A Kalman Filter to Avoid Annoying the Server (or the Guilty Pleasure of Over-Engineering)

I have a menu bar app that needs to know a single number. A percentage from 0 to 100. To fetch it, it pings a server every 30 seconds. Do the math: 30 seconds equals 2 calls per minute, 120 per hour, 960 over an 8-hour workday. Nearly a thousand HTTP requests a day to check a number that sometimes doesn’t change for 20 minutes. That’s not monitoring. That’s harassment. ...

March 12, 2026 · Fernando

Your Terminal is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin

The crime scene Zaragoza, Hotel Pilar Plaza café. A latte, views of the basilica, and yours truly with a shiny new MacBook Air M3 ready to work a couple hours with Claude Code before a meeting. Two hours later: battery at 15%. Red alert. Panic. But how? I was just in a terminal writing code. No video, no Zoom, nothing that would justify this kind of consumption. I open Activity Monitor, Energy tab, and there’s the culprit: Ghostty, with an accumulated consumption of 3,600 over the last 12 hours. For context, Brave Browser consumed 125. Zoom with video, 99. Claude (desktop app), 46. ...

January 24, 2026 · Fernando