Syncthing + Obsidian
Mar 31, 2025
Obsidian offers a paid syncing service, and it’s probably well worth what they’re charging for it, but I had heard really good things about Syncthing so I decided to give it a shot.
Apple Ecosystem One of the reasons I gravitated to Obsidian is that it is truly cross-platform. I am writing these words on a super cheap ThinkPad I got off of ebay, running the most excellent Zorin OS. If you are only using iPhones, iPads, and Macs, you don’t really need to do anything special, because Obsidian for iOS is going to automatically save your notes to iCloud, and when you open Obsidian on your Mac, you browse to iCloud / Obsidian and open one of your vaults.
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Reliable Systems Don't Happen by Accident
Dec 04, 2020
While we’re designing intricate systems, beginning with the happy path can be a helpful simplification—but it’s a big mistake to design only for the happy path. While it’s true for any computer program, our problems multiply when we interconnect things in the cloud. Here’s a partial list of things that go wrong all the time:
Something you want to reach over the network is unreachable. Something you want to reach over the network is unusually slow.
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Studying for the AWS Solutions Architect Professional Cert
Dec 07, 2017
I’ve been studying to take the AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam, and it is hard.
I’ve been good at test-taking in the past, but I’m not going to just skate through this one. I took the practice exam they have for $40, and I bombed it pretty hard. But they did identify areas of weakness to enable me to focus my study.
Here’s a partial list of topics you have to know well to get this certification:
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Hosting a Blog on Raspberry Pi
Mar 23, 2015
As of this writing, my blog is hosted entirely on a cute little Raspberry Pi downstairs in my family room. There are a million ways to publish a blog; I’ll tell you how I did this one.
Please note that this is not the easiest or the most reliable (or even cheapest) way to publish a blog. For that, just sign up at https://wordpress.com or https://www.blogger.com. Putting a blog on your Raspberry Pi is for you if you like DIY projects, you like making things work, and you don’t mind your blog going offline when your cat pulls out the power cord.
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The Fog of War
Mar 21, 2015
I enjoyed reading @jessitron’s blog post Estimates and Our Brain. Just about any software engineer will tell you that precisely predicting when we’ll be finished with anything is virtually impossible. This is plenty frustrating for us, but it’s even more vexing for the people who are not software developers, but have a vested interest in knowing when we’re going to be done.
The best treatment of this subject I have ever read is in the excellent book Waltzing With Bears by DeMarco and Lister (of Peopleware fame).
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Emacs Live
Mar 21, 2015
Sam Aaron is an amazing guy. We owe him a debt of gratitude for creating Sonic Pi, which is a way of making music through programming, is distributed with every Raspberry Pi, and is a fresh approach to teaching kids how to think in code while having a blast doing it.
But I’m here to talk about Emacs Live, which is a brilliant set of pre-configured packages that let you tap into the power of emacs very quickly.
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