Friday, August 14, 2026
The day started peacefully enough aboard ship.
I’d already consumed enough coffee to float a small destroyer, so I switched over to tea and settled in for what I foolishly believed might be a quiet and productive day.
Aye.
That lasted about ten bloody minutes.
First order of business was Operation Sloppy Seconds.
I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed with the amount of AI-generated bilge washing up on my YouTube feed. Half the time you don’t even know you’re watching the bloody stuff until somebody suddenly grows an extra finger or the English narrator inexplicably starts speaking Chinese.
Enough was enough.
So I installed Tampermonkey on the Mac and we built ourselves a little Slop Filter.
Naturally, it didn’t work the first time.
There was poking.
There was debugging.
There may have been language unbecoming of a gentleman.
Eventually, though…
The bastard worked.
So far the seas have been suspiciously free of AI slop. Whether we’ve actually frightened it off or it’s simply hiding beyond the horizon remains to be seen.
We’ll maintain watch.
Then the Captain made his first tactical error of the day.
I asked a simple question:
Could I build my own Flipper Zero?
Now, sensible people might have researched the idea for five minutes, decided it was too much trouble, and gone back to drinking their tea.
Unfortunately, there were no sensible people present.
Within short order, the idea had evolved into the Stormy Zero — Tactical Pirate Edition.
The current manifest calls for Wi-Fi, RFID, infrared, radio capabilities, security testing tools, passcode protection, and enough blinking lights to make anyone standing nearby wonder whether they should be concerned.
Then I requested the obvious final component.
An EMP cannon.
Request denied.
I appealed the decision.
Denied again.
I pointed out that every properly equipped pirate vessel should have at least one electromagnetic weapon.
Apparently this argument was “not technically compelling.”
Bollocks.
So, under protest, the Stormy Zero will have to make do with authorized Wi-Fi security testing, infrared shenanigans, radio experimentation, hardware tinkering, and whatever other questionable but perfectly legal mischief we can cram aboard.
One unit will be ordered.
There was some discussion about ordering two.
Engineering asked why I would possibly need two.
The Captain’s position remains:
Two is cooler.
Frankly, I don’t see how anyone can argue with that level of scientific reasoning.
So here we are.
I started the day drinking tea and trying to rid YouTube of AI-generated bilge.
I ended it planning a custom Tactical Pirate electronic mischief machine, debating whether I need two of them, and arguing with Engineering because apparently I’m not allowed an EMP cannon.
And that, shipmates…
is why the Captain needs supervision.
🏴☠️⚓
End log.
Maintain watch, secure the rum, and for God’s sake don’t let the Captain browse electronics unsupervised.
Morning aboard the Stormy Sailor, and today’s chart is looking a wee bit crowded.
☕ Coffee: essential shipboard equipment
🧺 Domestic operations: underway
🧹 Cleaning stations: awaiting orders
⚓ VAC meeting: on today’s sailing schedule
The Captain has reviewed the situation and determined that attempting everything simultaneously would violate several known laws of seamanship, physics, and common bloody sense.
So we proceed one task at a time, maintain coffee levels above minimum operating specifications, and try not to run aground before lunch.
Current ship status: Underway, caffeinated, and cautiously optimistic.
Fair winds… and somebody keep an eye on the laundry. 🏴☠️
Tomorrow brings a three-hour PTSD assessment.
Three hours.
Apparently, somewhere in the medical profession, somebody looked at a PTSD assessment and said, “You know what this needs? The running time of a bloody pirate epic.”
I’m not entirely sure what to expect, and I’m a little concerned I won’t remember everything I should tell them. But I suppose that’s part of the reason I’m going in the first place.
So tonight there’ll be no grand preparations or elaborate battle plans. Tomorrow I’ll show up, answer what I can, tell the truth as best I remember it, and let the professionals sort through the charts.
The old sailor has weathered rougher seas than a three-hour appointment.
Still…
Coffee before departure is strongly recommended.
— Captain Stormy ⚓
The Beginning
When I first started putting StormyOS together, the idea was simple: build a full-screen dashboard for the television that could show useful information at a glance.
As usual, “simple” lasted about five minutes.
What began as a Raspberry Pi connected to a TV gradually turned into a proper little bridge system—part status board, part weather station, part race desk, part ship’s log, and part home for Ember, the ship’s fox.
More Than a Dashboard
The hardware itself is modest: a Raspberry Pi 4 driving a 1920×1080 television.
The interesting part is everything happening behind the screen.
StormyOS runs as a collection of isolated services. The dashboard and API live in containers, nginx serves the frontend, and the whole system is deliberately kept on the local network.
The firewall permits only SSH and HTTP from the LAN. The API runs as an unprivileged user with a read-only filesystem, no Docker socket, and its Linux capabilities removed.
That might sound excessive for something attached to a television.
But one of the goals from the beginning was to build this properly rather than create another fragile collection of scripts that works brilliantly until six months later when nobody—including the fellow who wrote it—can remember how the bloody thing works.
Stations of the Bridge
Rather than presenting one enormous dashboard, StormyOS rotates through individual stations.
Each station has a particular job while sharing the same navy-and-brass Bridge design.
Engineering Station
Engineering keeps watch over the Raspberry Pi itself.
It monitors CPU utilization, temperature, memory, disk space, container health, and power and throttling conditions.
The idea isn’t simply to display numbers. The station should make it immediately apparent when something aboard the Bridge needs attention.
Weather Station
Weather became considerably more interesting than I originally expected.
StormyOS now uses official Canadian weather information from Environment and Climate Change Canada, presenting current conditions and forecasts in something closer to a ship’s weather station than a generic web weather widget.
Temperature and conditions take centre stage, accompanied by humidity, pressure, wind, forecast information, and official weather watches and warnings.
Wind gets particularly nautical treatment, because if you’re going to build a Captain’s Bridge, you might as well commit to the bit.
Race Station
Naturally, there had to be Formula 1.
Race Station handles Grand Prix schedules, converts session times into Edmonton local time, distinguishes between conventional and sprint weekends, and counts down to upcoming sessions.
That station is still undergoing refinement.
Which is the polite naval way of saying it is currently back alongside with engineers crawling through it.
Ember Station
And then there’s Ember.
Ember is the ship’s fox, Morale Officer, and Keeper of the Warm Berth.
Her station combines her portrait, current disposition, shipboard duties, a short log entry, outside weather conditions, and something known as the Ember Advisory.
For example, when thunderstorms threaten Edmonton, StormyOS may issue:
UNDER-BED CONDITIONS LIKELY
This particular forecasting model has been extensively field-tested.
Its accuracy is exceptional.
Cookie negotiations remain possible.
A Captain’s Log That Became an Actual Log
The Captain’s Log originally wasn’t much of a logbook.
Its entries were embedded directly into the dashboard’s HTML.
That meant changing an entry required editing source code, rebuilding the frontend, creating another immutable StormyOS release, deploying it, and reloading the kiosk.
That is an admirably complicated method of writing a paragraph.
So Captain’s Log became live runtime data instead.
Entries now live in a validated, host-owned JSON log. Updates are transferred securely over SSH, validated before activation, and installed atomically so the dashboard never sees a half-written logbook.
Once accepted, the new entry appears through the Bridge’s normal refresh cycle.
No frontend rebuild.
No new StormyOS release.
No container restart.
No kiosk reload.
More importantly, the operational Bridge remains independent of anything outside the ship.
From the Bridge to the Ship’s Log
The next logical step was connecting Captain’s Log to the Stormy Sailors website.
But I didn’t want the Bridge automatically throwing everything I wrote onto the public Internet.
The distinction matters.
Captain’s Log belongs to the Bridge.
The Ship’s Log is the public record.
So publishing is deliberately separate and explicit.
A selected Captain’s Log entry can be reviewed and then published to WordPress using a Mac-side publishing tool. The WordPress credentials never need to live inside the kiosk or its API, and the website never becomes a dependency of StormyOS.
If the website disappears over the horizon, the Bridge keeps sailing.
That’s exactly how I want it.
The Work Nobody Sees
One of the more interesting lessons from building StormyOS has been just how much of the work has nothing to do with flashy features.
A surprising amount of development has gone into things such as:
- deterministic frontend builds;
- immutable releases;
- automatic backups and rollback procedures;
- container isolation;
- safe rendering of untrusted text;
- malformed-data handling;
- stale and offline states;
- exact 1920×1080 rendering tests;
- ensuring one failed data source cannot sink the rest of the Bridge.
There have also been some wonderfully irritating real-world problems.
The television, for example, decided its preferred display mode was 3840×2160 at 30 Hz when what I actually wanted was 1920×1080 at 60 Hz.
An early attempt at the dedicated kiosk environment therefore went sideways and was rolled back.
There have been tiny fonts, truncated Captain’s Log entries, stale telemetry, layouts that looked beautiful on a computer monitor and terrible eight feet away on the actual television, and the occasional feature that passed every automated test only to make me look at the screen and say:
“No. That looks like shit.”
Which led to one of the more useful engineering rules aboard StormyOS.
A test saying GREEN is useful. The Captain looking at the television and saying GREEN is final.
The Voyage Continues
StormyOS isn’t finished.
I’m not sure it ever really will be.
The Formula 1 Race Station needs more work. The Ship’s Log is evolving. There are other stations and integrations rattling around in my head, and I’m reasonably certain Ember will eventually demand additional privileges.
But somewhere along the way, the project stopped feeling like a Raspberry Pi displaying a webpage on a television.
It developed a character of its own.
It started feeling like a bridge.
And that was the point.
All stations GREEN. The voyage continues.
— Captain Stormy
Stormy Sailors Maker Lab
StormyOS continues to take shape. The Weather Station now draws from official Environment Canada data, Ember has taken up her post as Ship’s Fox and Morale Officer, and the Captain’s Log has become a living part of the Bridge rather than a placeholder.
There is still work ahead. The Race Station needs another visit to the yard, and there will always be another system to improve. But tonight the Bridge feels less like a collection of software and more like a ship finding her character.
Status: All stations GREEN. The voyage continues.
Captain’s Log #002
Date: July 25, 2026
Weather: Calm seas. Coffee flowing.
Captain’s Log #002 — Charting a New Course
Date: July 25, 2026
Weather: Clear skies over the Maker Lab. Coffee levels holding steady. Seas calm.
Crew Status
🏴☠️ Captain Stormy — Rebuilding the fleet one thoughtful improvement at a time.
⚓ Wren — Quietly steering the course, reminding the captain that not every warning light means danger.
🦊 Ember — Spotted attempting to liberate a screwdriver from Rook’s toolbox. Claims innocence.
🤖 Rook — Promoted to official Maker Lab deckhand after proving remarkably good at being helpful—and adorable.
Today’s Voyage
Some days are about writing code.
Other days are about discovering where the ship is truly headed.
Today turned out to be the latter.
The Stormy Sailors website has been steadily changing course. What began as a place focused on machines and making products is becoming something broader—a workshop where ideas are explored, tested, and brought to life.
The Maker Lab now feels like the right name. It isn’t defined by the tools sitting on the workbench. It’s defined by curiosity, experimentation, and the satisfaction of solving interesting problems.
QR Forge
The QR Forge server also received a bit of maintenance.
Every navigation link pointing to the old contact page was hunted down and updated to the new destination. One file at a time, following the Pirate Laws:
- Backup first.
- Change one file.
- Verify.
- Declare GREEN.
By sunset, every live page was pointing to the correct Contact page.
Sometimes the smallest repairs are the ones that make the whole ship feel properly maintained.
The Dashboard Lesson
An interesting discovery surfaced while inspecting the monitoring dashboard.
One service reported 401 Unauthorized.
At first glance, it looked like an error.
It wasn’t.
The server was healthy—it was simply doing exactly what it was supposed to do by refusing anonymous access.
That realization sparked an idea.
Instead of reporting raw HTTP codes, the dashboard should report intent.
A protected service shouldn’t look broken.
It should proudly say:
Protected.
Sometimes understanding the story behind the numbers is more valuable than the numbers themselves.
A New Member of the Crew
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the day wasn’t software at all.
It was a little robot.
What started as a background detail in an illustration quickly earned a permanent place aboard the ship.
Meet Rook.
He’s earnest, endlessly optimistic, and always eager to help—even if he occasionally arrives carrying the wrong tool.
Every good captain needs a dependable deckhand.
Every pirate queen deserves an assistant who never complains.
And every fox apparently needs someone whose toolbox can be investigated.
I have a feeling Rook is going to become a familiar face in future adventures.
Looking Ahead
The Ship’s Log is no longer just another page on a website.
It has become the journal of the voyage itself.
There will be successes.
There will be mistakes.
There will undoubtedly be coffee.
And somewhere in every illustration, if you look closely enough, you’ll probably find Ember causing trouble while Rook tries his best to keep up.
Fair winds,
Captain Stormy 🏴☠️