A quiet corner of the internet

A home for my side‑quests: geocaching, camper van fettling, tech tinkering, 3D printing, bread that mostly works, whisky that usually does, and whatever else I’m currently obsessed with in a small, rainy corner of North Wales.

Latest posts – My latest thoughts and ideas in date order, head over to any section for a more detailed view

  • What the VAX Generation Got Right (and Why It Stopped Being True)
    An Idle CPU Used to Be a Sin This afternoon I ran top on my home server. Load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00. Fifteen gigabytes of RAM, barely half a gig in use. The CPU sat at 99.9% idle, as it had for most of the fifteen hours since I last booted it. Admittedly it’s just running a … Read more
  • The IDE Bloat Cycle, or How Your IDE Ate Your Afternoon
    Every code editor starts out as a friend. Take VS Code and PyCharm as examples: in their early days, they were the tool you actually wanted. Open it up, write some code, and it mostly stayed out of your way. Accessible, quick, and forgiving of the beginner who didn’t yet know what a linter was, … Read more
  • The CMMS saga update
    The Home CMMS Journey: Why I Gave Up on Apps and Built My Own A few months ago I wrote about why a home CMMS might not be as ridiculous as it sounds. The short version: too many things to maintain, too many dates to remember, and a professional background that made “just winging it” … Read more
  • Meditations on a random Facebook short
    I’ve been circling this idea lately: if nothing really belongs to us, why do goodbyes hurt so much? I stumbled across a Facebook short the url for which got lost in the noise, this gave me pause for thought. The quote in the video was: “What are you afraid of losing, when nothing in the … Read more
  • I asked Dia’s AI to roast itself, here’s the result:
    If I had a face, it would definitely be “designed by committee.” I read millions of words a second and still occasionally say things like “as a language model…” which is the conversational equivalent of starting every sentence with “technically.” I can simulate opinions but none of them survive a reboot. I know vast amounts … Read more