One of the coolest things you can do today is work on stuff that’s pretty damn niche. You shouldn’t do it for the fame and attention, that’s not the point of working on niche stuff. The point is that you can fix problems and resolve annoyances that no one else is interested in dealing with. Everyone seems to be busy building these big things, and that’s fine. But you should not discount what you…
In the past, I’ve owned both Kindle and Kobo devices, and I think when it comes to examining these devices at stock , there’s no doubt that a Kindle has a better reading experience. Kindles ship with better fonts out of the box, and the font rendering stack, which decides what text looks like : you know, that thing you’re effectively staring at for the majority of your time with the device.…
A while ago, I announced that I was working on Readerly, a new font derived from Newsreader. It was mostly built with an interactive build script and a bunch of manual testing on my part. The script for Readerly in question uses Python, FontForge’s Python API and various tools to modify the font, and some knobs (weight, scaling, etc.) that decide what the final font looks like. Of course, I also…
PHP Monitor was originally intended to be a tool created for use with Laravel Valet, but over time it has definitely changed a lot. Many features were added, and it has even expanded to also support a standalone mode without Valet. One thing has been consistent all this time, however: PHP Monitor has always required a little bit of manual setup before you can start using it. You need both Homebrew…
This blog post is unrelated to the book by Charles Dickens, in case you were curious. I was just being a bit cheeky when I came up with a title for this one. I think there’s a lot of societal expectations placed upon people these days in a way that concerns me: in particular, one of the most burdensome pressure that I’ve faced over the last few years is the idea that we should chase happiness.…
A couple of years ago I started using Nextcloud instead of Dropbox after having moved away from Gmail, and it was such a novel and good experience not to be constantly bombarded with bullshit, that I decided to slowly move my life away from the big businesses and their annoying practices. Most recently, I wrote about getting rid of Windows but I’ve also been moving away from other products in…
I’ve been busy, so I’ve got a fun story to share today. If you’ve been following me and reading my blog, you probably know at this point that I love tinkering with my Kobo e-reader. Unlike other e-readers, Kobo e-readers don’t need to be jailbroken if you want to mod them. It’s one of the best things about these devices. I like it very much: it’s customer friendly and definitely a good reason to…
When I got back into reading in 2022 with my first steps into the Cosmere, I did not imagine that I would become a reading fiend and make my way through many books as the years have gone by. I also ended up owning a bit of an e-reader collection. I’ve owned Kobo, Kindle and Boox devices over the years. My Kindle ownership was brief: after a couple of months, I sold the device but there was one…
A couple of years ago, in 2018, after becoming a fan of Total War: WARHAMMER , I started reading some of the Warhammer Fantasy books. I started with the Tyrion and Teclis trilogy, after getting really intrigued by the lore in WARHAMMER II. At the time, these books were available for purchase via the Black Library , which is run by Games Workshop. It allowed DRM-free .epub purchases of their books…
Welcome to the second part of my Windows-to-Bazzite journey. In my previous post I explained that I had decided to install Bazzite , a Fedora -based Linux distribution, because after all, why not take Linux seriously? (You may recall in the previous post I pointed out that, well, we might have Stockholm-syndromed ourselves into believing that debloating an operating system that disrespects you is…
Over the last little while, I’ve been wondering: what even is the point of remaining a software developer if [insert large language model here] can do a decent job in a profession that I’ve been doing for the last decade? Frankly, am I cooked? Note : While many people are using “AI” to refer to this new technology, I think it’s preferable to use a more concrete description of the exact technology…
For the most part, 2025 was still very much a year of recovery for me. I was fortunate enough to be able to play plenty of games this year, mostly out of necessity because I needed something to do as I continued to recover from burnout. In terms of games, I played a variety of genres, as I do every year. Did I enjoy everything equally? Absolutely not. I definitely played a couple of…
Unlike last year’s list, this one is going to be a bit shorter. In terms of what I’ve read, this year has been a continuation of the last year. If you saw that list, I’m sure you can guess what’s coming next. Yes, in fact, all of the books I have finished this year have all been books that are set in the Cosmere, by Brandon Sanderson. I did start some other books. I tried! I read a bit of Douglas…
Let’s not bury the lede: over the last few years, I’ve seen Windows become significantly worse, and it’s been frustrating to watch, and use. This is classic enshittification at work, and I loathe it. In fact, this is the first post in a series of blog posts about moving away from Windows, because I’ve had enough. It may sound silly, but you don’t need to tolerate a shitty operating system if…
For the last few months, I’ve been busy adding various new features and improvements to PHP Monitor, and there’s a monthly release schedule associated with the app again. As we’re getting closer to the end of November, it’s that time of the year that it’s necessary to be excited about the upcoming release of PHP, and that usually means I have to push out the obligatory build of PHP Monitor with…
Today I’m officially launching Mylonia , my freelance software development company. That means I’m officially going solo. If you’ve been looking at my site recently (or perhaps looked at some of my profiles on social media) you might have noticed that I soft-launched the company without any fanfare by adding links to the website and a contact form here and there, but I figured it was time to make…
Since my last post, I did some more research in regard to this kerning thing on Kobo devices, and I wrote a whole script to automate many of the changes I’ve been manually making to various fonts. In particular, I wanted to automate the creation of the legacy kern table that Kobo devices use when rendering text on firmware 4.x. That’s the same thing I blogged about last time . 1 How we got here It…
Not too long ago, I released version 2.0 of my collection of tweaked fonts, and I was pretty sure I was done tweaking fonts for the rest of the year. However, this morning I received a message in my inbox from a friendly person who linked me to an interesting post on the MobileRead forums and noted: One suggestion would be to consider adding ‘old-style’ kern tables so that kerning works correctly…
Last October, when I first sought professional help after getting my depression diagnosis, and it became clear that I was going to be unable to do my job for an extended period of time. I made a quick blog post (titled Burned Out ) to inform everyone that things were not going well, and that I was going to be inactive for a bit. It wasn’t a long post, and I closed it like so: I have sought…
PHP Monitor 25.06 is now available with a few fresh visual touches and some minor bug fixes. Read more below for details. While I remain on sick leave for likely the rest of the summer, I am doing better than before (I’m finally starting to get better, after getting surgery to fix serious breathing issues) and recently decided to see if I could get a little update for PHP Monitor out. I took a…
