Welcome to Arcana Labs
The best puzzles are those not intended to be solved.
-- Unknown
Providing Software, Hardware, and other Amusements, Arcana Labs is a small, independent technology exploration and development hobby shop operating out of Atlantic Canada. My past work has focused on security and disaster recovery, with present work focusing on creating toys, games, books and puzzles, such as through my flagship project, PETI. I’ve organized my projects into a few categories: hardware, software, writing projects, how-to guides, and a blog.
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Latest Updates
Internet Highlights - April 2026 Edition
2026-05-04 00:00:00 -0500
As is tradition - but equally delayed by a few days because of The Circumstances - I’ve kept a hold of the most interesting things I discovered on our wild and occasionally-wonderful internet in April, and now offer them up to you as a curated offering with only some mild promotional affect. None of these items are on the list as a result of any kind of sponsorship or promotional agreement. I just think they’re neat.
Spring Growing Season = PETI Updates!
2026-04-06 05:00:00 -0500
I’ve had a particularly lucky break in my professional life, and I’m going to be starting a brand new position with a new-to-me company in a few days. One of the practical upshots of this, though, is that it’s suddenly practical to pursue finishing PETI again. I know I said that I wouldn’t completely abandon the firmware work while I waited for the hardware work to be practical again, but I guess I was mistaken in that regard. Apart for some pie-eyed speculations, the code has sat largely untouched since last October and apart from some git commit messages and very sparse notebook comments, I have no idea what the state of the project is.
Internet Highlights - 2026-3-31
2026-03-31 00:00:00 -0500
I know we haven’t done it in a couple of months, but in actual fact I have been stockpiling links for you anyway, as though it had been the plan to do it all along. To be honest life has just simply been just enough madhouse lately that on the last of each month when the task would come up to pull this post together, I said “nah”.
Bodhidharma's Social Media Feed
2026-03-11 00:00:00 -0500
I’ve been toying for a few months now with the idea of a pithy aphorism, something along the lines of “the curse of sentience is its desire to be self-indulgent”. It’s not a commentary on craving chocolate, but this idea that somehow, in all our self-aware brilliance, there is a compulsive need to know about everything going on, to “monitor the situation”. Sometimes, this drive is taken so seriously that we latch to it as though it were potentially a moral failing not to keep up with goings-on. There’s a whole subset of modern Buddhist discourse concerned with Engagement; keeping an eye on the state of the world and attempting to nudge it in the ways best suited.
Signifying Nothing - US Operation Epic Fury
2026-02-28 00:00:00 -0600
It’s 9 AM on a Saturday morning and somehow I am already an hour into having learned that the looming US strike on Iran has finally happened, and that they’ve only gone ahead and gotten Israel involved too. The US has named this operation “Epic Fury”, which always brings to mind the old Shakespeare saw “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. It’s easy to get pulled into asides about the name of the operation and wrack up a few quick morale-boosting rhetorical kills against the men in the US who made this decision, but that would be missing the broader point here.