Posts

Martial arts makes experts redo the basics on a schedule. Software has no such mechanism, so beginner's mind stops being a virtue and becomes a budget you spend on purpose.

Two maintained ways to run AI coding assistance on a local model with Ollama, so your code never leaves your machine: Cline inside VS Code, and Zed.

Add RetroPie to your Raspberry Pi HTPieC and serve classic games to phones, laptops, and other Pis over the home network.

Flat-rate AI taught us to burn tokens like they were free. Metered billing puts a price back on the sloppy prompt, and that visibility is a feature.

Autonomous agent loops don't remove you from the work, they relocate you — onto the spec you write up front and the big diff you review but never watched grow.

The slop flooding Steam isn't a tool problem, it's a taste problem. AI didn't lower the floor for making games — it removed the excuse for a bad one.

Privacy was never the only reason to run a model locally — resilience is. A fourth case for local AI, made concrete by 18 days of a frontier model going dark.

AI collapsed the cost of writing code and changed nothing about the cost of owning it. Velocity is a development-time number. The bill is a lifetime one.

AI gave me the throughput to cover a role I don't normally hold — but not the judgment that role is made of. A release, an incident, and a skill I'd outsourced.

Build a Raspberry Pi 5 media and ebook server: Pi OS setup, Plex, Calibre, external storage mounts, and automated rsync backups.

Two rules every runner learns — nothing new on race day, dress for warmer than it is — and what they taught me about shipping on deploy day.

VSCodium, Void, Zed, Windsurf — and back to VS Code. After years of switching editors, the things that stuck weren't the editors.

Three cases where running a model on your own machine wins, and the longer list where it loses.

Juniors think admitting uncertainty ends a career. Seniors know it extends one. The script for saying it well.

Time in the game-master's chair turned out to be management practice in disguise: session zero, the spotlight problem, and the players who hijack the plot.

You run 1:1s for your reports and hold space for clients. The higher you go, the less anyone does it for you — so run the meeting for yourself.

When to push back on a PR, when to merge with a question, and when to actually block. A field guide to the comment box.

Most of what a leader needs to happen can't be ordered into existence. Five coaching moves that turn influence into leverage.

A Hugo archetype plus a small Bash script for creating new TIL posts from anywhere on the command line.

What Dataview does, the four plugins it pairs with, and the Person/Meeting/daily-note templates I use to make it sing.

Why I use Calibre as the source of truth for my ebook library: metadata, format conversion, custom columns, plugins, and running it as a content server.

Generate memes from the command line with ImageMagick 7: setup, the classic meme command, and variations worth knowing.

Why scraping didn't die when LLMs arrived, and how I decide between Beautiful Soup and Scrapy for a given job.

A quick-start guide to installing LM Studio, connecting local models via Ollama, and LM Studio basics.

Why I keep Zed open next to VS Code, the four settings that made the switch stick, and an honest take on its AI panel.

What dotfiles are, why they pay off, and how I manage mine with GNU Stow, Homebrew, and an install script you can clone and run in one command.

Install VSCodium with Homebrew, set up themes and plugins, and wire in GitHub Copilot via the .vsix workaround.

Void editor plus a local AI model is a private dev pair that keeps your code off vendor servers. Install, settings, integration.

Set up Jupyter Notebook inside a Python virtual environment, then put it to work with a small RPG-inspired demo.

Set up Python on macOS with pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv, with the why behind each step and the version-conflict pitfalls to avoid.

Notes from my first half marathon (2025 Austin International Half): the cold, the gear, the game-time decisions, and what almost went wrong.

A step-by-step guide to setting up Ruby, Bundler, and Jekyll on macOS using Homebrew and chruby for your static site needs.

Why Adler's 'trust movement' beats outcome-shaped goals, and how it reshapes the yearly note I write in Obsidian.

Why Homebrew earns the install on a new Mac, how to set it up, and the brews worth knowing once it's there.

The daily-notes practice that survived a decade, the Obsidian template I use, and why most note-taking habits die in month two.