the void meows also
I’ve been in a bit of a coding slump recently due to a constellation of work and personal Stuff™, and in situations like those I enjoy procrastinating by tweaking my desktop setup (do kids still call this ricing ?). One of the small things that’s always annoyed me is that, if I want to input the glorious currency symbol of our great monetary union, I basically need to search for “eur symbol”…
Update: This post generated a thread on lobste.rs with some more recommendations and thoughts from the friendly folks over there! If you haven’t heard yet, in big 2026 we’re all ditching Microslop for systems that actually respect you, and we’re also breaking up with our ever-pricier Spotify subscriptions in exchange for actual ownership of the media we consume. So, for Fun February, I thought I’d…
One really cool heritage of the Unix system is the concept of everything being a file. Normally, you think of a file as a collection of bytes that exists somewhere on your drive. And that’s true, for the most part. However, those are not the only types of files. What’s a file? For example, /dev/urandom on your Linux or macOS system is a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number…
Writing this down was not very easy. Usually, when I sit down to write a post, the words just kinda start flowing out. Before I know it, I need to go back and cut what I wrote to keep the length of a post manageable. As an ADHD enjoyer, my brain is already performing the function of an infinite slop machine. I do not exactly need another one in the form of an LLM. I think I’m struggling with this…
For the past four years I’ve had a cheap-ish, used Lenovo notebook stuck upside down in my electrical closet running as a computing equivalent of that one messy catch-all kitchen drawer. It ran Plex, Miniflux , backups, a remote mpd server, a Tailscale exit node, and a handful of other things on it. And as a real self-hosting enthusiast I’ve always meant to clean it up but never did. However,…
It has never been easier to ship something. Heroku walked 1 so that Vercel, Render, Fly.io and dozens of others could run. Point us to a Git repo, give us your credit card number, and we’ll take care of the rest, they say. You want a database? No problem, here’s our special sauce SDK, just npm install it. Object storage? Same thing, just call out to this function and we’ll take care of it. and how…
For the past couple of months I’ve been working on supporting a fairly interesting data science project at my day job. As pretty much everyone knows, the entire field of data science is oddly snake-shaped: Python is an inescapable reality, and whether you like it or not 1 , you have to work with it. In a follow-up to this post I will have more to say on where it falls short and how to best…
A couple of months ago I bought the Nanoleaf Pegboard Desk Dock , the latest and greatest in USB-hub-with-RGB-LEDs-and-hooks-for-gadgets technology. This invention unfortunately only supports the real gamer operating systems of Windows and macOS, which necessitated the development of a Linux driver. Over the past few posts I’ve set up a Windows VM with USB passthrough , and attempted to…
A couple of months ago I bought the Nanoleaf Pegboard Desk Dock , the latest and greatest in USB-hub-with-RGB-LEDs-and-hooks-for-gadgets technology. This invention unfortunately only supports the real gamer operating systems of Windows and macOS, which necessitated the development of a Linux driver. Previously, I set up a Windows VM for the purposes of reverse-engineering the protocol used by this…
A couple of months ago I bought the Nanoleaf Pegboard Desk Dock , the latest and greatest in USB-hub-with-RGB-LEDs-and-hooks-for-gadgets technology. This invention unfortunately only supports the real gamer operating systems of Windows and macOS, which necessitated the development of a Linux driver. The first step on this journey is to set up a Windows VM, on which I can install drivers and pass…
The unsafe keyword is an escape hatch from Rust’s guarantees. According to the book , it gives you the following powers: Dereference a raw pointer Call an unsafe function or method Access or modify a mutable static variable Implement an unsafe trait Access fields of a union unsafe usage is commonly tied to “doing weird things with memory” that might or might not be sound . For example, think of…
I made some attempts at writing before. Many, actually. It would usually not be consistent because I’d get distracted. I’d not have anything interesting to write about (or, rather, think that no one would read what I have to say). My then-undiagnosed iPad baby brain syndrome would get in the way. I’d feel guilty for not keeping up, then abandon the whole ordeal. But I did not actually stop…