Family, school and home
● Current as at 5 September 2026, AEST
Prefer to watch? Here it is in 81 seconds, narrated, with captions.
Most of Station is about my work, my ideas and the machines in my house. A small, quiet part of it touches the household — and it’s the part I’ve thought hardest about, because the interesting question was never what can it do. It was what is it not allowed to do.
Why this page has no pictures
Every other page here shows you screenshots. This one doesn’t, deliberately.
The screens involved are full of things belonging to people who didn’t ask to be on a website: names, a school, appointments, which room is which. I can redact a screenshot, and I do — the rest of this site depends on it — but that’s something I’d have to get right every single time, and the safest number of attempts is none. So no captures of any of it were taken; the record for this page says exactly that.
The same rule decides the words. No names, no ages, no school, no health, and nothing about anyone’s day specific enough to place a person somewhere at a time.
School notifications
A school portal emails to say an item has been posted. That’s all the email contains — the item itself sits behind a login. Station watches for those emails, signs in, fetches the real thing, summarises it on my own hardware, and drops a plain summary into my inbox with everything else waiting on a decision. None of it leaves the house.
That’s the good version. The honest one is that it did nothing at all for about six weeks. It had never once run: a value one character too long for the box it was filed in, an error swallowed quietly, and the failing line sitting before the line that did the real work. A feature that has never worked looks exactly like one with nothing to report. By the time I found it, that period’s notices had rolled off the portal and were gone.
What reaches the house’s own screen
The house already runs its own home-automation dashboard, and that’s where people actually look — in the hallway on the way past, not at a desk. So instead of building a screen nobody would visit, Station publishes into that one: a sentence on whether it’s worth going outside, and a time to leave by. Miss a few updates and the reading says unavailable rather than showing a confident half-hour-old answer.
Two things are deliberately not sent there. Who’s home — the house already knows, and doesn’t need a second copy sitting on a channel every device can read. And anything to do with health, which stays inside Station for the person it belongs to. A kitchen screen has a different audience, and putting it there is a disclosure nobody agreed to.
When the house quietly stops working
A morning wake-up routine failed three days running. Every dashboard said everything was fine, and the only trace was one line a day in a log nobody reads. What detected it was a person noticing the radio hadn’t played, on day three.
Station watches for that now — visible within fifteen minutes instead of never. The rule underneath is the one I’d defend hardest: a problem closes only when something proves it worked again. An error that stops appearing isn’t a recovery; it’s just as likely to mean the thing was restarted. Station may fix exactly two things, both single and reversible, and even that shipped switched off. It proposes; I press the button. An unattended agent writing to a live home isn’t the same as one writing to a test system — here the failure modes are physical.
The boundary
Anything filed under a project stays there. Content written inside a workspace doesn’t appear in general search, on my phone, or in a chat with my own notes — only inside that workspace. It’s never silently missing, though: a search tells me how many matches are sitting inside workspaces and offers me the door, because a boundary that loses your work is worse than the leak it prevents.
A private appointment’s title never reaches a model at all. I learned that one the hard way, when the evening call read a private appointment back to me out loud. The fix isn’t a longer list of banned words — word lists lose to life. Anything not positively identified as work is treated as personal, and the titles held back are never handed over in the first place. Telling a model a secret so you can instruct it not to mention the secret is not a boundary.
The copy I build against can read the house; it cannot operate it. That copy is refreshed nightly from a real backup, so it holds real, working credentials. Every way Station can touch the outside world is checked at the last moment before it happens, and there it stops and says suppressed on this instance. Approving an action answers "did you mean to do that?", not "are you on the real system?" — and it fails safe: a copy that hasn’t been told what it is assumes it isn’t the real one and stays quiet.
The machines side of the same house: the homelab →. What runs on its own, and what each thing may touch: helpers and agents →.