Dusting Off the Blog

Well, it's been a minute. Or more like 11 years. My last post was about moving a OneDrive folder in Windows 7. Windows 7. That should tell you everything you need to know about how long this blog has been collecting dust.

But here we are. The blog is back, baby.

What happened?

Life, mostly. Kids got older, work got busier, and somewhere along the way I stopped writing about the nerdy stuff I was doing. That doesn't mean I stopped doing nerdy stuff - if anything, it got way worse. I just stopped telling the internet about it.

The old blog ran on WordPress for years and served me well. But I've since rebuilt the site from scratch with Next.js because apparently I can't just have a blog, I have to build a blog. Some things never change. If 12-year-old me could go from a Tandy 1000 to running BBS systems that tortured my mom with modem tones at all hours, I think rebuilding a blog platform in my 40s is pretty on brand.

So what's the plan?

I've fallen deep into a few rabbit holes over the past several years, and I want to start sharing what I'm learning, building, and breaking. Here's what you can expect:

Home Assistant - I've gone full smart home. And I don't mean "I have a few Alexa plugs." I mean dashboards, automations, ESPHome devices, Zigbee networks, energy monitoring - the whole nine yards. I've made some really cool setups and hit some really dumb walls, and I think both are worth writing about.

AI & LLMs - If you're reading this in 2026, you already know AI is everywhere. I've been spending a ton of time experimenting with large language models, building agentic workflows, and finding ways to integrate AI into my daily life and work in ways that are actually useful and not just hype. There's so much cool stuff happening right now and it's moving at a pace that makes it hard to keep up. I'll do my best to share what's working for me.

General tinkering - If you know me at all from the old blog days, you know I can't resist a good side project. Whether it's a homelab setup, a new dev tool, a gadget review, or just some random "ah-ha" moment that took me way too long to figure out - I'll throw it up here. My old philosophy still holds: I'm a pretty good Google-er, so I typically won't post basic stuff you can find in 2 seconds. The posts here will be things I actually struggled with, things that made me say "why didn't anyone write this down?", or just things I think are genuinely cool and worth sharing.

Why now?

Honestly? Because the stuff I'm working on right now is the most fun I've had with technology in a long time. Home Assistant alone could fuel a blog for years - and when you start layering AI on top of it, things get really interesting really fast. I've been building things that would have felt like science fiction back when I was writing about the Microsoft Kinect SDK in 2011.

Plus, I've always found that writing about what I'm doing forces me to actually understand it. There's nothing like trying to explain something to realize you only kind of know how it works.

Let's go

So that's it. The blog is dusted off, the WordPress is retired, and I'm ready to start sharing again. If you were one of the folks who stumbled onto my old posts about ASP.NET quirks or iPhone-powered coffee pots - welcome back. If you're new here - hey, I'm Don, I live in Maryland, and I've been a computer junkie since the late '80s. Stick around.

More to come soon. I've got a backlog of projects I'm itching to write up.