I've had a lot going on recently. So much so that I'm questioning whether or not it's the right time to finally break the blogging streak. I think about this regularly, and tend to blog about it when I'm having a bit of writer's block. But then I remind myself, when you're at a massive streak that e...

This journey starts like most of the things I've been doing this year, as an experiment to run a website 100% unattended with an agent. Ideally this post won't go down as an epitaph in a future where robots hunted down unsuspecting humans named Josh. I'm aware of "claws" and I know I could probably ...

I'm not here to bullshit anybody, I have never been through a PostHog SuperDay. Like many humans, I've read about it on their website, as they are a company that over-communicates just about everything. This tale started when I got curious about their onboarding wizard. Their pivot from analytics to...

Building my own agent has been fun. Sure, I could have opted for an off-the-shelf solution, but I wanted control. The ironic part is that I'm using that control to offload more control to the agent. Recent experiments have included letting the agent work on itself. Super meta, but didn't quite go as...

Part of running your own website is being able to do what you want on it. Within the confines of the law, of course. Back in the day you'd add something trivial to your site and make a formal announcement about it to your adoring fan base. I've done it in the past. My buddy Geoff still does it. As o...

Every time I think I've seen it all from spammers, they do something that surprises me. The ingenuity of bad actors is an interesting thing. I always wonder what sort of world we'd live in if their efforts were focused on good. What sucks the most is when they abuse something that's intended to brin...

I don't trust our new robot overlords at all. I also don't fully believe that agents are out there dropping production databases without some serious coercion to do so. And while I don't trust the robots, I trust myself only a trivial amount more, so my local access tends to be extremely thin. But n...

I've been writing a lot about LLMs, AI (or the so-called "Artificial Intelligence") and the like. Part of that is because I haven't been running into many problems that I feel need documenting. Bigger part is because I'm finding that "how-to" content is easy to slop with a robot, so I'd rather write...

LLMs are great at pattern detection. Use them long enough, and you get good at it too. Smoking guns, being absolutely right, it's not X but Y. They tend to be cute at first, but then these AI-isms become bad jokes after only a few conversations. Now that I can practically recite all of the dumb shit...

New emerging technologies can save you time and make you more productive. They never come with any sort of guarantee of working fewer hours. Personally, I like to work, and I like having more productive days. I also value freedom, flexibility, and autonomy. Being more productive doesn't negate my fr...

One of my favorite things to come out of the generative AI wave is the speed in which I can knock out dumb little ideas I have. Before, when I would feel constrained by time, I'd reach for some off the shelf solution, often software as a service (SaaS) and would wire that up. Because it's so easy to...

My .zshrc from my world famous dotfiles has a couple of lines with the comment "because we can't have nice things". Both are for privacy with the command-line tools I use. One is specific for GitHub's gh, the other is a bit more generic, but allegedly utilized by Claude Code. As I sink deeper into t...

Call me crazy, but I feel like I've been reading the same fucking article over and over again the last few months. My main consumption website is Hacker News, specifically the front page. It's flooded with "AI" content, no shocker there. What's been starting to not sit right with me is the clusterin...

While I mess with a bunch of different agentic coding setups, Claude Code is my daily driver when I want to be productive. At some point, pasting images into Claude Code was working fine for me on Linux, then it stopped. Honestly don't remember when, but I'm guessing it may have been when I switched...

We're in an age of personalized software. I see it, I like it, I vibe it, I got it. I've been watching OpenClaw from afar, while forming some ideas around what I'd want from a personal AI assistant. Keep in mind, I've never actually used OpenClaw. It seemed a bit risky. It also seemed stupid that pe...

I want to start by saying that Uptime Kuma is quite fantastic. If you're looking for a replacement for Uptime Robot, it's pretty much there in terms of feature parity. Setup is pretty trivial if you're using Docker. If you're like me, and prefer to not deploy Docker containers to your servers, there...

I'm a life long professional wrestling fan. Growing up in Tampa in the 1980s and 90s meant not only seeing the WWF superstars on television, but also seeing them at the bank or the mall. Even had a neighbor that was a title holder in one of the local promotions. While I grew up on the likes of Hogan...

I've been doing a lot of technical spring cleaning this year. My dotfiles have been getting a lot of love, and I've been breaking up with quite a few services. As part of this little journey, I've decided that I want less apps on my phone. I started by going through the App Library list to identify ...

I'm in the tin foil hat era and I've been doing a ton of breaking up recently. I'm getting fatigued on AI features I don't need let alone use. I'm even more sick of the fact that these features are driving up prices of certain services. More than anything, I'm tired of having to think about which EU...

For years, I've been chasing the illusion of the so-called "Smart Home". Thermostats and vacuums. Doorbells and cameras. Light bulbs and switches. Garage door openers and bird feeders. Stoves and grills. Sleep mats and of course, bathroom scales. Fucking bathroom scales. Oh, and the stove I've never...

Slack is great... for work. Discord is sufficient enough. Sadly, I've never really found any community servers I have enjoyed. It also doesn't help that age verification is now a thing. I've been of age for longer than I haven't, so that's not really the issue. My issue is with possibly needing to p...

It's been over 3 months since I posted about finally embracing Flatpak. This now short-lived proclamation coincided with me moving back over to Debian. Fortunately, I went into this particular distro hop in the right head space and things have stuck. So much so that I've been purging my dotfiles of ...

Okay, so already I did this dance back in 2017. Looking back, my observations were somewhat shortsighted, but felt decent enough at the time. A year later, I contemplated the future of Vim once Bram Moolenaar dies. In 2023, we sadly found out what happens, with Christian Brabandt taking the lead. Si...

I like to travel intentionally light. I also like to make sure I bring enough of the right gadgets. Economical clothing and toiletry decisions aside, I tend to overpack technical items as well as downtime gadgets. Sadly, I have to remind myself that I'm not a toddler that needs all his toys. I'm als...

Every time I try to get further away from Google, they find a way to dig its claws in. This time it's with YouTube Music, a service I've always been reluctant to give much of a chance. I've been a bit of a lost soul the last few years, and I decided I was going to drop Spotify. This was some time in...

Yet again, I was deceived by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) console. Now it doesn't help that my notes never seem to marry up with the current state of the UI. This time the issue was with a small oversight on my part when looking at the NAT gateway list. The task I set out to accomplish was whitelis...

overly long exhale... I hate right now. It's not even because I'm going to officially be mid-40s tomorrow. It's because I feel like life in tech is a perverted version of Groundhog Day. But instead of living out the same scenario over and over, it's being stuck in purgatory being asked one or both o...

I love Eleventy, but I think I made a mistake in how I structure my sites. I don't consider blogs and other static sites the same way I think about coding projects. I don't toss everything inside of a src/ directory so my site content lives alongside files like README.md and I never thought much of ...

I got some unfortunate news recently. My hairstylist of the last half decade is moving away. Not only is she moving, but she's moving soon. Like, "this is your last haircut with me" soon. Honestly, this isn't too shocking, as she's always had a mercurial streak. Her globetrotting has always been pre...

The generative AI wave has made it very apparent to me that the world is absolutely out to get software engineers. I don't remember feeling this way over low code and no code solutions when they emerged to take my job. Right now though, I feel like a witch and everybody is carrying a match. The thin...