RSS Bilingual Reader

Companies, as they grow to become multi-billion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do. - Steve Jobs I don't typically write about Apple stuff. It'...

In the nightmarish world of 2026 it can be difficult to know how to help at all. There are too many horrors happening to quickly to know where one can inject even a small amount of assistance. However I wanted to quickly post about something I did that was easy, low impact and hopefully helps a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of people. Snowflake So I was browsing Mastodon when someone posted a link asking for people to host Snowflake proxies. Snowflake is a lightweight proxy best expla...

I have always enjoyed the act of typing words and seeing them come up on screen. While my favorite word processor of all time might be WordPerfect ( here ), I've used almost all of them. These programs were what sold me on the entire value proposition of computers. They were like typewriters, which I had used in school, except easier in every single way. You could delete things. You could move paragraphs around. It felt like cheating, and I loved it. As time has gone up what makes up a &quo...

I added a few modifications to the OSS Ghost theme that powers this site. You can get it here: https://gitlab.com/matdevdug/minimal-ghost-theme Added better image caption support. Added the cool Mastodon feature outlined here to attribute posts from your site back to your Mastodon username by following the instructions here. I tried to make it pretty easy to customize, but if you need something changed feel free to open an issue on the repo. Thanks for all the feedback!

I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter. So when Twitter was accidentally purchased by a fascist high on ketamine, I moved to Mastodon mostly because it seemed to be “Twitter without the bullshit”. No recommended for you feed, no ads, it was broken in a way I find charm...

Until recently the LLM tools I’ve tried have been, to be frank, worthless. Copilot was best at writing extremely verbose comments. Gemini would turn a 200 line script into a 700 line collection of gibberish. It was easy for me to, more or less, ignore LLMs for being the same over-hyped nonsense as the Metaverse and NFTs. This is great for me because I understand that LLMs represent a massive shift in power from an already weakened worker class to an increasingly monarch-level wealthy clas...

One of the most common requests I've gotten from users of my little Firefox extension( https://timewasterpro.xyz ) has been more options around the categories of websites that you get returned. This required me to go through and parse the website information to attempt to put them into different categories. I tried a bunch of different approaches but ended up basically looking at the websites themselves seeing if there was anything that looked like a tag or a hint on each site. This is the ...

My workflow has remained mostly the same for over a decade. I write everything in Vim using the configuration found here . I run Vim from inside of tmux with a configuration found here . I write things on a git branch, made with the git CLI, then I add them with git add --patch to that branch, trying to run all of the possible linting and tests with git hooks before I waste my time on GitHub Actions. Then I run git up which is an alias to pull --rebase --autostash . Finally I successfully commit...

One amusing thing about following tech news is how often the tech community makes a bold prediction or assertion, only to ultimately be completely wrong. This isn't amusing in a "ha ha, we all make mistakes" kind of way. It's amusing in the way that watching someone confidently stride into a glass door is amusing. You feel bad, but also, they really should have seen that coming. Be it VR headsets that would definitely replace reality by 2018, or self-driving cars in every dri...

When I wrote the backend for my Firefox time-wasting extension ( here ), I assumed I was going to be setting up Postgres. My setup is boilerplate and pretty boring, with everything running in Docker Compose for personal projects and then persistence happening in volumes. However when I was working with it locally, I obviously used SQLite since that's always the local option that I use. It's very easy to work with, nice to back up and move around and in general is a pleasure to work wit...

I don't like RSS readers. I know, this is blasphemous especially on a website where I'm actively encouraging you to subscribe through RSS. As someone writing stuff, RSS is great for me. I don't have to think about it, the requests are pretty light weight, I don't need to think about your personal data or what client you are using. So as a protocol RSS is great, no notes. However as something I'm going to consume, it's frankly a giant chore . I feel pressured by RSS ...

Once a month I will pull down the latest docker images for this server and update the site. The Ghost CMS team updates things at a pretty regular pace so I try to not let an update sit for too long. With this last round I suddenly found myself locked out of my Ghost admin panel. I was pretty confident that I hadn't forgotten my password and when I was looking at the logs, I saw this pretty spooky error. blog-1 | [2025-10-15 11:36:29] ERROR "GET /ghost/api/admin/users/me/?include=roles&...

Greenland is a complicated topic here in Denmark. The former colony that is still treated a bit like a colony is something that inspires a lot of emotions. Greenland has been subjected to a lot of unethical experiments by Denmark, from taking their kids to wild experiments in criminal justice. But there is also a genuine pride a lot of people have here for the place and you run into Danes who grew up there more often than I would have guessed. When the idea of going to Greenland was introduced t...

For a long time Bitnami containers and Helm charts have been widely considered the easiest and fastest way to get reliable, latest versions of popular applications built following container best practices. They also have some of the better docs on the internet for figuring out how to configure all this stuff. However Broadcom, in their infinite capacity for short term gain over long term relationships, has decided to bring that to a close. On July 16th they informed their users that the platform...

With the rise of the internet came the need to find information more quickly. The concept of search engines came into this space to fill this need, with a relatively basic initial design. This is the basis of the giant megacorp Google, whose claim to fame was they made the best one of these. Into this stack they inject ads, both ads inside the sites themselves and then turning the search results themselves into ads. As time went on, what we understood to be "Google search" was actually...

Around 2012-2013 I started to hear a lot in the sysadmin community about a technology called "Borg". It was (apparently) some sort of Linux container system inside of Google that ran all of their stuff. The terminology was a bit baffling, with something called a "Borglet" inside of clusters with "cells" but the basics started to leak. There was a concept of "services" and a concept of "jobs", where applications could use services to respond to us...

So awhile ago I purchased a Tp-link AX3000 wireless router as a temporary same-day fix to a dying AP. Of course, like all temporary fixes, this one ended up being super permanent. It's a fine wireless router, nothing interesting to report, but one of the features I stumbled upon when I was clicking around the webUI seemed like a great solution for a place to stick random files. Inside of Advanced Settings, you'll see this pane: You have a few options for how to expose this USB drive: I...

In general, Ghost CMS has been a good tool for me. I've been pleased by the speed and reliability of the platform, with the few problems I have run into being fixed by the Ghost team pretty quickly. From the very beginning though I've struggled with the basic approach of the Ghost platform. At its core, the Ghost CMS tool is a newsletter platform. This makes sense, it's how small content creators actually generate revenue. But I don't need any of that functionality, as I don&...

I generate a lot of CSVs for my jobs, mostly as a temporary storage mechanism for data. So I make report A about this thing, I make report B for that thing and then I produce some sort of consumable report for the organization at large. Part of this is merging the CSVs so I don't need to overload each scripts to do all the pieces. For a long time I've done this in Excel/LibreOffice, which totally works. But I recently sat down with the pandas library and I had no idea how easy it is us...

The impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on the field of software development is arguably one of the most debated topics in developer circles today, sparking discussions at meetups, in lunchrooms, and even during casual chats among friends. I won't attempt to settle that debate definitively in this post, largely because I lack the foresight required. My track record for predicting the long-term success or failure of new technologies is, frankly, about as accurate as a coin flip. In fact, ...