Captain’s log // Field journal
I'm Andrew, and this is where I write up the projects, reviews and rabbit holes that might be useful—or at least interesting—to someone else. Expect AI adventures, homelab and IoT builds, astronomy, and the occasional hard-won lesson.
LATEST ENTRY
I built a graphical Home Assistant dashboard that brings together solar, the Powerwall, Auckland traffic, motorway cameras and a nightly astronomy planner.
Continue reading →23 Sept 2026 · learning, ai
I used a self-hosted OpenMAIC classroom alongside Stéphane Maarek’s Udemy course and practice exams to prepare for AWS Certified AI Practitioner. On Sunday, I sat the proctored exam at home—and passed.
05 Sept 2026 · homelab
I turned the monitor attached to one Proxmox host into a full-screen fleet wallboard, while keeping the normal console one key away.
27 Aug 2026 · projects
I built Kitchen Companion to turn saved recipes into a practical cooking workflow, then had to solve the decidedly less glamorous problems of imports, privacy, background work and safe releases.
27 Aug 2026 · projects
I replaced the old Pinnacle Hill Observatory WordPress site with a faster, self-contained field journal that gives the images and the observatory build room to breathe.
11 Feb 2026 · AI, Projects
I built an iPad app today. From zero to App Store submission in about 12 hours. Not a side project that’ll sit in a repo somewhere – an actual submission… Read more »
07 Feb 2026 · AI, Homelab
I’ve been running The Captains Log on WordPress for a while now, but recently decided to give it a proper home on my homelab server rather than relying on shared… Read more »
Focused briefings on technology developments worth understanding, researched beyond the launch-day noise.
22 Oct 2026 · tech-news
Hy-Memory 2.0 separates remembering from answering, with an open model, framework and shared-memory app aimed at agents that must carry useful state across sessions.
15 Oct 2026 · tech-news
Hermes Agent's 0.22 release combines managed local inference, pinned plugins, multiplexed profiles and safer updates into a more operable self-hosted agent platform.
08 Oct 2026 · tech-news
Microsoft Execution Containers 1.0 moves agent permissions outside the model, with cross-platform policy, several isolation levels, and important limits.
01 Oct 2026 · tech-news
NVIDIA's Open Agent Safety Platform combines an open-source sandbox with an optional hardware watchdog, shifting critical controls beyond the agent's own reach.
22 Sept 2026 · tech-news
OpenAI's new mid-tier and low-cost GPT-6 models halve token prices and improve prompt caching, changing the economics of long-running agents more than the raw capability frontier.