One for the Road: Trust, but Verify
Before stepping away, one last day of checking my lab and my plans turned into a lesson I keep relearning: “done” isn’t the same as “verified.
Installing Orca IDE on Debian from the Terminal (and Why I Turned Yolo Mode Off)
I installed Orca, an open-source IDE for running AI coding agents in parallel, on Debian entirely from the terminal — then turned off its Yolo mode, built a sandbox repo, and walked the git worktree cycle by hand before letting an agent near it.
Installing Goose: The Docs Were Wrong Three Times
I set out to install Goose, the open-source AI agent, by following the official docs. Three times the instructions didn’t
match what my terminal actually did. Here’s what went wrong, how I worked around each one, and why “read the error, not just the docs” saved the day.
Stepping away for a while & why, but… I’ll be back!
I’m stepping away from the blog for a little while to be fully present on a trip abroad. Here’s why, and what comes next when I’m back.
PHP2Shell: How I Found Out and What I Did About It
A late-night BBC headline about a critical PHP flaw sent me checking my own WordPress site. Here's how I found my PHP version, protected and verified my backups, checked for intruders, and pushed my host for a straight answer, plus what's still open.
My First Mercury 3 API Call: A Key, a Clipboard, and a 401
I finally sent my first request to Inception's Mercury 3 API. Along the way I lost a key, saved a shell command instead of a secret, hit a 401, and learned how to store API keys safely on Linux.
God Is Real Unless Declared INTEGER: From a Fortran Joke to Catching Silent Bugs in Python
"In Fortran, God is real unless declared INTEGER." A late-night programmer joke led me into Fortran's implicit typing, the legendary DO10I bug, and a hands-on Debian lab where Python silently returned 0 instead of 60, and flake8 caught my typo twice.
Lab Journal: The Mesa Conflict I Saw Coming — Tumbleweed Update, Round Two
Last month’s Tumbleweed post ended with a warning: Mesa was split between Packman and openSUSE, the same setup that broke VLC. Three weeks later, it bit. Here’s how one zypper command moved eight Mesa packages to a single vendor, how a 911-package upgrade went through cleanly, and how a Packman codec package slipped in through the back door anyway.
Virtual Polymaths: What 50 Physics Problems Reveal About AI Agents
An AI agent solved 49 of 50 unpublished research physics problems for under $3 each. Are these "virtual polymaths"? Half right. Here's what the new TheoPhysEval paper shows they still can't do, and why it matters for security.
Restarting the CSI Linux Certified Investigator: Hardening My Investigation VM Before Module 1
Before restarting the CSI Linux Certified Investigator course on EchothisLabs, I verified my CSI Linux VM's big upgrade, closed five network services an investigation box doesn't need, fixed group memberships, and mapped out where the course goes from here.