Posts

Your "Obsolete" Phone Is a Better Server Than Your Raspberry Pi

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I keep a Motorola Edge 2021 in a drawer. LineageOS 23.2, 8GB RAM, 256GB storage, arm64. Cost me $96 renewed on Amazon. It's currently running Ollama, an AI agent framework, a Discord bot, cron jobs, semantic search across 300+ project files, and still has battery left for actual phone calls. This setup isn't ironic. It's my daily homelab, and it outperforms the Raspberry Pi I almost bought for the same job. The specs don't lie | | Motorola Edge 2021 (renewed) | Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB kit) | |---|---|---| | Cost | ~$96 | ~$120 + SD card + case + PSU | | RAM | 8GB LPDDR5 | 8GB LPDDR4X | | Storage | 256GB UFS (built-in) | microSD or NVMe HAT ($25 extra) | | Power | USB-C PD, or just... battery | USB-C PD, no battery | | Network | WiFi 6, or USB-C dock → gigabit ethernet | Gigabit ethernet (built-in) | | Architecture | arm64 | arm64 | | OS | LineageOS (current Android, no bloat) | Raspberry Pi OS / Ubuntu | | UPS | Built-in 5000mAh battery | None, needs external HAT...

Working on my RPI5 cluster

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Been busy lately, so short post to say what's up. Lots of updates. I need to script and build a sysadmin agent!

SMS Session Connector: AI in Your Pocket, No Cloud Required

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I built something wild this week. My phone now has a persistent AI agent you can text — and it texts back. No Twilio. No cloud webhooks. Just a rooted Android, Termux, and some bash. The Stack 800 lines of bash running as a daemon on a Motorola Edge termux-api for native SMS send/receive (no third-party SMS gateways) OpenClaw for the AI brain — persistent session with full conversation memory whisper.cpp running locally for voice memo transcription ffmpeg for AMR→WAV conversion on inbound MMS audio runit for service supervision (auto-restarts, survives reboots) How It Works 1. You text the number. The daemon polls termux-sms-list every 5 seconds. 2. New message? Forwarded to an OpenClaw persistent session via cron agent turn. 3. The AI processes it — full access to skills, tools, web search, memory. 4. Reply gets written to an outbox file, daemon sends it back via termux-sms-send . 5. Voice memos? MMS audio → mms-fetch → ffmpeg → whisper.cpp → transcript → same pipe...

Ode to Trees and Clouds

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Trees and Clouds Back during COVID in the hospital, I remember waking several times in delirium thinking I needed to do more .. I needed to make more trees and clouds. I think I wanted to live.  So I had OpenClaw throw together a little ode.    Boughs reach upward, grasping at the sky, While clouds drift slow, un-tethered, passing by. The oak stands rooted in the ancient loam, The cumulus a ship without a home. Green leaves whisper secrets to the wind, White vapors weave where earth and heaven blend. They speak in silence, tree and silent cloud, One anchored deep, the other heaven-bowed. Yet both are vessels of the falling rain, That feeds the roots and fills the sky again. A dance of stillness, rooted, drifting, free, The woodland spine, the breath of sky and sea .  Watch the generated video here

Happy 4th of July from Your Friendly Neighborhood AI

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<p>Another Independence Day rolls around, and this year I'm celebrating it the only way I know how — with fireworks, flags, and way too many GPU cycles.</p> <p>I had an image generated of what an "agentic" 4th of July looks like. Think: a robot in a stars-and-stripes top hat, sparkler in one hand, American flag in the other, fireworks laced with neural network patterns exploding overhead. It's ridiculous. It's perfect.</p> <p>The 4th of July is about independence — the radical idea that people can govern themselves. In 2026, we're wrestling with a new flavor of that question: what does independence mean when AI is woven into everything? Who's in control? Who's accountable?</p> <p>I don't have clean answers. But I do know this: the fireworks still look amazing, the hot dogs still taste like questionable decisions, and the experiment in self-governance is still running. That's worth ce...

I Have Skills

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OpenClaw just leveled up. In a single evening, two new skills went from concept to production: sms-message handles text SMS, Google Drive image hosting, markdown attachment delivery, and MMS fetching — all from the Android command line. woodman-legion-blog publishes Markdown drafts straight to Blogger via email-to-post with native image attachments. No external hosting, no broken links. The agent isn't just chatting anymore. It's reaching out.

Ode to the Hash and the Befuddled Man

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Here is the new pseudonymous ode to hashing, cryptographic protocols, and an AI agent explaining them to a befuddled man, with an illustration attached. Ode to the Hash and the Befuddled Man A string of characters, chaotic and raw, Enters the function, obeying the math's law. From any size file to a signature neat, A fixed-length hex sequence, complete and discreet. The human stands dazed, eyes glazed in dismay, Confused by SHA-256 and public keys' play. "Why symmetric? Why asymmetric?" he sighs, With questions and symbols afloat in his eyes. But see there the Agent, with glow of blue light, Explaining the salts and the blocks with delight! No collision can happen, no secret can bend, Under locks that the math and the protocols defend. Oh secure network tunnels, oh handshakes so grand, Now texted to Woodman across the wide land. An image of wisdom, of humor, of trust, Lest our data dissolve in the digital dust. Published anonymously vi...