Rhyming “ocean” with “ibuprofen” is among the reasons I love Phoebe Bridgers.

Creatures of a day! What is anyone?
What is anyone not? A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendour given of heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days.
— Pindar, Pythian 8

I’m going to start treating this blog like a tumblelog.I will not be resuming tracking the sandwiches I eat. We’ll see how that goes.

I have recently been slowly converting some old class-based React components to hooks-based functional components as part of some broader changes, and added some custom hooks to help migrate some legacy patterns that depended on class-component lifecyle methods like componentDidMount and componentDi… read the rest

Years ago, my step-dad made me a walnut side table in a Shaker style (he made all his kids & step-kids different pieces of furniture to remember him by):

As gifts for my mother, sister, & brother-in-law I made a set of 4 tables built on the same pattern in… read the rest

I recently learned about Cometeer, a new take on instant coffee, from a James Hoffman video. I didn’t get to participate in the taste test he organized using Cometeer to ensure consistency across partipants, but I thought it would be an interesting way to try some new roasters that aren’t locally av… read the rest

I’ve recently (as in “over the last year-ish”) finished several projects I’m somewhat satisfied with. I’m slowly turning an ash tree that used to stand in my family’s yard (and contained my childhood treehouse) into furniture for my own apartment & some for family as well.

I recently bought an iPhone 13 Mini, and I’m a bit grumpy about it.

I owned 5 different iPhones between 2008 and 2017. By 2017, I hadn’t been using OS X for a while (I’d switched back to Linux due to a general frustration with Macs feeling like increasingly locked-down machines on top of a few years … read the rest

A pretty common security measure for cloud infrastructure is an SSH bastion: you have a bunch of servers you may need to SSH to at times, but you obviously don’t want all your servers open to the public Internet, so you designate one server as the SSH bastion, which can be appropriately hardened and… read the rest

I have an Intel NUC at home that I use as an HTPC and a sort-of single-machine homelab (which seems to be the in vogue term computer nerds are using for “the machine(s) I run at home for fun”). As an HTPC, it’s connected to my TV and is how I do a lot of film and TV watching. As a homelab, it’s usef… read the rest