Brent

Brent

20
Jan

Now Is Usually A Bad Time

For the 2,922nd day in a row, it's the stupidest day in American history. I am spending the day addressing save the dates for my wedding and slow-cooking some short rib. It feels strange to be going about my usual business during world-historical moments, but since "weeks where decades happen" have been happening with an alarming regularity for quite some time, it seems like the only thing to do.

In retrospect this was a pretty bad week to decide to give Bluesky a shot. I used Skybridge to import my old follows from Twitter (which was a pretty smooth

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3 min read
personal history 100days
19
Jan

Hierarchy Of Needs

As I attempt to re-orient my internal compass towards prioritizing my mental and physical well-being and close relationships, I've been thinking a lot about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It's been a popular meme format for the last few years, but it may shock you to learn that it's an actual psychological theory from the 50s!

This is far from a rigorous scientific concept, and Maslow himself was kind of a weird asshole - he came up with the pyramid by studying "self-actualizing" people, believing that studying struggling people could be of no use:

"The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and
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4 min read
personal Health 100days
18
Jan

Checking Disk Space On An Ubuntu Server

 
du -cha --max-depth=1 / | grep -E "M|G"

From this StackOverflow answer - ncdu is also a good tool for this, allegedly, but its output didn't really seem to have any correlation to the actual folders on my server. I feel like I have to do this once a year because of storage issues and always forget, so hopefully this serves as a reminder going forward. Turns out snap is the culprit, as per usual. In a fit of pique I uninstalled snap and all of its files, and lo and behold I'm able to finally update Ghost!

til command-line linux note
18
Jan

Setting Up Tags and Post Previews In A Ghost Theme

After thinking through the appeal of boring technology yesterday, I've decided to stick with Ghost for my blog for the time being and actually, you know, put in the time to learn its theming system rather than start from scratch with something new. Ghost meets a lot of my criteria for my personal site: open source, self-hosted, and a pretty decent existing ecosystem. I'm not sure if it's quite at the level of boring that something like Django or Postgres is - things tend to break pretty badly whenever I update it, still - but it's been around for a

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4 min read
ghost personal-site handlebars 100days