I use a lot of old machines. I'm typing this article on a Dell D630 running a Core 2 Duo T8300 with a whopping 4G of RAM. I have a second one with a T7700 that's otherwise identical. I love these old systems for a lot of the same reasons …

When I was a kid, I didn't tend to wear a watch, with the exception of Boy Scout camp. I needed to know the time then, and there aren't any wall clocks outside, unfortunately. I would say we should fix that, meaning it in a tongue-in-cheek way, but I know …

I wrote this initially as some placeholder text for a blog theme I was creating at the time, but since it's relevant to the article I'm actually writing today, I figured I'd post it as a bonus for anyone who's crazy enough to be interested. I wrote it back in …

Happy New Year!

I wanted to kick off the new year with an article that I've been meaning to write for a long time now. Unfortunately I seem to have missed the holidays entirely, so this will be too late to give you any tips for entertaining over the holidays …

I studied computer science in college. I earned my BS in 2019, and entered the workforce working for a big company on an embedded OS. Quite honestly, while some of the classes that I took provided some useful information and set my mindset in a positive direction at school, there …

What happens when a game tries a little too hard to be too many things?

You've got that in mind? OK, good, let's dig in.

Final Fantasy X was one of the best RPGs I've ever played, and since I played it on PS4, it came with FFX-2 as well …

I'm going to be brief with this, hopefully my next post will be another Final Fantasy review.

This is for one I don't like, I won't name it just yet.

However, I've been continuing to play this game, even though I don't like it, mainly because I want to give …

I've been using the Workman keyboard layout since 2019. It's been a pleasant experience, for the most part, and I've learned a lot about what makes a good keyboard layout and why people use them. But why did I choose to uproot my own muscle memory? Why did I choose …

Shortly after I finished transitioning to Pelican, I started to do some research about what the most popular static site generators are. Normally, I would advise doing this the other way around, but my main reason for the shift was familiarity with Pelican combined with a desire to write more …

The first RPG I ever played to completion was Persona 5 on the PS3. I bought it for something like $15-$20, and finally played more than the intro because I wanted to play down some of my PS3 backlog. While I'm not reviewing Persona 5 any time soon, that …

I bought a gently-used XBOX One X from a guy on EBay about a month or two before the Series X launched. This sounds like a really strange time to buy one, they had been recently discontinued, it was clear there was a new generation approaching, I already had a …

As you can tell from the subtitle of this blog, I don't use Bash anymore. In fact, I switched away from Bash a long time ago now, for a myriad of reasons. I'll probably touch on some of those here, but the basic point is that my old post about …

A couple months ago, I wrote about how I had started using Ansible for desktop configuration. I still do, but it's a bit more nuanced now than it was then. There's a few reasons why, but really the most important one was that making any sort of configuration change ended …

Android Studio is a great example of what not to do when building a development environment for a device.

To be clear, they get some things right, but by and large the whole system is kind of bad, and encourages experimentation while simultaneously punishing it.

A Good Toolchain

Before I …

Sometimes, you can say a lot with few words. Sometimes, you can also do a lot with few apps. I don't use big apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, not just for privacy reasons, but because they don't fit my lifestyle. I use email, a browser, the camera, a calendar, and …

Starting this one with another disclaimer, I'm not a Linux kernel developer (though I have worked on kernels before) and my knowledge of Rust mainly lies in application programming. If that's a deal breaker for you, skip this one. If it's not and you want to hear yet another random …

My first interaction with email on the command line was back in high school, when I first started playing around with Mutt. Honestly, I liked it a lot and it did a lot of things that more "fully featured" email applications didn't seem to get right. It was fast, launching …

Quick disclaimer before getting too far, this article is targeted at a slightly less technical audience than usual, so if I'm explaining a lot of (what you consider to be) basic stuff, that's why.

Today's world is filled with "Apps" which run on "Phones". Let's just think about this for …

A common saying among people in the modern world is a sort of slogan for encouraging people to send their used things to the recycle bin rather than the trash, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Unfortunately, those first two steps often get ignored, which is exactly what leads to that phrase being …

I got asked recently why I decided to make a prototype of something in Rust, and I'm not happy with how I responded. There's a lot of reasons why I'm not happy with my answer, but the crux of the matter is that I didn't fully represent the circumstances that …

Since late 2009, I've been volunteering at the church I attend. I started by simply running the mixing board and recording the church service audio, but as time went on my role has expanded greatly. I've since started managing some of the computer systems surrounding the A/V system, for …

I took a week's break from the habit changer app.

Honestly, I didn't mean to, but life happens I guess.

Today, however, I spent the majority of the day working on the prototype, and I have something that mostly works! There are a few things I want to mention first …

I've posted a series of articles talking about my transition away from hand-coded HTML to Pelican. However, in all of this, I haven't really talked about my own workflow and how I handle writing and posting to the blog. Now that I've more or less finished transferring everything over to …

So a quick recipe for mac and cheese:

Ingredients

• Stick of butter
• >1lb shredded cheese (your choice, mix and match to taste)
• 12-16 oz pasta (Macaroni or shells are best)
• Double the amount of water (by volume) as pasta
• 1/4-1/2 cup milk

Instructions

Boil water on the stove …

I take a lot of photos. I like to think I'm OK at it, but for a long time I always stumbled when it came to organizing them properly.

In the beginning, I used Shotwell to pull photos off my camera and into folders. This worked OK, but Shotwell is …

In my opinion, this is one of the coolest tools I've ever made.

Maybe you agree, maybe you think the desktop site is cooler, but this pretty much universally solved a whole load of problems I was facing all at once, and it's not even that complicated under the hood …

The desktop site is here!

This was the original form of my blog when I first ported it from Blogger to GitHub Pages in 2018. However, the history goes back further than that. Originally, this was the interface created for the computer science club site at my university. We were …

Hello again, it's been a few days!

I actually took somewhat of a weekend break in the middle there, but now we're back with more habit changer work. However, during that time I managed to complete the data structures for the core habit system, a prototype algorithm for how to …

There's a time and a place for hard work, and there's a time and a place for just hanging out with friends and going fishing.

I've heard a few people I know claim that they've never understood fishing, and they can't seem to fathom why anybody would do it. To …

In my last post, I talked about a new app I wanted to develop, and while I said the next post would probably be the post after next, here I am one day later with my first draft design of the app.

Basic Idea

To recap yesterday's post, I want …

Since I have a blog, and since I write software, I figured I should finally combine the two.

Wow! What uncharted waters!

In all seriousness though, a friend of mine asked me months ago to write a diet app for him that would track more than just calories. He wanted …

I FORKED DWM!

I started this fork a long time ago. In college, I wanted to change the color of the titlebar as my laptop battery's state of charge changed. I wrote this after patching a bunch of things, and after discarding some of the formatting that the Suckless folks …

If you read some of my other articles, you might be able to guess that my systems are all set up in a pretty unique and custom way. I use my own window manager, a copy of Emacs that's heavily customized, I use my own photo system, while this post …

I have ADHD. Personally, I see this as somewhat of a mixed bag, and I know for sure a number of other people with ADHD see it the same way. It's not so much an inability to focus as it is a difference in how focus is achieved. It means …

It's been almost two weeks since transitioning this site over to Pelican, and I have some thoughts about the experience so far.

First of all, it's way easier to write new posts this way, though if you read my last post you'd already know that. Check the blog tag for …

I bought a used Playstation 4 Slim in late 2017 from GameStop with a PSVR. I've been using it fairly regularly ever since. Now that we're a few years into the lifetime of the PS5 and I've had some time to put off buying one, I thought it would be …

I recently bought my grandmother a new PC, just this past year. She had been using a mid-2007 iMac 24". The Mac enthusiasts among you may realize how out of date this is. It last received software updates in 2018, and ever since it's whined about a pending OS update …

In high school, I was the bike kid. I think every high school has at least one person like me, you know, that guy who rides a bike literally everywhere. In all honesty, looking back at it, I wouldn't shut up about it. The more time goes on, the more …

Since late 2018 or early 2019, I've been running a personal XMPP server. It's not federated, and there's only about 4 or 5 users, but I've learned a lot in the process of maintaining it.

Background

When I was in college, I had a number of friends who would text …

GNOME Shell is a pretty great tablet UI. It's not the most polished one ever, but it works really well, in spite of targeting desktop first these days.

I honestly wish I could get it on my (up-to-date) Surface RT.

This all started from a post I did a couple …

Not that many years ago, there was a significant amount of worry from people in the PC world. There was a new, disruptive marketplace segment that threatened to wipe out the PC world entirely. The tablet takeover is all but irrelevant now, and PCs remain (in one form or another …

In my last post in the tech blog, I talked about how blogging tech is hard, and generally whined about how I managed my site for way too long. My conclusion was that it was my own fault and I should do better. Eventually, I implemented the changes I had …

1. Introduction

The Ratchet and Clank series has been getting a lot of buzz lately, what with the trailers for the new PS5 entry, Rift Apart. However, the series got its start way back in 2002 on the PS2, as Insomniac Games’ first entry on the platform. This particular series …

I Play Video Games.

This isn’t really anything special these days, but I figure that at this point I’ve probably played enough video games to have some meaningful comments on them from time to time. This section will be where I talk about games, gaming, what I’m …

Update (2022-08-23): This post was written long before I started using Pelican, and the entire post was originally shown via the desktop site. If you see mentions of the technology showing this post/blog and you want the full experience of what that looked like (and you're on a desktop …

1. Background

As you can probably tell by the existence of this blog, I’m what most people in the tech world call a "power user". I make use of all sorts of little hacks and tricks to make my computers run faster, and do what I want rather than …

Introduction

Imagine for a moment a world where you need to bring food with you every day. I know, I know, no one reading this could possibly be in that situation. But bear with me anyhow. Let's just assume for a moment that you have a nice chili that you …

We eat every day. It seems obvious, but really think about that. Eating is part of the human experience. For nearly literally all of us.

With this in mind, I really love to cook. Sometimes there's nothing more satisfying than readying a new chili, making burritos, preparing a good steak …

Recently I've been toying a lot with the idea of doing more lisp programming to solve some of the tasks I generally would do with Python or BASH. Lisp often gets written off as old or weird, and while it is old and weird, it's certainly not past its usefulness …

Recently I was browsing through YouTube, and it kept suggesting this video about programming mistakes, with one of those paper-cutout like CG thumbnails. My first impression was that it was one of those "let me show you how to code" videos, like so many of YouTube's suggestions to me are …

Before reading, please note that anything surrounded by 'm/ and /' is to be interpreted as regex. If you are not familiar with regex, or REGular EXpressions, please  visit this CodeProject page. If you know a little, but don't know the syntax I'm using, visit the PerlDoc page for regex.

Introduction …

One of the things which most people in web programming have to deal with is the problem of interactive content. The oldest methods for solving this were through the use of Java applets, and Flash content. There are other ways to accomplish this too, with software such as QuickTime, Real …

In the world of Linux and Unix, one of the most powerful tools available is the command line. Those of us who are lucky enough to have Bash at our disposal will probably know of many of its varied powers and features. These include the ability to modify and rerun …