Nelson Minar

Today is the 25th anniversary of my weblog. Hooray! It’s been a long time on the Internet and a lot has changed. But some of the sites I linked in that first month are still around, like the Half Bakery and urinal.net. There’s a funny update on the EA / Ultima story. I’m still around too! I don’t blog as much as I do, no one blogs like they used to. I have more places to publish now. I write short posts on Fedi. Links are now shared on my linkblog. Casual tech posts go to my secret work blog.…

I got this recipe from a tech industry friend as a JPG labelled “Twitter congee”. I don’t know if that means “seen on Twitter” or “served in the Twitter cafeteria”, either is possible. It’s very simple. Garnish with whatever: I usually use some chili crisp, some pickled mustard greens, or some sauteed vegetable like bok choy. Ingredients 1/2 pound ground chicken 4 ounces sliced shiitake mushrooms 1 tbsp minced ginger 1/2 tbsp minced garlic 1 tsp shaoxing wine 1/4 tsp kosher salt 1 tsp oyster…

Hello friends, big day on my little blog! If you’re reading this post you’re reading my blog via a brand new blog engine. I call it “Flourish.” If all goes well you won’t really notice a change. I tried to get the Atom feed right so posts don’t show up as new, but if they do be assured it’s a one-time thing. Much love to Rael Dornfest and his Blosxom blog engine. I’ve been running that for 25 years. I may be the last person left who was running it, or at least the 2004 Perl CGI. Flourish is a…

Somebits.com has a new server. It’s been up for a few days and seems to be working great. Big things hosted here: Weblog Linkblog Postcards The new server is hosted at OVHCloud and runs on NixOS. For 20+ years I’ve been hand-managing servers like this. This time around I got an AI to build it for me. It was a very good experience and I’m quite satisfied with the result. Nix feels like a good match for AIs: the entire operating system is described declaratively so there’s no managing of running…

Major new product in the Nelsonsphere: my travel postcards. Our recent cruise to Italy, France, and Spain is a good example to start with. I plan to keep updating this going forward. I collected social media posts for 41 different trips I’ve taken in the last fifteen years. I think of each post as a postcard: a little thought in the moment, hopefully an image. When collected each thread becomes a diary of a trip and the collection as a whole is a summary of much of the travel Ken and I have…

When I was a young boy I played cards with my friend and his Sicilian father. Dad would cheat. He’d palm cards, fudge the score, take extra turns. When I got to age 9 I realized he was cheating and I was so mad. Cheating was wrong! I realized much later that he was teaching us a lesson. That while it might be wrong, sometimes people will cheat you. He taught us to recognize being cheated. When I was 15 I applied for a job at the local grocery store. Part of the hiring process was a test for…

A small update to my linkblog that you probably won’t notice: I’m now using self-hosted linkding as the backend instead of Pinboard. I switched to pinboard back in 2011 and have appreciated having a hosted service all these years. But development on the product stagnated long ago and the last few years service quality has been erratic. Right now the service is down because the domain registration expired. It’s galling that I had to log in to Nazi Twitter to even see what’s going on with the…

For the first time in about 25 years I’m running a Linux desktop. It’s great! I used to use Linux all the time. But even back in the early ’00s all I was running for work was ssh terminals and a web browser and Windows did that just fine. And for gaming you had to have Windows. I had a few years of using a Mac, then switched back to Windows once WSL got good enough to have a local Unix. But I liked to try Linux out every couple of years. Last month I installed Bazzite on an external drive to…