I don’t particularly trust mega-corporations with a history of everywhere I go. I do, however, want reminders that arrive when I can act on them. Imagine a reminder to replace an air-purifier filter: useful at home, pointless halfway through a day out. Those positions are not contradictory. Location is useful. A persistent account of my movements, available for purposes I did not have in mind when I enabled a feature, is a different proposition. ...
I recently reviewed six improvements that my AI assistant had marked complete. Only two were actually complete. The other four were not imaginary or abandoned. Code existed. Tests passed. Prompts had been deployed. Scheduled jobs were enabled. Several parts had already worked in production. But each task still had at least one promised live outcome that had never been observed. One was waiting for its first scheduled weekly run. Another had delivered its news path but not the reading-feedback loop included in the same specification. A third had a longer observation period written into its own acceptance criteria. ...
Earlier this year I built an AI and technology news digest. It pulled from newsletters, Hacker News, and Reddit, filtered for AI terms, and sent the results to Telegram every few days. It was useful. It was also a list generator. The system knew that an article matched a keyword and that a link was popular. It did not know whether I had seen the same underlying story three times, whether a consequential claim had a primary source, whether the item connected to anything I was working on, or whether I had rejected the same kind of recommendation last week. ...
I have a Quick Notes topic in Telegram. It is the nearest thing my personal system has to an input box: send a sentence from my phone and let the machinery put it somewhere useful. The first version was efficient in the way a paper shredder is efficient. It could turn a message into a calendar entry or task, but it did not understand that a thought, a reference, a question, and a commitment are different things. ...
My Google Tasks lists used to have a polite but important lie built into them. They mixed things I needed to do with work my AI assistant, Closp, could do. A reminder to make a phone call sat beside a research job Closp was perfectly capable of completing. Both appeared in the same list, in the same form, as if both were waiting for me. That is not a shared system. It is an AI quietly adding its own homework to the human’s pile. ...
I already run OpenClaw on my server. It handles the useful day-to-day layer: Telegram conversations, scheduled jobs, notifications, research, summaries, and the accumulating collection of small automations that make a personal assistant worth having. So at first glance, Claude Code Remote Control looked redundant. Why put another AI interface on the same box when I can already talk to OpenClaw from my phone? Because they solve different problems. OpenClaw is my normal control plane. But when an OpenClaw update breaks that control plane, I need an independent way back in. In the past that meant SSH from a laptop with the right keys. Fine at a desk; useless when the laptop is shut, elsewhere, or simply not with me. ...
Most notification systems do not have an information problem. They have a presentation problem. The email system had already done the hard work. In an earlier post, I described the scoring pipeline that separates mail needing an immediate alert from messages that can wait for the evening summary or a later review. More recently, I wrote about removing recurring junk at the source, rather than merely teaching the filter to tolerate it. ...
This was the worst OpenClaw update I have had. Not because one command failed. That would have been easy. It was worse: Telegram disappeared immediately after the update, openclaw doctor could not repair it, the local TUI was broken too, the first workaround degraded the system, and the beta recovery path corrupted enough state that I had to bring in a standalone Claude session from outside OpenClaw to patch SQLite manually. ...
Email junk does not arrive as one dramatic flood. It accumulates quietly. A shop you bought from once starts sending three promotions a week. A travel site mistakes one booking search for lifelong intent. A restaurant app decides you need personalised recommendations forever. None of these messages are individually offensive. That is why they survive. But the result is stupid: an inbox full of tiny claims on attention. So I asked Closp to audit the last month of Gmail and find the recurring junk worth unsubscribing from. ...
Intermittent broadband faults are annoying because they are both obvious and hard to prove. When the internet disappears during a call or a movie, everyone in the house knows it happened. But by the time the provider asks for evidence, the connection is back, the router status page looks normal, and the conversation slides toward the usual script: reboot the router, check the WiFi, wait and see. My issue looked like the ONT going down periodically. Connectivity would disappear, then recover after roughly 10-20 minutes. I needed precise timings for Sky and Openreach, not a vague memory of “it was bad again this morning”. ...