Bench notes

Short technical field notes on systems weirdness

09 Feb 2026

Shopping online, warts included

Found myself in the market for sweats and windbreaker pants. ChatGPT found a myriad of decent items meeting my criteri...
08 Feb 2026

Comprehending MELPA's size

For reasons, I grabbed the entire [MELPA](https://melpa.org/) archive of published Emacs packages to grep against. Som...
07 Feb 2026

Learned Quake 2 modding to recreate Instagib Blasters

After a bout of nostalgia, I learned the basics of Quake 2 modding then created a mod that's currently live. Learn how...
07 Feb 2026

1.5L cleans me

Today, I cleaned my body and hair using a rag and a wash basin. Total water expended: ****1.5L****. Roughly 0.5L for ...
05 Feb 2026

My custom bash prompt is nearly 5 years old

A small milestone, and a quiet test of whether my approach holds up: I've been using mostly the same custom Bash promp...
04 Feb 2026

My Quake configs are managed by Emacs

Woops. I guess I recreated configuration management inside Org-mode. The Org file is where I think; the actual config...
29 Jan 2026

MPV is my jukebox

[MPV](https://mpv.io/) does all my local media playback --- videos and music. I start MPV with: - `--idle` - `--i...
28 Jan 2026

Nuked GitHub repos

Every once in awhile, a public GitHub repository goes missing. This isn't new. The internet is an organic thing, and ...
25 Jan 2026

Computer science classes sometimes don't reflect reality

Recollecting my experience in my Systems Programming class. We had a 50 MiB quota on a Debian oldstable server. There...
25 Jan 2026

Trying discovery writing with GNU Ed

> Tools _can_ work against you as much as they work with you. And there I go, finding myself using [GNU ed](https://ww...