I’m Drew — based in Temecula, CA (for now; a Maryland move is on the horizon).
This is where I write about the things I actually spend time on: imaging the night sky, designing and printing things that solve real problems, stitching leather goods by hand, and keeping the homelab humming underneath all of it.
The Gear
The astrophotography side runs on a dedicated imaging rig. Post-processing happens in PixInsight. Images are stored on a self-hosted Synology NAS and served through this site via an NFS mount — no cloud middlemen.
The 3D printing setup is a Bambu Lab X1C. It runs in LAN-only mode on an isolated IoT VLAN, which is the kind of sentence that makes sense to me and probably no one else.
The leatherwork is entirely hand-stitched. No machines. I use a Speedy Stitcher for field repairs and saddle stitch everything else with needles and waxed thread. Veg-tan leather from a handful of suppliers I’ve tested and trust.
This Site
Built with Hugo. Served from a Debian VM running on Proxmox. The only public entry point is a Cloudflare Tunnel — no open ports, no exposed services, minimal attack surface. It’s static HTML from end to end, which means there’s nothing to exploit and it loads fast.
No trackers. No ads. Cloudflare Web Analytics runs cookie-free in the background so I know roughly how many people are reading without building a profile on anyone.