Recent content on Clinton Boys
Building an OPNsense router April 19, 2026 The first thing to understand when building your own router is what is usually meant by the word “router”. Your ISP will give you a (usually white) box with blinking lights which they call a router but which usually has several functions in the same package, all typically with a very low level of configurability: A “gateway”, which sits…
lit February 15, 2026 Like everyone else with a keyboard and an anxious interest in their future as a programmer, I’ve been using AI agents to write a lot of code recently. You talk to Claude or Cursor and code appears and it mostly works, you fiddle with it a bit to get it right, and you push it. I have mixed feelings about the results, about what it means for the future, and most…
Upgrading my home network to support VLANs and 10Gbps February 7, 2026 After improving my Wi-Fi setup , I started to focus on a wider rehaul of my whole home network. I knew I wanted to accomplish a few things: remove my ISP’s router and replace it with a custom router, located in my home office instead of the networking cupboard in my living room support VLANs for better security as I…
Upgrading my Wi-Fi network January 31, 2026 The first step in improving my home network had to be fixing my dreadful Wi-Fi setup. My ISP-provided router was nowhere near powerful enough to reach the back end of my house, let alone the garden or the home office. In a previous apartment, I had used a basic mesh system for a similar reason: the apartment was long and narrow, and the Wi-Fi…
Waratah January 27, 2026 We bought our first home last summer, and after the initial moving in, setting up, redecorating and making ourselves feel at home, winter rolled around: the perfect season for spending a lot of time at home tinkering with computers. I ended up diving deep into a project I have wanted to do for years but never felt I could justify in a rented house: building a proper home…
Angophora March 30, 2025 Angophora is a new blog I started this week to share some writing that doesn’t naturally fit on this technically-slanted personal website, or on my “digital garden” Mt. Solitary . I’m hoping to post things at quite a regular cadence here: links to interesting things I’ve found, reviews, thoughts, basically anything that comes to mind. Feel…
GreenChainer March 19, 2025 GreenChainer is a web application that I built a proof-of-concept for recently, inspired by the Green Chain Walk in South London, where I live. I spend a lot of time walking, and one of the greatest things about this part of the city is the immense amount of green spaces, which have been famously “stitched” together in the Green Chain Walk, a fantastic 80…
How will LLMs take our jobs? March 16, 2025 It’s a pretty inescapable take these days in tech circles: if you don’t want to get left behind, you need to be using LLMs , and become well-versed in how dramatically they can improve your productivity as a developer. Besides their utility as “next generation” search engines and replacements for online knowledge bases like…
My setup January 2025 In this post I answer the interview questions from uses this — again. This is an updated version of this post which I wrote in 2021, and is now the fifth time I have answered these questions. I have enjoyed reading uses this for many years and I like having a little archive of my own setups — you can see the five times I have done this exercise here . Who are you and what do…
Migrating my personal site to Hugo January 1, 2025 As foreshadowed in my recent post reflecting on ten years of running my personal website, I recently migrated the site to Hugo after many years of blogging with Jekyll 1 . I used the Liftoff theme by Will Holmes as my starting point, and ended up making a large number of customisations — mostly in the CSS, but also some changes a bit deeper in the…