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When I got my first dial-up internet account, dialing a modem into an SCO Unix system (System V, based off of Unix 3.2), I started researching the tools and technology of the era . It looked something like this after the modems finished singing. There were also magazines hyping up the nascent internet culture like Mondo 2000 and Wired . Mondo 2000 But both Mondo and Ed Krol’s Internet book…
X.400, the UN-backed email standard from 1984, was the more feature-rich system by a wide margin — recallable messages, self-destructing mail, built-in encryption, read receipts, delivery guarantees, decades before SMTP got around to bolting most of it on. It lost anyway. The best explanation I’ve read for why: X.400 was conceived as a tool, rather than a product. X.400’s spec…
There’s a particular flavor of joy that comes from watching a golden child get caught failing, and it’s very specifically a Jim McAllister, from Election (1999) flavor of sour grapes. You’ll remember McAllister: the put-upon high school teacher, ground down by two decades of unglamorous work, watching Tracy Flick work the cursus honorum toward a noteworthy college, an ascendant…
I love Infinite Jest . One of its most powerful lectures comes from a father — not unlike Polonius’ speech in Hamlet — delivering a wish that the addressed choose a better, wiser path in life: one that avoids merely acting in the scenery of life, for living it. In short, the listener and the reader are asked to avoid being figurants . …you can’t appreciate the dramatic pathos of…
New York City Subway Guide, 1970-1972 The New York City subway map is so iconic you can build an identity around it. You’ve seen it, or its 1979 redesign by Michael Hertz, printed on coffee mugs and t-shirts and chico bags.
After twenty years of dedicated tmux use, I listened to my younger colleague and tried zellij : a screen multiplexer written in the hot new language Rust. After 3 months of use, I am going back to tmux . Pros: On-screen menus make key bindings far more discoverable than tmux ’s man page ever did Mouse support (but this is actually a con for me) Cons: Its key-combo design clashes with the…
Like most nerds of a certain stripe, I’d always known that the Romance languages, true to their name, descend from the Roman Empire and Latin. But the YouTube creator behind 10 Minute Spanish has a genuinely great multi-part series on how Latin became Castilian, which became the national dialect spoken across the Iberian Peninsula. Somewhere in there was the light bulb moment: It’s…
Back in April, word got out about an unreleased, highly capable version of Claude called Mythos that, when pointed at large codebases, could surface serious, previously undiscovered vulnerabilities — including in software that was decades old . It was good news copy and the press fanned flames for several news cycles. But after having done a lot of AI-assisted engineering through Summer 2025 and…
There’s a YouTube short making the rounds about how textbooks seem to have been dumbed down: The upshot of the video seems to be that the venerated classic textbooks of yesteryear — e.g. Thomas’ Calculus and Analytic Geometry; 2nd ed. (~1958) — got to their essential material (e.g. the derivative) much more directly than do the bloated, ridiculously-expensive textbooks of the present…
Taken from private correspondence … happy Memorial Day weekend 2026. With a long weekend upon us, Lauren had the great idea that we (finally) take a family trip to Yankee Stadium and see the home team play. As game day (May 24) got closer, the forecast was dreadful: rain, rain, rain. It had been raining for something like thirty hours straight ahead of first pitch. But fortune smiled on us.
By the turn of the millennium I had pretty much given up on popular music. It had been a long-brewing shift, which started roughly the first day I got to Austin, when I heard Son Volt’s Tear-Stained Eye on KGSR on the radio. Later that year I’d be introduced to the Butthole Surfers , the sensual Goth of The Cure’s Disintegration , Failure’s Magnified , Björk’s Post ,…
As an elder technologist, there’s the danger of sinking into old habits and never updating them. I didn’t see anything wrong with tmux , and there still really isn’t. But some (younger) colleagues told me about some of zellij ’s features, and I adopted it. I saw ghostty and thought it was terminal emulation done right. And while the blood and tears I paid the git gods are…
Recently, on his podcast “ 60 songs explain the 90s ,” Rob Harvilla covered the Bush song “Glycerine.” Rob’s earnest and enthusiastic coverage and warm reflections about the music of our shared teen years gave me pause to think about this song, and I realized: it’s always there. Imagine summer in the late ’90s: I’m laying in a pool on a floaty in the…
In the years since I finished reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, I’ve never stopped thinking about this world. VanderMeer unites biophilic cosmic horror like HP Lovecraft; furnishes passionate descriptions of the majesty of nature like Jane Goodall or Sir Richard Attenborough; unmoors the reader with paranoia and conspiracy like Philip K. Dick; and stuns with…
Recently via my Mastodon friend Paolo Amoroso , I was informed about the existence of a Lisp book called “ A Programmer’s Guide to Common Lisp ” by Deborah G. Tatar — the book, it turned out, was a stepping stone. It was a remarkably lucid programming book. And often, when I find such a capable author, I look them up to see how their research and career went. After Dr.…
Hyperion Cantos is a four book set. Hyperion gets a lot of press because of its device of a Canterbury Tales structure: tales of the main protagonists as told by themselves. As a single book that is remarkable, unusual, and stands as a testament to Dan Simmons’ skill at characterization and plot-by-indirect narration. But in its sequel Fall of Hyperion , we see why he made that choice.…
I’m in a Japan moment. Maybe it’s the influence of the cherry blossoms of New York’s parks and botanical gardens in April, but Perfect Days , “Shōgun,” and a recent replay to the Platinum trophy in From Software’s ronin epic, Sekiro , have me visiting Japan daily. The latest voyage happened this weekend when Lauren and I watched Hikari’s Rental Family .…
I’ve been loving Neko Case for nearly a quarter-century now. Possessed of a voice whose key verb is “reverberate” and which sounds like John Bonham playing drums at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Her reverb-soaked songs have always spoken to me. It’s like the Pacific Northwest feel of Twin Peaks relocated to Roy Orbison’s home of Wink, Texas. Roy sang into the black,…
A few weeks ago, I read this post at Futurism and I found it unfair and it’s bothered me ever since. It’s 2026. AI is everywhere, and frankly, humans have had it too good for far too long. For the world’s corporations — the movers and shakers of the global economy, as it’s currently organized — it’s well past time to leave us flesh bags behind. That, at least, seems to be the contention of…
In the second season episode of Mr. Show , “If You’re Going to Write a Comedy Scene, You’re Going to Have Some Rat Feces in There,” we are introduced to idealistic, blissfully happy, tech naïf “Gregory Sniper” as played by David Cross. Where ideas can hang out and do whatever
Every day, millions of people ask an AI system a question they don’t know the answer to, receive a fluent and confident response, and move on — having learned nothing except the most dangerous thing possible – the answer. Patrick McGoohan explained and filmed this dangerous world in the 1967 episode of The Prisoner called The General . In the episode, what McGoohan warns us against is…
As an elder millennial, I grew up in the ambient wash of 70s folk and singer-songwriter rock. Across the shag-carpeted living rooms of my childhood memory, I can see lightly sun-bleached album covers — Carole King’s Tapestry , James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James , Jim Croce, Cat Stevens. My generation grew up downstream from people who knew how to craft a lyric and place a capo. While I…
Have you ever encountered something and thought: I am completely the target market for this, and I cannot wait to read/watch/listen to this? I think about Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture multiple times per week. I’m always fascinated when the recursive ladder of etymology leads me from English (say, “mother”) to Greek/Latin (“mater”) to a splash in Sanskrit…
I visited Fox News today to get a party-line take on an event. There’s no search interface. Where can I research those terabytes of You Report, I decide goodness? If the medium is the message, the message is: This is not here for you to explore. You are here to get told. You get to consume .
A few weeks ago, I filed anthropics/claude-code#30640 — a bug report about Claude Code’s native installer being unusable on FreeBSD as Anthropic soft-deprecated the npm install path. The issue management bot tried a few times to close things but I kept it alive. Ultimately, I decided to enlist the FreeBSD community. To my great fortune, Graham Perrin found my plea and worked to promote the…
I wrote recently about what Metallica meant to me — the album, the musicians, what it felt like to be a skinny kid hearing “Blackened” for the first time. The coolest band on the planet. So how did they become a punchline? “Napster versus Metallica” was more than a lawsuit. It felt like a moment where skinny thrashers in jean jackets became the homeowners association of…
In my early junior high era, Friday nights were for Casa Olé Mexican food at the mall before “20/20”. Between introversion and awkwardness, I didn’t have a John Hughes social calendar that needed attending to. So on Friday nights I really didn’t mind joining the ‘rents and sister for a Combinación Numero Dos and baskets of chips with red sauce. Up the mall arm from…
My 2015 MacBook Air (model 7,2 , for those keeping score) had been officially declared a vintage by Apple: no further OS updates, no support path, no security ( ulp ) patches. Which is a funny thing to say about a computer that still boots in under ten seconds, weighs nothing, and fits in a sleeve the dimensions of a manila folder as Steve (RIP) once showed on the stage at the Moscone Center.…
I’ve written a lot about editors here over the years ( editors , vim ). But I’m starting to sense something interesting. For programmers who have adopted AI and agentic workflows, the IDE may be hindering productivity. And even for those who, like myself, prefer a minimalist experience ( tmux / zellij + editor), I think we might need to update our workflows as well. Lately I’ve…
Around 2001, I needed to learn Perl. The primary means for doing so was Programming Perl by Wall, Orwant, and Christiansen — and indeed I did learn Perl, and spent an early part of my career using it as the glue language that made all sorts of impossible tasks possible (there are legacy posts recorded here that attest to this). But the book had three surprising gifts that have stayed with me far…
Some time in 1992, during my sophomore year of high school, Westwood released their landmark real-time simulator video game Dune II . After many hours in-game, I wanted to get into the lore of the universe. …to say nothing of my GPA I picked up a tattered copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune at the library. Whoa. It was the promotional paperback tied to the 1984 film complete with stills of…
Photo Credit: TechCrunch at https://www.flickr.com/photos/techcrunch/53202070940/ It’s a nightmare that wakes any developer in a cold sweat: I exposed internal code. This week, some poor developer at Anthropic unintentionally published the source code to Claude Code. The internet genies have copied it thousands of times and now all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will…
Being a computer dork of a certain stripe, I’ve had a TODO( .md ) in my personal wiki for a long time that was full of IT / tooling tasks that I wanted to do, but that I never found the time: Port the NeXT desktop to FreeBSD Clean up my blog repository of incorrectly committed binary assets that were bloating out my storage footprint and slowing up checkouts Remedy data loss in my blog due…
Recently, Anthropic changed their Claude Code installer from using npm to a native installer. It works on Linux/WSL. It works on Windows. It works on Mac. On FreeBSD today, you get a scary yellow deprecation warning suggesting that you and your platform might be a dead end. I think that’s a problem. History is littered with tasteful products made by artisans who gave the high-hat to unwashed…
This is Part 3 of a three-part series on my 2025 obsession with NeXTSTEP, OpenStep, and NEXTSPACE. In Part 1 , I introduced the project and my motivation. In Part 2 , I walked through the seven-phase technical journey of porting NEXTSPACE to FreeBSD. Here, I reflect on what AI-assisted development made possible.
This is Part 2 of a three-part series on my 2025 obsession with NeXTSTEP, OpenStep, and NEXTSPACE. In Part 1 , I introduced the project and what drove me to port NEXTSPACE to FreeBSD. Here, I’ll walk through the technical journey itself. The Slow-Boiled Frog We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy. Attributed to Maciej Ceglowski Starting Off…
Yeah, so it’s been a minute since I’ve written. With a toddler, marriage, work, etc. my tiny little bits of free time have forced me to choose between blogging or Doing the Thing . Let me tell you about the Thing I Did. I ported Sergeii’s NEXTSPACE project from Linux to FreeBSD—the operating system of my “Just Focus” laptop . NEXTSPACE recreates the NeXTSTEP desktop…
Photo Credit: Elan Rushkin Starting over alone, anew, afresh, in California a half-lifetime ago, I came to find out that the maw of the weekend can swallow you whole if you’re not careful. There are so many hours that you can easily do nothing thanks to the embarrassing riches of having time enough to do anything in a state being chock-full of everything . In order to etch numbers in my…
The promise of computing was that it would take drudgery away. And it has: I no longer have to squeeze in a bank visit on a lunch break and I can get disinformation pumped into my home without having to go outside to listen to the town idiot. Up next: flying cars. But computing, in doing so, has created digital chores that the more obsessive of us (👋) need help automating away. Ironically then,…
I’ve been watching discussions around AI systems since last winter, and I’ve noticed a divide in how people perceive their capabilities. The same technology that leaves some users genuinely amazed leaves others profoundly frustrated. What’s even more interesting, is that the frustrated ones are often the technically sophisticated; the amazed, the technically unsophisticated.…
One of the most charming aspects of English and many other Old-Norse-derived/-cognate languages are kennings . Kennings are words created by bonding multiple words, usually to poetic effect. The Beowulf poet speaks of “the whale road” to mean “the ocean.” Elsewhere, a “sword-storm” describes a battle. The kenning succeeds where its constituent words fall short…
My colleague Max dropped a casual observation the other day that struck me (paraphrased): There’s not a single day where I don’t wonder: “What did we lose in failing to make RSS the most foundational tool in everyone’s Internet consumption?” There’s a couple of interesting implicit ideas here: An internet experience where user agency and control is prioritized…
The Ruby community was always marked by an especially playful character. I haven’t written Ruby in over 5 years, but I still remember that feeling of play. It always surfaced in the oddest moments where someone would go off on a tangent and you could see the humorous stinger coming from a mile off and then you’d think: “Wait, they’re going exactly were I thought they might…
After previous (Ubuntu Mate) posts (Debian) about open-source Linux on cheap hardware, I decided to try out building/working on FreeBSD in a series under the Longform content. TL;DR: I got it working; I’m really enjoying it; and I’ve documented how to get to victory: “My Journey to FreeBSD: Building a ‘Just Focus’ Laptop”
That’s it! We wrap up and say thanks!
A list of the applications I installed for use while I’m very focused.
This laptop build was designed to help me focus and not get distracted – despite its building being a horrid distraction itself. By avoiding questions about a desktop, I thought I could get things done in the black-and-white, console-only austerity. But in the 21 st century, with so much knowledge parked in web sites or PDFs, you just might need access to a graphical environment.
FreeBSD likes to share diagnostic information. I turn this off. Well, at least as much as I could.
Given that we’re on a laptop, we might want to hop on to another WiFi network. 🛜
I often work in the wee hours. I definitely need to be able to turn down the brightness 🔆 on my screen. And while I pitched this as a “focus” laptop, the reality is sometimes I need some information that’s in a Udemy (or, ahem, YouTube) and need to turn the volume down or mute it.