The personal website of Darren Wood
I’ve had a little Synology NAS running all our media, but we’ve slowly outgrown it—so I built a custom one. This is that story. I’m firmly in the self-hosting camp, but like much of the world I once got swept up in the shiny convenience of cloud providers and services—Google Photos, Netflix, Kindle, and the like. That shine has started to wear off, and I’m now about 80% free of these services.…
For years I've been using em-dashes in my writing... but now AI is now coming for my punctuation! Look, I’m no writer—I suck at spelling, and I’m generally too lazy to write much. But I do enjoy good typography and try to use proper punctuation where I can. Over the past year or so, we’ve been thrown into a world dominated by AI and LLMs. I’m not going to pretend I don’t use them—I do—but I try to…
This is the first Mixtape Post. Remember back in the day when you’d make mixtapes for your friends? Well, this is that—and you are my friends. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4DcMpO0NrjxMA2HFxIVgUB?si=8af833e748ea4f99 As I wrote that intro, I was immediately reminded of Muxtape , that excellent website from around 2007. This was pre-Spotify, so it felt pretty groundbreaking at the time. I made…
I've had this website for a while now... it's been through a number of designs and permutations. It's been a classic WordPress blog, it's been a tumblr, but more recently it's just been sitting here gathering dust. Makes blowing sounds with my mouth 💨 And now the dust has been blown off with as little spittle as possible let's get stuck into it. This version of Dontcom is hand-coded using 11ty,…
The past month I've not been drinking alcohol—dry July, if you will... I have, however, used that as an excuse to try out the vast range of 0% beers on the market. What follows is a brief review of the ones I would drink again. Thanks to the jerks who provide beer I was able to try a bunch I ordinarily wouldn't have been able to source, so check their site if you want to partake. Lets jump right…
tangible /ˈtan(d)ʒɪb(ə)l/: a thing that is perceptible by touch. For pretty much my entire adult life I've been making things. Unfortunately, I can't really show you these things as they no longer exist. They've either been lost, overwritten, deleted or forgotten. The life of a website creator, I suppose. A screenshot of dontcom.com circa 2005 I know I should have done a better job storing these…