From LoRaWAN flood sensors to AI-powered image sorting, these are the rough notes from the workbench. Field tests in paddocks and basements, small utilities we build for ourselves, and the lessons that come from wiring real hardware into real places - shared in case they’re useful for whatever you’re building next.
Cloud audit tools are excellent at finding problems and remarkably bad at fixing them. Why remediation stalls, why Well-Architected reviews aren't neutral, and what a smarter audit should do instead.
After decades of electronics work, resistor colour codes still trip me up. So I built a better tool to decode them.
Radio is critical infrastructure that relies on volunteers and communities. Recent events on the Gold Coast prove radio's value when centralised communications fail.
A practical how-to for running Meshtastic on 433 MHz with a TTGO LoRa board, using your amateur radio callsign and ham mode settings.
I built a small open-source tool called Screenshot CLI. It does exactly what the name suggests - takes screenshots from the command line. It's written in TypeScript and uses Playwright under the hood.
Meshtastic is an open-source project that lets you build a long-range mesh communication network using affordable LoRa radios - no towers, phone lines, or internet required. Once you have the devices, you own the network.
Australia is one of the best environments in the world for meaningful IoT - not the kind that controls your coffee machine, but the kind that helps prevent a flood, catch a feral animal, or secure a remote gate before someone gets hurt.
Cat 1bis is a simplified LTE standard that only needs one antenna, making it cheaper to build compact IoT devices. It hits a sweet spot between slow NB-IoT and expensive Cat 4 modems, and is now rolling out across Australia and New Zealand.
The Refactor team attended UnrealFest24, Epic Games' two-day Unreal Engine conference in Brisbane. While game development is not our core focus, many of the techniques and challenges explored there translate directly to industrial and simulation work.
A client needed to move off end-of-life Atlassian Confluence Server without paying Atlassian's cloud pricing. We took on migrating all their content into WikiJS, focusing on navigation, search, and a more pleasant reading experience.