Recent content on Daryl Manning
Note Looking for the actual stack I survived with up till 2026? I muscled through 2025 with this stack largely unchanged till the new year, but very… dissatisfied. So, been rolling something new in neovim. It felt like my stack should be better. I’d seen a better way to organize already. Ones which made me calmer and feeling more in control of my days and weeks. Org-mode…
The things you own end up owning you. — Tyler Durden. Fight Club. I wrote a while back about how moving back to Singapore after nomading for a few years and unpacking my encased-in-amber flat had been, well… a bit embarrassing. Despite living out of a backpack for months on end, I’d left an entire apartment in storage. Stuff that was not so much needed as made me somehow feel more…
Having less, but better, possessions makes you happier. Invest money in things only where it makes a quality of life distinction. For me, that’s generally in things I spend a lot of time interacting with (eg. bed, office chair, laptop etc etc) This is my “would buy again” list of items I’d immediately replace if needed. (nb: I receiving no sponsorship or affiliate revenue on any of this…
Note A modified, even more secure setup on my post on being your own streaming service . Even more secure and hostable externally without the need for a homelab or fast line. I’ve been all sorts of happy being my own streaming service. It’s been kinda cool: a tight-knit book club kinda thing, just for movies and shows. Curated. Opinionated. High quality. No Filler. But I did notice a…
I’m a big fan of Fiber, the Go Express-esque web framework based on fasthttp. They recently had a major upgrade from v2 to v3 which had major breaking changes, and while less painful than other framework upgrades there are a few gotchas to watch out for.
When I originally wrote MdViews , I’d envisioned it as a navigation convenience. A way to get me to my vast sea of stuff faster. Strangely, it’s been ridiculously useful in terms of focus and introspection and useful in ways that Notion and Obsidian’s similar features were not. Here’s how I’m using it to GTD.
In a 2026 effort to simplify my stack and de-platform, I needed to build and remix some tools to get to better GTD. MdViews is a first release in this series. It parses markdown frontmatter and creates previewable picklists and views of your notes. Think Obsidian’s dataviews or Notion’s databases, but lighter, simpler, and faster.
Note This post is about harsh , a minimalist, CLI habit tracker designed to help forge, track, and build habits. Simple, easy, no-nonsense habit tracking for geeks. Check it for your New Year’s Resolutions. harsh has been a surprising accountability watchdog for forging and keeping my habits. What started out as a simple log parser has turned into an indispensable tool for helping me get…
ATLAS , the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System is a NASA-commissioned, University of Hawaii developed system that scans the entire sky each night to give us early warnings on dangerous solar system bodies that might impact the Earth . The reason you’re not a Saurian reading this is because the dinosaurs did not have ATLAS. This scanning seeks to detect new moving objects (such as…
One of the goals I’m most proud of this year was certifying as an Emergency Medical Responder. It was hard, it was challenging, and I learned a ridonkulous amount. Post-training, I feel vastly more confident in my ability to handle things going sideways. If you don’t know First Aid, I highly recommend making it a 2026 goal for yourself.
With far too many books over-marketed and over-hyped, making the most of your precious reading time is getting harder. Here’s what I read in 2025 with some suggestions on definite reads for you as well as what to avoid.
Streaming shone in many places while movies lagged. Most good games were indie- rather than studio-led. Here’s my list of online and offline media you probably won’t hate watching.
Be your own streaming service. Free yourself from bad content and choice paralysis. Curation and focus beats unending libraries. Easy setup.
A major overhaul to my minimalist CLI habit tracker, moving over to cobra along with substantial other speed and efficiency gains. A really satisfying refactor and release milestone.
Getting real things done is hard. Inspiration versus grind can be fleeting. Use the technique of counting coup on achievements to keep yourself reminded of how awesome you really are and everything you’ve managed to do.
Yup, it’s that time of year again. My annual list of the tools I use and sharing what works for my productivity stack. I hope you find something useful for yourself or your workflows here.
As streaming and studios waste your time with far too much pablum compared to quality watching, making sure the defend the time you have in front of the screen becomes a priority. Here’s my list of online and offline media you probably won’t hate yourself for watching.
Defend your reading time investments. Things off my 2024 reads you should definitely read as well as some perhaps suggestions and things to avoid. The TLDR are these top 5: An Immense World Americanah The Guns of August Fire Weather Born a Crime (Though you should read the post for the whys).
We all set goals. Few reading this lack aspiration. But graveyards full of New Year’s Resolutions show there’s a deep disconnect between people setting and accomplishing goals. So, how do you set goals that are actually going to move you forward and then get them done? Particularly, how do you work on the long arc goals that are the really satisfying ones that are accomplished over years? How do…
Working with startups for over a decade may have spoiled me. API Developer experience has come a long way in that time, SaaSifying backends to make building companies efficient, logical, and consistent. Sadly, after months doing “science stuff” my feeling is this is a major missed opportunity in scientific projects and academia (and to be fair, few scientists building these apis are…
I’m not really a stuff guy. I try to keep purchases minimal and to high quality stuff that lasts. Why might my gear be interesting? I’ve been travelling as a digital nomad now for over a year, living without a real residence and often leveraging hotels and visa stays to bounce between various countries here in SE Asia (Singapore, Bali, Thailand, and now Hong Kong). Riffing off my one-bag travel…
2023 felt like it was about simplifying. Getting down to a non-aspirational, efficient, simple stack for productivity, planning, and collaboration. I focused more on my systems with simpler or fewer tools, rather than trying to find the one tool to do everything — and worrying less about aspirational (and heavily influencer influenced) goals like zettelkasten and knowledge bases and focused on…
Comets are small, icy bodies left over from the process of building planets. They’re clues to our solar system’s formation and possibly even the origins of life on Earth. Despite being one of humanity’s oldest noted phenomena, comet data and imagery is scattered and not easily accessible, impeding science. COMA changes that, aspiring to become the global resource for comet imagery,…
I read a mere 39 books this year (still not sure why it was so much lower then recent years.) Felt like I read a lot, even with the new job and academic pre-PhD side-hustle, but felt there were few books which I felt were must reads or that I gleaned a lot from. Other than Sprint and How Big Things Get Done , your professional and personal life will not get any rocket assists from my recos this…
There was not a lot of truly great stuff in 2023. I’m not sure if this is just spillover from covid when every studio and streaming service were just thumping out any content to keep people engaged, so much bilgewater made it into production, or simply the fact that a lot of material seemed highly derivative of other shows, but 2023 had a lot of things to watch, but very little quality. While…