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.

Technology That Excites Me

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

I’m not a fan of most of the technologies that have been hyped over the past couple of years. I don’t like generative AI, and I don’t like the overall direction that most technology companies seem to be heading. That may make me sound like someone who doesn’t like technology, but on the contrary, I call myself a technologist and I’ve spent my entire life being fascinated by it. It’s just that the products most companies are building lately are either problematic or outright harmful.

(Insert “always has been” meme here)

But the truth is, in the background, under the radar, there are thousands of people working tirelessly on technology to improve the lives of others. There’s an entire slate of unsung tools and products that are making a difference. I thought it might be fun to shout out a list of the technological advancements that I find most exciting, in no particular order:

USB-C
AV1, FLAC, and other efficient royalty-free codecs
Literally all-day computing
FSR and DLSS
Multi-terabyte SSDs
Solar power + battery banks
Gigabit fiber
Immutable OSes
Flatpak + Flathub
Fwupd and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service
Password managers
Universal access to almost all knowledge and culture*
Memory-safe program languages
Federated platforms and services, like Mastodon and Matrix
Really, the entire free desktop and the entire free software stack that enables me use my computer every day!

Of course, that’s not to mention the other countless (and in many cases, more important) technological advances including vaccines, new medicines and safer medical procedures, improvements to sanitation, advances in agriculture, etc.

With so much awful in the world, it’s sometimes challenging to remember that there’s an awful lot of good in it, too. The slow march of progress continues to happen in the background, and mostly in the quiet. If anything, the Artemis II mission that just safely returned to Earth after taking humans the farthest distance away from home (so far!) is a good reminder of what can be achieved when humans work together.

Age Gates

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 20:00:00 -0400

A new bill, called the “Parents Decide Act,” has been introduced in the House that would require operating system vendors to verify the age of all its users. Lots of people more qualified than me have already had a ton to say about this topic. I might suggest this blog post from technically-good.ca, which isn’t so much about this bill as its Canadian counterpart, but which makes many great points about why age gating is such a bad idea.

Setting aside the surveillance aspects, the data siphoning, the impact to digital sovereignty efforts, and other countless downsides, I want to focus specifically on the impact I think it could have on the well-being and future prospects for young people.

Parents have a duty and a responsibility to look after their children, and teach them the skills they need to grow into happy and prosperous adults. That said, I don’t think parents’ rights completely supersede the rights of children.

Children are people. It’s not a personal belief or a feeling, it’s a fact of reality. And teenagers are especially people. Just because someone is not yet of age doesn’t mean they’re not fully capable of thinking for themselves and acting according to those thoughts. Many of them drive and have jobs and a whole slate of responsibilities. I don’t know if you can remember what it was like when you were a teenager, but there are so many stresses and deadlines and new social circumstances to navigate. Teenagers aren’t so much children as they are proto-adults.

I have met fifteen-year-olds that act more mature than most of the adults I know, and there are some adults I know who seem to act as if they never even started high school. It’s all relative, and subjective, and messy.

The thing that worries me most about these age gating measures is that it’s a direct attempt to control access to knowledge for people who are at a time in their lives when they most dearly need access to it. And specifically, to keep information away from children so they can remain sheltered and have their “information” drip-fed to them by their parents.

God forbid someone under 18 be able to use a computer, lest they learn about LGBTQ+ people, or how to have safe consensual sex, or that there are people out in the world experiencing genocide by “the good guys,” or even that the world might not have been created in seven days!

I weep for the future where young folks don’t have access to scientific or cultural information that may challenge their worldviews, or expose them to new lines of thought. I can’t imagine where my life would be today if I had didn’t have the means to access information that was otherwise kept away from me.

The internet is not a perfect place. Far from it. There are dangerous people out there. Predators. Creeps. People who bully, who get pleasure out of exposing people to harmful imagery. Not even that, most social media is absolute mental health wildfire. Doom scrolling is not healthy. So much of this stuff is plain bad for you. That goes for kids and adults.

But there are good, healthy communities online too. I’ve spent most of my life being part of them. I started in middle school!

Empowering young people to have the frameworks and skillsets to navigate these challenges, set appropriate boundaries, and identify potential harms is key for their personal growth, and the health of our society as a whole.

Computing should be a right for everyone, regardless of age. Parents have a responsibility to supervise and guide children in their computer use. Trying to shift that responsibility further up the chain will have many devastating impacts. The only solace I can take is that if this thing happens, I know that kids are incredibly resourceful at getting around censorship and technical barriers. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

You can’t stop the signal.

Checking in on the Personal Computing Dream

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

It has been almost two years since I wrote a blog post talking about how my dream computing experience has almost come into fruition. Let’s check back in and see how things are going!

Thanks to the proliferation of large SSDs, I carry every movie and TV show from my library around with me. A tiny 4TB SSD sits in a pocket, and can be connected any time I want to watch anything. With my next laptop, I’ll just get a 4TB (or larger?) drive, and keep everything on the internal storage. And improvements in video codecs, like H.265 and AV1, mean that I can keep Blu-ray and Ultra Blu-ray quality videos with me in a much smaller space footprint than ever before.

This happened! Before AI ruined the ability to acquire good hardware for relatively cheap, I managed to snag a 4TB NVMe drive for a couple hundred bucks, and now everything I own goes with me everywhere I go without needing an external drive of any kind.

The biggest source of frustration is, without question, power. Under typical use of web browsing and watching videos, I can squeak out almost four hours of use before the battery drains down to zero. I am constantly fighting with power.

This is still the one area that plagues me. I can make it through a full morning, but not through a full day.

To me, all-day computing is the holy grail. 16 hours is my threshold for what I consider all-day. Other than gaming or rendering videos, I should be able to get through a full 16 hours of web browsing, listening to music, and watching videos without needing to plug in and recharge. The M-series Macs get close to this, I’m told, although I don’t think there have been massive increases between generations of M-series chips. And there’s a report out that Dell’s new XPS 16 can get 27 hours of battery life, on an Intel chip no less! That gives me hope that within the next year or two, genuine all-day computing will be a reality, and essentially standard on all new models.

Between the new ARM-based Snapdragon processors that are starting to be the default for Windows laptops, or the new extremely powerful x86 chips that Intel announced this week, it’s just a matter of time before I will be able to buy a Linux-compatible laptop that has more power than I can realistically use.

I am now at the point of having a laptop that does everything I need it to, although I suppose I’m not yet at the limit of what I would be able to realistically use. With the AMD 7640U in my Framework laptop I am able to play every video game I want at 1080p resolution, but I suppose it would be nice to play them in 4K with quality settings on ultra. And while we’re at it, doing it on a fanless system would be pretty nice. That’s nowhere near possible right now, but CPUs and GPUs are getting better faster than games are progressing, so I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility within the next decade. That being said, this is just really a “wouldn’t it be cool if” item. I think in the spirit of the original statement, I’m already there. I’m quite happy with how my laptop performs.

All in all, despite the world generally sucking and people being down on technology thanks to all the spectacular ways companies have found to enshittify everything, not to mention the insane chip prices and availability issues for new hardware, I still think it’s the best time in history for personal computing.

Donkey Kong and Banjo-Kazooie Shrine

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

A while back I decided to let my childhood Nintendo 64 and SNES consoles go. I have so many happy, wonderful memories playing them, but for the last long while they have sat dormant in my closet, collecting dust. With modern emulation and recompilation projects like Banjo: Recompiled, there’s no reason for me to ever return to the original systems when I can play them in a much better way on modern hardware. And knowing that there are people out in the world who would be able to use them and appreciate them for years to come, I let them go.

I’m not really one for keepsakes or sentimental items, but I didn’t want to let go of my Donkey Kong and Rare game cartridges. Instead, I thought it best to put a little bit of money into buying proper cases for them, and storing them in a way that shows how much I value them. The original cardboard cases are incredibly hard to come by, and are brittle. Instead, I opted for custom molded cases that retain a lot of the original artwork while providing more protection and a better visual appearance on the shelf. And thus, my shrine was born:

Earlier this week, I received an email from the person I bought these from on eBay:

Hello,

This message is for anyone who’s purchased a video game cartridge case from my eBay store “The Game Galaxy” in the past 12 months.

I wanted to alert you that eBay has removed all 1000+ cartridge cases I had up for sale after a 3rd party (not Nintendo) complained to eBay about > the cases. 7+ years of work is now gone.

Additionally, I can still provide cases to you if you are interested at any point in the future, simply message me using any listing that is still left in my eBay store. The URL is below.

https://www.ebay.com/str/fastshippingnogames?_trksid=p2047675.m3561.l2563

I’m working on a new website so I can sell the cases there, but in the meantime, message me using the above method and I can explain how we can proceed in the near-term.

Thank you for reading all of that.

I want to sincerely thank all of you for your loyal support over the years. It meant the world to me. It was a dream come true opening and operating this retro game store and couldn’t have done it without all of you.

Be well,

Brian Yourdan The Game Galaxy

I’m not a huge fan of the concept of intellectual property, but knowing that it wasn’t even Nintendo who tried to get them shutdown makes me especially grumpy.

I don’t know anything about Brian or The Game Galaxy other than I bought a set of cases from them a few months back and have been pleased with the result, but if you’re interested in buying cases for your own cartridges I’d encourage you to consider giving them a chance. Then you, too, can have you own closet shrine!

The Graveyard

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

My grandmother and great grandmother (on my father’s side) are buried in a mostly forgotten graveyard on top of a lonely mountain, in the middle of a cow pasture.

To get there you have to make your way up a precarious, single lane road until you reach the gate. From there, you must open the gate, curry favor with the livestock, and trudge through a dirt road strewn with cow patties until you reach the second set of gates at the graveyard.

I did this trek a few days ago, my first time in twenty years or so. I was shocked to see the graveyard in such an abysmal state. Headstones were broken, knocked over, breaking down. The roof of the caretakers shed had been blown off, with only concrete blocks remaining. Tree limbs and debris were scattered over the plots.

And in at least one case, a grave was completely caved in, the outside of the vault clearly visible.

I couldn’t help but think about how sad it was for all these people to be put to rest in a spot that has been neglected and largely forgotten to time. The people here deserve better, of course, but on a long enough time scale this is the inevitable outcome for any of us who are buried. Eventually, the environment will wear down your plot, or the people who took care of it will grow old and die themselves, or the land will need to be repurposed to make way for other things.

There are two ways to avoid this fate. One, opting for a more natural burial, where your body breaks down and becomes part of the environment from which new life can spring forth. Or, your body can be cremated, and the atoms that once made you can be recycled into something new. In both cases, there is a renewal and repurposing. In my mind, this is much preferable to leaving a body behind in a sealed vault to slowly wither away.

I also think it can be a bit harder for people to let go when there’s a physical reminder of you left behind. People feel obligated to come visit, to pay respects, to leave flowers or sentimental items. Or, if they miss you and desperately want to feel near you again, they can come and believe they are closer to you at your graveside.

I don’t want any of that. When it’s my time, say goodbye to me, cremate me, and then let me go. I don’t want to be a burden or an obligation, or a reminder of things long gone.

It is my belief that the secret meaning of life, as much as there is one, is to learn how to let things go.

And the culmination of a life of learning is to finally let go of yourself.

Unpinning Terminal

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Terminal is no longer pinned to my favorites list.

I think I’ve used a terminal basically every day for the past two decades, but that was usually because it provided the most utility with the least amount of friction to accomplish certain tasks.

But we’ve reached the point where not only is it not necessary to jump to a terminal window for most things, it’s usually a less pleasant experience, and in some cases can even be slower than using a dedicated GUI to accomplish the same task.

The Bazaar application is so fast and reliable, I can do all of my app installation and updates through that, without needing to fall back.

The Parabolic app is great at downloading videos from across the web. I know it still uses yt-dlp on the backend, but it keeps me from manually invoking it from the command line and trying to remember all the various flags to capture the formats I want, plus it makes it incredibly easy to queue up a bunch of downloads at once.

Resources reliably shows me what’s running on my system, and killing misbehaving processes (a rarity in the first place) is quick and easy.

Most of my interactions with git can be done with gitg, which is a bit crusty and using end-of-life runtimes, but I’ve heard whispers that it is going to be revamped and updated to use the latest GTK version and Adwaita libraries later this year. I can limp along until then in its current state. It really does make interacting with git quit a bit easier.

The only reason I’ll need to fallback to a terminal is when locally building versions of our documentation at work, but that’s not an everyday thing.

I love that the free desktop is mature enough to not require interacting with a CLI, even for a (relative) power user.

32

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Today I turn 32 years old. There was a time when I wasn’t sure I would make it past 30. Each trip around the sun is another reminder that I’m still here.

I didn’t make it alone. I was supported by a system that helped make sure I got the medical care I needed. That system included nurses (especially dialysis nurses), doctors, surgeons, case managers, insurance specialists, and more. And I was given an incredible gift not once, but twice, thanks to two selfless and generous people.

For the first time in many, many years, I don’t have to spend this birthday feeling sick, or stuck, or sorry for myself.

Instead, I’m spending it by going outside, having a few adventures, laughing with friends and family, and eating at all my favorite restaurants.

I am grateful to see 32, and am looking forward to many more birthdays to come.

My 3D Printing Days Are Over

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0400

It’s finally gone. After years of lugging it between apartments and houses, and begrudgingly fighting with a thousand different issues, I am no longer encumbered by my 3D printer. It has been sold, and is now haunting a new owner. I hope they are able to tune it up and have a nice, easy-going life filled with hundreds of perfect prints, but I am thankful that this pestilence is no longer mine.

I’ve written before how I’m appreciative that 3D printing exists in the world, but how I personally don’t enjoy it or find it useful. I love the idea of it: that you can create, replicate, and share physical things with people across the world. In practice, though, I think 3D printing falls short of its lofty idealistic goals.

There aren’t that many practical 3D prints that you can make. Most prints are purely aesthetic, making plastic trinkets you can put on your shelf and admire. I have no need for these in my life. Occasionally, you can print a spare part to fix something that’s broken or missing. My favorite use-cases that I’ve seen have all been related to repairs, but I don’t want to ignore the fact that the product you end up with has limited function when it comes to raw strength and longevity. Often, that 3D-printed replacement part ends up breaking again, or in some cases causes further damage to the thing you were trying to fix in the first place.

I had spiritually given up on the 3D printing scene a while ago. I haven’t been printing much over the past few years, despite the printer being set up in my garage and OctoPrint being more than willing to accept a print any time I wanted to send one its way. There have been a few exceptions. I designed and printed the cake topper for our wedding, which I was proud of. The process of getting it just right resulted in more than one gray hair, but seeing the final result made me happy. There has also been the one-off thing here and there my wife has asked me to make her over the years. In fact, the reason I kept it as long as I did was to finish a set of Doorable display shelves for her.

But now our walls are full, my list of requested prints is empty, and the time is right. There has been a resurgence of 3D printing demand lately, with lots of folks using them to make bulk batches of Anti-ICE whistles. I can only hope that my 3D printer has gone to a home doing something as socially beneficial and punk-rock as that.

It wasn’t a bad 3D printer. It wasn’t faulty. There have been lots of new features and new innovations that have come out in the decade or so since the Ender 3 Pro was first introduced, but fundamentally it is as capable today as it ever was. It’s just ornery. Because of that, I have no problem setting it free and finding it somewhere new to live.

But I am thankful to be free of the maintenance, free of the tinkering, and free of the clutter. So long!

The Sandwich

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 14:05:00 -0400

For the first time in my life, I cried at a sandwich today.

I suppose it’s depression, or something similar to it, but for a while now I’ve been feeling like I have a difficult time feeling things anymore. Birthdays don’t feel like birthdays. Christmas doesn’t feel like Christmas. And most new experiences just feel like watered-down, less vibrant rehashes of things I’ve already done.

But today, that wasn’t true.

Near my parents’ old house there is a small, hole-in-the-wall kind of place that serves burgers and sandwiches. It’s your basic rural American hometown diner kind of place. But it just so happens that they make a club sandwich that is to die for. I used to eat them all the time in my teens and twenties, but ever since my parents moved out of that area, I haven’t had a single one.

Sometimes I crave that sandwich. It’ll be all I can think about. I lust after it. I sit and remember how good it was, and think to myself, it’s probably not that good anymore, or maybe I am just looking back with rose-tinted glasses. Maybe it was never that good to begin with?

Today I decided to take the drive and find out for myself. I walked up to the counter, placed my order, and a couple minutes later they were calling for me to pick it up.

When I first saw it I could have bawled. It was beautiful. Picturesque. Even better than I remembered it in my mind. If anything, this looked more delicious than it ever had before. And once I tasted it? Exactly like I remembered. Exactly as good. Perfect, in every way.

I sat at the table and tried to hold back tears. I failed. This wasn’t just a sandwich. This was a reminder that I can still feel things. And while some things are lost to time, or perhaps not as good as you remember them, there really are things out in the world that are waiting for you to find them again. And when you do, you’ll find you haven’t really lost anything. They say that no man ever steps in the same river twice; for he is not the same man, and it is not the same river. But today, for just a few minutes, I was the same guy I used to be, and that was the exact same sandwich.

eBay

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 20:00:00 -0500

For a long while, I’ve been looking for something that could replace Amazon for most of my miscellaneous purchases that aren’t available in brick and mortar stores. It never really occurred to me that eBay might actually be the exact thing I was looking for.

Of course, I’ve been familiar with eBay for as long as I can recall. I’ve used it many times to sell things, but had never really used it to buy things before.

A few weeks ago I decided I needed to buy some cases to protect and display the handful of SNES and Nintendo 64 game cartridges I keep around (some of the few purely sentimental items I allow myself to hold on to), and eBay was the natural choice to look for options. The original cases are almost impossible to find, and those that do still exist cost hundreds of dollars. That said, I found someone making custom plastic cases based on the original box art, and decided to give them a try. I’m happy to report that I’m very pleased with the results.

This little foray into the world of eBay unlocked something in my mind. I decided to look up an item I’ve had on my Amazon wishlist for a while. To my surprise, I found an open box (but new!) listing for less than half the price of what Amazon was charging for a new item.

I repeated this a little later, when I needed to replace a very old (and very basic) multimeter that had finally bit the dust. I searched on eBay, and found a screaming deal on a relatively high quality (for my needs) multimeter.

Now, I find myself defaulting to eBay first, then resorting to other means if and only if I’m not able to find something there (and even then, I only fallback to Amazon as a very last resort).

I’m not sure why I’ve had such a mental block against using eBay, but the past handful of purchases have been affordable and provided excellent experiences! Plus, when you buy open box or used items, you’re saving things from ending up in the landfill. That’s a win-win!

Gapless vs. Euphonica

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:00:00 -0500

Every music player I have tried on GNOME is lacking in one area or another. Since my perfect music player doesn’t exist, I thought it might be of interest to say what I do and don’t like about the two primary apps that I tend to jump between: Euphonica and Gapless.

Generally, I prefer Euphonica. As someone who likes to listen to entire albums from start to finish, I find that viewing an album and queuing it up for play is a much better experience there.

I also prefer its “now playing” screen. I love that it tells me the quality details about the song I’m listening to. I like that I can shuffle directly from it, and even adjust features like crossfading and ReplayGain. Plus, I like the larger album art. I could take or leave the audio waveforms, but they are a nice touch.

It’s also nice that you can set cover art for an entire playlist.

The thing I dislike most about it is the fact that it requires an mpd server to work. I suppose most folks who use Euphonica are connecting to an mpd sever remotely, but I’ve set one up locally on my laptop (only available to localhost) purely for using with Euphonica. It was a small pain to set up, but what really annoys me about it is that it’s not always consistent about finding or displaying music that should be available. Occasionally songs or albums will be invisible from the library, but they’re so few and far between it’s hard to catch. In some cases I’ll realize an album is missing, but if I look at it through the artist view and then look at the individual songs list, I’ll find an entire album’s songs without the album showing up in the list. I suspect this is a shortcoming of Euphonica itself rather than mpd, but because the two are so intrinsically linked, it would take a decent amount of investigation to figure out.

I also miss being able to just see a flat-out list of every song in my library. I often just like to shuffle through everything, and I’ve not yet found a way to do so here.

Gapless, on the other hand, is a lot more minimal. This is both good and bad. I like that it just pulls from your local music library and handles all that functionality itself without requiring a separate server. So far it has reliably pulled in all my music. It automatically detects my saved playlists in a standard format. The music playback is great.

It’s also wicked fast. It launches almost instantly, playback happens as soon as you click play, and navigating the library has no delays.

It’s just missing the little bells and whistles that I mentioned that I like about Euphonica: the larger album art, the quality/format details, the shuffle buttons, the individual album views, etc.

But what bothers me the most about Gapless is the way that it handles the concept of a queue. When you play an album it pulls those tracks out of a queue, but still shows every song in your library within it. If you try to shuffle all your tracks but then play an album, it’s like it un-shuffles just the songs from the album, so in the middle there will just be 15 songs by the same artist in album order.

Sometimes playing individual tracks will clear the queue. Sometimes it appends. It’s just confusing to me, I simply don’t comprehend how the queue functions. The only time the queue behavior makes sense to me is when I’m playing music from a playlist.

If I could, I’d merge the best of both apps together. I feel like each excels in the exact ways the other falls short, so together it’s a complete experience.

Realistically, I think if Gapless were to make just a few tweaks it would be a perfect app. Whereas I think Euphonica, while my current favorite, is more fundamentally flawed in its library management.

Still, I really like both apps, and use them every single day. Maybe one day I’ll give up on one and settle on a single tool. Today is not that day, though.