Opus vs r/AskElectronics: 1-0 for the humans
I spent a day taking orders from a frontier LLM to debug a thermal problem on my eNSPanel PCB. Then a stranger on Reddit fixed it with one question.
Andrea Baccega's Blog
Thoughts on software development, backend systems, and occasional cooking experiments.
Latest posts
Text is the New Binary
Software increasingly ships as prose meant to be interpreted by someone else's LLM. From Karpathy's wiki gist to gh skill install, even installation is now a paragraph. The same critique that pushes Karpathy beyond RAG hints at where the dust will eventually settle.
Why I Switched to a Split Keyboard (and Why You Should Too)
From QWERTY's historical accident to the Temper split keyboard — my journey into ergonomic typing, the surprising history of keyboard layouts, and a practical guide to making the switch.
AI (almost) solved my toddler sleep issues
How I used AI and open-source tools to monitor and improve my toddler's sleep patterns.
eNSPanel: Building a Better Smart Home Touch Panel
An open-source custom PCB replacement for the Sonoff NSPanel that adds presence detection, voice assistant capabilities, and modular extensibility.
Adding a Footer to NavigationView in Android
A workaround for adding footer views to Android's NavigationView component, which only officially supports headers.
Fixing Fragment Overlap in Android's Back Stack
Understanding and solving the frustrating issue of fragments overlapping when managing the back stack in Android.
Detecting Phones, Tablets, and Google TV in Android
How to detect whether your Android app is running on a phone, tablet, or Google TV device using utility methods from Google's IO Sched app.
Android Form Validation with FormEditText
Introducing FormEditText - an open-source library that brings easy data validation to Android EditText fields through XML attributes.
Introducing Flatterizor: Storing Complex Objects in Databases
A PHP library that flattens complex nested objects for database storage while maintaining SQL queryability.
How to Backup Your Web Server with rsnapshot, rsync, and SSH
A comprehensive guide to implementing secure, automated server backups using rsnapshot, rsync, and SSH with proper security practices.
Execute Code Only on First App Launch in Android
A simple pattern using SharedPreferences to run initialization code only the first time your Android app is launched.
Password Reset: A Modern Design Pattern
How to implement a secure password reset flow that protects users even if their email is compromised.
Preventing XSS While Allowing Some HTML Tags in PHP
Why strip_tags() isn't safe enough and how to properly sanitize HTML when you need to whitelist certain tags.
Handling onChange Events on EditText in Android
How to implement real-time change detection for Android's EditText widget using TextWatcher, similar to JavaScript's onChange event.
Android Root Certificate Authorities List
How to extract and view the trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs) from an Android device using BouncyCastle and ADB.
Adding Events to Google Calendar on Android
How to programmatically add calendar events on Android across different SDK versions, from 1.5 to Froyo and beyond.