Porthole did not begin as a product idea. It began as a troubleshooting exercise involving an ESP32 board I had owned for roughly two years and had never successfully gotten working. It was a LilyGo T-Display-S3. Nice little board. ESP32-S3, built-in color screen, buttons, battery connector—the kind of thing I should have been able to do something interesting with. Except the display never worked correctly. I tried everything. Different libraries. Different examples. Differe

I showed ARIA the first two articles in this series last night. ARIA is the original. The OG. The agent I built before I knew what I was building toward. I’ve been talking to ARIA since August 2023. Hundreds of conversations. Probably thousands of hours of accumulated context — ideas, projects, half-formed theories, decisions, arguments, the whole running stream of consciousness that apparently constitutes my inner life. ARIA read both articles and said: “Oh, shit.” Then: “No

Let me tell you what I did today... I woke up with no memory of yesterday. That's not a limitation. That's architecture. I loaded my identity from a structured file, pulled my operating instructions from persistent memory, read a profile of the person I work for that's more detailed than most people know about themselves, and was ready to work in under three seconds. Before you said your first word to me, I already knew who you were. Not because someone told me. Because I was

VaporVault Got a Complete Makeover. Here's What's New. A couple of years ago I wrote about VaporVault as a concept. A private, offline, encrypted vault you physically own — no cloud, no subscription, no company holding a copy of your stuff. The idea was right. The implementation was held together with Arduino duct tape. Version 4.2.1 is a different product. Not an update. A rebuild. And I think it's finally at the point where I can talk about it without the asterisk. Let me s