A blog, notes, gallery, lifestyle and fully conglomerated posts from Joshua.
“You’re just nostalgic!” They will say when you point out the fact that everything today is crumbling around us. Where every McDonalds has transformed into a grey box without a playplace - because the playplace would mean people stay longer without paying more money, and the grey box can be sold in the future when divestment is on the table. We live in a world where the food that we eat is less…
For 6 years or so, I have been down the custom, split, ergonomic keyboard rabbit hole. And, since running a few different boards, I have found what I like and dislike in a board - to the point that it sounded like a good idea to build one that ticked all the boxes of preferences - 34 keys, MX switches, wired (more reliable than battery and stops the need to charge occasionally). I had my eye on a…
Building your own keyboard is a rite of passage for those caught up in the ergonomic rabbit hole. So, it was only a matter of time before I went all the way and did so. However, as a complete noob when it comes to soldering, I had a rough time getting started. I hope that this brief guide saves you hours of anguish! How to (not) solder # After procuring all the parts required for our keyboards, my…
In 2019, I started using DOOM emacs as my main emacs “distribution”. A decision which I figured I’d stick with for many years to come. In late 2023, I switched back to neovim for some time , and finally came back to the light early last year . However, we all knew this day would come. I have been bitten by the vanilla emacs bug, the call to craft my own lisp environment being too loud to ignore…
“What we do in life echoes in eternity.” Maximus Decimus Meridius When I look around, the hardest thing to find is a person who cares. I see people doing the bare minimum, value-extracting, and overtly ‘screwing over’ their fellow man to “get ahead”. But, more than this, I seen an overwhelming comfort with mediocrity that would have me believe that we have reached peak “soft men create hard…
Back in 2014, I was on a cruise with family (boomer parents, I don’t actually like cruises) - and I did not have my phone or internet access for 17 days. This was in the time when internet access out at sea was exorbitantly expensive, and we just forewent connectivity. For the first few days, it wasn’t easy. I would look at my disconnected phone expecting a text message or Facebook notification to…
As a heavy emacs user, Guix system seems to be the logical place to rest one’s head in the perpetual distro hop . As an all-or-nothing type guy, I’ve been running NixOS for the better part of a year now, but Guix seems to philosophically align with me. That’s right, forget about pragmatism when you can have ideological purity! But, as one will very quickly comes to find in installing Guix, the…
With the Pope’s Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas recently posted, I have seen some of the worst takes online: All from people that have not read the thing they are critiquing. They will see a short soundbite from the Vatican’s meeting with Anthropic, and that will be their entire understanding. The piece is 42,000 words long, so I get that people “don’t have the time” to read the whole thing. You…
The Vatican has just released Leo XIV’s Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas , and I figured I would read through and give my commentary on such a pivotal document in the era of “AI” and the continual lockstep toward dehumanizing all of humanity. I sit at an interesting crossroads between Catholicism and Technology, and try every day to reconcile the two in the way that I work - so this will be a…
I just got off the phone with my bank, wasting about 30 minutes of my ever-shortening life to be told that I need not worry about the email that came in this morning and nearly gave me a heart attack. Opening my email inbox this morning, I see two emails about my address and information being updated from my bank. It explicitly says that if I did not make this change to call them immediately . My…
“All of man’s miseries stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal When I think about the challenge of living in the modern world, the constant that continually crosses my mind is that we are so unable to revel in silence anymore. We fill the potential silence with noise, continual distraction, the inability to sit with our thoughts. Music, podcasts, audio books, we…
I never thought I would reach 5k subscribers on Youtube , so I owe everyone a massive thank you! To all of my new friends and the support over the last few years, it’s been an awesome time. Here’s to 50,000 in the future! People have asked in my comments about a “thinkpad collection” tour, and I thought I would do one better - here is a tour of my entire computer infrastructure. Thinkpads # Let’s…
“The measure of love is to love without measure.” — St. Francis de Sales Our second child came into the world a few days ago, and I recall a conversation I had with a good friend of mine (also a dad) about how it would be possible to love the next kid as much as the first. But, we very quickly came to the conclusion that we will . There is no question about it, we would equally love our children…
If you only use social media and video hosting frontends - getting fed by algorithms and visiting the same 5 sites everyday on constant doomscroll , then the internet has never been alive for you . That experience is perhaps ~3-5% of what the internet could be. For the vast majority of people, yes - the internet is dying: living inside an algorithmically controlled echochamber that they will never…
When people talk about the “ internet dying ” - what they are really talking about is slop overtaking the algorithm - of social media becoming unuseable because it’s all bots. But that is not the internet, not by a long shot. If you live and die by the algorithm, then your experience will be one of curation. It will never be that which you have decided for yourself. It will be a path that is taken…
In my ever-increasing desire to use emacs as my sole computing environment , I have started to take browsing the web inside it far more seriously. Where I previously had thought EWW to be a niceity but far from capable, after using it for a few days it seems to be useable for about 85-90% of use cases - even on the javascript riddled hellhole that is the internet. Why? # I have seen in my own use…
While Org-mode is fantastic in its core functionality, there is a lovely little extension that creates a way to build a wiki for all personal knowledge, ideas, writing, work, and so much more: org-roam . A “clone” of ROAM research , if you are familiar with logseq or obsidian , this will have you feeling right at home (albeit, actually at home inside emacs). It has taken some time to figure out…
I recently discovered Meow as a modal editing replacement for evil-mode, and it has become a mainstay in my recent vanilla emacs configuration . Meow piggybacks on the Kakoune / Helix style of editing (of which I had never used prior, and I quite like it!) to visually select and then act upon text in a way that makes sense. Essentially flipping vim’s verb/noun (dw for example) to selection/action…
I had the absolute pleasure to be joined by the great Protesilaos Stavrou for a conversation about emacs, minimalism, life philosophy, interconnectedness, and infinite depth. Come along for the ~2 hour journey! As always, God bless, and until next time. If you enjoyed this post, consider Supporting my work , Checking out my book , Working with me , or sending me an Email to tell me what you think.
A simple thing I’ve overlooked with NixOS is that I can create very different environments with a simple nixos-rebuild switch - effectively making my machine distraction free when I want it to be, or permitting some play in the off hours. I wrote a piece a couple years back about blocking internet distractions - and while I stand by it for the “ legacy distros ” (debian/arch/fedora), Nix makes…
Apparently my RSS Feed was not displaying full post content - just the title - making people have to click through to the actual post on site. It should now be fixed and full posts should be available in your feed reader of choice (you are using Elfeed in Emacs , right?) Thank you to katabex, Sneed1911, and cyberarboretum in the #technicalrenaissance IRC channel for bringing it to my attention. If…
As we go into another year, I have paired down even further as to what is allowed on my mobile device. You can see my previous posts about smartphones here , here and here . I am running a Samsung s24 - with ADB you can disable much of the bloat, but it is not perfect. I would recommend going with a Google Pixel device in order to run GrapheneOS. Theory # The phone is (without argument) the…
With the LLM hysteria seemingly without an end in sight, what is sorrowfully missing from the modern world is a push toward mastery. This is not a new phenomenon. The vast majority of people have been trying to “hack” life away by any means necessary for some time now. Limitless tips and tricks to make things quickly with less effort - abounding “how-to guides” on shutting one’s brain off.…
While many would complain about the internet “dying” - the information is still out there for anyone to find - you just need to know how to look for it . Search engines still offer the ability to find that which you are seeking, but you cannot use them as 95% of people use them (ie. enter search term and pray). Using Google or any other mainstream search engine in this way will simply return…
Look around you, and you will see so much noise. So many attempts at your attention, so many attempts on the life that you are supposed to be living. If you give in to the noise, you will lose the way, you will find yourself 5,000 miles from your intended destination. Distraction drives the world in which we live. Billions of dollars are poured into getting us to spend just one or two more seconds…
I started the new year by getting kicked off Cloudinary’s free tier for image storage. Deciding that I do not want to have to migrate ever again, I have architected a simple way to get off of SaaS/Cloud services and still maintain control of my media. I was not willing to pay $99 a month for a hosted image service (I never used their transformations etc.) - and while Cloudinary offers a generous…
“I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.” GK Chesterton When I was much younger, I tried to found my own religion. We all do at one time or another: how can I take what everyone is saying and combine it to map the ultimate way to live this life? But that would have been like founding my own reality. Alas, I do not think…
I logged into IRC this morning to see this message: “Don’t take this the wrong way but does anyone else find Joshua Blais’ blog posts and twitter feeds a rabbit hole?” I had a laugh and then thought about a response (my friend that wrote this: come setup a bouncer and idle in the channel!) Here is my reply: When I first installed Linux on my machine in 2017, I did not know where that would lead -…
If you work in text, make everything you possibly can a git repository. This means that if you work in front of a computer, this post is for you. Stop being that person with 50 variations of the same file scattered across your desktop. Why would we want to do this? # At the surface level, so you can have a “backup” of things you are working on (yes I know git is not a “backup” per se but won’t…
It feels as if 2025 has flown by. Looking back it always interesting around this time, so let’s see what this year has brought. Personal # This year was a great one for our family. We… took a trip to Hawaii in November got formally engaged our daughter started daycare and is enjoying it immensely baby #2 on the way for May 2026 I’ve really been enjoying being a dad, seeing our daughter grow right…
Ah, programming language choices - the great philosophical debate of our time. While I am sure I will have a gazillion comments about “why not X?” or “why X?” - I figured I would still put out there the languages I am pursuing and wanting to grow in as we near the end of the year and head into the next. Without further ado, let’s go (haha, pun intended): For the web # Go # “But Go is so BORING!”…
I had the pleasure to collaborate with tony-btw on a Christmas stream, where we discussed all things free and open source, Nix, Guix, BSD, programming languages, screens, philosophy and more. You can follow Tony here . Merry Christmas to everyone! As always, God bless, and until next time. If you enjoyed this post, consider Supporting my work , Checking out my book , Working with me , or sending…
As I write this, there is a retired couple sitting in the coffee shop across from me reading books together. I can only hope to one day be doing the same! Reading together and conversing about those ideas is still possible. It is an act of depth of relationship to discuss our reading and deepest thoughts, perhaps couples who read together, stick together. I have always considered myself a fairly…
When choosing a machine, you face the Trilemma Of Choice: The Computing Constraint Trilemma # Portability - weight, battery life, form factor Performance - CPU headroom, GPU capability, thermal sustained load Economy - initial cost, maintenance burden, replacement cycle You can pick two. Most people choose portability + performance: a $4500 MacBook Pro that goes anywhere and handles heavy…
I recently took my old workstation out of storage, booted it and found it running Fedora 40 - so of course it was time to put NixOS on the machine and bring it into the fleet. I’ve probably been sleeping on the machine as a build/rendering server for my projects, and figured let’s do it. While the setup was farily painless (after a `nix flake update`), I have written a quick guide for setting up a…
I’ve built and released my first colorscheme: Compline , with its companion light theme Lauds . Compline : from the Latin “completorium” - completion. The final prayer of the Catholic Liturgical Hours, a time for deep contemplation, to be at peace with the darkness. Lauds : from the Latin “laudes” - to praise, to glorify. The dawn prayer of the Liturgical Hours, greeting the rising sun with…
The other day on twitter, I saw the question posed: “What are your favourite drugs/escapes from reality?” After going down that path in my 20s and finding no reprieve, I would say to my friend that asked the question: the goal is not to escape reality, but to align with it - to push toward reality with all your might. Now, you might be saying “but Josh, the world is so bleak, there’s so much evil…
Emacs has holistically become my daily computing environment. My efforts have been focused on building emacs into the workflow of essentially everything I do, as long as it doesn’t involve heavy video or media, I try my very best to accomplish it in emacs. The idea is to achieve deep integration with everything I do on a computer, to the degree my thoughts are immediately able to be acted upon in…
Table of Contents # For those of you with custom keyboards, the in-built laptop keyboard is and will always be a second class citizen. Even with kmonad , I still vastly prefer my chocofi 36 key (board) - very often sitting it on top of the thinkpad built-in keyboard to do my work. The only issue with this is that you get phantom keypresses occasionally from the board sitting on a key. The…
I got the Supernote A6X2 Nomad almost a year ago, and have been using it off and on for that entire time, deciding if it has a place in my workflow. TLDR; # I thought it a great writing tablet - nicer than pen and paper in a lot of cases . The fact you have nearly infinite notes in one little package was a big plus and fits in with my lifestyle but I couldn’t see how it fit into my unix based…
I apologize for my absence in the blogging world as of late - as my last post showed , I have been going down the Nix/NixOS rabbit hole and working on some personal business projects that will be out in the coming months. There has been extensive learning, deep diving, and exciting revelation that I am all too stoked to share. But, one thing I figured I would share that has me excited recently is…
When you first start into the rabbit hole that is Linux, you see that there are hundreds if not thousands of distributions that you can pick to use. While this can be quite intimidating, there are only a select few that are the root of the tree that all others are derived from: Debian , Arch and (some would say) Fedora / RedHat . But, there is one distribution that has lately come on the radar of…
If you are new around here, you won’t notice the changes I have recently made to my site - but if you’ve visited here before, things will be looking quite different! I did a full rewrite of my blog using the Antfustyle Astro template , built in a shortform Notes section (that automatically gets posted to Twitter/Mastodon), and will be working to add my org-roam directory to future builds as a…
Linkarzu had TJ DeVries , DistroTube , Gregory Anders and myself on a livestream to discuss Emacs Vs. Neovim on Friday night and it was a fantastic time. Teej and Greg are both core maintainers of Neovim, so it was interesting to see how they use the editor that they work on. DT has a super polished setup from over the years, and then there was me, emailling Linkarzu with M-x spook from Mu4e so…
The easiest way to migrate your email to a cost effective provider
I can no longer support disqus and their ad scheme
For some time, I have gone down the Tea rabbit hole, to come out on the other end with a Gaiwan for Gongfu brewing, a Matcha set, I started importing tea from abroad, and have found that tea is now my drink of choice in the afternoons. This guide includes some of the very valuable information that the / tea / general on 4chan’s / ck / offers, you can find a full copy pasta here:…
How do we understand what life is about
For the past few years, I have self hosted services that permitted me to leave behind all subscriptions. I have built out a system using off the shelf solutions for this which follows: Why self host? # The thing that one should start any endeavour with is “why”? For me, the reason is multifaceted. I want to have my own data in my own hands, even if that means taking responsibility for it. I want…
Recently, some influencer was banned from TikTok for some sort of prank video. I refuse to look it up, it just crossed my RSS feed and it sparked the idea behind this article. Many such cases. The thing about social platforms is that you do not own anything at all. You don’t even own your own account and it can be taken down tomorrow. So, why then, would anyone take the time required to build a…