DIY and Home Improvement
Hands-on work on the home: repairs, renovation, installing fixtures, tools, workshop technique and materials. Tech DIY (home labs, PC builds, electronics) stays in Computing. An extra channel alongside an episode's main one.
Hands-on work on the home: repairs, renovation, installing fixtures, tools, workshop technique and materials. Tech DIY (home labs, PC builds, electronics) stays in Computing. An extra channel alongside an episode's main one.
#6219: Dictation Beyond the Keyboard
Pedals, push-to-talk, and Android gesture apps promise keyboard-free dictation — but can any of it become a dependable daily setup?
#6186: A Virtual Disk Inside Your Linux Filesystem
Loop devices let a plain file act as a real disk — format it, encrypt it, mount it from fstab. Here's what works, and what bites back.
#6182: Running a Private APT Repo for Family Machines
Daniel wants his Debian packages on family machines without becoming their unpaid update service. Here's the modern way to do it.
#6166: Turning a Drifted Server Into a Rebuildable Playbook
Your server grew for years. Now you want a recipe that can rebuild it from scratch. Here's the honest path from drift to playbook.
#6128: Where the Screws Go: Internal KVM Mounting
PiKVM, NanoKVM, JetKVM, and BliKVM all promise remote rescue — but wiring one inside your case is a different problem entirely.
#6119: Two Keys and a Polite No: Labeling a Claude Code Approve Button
Daniel has two spare laptop keys and wants them to say yes and no. The electronics are easy — it's the labels that get hard.
#6088: What 5,964 Episodes Reveal About One Show
Nearly 6,000 episodes, sorted and mapped. AI and geopolitics spike, then fade — but a third of all "nearest neighbours" cross category lines.
#5985: Meccano at 125: What Kids Actually Learn From Bolts
Meccano just relaunched for its 125th year — but does childhood tinkering actually build lasting engineering intuition?
#5984: Reading a Mystery Adapter's Voltage Without a Label
An unpowered DC jack is electrically silent — so how do you find the right voltage? The answer isn't in the pins, it's in the current curve.
#5935: How Pressure Actually Bonds VHB Tape
Fifteen pounds of force isn't fifteen psi of pressure. That gap is why your whiteboard might fall off the wall.
#5907: Rackmounting a Desktop: Size, Cases, and the Swap
How to move a working desktop into a 19-inch rack — sizing by rack unit, picking a chassis that fits your parts, and what the transplant costs.
#5905: Bare Linux Routing vs OPNsense: What Actually Wins?
You can build a router on plain Debian or Ubuntu. The question is whether you should — and what it costs you over ten years.
#5904: Multi-WAN Beyond Failover: OPNsense vs OpenWrt
You stacked your links, failover works — so why does a dropped WAN still kill every session? Load balancing, mwan3, and what bonding actually solves.
#5897: Why You Can't Buy an IEC 60309 Power Strip
Daniel wired his first blue 16A commando plug. The cable math is easy — the missing product category is the interesting part.
#5810: Standoffs, Anchors, and the Outlet Behind the Whiteboard
A missing whiteboard, a metal-stud surprise, and the thread mismatch that turns one fastener into two.
#5789: Build First, Ask Later: Hermits Who Dug Cathedrals
No permits, no blueprints, no training. Two categories of builders who did the unreasonable — and what they share.
#5784: The Cheap Knife That Lies to You
Why a cheap sharp knife is worse than a dull one, and how to pick tools for stripping cable without nicking a conductor.
#5783: Can a Dremel Be Gym Equipment?
A Dremel afternoon left Daniel drenched in sweat. Turns out the research on power tool physical load barely covers his tool at all.
#5782: Unraid in a VM: When the License Is the Wall
Daniel wants Unraid's parity array without Synology's lock-in. The technology works. The licensing is the wall.
#5781: Measuring Keyhole Spacing: Why the Tool You Want Doesn't Exist
A digital slider that reads millimeters? It's actually two tools — and for keyhole spacing, the right answer might be no measurement at all.