Borjan Tchakaloff on Steady Monkey

Ported to Hugo

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:30:01 +0200

Here we go, I ported the website to Hugo.

I broke my setup six months ago when I pruned docker from my computer without a backup of Ghost’s database. Oh well, I “just” ended up finally doing what I wanted to do for a while: going back to plain-text.

That’s it, not exactly the same feature-set, but that’s fine given I accepted what Ghost offered me initially. (The code samples are a bit broken for example.) We’ll figure things out.

Balancing fast and slow thinking with AI tools

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:34:00 +0000

The gist of it

Many people said it, and I did too, but without really feeling it. You. still. need. to. think. for. yourself.

The longer form

I take it as a benefit from the current generation of AI tooling, how working with so-called agentic AI makes you (eventually) take a step back and ask yourself: do I need to go fast or slow?

An example of being fast would be:

My hobby? Speculative Engineering

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 21:26:49 +0000

I was thinking about my Famlab project this morning—the “homelab for busy families” idea where you reclaim data ownership (dare I mention #TechSovereignty?) without becoming a full-time sysadmin. Specifically, I was thinking about the maintenance of the base system and all services: the update path. It is an old idea that spawned from A/B updates in Android (where you have a second partition on which you install system updates, and then try to boot from afterwards; if it fails, you mark it as such and reboot into the other, older system partition) and the appeal from immutable operating systems—reproducible, easier deployments, safer.

On inequality and AI risks

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 21:03:12 +0000

Friday morning I read Jenny’s piece on how the ultra-rich make the world worse. Friday evening I attended a rationality meetup about If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (archived) . Sunday afternoon, an on-site PauseAI meetup.

Three events, one weekend. Some clarity in the end.

If you haven’t read the book mentioned above, or read my previous reflections on the matter, let me quote them directly:

If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.

Two Weeks with the Extinction Tool

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 12:22:07 +0000

I read a book that said AI might kill everyone. I’m now using it as a daily tool and enjoying it, and I don’t know what that makes me.

Two weeks ago I read “If Anyone Builds It, Everybody Dies” (archived) . I could follow the reasoning. There’s no surprise in the book, the title is it. The arguments appear serious enough, and that, even if the authors were inflating the risk, we would still be looking at a sheer cliff humanity is bound to fall off. So, what if they are right?

How I successfully used an LLM, or my Simon Willison moment

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 13:26:03 +0000

Simon Willison (archived) has a legendary throughput. No, seriously. Not only is he a co-creator of Django (archived) , he has been publishing interesting software (see Datasette (archived) and its gazillion plugins (archived) ) at an outstanding pace. More recently he has taken the task of making LLM’s easy to interact from the CLI with its llm (archived) program. In today’s post, I write about my first real success with an LLM. I shall update my subtitle to “He who prompted okay once”.

On Domain Events, English, and ubiquitous language

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 12:31:37 +0000

I attended a Python meetup last week, hosted by JobRad (archived) . The main presentation was a showcase of an “Event System”, or how they used messages to share customer data between their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning , the big database of their processes, inventory, and all other business activities) and their CRM (Customer Relationship Management , the main piece of software required by customer support with sales orders and support tickets).

Exploring Mainboard housing v1 with cardboard

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 13:02:14 +0000

Yesterday I played around with cardboard to have a better (physical) sense of the first housing version. In short, this housing will be the simplest I can build to fit the Mainboard and an Atreus keyboard. Nothing fancy, not even an internal routing of the USB cable. In the end I want to build momentum and, considering the blocks of time I can allocate to this project, I figured it would be best to use (very) small increments.

The transportable Mainboard-based computer

Sun, 29 May 2022 15:17:00 +0000

As I previously mentioned, my goal for the Framework Mainboard I will receive as part of the Mainboard Developer Program is twofold: build 1) a transportable computer that has 2) a better keyboard. The challenge is mainly about my own lack of experience as a maker. And that I don’t want to use highly specialised equipment such as CNC machining or 3D printing, at least not for the first iterations.

I got in the Framework Mainboard Developer Program

Sat, 21 May 2022 13:58:09 +0000

Two weeks ago, I received an e-mail telling me I had been accepted in the Framework Mainboard Developer Program. Framework (archived) has a very interesting approach to sustainability in electronics that reminds me of Fairphone, though I don’t want to compare them directly. I worked at Fairphone for more than three years at the time of Fairphone 2, and the modular aspect of the phone was amazing. I have been following Framework since they launched a crowdfunding campaign for their first generation modular laptop, it’s a really positive outcome that they are still there and made it to the second generation.

The cautionary nightmare

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 09:38:15 +0000

I had a dream. Rather, I had a nightmare last night. It went as dreams go, mixing reality and fantasy. When I awoke, completely stressed out for the day before morning light could stream through my window, I decided I would not let the dream happen. Here is the gist.

In that dream, my brand new laptop that I left in the car was stolen. Actually the car itself was stolen, but found later with only the laptop missing. The laptop sleeve was still in the car, though. Clearly that was the first sign this was ridiculous: who would take the time to take the laptop of its protection sleeve before stealing it? Anyway, my laptop is a few years old and I don’t even own a car. Details.

More adventures with the NAS

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 11:14:29 +0000

About ten days ago, I received a scary e-mail from the NAS (it has a name by the way, it’s called cactus): my boot pool was degraded but still operational. The SSD I added not so long ago to mirror the USB drive actually started to fail. TrueNAS detected slow read performance, and eventually detached the drive from the pool of its own accord. Smarty pants.

I was certainly not expecting the SSD to fail before the USB drive (they were roughly as old), especially given that the SSD did not see much wear and that it was stored in an ESD-safe bag together with a desiccant bag.

Upgrading my NAS to TrueNAS Core

Sun, 24 Oct 2021 19:23:26 +0000

Over the course of the week-end, I (finally) upgraded from FreeNAS 11.3 to TrueNAS Core 12.0.

One of the most notable things with the new version is that it is strongly discouraged to use a USB stick as boot drive. Since my NAS has an internal USB port for a boot stick, it is of course what I have been using since the beginning: a very small SanDisk Cruzer Fit of 16GB. Good opportunity to use that old (but unused) Intel SSD of 40GB that has been forgotten in the unnamed box of electronics.

Refreshing my NAS configuration

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 20:47:14 +0000

I setup my Network Attached Storage (NAS) back in 2014 after getting a nice discount on a HP MicroServer of the previous generation. I added some more ECC RAM, fitted four hard drives, installed FreeNAS, and then happily used it to offload my poor computers of all the media and random stuff I had lying around there. When I moved out of the country in 2015, I packed light and left the NAS behind. Until 2021.

Atreus build part 5: Adding external access to the reset pin

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 08:16:00 +0000