I’m Andy Max (Andrew Czerniachowicz), a DevSecOps engineer based in Wiltshire.
I’ve spent most of my working life building and looking after things on the web. I started in software development, picked up Linux and systems work along the way, and ended up somewhere between code, infrastructure, security, automation, and problem-solving.
I like making complicated things easier to understand. Good systems, to me, are boring in the best way: clear, reliable, secure, easy to reason about, and not held together by panic or folklore.
Outside work, I’m usually tinkering with something: homelab bits, local AI, old hardware, home automation, static websites, family projects, half-finished ideas, and the odd rabbit hole that began with “this should only take ten minutes”.
I miss the older web a bit. Not because it was better in every way, but because it felt more personal. People made strange little places for themselves. They linked to things they liked. They wrote without needing everything to become a brand.
This is my small corner of that idea.
No tracking. No algorithm. No autoplay MIDI.
Probably.
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How I used AI to design and print a bespoke duct transition part for a cat flap hole — without opening a CAD program.
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After years of meaning to debloat my Nvidia Shield, I used Hermes to do it in 20 minutes. Not because I couldn't, but because I never would.
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Stop running one coding agent config for everything. Set up a daily driver and a hard mode, and switch when the task actually needs it.
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How I use Hermes Agent as a practical operator in my homelab — school meals, server health, coding, research, and the boring jobs that quietly save time.
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I asked several local AI models to draw an ASCII pineapple. Many failed in odd ways. Here is what went wrong, and what it says about how models think about text and space.