photos & thoughts.
Something I hate that I like about AI, is that I can speak or type stream of consciousness into its little input box and wait for one of its mockingly endlessly infinite responses (which is based on nothing but probability and math no matter how much they try to market “reasoning” to us or whatever), but somehow it seems to, reason.
It’s a rainy morning on the way to the hospital for Amanda’s induction. We were pleasantly received on arrival by a witty intake nurse even though we were about an hour late, who, when we apologized for such tardiness, quipped “As long as she’s still in there we’ll still take ya!”
I often can’t think of what I should tinker with on my homelab, and then sometimes it decides for me.
I built our future daughter’s bassinet this evening and organized her room a little bit. I sat down in a comfy rocking chair we inherited from my wife’s side of the family, and rocked as I reflected on this past summer, and all the preparation we did in anticipation of her arrival.
I had been entertaining the idea of buying a new car for awhile. The first truck I had my eye on was a Tacoma. Because as capitalist American Car Culture dictates, that’s the truck a blue-collar outdoorsy homeowner needs.
I’ve heard this phrase before. In a previous life I sit scrolling endlessly on Reddit, when a video in my feed starts auto-playing.
I do not have a proper monitoring system like Prometheus & Grafana or Nagios setup for my zpools. I use a bash script on a cron job that gets the zpool status of each pool and sends me a daily status email.
It’s been a little while since I’ve done anything ZFS related.
Along with much of the nation and world, I have found myself enamored by the recent Artemis II mission.
It is dark. Pitch black. A small brown-haired creature scurries over a tiled ceiling grid.
Made my first plumbing call the other day!
I often feel the need to impose structure on myself to regain control when I feel I’m losing it. This sounds dramatic and it probably is.
Photograph taken and glitched in 2014
I haven’t posted anything lately because I’ve been very busy with my NAS build. (Any many other half baked projects around the house)
My undiagnosed ADHD has finally decided it’s now time to work on house stuff instead of Linux stuff
Here’s a few things I do that don’t give billionaires money.
I just recreated a $20 a month service in minutes.
Things got worse. It feels like we are on the brink of the next American Civil war. Are we ready?
Getting an eBay purchased motherboard to POST
Every bit of dystopian fiction I’ve ever read is coming to life and I’m worried we are powerless to stop it.
A list of media I am ingesting, discovering, and finding inspiring in 2026.
A list of media I ingested, discovered, or found inspiring in 2025.
thoughts, reflections, and of course a media list.
Remember when I said I wasn’t scared of Arch Linux on my server? — I lied. While I think it’s fine for containers, I’ve had my ZFS pool attached to my Arch desktop since I built it back in March and have been white knuckling the entire experience.
I have been divesting from spotify lately using navidrome. The experience has been amazing. Finding a decent iOS app has been tricky though.
Y’all ever use plex for multiple years before realizing you might not be using the integrated GPU on your Intel nuc for transcoding? Yeah me neither…
I'm trying to let necessity sort of guide where and how I learn things related to my homelab, otherwise I simply get overwhelmed trying to learn everything. There’s simply too much.
happy accident in gimp
All you hear as a noob when getting into Linux about Arch is that: 1) it’s not for beginners. And: 2) it’s not ‘stable’. After a number of years running Arch containers in “production” I couldn’t disagree more, on both points.
This visual language is everywhere. Look at your app icons on your phone and every container on every modern website. You’ll see smooth rounded corners on damn near every single one. Zero visual friction. Our entire modern world has been built on this conveyed convenience. Drive-Thru, 1 Tap to Apply. Click to Buy Now. Swipe Right to Fuck. All delivered via Infinite Scroll.
Fuji X100V - Pixel Sorted | Picture taken in May 2022 | Glitched in November 2025
I walled myself into the garden of Apple and Adobe products, opening wide for spoon feedings of early 2000s and 2010s billion dollar marketing campaigns.
This is a really cool way to rethink the traditional ‘blog’.
Spoiler: I say No, but I'm curious if I'm alone.
AVIF poses promise over WebP. But is it ready for prime time?
Since it’s too cloudy see the aurora this time, I’ll share a poem I wrote about the one I saw last year.
Images taken on 2025-11-08 - Shot on a Fuji X100V - Processed with Darktable
This gargantuan book about drugs, tennis, and entertainment has taunted me from our bookshelf ever since my wife and I moved in together 8 years ago...
I went on a journey trying to fix a GPU issue with Claude and now I’m making you read about it.
I’m starting a new blog, that turns out isn’t a blog. It’s a digital garden! What a concept. Hopefully turning it into a digital 'thought darkroom' is something I can find a bit more freedom with than my 'portfolio' website.
What's the point of using and learning linux if you're not gonna break things due to your own carelessness?
Something happens in my brain when I read a book, like a switch flipping. They can be quite powerful, if you can open your mind and give them the power to do so.
On May 31st, 1889, disaster struck the City of Johnstown, Pennsylvania when a catastrophic flood took the lives of 2,208 people. Unprecedented rainfall in the days before compromised an inadequate dam, unleashing destruction upon Cambria county's largest city.
A couple of weeks ago my wife and I visited the Wharton Esherick house in Malvern, and this past Saturday visited the Experiencing Esherick exhibition at the Brandywine River Museum.
fall poem from last year 🍂
Image taken in May 2024 - 4x5 Cyanotype Contact Print - Digital B&W Conversion
I'm getting old, this used to be a lot easier. Domino thinks as he slowly moves his four paws one by one up the creaky wooden steps in the 1950s brick house he's lived in his entire life with the Reynolds family.
Fallingwater was one of the most intriguing architectural wonders I have ever experienced in person.
An amateurs observations on the digital content lifecycle
A man wearing sunglasses indoors offers to sell me cocaine by the escalator. I put up a hand and solemnly decline. I see a man wearing a white t-shirt with green lettering that states: "I'd cash out but I'm not a quitter". I will be one tomorrow.
From a hike a couple years back (not the Appalachian Trail)
Image taken on 2019-04 - Ilford HP5+ | Leica R6 or Canon A-1 | 35mm f/2.8
A buttered cast iron pan sizzles in a haze filled kitchen.
An overview of my most recent portfolio redesign sprint Hello World Red Chair (in the Woods) On the name: Negative Earth Recent house projects Future NAS on the workbench integrated GPU passthrough proxmox & plex happy inverted accident. why I'm not scared of using Arch for my homelab now I really want to get back into glitch art. I switched my websites image format to AVIF instead of WebP, maybe you should too? aurora. pictures from a fall walk. Happy Interdependence Day! - A Celebration of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. gpu troubleshooting saga. welcome to a new, hopefully improved … something. Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Esherick at the Brandywine River Museum. dogwood. bulb. Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Viva Las Vegas white blaze. the walking dude.