100days

11
Apr

We Should Still Dream Of The Stars

We've re-entered the semi-annual cycle of trend pieces about Silicon Valley freaks trying to make their own city - this time, with Esmeralda, a planned walkable small town for "creative, high-agency people". Sidebar here that I really do not like the term "high-agency". I assume this is manager speak for rich people since as far as I can tell the primary driver of how much agency you have in America is how much money you have. Agency is not a property that is intrinsically available in greater or lesser quantities based on the type of person you are, it is

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3 min read
10
Apr

At least this time I have a good reason

Most of my earliest memories are of not being able to breathe. I had really severe asthma and had to use a dorky breathing device called a nebulizer for a couple of hours a day or I would have an asthma attack. Anytime I missed using the nebulizer or sometimes just because I was asleep I would have an attack and when I had an attack there was a solid chance I'd end up in the hospital. I actually ended up really liking the hospital. My mom was a health nut and we weren't allowed to watch TV so for

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4 min read
09
Apr

Provisioning a Red Hat VirtualBox VM With Vagrant

In what I hope will be the last entry in the "Brent learns the basics of VM provisioning" series, I finally moved to using Hashicorp's Vagrant yesterday. I'm glad I took the time to mess around in VirtualBox itself first - I always like understanding what I'm working with before I move to abstractions - but Vagrant makes it significantly easier. Vagrant sets up SSH in your VM by default, which is a nice time-saver, and generally makes the process of automating VM setup quick and easy. Behold:

1) Install Vagrant & VirtualBox.

2) In your project folder, add the

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1 min read
08
Apr

Setting Up Port Forwarding on a VirtualBox RedHat VM With A NAT Network Adapter

OK, quickly discovered that I was less brilliant than I thought yesterday. It appears that for the functionality I wanted (both the ability to SSH into the VM and to port forward from my local machine to an application running on the VM) I need to use a NAT and not a bridge network.

I spent a while struggling with this and discovered that to assign your VM to the standard 10.0.2.* range and successfully connect to the internet, a NAT drive should be your first network adapter. I'd initially had a bridge network as Adapter 1 and

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3 min read
05
Apr

Things I Am Consuming: 4.5.2025

It's the weekend, I've got no brilliant tech tutorials in my pocket and I have no particular desire to write about societal collapse for at least a little bit. So I'm just gonna write about some stuff I enjoyed this week. I've finally burned out on videogames for a bit after spending a few weeks housing my backlog of visual novels and I'm finally getting back on my book/show/movie shit. There appears to be a throughline of lore-heavy nerd escapism which frankly I deserve.

“Children are dying."
Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who
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3 min read