Recent Posts

Trying out Bluesky again

November 12, 2024

I've decided to try out Bluesky again since it's gotten so much media attention lately. For some context, I've been off Twitter entirely since its rebrand to X, and I'd been slowly falling off of it prior to that since Musk bought it. We all knew it'd be on a downward slope at that point, and it's fallen far down that slope indeed.

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What I'm listening to - We've Got You by Vienna Teng

November 11, 2024

I've been a fan of Vienna Teng for quite a while now, which until recently has mostly meant listening to her backlog, because she's been on a musical hiatus for a while. But recently, she released a new single - or rather, a set of singles.

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Smalltalk and capabilities: a vision of a road not taken for desktop computing (and beyond?)

October 27, 2024

This is my submission for the Malleable Systems Collective's "Fearless extensibility" challenge problem.

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Visual structural editing for Guix (and Schemes in general)

September 21, 2024

I've been noodling on structural editing for a while now. I'm fully bought into Lisps myself, but most of my friends and coworkers are skeptical, and I think a lot of their skepticism has to do (as usual) with all the parens. One of the points I make frequently is that with Lisp code being written as a nested data structure, the textual representation is just one of many possible representations. But it can be hard to get across what that means without concrete examples.

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Custom Pocket Reform lids have arrived!

July 15, 2024

The custom Pocket Reform lids I was working on have arrived, and I think they came out pretty well!

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Customizing my Pocket Reform

July 11, 2024

My MNT Pocket Reform hasn't arrived yet, but ever since I read this post I've been wanting to put together my own custom Pocket Reform lid. The post made it seem so easy. And, well, turns out it kind of is once you get the hang of the tools!

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Giving blogging one more try

June 21, 2024

As with probably a lot of very ADHD people, I've gone through several attempts at maintaining a blog, most of which I've fallen off of relatively quickly. But I keep wanting to come back to it... so here's one more attempt at it.

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Convergence, the dream

April 22, 2021

Phone manufacturers have promised convergence for years, but every attempt I've come across in the past has never quite satisfied me:

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The SSPL is not a reasonable copyleft license (but it maybe could be)

January 22, 2021

So the big free software news of the week is that Amazon is forking Elasticsearch after Elastic relicensed Elasticsearch under the SSPL. The internet's in a frenzy about this, as tends to happen these days whenever a large previously free software project goes proprietary. I'm disappointed that the free software world has partly lost yet another useful piece of software, and glad that the project will at least live on in some form as free software, even if not from Elastic.

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Links: June 23, 2020

June 24, 2020

The good

You can't tell people anything: On the difficulty of really conveying something to someone without hands-on experience. I've experienced this from the teacher's side recently when trying to explain Kubernetes concepts to someone who only has experience administering individual, mutable machines. I think I've also recently experienced it from the student's perspective trying to absorb some of the object capability literature. Trying to get some hands-on experience there to avoid that!

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