It's been over a year since I mostly broke up with GitHub. In that year, I've been running my own public Forgejo instance for my personal projects. It's important to stress the public part, as most of what I'm going to discuss is directly correlated to that. This isn't a post to critique Forgejo vs....

I personally own well over 100 domains. A select few of them are actually live. The rest? Parked, forwarded, or none of the above. These domains cost me real money. For whatever reason, I've chosen to be loyal to a domain registrar that doesn't have the best prices, unless you jump through some weir...

From humble beginnings in eLearning, I have somehow spent the majority of my career thus far in or around email. Not to flex, but I am an email expert. Cold, hot, and everything in between. I'm one of very few people on the planet that can say they've personally been responsible for sending 10,000,0...

As a child, you drink Kool-Aid. Then somewhere along the way, you stop. Maybe you switch to sugary sodas your parents never let you drink. Realizing it's just sugar water, you switch to a healthier option. For me, it took a little longer to grow up. I had the Kool-Aid jug and matching cups, and even...

Another week, another chance to struggle with a blog topic. I just got off of a whirlwind of a couple of weeks. An 11-state road trip to get our daughter off to college. A first-time empty nester vacation. Trying as hard as possible to not open my laptop. My first week back to normalcy was less than...

The last two weeks of my life have been quite transient. More so than the time I hopped a plane to San Francisco, interviewed for 5 hours, and hopped back on a plane back to Florida the same evening. The trek started in Texas with a road trip that passed through 11 states, ending up in Rhode Island ...

I'm still on my self-hosting kick as of late, while also questioning my life choices around hosting my own git forge. The last week or so has included what appears to be a DDoS attack rather than some coordinated scraping effort by a sketchy LLM company. Open source will prevail, even if I'm being s...

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...