A coding agent running on a Commodore 64, free OpenAI Academy courses, and how I fixed email overwhelm

Plus, ADHD explained by a duck, Hamilton sings get-out-the-vote, a self-cleaning resin printer, the return of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and more.

Oct 26, 2026

I’m David Gewirtz. Welcome to this week’s Advanced Geekery newsletter. It’s been an exciting week. Let’s dive in.

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My articles

Here’s a quick recap of the articles I published in the last week on ZDNET.

How I fixed a small business's email overwhelm for $120 - thanks to ChatGPT Plus and Claude: My wife dreaded her small business’s email support inbox - so I used AI to automate it. Here’s how.

I tried OpenAI Academy’s free AI courses - and the certificate was a nice bonus: OpenAI Academy offers useful ChatGPT training, engaging assessments, and free learning resources worth exploring.

Must-watch YouTube

Moving on, let’s queue up some interesting YouTube videos for your entertainment and edification.

Bizarre animation about ADHD and showers explained by a duck. I know some of us identify with this.
Uncle Jessy is showcasing a prototype resin printer that also automatically cleans prints. He says it might make resin printing less gross. But if you look at the machine, you’ll see there are blotches of resin over the whole thing. So it may remove print cleaning as a project, but it looks to me like there will still be a lot of machine cleaning involved. Watch it, and then let me know in the comments if you agree.
The performers from the Broadway show Hamilton filk things up with an ode to the upcoming midterms. It’s really a get-out-the-vote message, is pretty much non-partisan, and is very entertaining.

Gear of the week

Last week, I spotlighted a 12-bay direct-attached storage hard drive tower. This week, we’re taking a look at an NVMe DAS, which provides a very handy way to attach much faster external storage to your ‘puter. This shell is a step up from those external SSD storage devices that offer one SSD. This allows you to attach a bunch into one case.

Note: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Interesting reads

And now, some good stuff from around the Internet, well worth checking out.

I am so pumped. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was the first TV program my parents declared was “not for me” when I was little. Star Trek was the second. They didn’t like science fiction TV. Oddly enough, they were okay with animal documentaries where one beast killed another, and the nightly news which consisted of reports of deaths and attacks in Vietnam. Go figure. In any case, apparently Paramount is remaking VttBotS starring Daisy Ridley as Lee Crane. Hopefully, this is true and doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of the ownership change. Who do you think should play Admiral Nelson. Should he be a good guy or villain? Let us know in the comments.
Washpo repeats advice we’ve all gotten over the years: going to bed and getting up at inconsistent times can screw up your sleep. Yeah, I know.
Apparently, participating in Zoom calls on flights is really annoying to other passengers. Ya think?

Reader projects

Today we’re spotlighting someone whose photos show that he is clearly a fellow advanced geekernaut.

This is Darko Mesaros, a Distinguished Developer Advocate at AWS. He has Kiro (Amazon’s coding assistant) wired up to an ancient Decwriter. Apparently, they still make ribbons for those machines.

He tells Advanced Geekery that he, “Used a serial-to-Wi-Fi modem emulator to connect the machine, then built a small Rust application that talks to Kiro through the Agent Client Protocol and converts its output into plain, 7-bit ASCII the old hardware can handle. The setup also works with a Commodore 64, an IBM PC, and a TRS-80 Model 100.”

Darko tells us, “I also used a 1986 Tandy 102 portable computer, with just 32KB of RAM and an eight-line screen, to deploy a Kubernetes application to Amazon EKS. I connected the machine’s serial port to a Wi-Fi modem emulator, then used its built-in terminal software to log into a Raspberry Pi running the modern tools. I adjusted the terminal settings to accommodate the Tandy’s small display, character encoding, and keyboard, letting me control the deployment from the vintage machine while the Raspberry Pi and cloud handled the heavy lifting.”

Right now, he tell us he’s working on wiring a Cold War-era military phone to an LLM (which is still a work-in-progress).

Send in your projects

I’d like to regularly spotlight a reader project or two here. Your project doesn’t have to be a big Kickstarter launch. If you’ve built something cool, it has some pretty pictures, and you’re proud of it, I might be able to share it here.

If you have a photogenic reader project, send an email to me at david@zatz.com with the subject “READER PROJECT,” a few pictures, and a short one-paragraph description. If you have a social media link or a link to the project, include that, too.