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tomjuggleron Two-tier encryption in the UK

Linux phone cannot come soon enough

From an Android developer perspective, not good. All apps on f-droid will have to be certified by the developer with Google (it's per-app I checked) otherwise they won't work at all. And the process of not easy, even for a verified play store developer, I still have to jump through hoops to register.

Then you have to explain to users how to enable this. Not too mention the onerous F-droid requirements for publishing, it's bad enough as it is.

Average users are not going to do this, just like Google wants. Hopefully someone sues them and wins or we get Linux phones, not holding my breath though

tomjuggleron Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

If I remember correctly, the code base left a lot to be desired on the one I tried - it was fun but wasn't very adaptable. I'm sure you can do a better job

tomjuggleron Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

I meant dinosaur tamagotchi - I cannot find it on github though

tomjuggleron Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

Cool idea - I forgot where I found it but there was a cute dragon Tamagotchi clone that I found for Arduino a few years ago.

For ESP32 - recommend paying close attention to the FreeRtos, it's seriously powerful. Even if you are just using Arduino style code you can use it for background scheduling and interrupts (for your api and buttons for example), as well as dual core use on S3.

tomjuggleron Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

ChonkyBlox: A new approach to Block based coding - instead of complicated algorithms to derive the code from block programs I am using AI on the back-end, which actually makes a higher level of abstraction possible with the blocks. Each block has an LLM instruction attached, along with rules defined in the bespoke back-end harness.

Also: kids can code using cardboard cut-out blocks and just take a photo to import, generate Arduino firmware, compile and flash to ESP32 - all from a single docker web application.

Hoping to bootstrap a cheaper, open source alternative to current systems (one of which my son is using at his school). I have had success doing this with another project on Patreon so that's where it is going to be launched. https://www.patreon.com/ChonkyBlox - so far just a couple of demo video's but code will be released in full once I have added more blocks and a tutorial.

Ultimately this is aimed at the South African education sector, where many schools may have only one computer available for a classroom to share, hence the cardboard cut-outs. There is also a hardware component still in development - a simple pcb breadboard break-out with connectors for components instead of kids having to use jumper cables on the breadboared. We also have a working Desktop application which does code assistance from within the Arduino IDE - using the same web server with api, so literally everything from very small kids to advanced is covered.

tomjuggleron qm – Multiplayer agent harness for work

I feel the same but my preference is for Cecli (cecli.dev)

It does what I need it to do and since I invested so much time in setting it up and even contributing to development it is my go to for coding and even managing my VPS as well as business tasks

tomjuggleron The Art of Money Getting

Thank you for the link - I was just thinking that there were some core principles missing imo and yet there they are in the full text

For me "Persevere" is probably the main one, many people in the comments here mention the difficulty of making it in a niche field, one that you love and are good at. Personally I lived in a tent/garage for 5 years before finally becoming successful.

Also "Location" resonates. I had to move to a new city when I was starting out due to over saturation in my field at home.

tomjuggleron DeepSeek V4—almost on the frontier

So I'm involved in an open source AI cli coding assistant called Cecli (cecli.dev) which is specifically designed to work well with DeepSeek.

DeepSeek is a great model, and Cecli is all about efficiency. It works great for my purposes - agentic programming on a budget.

tomjuggleron Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

LOL DeepSeek V4 just reduced their price to less than $1 per million tokens for Pro and people are worried about Claude

tomjuggleron Iguanaworks has closed and our products are no longer sold

Awww I have one of those. It still works after more than 10 years!

Maybe that's what happened, everyone who needed one bought and we don't need an upgrade

tomjuggleron Every single board computer I tested in 2025

Same here. I really wanted Orange Pi to work, tried, but after getting my raspberry pi 4 it's night and day.

tomjuggleron How important was the Battle of Hastings?

The battle of Hastings features prominently in my house, it's one of the first history subjects we taught the kids about.

Tom Hastings

tomjuggleron FreeCAD

I started learning CAD with Free cad and never looked back. Yes it's clunky but it's free, and does the job!

tomjuggleron Cord: Coordinating Trees of AI Agents

Looks like everyone is trying to solve the same problem - here is another example I've been trying to wrap my head around lately:

Brainfile - An open protocol for agent-to-agent task coordination.

https://brainfile.md/

Well worth a look imo

tomjuggleron The bare minimum for syncing Git repos

Cool! I wrote a similar blog post last year when I decided to "Cut GitHub out of the loop"

https://www.circusscientist.com/2025/07/23/cutting-github-ou...

My motivation was mainly the fact that Bitbucket cut their free tier, and who knows how long GitHub will be free? So I tried and found out how easy git actually is to sync without third parties

tomjuggleron Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

There's a gap in the market here - not me but somebody needs to build an e-commerce bot and call it Santa Claws

tomjuggleron OpenClaw is changing my life

I got into embedded 10 years ago, there really is something about driving hardware directly that is just so rewarding.

For AI I've been using Cecli which is cli and can actually run the compile step then fix any errors it finds - in addition to using Context7 MCP for syntax.

Not quite 10x yet but productivity has improved for me many times over. It's just how you use the tools available

tomjuggleron Cecli AI Coding Assistant

Cecli (pronounced like "Ceclily") is a new AI coding assistant. Originally forked from Aider but now over 1000 commits ahead of the old project, Cecli has evolved to be much more.

Now with MCP, tools, skills, built-in TODO list, repo map, ask-code workflow OR agentic OR in-line coding. Includes the git integration, auto linting and testing that you need.

Open Source, built with Python, actively developed.

tomjuggleron Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

Personally I use "agent mode" in Cecli for almost everything - I don't know about other AI coding agents but you can easily set up tests to run and validate the output.

Since MCP came out the quality of code has improved since there is always context7 and fetch to look up syntax.

But yes at some point you need to look at the code yourself just to be sure

tomjuggleron Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

https://github.com/dwash96/cecli

It's a fork of Aider but with agent mode, MCP, skills, task manager and more. Very active development team!

tomjuggleron Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

Pretty cool idea, I'm going to be trying this only using open source Cecli (with DeepSeek API) instead of Claude CLI because I don't have infinite $$$

tomjuggleron Google is dead. Where do we go now?

For posterity, if anyone can ever find this comment amongst all the others:

We went with Instagram ads, where we have the most followers. The result: 4 paid bookings in 48 hours - all confirmed leads from the new Instagram ad campaign.

Blog post updated.

tomjuggleron Google is dead. Where do we go now?

Oh right Battlestar Galactica! I watched that like 3 times already, best sci-fi ever

tomjuggleron Google is dead. Where do we go now?

20 Years now. I'm from Cape Town, but the weather here is better. And no need for a wetsuit!

tomjuggleron Google is dead. Where do we go now?

It's fine now, somehow got to #1 on Hacker News and 1000's of visitors did that. Learned something new about Cloudflare Cache Settings, it won't happen again

tomjuggleron Google is dead. Where do we go now?

Not much chance of that at this point - I'm almost 50 years old and managed to make a living purely from performing so far (with a small exception of the pandemic, where I did coding mainly)

tomjuggleron Google is dead. Where do we go now?

You must be referring to my personal Blog and Tutorial Site. It's messy, and serves no purpose other than to talk about whatever I am interested in at the time. Sometimes other people are also interested. And it's 14 years old now, so yeah.

If you need a payoff, click the Patreon link banner on top and go support development of my Open Source LED Poi!

tomjuggleron Google is dead. Where do we go now?

I think the Magician equivalent is David Blaine, making people pass out from shock because you smuggled a fake spider into their ear or something.

Mostly we do kids entertainment though, so that's not really going to convice moms to hire my magic show for Bobby's birthday

tomjuggleron Google is dead. Where do we go now?

We are on Google Maps. Many 5* ratings (apart from that one psycho neighbour who objected to me asking him to turn his base down - they left one night without paying their rent and a week later my business has 1* review. urrgh 10 years and I'm still annoyed)

Instagram has apparently got hyper specific location targeting, so we are doing an ad on there now.