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.
Consider adding our RSS feed to your reader for instant updates!
Latest Updates
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.
We've Been Doing Business Wrong
2026-02-18 00:00:00 -0600
For some reason, after spending the best part of a decade in the tech industry, I’ve begun to feel a certain kind of way about the state of enterprise in the highly industrialized parts of the world. I can’t begin to imagine why. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”, the kids say. (I’ve looked. The quote’s hard to source, but it appears in a 1969 article by Edward Abbey, though he was chiefly concerned with urban sprawl.) Like most ideas a person can hold, the way I’ve viewed enterprise and corporation over the last thirty years or so of my life has gone through some changes. Now, with nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon but finally put some of those thoughts to pen, I am going to inflict them upon you.
PETI Single-Board Dev Kit, Consumerism, and Unusual Delays
2026-01-21 04:00:00 -0600
Last October, I took the time to share some updates about PETI, which at that point was more a project-in-concept than something I was hands-on-keyboard “working on”. That’s not really true anymore; over the last couple weeks, I’ve been actually working on our favourite virtual pet again. Specifically, on the new Single Board Development Kit (SBDK).
Internet Highlights - 2025-12-31
2025-12-31 00:00:00 -0600
As is increasingly our tradition around here, I wanted to take one final opportunity this year to round up the fun and interesting things I found this month and share them with you! But first, a more important message: If you’re on the Gregorian Calendar, let me extend to you my warmest wishes for the upcoming year. I don’t think there are many adults whose impression of 2025 was overwhelmingly positive, so, quite seriously, All the Best.
Passkeys: Ruining a Great Idea
2025-12-16 04:00:00 -0600
Passkeys are undergoing a major adoption push at the moment, as a replacement for the more traditional username/password authentication model. And while they do carry significant benefits, the way they’re being adopted makes me a bit nervous, to say the least.