Notes on building, thinking, and shipping. A quiet corner of the internet where I publish long-form notes on software, design, and the work in between.
I needed a browser-based web client to reach my home machine from a work PC that locks down software installs. RustDesk, RayLink, and ToDesk all gate the web client behind a paid plan, so I self-hosted HopToDesk instead. Notes on what worked, what surprised me, and the one TLS gotcha that ate an afternoon.
Moving oMLX’s model library to an external SSD on a Mac mini, then letting Kopia take hourly deduplicated snapshots to a second drive — so 36 GB of local models restore in minutes instead of hours of re-downloading.
Wiring Claude Code to a fully local memory stack: oMLX serves the LLM and embeddings, pgvector stores the vectors, and the open-source mem0 MCP server glues it together over SSE.
A pragmatic walkthrough: install Hugo, scaffold a site, write three posts, and build a static bundle you can open in any browser.
How a small set of type and spacing tokens can hold up a whole site without ever needing a redesign.
Restraint, proximity, and the case for letting a 1px border do the work of a 24px blur.
David Dai (戴炜)
