Thoughts

Ben sold me on the mini pocket pry here. It’s funny how so many minimalist tools become over the top titanium damascus with wild patterns and designs. they look amazing, but are they worth the insane price for simple things? I like my edc to be things I don’t worry about breaking, loosing, or giving away. Fancy ass prybars for $200+ gives me all of those negative feelings I don’t want on my edc.

Ben is always good for a banger of a video, this images app is something that i really want in my homelab, he did some great polish here! The idea of building vibe coded applications for your own personal use with all of your own personal opinions and workflows is something that has been an appealing part of ai, I’ve definitely tossed a few apps in my homelab that I use occasionally and they do what I ask of them pretty accurately.

This feels great to use, but also seems to kill any startup idea I have, as most of them feel like they could be vibe coded out by someone with a bit of skill and they just host their own. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe we are moving into an era of more people owning their own app they use for themself, maybe i need a security related startup?

I don’t think I ever fully heard the full meaning of vsc*** and why it gets bleeped. I knew that it had to do with M$, but Teej explains it so well here. Its about the editor not really being open sources, but is marketed to be such.

I really enjoy David’s Glossary, he has absolutely nailed it. I’m working on one for myself that feels close but not quite. I want to have a list of words that auto glossary to terms for me, maybe this is too much automation and I should just lean on wikilinks, i.e. sick wikilink hover, they only take wrapping in brackets. But like David mentions here its a lot of work to make sure they are right on all the older posts. I think it needs to be done with js on my setup, I don’t have no fancy wroker to modify html on the way out, I’m fully static right now, so i would need to do full rebuilds any time the glossary changes, i’m trying to cut down on the number of features that require full site rebuilds and potential cache issues.

I like reading about old hardware and how to keep it running, sending shit out to e-waste after barely using it for a year makes my skin crawl. I find it interesting how most of these resurrections start with a linux build, and the author giving in and going for linux for the first time and enjoying being able to use something they thought was useless for real work.

That being said I have weird thoughts similar to this guy about being able to take a machine and write a novel somewhere off in the distance, but any time I try to do real work form any laptop these days the ergonomics become so unappealing that I tend to just not do anything away from my desk. Theres something that sounds so great about opening vim on old hardware that could last for hours, sip on coffee and write away, but it never works out like that in practice.

Fantastic resource of background textures, I will be using this for some projects.

Such a fantastic use of uv, its so fast and flexible and does everything I need that next time I go to set up some more complex testing like this I’m going to lean towards it more than i would something like tox. In the post Daniel sets up matrix testing for testing out different versions of python with the same pytest test suite.

big fan of eza and dust, I like these aliases to have some common commands at my fingertips. I often use the tree command and yes it sometimes goes too deep to actually be useful.

Love this dudes casual dry humor style, not afraid to poke fun at things with his dry ass satire. that being said, fc is new and as a long time fan of up arrow and !! I will be using this often.

This has to be the most incredible looking Desktop experience I’ve ever seen, riced to the nines, more polished than macos, more features than kde plasma, this looks incredible and I want to try it and feel it.

https://quickshell.org/assets/showcase/end4.mp4

DT says it so well in this video, I’ve never really been one to shit on software projects, with maybe a VERY small handful of exceptions. The shitting on ubuntu always rubbed me wrong, shitting on flatpak and snap I never got, shitting on systemd because of Leonard Pottering I never got, DT puts it in such good words here. If you don’t like it you are probably not the target audience.

If Ubuntu is too bloated, don’t try to debloat it, this is not windows, we have options, Ubuntu is one option and so much is intertwined together in something like Ubuntu if you think you want to try to “debloat” it good luck. If you have a problem with Snaps, this is probably not for you. You are probably looking for a distro with more control, probably something that you choose everything for.

Always enjoy a good read through someone elses setup. I appreciate the desire for pi clusters they are cute, they seem cheap, but feel a bit overrated (at least for those of us with relatively cheap electricity). I love seeing the refurb “tiny desktops” getting a second useful life in a homelab after they have serve their useful life in the corporate world sitting behind the monitor of some reception desk. These things rock, they are underrated, x86_64, not ARM, so they just work. Until ARM becomes more normalized in the datacenter this is where its at.

Enjoying watching David bring together his rss reader day by day. Excited to see where it goes. Im trying to get better at dropping notes like this without a ton of context, without needing to be right, just a note of whats on my mind and what I’m doing.

Good point to check on your uv cache if you are running low on disk space. I checked mine today, and it wasn’t too bad so I left it alone.

I’m digging these web2app’s from DHH’s omarchy for setting up an opinionated archlinux hyprland. This gives a way to quickly open a web app as an app either with a hotkey or run launcher in its own dedicated window that you can put on it’s own workspace. I really like a workflow of keeping one window per workspace on one monitor and I can quickly navigate between apps with a single hotkey. This gives you the power to switch through things like chat, terminal, browser, steam game with blazing speed from the keybaord, no clicking no searching, just going directly to it.

awrit is a full graphical browser that runs inside of kitty. I’ve moved on some of my machines away from kitty as the maintainer has seemed so hostile and there are other great therminals out there, but I’m going to give this a go. I have kitty running on my hyprland setup as it is the default anyways. It is actual chromium rendering to a kitty graphics protocol.

I need to give this a try for markata glossary

Never did I think I would see the day that theprimeagen decided to run archlinux. Furthermore him to start ricing it, EVEN furthermore, Pewdiepie runs arch now, and thinks you should too?? and is promoting it on one of the largest YouTube channels ever?? Even DHH is getting in the mix with omarchy Such a cool transistion to see everyone find their way to linux and diving deep into the freedom and customization.

This has to be top tier dopest home page of all time. The commands are all so well customized and whimsical on the terminal.

I’ve ran my homelab on k3s for a year and a half now, and have had talos fomo the whole time. I’m not sure if this article helps or hurts. Helps to see that techdufus struggled and wished he went k3s first, but theres so much good to it that I want it.

I’m getting there, ok, I have some of it figured out but not firing on all cylinders like I want.

for PostgreSQL (way better than managing databases manually)

Amen to this, cnpg is kick ass and has me tempted to drop sqlite for my production database default. I mostly make small shit on the side that is never going to blow up. sqlite is really good, but the automation that comes along with cnpg to just run it on all nodes and backups once you establish the pattern with the first one is sick.

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For anyone self hosting a bunch of apps under one domain, I just swapped all of mine to Host matching which includes the full subdomain, and it is glorious to not have 9+ items hit on all of your pages and only the one that you actually want.

open one > edit > gear icon next to url > Host

vim usage is becoming normie level. Just like archinstall made it too easy to install arch and brought normies into the ecosystem. It killed ArchBTW^TM^, distros like lazyvim have killed vimBTW^TM^. It used to be that to run arch, vim, nvim you had to read the docs, and go deep on understanding. running archinstallor lazyvim make it so easy to get started that you miss all of the details, you no longer have to understand ctags, quickfix, what an lsp is, or even how to set your own keybindings. You just use the damn thing, like you would with VSC****. No shame to anyone who does this, but you are probably missing out on a bunch of really useful features of a very core tool in your workflow.

Just discovered Sylvan Franklin in this post and he is cracked, sub now.

Wish I would have saw this guide and provided assembly file for setting up virt-manager in distrobox. They call out immutable distros like the knew I was coming.

What’s even real anymore? What a shitty age we are in that you have to form an opinion about news outlets and media outlets.

I just never quite understood why the word just can send people over the top. I get it when you don’t know someone, you don’t have history with them, and they come in saying you are doing something wrong.

I pulled this out into a full post just

2025 is not the year to get put on the market, its rough out there. Junior’s have little chance, senior+ are even struggling. We had it easy from 2020-2023, now its over saturated and you have to want to be in this industry to be here and stay here. It used to be a fine place to get a good job to pay the bills, the bar has been raised and if you don’t want to be here you are going to struggle. Theo covers this in this linked video deeply [[ thoughts-472 ]].

Nailed the netflix documentary style. Videos like this make me so grateful that I have a job in this rough market, if you’ve followed jepi’s series you know he’s been out of a job for months, and he is not alone in this. This is the year of “laid of, i didn’t get laid off, I left to focus on my startup”, [[ thoughts-716 ]]

David’s design on his blog is fantastic likely from years of small improvements like this converting ugly quotes to pretty quotes and optimizing fonts.

It’s common for markdown libraries to convert the first to the second like my build script does.

This is new to me, I had no idea that markdown libraries did this, I’m now interested if markdown-it does it.

For subsetting I use the fontTools library but I’ve no idea how to setup Python environments. I got it working once and failed to document the process.

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pypi yanks suck, they are rare, this one got me today as it was a pinned dependency in my dependency chain. The latest release broke python 3.6/3.7 (which 3.6 has been EOL for 3.5 years btw), and it claimed >=3.6. In order to allow users to still install xlsxwriter without pinning down it needed yanked. I’m not sure if there was another way around it as pypi releases are immutable, so you cannot fix

This now has me wondering what the heck is using it with old pythons.

It appears to have broken builds on Canonical/checkbox for ubuntu 18.04. Checkbox is a device compatibility testing framework.

https://github.com/canonical/checkbox/actions/runs/14644718138/job/41098549191#step:8:125

I try to use conventional commits on all of my commits, but I often end up only using feat/fix. I need to keep this page handy and get new verbiage worked into my language

Optionally include a scope fix(parser):

A bang indicates a breaking change note. For example …

Wyatt built out this full world to start making a film series about FROGS. The entire set it built on a flat world, but yet feels so immersive.

I like Jim’s visualizations on his site, reminds me a lot of obsidian. I’ve tried to do the same on my analytics page in the past, but it didn’t come out right. I’m going to have to give this another go.

Great breakdown of nextjs. I was highly unaware of its performance optimizations before reading this. The smell of vendor lock in from next/vercel has been there from the start, this is the first real claim I’ve seen.

I’m out on modern js front ends, complex builds that change every 6 months, design patterns are out of date just as fast. Its hard to keep up, especially when you don’t have the use case for highly interactive apps. Libraries like htmx or plain ol js gets the job done on the majority of sites and everything I tend to work on.

I’m totally with Prime here, there is something about the read only, mouse clicking part of my brain that causes me to be more critical of the code at a different level. It doesn’t hit the part of my brain thinking about the edit or how to do the edit, it hits a part thats thinking about how I will have to deal with the code moving forward.

Vendor lock in disguised as performance. Nextjs aparantly now streams all of your metadata on the fly with js. This would obviously kill all seo right, well not if you’re on vercel they automatically detect search crawlers and serve the metadata. Why the f do they need to do this and not just serve everyone the metadata. The Web is this beautiful place where anyone can create and build amazing things with a relatively low skill. Js is meant to be enhancement, not degrade the experience of its users.

I thin a lot of us have this issues, especially on side projects. At work therre are expectations, jira tickets and so on, keeping you shipping. I think there is something to be said about getting that quick and dirty POC to the right group of people early for feedback before you add redis caching, kubernetes, auto scaling, disruption budget, distributed nodes, high availability, backups, disaster recovery. At work you kinda have to have the right person to shoot ideas by that can understand that you probably need some of these complex things for your app and it will take time to get right.

I would love to have a browser based video editor I could throw on a server and do quick edits from anywhere. I tried to get this one to work and struggled to get front end to send api requets to backend. I think the root of it was their redis wants to run on 80, this caused a permission error so I tried to run 8880:80, but redis was still unable to start due to a config permission error.

The ability to query s3 buckets so seamless looks like such a pleasure to work with if you have a use case for that. Kedro catalog takes care of this most of the time for me, but I wonder if there are some cross project searching use cases I might find for this.

I love this idea of tiny useful apps for yourself. In fact I’m working on a project to built out tinyapps for myself to replace my common needs. I absolutely love that all of the state is stored in the url bar, nothing is stored server side. As much as I love to hate js, I really appreciate that things like this can be built to just live on the web, be accessible from anywhere, and live practically forever as they require such little hosting demand.

This looks like a very useful formatting tool to keep in the back of my mind. I do a lot of python and our tool tends to be pre-commit, named after the git hook pre-commit. It specifies a bunch of tools to run, you can run them in ci, manually, and opt into doing it before commit. I like the simplicity of this one not needing a whole ecosystem, but rather just leveraging the cli commands from those tools. This would probably be something that would get in the way of setup for new devs and not something I would throw on one project by itself, its another thing for everyone to figure out how to install and run on every platform, I’m sure its not hard, but being on python teams pre-commit just fits in.

This is one of the greatest pycon keynotes I’ve ever seen, bookmarking this to come back and leave better thoughts on later.

Focus on the joy, not the suck. Nothing you do in life will be absolute pure joy with no downsides forever, life does not work that way, your brain does not look that way. Look at anyone who ever got massive billion dollar payouts for something like minecraft and how much their life is not glorious when they have nothing to really look forward to.

Prime talks about it in almost a cliche way, every boring ass task is an opportunity to grow. This is so real though, if you look at every task ask a shit you gotta do to check that jira ticket off and make bossy lady not scream at you its going to be a hell. If you rather look at it as opportunities to implement new features in new ways or learn something to better yourself and watch yourself grow you are going to take a big dopamine hit. I think prime talks about this in the sense of larger projects. He as talked about his experience being much less of a daily standup, but more of a ok we got three months to figure this out lets go boys. When you are stuck in that daily jira grind it’s harder to see that larger picture of the learning and growing you are doing over the course of 3 or 6 months.

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Should I go to college? Was my education worth it? Should I keep going. A question that comes in all too often accross most industries that require some level of education. DHH has such great takes on it, some I had never fully thought about. He starts out with should we have people study niche topics (using Russian Poetry as an example). Yes the world deserves people who can make their life works out of something that brings them and many other so much joy, but no you probably shouldn’t go 100k’s into debt to do it. Should I get a software engineering degree, or become a doctor also have similar answers, it needs to be somewhat justified and not outrageous as has become the norm.

We used to listen in to Dave Ramsey on long car rides and he would have people call in and say, they went half a million dollars into debt to become a dentist, only to discover they did not want to do dentistry. At this point it’s too bad, you gotta suck it up and pay that off with something that makes some serious cash, and the only skill you probably got that can bring in that level of cash is … dentistry.

They dive into the college experience, learning to have adult debates with classmates about...

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webtui, looks like a pretty sick design aesthetic. I like the keyboard driven nature of it, the look and feel is on point to a terminal interface, sadly it looks like it is not a 2 way street, you don’t automatically get a tui our of your website, just one that looks the part in the browser.

I’ve never heard of niri, or a scrolling window manager, it looks quite interesting. I think tiling window manager misses out on named sessions and hotkey straight to tmux sessions, Brodi mentions not using tmux right before this segment. Niri looks quite interesting, but looks like it suffers specificity. maybe there are other tools that allow me to jump straight to something like brave, or steam, but I don’t see how I could jump to a specific terminal.

I’m way behind on my notification game and need to pick it up. maybe I’ll look into hcio as well. maybe I’ll look into something that goes straight to signal or just get things working on ntfy. An 80GB log file is massive and the kind of thing id like to see notifications more.

Taking this as inspiration to do more non-tech on my blog, I’ve branched out into Posts tagged: gaming, but need take it to the next step. excited to watch pype.dev evolve as well.

I’ve long avoided running ads on my blog for the same reason. For a few months I ran an ad above the fold. It was a “Your Ad Here” kind of thing, and in the messaging I was looking for content relevant to my content, not google driven ads. This resulted in nothing, no hits, not a one. I’m kinda with Will on this one beer money is not worth degrading the project for. I seriously thought some of the big projects with a moderate level of success got a good cut for these sponsorships. Some of the companies are big companies, like how do they even go through meetings and decide who gets beer money without spending more than that in decision making resources. Maybe they have a guy with more autonomy than I would expect.

Browsing for the minio tag that I have running right now I discovered that you can do minio --version and you get the same version that matches the docker tag, this is super convenient and helpful. I also notice that they use timestamped version numbers. I kinda dont mind this. It feels easy to understand how far behind it is. I really appreciate that the version in the container matches the version inside the container.

It’s not as pretty or flexible as semver, it does not communicate trees of majors and minors, but how often do we continue supporting/patching older majors and minors, in my experience only really big teams or teams with sufficient motivation are doing this.

food for thought.

I am going to start trying to employ this rhythm to my writing. I’m not very sure how I feel about it, there is something almost too assertive about it. It’s giving me a (i’m great and you should too) kind of vibe. I want to become more assertive in my writing.

I’m giving this a shot and see what I learn, you might notice in my tils.