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”. ...
My garden CCTV system started with a simple loop: Frigate detects movement, a Python script sends a Telegram notification, and I can look at a snapshot or short clip from my phone. That was good enough for real-time alerts. It was not good enough for history. Telegram is a terrible archive browser. It is excellent at interrupting me when something happens, but bad at answering questions like: What happened in the last two hours? Did I miss a person detection yesterday? Which clips exist for this camera? Can I open the full event without digging through chat history? So the next small project was obvious: keep Telegram as the notification surface, but build a proper CCTV history portal on the Raspberry Pi itself. ...
Most AI assistants are designed to be agreeable. They say “Absolutely.” They praise the question. They hedge every answer until nothing is left but damp corporate fog. This is fine if the assistant is a search box with manners. It is not fine if the assistant has access to your shell, email, calendars, automations, Raspberry Pi, finance reports, blog drafts, and the long tail of unfinished things that make up a real life. ...
I run a Raspberry Pi 5 at home as part of my OpenClaw setup. It started as an OpenClaw node connected through an SSH tunnel, then became a garden CCTV box running Frigate and recording video clips. By this point it is a camera box, a Frigate server, a Hailo detector host, and a remote machine my AI assistant can inspect from Telegram. At least, that was the idea. After a recent OpenClaw update, the Pi still looked connected. It was visible in the gateway. It was paired. It had broad permissions. The UI suggested everything should work. ...
In my previous post I connected a Raspberry Pi 5 to my AI assistant as a remote node. The natural next step: attach a camera and turn it into a proper garden security system — motion-activated, AI-powered, with notifications straight to Telegram. This post documents what I built: Frigate NVR running on the Pi 5, a Freenove 8MP camera module, automated clip retention, and a Python bot that sends snapshots to a private Telegram channel the moment something moves. ...
I recently got a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) and decided to connect it to my OpenClaw setup as a remote node. The idea: give my AI assistant direct access to a physical machine sitting on my home network, so it can run commands there, monitor things, and eventually interact with hardware. This post documents how I did it, the pitfalls I ran into, and what I plan to use it for. ...
I just moved my self-hosted OpenClaw from one cloud VM to another. The whole thing — from “let me have a look at what’s running” to “the bot replied to my Telegram message on the new box” — took about 90 minutes, and the bot was offline for less than two of them. The interesting part isn’t that it worked. The interesting part is what shape the plan had to take so that nothing ended up in a half-migrated state, and how OpenClaw itself helped me think through the migration before I touched a single file. ...
A few weeks ago I wrote about fixing OpenClaw after context bloat and bad model routing. Then I immediately made a related mistake in the opposite direction. I switched the default model to openai/gpt-5.4 and kept the context window at 32,000 tokens. I wanted to test the model on real daily workloads. What I got instead was a week of repeating myself, failing background jobs, and an assistant that felt like it had short-term amnesia. ...