// the workshop

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On choosing the machine where the real work happens.

the phone is not the workshop

I run GrapheneOS. No SIM. No eSIM. Radios off by default. By most measures, it is the most hardened daily-carry phone you can run outside of a classified environment. And it is still, at its core, a communication device. It responds. It receives. It fits in a pocket and reacts to the world.

The laptop is something else entirely.

// how I got here

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The very first thing I remember about computers was how they smelled. Something new, completely alien, but welcoming. Inviting. Like a door I didn’t know existed had just swung open, and whatever was on the other side already knew my name. It was 1990. I walked through. I never came back out.

The room wasn’t much to look at. Cracked concrete walls, paint peeling in sheets, heavy wooden tables that had probably been there since before I was born. My mum worked at the national mining institute, the kind of place that sat at the very heart of what a communist country valued most. Metals. Output. The collective. But sitting on one of those wooden tables, humming quietly to itself, was something that didn’t belong there at all. A PC. The only one I’d ever seen. Possibly the only one anyone in my world had ever seen.

Personal on TAZ

// the workshop

the phone is not the workshop

// how I got here