When you understand what a website is and how it's built, it's easier to understand the trade-offs between the different options for building them. Websites are like houses. The cost of construction and maintenance depends on what you build and how you choose to build it. You need three things to build a house: 1. The house itself, mad...

I chased the mirage, followed the dream, made a mad dash for the pot of NixOS gold at the end of the UNIX rainbow. Now I'm looking over the Jordan into the promised land. There's only one thing left keeping me from crossing over to the other side -- an editor that I can rely on. See, back in Omakub/Ubuntu land, it's easy. LazyVim is *e...

Every few weeks, the same foolish dream comes back to me. I'm using Ubuntu Gnome on a Framework 13. It's stable in the way a bike with training wheels is stable. Training wheels prevent you from falling down, but they also make it hard to go fast, take tight turns, etc. So here I am again, wondering if I should give Arch or NixOS anoth...

Growing up, I was a reader. I had no video games, almost no computer use, limited TV/movie time, and lived in a rural area. But there were other things to do: be outside, play with toys in my room (mostly Legos, Fisher Price, and GI Joes), or read. Reading was an hours-a-day sort of thing for me. Mom had hundreds (and eventually thousa...

A friend and I have started working as a visual jockey duo. We're new, but I've picked up that a lot of people in this trade are single-player mode only. We double the fun, but bring double the computers -- producing visuals in one and then using SRT (or sometimes NDI) to send video streams to the second computer, which produces its ow...

Today I decided that my life has enough stability for me to restart my goal of writing daily. I sat here for twenty minutes trying to think of what to write. The only topics that immediately sprang to mind all related to tech and politics. Then I realized that I don't want to write about tech or politics, because I alread read and thin...

I'll never not be amazed by computers. As summarized by this xkcd comic: That's all my laptop is -- a metal rectangle of full of little lights. I push buttons and the lights change. The physics that make it possible are no different than the physics that govern a light switch in my house. I flip the switch on my wall and the bulb turns...

I've been getting back to old habits for the last few weeks by going to bed around 8 pm and getting up around 3 am. I have to say, it's beautiful to bike out into empty streets to get to the office. And it's peaceful to work in an empty common room. I can be set up and working hours before the sun comes up. Obviously it's not for every...

Every night I sleep on a mattress, with warm blankets, next to a window with heavy curtains, in a temperature-controlled room, in a house with no drafts, in a safe neighborhood, in a prosperous city. I could list that out in more detail, but the point is that I try to keep things in perspective when I'm trying to fall asleep or when I'...

Here's an interesting question for you: how can you remotely detect a fire in an era before modern smoke alarms existed? Well, if you live in the early 1900s you can refer to your copy of The Boy Mechanic**, which was "one of many compliations [sic] of short how-to articles from Popular Mechanics, a monthly magazine of the late 19th ce...

Years ago, when learning Spanish for the first time, I was fascinated to discover rhyming words popping up where I would have least expected them in English. To wit: Los pecados pasados del pescado son pesados. The past sins of fish are heavy. I'm sure that English has just as many fun twists and turns for non-native speakers to discov...

I keep thinking about something I heard last week from this guy. As best as I recall it was something like this: Exercising without making time for quality sleep is like working a job and never cashing in your paycheck. I've been paying more attention to my sleep habits since hearing that. I've also started to notice other areas of my ...

About a decade ago I had a supervisor who liked to remind us that the easiest way to make an adult angry was to make an unannounced change to their plans at the last moment. Then about two years ago I heard this Mister Rogers song for the first time: I like to be told When you're going away, When you're going to come back, And how long...

Around the time that I was eight or nine years old, my parents started to think about building a home out in the country. Back in the early 2000s, that meant my mother got a lot of home plan books from the local library. I didn't really understand the larger purpose behind the books, I just thought that they were so fun to read. Most o...

There's a software development concept called "technical debt" that has good applications to life in general. The basic idea is that, when you solve a coding problem with a temporary quick fix, you're really just kicking the can down the road for your future self. Except that's a bad metaphor, because a can doesn't change much when you...