Michael Harley
Michael Harley
Michael Harley
Hello, I'm Mike. I care about the IndieWeb, digital sovereignty, and the open web. I'm a developer and team lead based in Richmond, VA, and this site is my corner of the internet.
Latest Posts
On a whim, I decided to ride my eBike on a 30+ mile ride. Men of a certain age love WWII or Civil War history; I love both types! Some quick searching of the Richmond area led me to pick Malvern Hill Battlefield as my destination....
I saw Chris's post, The Grand Blog Reunification, where he explains that his cloud sync was silently failing and he wiped his computer without realizing he didn't have a backup. Oops. Not wanting to repeat that type of issue, I decided...
We work under a year to year award, so the end of every fiscal year comes with a little cloud over it. Well, we might not actually get it this year. That cloud has been sitting on me lately and I'm having a very strong sense of deja vu....
I forget how I started making this for breakfast, but I first wrote about it all the way back in 2012. It's still pretty much the same recipe, but it has evolved a little. I prefer lots of veggies in my omelets, so that's how I do it....
I'm a big Home Assistant fan and power user. It's the home automation platform of choice in our house and I've added many devices and automations, sometimes to the chagrin of Rachelle. We also have five cats so it only makes sense to use...
I do not do any Phoneblogging. Zero. None. Zilch. The closest I get is reading my RSS reader and saving posts to a blog ideas list. As I get older, I just don't want to mess with my phone for in-depth things, and blogging, for me,...
If Emily Dickinson had written her poems on her Wordpress blog, her host would have deleted them outright when the bill came due. Instead, her sister found 1,800 poems written on paper and stored in a drawer. Words written on paper take...
Hello again. It's your boy Mike here, blogging about blogging (glances at Wouter). Today, I'd like to explore the topic of making my blog posts more durable. I recently completed importing a backup of some of my old blog posts. These...
I cannot understand Mozilla. We took time off of X, but we’re back. The internet is changing again, so we’re here as an independent voice for our users and the open internet. @firefox · Jul 20, 2026 They either do not know who their user...
A smart thermostat was one of the first connected devices I purchased when I started building our smart home. I wanted automatic presence detection so the thermostat could set an away mode when we leave and "we're home" mode without us...
Let me start by saying happy belated anniversary to Absurd Pirate and Mrs. Pirate! I enjoyed reading their post, What I Learned About Relationships After Being With My Wife For 8 Years, which got me thinking about my own relationship...
A few weeks ago, the Canadian wildfire haze reached Central Virginia, where I live, and we noticed it as a haziness in the air. Well, I have an AirGradient Open Air (model O-1PST) outdoor sensor and two AirGradient ONE units (model...
That's the reason I've always felt that private journaling isn't for me. Is it an attention-seeking look-at-me kinda thing? I honestly don't think so. For me, writing in public adds more reflection to the words. I can sit for a good...
This is the companion to I own my books, where I made the case for stripping DRM and actually owning what I buy. This post is the machinery overview: how I store, serve, and read all of it from my own homelab. My books workflow # When I...
I love reading. I caught the bug as a middle-schooler when I got caught skipping school, and as punishment, I had to read The Chronicles of Amber and do a book report about it. Even today, opening a book and fanning the pages to get the...