Posts

I do a lot of reading on various technology topics. This includes the “reviews” of various new or upgraded distros as they come out. What I’ve begun to recognize more and more, though, is that most of those reviews focus less on the technical aspects of the distribution under review and more on the Graphical User Interface of the distro. That is, at least 75% of the discussion is centered around changes to the Desktop Environment, whether those changes be functional, in the sense of added features, or aesthetic in the sense of color changes, font selection, etc. That realization got me to thinking about what is really important in today’s Linux environment and whether the DE is more important than the underlying distribution. ...

In my last post about MangoWM I noted that there were several things that I wanted to do but hadn’t quite figured out. In today’s post I want to share a few of the things I’ve figured out since then. Getting a Good Basic Configuration To get started, you can simply copy the default configuration from /etc/mango. # cp /etc/mango/config.conf ~/.config/mango/ But I wanted a bit more, so I used DreamMaoMao’s configuration files. From what I understand, DreamMaoMao created Mango, so I figured that would be an even better starting point. ...

I have struggled for several months trying to put into words a thought that’s been bouncing around in my head. Yesterday, though, I ran across this blog that perfectly described my dilemma. I think I’ve alluded to this whole idea previously, but was never able to really put it into words that made sense. What I finally realized, and that author put into words, is that I enjoy the process of learning, building, tweaking, and so on, more than I enjoy the actual outcome. ...

For a good while now I’ve been using Niri as my go-to window manager on my CachyOS laptop. This is the laptop on which I do essentially all of my writing, including this post. I initially started with Niri after realizing how heavy some of the full Desktop Environments (DE) were and, too, given that I wanted the machine solely for writing, all of the extras that a full DE included was simply bloat. The fact is, at this stage in my tech life, I want to be able to have more control over the software that I use and avoid loading my machine with stuff I don’t use. ...

Back in November or December of 2025 I became aware of the “Indieweb” and the Fediverse. In reading through the material I could find on those topics I ran across the idea known as “POSSE”: Post (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere". The idea is that you post your content on a site that you fully control, then syndicate that posting out to other sites e.g. Mastodon, Bluesky, etc in order to let folks know that you’ve posted something new. This does several things: ...

In the Beginning … Like most homelabbers/self-hosters my setup has morphed over the years. I started, as most do, with a single machine that was built and rebuilt multiple times as I experimented with different technologies, software stacks, and so on. I started back before the advent of Docker so I was literally building Apache from source or, if I was lucky, installing a .deb version. Most of the early work required a lot of setup, futzing around with config files and so on. (If you’ve never installed Oracle from source you haven’t lived!) The result was something of a Frankenstein setup. ...

Table of Contents the Problem The Solution Browser extensions How Do you Get Hister? Final Thoughts the Problem I don’t know about you but one of my biggest frustrations in reading something on the web then, when I want to refer back to it, being unable to locate it again. For example, suppose you were trying to solve a problem in setting up a piece of software. You did your search and found what you think might be a solution. But, to be sure, you wandered off in search of more information. And you closed that tab. “No worries,” you say, “I’ll just look in my browser history.” Except that your browser history doesn’t actually store the history from all of your tabs. Well, crap! Now what. So you spend the next hour trying in vain to remember the search term that got you that specific page. ...

Table of Contents Limits to Hugo’s Native Org Support Enter Ox-Hugo Why Did I Change? The Experience So Far The Final Question For the past year I’ve written almost all of my posts here in Emacs. My workflow has typically been to create a new file in my content/posts directory with the command ```hugo new posts/filename.md```. Notice that the file has a “.md” extension. I prefer writing in markdown which is one of the reasons I settled on Hugo to start with. It made sense, then, to create a markdown file to write my posts. ...

Introduces Emacs for Neophytes

I first started looking at emacs as my writing software a number of months ago and wrote about my initial thoughts back in August of 2025. At that time I noted that I was starting with vanilla Emacs. That is the base version that has no (or at least very few) additional packages added. This minimized the complexity. Emacs is complex enough without adding more to the challenge. And, since then every post I’ve made on this blog and essentially all of the writing I’ve done since then has been on vanilla Emacs. ...