Something about the last two years has eroded my ability to focus. I find myself doing less deep work and more context switching. I’ll give you three guesses why. It is what it is though. I used to be an i3wm zealot, and I remember it fondly, but I don’t have the time or energy to sink into maintaining a functional...

I recently got my documents in order with Paperless-NGX. It’s been on my todo list for years, but I mistakenly believed I would need a document scanner to make effective use of Paperless. Not so! Mobile camera scanning is pretty good, and so far I prefer the QuickScan app. Almost immediately, I wanted an MCP...

https://hono.dev/ is a lot of fun to use, in large part due to the simplicity of the tooling. It feels a bit like writing one-file-per-page web applications in PHP or python and dropping them on a web server somewhere. I used to do this in ~2012 when I was just learning to code. Hono apps are just server-side JSX. I...

48 hours on the empire builder and 2 days in Whitefish.

I’ve been using claude code on and off since it launched a year ago. Since the Christmas holiday, it seems a ton of folks outside the software industry have discovered it as well. Despite its popularity, I’ve seen almost no discussion of Claude Code SDK. It’s essentially a typescript or python wrapper to the agent...

I live in Minneapolis, where on Jan 7 Renee Good was killed by an ICE officer while trying to flee from another officer attempting to force her car door open. Moments before, she is seen on camera waving out her window for the ICE vehicle to pass her using the open lane in front of her. Neither the footage nor a...

I celebrated the new year by having covid and coughing a lot. It caused us to cancel a lot of plans with friends and family and cut holiday travel short. 2025 was good to me, though. I married my wonderful partner of 10 years in June. The joy and gratitude I feel overwhelms everything else that happend this year. My...

The IKEA Kapplake accent light works really well as a backlight. Compared with the picture above, it looks a bit softer and warmer in person. The entire light is a toggle button, so I’ve put them toward the top and right side so they’re easy to reach. (Yes, that is a UHK) Behind the laptop stand Behind the monitor...

I want the ability to easily share tagged links to this website, inspired by the blogrolls of yore (shoutout to sethmlarson). This is a static hugo site, though. I have no interest in creating a commit just to make new links appear. Linkding, my bookmark manager Incidentally, I recently spun up a linkding instance...

Why is buying music so inconvenient? It’s kind of insane that setting up a piracy stack is somehow easier than regularly purchasing and downloading music in a way that supports the artist. Read this setup guide for example. Toward the bottom of that article, Nik documents his end-to-end purchase workflow. It’s...

What does winter feel like I sometimes hear about how winters are nothing like they used to be. Were they really worse in the 80s? Memory is foggy. Averages and trendlines can be hard to relate to subjective personal experience. The average annual temperature in Minnesota has increased by 3.2°F between 1895 and...

Long before we get to the point where a machine is a moral agent, we will have machines that are capable of suffering. - Ted Chiang I want to write out some thoughts to revisit later. It can be easy to get revisionist about what you believed and when, so here is a list of things I thought were true in late 2025...