The whole archive starts with one simple rule: every photo either of us takes should land on our home NAS by itself, with no monthly cloud fee. Two phones, one box in the house, automatic. That’s the first stage of the pipeline. It mostly “just works” — until, one day, it quietly doesn’t. This post covers both: how to set it up, and how I noticed one phone had stopped. ...
Every time I type a prompt that actually matters — one that solved a real problem or unlocked something I didn’t know how to do — I prefix it with //. That double slash is a convention I made up. It tells my Claude Code hook: this one is worth keeping. The hook saves it to a file. Eventually I want those files to feed an app that writes blog drafts automatically. That is the plan for episode 20 of this series. ...
I checked the DSM auto-block list (empty), confirmed SSH was enabled in Terminal & SNMP settings, verified the iptables startup task was running, and ran a TCP port test — ports 22, 445, and 5000 all appeared blocked. After all of that, I ran ipconfig. The PC was connected to the wrong Wi-Fi network. What Was Actually Happening I have two Wi-Fi networks at home. My NAS sits on one of them. My coding PC is supposed to be on that same network — but Windows had quietly switched it to the other one automatically. ...
I built an audio app once. Then I built the same app again — and the second time took an afternoon. Not because I’m fast. Because I didn’t really build it again. I cloned it. I took the thing I already had, copied it onto a different machine, pointed it at a different home, and turned it on. That sounds ordinary until you notice you can’t do it with the apps you use every day. You can’t clone Netflix onto a relative’s device. You can’t copy your Spotify and hand it to a friend. The big apps are sealed boxes you rent access to. But software you build is yours, which means you can make copies of it the way you’d copy a key. ...
My phone has backed up about six thousand photos and videos from 2025 alone. On my PC, I run a local browser tool — pick_yeju.py — that lets me scroll through them, pick the ones worth keeping, and copy them into my daughter’s media library on our NAS. The files are sorted oldest-first. Six thousand of them. That’s about ninety pages at sixty per page. The problem: every time I restarted the tool, it opened at page one. I’d have to scroll back through to wherever I’d left off the previous session. Ten, twenty, thirty pages — just to find my place again. ...
I keep forgetting how to reconnect my NAS folder in Windows Explorer. Every time, I end up asking an AI to walk me through it again. So this time I’m writing it down — for myself as much as anyone else. And then today, the usual steps didn’t work. The folder was gone, and reconnecting it failed too, even though the laptop was on the same Wi-Fi as the NAS. That turned into a longer fix. I’ll cover both. ...