I'm not a big fan of data collection and connection just for the sake of it.

When I learned that remote start was paywall’d behind a subscription, both with the fob and the mobile app, it pushed me over the edge to find out how to dumb my 2021 Toyota Tundra.

This led me to the DCM module. You can learn more about this here. The long and short of it is constant data collection with data brokering to insurance companies on the side. No thank you. Toyota will tell you that you can completely opt out and disable all this via a software toggle on their end. Since these claims consistently are debunked, I wanted to go the for sure route. For sure after seeing this little nugget:

Unhooking the fuse to the DCM will throw errors, unplugging it will do the same while also disabling the trucks built in mic. I'm sure this was just a oversight, not just a way to demotivate folks from unplugging them. 😉

A bit more digging led me to other privacy minded folks. One person also made block off harnesses to disable the DCM while not losing unexpected functionality. Big shout out to this thread here.

Taking the dash and glove box apart wasn't too bad, for sure easier with my assistant.

How I keep my weekends family focused with an "unplugged" phone

I've tried or owned just about every minimal unplugged phone out there, from Punkt to lightphone and everything between.

Why I use this opensource tool for my analytics

I've dabbled in self hosting my blog on and off for years.

Something  that i never really felt was where I wanted it was light site stats. I  had no interest in paying for this functionality, or giving big brother  Google any of my data.

When I landed on Ghost, they did not have the partnership with Tinybird yet, so I started to dig.

I finally found Umami

Out the gate i was really impressed on how easy it is to get going.

Once I set up my site, it gave me a simple script to add to the site. Once done, I could see all the goodies I was after.

A quick post on how and why i use self hosted LLMs

While I have strong feelings about the overarching "AI" umbrella, open-source models and tools are neat.

Powered my home lab, with unraid, the ollama docker, and the open-webui docker.

Right now, these are my favorite opensource models:

• Llama 3.1 - Fast, solid all-rounder; tool-calling support
• Qwen 2.5 - Stronger multilingual, math, code
• OLMo 2 7 B - 100 % open training pipeline
• Mistral 7 B Instruct v0.3 - Fast, creative writing
• StarCoder2 7 B - Code-generation specialist, 600+ langs.

I have a few more at the ready when needed

Immich for local backups via my Unraid server.

Then surprisingly, proton drive for my cloud backups. While not feature rich, and reminds me of old school dropbox, its been pretty great.

I love Ente and look forward to them growing, but its for sure on the slow side and can be frustrating.

Jealous of all the fun fruit folks are having: https://blog.kagi.com/orion