Wandering in Wondering

Code, Coffee, Photography, and Travel

A Word On Mechanical Keyboards

Introduction I’ve been using mechanical keyboards for nearly as long as I’ve been using computers. When I was a still a little boy, my parents got an IBM PS/1 with a 486, and most importantly the ubiquitious IBM Model M keyboard. I still have that keyboard and used it for years until I was no longer able to use a keyboard with a PS/2 connector. For as long as I’ve been using computers, part of the visceral nature of putting thought to page or writing code was connected with the tactile feel and clicky sound of a mechanical keyboard.

Ditching Google Analytics for GoatCounter

Analytics Doesn’t Require Tracking As a very fast follow to my previous post, I’ve now ditched Google Analytics as well. As I noted there, I was interested in privacy-respecting alternatives, so I found quite a few interesting ones. The options I considered were Plausible, Offen, and GoatCounter. I ended up choosing GoatCounter because it provides a free SaaS tier for strictly personal use websites, which this is. Plausible looks super slick, but is $4/mo even for my minimal traffic, which is almost what I pay every month for hosting.

Replacing Disqus with Commento.io

If You’re Not The Customer, Then You’re The Product You’ve probably heard this statement before, and I don’t know that it’s always true, but it’s become something of an axiom in the web/internet space. It’s true enough in the ways that matter, though, and that brings us to the topic of the day. Today a post made it to the front page of HackerNews written by Supun Kavinda on his blog entitled “Disqus, the dark commenting system”.

A COVID Safe Valentines Day Plan

Introduction This year definitely is operating under some new restrictions. With COVID-19 still looming and vaccinations not yet distributed widely, it’s important to keep in mind keeping social distance and staying out of doors. That said, I’m sure I’m just like many people in my desire to get out of the house. My girlfriend and I decided that instead of gifts this year we’d plan COVID safe experiences for Valentine’s Day.

2020: Year in Review

Howdy all, It’s been one year since I wrote my last update on the blog. I am hoping to become more active in the near-term future as I’m in progress (albeit slowly) of migrating my site to a new server so I can expand it by adding new sections to cover my interest in cars/racing and cooking. In the process, I’m also planning on reducing my time on social media and likely removing my Facebook account.

2019: Year in Review

Howdy all, It’s been a long time since I’ve posted an update to my blog. As you might have gathered from that I’ve been busy and kind of forgot about writing for awhile. I originally had a huge post planned to kick things off again with all sorts of ideas, but instead I’m just going to write something that’s a bit word salad in the organization that comes to mind, and we’ll see how long it is when I get to the end.

Remote Year Darién - Is This a Conclusion?

Many of my fellow remotes have already written something about their experiences during the year and come to some conclusion about the meaning of it all. The honest truth for me though is that I don’t know what it means to me yet. My experience was very different from most of the people in our group, and yet I can’t help but see that some of the things I’m slowly coming to conclude align pretty strongly with others.

RY Darién Update - New Years in Bogota

Happy New Years! First of all, welcome to 2017. 2016 was an interesting year for me in many ways and a really positive experience, I hope the same can be said for all of my readers. I’m writing this from my apartment in Bogota, Colombia as I begin Month #8 of Remote Year - Darién. When I think about last year and what sort of theme it represented in my life, I can only categorize it with the term “Discovery”.

Setting up fgallery on OS X with Homebrew

How’d I Pick fgallery Anyway? Currently this site is being generated offline as a series of static images, HTML, CSS, and JS files that get served almost entirely out of cache through the CDN provided by Cloudflare. This is made possible by a piece of software called Hugo. Hugo takes a series of Markdown formatted text files, some HTML/CSS/JS templates, and a theme made of HTML/CSS/JS and generates this entire site each time I run the command hugo inside my site repository.

RY Darién Update - September Interlude: A Love Poem for Pastéis de Nata

Where Have I Been? It’s been awhile since I’ve last written anything here and I apologize for that. I’ve had a few people ask me when I was going to post something again. The truth is, I’ve been spending a lot of time working. When I haven’t been working I’ve been reading and sometimes thinking, although reading quite a bit more than thinking. I’ve thought a lot about the experiences I’ve been having on my journey and what it means to me as a person, what it means to us as a group.