What I'm up to recently
Last updated: Oct 5th, 2026
I’ve been going down quite the rabbit hole in the past week or so. It started with Emacs, then interest in GNU / FSF, and finally today I migrated my desktop to Guix. It’s absolutely incredible, like a less complicated NixOS with way more freedom involved. I’ll probably do a long form post in the near future on the philosophy aligned with these decisions, but for now, enjoy a peak into a new system.
Every Saturday morning I make my family waffle recipe, and then I watch Spongebob with my kids. It’s one of my favorite family traditions, and it’s something we all look forward to.
These are the small routines and patterns that really make a difference. If you don’t have them, start making some today.
Did I just write a custom extension to write micro blog posts to my website from within emacs?
Yes I did.
I also already have:
This thing is insane, and I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg
XMPP has been fun to play with. I think I got both mobile and desktop at a place that’s usable on a daily basis, and it’s kinda crazy how efficient this whole protocol is. Will probably write a post about it, why I love it, and how sad it is that I’ll probably never use it lol.
Recently been digging more into XMPP as a messaging protocol, with small experiments in self hosting and even building a client 👀 If you’re on XMPP feel free to shoot me a message or join my muc!
It’s a cool 54F outside as Fall starts to roll in this week. The sky has turned that light shade of blue, and the birds are singing with gusto. The low hum of the trains moving in the distance, followed by the occasional yet distant horn.
Here I sit, and no matter way the day brings, it was a good morning.
Updates from the bridge:
I have been way more offline due to the workload of my day job, and what time I have left I’ve been using most of it for reading.
A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to do more tinkering programming without AI assistance. Started a project in C, but ended up switching to Rust. Was a great motivator to finish working through the Rust book which I keep putting off.
Waiting for fall weather to kick in, currently hot as hell down here in TN.
Getting back into my regular wine tasting and this one blew me away last week.
My wife and I are on a huge ramen kick and have been taking stabs at homemade recipes; best thing ever!!
Thoroughly enjoying ricing my Alpine Linux setup :3
Until next time 🫡
One of the biggest problems I’ve seen descend on engineers recently is the inability to understand the core problem and actually guide an LLM.
With AI it can be incredibly tempting to just throw an issue to an agent and let it figure out the rest. I wrote about this in my /ai page: LLMs are just vehicles. If you don’t know where you’re going or why, then what are you even doing? What happens when the output completely misses the mark because you never took the time to understand the problem, it’s context, and ask clarifying questions? (Heck even Claude knows to do that)
Overall it’s really disappointing to see. I feel like these engineers had a time when they were true problem solvers and made moves back in the day, but now they’re just a copilot to an LLM. Ironic that it was supposed to be the other way around.
I and many others mourn the loss of Wendell Berry, who passed away yesterday at the age of 92. He was a writer, a poet, an advocate, but most of all, he was a humble farmer from Kentucky. His writing challenges all of us to be closer to the earth, to question progress, to pursue a simple life, and to love deeply.
If you haven’t read Wendell Berry, I highly recommend both his poetry and his essays. Anything you can get your hands on. I also recommend watching the film Look & See, a portrait of Wendell Berry, but also a look of what rural America is losing through big agriculture. Every time I watch it I feel compelled to be an organic farmer, and to be honest I wish to be one someday.
Farewell Wendell Berry, you live a full life, and you will be missed.
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides…The river will run
clear, as we will never know it…
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields…
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.– Wendell Berry, Work Song Part II - A Vision
Ayyyy we did it
Not sure if I’m a fan of compiling literally everything but yo that ram usage 👀
Thought it might be fun to install Gentoo on my Raspberry Pi this weekend.
Halfway through the install, I’m wondering if this was a good idea 😅
The majority of it is me doing this
Finished reading Dune Messiah today and I don’t think I’ll be able to think about much else for a while; what a story.
In other news I also finally got to play with a watch movement kit I bought to get familiar with the basics of watch repair. Thoroughly enjoyed taking this thing apart and putting it back together again!
Going to do it a few more times until I have it memorized, then decide if I want to invest into the hobby further.
Successfully migrated my home server from Arch Linux to Alpine Linux this afternoon. Been on my list of things to do ever since the AUR got über compromised, so I was glad to finally knock it out. Did a bunch of test runs on my raspberry pi to make sure all my Andromeda services could be scaffolded again with relative ease, and I gotta say, I love using Cloudflare R2 for backing up SQLite. Such a painless process to backup and restore again.
I started digging into Alpine several months ago and I absolutely love it, even as a desktop distro. It’s incredibly lean, comes with cool stuff like openrc, and the package manager is insanely fast. Paired it with oxwm and my desktop env is just over a gig; I could probably get it even lower if I swap out some programs. That level of minimalism and low ram consumption is something I want to keep pursuing in all daily use tech.
Anytime I see “loop” engineering I think of this, except it’s invented by frontier companies to increase token usage
Visited the Oregon coast this week and it was incredible. If you’re interested in seeing more photos check out my portfolio site steve.photo
Went to an arboretum today and saw some sick trees
Got to visit Crater Lake National Park this weekend and it was absolutely insane. This is the mouth of a volcano that has turned into a lake after thousands of years of rain and snow. It’s almost 2000 feet deep, 5 miles wide. The pictures don’t do it justice, especially when it comes to driving up to it. You’re literally driving on the rim of a volcano 6000 feet high.
Unfortunately the time we were going to spend there was cut short due to wildfires (saving for another long form post), but leaving in the evening gave us quite a view of the lake and surrounding vistas at sunset. Hands down some of the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen in person. 10/10
This was such a fun watch, but I particularly loved this bit at the end.
If we want our communities to outlast big tech silos, we need to build our communities, as much as we can, without big tech’s convenient, centralized tools… Platforms die where protocols thrive.
Unreal moment at Trillium Lake!
At this point it feels like a running gag; I forked my app Feeds yet again to serve another purpose.
For those who may not know, I built a small minimal RSS reader using just Bun as a way to get a list of links instead of a formal reader. Then I rewrote it in Rust. Then Go. And then I made a TUI version of it called Bullets. I’ve posted about this dumb app so many times now but I promise it’s different this time, sorta.
I realized that my little app, with a few small tweaks, could serve as a great introduction to RSS. Instead of a wall of text explaining the technical details of RSS that no one cares about, or making them go through the process of downloading an app or making an account with a service, I could just give them feeds.
Yes the full version of this app as part of Andromeda has an admin page where the person self hosting the app can add feeds and do all sorts of cool stuff, but one of the original features I always loved using was a simple URL query parameter that lets you “preview” multiple feeds:
https://feeds.software?url=feed1,feed2
Then I realized I could add a small explainer paragraph, provide some example feed buttons, then just put the user right into a feed of posts. The user can just experience RSS in a few clicks and see the value for themselves.
That’s what I’ve been polishing for the last week or so, and I’m excited to release Feeds once again. Please do check it out, share it with a friend, and tell me how I can improve it for others!
Have thoroughly enjoyed this past week in Portland Oregon! Decided to pick up an old iOS app I used back 5+ years ago, really does pump out some fun shots on the iPhone.
We’re staying on a homestead that has like 15 chickens; so many eggs lol
The parks out here are incredible
Also incredible Ramen
Until next time! ✌️
My shell history is… dizzying. Like many I started with Zsh. It was the default on MacOS and I followed multiple tutorials trying to find ways to customize it. Eventually this made it mind numbingly slow. I couldn’t take it, so I tried out Fish instead. Fish was much faster, but the scripting was very different and hard to adapt to. Nevertheless I stuck with Fish because of the speed. Then I discovered Nushell, and boy was it attractive. It turns all data into tables, making it a pretty slick tool for scripting. Nushell is written in Rust so it also was very speedy.
I liked Nushell fine, but as I started doing more work on servers and other Linux machines, I started realizing how much of a pain it was to install and use. Yes it’s fast, but that’s not always the case over SSH or lower powered hardware. After a while I started just tweaking bash on these other machines, and I found myself thoroughly enjoying the simplicity. Not only that, it was the default for most distros, and it took up hardly any ram. If you have been following my blog then you know that I’m a sucker for low memory and digital minimalism.
So tonight I migrated everything into a single bash file and it is glorious. Nothing beats this feeling (well not true but still feels great).
The mothership.
Largest independent bookstore in the world. Four floors that take up a whole city block.
Love it.
Been thinking and researching a lot around the concept of accessible computing. Ram and storage prices are getting out of control due to the demand of AI, so the need for minimal and zero bloat apps is becoming stronger. What that actually looks like is the challenge. I’ve spent time looking at minimal Linux distros that still offer a balance of UX like Q4OS, as well as other projects like uxn by Hundred Rabbits.
Then it dawned on me; what about web apps? Now before I lose you, I’m not talking about bloated react apps. I’m thinking of the stack I used for Andromeda: Go, SQLite, html templates with form post submissions. Currently I run my apps over the web with password authentication, but what if you just ran them locally? Low memory consumption, simple local file database, works in virtually any browser, cross platform with ease, the list goes on.
This really is an intriguing question, and it’s something I might experiment more with soon.
Spending some time in Portland and we got NEW BIRDS ON THE LIST! This is just the first day or so; freaking pumped!! Will be updating my /birds page soon!
The irresistible urge to buy an old Thinkpad as a backup machine in the soon to be hardware-pocalypse
iykyk
Saw the headline Heztner increased dedicated server prices 3-4x and was reminded of this post. Now is the time to seize your hardware and hold onto it as much as you can (the urge to buy a Thinkpad is strong). If you’re writing software, building low memory and cross compatible apps has become more relevant than ever.
A meme I sent to my buddy Matthias after getting NixOS pilled. Here’s where I’m at so far:
I liked the idea of using NixOS for the ability to programmatically render my setup with 100% certainty.
Currently my home server runs on Arch (btw) which has been great, but after the massive AUR worm, I’m wondering if something more specific is the better route.
One day I’d like to go full time Linux and downgrade my phone to a dumb phone. Will that ever happen? Hard to say, but I kinda want to have a system that will be dirt easy to install on a new machine.
I don’t have any spare hardware other than a Raspberry Pi which has been noted not the best way to get started with NixOS, so I’m currently doing some experimenting with VirtualBox.
The plan is to recreate my Arch home server setup on this virtual machine as much as possible over the next month or so. It should give me a good idea if I want to continue with this kind of setup or if I should stick to a classic symlink dot files approach. However I will say I’m already having my eyes opened and it is freaking sweet.
Anyway that is partly why I’ve been so quiet. I also started reading The Count of Monte Cristo so maybe see you in a few months lol.
Without books, a society dies
I’ve always enjoyed paintings in some form or another, but it wasn’t until I met my wife that I was introduced to world of art history. Since then it’s been a fascinating subject, and while I’m a complete noob, I love finding paintings that strike a cord with me and learning as much as I can from them. One of those series is The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole.
I highly recommend checking out that link and learning more about them, but in short, its a series of 5 paintings that represent the rise and fall of a civilization. Again, that is a crude and short summary so please go learn more about them for yourself. I’ve enjoyed these so much lately that I had the idea to use them as wallpapers. It just so happens that I use 5 MacOS spaces, so this setup works out great.
To make these I downloaded the raw scans of each painting, added them to figma, resize them to 4K resolution, then added a slight matte overlay to help reduce the saturation and brightness. I’m a huge fan of how they turned out!
For those interested I’ve provided a zip file you can download with the link below, but you will enjoy them more if you learn the messages they carry!