A friend showed me Simple, Non-Commercial, Open Source Notes. (Warning, this video will berate you for 30 minutes.) My values are different from the author’s, but I appreciate their methodical(??) approach to articulate their needs and explore the solution space of digital note-taking systems. Here, I do some of the same. Composing and Editing I...
Warnings: This topic, personal eating habits, is tired. Anything I could say, a different nerd has said better. I currently eat meat but try to avoid eating mammals, which I learned today is called mafism. I’m a mid-30s knowledge worker who lives with a partner. We share some meals spontaneously but don’t plan around it, each keeping our own...
It seems that you want my help making a personnel decision? Sadly, I have little to say about the agent who answered my phone, email, or chat inquiry. They appeared to be a competent human. If I was unknowingly interacting with an LLM, you did a great job fine-tuning it. While I’d have preferred someone with forensic troubleshooting skill and...
I sponsor development of technologies that answer to their users’ own interests, rather than the interests of megacorps (who harvest users’ data and attention, extract rents, impose lock-in, and so on). I particularly support indie developers who are heading upstream of their own economic incentives. I also support some creative work like music...
Book clubs for professional development are not new, but nothing like this exists at my employer or in my city, so I guess I’ll start one. What does “Effective” mean? Borrowing from another group 1, I’ll say whatever it means to you. 2 And “Technologist”? Someone who builds or wields technology as a career. It’s a big tent including software and...
Every major city in the USA provides transportation as a public service. 1 Not only streets, but also vehicles, with professionals who drive them, and anyone can ride these vehicles, for a price between free and cheap! And it’s not intended only a service for the poor: transit agencies encourage everyone to ride. These services are expensive to...
An invitation for software developers, makers, and similar creators Is there a project that you’d love to work on, but work and life get in the way? Join a week-long retreat to incubate or evolve your project in the energizing company of others doing the same. My goal is to enable our self-actualization. We’ll hack on our projects together in an...
If you don’t know what a Framework laptop is, go read someone else’s review first. This ain’t the best introduction, but it will be helpful if you are nitpicky, migrating from a Thinkpad, and/or running Linux. (I also posted this on the Framework Discourse.) I am (approximately) a software and cloud infrastructure engineer. For about 8 years I’ve...
No Screens Cafe At the No Screens Cafe, you can enjoy coffee, tea, and scones. You can make conversation with neighbors, friends, and folks you’ve never met. You can have a first date or a 101st date. You can read and write. You can make music. You can stay here as long as you wish. You just can’t use any screens. No phones, tablets, laptops,...
You might think paper writing is obsolete, or there aren’t interesting developments in writing technology anymore. I was surprised to discover: It’s very relevant, even to a software engineer (more on this later). There has been a lot of innovation, mostly from Japan, in the 15 years since I last bought “school supplies”. Here are preliminary,...
People who make computers do new things often work physically alone. Solitude can enable productivity, but it can also stagnate creative work. Fellowship and collaboration enriches life and craft. So, people who work with code can establish public gathering places, like libraries. They can meet to share experience, mentor and learn, help each...
This is a draft blog post, I would like to hear how I am wrong, so I can revise before sharing this more widely. Please email chris at c-mart dot in. We only have one spaceship, we are irreversibly damaging its life support system, but the sum of our actions can slow the damage a lot. I am not an expert on the climate, but I have a vaguely...
Background (talk about blog.c-mart.in) Planning and Design Things I Want in a Blog Compose with Markdown. In 2015 this was rare, now everything supports it. Image etc hosting? image galleries? I don’t want to sysadmin it or self-host it, but I want the option of easy migration to self-hosting if the hosting turns evil. Resistant to...