Recent content on debene.dev
I froze a tiny machine-readable Gopher API so any client that speaks RFC 1436 can drive my homelab Spotify bridge — no SDK, no auth dance. Then I wrote native remotes for Mac OS 9, OS X 10.5 on a Power Mac G5, 10.6, and Android. Same three-line protocol, 24 years apart.
There’s a screenshot on my other monitor right now that I can’t stop looking at. An M4 MacBook is running a VNC viewer. That viewer is connected to a Mac OS 9 machine with a broken display and broken clamshell (new parts on the way) running bare on my workbench. On that classic Mac desktop, a little app called Casquinha is playing The Fate of Ophelia off Taylor Swift’s The Life…
Or: how fifty-nine builds taught me that someone has to own the state, and why I shipped b59 with the seams still showing. Last week I put Spotify on Mac OS 9 over Gopher. That post ended with a small confession baked into the architecture: the “client” on the OS 9 side was Netscape Communicator , browsing gopher menus. It worked — Netscape speaks gopher:// natively, and a menu of…
Streaming 2026 music on a 1999 Mac via a 1991 protocol. Because the only thing better than making old tech work is making it work wrong.
In one day I turned a single gopherhole into a neighborhood: pulled out a shared Rust core, built an interactive tarot reader that draws three cards against the real sky, and wired three holes into a hub. Then I published this post to both the web and gopher — to see which version gets read.
Real-time CTA 'L' train tracking over Gopher, the 1991 text protocol. Braille-dot maps, PowerPC Macs, and a conversation with Cameron Kaiser about permanent vs ephemeral selectors.
I Built a 1990s BBS in 2026 (In One Day) Remember bulletin board systems? Those pre-internet communities where you’d dial in with a modem, navigate ANSI menus, download files, and leave messages for other users? I spent yesterday rebuilding that entire experience from scratch. In Go. In under 6 hours. Why? Honestly? Nostalgia hit hard. I grew up in Brazil in the mid-90s, and before the…
I built a real-time tracker for every train in Chicago because the existing ones weren't quite right. NORAD aesthetics, 100 trains, 30-day replay. With Claude as the brake.
My laptop has a ~/projects folder. Most of it is a graveyard. Not because the ideas were bad — I’d still build some of them if I sat down today. They’re dead because I get excited by a technical problem, work on it for two weekends, hit the part that stops being fun, and drift to the next thing. The codebase stays. The git log doesn’t. I’m 40, a Cloud Architect with ~18…
What Are We Even Doing Here? It’s 2026. Most people run LLMs on NVIDIA H100s, AMD MI300X, or at least a decent gaming GPU. I’m running them on a 2016 IBM POWER8 server with 160 hardware threads and zero CUDA cores. Why? Because I can. And because nobody else has published POWER8 LLM benchmarks in 2026. And because alternative architectures deserve love too. This post covers: Building…
Apple Silicon vs IBM POWER8: A Tale of Two Architectures Running LLMs in 2026 Last week I published benchmarks of running Qwen 2.5 7B on a 2016 IBM POWER8 . The results were surprisingly good — 6.81 tokens/s on CPU-only inference with 80 threads hammering away. But then came the inevitable question: How does it compare to modern hardware? So I ran the same benchmarks on my daily driver: a Mac…
A short story about installing Talos Kubernetes on a Rock 5 ITX (RK3588) with no working display, an EDK2 UEFI flash from a running Armbian, and an HDMI cable that pretended to be a brick for half an afternoon.
Uma telenovela brasileira em 8 capítulos sobre como construir um node K8s com NPU, RDMA, e muita treta com Ubuntu 26.04
A Brazilian-style soap opera in 8 chapters about building a Kubernetes node with NPU, RDMA, and a lot of drama with Ubuntu 26.04
How a brand-new Intel Core Ultra 9 285H benched at half its potential, and the rabbit hole that fixed it.
OEM firmware locked your ConnectX card to Ethernet-only? Here's how to cross-flash it to VPI mode, survive the GUID apocalypse, and get 40 Gbps InfiniBand running in your homelab.
Why I bought a laptop CPU soldered to a motherboard from Shenzhen, what I'm actually paying for when I build infrastructure, and why the homelab renaissance isn't about saving money.
160 POWER8 threads vs 28 Xeon threads in a real-world media transcoding benchmark. Spoiler: the elephant dances when the floor gets crowded.
Running Jellyfin 10.11 on an IBM POWER8 server with .NET 10 — a tale of 9 build attempts, zero Dart VMs, and one very stubborn lobster.
Building the .NET 8 SDK entirely from source on an IBM POWER8 running Gentoo Linux — 7 patches, 160 threads, a Y2K bug, and an AI lobster named Garra helping via Discord.
34 commits in one day: REST APIs, PostgreSQL, CI/CD, OIDC disasters, Docker nightmares — and the moment I gave up on AIX and deployed on Gentoo instead. Sometimes the best engineering decision is knowing when to pivot.
Installing AIX 7.2 on real IBM POWER8 hardware, fixing yum's sqlitecachec bug, surviving the OpenSSL 3.5 disaster, and running Apache DayTrader on WebSphere Liberty — all from a basement in Chicago.
A Tale of Two Philosophies: When 160 Threads Meet Modern Silicon. Can a 2015 IBM POWER8 server compete with Intel's 2021 flagship? The answer might surprise you.
For fifty bucks, I got myself a time machine. A journey into resurrecting a PowerMac G5 and discovering the forgotten world of Big Endian computing.
The Dream: A teenage obsession with the iBook G4 finally fulfilled two decades later. A journey through SSD upgrades, broken power buttons, distro hopping, and building a Kubernetes-powered compile farm.
The Recipe for Modern Content Creation (Now with Extra Bytes!). Building an automated pipeline that transforms Instagram posts into a fully-featured recipe blog using Hugo, AI, and cloud services.
Opinions expressed here are my own, fueled by late-night coding sessions and an unreasonable amount of coffee. Building a reproducible DevOps infrastructure with Harvester HCI and SaltStack automation.
Who runs this basement, and why there’s a Power Mac G5 talking to Spotify over a 1991 protocol.
![](https://debene.dev/posts/casquinha-macos9/"https://debene.dev/posts/casquinha-macos9/images/hero-full-desktop.jpg")
![](https://debene.dev/posts/askthedeck-adhd/"https://debene.dev/posts/askthedeck-adhd/images/graveyard.png")