negative earth.

Moonshot

Along with much of the nation and world, I have found myself enamored by the recent Artemis II mission.

Smorgasbord

It is dark. Pitch black. A small brown-haired creature scurries over a tiled ceiling grid.

When a simple DIY plumbing task isn’t what you bargained for

Made my first plumbing call the other day!

Daily Constitution

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.

Escaping the iCloud with the help of a 44-year-old Linux coreutil

NAS Server Build and Migration

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)

On the name: Negative Earth

Recent house projects

My undiagnosed ADHD has finally decided it’s now time to work on house stuff instead of Linux stuff

My guide to being anti big-tech

Here’s a few things I do that don’t give billionaires money.

Why did programmers program themselves out of a job?

I just recreated a $20 a month service in minutes.

I’m so fucking pissed.

Things got worse. It feels like we are on the brink of the next American Civil war. Are we ready?

Future NAS on the workbench

Getting an eBay purchased motherboard to POST

Post-Mortem: Suspended ZFS Pool

Things are bad.

Every bit of dystopian fiction I’ve ever read is coming to life and I’m worried we are powerless to stop it.

2026 Media List

A list of media I am ingesting, discovering, and finding inspiring in 2026.

2025 Media List

A list of media I ingested, discovered, or found inspiring in 2025.

new years eve

thoughts, reflections, and of course a media list.

moved my ZFS pools around

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.

navidrome to the rescue, finally divesting from spotify

I have been divesting from spotify lately using navidrome. The experience has been amazing. Finding a decent iOS app has been tricky though.

integrated GPU passthrough proxmox & plex

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…

letting necessity be my guide while learning Linux

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.

I vibe coded a cursor for my digital garden (this website) and I hate that I love it.

why I'm not scared of using Arch for my homelab

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.

Brave Smooth World.

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.

Escaping the walled gardens and embracing Open Source - a photographers ongoing journey into Linux.

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.

'Digital Garden' turned into my 'Thought Darkroom'.

This is a really cool way to rethink the traditional ‘blog’.

A rebuttal to “Is Photography Yorgos Lanthimos’s True Calling?”

Spoiler: I say No, but I'm curious if I'm alone.

I switched my websites image format to AVIF instead of WebP, maybe you should too?

AVIF poses promise over WebP. But is it ready for prime time?

aurora.

Since it’s too cloudy see the aurora this time, I’ll share a poem I wrote about the one I saw last year.

Happy Interdependence Day! - A Celebration of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

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...

gpu troubleshooting saga.

I went on a journey trying to fix a GPU issue with Claude and now I’m making you read about it.

welcome to a new, hopefully improved … something.

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.

I am my own chaos monkey.

What's the point of using and learning linux if you're not gonna break things due to your own carelessness?

2024 books

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.

Esherick at the Brandywine River Museum.

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.

dogwood.

fall poem from last year 🍂

Domino

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.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.

Fallingwater was one of the most intriguing architectural wonders I have ever experienced in person.

The Swingset

A buttered cast iron pan sizzles in a haze filled kitchen.