This past week I spent a good deal of time experimenting with XMPP, a messaging protocol that works kinda like email when it comes to it's design. In that journey I re-encounterd Joshua Blais in a few channels, as well as his IRC channel #technicalrenaissance. I was curious, as I can't say I've really tested IRC, so...

For a long time I enjoyed Black Metal Bathory as my primary theme, and I used it just about everywhere. Eventually I just couldn't deal with the #000000 black background and wanted something more subtle. Out of this a new theme was born, which I called Darkmatter. Over time I built ports for all the apps I used, and...

Earlier this week Daniel Roe wrote a blog post called "Don't be nice." It's a short read so you should just take a glance at it, but the TL;DR is that someone joined the Nuxt community server with an avatar of a man wearing a Nazi uniform, and the offender was swiftly removed. The point of the post was that there...

It was a regular Thursday at work. I tried to open Postman for the 3rd time in a row, and yet again everything froze and nothing would load. "Fine then." That's how Cielago was born. There are plenty of other tools out there for testing or interacting with APIs, however I had a few specific requirements. I needed...

This past week my family and I visited the Oregon coast, spending time with our friends who live in the area. It was a beautiful sunny day and a mild 65F with a steady breeze. We specifically visited Cape Kiwanda which has a breathtaking view and sample of Oregon coast geology, including a haystack and a ridge made...

Earlier this year we made a plan to visit our friends in Portland, Oregon and do a camping trip at Crater Lake National Park. For months our family had been looking forward to it, especially my oldest son who is obsessed with volcanoes. This past weekend the day finally arrived. We crammed everything into the cars...

Something I discovered several years ago, that I'm now realizing may not be popular knowledge, is that iOS shortcuts has the ability to make API calls. The action is called Get Contents of URL. It's a bit deceiving because it sounds like it only does GET requests, but in reality it can also do POST, PUT, PATCH,...

I read a blog post recently saying that it was ok to hate AI. While I agree to some extent, I think it was missing some key points about how to hate AI. It’s easy to just hate something you don’t like. We as humans have a natural propensity to hate or dislike things we are not familiar with. The problem is that this...

This post is about a little app called Feeds, how it has evolved and fills all my RSS needs. The Reader I’ve tried many RSS readers, but the one that stuck for a while was NetNewsWire. It has such a simple no nonsense approach to collecting and reading feeds. At the time I used it in combination with FreshRSS, and...

For the longest time I’ve had a weird obsession with stationery. I love finding and collecting pens, optimizing inks and paper, collecting a billion notebooks I’ll never use, etc. Recently I got back into using and collecting fountain pens. I’ve kept a pocket notebook for over a decade, and I liked the idea of...

Earlier this week I quietly released an iOS app called scout, a Gemini protocol client. I built it quite a while ago but never published, and thought “why not?” Almost immediately after doing so, I read this post that really made me think about the Gemini approach in general. After some deliberation, I thought it...

For the past month or two I’ve been experimenting with building personal, self hosted software in Rust. The apps include anything from simple note taking, a wine tracker, image resizing, even a full blown RSS aggregator to replace FreshRSS. I’m not going to go into too much detail around the apps themselves, you can...