Writing

A practical way to organize Proxmox hosts, guest roles, networks, services, storage, and recovery without pretending every home lab needs enterprise HA.

How I added lazy, locally bundled Mermaid rendering to blog and project content, with theme-aware SVGs and a Proxmox layering article to exercise it.

A step-by-step troubleshooting and recovery guide for Codex Desktop 401 Unauthorized errors, stale API credentials, broken auth state, and CLI/Desktop mismatches on Windows and macOS.

A quick, step-by-step guide to safely backing up and restoring your Windows Registry before making edits.

How Proxmox unifies disparate, repurposed hardware into a single control plane and bridges the gap between snowflake home servers and automated infrastructure.

A quick note on the automation, content linting, and workflow cleanup added to johnmcdougal.com today.

How to easily correct a broken or mis-selected file extension association in Windows

Proxmox already has the pieces to get trusted certificates with ACME DNS-01, without exposing a node or pointing a public IP record at it.

The first output isn't the work. It's the starting point. What changes when you treat AI-assisted work as a cycle -- generate, evaluate, refine -- rather than a prompt waiting for the right answer.

The most useful thing AI changes isn't individual tasks -- it's the economics of building the systems that do the tasks. When scaffolding gets cheap enough, you build infrastructure you'd have skipped. That infrastructure compounds.

AI changes the cost of execution. It doesn't change the cost of judgment. The person who keeps the diagnostic loop open, asks the question that reframes the problem, and knows what the system is actually for -- that's the human moat.

Most people treat prompts as instructions. They're not -- they're the starting position for a context window that already has shape. Treating the prompt as a draft you revise before sending is the simplest way to change what comes back.

DMARC aggregate reports are XML zip files emailed by mail servers worldwide. Postmark DMARC Digests parses them and sends you a clean weekly summary -- free, no Postmark account required.

SMTP2Go's wizard gives you SPF. That's one of three records. Here's how to add DKIM and DMARC -- in the right order -- and why the order matters.

A domain you never use for email can still be spoofed. Four DNS records fix it: null MX, SPF reject-all, DMARC reject, wildcard DKIM null. No key generation, no sending infrastructure.

The context window isn't a log of your conversation -- it's the environment you're working in. How you build it, manage it, and know when to reset it is a learnable skill.

Most AI failures aren't the model's fault. They're navigation errors -- reaching into the latent space without knowing what you're doing.

Custom domain email without Google Workspace: Cloudflare handles inbound for free, SMTP2Go handles outbound, and Gmail ties it together.

Building this site with Claude wasn't about delegating the work -- it was about having a thinking partner who helped me make real decisions and ship something instead of planning forever.

PostHog Cloud + a Cloudflare reverse proxy gives you real analytics without Google -- but skip the AI wizard and read the docs first.

What this site is, who it is for, and why I am building it in public.