iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 22/10/2026

Reject Modernity My first ever O’Reilly book

Book cover:

Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL

Photo of the inside of the book, including:

Introducing PHP
PHP is a recursive acronym that stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor; this is in the
current release at the time of writing is 4.0.6.
The current version of PHP is PHP4, which we call PHP throughout this book.

Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

Celeste playthrough #2 complete. Eight years since my first 100% playthrough; had to re-learn most rooms/berry locations, but happy I finished in half the time/deaths. If I keep at a geometric pace I'll be at WR pace on playthrough 8. Quite possibly my favorite all-time game

Screenshot of Celeste journal of playthrough #1. Total deaths, 17.7k, total time 59 hours

Screenshot of Celeste journal of playthrough #2. Total deaths 8.9k, total time 32 hours

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2026

I asked Michael Jackson what algorithm Git uses to calculate hashes

Photo of Michael Jackson wearing a red leather jacket, mid-dance. Meme text at the bottom, originally saying "SHAMONE", has been hastily edited to "SHA-1"

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 04/07/2026

SVGs of pelicans are old hat, real ones know you benchmark with Saddle Creek Records fic @ernie tedium.co/2026/06/10/gigabyte-aorus…

Local LLMs do have limits, however, and they’re easy to hit. I proved this with a very Tedium-coded challenge involving one of my favorite indie-rock dynasties: “Share with me a story about how Conor Oberst beat Tim Kasher in a trivia game about the history of Omaha.”

All the tests shared a story, but the details were where everything fell flat. Most, not all, of the LLMs were aware that Oberst was the singer of Bright Eyes, but none got close to figuring out which band Kasher led—one said The Decemberists, another said The National. (The answer, of course, is Cursive, or if you’re a real fan, The Good Life.) You don’t trust models with anything factual, of course, but local LLMs are likely more fact-deprived than their server-rack cousins.

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 25/05/2026

Looks like with machine pin sockets I can make it work with a ~9mm header for the OLED and keep everything socketed. Items ordered. Was hoping to get it all done today since I’m homebound but electronics assembly is not immune from Hofstadter’s Law

Digital calipers measuring the insulation height of a male jumper. 2.45mm

Digital calipers measuring the width of a PCB. 3.21mm

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 25/05/2026

Everything else is through-hole so the scary stuff should be done. but! The socket for the microcontroller is approx one million miles tall. And I forgot to get a socket for the OLED which is supposed to sit over it. Don’t think I’m going to be able to fix this today

A set of components meant to be installed on the keyboard PCB. Elite-Pi microcontroller, OLED display, and a set of male and female headers. Notably missing is a 4-pin female socket for the OLED

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 25/05/2026

Hotswap sockets installed so I can replace my clicky switches after sufficient threats from coworkers

Back side of PCB. 30 hot swap switch sockets installed

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 25/05/2026

Diodes installed. I think I see why everyone goes buck wild for compact keyboards, soldering 104 of these would have broken me Lifted the pad on one diode, so I installed it on the other side (the board is supposed to be symmetrical, we’ll see how true that is)

Overhead photo of a PCB with 30 diodes installed. Looks good if I don’t say so myself

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 25/05/2026

First diodes in. Never surface mount soldered before, so I’m learning to tin pads along the way. Only 59 more to go Keyboard is a Sofle Choc v2 josefadamcik.github.io/SofleKeyboar…

Close up of a printed circuit board with a single diode soldered. Hope I did it right

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 24/04/2026

Unexpected benefit is I get advance notice when my cat is about to emerge from the basement with a present 🐁

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 10/04/2026

New blog: I got Home Assistant to light up my living room when my cat climbs into the ceiling www.steele.blue/ceiling-cat-presenc…

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 08/03/2026

Power meters are overrated, who in the analytics-minded cycling community will use the metric of training load as measured by air quality CO2 sensors

A chart of an AQI sensor over the past 24 hours. There is an especially prominent spike from ~500ppm to over 1100ppm, which happens to overlap with a Zwift workout

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 01/03/2026

YOLO is asking the tough questions in object detection, notably "is an orange cat a sandwich"

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 27/12/2025

My bookie, increasingly frustrated by my indecisiveness whether to place a wager on Travis Kelce’s retirement

Billboard with text:

JESUS CHRIST
EITHER HE IS OR HE AIN'T
HOW MUCH ARE YOU
WILLING TO BET?

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 21/12/2025

When you’ve heard about accessibility but you only have a labelmaker

Photograph of the top of a baby changing station. On it a label has been affixed: it reads “Never leave child unattended”. Below the text are the same words in braille.

It appears that the label has been printed with a standard labelmaker, which would clearly not produce raised letters.

In reality the Braille is *extremely slightly* raised, though I don’t think I would be able to discern anything

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 15/12/2025

When you love Ren & Stimpy and you’re granted access to customizing the POS machine

Photo of the bottom portion of a restaurant receipt. It includes the line “Powdered by TOAST”, a pretty excellent pun.

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 01/11/2025

Spent way more time hacking custom gifs onto the mask than wearing it, follow me for more productivity advice

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2025

RIP to my Beat Saber machine (aka a Quest 2 won as a door prize), wish I’d have known you can cause permanent damage to the display if it’s exposed to direct sunlight, even indoors, even for just a minute

Still photo of the inside of a Quest VR headset. Across the top of the lens is a black streak, indicating sun damage

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2025

@jw you could do it the dumbest possible way Had a limb fall back in March, also destroying my awning. Borrowed a chainsaw for an afternoon to cut the limb into manageable chunks, and then spent the next five months batching it into yard waste collections […] [Original post on carhenge.club]

A backyard, covered in snow. On the awning is a large tree limb, which had recently snapped and fallen.

An untidy pile of logs, sticks, and broken awning pieces

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 18/04/2025

Recouping from the first gravel race of the year - Zwift can help maintain fitness, but nothing can prepare you for those midwest spring crosswinds. When's the next one?

Selfie of me while cycling across a minimum maintenance road

Third-person shot of me smiling while riding across a gravel road. Clearly not riding hard enough. Photo: Michael McColgan

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 08/02/2025

Heading to a foodie party tonight so of course I’m making Trece Leches cake foodisstupid.substack.com/p/trece-l…

A collage of assorted “milks”, with a box of Betty Crocker cake mix hidden in the back. They include: oat milk, heavy cream, buttermilk, almond milk, goat milk, strawberry milk, whole milk, coconut milk, soy milk, Muscle Milk, sweetened condensed milk, Dulce de leche, and evaporated milk.

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 17/01/2025

Aaron Grothe and @MattPayneOrg speaking on the nuances of private LLMs at the Omaha JUG

Two presenters at a user group in front of an audience, showcasing a slide on Hardware Requirements for running a Private AI coding assistant

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 16/01/2025

@closingtags “You all like weird stuff. I want to hear about it. Start a blog and own your place on the Web.”

Dylan, @closingtags, presenting a slide with the title “You should blog too!” with the logos of 11ty, Svelte, Ghost, Jekyll, Astro, and HTML5

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 16/01/2025

Hey it’s @closingtags talking about SvelteKit at NebraskaJS!

Dylan, a public speaker at NebraskaJS, on the left at a local user group

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 13/01/2025

Catching up on Jeopardy from last month

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 12/01/2025

Added outgoing webmentions to my blog, so now when I link to a page, it sends a web mention. One-line addition to my build, thanks to @rem’s `wm` tool. It’s hard to describe how magical it is to refresh @benji’s page and see my link show up, with nothing but web standards.

The footer of @benji’s website showing web mentions on his post, including one reference to https://steele.blue

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Matt Steele @mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy · 12/01/2025

@jw putting this on my car, which I now see twins of everywhere around town

Bumper sticker:
KEEP HONKING! I'm Listening to
Max Fun's Long-Running NONSENSE
podcast 'JORDAN, JESSE, GO!'

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