This is my personal website. I will write blog posts here on occasion.
Patrick Murphy recorded a couple of good church covers. That is the reason the technical work was worth doing. The recordings had usable performances in them: a guy singing communion hymns in a church, with the room around him, the natural rise and fall of the song, and enough musical information that I wanted the files to be easier to share. The finished tracks are here: Matt Maher - Lord I Need…
I am building a box whose whole job is to listen to the TV and hit mute when commercials start. Not a browser extension. Not a smart-TV app. Not a cloud service trying to understand my living room. A small Linux box, a microphone near the speaker, local speech-to-text, a tiny local classifier, and eventually an infrared blaster that presses the same mute button a human would press. The goal is not…
An NVR (network video recorder) is the software stack that pulls in camera streams, writes clips to disk, and serves a timeline you can scrub in a browser. Frigate is the one I run. This post is about replacing a Ring-shaped habit with that kind of recorder, on hardware I control. Ring-style products got the UX right: clip, scrub bar, audio in the clip. I did not want the usual bundle:…
Control OpenClaw without touching a keyboard—from your pocket. Speak into your phone, and seconds later a timestamped line lands in a file on your server. A thought becomes state. Your voice becomes infrastructure. Why this matters: ideas almost never show up when you’re sitting upright at a keyboard, ready to type. They hit while you’re walking, driving, showering, or drifting to sleep. Usually…
I took a side project from zero to a live HTTPS app with auth, transactional email, and catch-all inbox forwarding. I did it while pair programming with Cursor and using the current Rails and deployment ecosystem. Here’s every step that got me there. What We Built A small Rails 8 app for hosts and cleaning crews. Sign-in, roles (admin / host / cleaner), password reset, and a full production deploy…
I recently bought all the books from this tweet. Here are my affiliate links to them. I just finished Sapiens and it was awesome! Sapiens Antifragile The Black Swan Thinking Fast and Slow Zero to One Stumbling on Happiness Mastery Seneca’s Letters 48 Laws of Power Influence
I have recently started a new Ruby on Rails project which I hope will exist for a very long time. I decided, after getting burned in the past regarding this issue, to ensure the application supports emojis in all text fields. Here is the stack: Ruby on Rails 5.2.0 Ruby 2.3.1 Elastic Beanstalk (Passenger with Ruby 2.3 running on 64bit Amazon Linux/2.7.2) Aurora MySQL 5.6.10a The Problem YourModel .…
I will quickly describe the most important tools I use when using a computer. I use MacOS (Sierra, right now), but the lessons apply to all operating systems. Never Use The Mouse Most of the tools I use assist me in the furtherance of the goal of never using The Mouse. I will eventually write a lengthy blog post about this subject. I believe that The Mouse has caused an epochal negative feedback…
This post will describe how this website was created and will be maintained going forward. Here were my technical requirements for this site: Hosted totally in an Amazon S3 Bucket (i.e. no servers/ec2/PaaS cost) Free SSL support Ease of writing blog posts After some consideration, I settled on using the following technologies: source control: Git/Github blogging platform/CMS: jekyll DNS: Amazon…