Almost a year ago, I had posted that I had been happily using mutt and davmail for all my mail. I was mostly happy with it, but doing calendar appointments with people, getting HTML emails, and too many people sending me screenshots, I ended up going back to Thunderbird.

Another …

When I bought my new Keychron K8 pro keyboard, I was stuck between choosing the "red" or "brown" switches. Based on many things I found around the web, it seemed like the brown ones would suit nicely. When I got my keyboard, I fell in love with the feel of …

One of the main reasons I wanted the Keycron K8 pro instead of any of the other Keychron options was the QMK firmware. Updating macros, and normal keys using VIA is handy, but doesn't let you do the more complicated things like MOD-TAP which I wanted for my CAPSLOCK key …

I have spent most of my space on this blog bitching about MS stuff. I can (and do) go on forever about that stuff. Instead, today I am going to talk about something that is awesome. And that is my new keyboard.

You can read my life story about keyboards …

Like many Microsoft products, I do not care for OneNote at all. I dislike the text placement box, I hate the organization that is vaguely skeuomorphic and mimics a physical notebook. I just don't like it. But today I am going to present some absolute stupidity. This stupidity may be …

For quite a while, I have been running an elasticsearch cluster of 5 nodes internally. They all talk to each other happily, but there is no authentication. I wanted to add some security with SSL and authentication. I checked out the elastic documentation, and the thought of managing a bunch …

I have loved Slack and have used it for a very long time. It is the standard by which I judge all other chat platforms. While it's certainly not perfect, it's as close to perfect as any of the options out there, and the mobile client in particular is stellar …

For the longest time, I had been against "dark" themes on my computer. Much of the time the colors were just not optimized and so many things were hard to see because of that. That was a long time ago, and now dark themes have gotten more love than they …

I have been toying with IPFS for quite a while. Typically just hosting decentralized file shares for things that I post to reddit. Today I decided "since I am publishing arachnitech.com via pelican, it is already a static site, and could pretty easily be pushed to IPFS. So here's …

For about 7 years, I have managed my dotfiles from my home directory in a github repo and symlinked the files on the system where I wanted to use them. I recently had a catastrophic system upgrade (of my own doing) and had to rebuild a lot of my home …

Email is one of those "necessary evils" in the world. There is pretty much no way around it, though things like Teams tries (and fails because it's a giant POS). Until Teams, Outlook was my most-hated MS creation. I think it is a jumbled mess of crap that complicates email …

One of the things I am constantly trying to do better is note taking. I do generally prefer to take notes on paper, but I like the accessiblity of things being digital. I'm also a huge nerd, so end up trying to make digital work. I have tried various things …

After playing with the cactus comments a little bit yesterday, I started playing with themes for this site. Since it takes modifying each theme to get the comments to work, I created a little utility to automatically modify pelican themes to use cactus.chat.

All of the details are on …

Cactus Chat is live!

So this is the commenting system I alluded to in my last post. Today it went live, and I was able to modify the pelican template system to take advantage of it, and host it on my homeserver. So now all the comments are self-hosted, which …

Over the weekend I saw an article about Disqus being filled with all kinds of client tracking hooks. I set up Disqus as a comment system for this blog ages ago and never looked back. It seems a lot has cchanged and my goal is to be self-sufficient and not …

Testing an embed of a matrix live-blog bot thingy

Creating rules with OPNSense to allow for a private GTA lobby

Well another bunch of time has passed since I posted anything here. But I have a new project that I am hoping to share information that I find. My wife got me a 3D printer for Christmas. Specifically the Xvico X3S. Sadly, a part broke within the first couple days …

It's been a while

Float Switches

Power Final

rdio and linux part II

Relay Update

An update on progress

Embedded computing

Fun with python sockets

Testing new blog software

I have been using [Rdio](http://www.rdio.com) for about a year now. While it has some holes with older music, all-in-all I am very happy with the service.

Rdio uses a very capable web player so you can play your music in your browser.  That's perfect, however the …