Notes

Gem.coop is a new server for sourcing Ruby gems. It's easy to switch.

I switched because Ruby Central's actions left me feeling uncomfortable. Supporting the folk who are doing the work rather than, whatever Ruby Central does, feels better and better aligns with my values.

  -source "https://rubygems.org"
  +source "https://gem.coop"

We aim for fast, simple hosting, that is compatible with Bundler but optimized for the next generation. It’s built for the community by the former maintainers and operators of RubyGems.org.

A website is a garden to tend to, and the IndieWeb is a guide for how to grow a garden that yields higher quality. Or something like that. Anyway, lots of updates here.

Templates have been tidied up. The website structure has revealed itself to me and struturally I am quite happy with it.
Microformats have been added where appropriate.
Webmentions are now being fetched and displayed.
HTML comments have been added to the source code to help not only me remember what I am doing, but to help others who are learning how to build websites.
Tailwind CSS has been removed

There is now a page where I document some of the tools and processes I am developing to support my participation in the indieweb.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy A good resource to support reading and learning philosophy books. They can be a lot. The SEP is a translator for the language of philosophy, a resource that provides a trusted, academic-level overview of key terms, thinkers, and schools of thought.

The affinity news kinda sucks. On the surface it looks like a good deal but there is a lot of historical precedence that this is just another step on a path to full enshittification of the software suite. This is not a move that will benefit users long term. Then again, such is the cycle of software.

As Matthias Ott explains very well, design tools come and go. Affinity tools have been fucking awesome for me for years. And they will continue to work fine for a while. I will set my sights on other tools soon. Stay curious and have a beginners mind.

Ruby community is in a bit of a crisis. RubyCentral has performed a hostile takeover of RubyGems and Bundler. You can read a pretty non-biased accounting of what transpired here. I, however, am full of bias. I just do not trust RubyCentral. I love programming with Ruby. It’s a joy. Watching what transpired with RubyCentral, and learning more about some of the public faces of popular Ruby projects, has just turned me off.

The events have also widened my view of the community - hanami looks incredible, i have also been tinkering with roda. And to be real, I can just write ruby without participating in rails, rubycentral, shopify, etc. We don’t need them. I certainly don’t. I am very fortunate in that regard.

DevOps is never a straight line. It's one rabbit hole after another. Log ingestion and tracing, turning all the knobs and dials and fiddly bits, digging into metrics, only to find three more things to learn.

Today's rabbit hole was digging into PHP app performance + Azure, and learning that I have a some things to learn in regards to OpenTelemetry + PHP instrumentation.

Tonight is continuing to learn Kubernetes to round out some Containerization study.

Continuous Learning really is continuous and I wouldnt have it any other way.

https://マリウス.com/a-word-on-omarchy/ Excellent review of Omarchy. I admit I was falling for the hype but after running it for a few days I just, didn't care for it. This article breaks it down and explains all of the little ways that Omarchy is just not that good. The lesson here is to just install Arch Linux and all the tools you need. Also, wow I love this website! https://マリウス.com/.

I love containers because they don’t just change how I build, they change how teams ship. Reliability at every stage, fewer blockers, more focus on the work that matters. Containerization is not just tech for me. It is trust. It is speed. It is peace of mind.

I literally couldn't imagine _not_ using containers at this point.

https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/ An incredible dive into why you don't need, or really don't want, React for your next web project. I agree with mostly everything here. What's stood out is that we offload too much to user machines, and in fact, put too much emphasis on the developer experience and organizational baggage than on real user needs. Also, use hotwire or htmx.

https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/terminal Joplin is a neat note-taking app. Also does "todos". Has a CLI which is pretty useful if you spend a lot of time on the command line. I've started tinkering with the tool and it's neat. I think if you version control the data this becomes even more useful.

https://norsemythologist.com/ Pretty fun site I found when watching American Gods and looking up why Wednesday was named such. I knew that Thursday was "Thor's Day," but did not know Wednesday is Odin's Day. Tuesday is for Tyr. Sunday and Monday are named for the Sun and the Moon. Friday is Odins wife Frigg. Interesting stuff, especially as I am slowly digging into Anglo-Saxon paganism, which shares some roots in Norse as well.

https://thetruesize.com Want to know how big our world's land masses really are? Fun site giving you the real scale of the world's countries in comparison to each other.

https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2025-04-21-this-blog-is-hosted-on-a-nintendo-wii/ They are hosting their site on a Nintendo Wii. I love it. So fun!

https://modernagejournal.com/notes-toward-the-definition-of-kitsch/249336/ I have been learning about kitsch, what makes art kitsch, what makes art "art," and how all of this craft evolves. What was avant-garde in the past could be kitsch today. Or hell, even just taking someone's real "art" and mass-reproducing it beyond reason can dilute the work so much it falls into kitsch. The Mona Lisa, for example. It's like right on the edge and it's just now a de facto avatar of "art" without meaning.

I started reading the Anxious Generation today and it is fascinating! Like, you just _know_ that phones are a problem, it's obvious, but what I realize now is less obvious is just _how_ they are a problem. To sum it up as I understand it so far; social media has been engineering to bypass crucial and important learning paths for youth during the most sensitive and important points in their development as members of society.

Spring is here! Backyard is setup. I will now live outside until November. Our poor apricot tree has blossomed, it survives another year. Hoping we get some fruit :)

Severance season 2 finale was meh. I'm bored by vibes shows and intentionally vague dialog. Season 2 had some good moments but after 3 years, I really wanted something more. I had expectations and it did not live up to them. That's on me.

I spent most of March sick. Literally 3 weeks just feel like they disappeared. It's been disorienting coming back; I celebrated a birthday, the time changed, and now it's spring. All of that is a blur.

I am learning how to incorporate AI into my day to day in more meaningful and impactful ways. Next up is to work with MCP servers to fine tune. It's all very fun. At the same time I want to find more ways to avoid touching computer. Hard to do when everything is computer.