An Unfavorable Review of Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

I just finished reading “Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport, and found it incredibly lacking. I think it’s because I expected something more aimed toward guiding people into decluttering or simplifying their digital lives, but instead it blathered on about how to reduce the size of your digital life altogether.

I know the latest trend is to abhor computers and digital life, and instead yearn for a secluded life herding goats in rocky pastures, but I still find that technology enriches my day-to-day life, and the online world is still a place filled with brilliant and charming people. But, there are problems with the way most people (myself included) connect with these digital worlds, and getting advice about how to effectively manage these problems would have been nice.

I don’t want to read advice books about avoiding a problem, I want to read advice books about dealing with a problem.

The book is a chaotic mess. It starts the way you would expect: talking about how technology from the late 90s and early 2000s was really great, but now companies use algorithms to get you addicted in order to show you an endless stream of ads. That’s not inaccurate, but I think it’s over-simplified, and I think we forget how crappy and user-hostile a lot of the older technology actually was.

The author then spends an incredible amount of time hyping up Henry David Thoreau and quoting from Walden, which is a favorite hobby of aspiring minimalists. I mean, I’m guilty as charged, I also adore Walden. But maybe this isn’t the place for that?

A couple chapters are focused on social media, despite the fact that the author has never actually used social media (a fact of which he is proud to tell you, and smugly reminds you about as often as he can). He encourages you to delete social media apps from your phone to figure out the ones you can’t live without, and then be mindful of how you use the social media networks you stay on. Multiple times throughout the book he highlights that you probably only get 10 minutes to an hour of actual value out of social media scrolling each week. That part is probably true.

He then spends an entire chapter trying to convince you to get non-digital hobbies, like reading books, taking walks, and picking up new home improvement projects. Sure, those are probably good things to do, but it doesn’t really help you minimize your digital footprint.

Another key piece of advice is how you should aim for deep conversations with people, right after the chapter titled “Spend Time Alone” in which he waxes longingly for solitude.

I think it’s also weird how he sprinkles in the most random product references, like the “Mouse Book Club”. I had never heard of the Mouse Book Club, but apparently it lets you subscribe to expensive, abridged versions of public domain books that you then keep in your pocket so you can read when you’re bored, rather than immediately reaching for your phone. Call me crazy, but I can achieve the same results for remarkably less just by using a dedicated ereader. And I don’t have to slog my way through abridged public domain books. I suppose if you wanted to avoid something digital you could also just as easily fall back to a cheap copy from a used book store. But then again, I have to ask: is this “digital minimalism,” or just “minimalism?”

In any case, this is not a book I especially enjoyed, nor one I would go out of my way to recommend. What kind of advice would I give if I were to write a book on digital minimalism? Stay tuned, that’s a future blog post.

Moka Pots Suck

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

I know that moka pots are the beloved jewel of the at-home coffee community, but I absolutely despise them, and I’m tired of pretending that they’re not awful.

I’ve had many of them through the years, hoping that each new one I brought home would work flawlessly, rendering the issues I had experienced with the prior iterations nothing more than obvious manufacturing defects. That has never been the case.

Moka pots are essentially pipe bombs, and they always, eventually, leak. Every time you put a pot on to boil there’s a 25% chance you’ll get good coffee, 25% chance you’ll get sludge, and a 50% chance you’ll start seeing beads of water slipping past the gasket and shooting down the sides of the pot.

I can hear you preparing to comment now:

“You’re doing it wrong.”
“You just have to know how to use them!”
“You’re overfilling the water chamber!”
“You’re underfilling the hopper.”
“You’re overfilling the hopper.”
“You’re supposed to take it off the heat source once it starts rapidly boiling!”
“You let it get too hot!”
“You just have to wash it the right way.”
“You just have to replace the gaskets periodically.”

I’ve read every blog post, watched every online video, read every forum, and exhausted every possible avenue for improving my moka pot performance. I swear, I’ve done it all. Gently handwashing. With soap. Without soap. Washing the gaskets. Rinsing the gaskets. Replacing the gaskets. Only filling the water to right below the internal valve. Filling the hopper so the grinds are level with the top. Filling the hopper and leaving a little bit of space. Boiling it with the lid on. Boiling it with the lid open. Keeping it on the heat. Taking it off the heat. Heating it quickly. Heating it slowly. Tightening the vessel fully. Over-tightening the bejesus out of the vessel.

Not only have I tried every technique, but I’ve tried pretty much every kind of moka pot you could get. Aluminum. Stainless steel. Bialetti hardware. Off-brands. Knock-offs.

They’re all garbage. They don’t work reliably. Occasionally they are amazing, and most of the time they are a messy emblem of despair. I promise, you’re better off making your coffee some other way.

Crepuscular Micturition

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Warning: this blog post discusses the bodily function of urination at great length.

You can definitely file this under “TMI”, but it’s a milestone that’s worth celebrating: the past couple months mark the first period of my life since I was a teenager where I can make it all the way through the night without having to get up to pee.

When you first have a kidney transplant, you pee almost constantly through the night. You find yourself waking up every every hour or two bursting at the seams and rushing to relieve yourself (or at least I did).

Over time, things start to get more normal, and everything settles down a bit. But even a year into it, by three or four a.m., I would either be waking up with the urge to go pee, or even worse, start dreaming that I was peeing (danger!).

Now, I sleep soundly through the night, and start my day off the way so many others around the world do. I know that they say things get worse as you age, and that almost everyone starts needing to get up and pee in the middle of the night, but for me it’s the opposite. I’m loving my thirties!

Why I Made 'Kepublicity'

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:30:00 -0400

If you follow me on Mastodon, you might have noticed that I launched a new app a few weeks ago, which is available now on Flathub. The name is Kepublicity, and it’s a GNOME app for people who like to send book files from their computer to a Kobo ereader.

It serves two main functions:

Converting standard .epub files to Kobo-formatted .kepub files, and
Sending converted files to a connected Kobo device

Under the hood, it uses kepubify to do the conversions.

Kepublicity as a tool

I was inspired to write it because I was honestly tired of having to go through Calibre every time I wanted to convert a book. While Calibre is an impressive piece of software that works incredibly well, the install size approaches 1GB, it maintains a separate library, includes a handful of other apps/utilties, and is just completely overkill for the workflow that I use.

While looking for alternative options I found myself using web-based converters, then command line-based converters, and would ultimately end up mounting my Kobo and copying the converted files through a file browser. I longed for a simple utility that would do the entire workflow from start to finish, with little effort. Just open it, drag-and-drop a load of files, hit a button, and watch as they all convert and then get sent to the Kobo.

So that’s what I built!

When I first launched the app, the main question I got was “why is it necessary to convert book formats, when Kobo supports epubs?” It’s a fair question, especially for folks outside of the Kobo ecosystem, but there are actually several important reasons. The main reason is that Kobos actually have two different book renderers built-in. epubs open in an outdated, slow Adobe-created renderer (RMSDK), while kepubs open in a more modern WebKit-based renderer. Kepub books load faster, turn pages faster, support zooming in images, give you pop-up footnote links, provide time estimate measurements, work better with custom font faces and sizes, and are just generally the way to go on Kobo devices.

I’m not suggesting that you take a perfectly good epub file and forever toss it aside. The workflow I use is to keep a local library on my computer of my epub files, then convert on-the-fly as I need them, and store only the kepub versions on my Kobo.

Kepublicity as an engineering project

There’s another reason why I wrote Kepublicity: as an engineering challenge to myself, to try and reflect the ways I have grown as a developer.

In another life, when I created the Vocal podcast app as a college sophomore, I was completely new to software development, Vala, GTK, version control (remember Bazaar?), localization, and free software maintenance in general. I learned more and more about the field of software development and what it takes to be an effective open source maintainer, but I never really had the chance to showcase everything I had learned before I had to end the other projects I was working on. I never properly maintained Vocal (or any app) in a way that I was proud of.

So now, all these years later, what would it look like if I were to create a project using everything I’ve learned from a decade of software development, and after years of being a professional maintainer through my work on SecureDrop for Freedom of the Press Foundation?

In short, it looks like this: https://codeberg.org/nathandyer/Kepublicity

Within the repo, I hope technical users and developers will notice:

A clean git history
Small, self-contained commits
Useful commit messages that roughly adhere to the Conventional Commits format
Proper semantic versioning
An up-to-date changelog
Releases with an accurate list of changes since the previous version

I don’t yet have the localization story figured out, but within the next couple releases you should expect all the strings to be translatable, and then regular releases with new translations added as they roll in. Stay tuned.

The truth is that with the ever-expanding use of LLMs, I sometimes feel a measure of despair about the state of the software industry, and especially the FOSS environment as a whole. Sometimes it’s nice to remind yourself that software can (should?) be a craft, with humans at the core. And I hope to also convince myself that I’ve improved in both expertise and skill since the first code I released all those many years ago. Of course, my bio still says “not a great developer, but I dabble,” and I don’t expect I’ll be removing that line any time soon. There’s always so much more to learn.

Download and feedback

If you have a Kobo and you’re using Linux, I really hope you’ll take Kepublicity for a spin! It’s available to download from Flathub here: https://flathub.org/en/apps/me.nathandyer.Kepublicity

If you have a feature request, run into an issue, or can think of a way to improve, I would really appreciate an issue report: https://codeberg.org/nathandyer/Kepublicity/issues

Or if you want to share any feedback at all, you can contact me on Matrix, Signal, Mastodon, or email. I would really love to hear from you!

I hope you are able to get lots of use out of it!

You Are Not the Library of Congress

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

In the real world, I am neither a hoarder nor a collector. If something gets in the way I consider it clutter, and I get rid of it. I don’t save things for “what ifs.” I also don’t feel compelled to collect things I don’t like just because they’re part of a set with things that I do like.

That doesn’t always carry over to my digital life.

When downloading an album, I often download every track, even after I listen to all the songs and realize there are only one or two that I would ever realistically want to listen to again. If I were to go to the store and buy a CD it would have every track on it, why wouldn’t I want to have the entire album in my library? What if I wake up one day and decide I actually like those other tracks? Wouldn’t I be sorry if I didn’t hold onto them?

Or what if I friend might want to borrow that album? (They won’t, they have streaming. Also, you’re 32 years old and haven’t given someone a burnt CD or a mixtape in over a decade.)

The same thing applies to movies. You have a 4K copy of The Dark Knight, don’t you need to also keep a copy of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises in case you ever feel a need to re-watch the trilogy (even though you don’t like the other two movies very much)?

There are many videos I’ve saved because I may want to watch them again one day, even though I have little to no desire to every actually sit down and rewatch them. If there’s a movie in my library that goes years between viewings, do I really need my own copy to keep and backup in perpetuity?

Sometimes I even picture myself sitting down ten or twenty years from now, possibly with a child, wanting to show them some film that I enjoyed once upon a time. Maybe in the future these movies will be more difficult to get. What if I can’t rent them from a streaming service? What if they disappear from civilization? What if I’m the only one who remembers them and this is the only way to keep them from dying out forever?

That’s not going to happen.

Sure, maybe some really obscure title might be hard to find, but how many of those do you really have in your library? I promise you, it will not be hard to find a copy of Blade Runner somewhere in the world, even twenty or thirty years from now.

The thing I have to keep reminding myself is: I’m not the library of congress. It’s not my duty or calling to keep a copy of every single movie that is vaguely interesting. It’s not up to me to keep every book I read, or every song or album I download. If you only like three tracks from a Greatest Hits album, don’t keep the other seventeen around “just in case.”

You are not the library of congress. Your collection is not the last vestige of a bygone media era.

What you are is a human being who consumes media, and who curates a collection of things they like and want to keep around. That movie you watch every Christmas? Keep a copy. That comfort show that you rewatch every couple of years? That stays. That album you know you’ll listen to again, when the mood is just right? Obviously. But that album from the 90s with that one hit song, and then a bunch of filler?

Get rid of the filler. It wasn’t good then, it’s not good now, it won’t be good later.

Online life is real life. Your digital possessions are the same as your physical possessions. Every file has a weight to it. It has a maintenance cost. It is something that has to take up space on your drive, potentially at the cost of something else you would like to store in its place. There are tradeoffs. There are tasks you must perform to keep it safe, like backing up (to multiple devices, in multiple physical locations). There’s work to be done.

Curate a library that you love. One that speaks to you. And don’t worry about what others will think about your library. You are not the librarian of Alexandria. You are not the library of congress.

Disability Pride

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:22:00 -0400

July is disability pride month, and I love that so many free software projects are making efforts to call attention to accessibility and wellness features, as well as highlighting some of the disabled people in the various communities who help make free software possible.

At first I hesitated to make this post because on most days, I don’t really think of myself as disabled. I certainly was while I was in kidney failure, but I’m doing quite well these days. That said, there are still minor disabilities I have to work around. I suppose it’s better to acknowledge them and embrace them than pretend they’re not there.

The hard truth that I’ve learned through years of various medical ups and downs is that at best, you are only ever temporarily abled. You never know when you will experience a new challenge, a new diagnosis, or a new life-altering event that will have you looking for ways to make the tools and products you use adapt to your needs.

When I broke my ankle in three places and spent months trying to get around before I could walk again, I had a newfound appreciation for wheelchair ramps, curb cuts, elevators, and other similar features.

Of course, many of these features are useful for people who have no issues with mobility. Accessibility features aren’t exclusively for people who are “disabled;” accessibility features are just features, and often they benefit everyone!

Turning that same logic toward computing, that’s essentially the problem I have with lumping a bunch of features together in one spot and labeling them all “accessibility features.” It introduces an unnecessary barrier. People either avoid that section in the system settings (“I’m not disabled, there’s nothing for me here”), or they manage to find a feature that would be useful to them but think “wow, that sounds useful! But that’s an accessibility feature, and I’m not disabled.”

Accessibility features are just features, and should be grouped with other settings or utilities that fit into similar themes.

Getting back to my own lived experience, there are some disabilities that I deal with on a daily basis. Some have implications to my computing life. Some of them have implications more for when I’m away from the keyboard.

For one, I have astigmatism, which affects my vision. I have difficulties with dark interfaces. I used to prefer the trendy dark modes available in most operating systems and apps, with light text on dark backgrounds, but I am simply unable to use them now. The text begins to jitter and jump around, everything gets fuzzy, and then the headaches start. I can’t use it.

Light mode isn’t something that I prefer. It’s an accessibility feature. I require it to use my computer.

(As an aside, that’s why I wish the light mode in GNOME applied to notifications and the panel as well. I can use extensions to achieve the same end result, but it would be awesome if it were a fully-supported feature. Thankfully, work is actively under way to make this a reality!)

I also suffer from Meniere’s disease, and reduced motion was helpful when I was frequently dealing with episodes of vertigo as a result of it. Thankfully, I’ve not experienced any of these issues since I stopped dialysis, but for a while it was truly debilitating.

Meniere’s disease also makes me partially deaf in one of my ears. Being able to fade audio between left and right channels, and occasionally enable sound over-amplication, is often helpful. These are accessibility features, even if they aren’t labeled as such.

Following each of my kidney transplants I had to go through a period of medication adjustments, and the most potent medicine gave me terrible tremors. I got to the point where I could not legibly write my own name. That’s why I completely gave up writing notes and other items by hand, and became so incredibly thankful to be able to type everything, and store it all on devices I could carry with me everywhere. (The tremors have since subsided after adjusting doses and eventually moving to an alternate medication).

Alternate input methods are accessibility features. For some people, typing is painful or impossible, but being able to input text via handwriting recognition makes computing possible. Others, like me, find the opposite. And some people require voice input and dictation. These are all accessibility features.

There are hundreds of other features that make computing more accessible, which I don’t personally have a need for, nor any experience using. Perhaps one day I might need to enable more and more of them. For now, I’m just glad they exist for the people who can benefit from them.

I’m grateful for all the people who are working to improve accessibility, for everyone. Happy disability pride month!

Dumping Mullvad for IVPN

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:40:00 -0400

Until recently, if you had asked my opinion for the best VPN provider, I wouldn’t have hesitated to recommend Mullvad. I have been a customer for several years and have found their service essentially flawless, and their apps well-designed and functional. I also like that the code they produce is open source, and that they have undergone several audits.

But then it came to light that one of the founders of the company, Daniel Berntsson, spent 5 million SEK to single-handedly keep an anti-immigrant and fascist party in Sweden afloat. A non-negligible amount of every subscription fee you send goes to directly fund fascism.

So of course I did what any sensible person would do: I found a viable alternative, took the effort to switch, and then requested a refund from Mullvad for the ~5 months or so I had already paid in advance. To their credit, they responded quickly and didn’t hesitate to refund me the unused portion of my subscription.

I dragged my feet a bit in finding an alternative. As I said, I rely heavily on a VPN, and finding one that worked as well as Mullvad felt like it would be a monumental challenge (by which I mean, a tremendous pain in the hole). Most of the well-known VPN providers are likewise problematic.

I eventually landed on IVPN, and to their credit, I am shocked at how smooth the transition has been. Their account creation process works the same as Mullvad: generate an account without providing any email address, username, or identifying information, and then pay using a method that suits your comfort level / needs / threat model.

The app installation was quick and painless (adding a repo in Fedora and then dnf installing), and setup was likewise simple. It uses Wireguard as any VPN worth is salt should, and handles all that configuration in the background. Plus, the app provides advanced options like kill switches, tracker blocking, and multi-hop routing.

I thought the switch would be a gigantic pain in the ass, but I was actually up and running with IVPN in under 10 minutes.

There are a few things I either haven’t fully tested yet, or have found to be lacking. The list of servers is dramatically smaller than Mullvad. Fewer locations, and fewer servers within each location. That doesn’t really matter to me, but if having access to loads of servers in different places is important to you, this may not be an ideal solution.

Anecdotally, I also feel like browsing the web is slower, but I have low pings and high speeds, so I think it’s probably just me being paranoid and looking for something to be different.

In any case, switching away from Mullvad to IVPN was necessary, and has been relatively low-friction.

As it happens, right before hitting “publish” on this blog post, Mullvad released a blog post addressing this donation, which was mealy-mouthed and shameful.. In it, they say “It should be clear by now how the party donation relates to this. Mullvad does not condone it, nor condemn it. It most likely was a bad idea; most things where there are a multitude of conflicting opinions necessarily are.” I encourage you to read it for yourself.

I’m still angry about how the news about Mullvad caught me off guard. Before now, I would have listed them among the handful of companies and organizations that are actively doing good in the world. No more, clearly.

“Don’t let the bastards get you down” sounds like sage advice, until you realize just how few non-bastards there are. I suppose the only thing you can really do is make the best judgment calls possible with the available information, and adjust appropriately as new information becomes available.

Sausage and Egg McMuffins

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:00:00 -0400

The irony of this blog post coming out right after the one talking about trying to lose weight is not lost on me, but I can’t help it: I’ve been obsessed with Sausage and Egg McMuffins over the past few months.

This represents a maturation of taste in two different ways: for one, I’ve never liked english muffins, and for two, I’ve never really liked eggs prepared any way other than scrambled.

In the first case, I think it goes back to me being a pickier eater in childhood. While I am now willing and excited to try anything (twice!), I never actually gave english muffins a shot. As a person born and raised in the US South, I was a proud biscuit (as in the scone-like pastry, not the sugary sweet) eater. I once took a single bite from a McMuffin decades ago and swore them off forever. I think, though, I wasn’t really willing to give them a shot.

Eggs, on the other hand, I just haven’t been a fan of traditionally. I tried a fried egg my Dad made when I was younger, but the taste and texture grossed me out. But even with scrambled egg, I often found that I didn’t like them when paired with other fooods. I just was never an egg guy.

But, every time I have a major surgery I wake up with my tastebuds being completely different (I know it’s weird, I know it sounds crazy, but my family will contest that it’s a thing for me). And this time, eggs are apparently one of the foods that I’ve picked up.

Which brings me to the McMuffin. A couple months ago McDonald’s accidentally gave my wife the wrong order. Left with a Sausage and Egg McMuffin, and not wanting to let food go to waste, I decided to suck it up and give it a try.

The minute it hit my lips the pleasure center in my brain lit up like a christmas tree.

The taste in my mouth was indescribable. The egg was creamy and buttery, the sausage had the perfect blend of spices, and the cheese was gooey and decadent.

Since then, I’ve had a sausage and egg mcmuffin two or three times a week. You might think that eating like that conflicts with my weight loss goals, but I’ve been able to make it a part of my balanced diet. They’re 480 calories, but I tend to eat smaller, healthier meals throughout the day to offset them. Not to mention that it’s relatively nutritious, especially in terms of protein.

As an engineer and a somewhat experimental person, this of course set off an obsession of trying to make my own version at home (ideally for cheaper than what I pay at McDonald’s).

Unfortunately, despite all my best attempts, my homemade McMuffins just haven’t been the same. The muffin part is the easiest to solve. Nearly any store bought english muffin is adequate. The other ingredients, however, have been the most difficult to match.

For one, I can’t find the right sausage. The sausage I buy that comes in a tube is too… sausagey. Too much sage, if anything. And it’s hard to get it to come out in a consistent size and shape that fits neatly on the muffin. I’ve tried the pre-portioned patties, and the frozen stuff, and still nothing quite matches what I’m looking for.

I watched a million tutorials online about how to make your own “round egg” at home. I’ve mastered the technique with an egg mold, some butter-flavored cooking spray, and then adding water on the outside of the ring and covering with a lid to steam the top of the egg so it cooks consistently. My eggs come out looking perfect. And then you take a bite and… sadness. They are rubbery. They are tasteless. They are not creamy. They are not buttery. This, too, alludes me.

I feel like the cheese is an easier problem to solve. The pack I bought just does not melt the same, and is nowhere as rich as the ones to be found on the real sandwich, but I cheaped out. I think if I got a better cheese, maybe one from Borden’s or Tillamook, instead of the ultra-processed grocery store brand, I would have better luck.

That covers the fully manual process, but what about cheating and using the Jimmy Dean’s frozen ones? I’ve given them a go and they’re alright. They certainly taste better than the ones I’ve tried assembling from scratch, but the sausage in it tastes completely wrong. It’s less pork-ish and more mystery-meat-ish.

It’s worth saying too that I’ve tried other fast food restaraunts’ versions, with similarly disappointing results. The Starbucks version actually tastes identical to the Jimmy Dean’s version. Kinda makes you wonder.

In any case, the “real” McMuffin is realtively affordable, and is only ever 5 minutes away, so there’s not a ton of incentive to find an alternative.

I’m sure I will soon grow tired of them, as I do nearly all my food obsessions. I often find something I love, eat it way too often for weeks in a row, and then get to where they no longer spark the same joy they once did. That’s just how my brain works. For now, though, I’m going to enjoy them while I can.

Even typing this now, I can’t wait until it’s tomorrow morning so I can have another Sausage and Egg McMuffin. If only McDonald’s still served breakfast all day! Although on second thought, it’s probably best that they don’t.

Starting a GLP-1

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

I started a GLP-1 drug nearly two months ago, and so far the results have been borderline miraculous.

I decided to take the drug for a number of reasons:

I have had two instances of my heart going into atrial fibrillation, and losing weight relatively quickly is imperative to avoid further procedures, especially ablation. Anything I can do to prevent yet another surgery, especially one on another vital organ, feels like an absolute must.
Studies show that kidney transplant patients who take GLP-1 medication have better long-term outcomes.
Studies show that GLP-1 medications may lower the risk of developing certain cancers, which is helpful since my anti-rejection medicine and being immunocompromised significantly raises my risk of cancer.
I have obstructive sleep apnea, and using GLP-1 medications can help eliminiate it (mostly through the associated weight loss).

And if I’m being honest with myself, I hate the way I look in the mirror. I haven’t liked how I’ve looked since I was in highschool and lost 60 pounds while working in a fast food restaurant. Unfortunately, after quitting the job and starting college, the weight came right back and has been with me ever since.

I made an honest effort to lose the weight independently earlier in the year, and originally had some moderate success. In my earlier blog post I mentioned how I was trying to live a healthier lifestyle, reduce my calorie intake (largely through eating smaller portions and removing the least nutritious foods from my diet), and be more active by going to the gym at least three nights a week.

I’ve had ups and downs since then, but aside from slightly falling off the bandwagon around my birthday, I’ve managed to mostly continue those good habits. That said, my weight loss plateaued, and I decided that moving forward with one of these medications would be the best path forward.

I spoke with my doctor, and without any hesitation at all I was put on Zepbound, which my doctor believed would be the most effective medication for me. I picked it up, and starting taking weekly at-home injections.

I’m still in the early stages, having only had eight doses of the medicine so far, but my initial review is that these drugs are nothing short of a miracle. All the things you hear about them are true: the food noise disappears, you feel full quickly, and you rarely feel pangs of hunger. But setting all that aside, I was most surprised at how much energy I suddenly had. I have a pep in my step that I’ve not had in years, and I felt that as soon as the second day after taking the medication. I’m not as tired, and I feel like I can move from task to task and keep going. It has been an instant boost for productivity. Even my mood is improved. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt this good!

I’ve managed to lose twenty-one pounds so far. I don’t expect this pace to continue, and I will almost certainly plateau again (at which point the doctors will raise my dose and I’ll just have to be persistent until I break through it). Still, feeling a little better every day and seeing those results not only in the numbers on the scale but the little wins — going down a couple notches in my belt, seeing my face look less puffy on video calls — sustain me. I’m excited for this weight loss journey, and can’t wait to see how I look and feel on the other side of it.

Then the real work begins: maintaining.

Carolina in My Mind

Sun, 31 May 2026 19:30:00 -0400

(This blog post is incredibly USA-centric. If you’re not American you’re welcome to read, but it may be geographically less accessible.)

Every time I travel back to North Carolina I feel strangely as if I’m returning home from a long journey. Although I think a lot of people know me as “that guy that lives in Tennessee”, I have just as many roots in North Carolina. I was born in Boone, which is a town I still absolutely adore. All of my family from my mother’s side is from Old Beech Mountain, and I spent the first twelve years of my life there (not to mention summers in college, and a few years after). Other than college, all of my education happened in North Carolina.

And then of course, I had both of my kidney transplants in North Carolina, and spent weeks and months after each recuperating and attending medical appointments.

I may live in Tennessee, but my soul feels happier when it’s in North Carolina. And most specifically, the mountains there, near Boone or Asheville.

Don’t get me wrong, Tennessee has its pluses and minuses. Compared to most other states in the U.S., it’s super cheap to live here. Although the sales tax is relatively high at ten percent, there is no income tax on wages or salary. And overall, at least in my area, the cost of living is low. Probably because there’s nothing to do and very little to see.

The culture of Tenneessee leaves a lot to be desired, at least in East Tennessee where I’m from. This is a very conservative, MAGA-filled area. The people here are smart, but they are not as educated as perhaps they could be. There are not a ton of opportunities for growth, professionally or otherwise. That’s not to say that North Carolina is a progressive or liberal haven. Indeed, many parts (especially the mountainous ones I long for the most) are just as conservative as Tennessee, if not more so.

The vibe of Asheville in particular is where I feel I fit in the most. I’ve heard it referred to as “hip-neck” (hippy rednecks), and I think that describes me to a fair degree. I want everyone to look out for their neighbors. To love each other. To want the same rights for everyone, and treat all people with respect and dignity. But there’s also a stubbornness that’s built into me, and (for good or ill) a nature of longing for solitude and self-reliance as much as possible. There’s a resourcefulness to the people in and around Asheville, paired with a relaxed and good-natured spirit, that calls to me.

When I cross the mountain into Sam’s Gap on my way back to North Carolina, I look over the Blue Ridge Mountains and smile. When I’m not there, even if just subconsciously, there’s a part of my heart that misses it. I, too, am gone to Carolina in my mind.

Replacing GNOME Software

Sat, 30 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

I try to be charitable when it comes to free (libre) software. Most of the tools that I use are made by people who are developing and maintaining them in their free time, with no financial compensation in return. What they do is a gift to the open source community, to the public commons, to the world.

But sometimes my rage overcomes my gratitude, and I can’t help but feel frustrated with a tool I’m using. Such is my life working with GNOME Software, the application and firmware installation tool.

I’ve tried, I mean really tried, to like GNOME Software. But every time I open it, it freezes, hiccups, or otherwise does something that gets in my way. I often don’t even intend to open it in the first place! I’ll inadvertently click a .flapakref file, or search for an app that I think is already installed but isn’t, and then it leaps to life on its own.

At which point it inevitably locks up and slows down my entire system until it asks if I want to force quit the application, the equivalent of taking it out behind the shed and putting it out of its misery.

A few weeks ago this happened one too many times, the straw that finally broke the camels back. My frustration grew beyond what I was willing to tolerate. I originally thought that removing it would result in accidentally uninstalling the entire GNOME desktop environment, but to my happy surprise GNOME Software is not a hard dependency, and removing it had no downsides.

I was also worried that removing it would mean I could no longer install firmware updates via fwupd, but I was quite pleased to find there is an official standalone application called “Firmware” that gives you even more access, and it’s made by the maintainer of fwupd itself.

With no real downside, and with the knowledge that there is essentially never a scenario where I want to install the RPM version of a package rather than the Flatpak (and for those rare events I can dnf install from a Terminal), I purged it completely.

In its place I turned to a software manager (app store?) that I had already grown incredibly fond of, Bazaar.

Bazaar is the exact opposite of GNOME Software, and is indeed one of the finest examples that I can point to in regards to the kinds of incredible software that can be made on the modern GTK/Adwaita stack.

The design is immaculate. The animations are fluid and delightful, but never get in your way. It’s fun, but also stable and dependable. Everything just works. Bazaar is astonishly pleasant to use. And while it is limited to just the apps available in Flathub, those are the only applications I’m currently interested in installing, so I see that as a benefit more than a limitation.

I hope that one day GNOME Software can improve, or else be replaced by something like Bazaar. I would love to see a future where Bazaar is the default way of installing apps in GNOME, and the system updates and firmware patches are available to install via the settings app, like many other modern OSes. I’ve seen some early plans pointing in that direction, so I’m hopeful.

Until then, I will make do using Bazaar and Firmware, and manually install OS updates through the Terminal. Using three tools instead of one is not quite a replacement, but it is infinitely less frustrating.

Reading on my Laptop with Foliate

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

I haven’t been using my Kobo as much as I used to because I’ve been reading everything on my laptop. I used to try and read before bedtime, but reading puts me straight to sleep, so that’s not an effective strategy.

On the computer, however, I find it easy just to open an app and read a couple pages here and there, as time allows. I don’t use this as an alternative to anything. I still scroll through Mastodon and keep up-to-date with articles in my feed reader. It’s just that when I’ve caught up on everything else, jumping into a book for a few minutes at a time is a pleasant experience, and a way to get through books much faster.

There’s nothing wrong with my Kobo, and in a lot of ways it’s a better reading experience. But then again, I find reading on my laptop very pleasant. The matte display never hurts my eyes, the sharp text of my hi-DPI display makes everything look crip, and being able to see the cover art and internal images in full color is a great touch.

I still use my Kobo, and it has plenty of benefits (portability!), but I can’t deny that my habits have changed.

To read books, I absolutely adore the Foliate app. It’s a prime example of what a high-quality, well-designed app for the Linux desktop can be. It shows my entire library in an organized and visually pleasant way, it lets me customize the reading experience to suit my preferences, and then it gets out of the way so I can read. I love some of the more desktop-oriented features, like jumping between links within the text, being able to choose scrolled vs. paged mode, and having access to reading progress and the table-of-contents in a way that adapts to the window size. And of course, you have all of the expected features like being able to adjust font size, typeface, spacing, background colors, etc.

Back in the days of glossy, low-resolution LCDs I couldn’t read on a computer without getting a headache and screwing up my vision, but things have improved, and it’s now the main way I read. If you are skeptical about it, I might gently encourage you to try it if you are looking for a way to sneak in more reading time here and there. I’m also told reading on phones isn’t half bad, either!

RCS

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

RCS is supposed to be an open standard, but it certainly doesn’t feel like one in any meaningful sense. Before my move back to Android, based on some of the news articles I had read online and conversations I had heard in passing, I naively assumed it was the kind of service that any app could adopt. Much like SMS apps, I thought I could try a few, pick the one I liked most, and then choose a default.

I was horribly wrong about all of this.

On Android, the only way to use RCS is to use Google Messages and Google’s servers. Samsung Messages was also nominally an alternative, although it still used Google’s Jibe implementation/servers underneath, and is now being phased out and users are being migrated to Google Message. Not only do you only have one option for an app, but you are also limited in the circumstances where you can actually use it. Want to unlock your phone and install an alternative operating system? Too bad, Google will check the “integrity” of your device, deem it insecure, and limit you to SMS only.

The idea of RCS is great: an open standard shepherded by a standards body, that any vendor can create an implementation for. On the technical side, RCS is a gigantic improvement over SMS, providing features like delivery and read receipts, high quality photos and video, and typing indicators. Plus, being a standard for every phone means that people don’t have to resort to third-party apps, or come to an agreement on which ones to use. As much as I would personally love for everyone to use Signal, some people prefer WhatsApp, others want Telegram, and others opt for even more obscure choices. With this, at least everyone can still chat with one another.

That’s part of the reason why I’m optimistic about Matrix. I hope that one day it becomes as easy to use as some of these other protocols, and everyone can choose a server and client they like, and chat with everyone else that way. Of course, I think we’re really far off from that kind of future.

For now, I wish there were more choices. I wish that you didn’t have to pick between Apple’s proprietary iOS app or Google’s proprietary Android app. If you’re wanting to pick up a phone to install GrapheneOS or LineageOS, and you’re banking on being able to use RCS, I would encourage you to reconsider, or at least find an alternative to use with the people in your life you want to stay in contact with. In 2026, SMS simply doesn’t cut it any more.

My FOSS Mobile Setup in 2026

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

I’ve been actively working to move away from proprietary software and big tech as much as possible. I use FOSS every day for all my desktop computing needs, and have done for the better part of two decades, but I never made the same effort when it came to mobile. Why is it that when I walk away from my laptop I stick a computer filled with proprietary software in my pocket without batting an eye?

As regular readers will know, I’ve been trying to move away from Apple products over the past several months. My iPhone was the one Apple product I was originally intending to keep, but the more I investigated opening up my mobile computing stack the clearer it became that moving away from it was not only a possibility but a necessity. Now, for the first time since childhood, I no longer own an Apple device.

My primary goal was to use some of the more open, community-developed tools and invest back into them. Not just the software itself, but also the back-end services that many of them rely on: OpenStreetMaps, OpenMeteo, etc. I was less interested in testing a hardened, more secure, privacy-focused os like GrapheneOS, although I did want to swap out some of the key components just to make sure all my keystrokes weren’t being shipped off to train some LLM somewhere, for example. And on the subject of AI, with more and more AI products being forced on users, I wanted the ability to completely disable all AI agents.

I also thought it would be nice if I could switch from an expensive mobile carrier to a less expensive one, and invest the savings back into the ecosystem by sponsoring projects and developers. I decided to give Mint Mobile a test drive alongside this project, cutting my monthly bill from $80 down to $30, and used the money from selling my iPhone to purchase a Pixel 9a outright.

I’m leaving out a misadventure I had with a cheap Motorola phone, which I purchased as an experiment to play around with unlocking bootloaders and flashing LineageOS. LineageOS was great, but I really resented not being able to use RCS messaging or tap-to-pay, and I experienced some gnarly stability issues where the entire phone would freeze, crash, then reboot at least once per day. Motorola doesn’t make it easy to re-flash the stock OS, and I made a few critical errors along the way that led me to doing a hard brick and leaving the phone in a completely inoperable, unbootable state. You live and you learn. I sold that phone for parts, and moved on.

That was a very useful experience because I got to learn a lot of new things about using adb and flashing custom roms, and I also was able to test drive a ton of new apps. That meant that when it came time to officially set up my new Pixel, I already had a good idea of how I wanted to set it all up.

I’ve landed on this suite of apps for my daily needs:

Thunderbird, for email
Etar Calendar app
Gallery (by lacoblonut01)
Gadgetbridge, paired with my Mi Band 10
Breeze Weather, which uses OpenMeteo and is able to act as the weather provider for Gadgetbridge
AntennaPod, for podcasts
Voice, for audiobooks
Booming Music, for music (I also tried Retro Music Player, but discovered it crashed every time an album finished playing, and also noticed the project is currently in need of new maintainers)
StreetComplete, to gamify contributions to OpenStreetMap
KeePassDX, a password manager
1List, to jot down items on my grocery list
CoMaps, for all my navigation needs
Capy Reader, an RSS reader. I don’t really need an RSS reader on the go, so I may uninstall it if I end up never using it
HeliBoard, an on-screen keyboard
Lawnchair, a FOSS version of the Pixel launcher that allows for a lot more customization

I’m still on the lookout for a good epub reader, although “Book’s Story” looks like it might fit that bill pretty well once I iron out some compatibility issues.

I also installed DAVx5 so I can sync my calendar and contacts, although I’m amazed that Android-based OSes still don’t have native support for CalDAV and WebDAV built-in. This has been baked into iOS for well over a decade now.

As an aside, last year I tested using CoMaps for navigation, and mentioned that I couldn’t really use it for my needs because it doesn’t give you lane assist features. Imagine my surprise when all of a sudden, with my new phone, I was going down an exit ramp and it told me to get in the right lane. What?!? Apparently lane guidance is not available in their iOS app yet, but works beautifully in the Android app.

That has been kind of a theme these past few weeks: constant little surprise delights. Another example is with the music app. I love being able to import playlists from my computer and the music app just rolls with it. Not to mention that copying data to and from with a USB cable is quick and painless, and makes managing a local library a million times easier than on the iPhone. On the whole, the software experience has been excellent. The apps are as good as, if not better than, their iOS counterparts.

That’s not to say there aren’t papercuts or rough edges here and there. Even with these papercuts though, it seems worth it to me to use as much FOSS as possible. And while I’d love for the entire operating system to be FOSS from top to bottom, the trade-off of using the stock OS with Google Play Services so I can have tap-to-pay, RCS messaging, and incredible photos is a worthwhile trade-off for now. It shouldn’t be necessary, but as with all things, I think the secret is to find the right balance. I’m now using FOSS for about 95% of my daily computing needs, including on-the-go. There’s always room for improvement, but it’s great to celebrate the win, especially right now when users’ rights and autonomy on computers is otherwise going through a bit of a rough patch.

Matrix is Our Best Hope

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

One of my favorite hobbies is dunking on Matrix. I mean, hell, they make it so easy. “Unable to decrypt message” is more of a punchline than an unexpected error message. And that’s not to mention the bizarre handling of reported security issues that have cropped up on more than one occasion so far.

There is a lot to ridicule, and I enjoy it as much as the next person, but I think it’s also important to say outright that I believe Matrix is our best hope for a cross-platform, federated, secure messaging protocol, and we should be more active in showing them support.

Working in the open is hard. Setting up a governance model from the beginning and making changes to the existing specification issue-by-issue as a community is not the easy way, but it is the right way. Building open protocols that a multitiude of clients can build around is not a trivial matter. Federation is built-in by default. They don’t require a unique identifier, like a cell phone number. And users maintain their own crytographic keys, for better and for worse.

I’m hopeful that one day Matrix, or something Matrix-shaped, will be the default way that humans send messages to one another. I know federated platforms get a lot of hate for some of the UX problems that come with the territory, but people understand email, and I don’t think it’s as big of a conceptual leap as others tend to make it out to be. I think this is something your dad, your granddad, your aunt, and your barber can all pick up and start using.

All it takes is a catalyst. Before covid, “normies” didn’t give two rips about QR codes. Everyone said they were too nerdy, too techy. One pandemic later and now you run into QR codes everywhere you go. Every phone ships with the ability to scan them, and essentially everyone knows how to use them.

I think the same could be true for something like Matrix. And I think it’s true not only for direct chats or small groups (like RCS/SMS/iMessage does now), but also for larger room-based groups, which is already one of Matrix’s big advantages. (Although I must admit, I fundamentally don’t understand the desire to use a tool like Discord, and I don’t have an intimate knowledge of the features that Discord has compared to Matrix, or what gaps there are that may need to be filled).

In any case, I always joke that I tease the people I love the most. In some ways, that’s true for technology, too. I love the idea of Matrix. And on some days, I almost love Matrix itself. I want to see it grow and thrive. The project has such a fundamental role to fill. It just has to get out of its own way first.