Hugo is an open-source static site generator. Building websites with Hugo is much easier than creating dynamic websites that are far more complex.

Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of existing software interaction paradigms. For example, there’s the hamburger menu (≡) which saw a proliferation during the rise of mobile due to the constraints around screen size. It has since spread to many other parts of software interaction design and will likely remain prevalent for a long time as a terse way of indicating “more…

Mt Haku (白山, haku-san) or quite literally "White Mountain" is a 2702m elevation mountain located on the borders of Ishikawa and Gifu prefectures. We hiked Mt Haku as a day hike in mid-July, which turned out to be the perfect time to enjoy the alpine flower fields that line the trails. As well as being one of Japan's Three Holy Mountains (along with Mt Fuji and Mt Tate), Mt Haku is also one of Japan's Hundred Famous Mountains. This list is based on a book written by author Kyuya Fukada - and as…

This spring E took down her WordPress blog and replaced it with a static website. In the past weeks she did the same for her business website (and added her own sales channel to it, with just the payment provider as third party element). Now I have static website envy. Until 2002 I had static websites, hand coded in a text editor. Still the easiest way for simple websites, I’m amazed to say. Then from 2003 I used a CMS for my blog, first Movable Type for about a decade and then WordPress from…

The old Postville Courthouse in Lincoln, Illinois, via The Library of Congress. Abraham Lincoln practiced law there from 1847 to 1859. Well, as a surprise to me, my silly little Gravatar article was posted to Hacker News. This has called a lot of attention to the post, and made for some interesting comments. The most interesting of this is the claim that I have “cognitive dissonance”: We live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don't you'd go insane. This article is…

If you look at the changelog for my site, Brennan.day, you'll notice two things. First, I am working on this project way too much, and second, my attempt at good git commit message hygiene. There is a problem, though. Across over a thousand commits, 448 were prefixed feat: and 417 were fix:. Nearly the same count, for wildly different kinds of work. A new 2,000-word essay? feat:. A corrected typo? fix:. An automated comment sync running at 3am? feat:. A CI pipeline toggle? feat:. Everything is…

(July)replying to the Absurd Pirate's post. The Absurd Pirate writes: I think of a friend who moves away, and that you only talk to online anymore. By all intents and purposes, they're now mostly an "online" friend. But does that really change the bond you made with that person? Is the fact that person is now on a screen for all of your communication make your friendship any less valuable? I had never thought of it that way and it makes sense. In fact, my closest friends are online friends. A…

If you aren't a privacy nerd then you might have missed this exciting new development in the world of web browsing! Containers have landed in Firefox and Brave and I'm pretty stoked for it.The question is, what are Containers? How do they work? And how can you use them to use the web more efficiently – and perhaps even more privately?What is a Browser Session?Containers are a way of separating your Browser Sessions into, well, containers. To really grasp how these work, though, it's important…

I stopped by a Filipino/Hawaiian (mostly filipino) restaurant/bar that was recommended to me a few months ago by someone I met at an AANHPI event. One of my friends that was eating with us had gone many times before and said they enjoyed the menu. We looked up the menu before heading over. As a Filipino-American I always get curious about Filipino restaurants because a lot of our dishes are family-style/comfort food, so it’s always interesting to see what foods will be on the menu. To our…

Yesterday, Unattributed posted a long response and dissection of my article What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, analyzing the lack of intellectual rigour, nebulous wording, and poor research I did throughout. I already added an update to the post in question, so I won't get into the weeds here. I tried my best to respond graciously and with appreciation towards the author of the response. The writing was critical, but it was also fair and written in good faith. That said, seeing a…

Reading through an RSS feed can dull the experience of enjoying a blog's unique style—try visiting the site directly for the full effect.

Shoreline with lights. License: CC-0 So, Brennan Kenneth Brown wrote about the experience of my response to one of his posts topping the Bubbles list for most of a day. To that, I have to apologize, and hopefully provide a little context. Brennan wrote at the beginning of his post: The writing was critical, but it was also fair and written in good faith. That said, seeing a 3,500-word article about me on the top of Bubbles.town yesterday certainly did give me anxiety—but that's par for the…

You've probably run into some Obsidian evangelist espousing some convoluted system of organizing all their notes, and building some knowledge base. Heck, I was just involved in a conversation about Personal Knowledge Management. This isn't that article. My personal use of Obsidian tends to be simple. I build into it the tools that I need to get things done, to make things easier. There is a saying (which I can't locate, so I'll paraphrase) that a system should only be as complicated as needed,…

Two boats docked behind a berm. Introduction Many years ago (over a decade) I wrote an article about RSS Feed reader alternatives after Google announced they were killing Reader in March 2013. That article attracted a fair amount of attention, including a request from RedHat to republish the article on their blog. On the ten-year anniversary of the death of Google Reader, the Verge published Who killed Google Reader?(pay-walled article), indicating (to me) that even a decade on there was still…

The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content, David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more personally relevant content.

Earlier this month, I talked about a rotation button in photos that behaved really nicely in iOS, and not so great on the Nothing Phone. Here’s a story of a similar fumble iOS once made that might bring the point home even more. The calculator app has been preinstalled on iPhones ever since their debut in 2007. For the longest time it hasn’t been anything more than a standard four-function calculator with a decades-old feature set. If you’re not careful, however, you can mess up even that. Ten…

Table of Contents 1. Infrastructure 1.1. Server 1.2. Network 2. Software 3. The Outcome It's true. I don't maintain my homelab… it maintains itself. Have I reached nirvana? Is this the ultimate goal of homelabbers? It seems that I've somehow automated myself out of a job (hobby?) by building a resilient homelab. Let's figure out where it all went "wrong". 1. Infrastructure 1.1. Server I have used a few different servers over the years, but have since consolidated all of my services onto a…

Wolf looking directly into a camera at close proximity. There is a bit of an issue I have noticed lately: websites actively blocking Reading Mode in Firefox, and derivative web browsers. I was stunned to find out (just a minute ago) that Reading Mode doesn't appear to be a default feature in Chromium, but instead an add-on. So, I don't know if this is an issue for Chrome based browsers. This is getting frustratingly annoying for me. Why? There are multiple reasons that Reading Mode is a…

Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0 I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan's article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and counterarguments in his piece? That seemed to have a simple answer: yes. Any good piece of writing should undertake to…

✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: AI & the job market: The cognitive dissonance of "Oh no, recent grads used AI in college!" vs. "New hires will absolutely be required to use AI once on the job"; Job applications from people that aren't real; and why is replacing human labour with AI so expensiiiiiive 😩 <insert crocodile tears here> 🌞 Good News!: Librarians are still cool; AI overview opt-out is becoming a thing; and lawsuits may be happening. 📯 The Post-Script: Reading Karl Bode's…

I'm somebody who writes a lot—half a million words and 200 blog posts in the past 8 months. I'm also someone with an unrelenting curiosity to better understand our world. Beyond that, I also graduated with a degree in English literature with honours, with a 3.8 GPA. So, it should be no surprise I've done extensive research on how best to do research, which resulted in me diving into the world of personal knowledge management systems. These are the systems and methods of keeping track and…

The latest anti-feature from Automattic—now infecting Gravatar. Photo by: Unattributed, License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. Happily Imperfect posted Bye bye Gravatar a short while ago, and I have to say, I've had a similar thought about deleting my account on there as well. My feelings towards WordPress and Automattic started changing some time ago, back when they introduced the Gutenberg editor. Ever since this “improvement” it's been a downhill slide…

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Introduction A few years back I became interested in the idea of getting a smartwatch. However, what I found when I started doing research into them was nothing short of horrifying. Take the journey with me as I talk about why I thought a smartwatch would be a good fit in my life, to the realization that there was no chance I would ever buy one of them. The level of enshittification that exists in this market segment is stunning. It is so rampant that in the…

When I was a kid, my father bought a family home computer and placed it in the living room for all to see. When guests came to our house, they would stop by the computer and admire its marvel without even turning it on. While everyone else was careful with the computer, treating it like an important investment, I quickly started inserting discs and installing games. One thing we take for granted today is how cheap and abundant storage is. Our family computer had a single hard drive with a…

I'm not pretentious when it comes to coffee. I like it slightly weak and bitter with a ton of milk or cream in it, and that's it. Go to any cafe in America and this is the kind of coffee you find: drip coffee, bitter but weak, with a splash of milk (some people even push it further with pumps of sweeteners, but fortunately I'm not that uncultured). However, it wasn't until the first time I left the US (I went to London over a decade ago), when I ordered "just a small coffee, please" and watched…

AI-drunk companies love to trumpet their millions or billions of users. What they don’t tell you is that most are forced to use such features. Think of the AI overviews that Google Search forces on you, whether you asked for it or not. Samsung seems to have taken this tactic to the next level. According to How-To Geek, the Samsung Health app will delete users’ health data from the company’s cloud — making sync between devices impossible — unless they agree to hand it over for AI training and…

One thing I’ve noticed over the last few months is how my OmniFocus has become a bit of a black hole. Over the course of a week I’ll input a bunch of tasks, but beyond moving them out of the inbox and into their relevant projects not much happens. Either I’ll completely forget to do the thing or I’ll come across the task days or weeks later, after it’s already done and I’ll check it off then.This is clearly not a useful system.How exactly I’m going to fix this issue I’m still not sure, but it’s…

To summarize my answer to Antonio's post: good! I don't read posts in my feed reader to look at styles, I do it to consume content - to read their thoughts. I use my feed reader because it's configured exactly how I like it. The colors are tweaked to a palette that's pleasing to my eyes and doesn't cause strain. The font family, font size, and other elements are customizable and configured exactly how I like them. I can't tell you how many times I've opened a great blog post and struggled to…

I love reading. I caught the bug as a middle-schooler when I got caught skipping school, and as punishment, I had to read The Chronicles of Amber and do a book report about it. Even today, opening a book and fanning the pages to get the paper smell activates very fond memories and emotions. I remember a time before e-readers came out. I always thought reading on one seemed very futuristic. In military sci-fi books, characters are reading on their data pads, and reading on an e-reader makes me…