Bench notes

Short technical field notes on systems weirdness

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...
21 Jan 2026

Deskthority is no more

Deskthority has begun to be gutted. - The wiki no longer loads - The forum is intermittently failing The site was...
20 Jan 2026

Replacing Bulbs Is Not Diagnosis

> Replacing parts without understanding failure modes is not a repair --- it's a > ritual. Cleaned out my tool bag tod...
19 Jan 2026

ChatGPT has gross fonts

I don't know exactly what fonts ChatGPT uses, but it's definitely not my browser default. Behold the grossness. {{< f...