17 Aug 2026 · Serious Computer Business
My little Rust library netwatcher has a new release and the changelog is unusually long . As you’ve probably already guessed from the title, this is because I took the time to run some LLMs over it looking for bugs and doc inconsistencies. It turns out that even within Rust’s guardrails I wrote plenty of bugs. Who could have seen that coming? This won’t be a surprise to anyone who’s been using LLMs in 2026. There are no special tricks and you don’t have to overthink it [1] . We really …
9 Aug 2026 · Serious Computer Business
In a recent post I was getting excited about HaLow and I mentioned that I had some HT-HD01 units on order from Heltec. Those have now arrived and my excitement continues. These units are very cool for three main reasons. It’s affordable. They cost 69 USD each. Nice. Versatile deployment modes. Out of the box you can build a standard AP/client scenario. You can also use 802.11s meshing , which I haven’t tested yet. You have the choice between NAT and bridging, so you can make it so that all t…
5 Aug 2026 · Serious Computer Business
I’m rather pleased. I’ve been able to bolt together enough pieces of software that I can now run DeepSeek v4 Flash with native MXFP4 routed-expert weights on my MacBook Pro, not only via a CLI harness like OpenCode, but also through Xcode’s native “intelligence” integration. Before you get too excited please realise that I’m running this on a ludicrously expensive M5 Max with 128 GB RAM. However , I am hoping that the upcoming Qwen3.8-27B release will be awesome and it will be practi…
23 Jul 2026 · Serious Computer Business
When you’re running Rust code in the context of an Android app, if you want to work with Android-specific functionality over JNI you tend to need three things: A reference to the running Java virtual machine. A reference to a suitable Context , often the ApplicationContext . Some helper code on the Java side to provide APIs with required callbacks, and so on. My cross-platform crate netwatcher has to do all of these when it finds itself running on an Android. It handles items 1 and 2 in a very…
22 Jul 2026 · Serious Computer Business
I’ve been waiting a long time for WiFi HaLow (802.11ah) to show up. For the unaware, this is a standardised variant of WiFi using the 900 MHz ISM band to provide range over 1 km with a corresponding lower throughput—up to tens of Mbps. The standard was published in 2017 but for a long time the only available hardware was pretty specialised and I stopped paying attention. Manufacturing has increased and around 18 months ago Heltec started selling a properly convenient USB/ethernet bridge devi…