Blog

1. A cleaner, greener Christmas

   Here's a quick quiz for you: what holiday season tradition is the #1 contributor to the ongoing climate crisis?

2. Introducing: Emoji Summarizer

   Hawk-eyed readers might've noticed a stealth addition to my projects page the other week: Emoji Summarizer. You see, lately I've found it hard to relate to the youth; I thought that my working knowledge of leet- and lol-speak put me on the cutting edge of pop culture, but recently ingrate youngsters have disabused me of that notion, and heaped scorn upon for me for assuming their deadpan "ong" was an inadvertent corruption of "omg."

3. Cal Newport's pragmatic pessimism

   (Note: this essay was originally submitted for the Astral Codex Ten Book Review Contest 2023.)

   Reading Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You was a confounding experience. I generally agree with his central premise that "follow your passion" is bad career advice, and that "skills trump passion in the quest for work you love," but there's also a lot I disagree with along the way. More importantly though, Newport's dissection of how to achieve conventional success is predicated on the continuation of the status quo. Fundamentally, this is a book about how to make the best deal you can under the system that we've got. That may be a pragmatic point of view, but it's one I find somewhat disheartening.

4. Self-hosting Plausible Analytics (with Tailscale Funnel)

   Friends, as we all know, pride is a sin. In a world obsessed with likes and followers, I want my work here at the Simpsonian to be guided by the love of the craft itself; not whatever debauchery gets the clicks. So, to ensure I am not falling victim to pride, I recently set up some basic web analytics. Fortunately, I can rest easy—I have officially confirmed that this blog has precisely zero readers. Here's how I did it.

5. Unleash die Blinkenlights!

   When looking at PC cases for my most recent build, there were many adequate options, but only one stole my heart: the be quiet! Pure Base 500DX. Yes, it's bigger than I would've liked, and not the cheapest case either, but I was drawn to that understated front LED strip like a moth to flame—it offers all the fun of addressable LEDs, but without the whizbang gaudiness of three fans in rainbow mode 24/7.

   But of course, anybody can make LEDs look beautiful. This is a journey to make them useful.

6. Open Heart Partition Surgery

   Sometimes in this life, you aren't sure that something will work, but you have to try it anyway.

   The other day, I ran some experiments that I would describe—in my usual overdramatic way—as "open heart partition surgery."

   A word to the wise: this post is really just a braindump for me to refer back to later, and is even less coherent than usual. It is certainly not a how-to guide… but if you are looking to mutilate your hard drive, welcome!

7. My ChatGPT Moment

8. Sysadmin Sunday: debugging mDNS issues

   This past weekend, I was trying to set up some software on my NAS (that's network-attached storage; think "small server with some hard drives attached") and accidentally borked a thing along the way. I thought it would be fun to write up the play-by-play of how I diagnosed and (mostly) fixed the issue—not because this was an especially thorny or illustrative problem, but because I think it shows how a disciplined approach to debugging can be highly effective.

9. Parsing XML in Rust: by hand & by macro

10. Anachronyms

    Quick, what does KFC stand for?

11. Life in a tandemic

    It seems that biking across the Golden Gate Bridge is perhaps the quintessential San Francisco tourist activity.

    For the life of me, I cannot understand why.

12. Securing my home network with dnsmasq and Tailscale

13. The Two Tractor Challenge

14. A long overdue nap

15. Special edition travel blog: Springfield, Illinois!

16. Review: Later Alligator

    If you're charmed by the trailer
    and no minigame hater
    Then I think you should play
    Later Alligator

    (ominous mandolin strumming)

17. Tom Brady Super Bowl

18. Manually renewing a TLS certificate with Certbot

19. Guns in the classroom: a reprise

20. You must visit: The Under Presents

    The Under Presents isn't just a game: it's a magical—sometimes inscrutable—world, and a hub for Tender Claws' delightful VR storytelling. It's a living, breathing environment with mysteries to piece together, adventures to conquer, and spells to master. At a time when social media bubbles are causing polarization, the absolute anonymity of The Under leads to delightful, if fleeting, moments of genuine human connection.