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The Life of Kenneth
Personal blog · blog.thelifeofkenneth.comhardwaresystems
The Life of Kenneth is a personal blog at blog.thelifeofkenneth.com about hardware and systems. Since 2013, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “Creating an autonomous system for fun and profit (2017)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for posts on off-grid and offline networking, Raspberry Pi recovery kits, BGP and personal ASNs, internet exchanges and hardware hacks such as RAM upgrades.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The thoughts and projects of an engineer who likes to convert solder, firmware, and wire into all sorts of different forms of entertainment.
Most-linked posts?
- Creating an autonomous system for fun and profit (2017)11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2020-01-14
- Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-11-16
- Building an Anycast Secondary DNS Service2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-30
What Hacker News says?
Update: In case anyone finds this later, I just ran across this page of someone else doing EXACTLY what I wanted to do, for exactly the same reason: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-...
Comment linking /2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-repositories.html
on “Off-Grid Cyberdeck: Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit”Submitted Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit as a story · 140 points
HN discussionThat's the use-case I set mine up for, just for fun. Unplug my cable modem and see how long I can still be productive. With a local copy of most StackOverflow sites and Wikipedia, I'm pretty well equipped for a certain set of problems. Next up, I need to figure out how to wield the various github-mirror-an-entire-org scripts I've found, to keep a local copy of Adafruit's github, since their code and libraries power…
Comment linking /2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-repositories.html
on “Internet in a Box”Submitted Creating an autonomous system for fun and profit (2017) as a story · 20 points
HN discussionRelated and fun: the Fremont Cabal Internet Exchange[1]. The person who started it has a great blog[2] about all kinds of related things. There’s a really good interview[3] with him about how it started and what it takes to run it on the On The Metal podcast (highly recommended in general) 1: https://fcix.net 2: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com 3: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/kenneth-finnegan
Comment linking /
on “Start Your Own ISP”Submitted Building an anycast secondary DNS service as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt doesn't have to be that large. Many people have "personal" ASNs. Check out this blog (not me, I just remember it from years back): https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2017/11/creating-autonomou...
Comment linking /2017/11/creating-autonomous-system-for-fun-and.html
on “BGP handling bug causes widespread internet routing instability”Submitted Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI share this interest! I feel like a lot of ham radio networking is still "offline" from an internet perspective; you may have a LAN or even a WAN but no connection to root DNS or certificate servers or whatever. This tickles my fancy: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-... I feel like /r/darknetplan is tangentially related, but not quite what I'm looking for. I've been playing with Internet…
Comment linking /2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-repositories.html
on “Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?”Submitted Serving 90TB/Day of Linux Updates from Thin Clients as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI remember swapping the TSOP packages on a WRT54 to double the RAM. Here's a blog post about this, not sure if it was the same one I followed: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2010/09/upgrading-ram-in-w...
Comment linking /2010/09/upgrading-ram-in-wrt54gv2.html
on “OpenWrt: A Linux OS targeting embedded devices”Submitted Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere is an interesting article for anyone interested in BGP or IXs https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2017/11/creating-autonomou...
Comment linking /2017/11/creating-autonomous-system-for-fun-and.html
on “Tools to Explore BGP”Submitted Building an Anycast Secondary DNS Service as a story · 2 points
HN discussionModular hardware? Yes, please! Right now, I can upgrade the RAM, CPU, GPU and storage in my servers, desktop, and laptop. My phone? Not so much. And it wouldn't pain me so much, but for the fact that I'm missing out on things like NFC and low power Bluetooth. If I can get a software defined radio in a wristwatch ( http://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2011/04/reprogramming-ez430... ), then why can't I have one in a cell…
Comment linking /2011/04/reprogramming-ez430-chronos-rf-dongle.html
on “Get Ready for Disposable Hardware”Submitted Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit (2017) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOh this is super interesting! I've been playing with Internetinabox, Kiwix, yt-dlp, httrack'd websites, mirrors of github orgs... and I have all this data but no frontend for it. Searchability is huge, I will definitely be playing with this. IIAB, notably, has an offline maps function in recent versions. I haven't looked at how it works. Ultimately I'd like to put _all_ that content behind the same interface as my l…
Comment linking /2018/01/off-grid-raspbian-repositories.html
on “Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell”Submitted Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Creating an autonomous system for fun and profit as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Teardown of a Sonoff Basic WiFi Relay as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Off the Grid Debian Install Setup as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
