The lastest posts from Asymptomatic
A few months ago I picked up a LincStation N2 - a small box that looks like an overgrown Raspberry Pi case. The box itself is reasonably affordable; by the time you add drives the budget expands considerably. Nonetheless, the pitch was simple: a low-power, always-on machine that could sit quietly on a shelf and do homelab things. 
 The Foundation: Unraid 
 The Lincstation came with Unraid…
We’re remodeling our kitchen. Everyone keeps saying the same thing when they see my exhausted face: “Think how nice it’ll be when it’s done.” They mean the kitchen. New cabinets, new countertops, new everything. The same room with a changed face. 
 I mean something different. I mean the end of the purge. 
 Here’s the thing about a kitchen remodel that nobody warns you about: it’s not…
I asked my kids while we were watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: who’s the most evil villain you can think of? Riley said Pennywise. 
 Ugh. 
 Here’s the thing about Pennywise, or the Joker, or any villain whose evil exists purely for its own sake: they’re boring . Not as horror – they’re effective enough at making you check the shower curtain. But as moral objects they’re…
There’s a guy in my band at School of Rock – funny, good taste in music, takes the playing seriously without being precious about it. We get along well. After rehearsal we pack up our gear, say “good one tonight,” and go home. We’ve done this for months. 
 I know what he does for a living; we’ve talked about it in the green room on performance nights. But I don’t know much beyond that. I don’t…
I read an article recently claiming that AI will replace spreadsheets . The argument goes something like this: why wrestle with pivot tables and VLOOKUP when you can just ask AI to generate code that does the same thing, but better? It sounds reasonable. It sounds like progress. And it fundamentally misunderstands what kind of leap we’re talking about. 
 A Bounded Jump 
 Going from a…
Last night was our performance for the 80s Alternative winter session at School of Rock. I got to play some more synth-forward songs with a bunch of talented adult musicians, many of the same folks from the prior session. 
 Here was our set list: 
 
 Genius of Love - Tom Tom Club 
 Wild Wild Life - Talking Heads 
 Waiting Room - Fugazi 
 Topaz - The B52s 
 Girl U Want -…
Back in November, I walked into School of Rock in Downingtown and asked about learning to play keyboard. The next day, I came back to watch a rehearsal for a show in production. By the end of that night, I’d agreed to play keyboard on a couple of songs I barely knew. A month later, I had my first live rock band performance under my belt. 
 This is how School of Rock works, and it’s one of the…
I’ve seen this pattern before. Work tightens - end-of-year reviews, auditors wanting receipts on every decision, the odd mathematics of pursuing a promotion while doing the current job and creating space for whoever inherits it. Half-hour blocks stacked into a grid where each one demands a different mental model. 
 And when that ends, I don’t rest. I add more. 
 I’m a jack of all trades. I…
I bought Nimble — a streamlined version of Dungeons & Dragons — after a friend recommended it. He seemed surprised I actually did. 
 I like D&D. But what I like about it isn’t the game itself. I like that it’s possible to play D&D. It’s the lingua franca of tabletop role-playing — the one game that everyone at least recognizes, even if they don’t play. It’s the reason I can tell my mom, “I’m…
I’ve spent the morning trying to get my ActivityPub implementation off the ground, and I fee like I’m making headway. You can currently follow my account at the blog (@owen@asymptomatic.net), and it seems to record that information for future publishing. The testing suggests that when I publish this post, it’ll push it out to anyone that is following that account, but given that the Mastodon…