Archives

Lem's The Invincible works as a game and it works as a novel. It doesn't work as both, and whichever you come to second is the one that pays.

Keeper tells its story the way Inside and the Souls games do, with the history in the world rather than in dialogue—and none of the adrenaline.

Puzo's The Sicilian sets a bandit's belief against the law of the Mafia, with Michael Corleone caught in the middle.

GitHub dropped my one model from Copilot. I went to Claude, and the work came off the desk onto my phone.

Keep a local copy of your Google data: one TrueNAS Cloud Sync task and a short script that unpacks and prunes each Takeout export.

A rule I gave a coding agent, to keep it off the moves I couldn't undo, turned out to be one question—how hard is this to undo—sizing every decision I make.

The data was never the hard part. Recovering a Linux box I run from another continent is a plan I've never dared to run, and the risk lives in one configuration file.

I merged sixty-odd agent-written pull requests in a week, and it barely felt like work. The checks I built watch the code. Nothing watches me.

An agent can do the work, and even build the guardrails that check it. Accountability is the harder question, and I'm not sure it can ever belong to the tool itself.

The hard part of keeping a blog was never the writing. It was remembering what the week held and seeing which of it was worth telling.

I archived this blog and meant it. What reopened it wasn't a better tool—it was agentic coding leaving me more to share than I could keep to myself.

How a TrueNAS, a Home Assistant box, and a Chromebook back themselves up—delegated to Cloud Sync, Nabu Casa, and a Google account.

Eight years on from the 2018 "How I Read" post: same practice, different tools, and still no way to prove which one's doing the work.

Codifying how I read several books concurrently—short bursts per book with practised recall between sessions, plus a 'readability' formula for ordering the stack.

A cron-driven rdiff-backup recipe that pushes incremental backups over SSH from a NAT'd client to a remote server, wrapping the SSH call through --remote-schema.