Chris Wiegman

I’ve been using tmux on Mac for a very long time. It’s a simple way to get proper panes in Mac’s terminal without replacing the app entirely. Of course there are replacement apps that handle a lot of this out of the box, but from iTerm to Ghostty and others, they always fall short for me in one way or another. So I stick with Terminal, and honestly, it works really well, minus the pane support. tmux fixes that, but it also overrides so much native Terminal functionality that other basic…

At least once a year I still get the urge to switch up my tech again. In the past I’ve gone as small as switching tools and as large as switching my entire tech ecosystem. I guess you could say I’m always searching for something with my tech and I’m OK with that. These past few weeks have found me looking again at moving off of Apple. I’ve been eyeing a new Pixel phone (I still say my Pixel 3XL was probably my all-time favorite phone) as well as Linux laptops. It’s tempting, but I’m going to…

It’s been a very long time since I’ve formally taught in a classroom, almost 13 years, and I miss it. Since then I’ve given plenty of conference talks, Meetup presentations and other more informal teaching, but it’s not the same as being in a classroom. There’s something to be said about helping folks move forward in their lives, whether it’s a classroom, where I taught computer science, or an airplane cockpit, where I taught folks how to fly. For all the experiences I’ve had before or since,…

I love writing code. I’ve always loved writing code. That said, writing code is no longer part of my day job. Today my job is to build my teams and help push our engineering org forward, a very different role that requires a different toolset. In 2026 part of that, whether I like it or not, has involved AI. To learn how to use AI I’ve also deployed it in some of my own work, but that use case has been far more limited and, frankly, not something I’ve found valuable or even particularly useful.…

I’ve written before about how I reset my digital life every so often. Most of those resets are housekeeping: old posts deleted, histories cleared, accounts closed and obsolete email/messages/etc cleared out. This time I’ve taken it a lot further and the reset that actually mattered to me most was my music library. Why I Wiped It I wasn’t unhappy with my library because it was messy. I was unhappy because I was bored with it. I’d re-listened to the same collection for years, adding albums, but…

Last fall I moved this site back to Hugo and resumed work on its theme. I haven’t written much about the theme itself since then, so it feels like a good time for an overview of what’s actually changed under the hood. None of this was one big redesign. It’s been a lot of small releases, sometimes a few in a single day. Each one nudged things forward, but looking back at the changelog, a few themes stand out. A New Coat of Paint The most visible change was a full color refresh back in the…

I’ve recently changed RSS tools again. It wasn’t because my old setup stopped working, but because my RSS client of choice, Reeder, has pivoted to be, well, something else. There’s still Reeder Classic but it’s not being well maintained at this point. It was time to move on. After a lot of trial and error I settled on Unread as my feed reader. It works well, though I still prefer Reeder back in its prime. Unread does have one feature I haven’t seen in years, though: a free syncing service that…

One of the hardest parts of keeping this site running as it ages has been staying on top of link rot. Having 18 years of links adds up, especially when you’re talking about tech that counts in days what the rest of the world counts in years. For a number of years I used Dr. Link Check to give me a report of broken links, which I’d then fix by hand. It’s been effective but this site has grown to a point where I need an ever-more-expensive plan to keep up with it all. That’s OK, but not ideal.…

There’s a lot of hype about accessing DuckDuckGo via its “noai” subdomain. It works, but there’s a better way. Instead of using a special domain to access DuckDuckGo, a method that works, but not in every situation, you can just use the normal DuckDuckGo domain, without AI and customizable even further to serve your needs. Just look at the screenshot at the top of this post. It has no AI, custom colors and a lot of other settings customized. Best of all, DuckDuckGo shows up like this on all of…

I’ve hit the point where I don’t trust GitHub but, for right now, it’s still my best option for the projects I host. That means I need a simple and reliable solution to back up my code there. To address this I’ve created a simple Backup GitHub app that does one thing and one thing well: it fully backs up all my GitHub repos, public and private. This script, with few options, has you log into your GitHub account without playing games with access tokens and stores that login in your Mac keychain.…