// Personal website of Chris Smith

Building a new Computer

Published on Jun 3, 2025

I recently built a new computer, after exclusively using a laptop for three years. It’s also the first time I’ve departed from the usual combo of an Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU.

While the form factor of a laptop did make it amazingly handy for travelling and attending LAN events, it was starting to show its age and there was basically no sane upgrade path. The main problem was its 3060 mobile graphics card, which was okay for the first few years and then slowly descended into painful. At the time, the (fairly disappointing) 50-series had just been released, but hadn’t yet made it into laptops. Nvidia had stopped production on the 40-series beforehand, so there also weren’t any compelling options there, either.

That’s not to say there were no laptops at all that I could have upgraded to. There were. Just not really any that ticked all of my perfectly normal boxes like “run Linux”, “have at least 64GB of ram”, and “run modern games well”. Having to upgrade the entire system just because the graphics card was showing its age was a bit of a drag, too. So back to the land of desktop computers I went!

To try to preserve some of that convenience, I opted for a small form factor (SFF) case. The computer and all the accessories can fit inside a hand-luggage-sized flight case. More on that later, though.

Components, Choices, and Cramming

So what, exactly, is in this computer? The case is a Fractal Design Terra, which is a lovely little 10.4L case. My last desktop PC was a normal-sized Fractal Design case, which I liked a lot, and it seems like they’ve upped their game since then. The Terra is both pleasant to look at (just look at that wooden panel!), and a breeze to work in. The sides and top are fully and easily removable, giving you great access to everything inside. I expected an SFF build to be fiddly, but the case made it feel about the same as a normal full-sized build.

Coming around on LLMs

Published on May 28, 2025

For a long time I’ve been a sceptic of LLMs and how they’re being used and marketed. I tried ChatGPT when it first launched, and was totally underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong: I find the technology damn impressive, but I just couldn’t see any use for it.

Recently I’ve seen more and more comments along the lines of “people who criticise LLMs haven’t used the latest models”, and a good number of developers that I respect have said they use coding models in some capacity. So it seemed like it was time to give them another shake.

The first decision to make was which model to try. OpenAI are no longer the only player in the game, every tech company of a certain size is now also somehow an AI company. I looked a bit at some benchmarks, and then mostly ignored them and went with the only company that I didn’t outright hate: Anthropic, and their model Claude.

Initial impressions

The latest Claude models do feel a lot more “capable” than the earlier ChatGPT versions I remember, but they also still have a lot of the same problems. At their heart, they’re still text-prediction models, and still seem to be trained to predict text that will please the user rather than be factually accurate or useful.

Home Automation Without the Megacorps

Published on May 21, 2025

I first experimented with home automation in 2016, by picking up a Samsung “SmartThings” hub. It was terrible. The UI to configure things was slow and clunky, firmware updates were applied whether you wanted them or not, and everything stopped working if their cloud services stopped. You were also locked into whatever integrations they deigned to support, of course. After that broke for the umpteenth time I scaled back and for years the closest I got to home automation was a couple of Hue bulbs.

Recently I’ve been building it out again, though. This time using off-the-shelf components that interop using Zigbee, open-source software, and some code I wrote myself. It’s great; it runs entirely locally and has had basically zero downtime. The Zigbee ecosystem lets me integrate all sorts of things without having to spend lots of money on “smart” alternatives. I think I’ve spent less on this incarnation than I did on the original SmartThings hub all those years ago (even without adjusting for inflation!).

My current setup

I run everything on a Raspberry Pi 4, with a Sonoff USB Zigbee adapter based on the CC2652P chipset. Interfacing with the Zigbee stack is handled by zigbee2mqtt (z2m for short), an open-source project that basically bridges your devices to an MQTT broker. When a device reports some data, it will send a new message over MQTT; when you want to make a device do something you just post a message back. It’s incredibly lightweight, but supports a huge array of devices out of the box. And as it’s just using MQTT, it’s trivial to integrate with other software or build on top of.

The Curse of Knowledge and Blogging

Published on May 16, 2025

The single worst part about blogging for me is trying to come up with ideas for what to write about. Not because they’re hard to come up with, but because every idea seems too basic or not worth talking about. Seems.

It’s not just me, either. My friends will occasionally describe some interesting problem they’ve dealt with, and I’ll chime in with “you should blog about that”. Almost invariably the response is something like “it’s not that interesting”.

There’s a cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge. Basically, once you know something you can’t accurately reconstruct your previous state of mind from when you didn’t know it. You can struggle to do something for hours, piecing together scraps of information, using all kinds of specialist knowledge, and as soon as you’re finished it all seems so basic why would anyone want to read about that?

Building a travel toolkit

Published on Jan 2, 2025

For a while now, whenever I’ve traveled anywhere I’ve dumped a selection of tools into my backpack just in case I need them. Originally this was mostly focused around being able to open and fix my laptop if anything went wrong, but over time has slowly expanded to include other useful tools.

Repeatedly packing these tools and then returning them to where they belonged was tedious, though. I couldn’t just leave them in the backpack as I often needed them for non-travelling purposes, and I didn’t want to just buy duplicate tools that spent most of their life a few meters away from each other, so I ignored the problem and just dealt with the tedium.

Eventually I acquired enough tools that — while not quite duplicates — I wouldn’t miss often if they were kept in the backpack. Building on these I’ve created a little travel toolkit that contains everything I might want (and more) while away.

The base

The biggest challenge I had before was finding a screwdriver set. I have an iFixit Mako set that did the in-and-out-of-the-bag routine for several years. Nothing else covered the range of drivers I wanted for generic electronic tinkering and more chunky work. I finally found one in the form of a Wera Tool-Check PLUS TR-Edition. “TR” stands for “Tool Rebel” and is Wera’s “fan club” brand. Its signature features over the normal Tool-Check PLUS are a fancy fabric case and a 152mm bit extender; but it also comes with a much different set of bits, which is why I picked it up.