Here’s a curated link dump of standout articles, tools, and odd corners of the web that caught my attention this month. Expect a mix of tech, design, culture, and a dash of whimsy. Enjoy exploring!

How it started 🔰

This one hits close to home for me. I started working from home about five years ago, and at first, it was great! I could work in my pajamas and eat lunch with friends and family. I could make myself a nice home-cooked meal; no more bagged sandwiches or takeout!

🤯 Information Overload

I’ve been rethinking my bookmarking and sharing habits. I consume a massive amount of content via RSS using Inoreader, often skimming 100-250 posts daily. This leads to an overwhelming reading list.

Intro

The AI tooling landscape has exploded recently, and it can be overwhelming to sift through the noise. This review covers some tools I’ve found genuinely handy. There’s also a really nice PDF report I’ve attached below, worth a read if you have the time.

Play in background

https://youtu.be/ATA4JAwZ15I?si=5bWVhwVarOuFgvE3

It's Sunday.
Hazy blue sky, cold, but sweaters make due.
A stiff breeze blows through me.
A blue jay hops along the gutter.
Snowball bushes, now long dead.
Winter is knocking on fall's door.
Cranberry sauce & Stuffing.
Coffee & Cake.
Maybe it will snow this year?
I look forward to warm sheets & cats.
Hurry home, there is still much to do.
27 days to go...

No fat high fiber high protein pancakes! Delicious for anytime!

Ingredients

• 120 g Egg white
• 20 g Oat fiber by anthony’s
• 20 g stevia sugar
• 5 g of cinnamon
• 6 g Baking powder
• 6g Stevia
• 2g Salt
• 20 g Fiber one cereal with whole grain by general mills
• 56 ml Original unsweetened almond milk by almo

Directions

Grind fiber One cereal to course powder Combined dry ingredients in a small bowl

Stats

Review

I do my fair share of poking around network infrastructure from time to time. While I do appreciate bind-utils and their wide reach, sometimes, I just want something a little… nicer. I love to swap out basic CLI utils with Golang and Rust versions, nice and easy to install. So here we are, replacing dig with doggo… and this util is a good boy for sure <3

Ug

So Samsung just dropped this update for my watch…

https://doc.samsungmobile.com/SM-R860/XAA/doc.html

Normally, I’d be happy to get new shit for my older watch, but I’ve been following post for my FAVORITE watch face Sectograph and the latest WearOS 5 update breaks complex custom watch faces.

Stats

Review

Anyone who’s run into disk space issues I’m sure knows about NCDU. It’s a super handy util to see what and where is eating the most disk space on any Linux or Mac. However one big issue I’ve run into is that it’s fairly slow, even on a SSD.

I’ve been following Joan Westenberg for a while. I forget exactly where I found this blog, but it really resonates with me, and I wanted to make it a point to share a few recent articles that I think are really good reads for anyone coming across my blog.

I know this is a repost, but it brings me so much joy…

So this is going to be a quick post.

For anyone who is running BTRFS on their computer, they MAY be getting occasional stalls at regular intervals.

Crickets are chirping.

The sun is starting to set.
Cars are slowly driving by, and I can hear the sounds of the birds far away.

Stats

Review

I’ve used a lot of TUIs over the years, and have dealt with many different Git GUIs as well. TBH most are either big desktop affairs a-la SmartGit or are underwhelming TUIs that lack a user interface designed for Normal People™. I’ve been looking for years for something to fill the gap between CLI speed and GUI simplicity, so enter LazyGit.

👋 again

Well, it’s been a hot minute and I’ve gotten deep into Hugo and front end dev. Man, CSS sucks…

I know I rant and rave about RSS alot and am a big fan of Inoreader but I know some folks like other options, so I figure I’d post some recommendations here…

Intro

I’ve gotten to become quite the fan of CLI apps as of late. Maybe it’s the allure of the terminal of my childhood (starting with DOS on a 486/33 and my dad’s old Apple IIe). I was born a little too late for the Gen X Commodore64 era, but just in time to know more then just Windows 95. It was interesting era, back when dial up and 56k modems were king. I know most blog posts these days have intro fluff, to pad out word count for SEO, but this really is even why I still love the CLI when so many the younger folks these days only know GUI apps. Nothing makes me happier then to see Gen Z kids fire up the terminal, even for simple tasks. Man, wait till Gen Alpha finds out what a BBS is. “Grandpa computers” they’ll probably say 🤣. “GET OFF MY LAWN” ✊✊

👋

So I’ve added a few new neat features to the site:

• Comment section powered by Github Discussions
• App list change list, this is still a local pre-commit hook, but I’ll eventually add it as a GH Action
• CSS cleanup, man was the article list hard to read
• Added clickable tags in the article view, still need to figure out how to add it in other views

Should make the site more usable and user friendly. Also should save me from having to spam folks with posts when I add new apps to my ever growing list.

Hey

So I’ve added some quality of life stuff to my blog. Just minor things like reading time and some visual tweaks, should make the site itself easier to read. I’ve also added a few neat app to my list ASN and fd-find. Both are handy for getting network info and making the common ‘find’ command easier to navigate. I’m a big fan of aliases for common commands, often swapping them for easier to use version written in GoLang (yay) or Rust (…yay?).

Stats

Review

I’ve tried quite a few file managers over the years, from Midnight Commander to GUI ones such as Caja and Thunar. I always seem to be coming back to good ol’ MC. That being said, I’ve seen to recommended by the nice folks over at TerminalTrove, so I took a look, especially due to the fact that it was written in GoLang, a big fav of mine.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been needing to do something very simple, in theory, type out a timestamp.

So I updated the main page to better reflect that I’ll be keeping a goofy little blog here as well. Should be nice. To be honest, keeping a formal dev blog is pretty hard for me, long form, lot of research, A LOT of pressure to make it good and stand out. I’ll still try and write stuff for it, but the only big thing I have “in the pipe” is a neat article on the rise of the #smallweb so that’ll be neat when I finally finish it. Been super busy with FHF stuff and works been busy as heck as well w/ doing CICD stuffs.

So… I created this site because I felt that having folks just visit my link site wasn’t quite up to what folks expect when they thing of a “home page” from back in the days of old. So far this page is just a collection of apps that I’ve found are neat. You may like them, maybe you don’t, but hey hopefully someone does 😅.

(Image credit to bphope.com)

Intro

So it’s no secret among my friends and family that I’m a bit of a scatterbrain. I also love to offload anything difficult into different applications, either on my phone or on my desktop/laptop. While I’ve covered some great tooling before, this time, I’d like to review a few neat things I’ve found that more normal users can benefit from.

Intro 👋

I’ve been playing quite a bit with my new (old) laptop, a Dell Latitude 7490. Great laptop for sure. Feel like a ThinkPad, great 1080p screen, decent battery life, i7, 16gb ram, but I digress. I would often pick up and put down what I was working on throughout the day, but not having to reopen everything each time I decide to boot back up. After much digging I discovered that while my laptop supported S3 sleep, hibernation was no where to be found. I also had been struggling with getting a decently long amount of usage out of the refurbished battery it came with.

Cover photo - contextualelectronics.com

tl;dr What DOES work

The 3 F’s

When I think of tooling, I think of my dad’s electronics shop, a big sprawling room, filled with random parts, power supplies and oscilloscopes. I used to spend my Saturdays with him as a kid. He would “put me to work” and I would help with small tasks, unsolder some old burnt-out capacitors, or log data on faulty power supplies. Nothing critical, but it was neat getting to learn and play at the same time. Anytime there was a big project around the house, my dad would rope me in. Fix a car, build a shed, my dad always had the right tool for the right job, form, fit and function.

Intro 👋

As you might have guessed, I’ve decided to write this entry on Poetry (as in the package manager). I’ll start right off by saying that I’m no expert by far. While I’ve been programming for several years in Python, much of my original experience was just with good old Pip alone. This was partly to do with the fact that back in the early 2010’s there weren’t as many options as there are now. If PyPi is accurate Pipenv was only started back in 2017 and didn’t hit maturity until 2020. Poetry only hit version 1 at the end of 2020 as well.

Initial Commit

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything substantial in Python. Up until this point, I’ve mostly just written little toy programs here and there, as you can probably tell from my Github’s list of half-finished projects (like any seasoned developer has).