Measure everything.
Centralize nothing.
Field notes from a man who weighs his coffee, self-hosts his email, and believes the future has no headquarters.
- Entries logged
- 031
- Words on record
- 22,160
- Days measured
- 28
- Single points of failure
- 000
THE LOG · NEWEST FIRST
- LOG-031 The Cost of Keeping Score Measuring everything has a price in minutes. I logged the logging for a full quarter, and one of my practices is not worth what it costs.
- LOG-030 Three Weeks of Traffic, Measured Without Google The log launched on 2026-07-05. Here is everything I can learn about readers from server logs alone, and the much longer list of things I decided not to know.
- LOG-029 How Many Parties Can Freeze My Money? A banking audit. I counted every institution that can stop a payment of mine, then measured how many days the household runs without each one.
- LOG-028 Replication, Explained with a Recipe Box Copies, quorums, and eventual consistency, explained with my grandmother's index cards and no distributed systems vocabulary at all.
- LOG-027 The Restore That Failed I keep saying a backup you have not restored from is a rumor. This quarter my own drill failed, and the reason was embarrassing in a way I think is useful.
- LOG-026 The Outage Ledger Since 2019 I have logged every large centralized failure and what kept running through it. The pattern is boring, repeatable, and the strongest argument I have.
- LOG-025 Six Months Without a Cloud Drive I replaced a consumer cloud drive with peer-to-peer sync across four devices. 182 days, 61 GB, and the two failure modes the enthusiasts never mention.
- LOG-024 This Log's Own Dependencies, Counted The site went public yesterday. Before I audit anyone else's infrastructure again, here is an honest count of every party who could take this one down.
- LOG-023 The Tracker: Four Numbers That Test the Thesis I promised a falsifiable dashboard for the decentralization thesis. Here it is: four metrics, their current readings, and the thresholds that would prove me wrong.
- LOG-022 Email: The Decentralized Network That Already Won Federation is not a theory. You have been using it since 1982, and its history contains both the proof and the warning for everything being built now.
- LOG-021 The Future Doesn't Have a Headquarters Every era centralizes until centralization becomes the risk. We are at that point in the cycle.
- LOG-020 Water: The Dependency I Almost Skipped The household audit's most embarrassing omission. One pipe, one utility, zero buffer, and the numbers that fixed it for $412.
- LOG-019 Renting Culture: A Media Audit I measured what the household actually watches, reads, and hears against what we pay to access it. Then I counted what we would keep if every subscription died tonight.
- LOG-018 The Credentials I Do Not Hold I inventoried every credential that proves who I am. I physically possess almost none of them, and the ones I do hold, no computer will accept.
- LOG-017 I Repatriated My Heart Rate Six years of my body's data lived in three vendor clouds. Now it lives in one database I own, and the export process was a scandal in table form.
- LOG-016 The Neighborhood That Routes Around Me Mesh networking explained from first principles, plus five months of data from the solar-powered radio node on my roof.
- LOG-015 Eighteen Months of Solar: The Honest Numbers Production, payback, and the day the grid went down and my panels shut off anyway. Energy independence, measured without the brochure.
- LOG-014 Single Points of Failure: A Household Audit I audited my own life like a production system. Sixteen findings, four criticals.
- LOG-013 My House Called Someone Else's Servers 14,000 Times Last Week I logged every DNS query my smart home made for seven days. The thermostat is chatty, the vacuum is a gossip, and the garage door needs a foreign cloud to open.
- LOG-012 My Notes Have Outlived Four Apps Eleven years, 6,140 notes, four dead applications, zero lost words. The file format was the decision that mattered.
- LOG-011 Self-Custody Is a Skill, Not a Purchase Buying a hardware wallet makes you self-sovereign the way buying running shoes makes you a runner. I drill quarterly, and I publish my drill times.
- LOG-010 Skeptical Entry: Decentralized Social Media Does Not Measure Up. Yet. I believe in federation and I ran the numbers on it anyway. The architecture is right and three of the five metrics are wrong.
- LOG-009 How Much of My Dinner Do I Actually Control? I weighed every gram of food the household consumed for four weeks and computed a self-provisioning ratio. The number is humbling and the trend is not.
- LOG-008 Forecast: By 2030, the Best Model You Use Daily Will Run in Your House A falsifiable prediction about local AI, with the three numbers that will decide it and the confidence I am prepared to be graded on.
- LOG-007 Why I Measure Everything Measurement is not a hobby. It is the entry fee for ownership.
- LOG-006 The Day 45 Million Pagers Died In 1998 one satellite failed and most of America's pagers went silent. The systems that survived that day share a shape, and it is worth studying.
- LOG-005 The Sovereignty Score: One Number I Compute Every Quarter I built a metric for how much of my life runs on infrastructure I control, and I have been tracking it for nine quarters.
- LOG-004 Four Companies Between You and Every Website A DNS audit. I counted every party who can silently unplug my corner of the internet, then removed two of them.
- LOG-003 Consensus, for People Who Do Not Care About Consensus How thousands of strangers agree on one ledger without a referee, explained with a potluck and no mathematics beyond counting.
- LOG-002 Ninety Days of Hosting My Own Passwords I moved 214 credentials off a commercial password manager and onto a server I run. Here is the uptime, the cost, and the one incident.
- LOG-001 The Redundancy Ledger: What Resilience Actually Costs Per Month Everyone says redundancy is expensive. I added it up. It costs less than my streaming subscriptions did.