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User states: Upon picking up an old project and trying to install pip says “cannot find a version to satisfy” I’ve got this, I’ve had this a hundred times before it’s a python version, a rogue package, maybe a yank from the pinned deps. I pop open the project get us on the same commit. I get a different error, make a few updates and we are good, except the user gets the same error from the start. They never saw the error I did, and my fix did not magically resolve their error. We circle all the things it could be for hours. I consistently wipe my venv, and recreate with ease, send them the commands I ran to no avail. Something is up and I can’t put my finger on it. We’ve checked all the things and inched as close as we can to running everything exactly the same. Os python version Network vpn uv version Nothing makes any sense. Finally I throw in the towel, is it the artifact server. I forge a token and give him one to borrow. BAM it works, like magic. The first sign of progress. Then h…

Last updated Jan 2026. Seealso Looking for all posts tagged with ai see [[ tag/ai]] Ai is a tool I use a lot for code generation, research, image generation, and debugging. The words I publish on this site are my own unless explicitly stated from the top. There’s only one or two posts in this category. Words are mine # The core of what this blog is, is my thoughts ideas, sharing experiences. The words are the important part. They are not perfect, I often do not spell or grammer check, and what is here is from a flow state of writing and very often not refactored. No AI unless explicitly stated code gen # Up till around 2023 all of the code to create the site was hand written by me. I have my own site generator that I maintain markata. From 2023 through 2025 snippets of code, sometimes entire plugins or modules were created in chat apps like chatgpt. There was no agentic coding, windsurf, cursor, claude code, opencode, none of it. It was all integrated into the site by hand. Starting ar…

I’m making an effort to make my og images better yet again, I’m going for that next 10% better. I really like my og images, but there are some title sizes that overflow. This page is a page to help debug. How I make these og images is for another day. Script # I use my own static site generator markata. I can use it to generate a list of posts wrapped in their og image. I use itertools to do a groupby so that I can do roughly every 5 characters larger, and see a wide variety of sizes. OG-Sample # shots # I also do Posts tagged: shots posts that change the og template quite a bit by adding the image to the page. I’ll do the same script, but add a filter to the images.

It’s that time of year, Coming back to work out of a big break and thinking about big changes. Daily Notes # Keep up with daily notes, maybe not here, I tend to have more targeted notes here with full blog posts, but for work daily notes is POG and needs to be leaned on. LLM’s do really good at ingesting markdown and reminding me of things that I need to do, or did, or need to follow up on. Reader # Social media is changing, quickly becoming enshitified, I enjoy interacting with some of the people I’ve met online, reading their opinions, and learning from their experiences. I don’t need their hot takes, don’t care about their political takes. I like boring posts that typically fade out of whats picked up on the algorithm. I like a good 5-10 minute read or a long form podcast talk. I will be aggressively collecting more rss feeds to read and keep up with. (Neo)Vim # I’ve had these bad habits in my config for years, from day one of using vim. It’s time to kill these.. I killed them this…

The other day I was watching [thePrimeTimeagen]https://youtube.com/@theprimetimeagen?si=jVcp23FbfQSFZfDc) and he talked about devs loving ai and artists revolting. There was some discussion in chat about art being more creative and prime quickly squashed that. He ended with being oddly confused why developers are jumping on board and artists are not. Both had their art stolen to build out the models. my own vibes I’m writing this from my phone without further research, all vibes, personal experience, and thoughts, no research. Good Tools # First I want to argue that artists have had some form of ai in their tools for years. Idk, probably not ai as we know it today but functionally similar. Content aware fill. This is a Photoshop feature from Adobe, as far as I know it’s one of the special things you get from Adobe that you don’t get from the FOSS alternatives easily. This is an example of a good took that is well loves by the community and widely used, if you put ai in it to make it be…

Running kubernetes in your homelab is a fantastic way to learn, explore, express yourself, and run services that you use. The Right Reasons To Run Kubernetes In Your Homelab # There are not many You want to learn kubernetes You like kubernetes You want to learn to scale There are also The Wrong Reasons To Run Kubernetes In Your Homelab You want to learn kubernetes # Homelabbing is a such a great way to learn new skills, deploy real apps that you use. Create new custom apps for your specific use cases that no one else has. You should absolutely run kubernetes in your homelab if you want to learn it. I would recommend to start locally, pull up kind, minikube, or k3d and start from your local machine before putting it on a server. When you decide you are ready for a server, you probably don’t need any crazy hardware. You can probably run on some old retired Dell Optiplex or an old desktop someone is throwing out as it no longer runs windows. You like kubernetes # Hell Yeah Brother, 100% n…

I’ve been running my shot scraper api for a year now. It creates og images for my website and thumbnails for my Reader using a headless chrome instance. 25870 shots 73 shots per day on average 12-09-2025 first shot taken Histogram # You can see in the histogram that I’ve had a few big spike days, This has been mostly for days that I’ve integrated into a new service or changed the endpoint. On February 13, 2025 I swapped over from using the post to using template specific to open graph images. Image Comparison Original Post Image New OG Image Swapping to og images Collage # For fun I made a collage of all the shots. It’s cool to see all of these together, I remember a lot of the thumbnails and posts. Many of them from my rss reader. I tried to make a video collage, but turns out it takes a long time to show all 25k shots in video form. It also turned out to be a bit of a strobe as I don’t yet have it figured out how to dark mode in headless chrome.

Running kubernetes in your homelab is complex, time consuming, there are almost no docs to help you (homelab focused docs for things you want to install), and nothing is copy paste. You have to make everything happen yourself. The Wrong Reasons To Run Kubernetes In Your Homelab # I run compose and think kubernetes is the next logical step Techno Tim runs it I heard it’s what cool kids do Kubernetes BTW Talos Linux looks cool I found a cool helm chart on GitHub I need scale There are also The Right Reasons To Run Kubernetes In Your Homelab. I run compose and think kubernetes is the next logical step # No it’s not. It’s much different than running docker, compose, swarm. It’s meant for scale, it’s complex, it’s made for enterprise, not your local development or your homelab. It can do these things, it can do them quite well, but it’s not the target audience. Techno Tim runs it # I heard it’s what cool kids do You need to rethink who the cool kids are, touch some grass. Tim also does it f…

Today I woke up to finding out that cloudflare hade a widespread outage. My Reader uses tailwind cdn for styles and it was down. Otherwise it was not so impactful to me and felt kike they were quick to have it up. I’m not really researching here, just jotting thoughts down from a parking lot waiting for pickup. It feels like we are seeing a lot of these lately. They feel much more frequent. It feels like a whole industry was sold on 9’s and reliability of big cloud that we just aren’t getting. There’s a huge push to go back to self hosting, racking and stacking. I think this is great. I love it. I’m a big proponent for ownership and self hosting. It’s not the right move for everything and everyone, and is certainly not something to make a knee jerk reaction about in the moment of frustration. There’s a lot of things that are just impossible to do yourself, cdn caching, edge compute, ddos protection. These companies are not magic they are vulnerable to changes just like you and I. It re…

Getting ready to batch out 18 apple boxes for the local theater. Need to step up my woodworking tool game here quick on a low budget. Whipped this up up and built the prototype box, went really well. We have 4 in the arsenal now, might do 4 more if we need more assembly capacity. Pretty proud of the first 3d printed thread project here. The design for good 3d prints can be quite different with its anisotropic strength and hollow sections being nearly weightless when compared to traditional manufacturing methods. Its so fun to be able to do it for almost no cost right in my home office.

I just heard someone drop the this term and it kinda fits a lot of shit on the internet right now. Arguing that its OK to question AI, its OK to like it, its OK to question if it needs to be in every goddamn thing we do, question its morality on training and the slop being pushed at us all the time. I’m not Technophobic I’m Techbrophobic I heard this and it kinda hit with a lot of things that I’ve resonated with lately. Tech bros of today have been compared to Steve Jobs in a lot of ways. Whether its style or the way he was so good at marketing, but this feels different. When Jobs launched the iPhone as this next great thing, He fucking made the thing. No broken promises of being sold something with hopes that it will do more tomorrow. No pushing around insane amounts of money with the hope to become profitable years down the line. No fear pushing that if you are not doing X today your business will be dead in 6 months. Giving us the promise that it was about to create an entire indust…

I’ve long looked for a way to cat anything in the terminal. I’m am terminally in the terminal. I manage all of my projects, code, website, notes, files, servers, infrastructure, almost everything from the terminal. I occasionally open a file manager, mostly at home, only so that I can browse images. Compounding my issue, I’m a tmux user. It works great for me, and I barely have to think about it at this point. The keybindings are second nature to me. I can go between server, terminal, nvim, and between projects instantly, no loader, no lag, no animation, it just works for everything that really matters to me for really getting things done. Mcat # is a new tool that seems like it can cat anything in the terminal, code, files, images, markdown, markdown with images, and even video, without leaving tmux! But it doesn’t always work # The keen eyed of you will notice the blank screen at the start of the demo above, not sure what happened, but resizing the terminal fixed something. Sometimes…

No one is perfect, this is why we have things like checkpoints or gates in the form of pull requests, linting, type checking, and tests. What happens when you work on small side projects by yourself that try to be content focused? What happens when you end up building a lot of the tech under that site and build it on the bleeding edge of all the tech you make? They are likely missing these things and occasionally there are some periods of regression. This is one reason I really like the term digital garden to describe one’s small corner of the internet where they share their thoughts. There will be regressions The Signs # There were signs, signs I did not notice Chat is your rss feed broken? I’m not seeing anything show up in my rss reader me Do I not put thoughts in my rss feed, I swore I did. Chat my fault, Turns out I must have already clicked it in my reader. me great, glat it’s working …But it wasn’t Later this week comes the next sign that I also choose to ignore… Google search h…

There is no such thing as magic Be ready to roll back live deployments If CI was too fast be suspicious Always be available after a release. No one wants to read your slop, if you are too lazy to write it don’t send it. Tech will always fail, we only have some control over blast radius strive for a blameless culture Need a tool Make a tool Recognize the right idea when you hear it. Always carry a knife One Breath at a time Let Glue Dry Obsess over quality. blocking others is a p0 creating process is a cardinal sin

Working on an upcoming project that requires some threaded screws. Trying to keep a low budget on this one with as much to come off of the printer as I can. It might become a slant3d portals product if it works out. I always like making test prints for stuff like this especially to see how the feel is off of the printer that is going to print the final product and take much longer. First try was a success. What worked # I started out looking up standard half inch thread pitch and size, but ran out of time to get the exact profile of a half inch bolt, so I will need to fix that later. Th The print orientation is critical for strength here. This part is a full 1/2: so it should be strong either way, but to make sure we are printing the bolt horizontally to get nice long print layers. To do this we have to give it a bit of a flat spot on the top and bottom. This does not hurt performance, if anything it probably helps give some room for poor tolerances..5" od 13tpi pitch non-standard prof…

I hit an issue with 3d printing oversized parts that I have not hit before. I’m working on some jigs for an upcoming woodworking project that will involve a lot of repetition. We want to utilize some dowel joinery and jigs for consistency. These parts will be up to 20in in length this is much larger than my print bed. I’ve fit things together before # Here’s where I went wrong, I wasn’t really thinking through my previous applications. They’ve all been slip fit, primarily print in place joints that need to move. My go to offset for print in place on my printer is 0.2mm, sometimes 0.1mm depending on the scale. A live hinged [[ knife-sharpener-double-hinge-first-try]]. And in the hinges of [[ a-box-of-caps-and-a-macropad]]. Experimenting for feel # Fitment like this is a lot dependent on the tolerences of your printer and the feel you are going for. I went to school as a mechanical engineer and theres a lot of science behind press fit joints, that’s not happening in my house on my deskto…

Python has two ways of adding optional dependencies to your projects pyproject.toml file and. dependency-groups # for development Dependency grooups are used when working on the project, they do not ship with the project, users cannot select to install them with the project. These are for things like running tests, linting, or docs. You might want to run these in ci, or keep your dev machines tight. For the most part you can probably keep these in. Depending on your team, fluency, and tolerance for slower installs extra packages. Adding too many tight groups might make it hard for the team to remember all the groups and which one to use and end up with them using anyways. optional-dependencies # for users Optional dependencies are for shipping. These are for your users, not your development team. This is used for dependencies that are clearly not needed for all or main use cases. It is annoying to use projects that you need to add optionals to just to use at all so use them a bit spari…

Handy reference for coordinates in the kraft world. Home # Overworld:-208 71 -291 Nether:-26 9 -36 Ocean Monument # Overworld: 209 62 -752 Nether:26 1 -94

Today I updated my jinja templates and feeds to include shots posts in the main feed. These posts will prominently show the image in the feed with a small post for each one. Shots are instagram style imge posts inspired by https://justin.searls.co/shots/.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t re-flash my keyboard enough to ever remember where I put the bootloader. Sometimes its the last thing I think about in a refactor and I end up cornering myself into a place where I cant get into that layer anymore. I’ve started putting hardware switches on my newer builds, but some older builds don’t have a hardware one, so it requires disassembly and jumping the microcontroller. Even when I have one though, I gotta flip my board over and its annoying sometimes, so I prefer to have a keystroke for it. Two Hand hold down # What I’ve landed on recently is the idea of a two hand hold down combo for the bootloader. These combos are ones that there is no way I can hit without picking my hands up from their normal homerow position and pressing four keys simultaneously with pointer and thumbs. Here are some example layouts from keymap-editor Timing # You can even give it a long prior timeout to really make sure that its not an accidental hit.