Recent content in Posts on Angela Ambroz
A letter to my past self # This blog post is a letter to my past self. It’s what I wish I had known back in 2020 or 2021. Back when my domestic demands were growing - a family growing bigger, babies arriving, and the sudden ending of the “student”/20something phase and beginning of the “adulting”/middle aged person/householder phase . tldr: Do it room by room. Bad…
Metadata # Author: Chip Huyen Number of pages: 532 Year published: 2025 Year read: 2026 Review # Done! OK, that took a while. Overall, distilling it to a singular purpose - did I learn from it? - the answer is, “ya.” But did I learn a sufficiently satisfying amount from it? No, not at all. This was only a starter! Quick overview # The problem with the book - as Jake said - is that…
Eternal question: Where is my peaceful bottega? # If I had my way, I would be working in a little 15th century Florentine bottega, carving and chipping away at my craft in blessed peace and good vibes. Having saltless bread and pasta for lunch. Tiny espressos. Admiring the Duomo. Ample time for my family. It would be solarpunk and sane and full of diversity. “The Cathedral as depicted in the…
Okay, this feels a little bit like I’m basically working when I’m not working, but, well, here’s my write-up on what I read in 2025, as digested by a little bit of exploratory data analysis. 2025: The year I read 82+ books # ❤️ Here’s the full list on Goodreads 🌈 Yes, I put the + because I’m almost done with Bill McKibben’s Here Comes the…
Wow, 2025 really has been the Year of Linux Self-hosting! This stuff is the gift that keeps on giving. The problem space: Reading it later in comfort and style # My latest project has been tinkering with my read-it-later flow. I realized I had several quirks in my workflow that, ideally, my tooling would reflect (and these are roughly ranked by importance): I knew I always preferred reading on…
Metadata # Author(s): Anna Wiener Number of pages: 281 Year published: 2020 Year read: 2025 Review # Hm, an interesting memoir that I consumed like gossip or candy - but am unsure if I’d recommend? This is a memoir of a very specific experience: being a relatively privileged, liberal arts/literary fiction-type white lady going to work in Silicon Valley in the 2010s. I am a white lady who…
I now have several different apps to organize my self-hosted media: Plex for movies and TV, Audiobookshelf for audiobooks, and Calibre-web-automated for ebooks. 🎥 Discovery on Plex: really good # The UX on these apps is uniformly pretty good, with a few being great. Plex, for example, is a joy: the metadata is super well-organized, and so you can easily traverse your movie collection to find,…
Metadata # Author(s): Ian Milligan Number of pages: 208 Year published: 2024 Year read: 2025 Review # Note: Available for free on the publisher’s website . I have no idea how I found this book (probably my self-hosted RSS feed or Mastodon or other nerd worlds) but I’m so glad I did. Pretty fabulous. This reads a bit like a very well-written PhD dissertation, or academic textbook.…
Metadata # Author(s): Emily Bender, Alex Hanna Number of pages: 288 Year published: 2025 Year read: 2025 Review # As Weapons of Math Destruction was to the 2010s and basic machine learning, so this book is to the 2020s and “AI”. So: I loved this book. It set my head straight on a lot of things I intuitively knew, as someone with enough expertise to understand how the “AI”…
Like many a data scientist, I’ve spent tons of time in Jupyter notebooks. For many years (2015-2022), I mostly just used vanilla Jupyter - or sometimes Google Colab. In 2023, we started using Hex at work, which was super slick and fun: LLM-powered cells! Dark mode! Cells that remember each other’s state! I’ve been, indeed, very happy with Hex for these last couple years. But, in…
Updated: 5 Dec 2025 thing service replaces devices rating thoughts Movies, TV Plex Netflix, all the various streaming services 📱💻📺🎮 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Ebooks Calibre-Web-Automated Amazon 📱💻📖 ⭐⭐⭐ Audiobooks Audiobookshelf Amazon 📱💻 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ News/blogs/social media FreshRSS Twitter, Facebook, NYT 📱💻📖 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Moving everything to RSS Bookmarks/read it later Wallabag Readeck Pocket 📱💻 ⭐⭐⭐ Reading things…
For about 30 years, my grandmother used the same hole-in-the-wall shop to get her photos developed. She loved taking pictures of her paintings, sunsets, flowers, her family, and trips. Every few weeks, she would drop off a roll of film. The shop would do that darkroom chemistry stuff and deliver back to her a couple dozen photos, usually in a little, branded album. We have many of those albums…
I mentioned in my homelab post that one of my STILL-TO-DOs was self-hosting LLMs. Unfortunately, we run into immediate hardware constraints on that one - I don’t have a single GPU lying around! Sad. I was ready to put this dream to rest, but a video by YouTuber NetworkChuck was super interesting and inspiring. Basically, the idea is: In other words, I’m currently using my NAS as a…
In July 2024, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and it had a profound effect on me . It appealed to lots of long-time personal and professional passions: rationality, sustainability, technocratic solutions to social failings, saving the world. It triggered one of my hyperfocus periods - where I become all-consumed by a topic and obsess over it and adjust my life…
One of my favorite movie genres is commedia all’italiana - aka, “Italian-style comedy” - aka, Italian tragicomedies with sharp socio-political edges, mostly made in the 1970s. Two of my favorite examples from this genre are Ettore Scola’s Dramma della gelosia and, uh, Ettore Scola’s C’eravamo tanto amati . (Scola was good at this!) Anyway, the tragedy of these…
My boss recently called me an “Obsidian power user” and - how flattering! So let us take a tour of this, ahem, POWER. What be Obsidian? # Obsidian is a closed source note-taking app. It has cultural roots and overlap with the Zettelkasten knowledge management system/lifestyle/philosophy, and has lots of overlap with Evernote - which is what I used for many years, before it became…
Oh wow, this is handy. Noting this down! You can subscribe to a GitHub repo’s releases via RSS (thanks, trusty old StackOverflow ). I wanted to keep an eye on the Wallabag repo, since I made a feature request about some relative URL referencing being broken. You can do that via RSS! GLORIOUS RSS! Just append .atom to any releases page, e.g. https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/releases.atom…
Reading things later # In 2014, I discovered Pocket . I was living in Tanzania and often took the ferry between Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. This is about a 2.5-hour trip, and the internet dies out pretty quickly once you leave port. I paid for the “fancy” tickets and normally preferred sitting in the lounge, which had gigantic La-Z-Boy-type chairs and a big TV screen. I watched a lot…
NAS joy # One of the few things that brings me true joy these days (!) is self-hosting. Bit by bit, I’ve been moving things into my little NAS - and each little app or service gives me just a little more feeling of dopamine and control during these unsettling times. Of course, I don’t always end up using the apps and services I self-host. For example, while I use the heck outta Plex ,…
Welp! It was time! Time for a big website refresh. Let’s talk through it. 2017 - 2024: Tech debt 😱 # As a reminder, the previous version of this website was: originally written in HTML + CSS + a touch of Javascript, with just a few html pages ( about.html , scifi.html , etc.) a static blog generated by Pelican using a special Pelican theme on an outdated fork modified to match the…
Metadata # Author(s): Michio Kaku, and Jaime Green Number of pages: 384 Year published: 2020 Year read: 2024 Review # I always enjoy these essay collections. I was flustered that the editions cover the preceding year, so this one was actually 2019 articles. Aaarghhh. I wanted an overview of Covid science!! Oh well - onto the next one! This one had lots of gems. Stuff that really struck me: - The…
Metadata # Author(s): Derek Beres, and Matthew Remski, Julian Walker Number of pages: 384 Year published: 2023 Year read: 2024 Review # A long-ish, engaging intellectual screed against the marriage of conspiracy theorizing and New Age woo. This was written with a lot of color and brio, so it’s a lot of fun and quite podcasty. This is a history of 20th and 21st century wellness movements -…
It’s been a while! Here’s how my workflow looks, in this post-LLM world. Editor: Neovim # After several happy years in Vim, I switched to Neovim. My .dotfiles will probably keep evolving, but, right now, I’m enjoying plugins like: Lazy - For plugin loading. Git gutter - For :Git blame all the damn time. Telescope - For very quick and convenient file search. DAP - Debugging.…
Metadata # Author(s): Nita A. Farahany Number of pages: 288 Year published: 2023 Year read: 2024 Review # A fun, wide-ranging, and provocative non-fiction book about the ethics and possibilities of neurotech (aka brain-meddling!!). So I spent most of this audiobook running and arguing with it in my head. I almost threw the headphones off in an angry huff during the “why ADHD meds are…
Metadata # Author(s): Jaron Lanier Number of pages: 368 Year published: 2017 Year read: 2023 Review # Jaron Lanier’s brain is a veritable wonderland. There is no one like him. I was absolutely DELIGHTED by much of this book - especially the memoir of his childhood and adolescence. He is really an inspiration. And so funny! And so smart! It’s like his brain is made of champagne fizz.…
Metadata # Author(s): Darren Byler Number of pages: 150 Year published: 2021 Year read: 2023 Review # A disturbing and distressing examination of the currently-happening Uyghur genocide , and how it’s accelerated by modern surveillance state technologies to create “smart” labor/reeducation camps. Just like the Nazis leveraged early 20th century industrialization to organize the…
Metadata # Author(s): Richard E. Culatta Number of pages: 256 Year published: 2021 Year read: 2022 Review # Finding pro-screentime parenting advice is about as common as finding pro-formula tips. i.e. Completely uncommon because of an enormous cultural juggernaut that moralizes against it. I was starting to feel crazy trying to parse the WHY screens are demonized so totally for our kids - by…
Oh God. Never have I had so many emotions over something as banal as a keyboard. But, after some research and a moment of madness, I decided to invest in a split ergonomic keyboard. This is the ZSA Moonlander , a stupid expensive mechanical keyboard that is super duper customizable, and also split and ergonomic (via being split and having “columnar” keys). Ever since my last pregnancy,…
I got a new job. I’ll be starting in a few weeks. I want to talk about the job search process since it’s been a while since I job hunted (I was at Optoro for almost five years). Some stats # Platforms I used to find opportunities: Glassdoor , LinkedIn , Hired . the #jobs channel on PyLadies Slack, a couple friends Applications I submitted “cold”: 48 Applications I made via…
Metadata # Author(s): Reeves Wiedeman Number of pages: 352 Year published: 2020 Year read: 2022 Review # A brisk and frisky journalist’s account of the, indeed, spectacular fall of WeWork. I have, like many people, used WeWorks. They’re fine. They’re very Millennial. And Millennials are getting old, people. I’m an old Millennial and even my “young Millennial”…
Hello! Some nice things I’ve been using lately: zoxide : Smarter cd # zoxide is great - it keeps a “memory” of the directories you’ve been in and, once you’ve visited them, you can revisit them using something like z blog and it’ll jump you to whichever recent directory had blog in the path. Much, much more streamlined than cd /some/super/long/path , or making a…
Metadata # Author(s): Adam Alter Number of pages: 368 Year published: 2017 Year read: 2021 Review # He’s preaching to the choir here, but I couldn’t get past the long, looong intro on “addiction is a thing”. Yes, it is. Yep, cocaine. Yep, lab rats pressing pleasure buttons until they die. I thought we’d get to the tech addictiveness-by-design a lot sooner. I ended up…
Big changes in 2021, beyond Linux . Yeah, boy. We’re getting serious about computers, man. I shelled out the cash for a network-attached storage (NAS) device, AKA a tiny little cloud that lives in our home. Thrilled with this. Thrilled! Our use cases # 1. Consolidated data backup # Like most people (I assume), we were backing up our data in a number of places: External solid state drives for…
This year was personal laptop rollover year, and I was excited to finally take the plunge: Linux! Yes, Linux. After polling some dev bros and doing a lot of YouTube research, I ended up replacing my 2015 MacBook Pro with a System76 Lemur Pro (specifically, the lemp10 ) . With that new hardware came a whole new operating system: Pop!_OS . I’ve now had the new machine for a few days, and I…
I began “learning to code” in 2014, where by “learning to code”, I mean moving away from Stata (a proprietary statistical programming language) and into d3.js , JavaScript more generally, and, finally, glorious Python . You can read the whole journey here . Anyway, back in 2014, I found a number of fun, puzzle-driven coding practice websites. Among these were: HackerRank…
I just ran: find * -type f -exec echo '{}' \; -exec awk 'NR==26' {} \; Which I adapted from this StackOverflow post and, tldr, searches all files in my current directory (and subdirectories) and tells me what’s written on line 26. Or, parsing it out: find : “Find files or directories under the given directory tree, recursively.” ( - tldr ) * : Anything in the current directory.…
A small, short tutorial today: How to convert those darn .webp files into .jpg ? Motivation # If you, like me, periodically refresh your Zoom background to something fun and festive, you too may run into the dreaded new Internet image format: .webp . This is a Google-developed image format which is a bit more efficient in compressing images for the Web, with less quality loss. Unfortunately, while…
Metadata # Author(s): Tracy Kidder Number of pages: 293 Year published: 2000 Year read: 2021 Review # Disappointingly Basic Tech Bro-ey. I thought this would be a bit more like “Halt and Catch Fire”. Oh well. 📚 Goodreads
Motivation # It is winter. The air is dry. Beyond slathering my face in Burt’s Bees, we have mostly suffered in this dryness. I am anti-humidifier. They seem like diva equipment. And who wants to clean them weekly? Ugh. But no more! It is time. Also, my last Pi project broke important barriers in my brain - mostly emotional - and now it seems much easier to try new Pi things. Also also, I…
Finally getting my Pi-hole act together # I have been meaning to do something with the multiple (!) Raspberry Pis I’ve received over the years, and never got around to it. Until this weekend! Let us take a journey through the Pi-hole project. The Raspberry Pi # Chances are if you’re reading this blog, you know what a Raspberry Pi is. But perhaps you don’t! In which case: it is a…
Made this for an art class I’m taking. It’s a three-panel exploration of what motivates my character, Carrie Nation (based on the historical Carrie Nation , but with some important liberties taken). It relates specifically to plot points from my sci-fi short story, The Good Deaths, Part II .
Overall stats # This year, I read 84 books . The vast majority of these were picture books: either graphic novels or children’s books. At a glance, 29 (35%) were by POC, and 37 (44%) were by women. (This was just me guessing based on the author names and pictures, so it might be a little wrong.) So, no improvement from 2018 on POC (2018: 33%), and a very decent improvement on reading women…
People are getting vaccinated. The end feels near and tangible! Things I’m looking forward to in a post-pandemic world # Wearing a mask on my commute (I don’t know why) Cafe chatter and bustle Movie theaters Art museums!!!! Running without a mask on Curbside pickup continuing? Maybe? Natural history museum! Indoor gyms and play areas, etc Things I’m not looking forward to #…
Made some silly, amusing art. Self-portrait in acrylic yarn, Play-Doh, and a jumbo marker. Claymation is harder than it looks!
Metadata # Author(s): Eleanor Davis Number of pages: 152 Year published: 2019 Year read: 2020 Review # I read this through once, thinking it took place now. One plot point felt outlandish to me and then, reading other Goodreads reviews, I realized this is meant to take place in the very-near future: a sort of “one minute forward”, bleak Black Mirror-ish speculation. That fit the puzzle…
seven, +/- two Hello, world! :wq # This is coming to you live from a Vim terminal! Or is it a buffer? An insert mode thingie? Well, whatever it is, I am writing this in Vim. Long have I sought to vanquish the infamous learning curve. Many a time have I tumbled back to the bottom, into the warm embrace of PyCharm, Sublime, Atom, literally anything else (except Emacs). Well, this year is the year. I…
One of my favorite songs (and performances), ever, seems especially appropriate today/this week. Charles Bradley was such a phenom. He sadly passed away in 2017, so soon after starting to achieve the recognition his talent deserved.
Metadata # Author(s): Ed Piskor Number of pages: 288 Year published: 2012 Year read: 2020 Review # An interesting, troubling book about very early hacking and phreaking. I’m always interested in the hacking mindset - the protagonist, Kevin “Boingthump” Phenicle, is constantly trying to reverse engineer and find loopholes in the phone system and the Internet. He doesn’t have…
Scorecard # Facebook: deleted 2014 Twitter: deleted 2019 [] Amazon: actively trying to extricate myself [] Google: dreaming of breaking up Motivation # Jeff Bezos has way too much money, and I am tired of giving it to him # Jeff Bezos has $200 billion. The human brain boggles at such a number, so here’s a picture of it . No one human being deserves this much money (I don’t care how…
Hi. Gee whiz, do I like continuous integration (CI) . Though, hmm, that wiki entry has a very different definition from what I mean. I mean CI as in automated testing of your code upon merging into a GitHub or GitLab repo. Anyway, one of the coolest things I learned from working a little bit on open source was how to run a super-tight ship. Given that these big projects like pandas need to operate…