The guesthouse has eight rooms in a Kapadokya village, and the owner takes bookings on a phone over Wi-Fi that drops every time the wind picks up. The original form was a single POST to a PHP script:
The guesthouse has eight rooms in Mustafakemalpaşa-ish hill country outside Ürgüp, and the water comes from a tank on the roof fed by a well pump. Twice last spring guests got cold showers because the
The 01:30 Istanbul–Göreme night bus, a Mercedes Tourismo, was advertising a Wi-Fi network with no password. My phone connected, got a DHCP lease, and then nothing: no DNS, no gateway, five bars of lie
A small guesthouse in Ortahisar runs two things I care about: a booking page and a Wi-Fi network that guests judge within the first ten minutes. Last spring the owner reported that the Wi-Fi "disappea
Last spring I helped a guesthouse in Göreme move its booking page off a shared PHP host onto a single 4 GB VPS. The site is tiny: about 40 bookings a day in season, a handful of room-photo requests, a
In March I flew IST to NAV with a 7 kg cabin bag limit and a bathroom scale. Two weeks earlier I had come back from a four-day Göreme trip with a 9.4 kg bag, most of which I never opened: a second fle
Last April I spent six days walking the valleys between Göreme and Çavuşin with a phone that had no data plan and a 2016-era 32 GB microSD card. The usual offline map apps wanted 1.2–2 GB for the regi
A friend who runs a small guesthouse in Göreme asked me to look at their trip archive last spring: five years of guest photos, scanned maps, and short video clips, about 1.8 TB, sitting on two USB dri
Last winter I ran a small board off a USB port for eleven weeks, logging arrival predictions from the LRT signs near my flat in Kadıköy. The data volume was unremarkable: roughly 40k rows, one line pe
A guesthouse in Ürgüp runs a small reservation script on a €5 VPS. Every ten minutes, cron fires a PHP script that polls the booking inbox over IMAP, parses room requests, and writes them into a MySQL
Two winters ago I started noticing that the power in our flat on the Asian side dropped most Saturday mornings, usually between 09:10 and 09:40, and almost never on Sundays. The fridge clock and the r
The minibus office in Göreme runs a 32-inch screen on the wall showing the next three departures. It was a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a cheap HDMI panel, LibreOffice Impress in slideshow mode, and a USB st
Last summer, a small guesthouse in Ürgüp asked me to figure out why their Raspberry Pi kept losing power. They run a simple check-in display and a backup Wi-Fi AP. The Pi would reboot randomly, someti
The guesthouse in Ürgüp has stone walls about 70 cm thick, six rooms, and a router that lived on a shelf in the breakfast room. In January 2023 the owner sent me a photo of the router's lights and a m
A relative's laptop came back from a Göreme trip in September with a swollen battery and a 480 GB SSD that would mount read-only. The drive held roughly 61,000 CR2 files and 14,000 JPEGs from eight ye
A small tour-booking backend I help maintain runs on a 2 vCPU / 4 GB VM in a Turkish datacenter, Postgres 15, and a Go API that handles about 40 requests per second at peak. Last spring, right before
Last March I was planning a week between Göreme and Derinkuyu with almost no signal, so I pre-downloaded map tiles for the whole route onto an old Android phone. I used a small self-hosted tile proxy,
Last spring I helped a small guesthouse in Göreme keep its booking calendar straight. They take reservations through two channels: a web form that writes to a SQLite file, and walk-in bookings typed i
A small esnaf café in Ürgüp asked me to fix the laminated bus timetable they kept taped to the window. Their problem wasn't the schedule; it was the sun. By August the print had faded to pale yellow,
On the last week of March I did Istanbul to Göreme and back with two phones, a power bank that turned out to hold about half what its sticker claimed, and a 2019 ThinkPad I left at the hotel. The symp