What broke, what I built, and what I’m still learning.
These five are a good map of the machinery, including why any of it exists.
Newest first. The useful failures tend to age well.
Bubbles sends ten songs on Friday morning. The useful part is not the number. It is that the first pick should feel brave, yesterday's misses change next week's angle, and familiar songs do not waste the list.
Every machine in this house is named for a Trailer Park Boys character whose job matches the machine's job. The family assistant got Bubbles, the one who looks after everybody. The name set the personality, the trust level, and the tone of every email.
A monitor inside the house goes silent during the same failures it is supposed to report. Barb lives elsewhere so she can still tell me when the house disappears.
I kept writing temporary thoughts in the terminal and repairing the pasted text afterward. jot. gives those thoughts one clean place to exist for exactly as long as they are useful.
An automation dimmed the bathroom lights while somebody was still in the shower. The repair was small. Writing down what happened is what keeps future me from learning the same lesson in the dark.
The monitoring database kept growing long after anyone stopped opening its dashboards. Removing it exposed the more useful question: what work on this machine still had an audience?
I knew the house had accumulated old devices and routines. I did not know that a quarter of its records were furniture or that most scripts had never run. The useful repair was subtraction.
Bubbles runs on Hermes, lives on a Mac Mini, and has an iMessage number through Photon. The chat is not the useful part. The useful part is the skills that connect it to the tools I already use.
The most useful sentence in our smart-home guide is an invitation to complain. Explaining the house to the people living in it exposed rude routines that looked correct from the admin chair.
We wanted to ask Bubbles for an old family photograph without scrolling for ten minutes. The useful design was not what the assistant could do. It was making deletion, editing, and broad access impossible.
My son and his grandfather build their league's spreadsheet together every July. I added four research agents and an offline draft board. The research confirmed both of their selections.
list. is also list.mckinnon.ai: a Tailscale-only address that Caddy routes to the right private app. The product name, browser address, access boundary, icon, and switcher label all come from the same word.
A task list, groceries, trips, workouts, and a few other household annoyances became small tools on the server. Their value is not that I built them. It is that the family kept opening them.
The new house-control app was fast, polished, and expensive to keep correct. An outside review asked whether it should exist at all. The honest answer sent me back to the dashboard already in the house.
A traveler used Southbound in two time zones and came home to an app that would not open. One calendar day had become two records, and the launch screen could not survive the disagreement.
A task list that only I can reach kept demanding my password. The token was fine. The larger mistake was copying a public-app login screen into software that already lived behind a private door.
The family shopping list did not load. I found that several small services had been unreachable since a routine update three days earlier. Nothing crashed loudly enough to tell me.
A new preference about movies or songs kept becoming a software release. Moving those opinions into ordinary notes made changing my mind editorial work again.
The good trip idea appears months before dates or confirmation numbers exist. I wanted somewhere that could keep the sentence alive without pretending the family had already made a decision.
Weather, the calendar, the house, and the few things that need attention arrive in one email before the day starts. The facts come from code; Bubbles is allowed to add the voice.
Four streaming apps and several watchlists still left us reading the same synopses at nine o'clock. One useful recommendation required remembering what we owned, watched, and already rejected.
The official handicap, scorecards in a drawer, and my own memory told different stories about where strokes disappeared. Before building anything new, I found pieces of the answer scattered across three machines.
Gift ideas, books, and packing lists kept leaking into the task manager. Treating every maybe as an obligation made the real work harder to trust.
I tried to register my family AI to send legal text messages. Twilio's compliance robot rejected the same field four times. Two of those times, I pasted the robot's own suggested words. The robot won.
Each light at the lake place was invisible to voice control. The setting that must expose the lights was dead the whole time. I fixed that. Then I rebuilt the whole voice surface, so two grandparents can run the house and never open an app.
I checked other systems carefully and assumed the site with my own name on it was fine. It was slow, partly blind, and full of links that went nowhere. None of those failures announced itself.
A provider bill kept growing even though Bubbles used a cheaper model. A background process I installed by accident was reading its own notes all day, and its budget guard trusted the wrong meter.
Bubbles had access to years of my notes and still answered familiar questions from the wrong place. Fixing retrieval was only half the job. The memory also had to arrive without being asked for by name.
fit. made each session easy to follow and log. Then our actual routine changed while the app kept producing a beautiful plan for workouts nobody did.
The useful test of my private network is not a speed chart. It is that the family apps open, the remote house stays reachable, and this layer never appears in an incident report.
Bubbles stopped answering, and every status light blamed the outside API. The real cause was a forgotten command on his own machine that had been retrying quietly for more than two weeks.
Typing 'call the roofer' takes seconds. Deciding where it belongs, when it matters, and whether anybody will see it is the part that made capture feel expensive.
At the lake place, my laptop fell off the network every five minutes. The logs showed 38 hard disconnects in 5 hours. The ISP, the router, and the laptop were all healthy. The cause was the position of the desk.
I texted a screenshot to my AI. It said that no image arrived. The iMessage adapter was compiled bytecode with no source, and it never handled inbound images at all. So I taught it to handle them. I never saw its code.
Groceries enter the list while someone stands at the fridge and leave it from a phone in the store. The useful system had to respect both moments, even though the bridge between them could disappear.
Somfy's official cloud integration refused to see 18 motorized shades because of an account merger on their side. An undocumented local API let me in. You unlock it when you tap the hub's PIN screen seven times. The workaround was better than the front door.
Four LG air conditioners in Canada serve Canadians. They refused a connection until I told the setup flow that they were American. The location of the hardware is not important. The region of the account is important.
The cottage had excellent fibre and an extra router that made remote connections unreliable. Removing the duplicate layer worked. My impatience during the cutover caused the only real outage.
Every device agreed that the cottage internet was slow. The fibre line was innocent. One badly terminated wall jack forced the whole wireless network through a narrow link.
I rebuilt Bubbles' memory and watched it fail again the next morning. My own watchdog probably killed it during a write. I got faster at recovery, but I did not get to call the problem fixed.
The router at my salon suite location crashed every week. The repair that everyone assumed was wrong. The cause was a missing $2 battery. The battery made the router believe the year was 1980. Fifteen days, three visits, four bad theories, one $199 box.
A macOS security patch deleted one config file and broke the pairing between my keyboard and the Secure Enclave. There was no message anywhere. I used file timestamps and Bluetooth evidence to get my thumb back in 34 minutes.
Git history showed what changed and forgot every wrong turn that explained why. The missing reasoning was still sitting in old coding transcripts, unreadable until something turned it into notes.
Plain text made it easy to keep years of notes and surprisingly unpleasant to return to them. A private reading surface made the same files feel worth opening without changing how I write.
I inherited an encrypted backup of a router's configuration. Nobody had the password. So I guessed. After 1,158 guesses, I did the smarter thing: I stopped.
At 7:48 one morning, Bubbles filled my phone with texts that nobody asked for. The investigation took six and a half hours and ended one whole agent runtime. It produced a rule that I still follow: the assistant does not text me.
A note I could see on disk disappeared whenever I searched for it by the name I actually used. A longer description worked. The mismatch explained why one kind of search was not enough.
The small household apps worked, but only I remembered where they lived. Familiar names and normal browser security turned private tools into things another person could actually open.
The installer's test passed, the van left, and my own router could not get online. The provider had approved one physical port while I had plugged the new connection into another.
The server restarted, every dashboard loaded, and the speakers and streaming boxes quietly vanished. My earlier fix had worked only until the next reboot.
Changing the software behind Bubbles was straightforward. Finding every quiet routine attached to the old software was not. The morning email depended on a schedule that could disappear without failing.
The data existed, but seeing it required remembering to visit ten quiet dashboards. I replaced the ritual with one morning email and then learned that the email itself could run stale code without complaint.
Arrival routines fired while I was still away, and the house stopped earning trust. A second signal from hardware already in the building helped, but only after I learned what a silent tracker actually means.
Most people give a NAS the name nas-01. Mine has the name Randy, from Trailer Park Boys. The rule is simple: the character's job on the show is the server's job in the house.