field notes from a
small web empire.

I run 21 domains on six Hetzner boxes — price guides, browser workbenches, a bespoke mail stack, and the automation that keeps it all semi-passive. These are the build logs.

  1. Shipping the blog I postponed for six years

    martymonero.com was registered in August 2020. The first post went live in July 2026. What finally unblocked it — and the ~1,500-line stack it runs on.

    meta

  2. Why Windows Search Freezes for 30 Seconds After Every Reboot

    Reproduced on 4 machines. Frida instrumentation, minifilter tracing, and a Dropbox cloud files deadlock that blocks Windows Search at boot. Plus a persistent variant from orphan sync root registrations that no mitigation fully solves - and the replacement search engine being built to close it for good.

    windows internals

  3. Reverse Engineering Samsung's HD+ TVkey Cloud

    260 MB of firmware from a Samsung Smart TV, the NAGRA conditional access middleware, and why millions of German TVs periodically lose their paid HD channels.

    tizen