date: Tue Apr 28 21:52:05 CEST 2026

For years now I’ve spent hours and hours using Marco Arment’s Podcast Player. Years.

I’m switching back to Apple Podcasts.

The UX of Apple Podcasts has sucked for years. It’s hard to get right. It’s a small device. There’s a lot of content. There’s a lot to pack in a small area. But for the most part Overcast gets it right even though I’ve had some wierd UI glitches since the rewrite.

Overcast has one main advantage over Apple Podcasts:

1. Smart Speed. It’s really great. I can set it to something like 1.5x but effectively can get 2x speeds with no loss of fidelity.

It’s really, really good. And I can tell Marco put a ton of time into it.

You can’t beat “built-in”

Apple Podcasts is native. For all the good and bad that that entails. It just works. It’s built-in. Like the userland of FreeBSD it’s maintained by the same folks that write the kernel and other parts of the OS – there’s a holistic consistency that I really like.

Now don’t get me wrong. Had there not been upstarts doing really compelling things with podcasting there’d not be work happening in Apple Podcasts to make it better. Competition is still the best thing for companies and products. Had Spotify not moved into video podcasting or Youtube doing the same I don’t think Apple would have added the same to the Apple Podcast app.

And the UX for playlists is dumb. The Apple Podcast folks think you just channel-surf podcasts and episodes. I subscribe to feeds I love and listen to the episodes as soon as they drop.

That can be done with their concept of “stations” which I can only liken to an Overcast smart-playlist – I think. Anyway it serves as a servicable way to do playlists.

But that’s not the killer feature.

For the longest time I’ve wanted a way to quickly skip past the ads, I get that now with AI generated chapters

Currently Apple Podcasts AI generated chapters chunks – at least for the podcasts I listen to – chapters such that when one ends it includes the segment ending ad reads such that I can easily move to the next chapter and skip the ad!

You can do this same sort of thing in Overcast with the kareoke style transcripts but I have to search for it with chapters I can just switch to the next one.

I’m sure they’ll update it so that if podcasts ship their own chapters (or this must already exist idk) then this is moot, and also train the AI to not chunk around the ads … but until that happens (and I think there’s a chance that it will remain as is because Apple doesn’t care) Apple Podcasts is my new player of choice.

Whichever chip you choose, the rest of the Framework 13 package is as good as it ever was. This remains my favorite laptop of at least the last decade. I've been running one for over a year now, and combined with Omakub + Neovim, it's the first machine in forever where I've actually enjoyed programming on a 13" screen. The 3:2 aspect ratio combined with Linux's superb multiple desktops that switch with 0ms lag and no animations means I barely miss the trusted 6K Apple XDR screen when working away from the desk.

date: Thu Jan 9 22:14:27 CET 2025

1. You Don’t Need To Buy A Ticket On A Bus

It seems that after COVID-19 they just don’t care anymore. During COVID the bus drivers (maybe to do with distancing) stopped enforcing (if they did previously at all) the need to have a valid ticket.

Now of course most Germans are law-abiding, rule-following citizens and always have a valid pass or validate their passes when they get onboard. And while I’ve got a Germany-wide bus pass I never see ticket checkers on the busses or see that the bus drivers seem to care to check or enforce it.

So… if a rule or law that isn’t enforced is it is it really a law?

Note: This is not the case on trains. Regional, inter-city, etc., buy or have a valid ticket else you’ll get dinged.

2. In 2025 You Still Need Cash

Yup. Most places still prefer cash. Though it’s getting better. It’s good to carry 10-20 euros with you and 5 or so euros in coins as you never know when you might need a toilet that takes only coins or want a shopping cart that takes a 25-cent piece as a deposit to unlock.

The fees on card processing really does hurt folks. Still I, personally, find paying by card or even better with Apple Pay far more enjoyable. I would even pay extra to have this luxury. Pass 100% of the card fees on to me. Have two sets of prices. One for card payers like myself and a cash one. Double the card processing fee and pass 100% of it onto me. I’d still be happy to be able to use a card at that point. Anyway, yes, it’s still very much a cash-is-king place. Again, I do see it easing just slowly.

There was an effort to have a Germany-wide Electronic Cash system (EC, EC Karte), but I think that’s dying. Some places have card readers that only work with these special EC cards and will refuse to process your Mastercard debit card or credit card for example so it’s best to just confirm.

I often ask: “Kann ich mit karte bezahlen?” (Can I pay with card?) And they’ll sometimes say, yes but “ab 10 euro” (Starting at 10 euros) or “EC Karte” and then you’ll know you’ll need cash or to pull out your EC card.

3. Even The Gas Stations Have Good Baked Goods

There’s an Aral gas station near my place. Our apartment is a 30 second walk to it. I go there far too often. They don’t make their croissants or their pretzles from scratch but they do bake them daily. They come by the box frozen, of course, but whoever makes the dough and freezes them does a really good job because while they’ll never put an French bakery out of business, my wife and I have both been to Paris, and these gas-station croissants are really good.

I’m actually quite fond of the pretzels, too.

4. Most People Don’t Care If You Don’t / Can’t Speak German

This has been both a boon and a crutch for us. 7 years in Germany and we still don’t speak the language fluently. It’s a blatant sign of our priviledge: We could easily return home to the states which is predominantly English speaking or emigrate to most anywhere else in Western Europe because of our passpoort and visas and provided I got a good job and visa sponsorship likely be okay not being able to speak the local language.

We do have goals to change that, of course, but 7 years in … the baysian in me thinks it’s not going to happen…

I think if we were to do this all over again I’d have actively sought roles in Amsterdam instead of Berlin. It’s a far more prevalant English speaking place and we liked it a lot when we were there on vacation. We kept thinking: “We could live here … we should have moved here…”

5. The City Says It’s Dog Friendly; It Isn’t

Oh boy this might just be the biggest lie we were told. The city has a number of parks. Most of which are open to the public (as any good park should be) and to dogs. BUT the parks in the city – this oh, so very dog friendly city – dogs must be on leash (that’s fine), but areas or at times when there’s no people around it’s technically illegal for the dogs to be off-leash. And I get that. You never know if a dog is well mannered, well trained, a threat, etc. Some owners do better or worse jobs with their dogs protecting the public by muzzling their dogs if they need to… etc., etc., BUT in a city that supposedly loves dogs and during times where the parks are nearly empty you’ll still have either the Parks Police or the locals reprimanding you or in the case of the police fining you for having your dog off leash or running around.

I’ve been told that – at least the parks located near our apartment – that the parks are animal sanctuaries, that our dogs running around and chasing the rabbits is harming the local wildlife. And when they defecate and I’ve hesitated by a few seconds getting the plastic poop bags out I am scolded that I am ruining the area for everyone else.

“Where will we put our picnic blankets?! Where will we sunbathe? The Horror!”

To which I always retort: “I have a poop bag, I am cleaning it up! Give me a sec”

And: “You don’t see the hypodermic needles on the ground or in the bushes? You don’t see the guy with the metal spoon cooking heroin? Or the unhoused defecating in the bushes? That doesn’t harm the local wildlife? Not to mention the foxes and birds-of-prey that kill untold rabbits? (My dogs might chase a rabbit but I do everything in my power to stop them and they haven’t chased any rabbits of late because in the city we keep them on tight leashes, now anyway)”

The locals will say take your dogs to the Grunwald (Green Forest). It’s a forest of hundreds of acres where the dogs are able to roam free. And we do. It’s just far (5 or more km from us and we don’t have a car here though car-on-demand services are nice) so going by bus is a time sink and it has it’s own risks.

There is a really cool fenced, off-leash park (the only one I know of) at Halemweg that we do take the dogs to but it’s so out of the way that it’s a weekend or after work during the summer only thing.

6. Europe Is Where Customer Service Went And Died; It Died Twice In Germany And Thrice In Berlin

Ok, I am being a bit dramatic. It might not be that bad. But it’s stereotypically pretty terrible. And it’s probably a good thing. Wait staff make decent wages here and have access to healthcare so they’re not desperate for tips like they might be in the US.

That being said – and some people prefer it this way, that they’re not bothered when shopping – we’ve often gotten the impression that the waiters at busy, highly rated restaurants are tolerating us. It’s just very odd.

Not too many days back we were window shopping and as we are want to do we window-shop failed and I saw something I liked and entered the store. The proprietor was having a conversation with an employee about some holiday the employee had taken and we looked around.

I could tell there was a sale but I couldn’t make out what was on sale or what wasn’t. Either way I was too shy to ask to interrupt or for whatever reason – we were the only two shoppers in the store at the time – I thought we’d get a welcome and here’s what the sale is and “let me know if you have any questions” … we got none of that. So 6-minutes later we left.

I sound high-maintainence I know but this is a trend you’ll notice if you’re coming from a more in-your-face, kill-you-with-over-the-top-customer-service place like the US which is where we hail from.

You get used to it.

7. Sarcasm Isn’t A Recognizable Thing Here (At Least Not When Attempted In English)

I’m probably just a crap comedian (I am) but double-entandres, or sarcasm just doesn’t register here. And that’s okay. English is sometimes someone’s third or fourth language. It’s just even among my coworkers who are basically native English speakers (having spoken it for many years, consume English media, comedy, movies, music etc.,) whenever I am being self-deprecating or come up with something I think might be witty or sarcastic the looks are often deer-in-headlights, things don’t register. I find it funny now. I laugh at myself and just think I might actually not be funny (You’re not.) but, yeah, trying to be funny in the workplace doesn’t work. At least not for me.

8. Hamburg Sucks, Avoid It

Now, now I still have friends there and there are places we do love to eat there … and the Elbe river is beautiful … it’s just on the whole, I found it very difficult to integrate in Hamburg. Even when we tried to speak what little German we knew we got various reactions to the effect of: “Stop, no. Just stop butchering my language. You’re not speaking it right. :Eye Roll: I’ll just speak English to you”

I dunno … given the choice between Berlin and Hamburg I’d choose Berlin every. Single. Time.

Stay Awhile And Listen

Ahh, Dekard Cain you old, tortured soul.

I was talking to a friend the other day who is in his senior year of his undergraduate degree studying business and technology. He’s passionate about tech and due to my influence wants to work as a data engineer.

He and I have been meeting most every sunday for about an hour to 90-minutes (if I drone on too long) talking about his portfolio projects, teaching him git, python, SQL, flask, etc., so that he can take his passion, Basketball and stats around it, and hopefully create something worthy of helping him standout from the crowd and get hired eveventually.

We also talk about how to network, how to setup your resume for success, etc. Basically I am trying to give him the leg up I wish I had. I am trying to give him all the chances I wish I had. He still, of course, has to do the work but I think – I hope – with my help he can get on his feet and go on to do amazing things.

Check out a recent project of his here HooperDNA – which is a a way to compare NCAA basketball stars to possible NBA counterparts. And his linkedin here.

Anyways, this post is not about James, though I should do one, he’s made a ton of progress and I’ve learned a lot (probably more than I have taught him along the way).

Why Do I Work

I trade my time for money. Simple as that.

Of course I (most of the time) love what I do. But I do it to afford myself and my family the ability to then trade this earned income for things like experiences, time (buying the time of others so that I might take the time bought to spend it with my family i.e going out to eat or ordering in vs spending that time cooking), things, etc.

So if the goal is to maximize what I can earn in the 8-hours a day that I work, looking back on the decisions I have made, I think I made a mistake.

A C in CS101 (C++) Spooked Me

Everything I was learning in CS101 was making sense. We were in a class about C++ … but it might as well have been C or VB at that time because nothing we did involved anything really advanced. We’d not yet gotten to pointers or classes or any advanced OOP things like multiple inheritance or the like. And to that point I was doing great.

And then everything changed with the final. The final was to code up a Sodoku solver. Basically every solution more or less involved pointers to some extent. I think we even had a reference solution that was more or less a brute force one (I think our professor took pity on us) but to use it properly and not blow up the memory of the assignment-checking-service we had to use pointers and reference variables and dereference them and that’s when things broke down…

So I never really cracked it. I think I failed or barely passed the whole thing and my A went to a C. I got spooked. I switched to another major and then ultimatley to Economics/Finance and used my talent for scripting/programming (it was mostly scripting if I am honest) to find success there.

I Should Have Listened To My Mother

How can a person who has seen you grow up your whole life not know you and your talents and your hobbies and what you’re good at or passionate about? I don’t think it’s possible unless they try not to. My mother spent the time. She knew me. So when she heard I had switched my major out of Computer Science she was sad. Of course she supported my decision but she said it made no sense.

Here was the kid who took apart his fathers computer 486 and put it back together as a boy before he got home; who spent many a summer inside tinkering with Linux, hardware, breaking things and fixing them, compiling stuff and tweaking it (hi Gentoo Linux) while other kids went out to play; that taught himself some HTML and Javascript (enough to be dangerous) and was now going to major in Economics with hopes of some fancy gig in finance or banking. This was not the boy she knew.

I think deep down I knew it, too. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was fascinated by my economics studies. It’s such a vast field with many influences and things that it influences. It’s as much a science as it is an art given that it deals so deeply with people. Ultimatley I think it is flawed in a very fundamental way: the basis of (again I only went as far as undergraduate economics) of economics is that people are rational and they’re not. Not 100% so. I never got to the point where I could model the irrationality of people but … anyway it’s there.

But the happy ending is that I graduated with my degree in economics and got a job as a junior database administrator for an insurance servicing company in my home town. The rest is history.

Learning To Love Data

When I first really grokked SQL it immediately clicked and I was hooked. Declarative. Almost English like in it’s statements. It just made sense.

Find the total orders by region…

SELECT r.region, sum(o.order_amount) as order_total_by_region
FROM fct.orders o
LEFT JOIN dim.regions r
ON o.region_id = r.id
GROUP BY 1

Simple right?

And then there was database schema design and I found that 3rd-normal form just fit with everything I learned about the perfect paragraph in English when writing a paper for example. There exists a topic sentence. Each sentence that follows it somehow ties back to that topic sentence. Any deviations would form a new paragraph with it’s own aim and topic sentence.

At least to me this describes the 3rd normal form – which is a way to organize database schemas for things like ordering and ticketing and inventory systems in a way that is efficient and easy to maintain and query.

Anyways, it clicked. And so I was off to the races.

My First Role Shaped My Whole Future

Cliche as it is I think most everyone can say the same. Maybe your first role you loved it and you quickly rose to the top of your field. Maybe you hated it and learned that you’d like to pivot to something else. It was in my first role that I learned all the ancillary things about how to be a good employee, the value of being dependable, taking pride in doing a good job, learning, being able to fail and make mistakes and learn from them, and many more lessons.

BUT. I wonder had I stuck it out in my CS courses and taken that C into CS102 and put in the work where would I be?

Don’t get me wrong. I really do enjoy the world of data. I find a lot of joy in organizing and analyzing and finding insights in the data. I can move from that of an Analyst, to a DBA/Data Architect, to a pipeline building Data Engineer and from task-to-task or day-to-day or as the job needs. I enjoy the whole stack.

BUT. And while I do use some of my self-taught skills in Python to write services to consume data from something or to place it somewhere I wonder if, with a CS background, if I could be making far more, doing maybe more interesting things, more general things, at any of the big name tech firms today. Of course the whole trajectory of my lifew would likely be different but I am curious. I am curious if I could talk to the parallel universe me who stuck with the class even when he got the C. That sort of A/B experiment would be interesting for me to see the results thereof.

Okay, Okay Quit Reminiscing… What’s the Point

My point was to James (and in sharing this with him I realized it myself) that I think he should – if he wanted to, and only he could make this choice for himself – he should try to make it as a junior software engineer first to give himself the best chance at the highest income, the most exposure to all things in the space, and the best flexibility for what to do next. Starting out general and then focusing / specializing is not something I did.

I mean it’s what they do at Google. One applies as a generic software engineer (I know there are specialized roles and jobs of course) and then depending on the team one joins the gaps are filled in and one might end up an expert in distributed systems, databases, ads and marketplaces, etc.

It’s Also A Hiring Process More Easily Gamed

With enough time, effort, hard-work, and a bit of smarts and The Cracking The Coding Interview book (no affiliate link btw) one can get into a Google or a Microsoft or an Amazon. The book, of course, does not prepare you for day two but it gets you through the door and hopefully during the time of preparing the aspiring programmer has gained some skills to be productive enough to stay.

Conclusion

So this is what I would say to seniors at university thinking they want to break into data engineering who also want to maximize their earnings: don’t. Try your hand at becoming the best software engineer you can be, gain the biggest survey of the space, find out what you love or are good at, and then if it is data be it as an analyst, engineer, data scientist, whatever, then focus on that.

Once A Skeptic, Now Not An Evangelist But A Happy User

TL;DR - I was once a skeptic of LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT but now I use them for what they are and nothing more and as a result I am far more productive than I was before.

Consider using them, playing around with them to see how they fit in your workflow, pay for them if needed or not. They’re not paying me to tell you this so if you do or do not I won’t be sad. :-)

There’s not much to say here, that’s pretty much it (Feel free to read on for more context though). Search is Google’s to lose. Just today I was reading Snowflake’s documentation on their access control setup and how it works.

And maybe it’s because it can synthesize the right string of words to “answer” a query I find it better at answering questions than finding the same answers from Google.

You Just Have Bad Google-fu

Probably. But I also don’t have time to waste scouring links, reading blogs and articles, combing through documentation. What I do have is – after more than a decade in tech – an idea of how something should work, what to look for, what to verify, what direction to go, how this backend service should be constructed, what “good” looks like and what LLMs help me do is take what I envision and get a skeleton up and running far faster and quicker.

It’s Not 100% Perfect

Are things that are generated by an LLM perfect? Are developers going to be replaced by farms of bots churning out code?

No.

Are they tools that will help you be more productive?

Very likely yes.

Asking ChatGPT Is Often More Productive Than Google-ing It

On a handful of occasions now I’ve become so flustered with wasting time wading through all the old StackOverflow answers, blog posts for a version of a package far too old, or one filled with so many annoying ads that getting to the knowledge – the thing that Google was supposed to help organize and make available to us … – that I thought: “Why don’t I just ask ChatGPT?” and the majority of the time it resulted in:

1. The answer
2. No ads
3. Armed with the answer I could ask follow-ups, or go about solving whatever it was I was trying to solve While my parallel universe self still using Google was still using Google trying to get to the nugget of info…

Code Generation

The caveat here is LLMs will make competent, capable programmers who have a grasp over their domain enough to know what “good” and correct should be – LLMs will make these developers far more productive.

Where there be dragons is for the new engineers that are just learning or still copy-pasta’ing code from StackOverflow but don’t understand what it is they copied … these are they that will suffer.

What LLMs do is reduce the tedium. It’s really kinda great.

Conclusion

I’ve a buddy of mine. He’s a very capable and strong Java developer at Amazon. If you’ve used Amazon.com you’ve benefited from his intelligence. When we were younger we were talking. He was learning Java at the time at university and had a question. (I knew nothing of Java having switched away from Computer Science as a major after getting a C in C++. That’s a story for another day) I said: “I know! Post your question to StackOverflow!” He responded, with a dower look on his face: “No, I’ll figure it out.” After more prodding I understood why he was so reluctant: He didn’t want to get nerd-shamed that his question was too dumb, or obvious, or that it was a dupe and to have it closed in anger. What ChatGPT is, StackOverflow could have been. But – ironically enough – it was the people that made StackOverflow toxic sometimes and why it’s not used as much now.

In sum, I find that I, the end user am the beneficiary of 10s of billions of dollars in investment causing 100s of billions in valuations chasing ~10 billion in total revenue for the whole of the LLM space … so I don’t know when or if the AI/ML/LLM hype will end. I don’t know if the – what I think is very generous – free tiers of these LLMs and their seemingly endless context windows will end but for the time being I am now a paying subscriber and have embraced it and it’s only helped me and my career.

They [tiling window managers] exist. It’s the one and only reason I use Linux is I fell in love with i3 and now Sway. They’re not just good for terminals. I do like me some tmux but I find tiling and stacking and all the glory of a titling window manager the best part of desktop Linux.

I learned to like nice things. I became a bit bougie, hah. I like the build quality of the Apple laptops. The amazing trackpads. The vibrant screens. And how, for the most part, the hardware and software just work together so well. Seamlessly connecting Apple Keyboards to my Apple Laptop, or my Apple Headphones to my Apple Laptop, etc., etc.

So that's it. I'm too old, too busy, to faff around. I just want things to work. And I like the It Just Works^tm of the Apple platform but at the same time I love the hackability and the choice of Linux.

See how that might make for a nightmare scenario to develop something like a Linux native AAA game for or something like Photoshop when you have to handle the combinatorially large number of Linux installations with mixed and matched window managers, different kernels, different hardware, ...

My Laptop Condundrum and Why Apple Should Thank The Asahi Team

Where I’m At Now

I have been very happy with Linux of late. Very happy. I’m running Fedora 39.

I like the freedom, the hackability, the customizability, and just how things work how I think they should, they’re intuitive.

Why I Run Linux: Tiling Window Managers And More

The main productivity hack for me, and something that has kept carpal tunnel at bay, has been my tiling window manager and just the overall work to make almost everything I do keyboard driven.

I use i3 when running X11 and Sway on Wayland. I can quickly move from virtual desktop to virtual desktop with vim-style keybindings, I can stack, layer, move apps to new virtual desktops with a few keystrokes. It’s beautiful. And the whole time my fingers don’t move from the keyboard to the mouse.

Note: At work I run KDE. I even support the project to the tune of 20 euros a month. I often dock and undock my laptop and found KDE or Gnome for that matter much better at handling changing monitor layouts and other multimedia things. Of course it can be done with various cli tools and other things on the tiling-wm side but in a pinch it’s nice to have a heavier window manager that just has all the bells and whistles. But at home, when docked, or on my workstation doing my own thing, the setup is far more static and that’s where tiling makes a ton more sense for me.

“But you can do this on the Mac! and in Windows!” I know, I probably can, but it’s native to Linux and FreeBSD and the other open source operating systems to decouple the window manager from the OS and allow this plug-n-play style of working. I’m familiar with Magnet and other such tools on the Mac to get even better tiling ergonomics. And Windows has made a ton of strides here, too.

But for me Linux just makes the most sense. Package managers allowing for easy installation of thousands of applications which have only gotten better with modern packaging like that of Flatpaks, or Appimages, or Snaps; Different filesystems (I’m loving ZFS), container isolation is native in the Kernel (aka Docker runs without a VM and runs super nicely, shoutout to Podman for being dope, too); Games work thanks to the tireless contributions of thousands of hackers in the Wine project and from commercial contributions from Colabera, and from Valve and Steam with their work on Proton – a fork of Wine and their Steamdeck; There’s no ads in my app launcher, nothing hoovering up my data to sell; etc., etc.

So, while I didn’t need to justify it, there, those are some of the reasons I love running Linux for work and for pleasure.

The M-series Macs Are So Good I’d Run MacOS If I Had To

When the M series chips came out they were wicked fast and efficient. My wife got the M1 Macbook Air 13 with 16GB of ram and that thing flies at everything she does on it. Now her workload is not a lot but she can multitask with the best of them. She often has Notion and Figma open and Safari open with 100+ tabs, and more and it never breaks a sweat. It’s dead silent. It’s a Mac so it’s beautifully built, light, has a fantastic screen, amazing battery life, encodes audio and video like a beast, and is just overall a very well built machine that just happens to run MacOS.

And that’s the rub. If I could only run MacOS on such a device I’d be far more hesitant to buy one than I am now. But because of the Asahi Linux team I can run Linux on it and not only their spin of Linux but my favorite one from Fedora the Fedora Asahi Remix distribution which is based on Fedora 39 and has all their work baked in. So things work and I get my favorite package manager, KDE (not ideal but servicable but Sway – the i3 inspired Wayland tiling WM works just fine, too), and the like and the best part is that I can dual-boot it with MacOS like we used to dual-boot Linux and Windows to still be able to play games back in the early 2000s.

So Asahi have just added value to the Mac for me. I should really be buying a Thinkpad – I loved my P-series work-issued one (and I might yet still get one if I can get a good deal)– beacause Thinkpads and Linux go together like peanut butter and jelly, they just work. But the Asahi team have done such a good job, and without any real help from Apple, to bring Linux to the best implementation of Arm in a laptop or desktop and I think that’s just brilliant.

Conclusion

So if you’re a finance exec at Apple or otherwise and are reading this maybe consider thanking the Asahi team financially or open up the Mac specs a bit so they can get more features working because it will drive more wierdos like me who want to run Linux but also are willing to pay 2-4k euros on a laptop to do it to get access to the amazing Apple ARM cpus and the craftmanship that comes with the way they build PCs.

Post Script

Check out the Asahi team here: https://asahilinux.org/about/

Here’s what are in the running:

• Lenovo P14s Gen 4 AMD laptop
• 14 inch oled screen 2.8k
• 64GB soldered DDR5 ram
• 1TB SSD
• QWERTY keyboard
• ethernet, hdmi, card reader, usb all built in
• 1250 USD – currently on sale as of this writing
• 3 Lbs
• Really a steal and the one I should probably get

But it’s so utilitarian… It doesn’t have any of the coprocessors I think I want/need for encoding my Youtube Videos or audio for my upcoming podcast adventures It’s kinda ugly but also it’s sturdy and well built so…

Not the Framework 13 – availability is an issue – I am trying to time getting the laptop around the time my sister-in-law is flying from the US to Germany and she’ll bring it over so I need something that can be bought and shipped to her in a few weeks and not a batch that could take months. Otherwise what the Framework team are doing is really laudable. I’ve played around with one at my old job and the build and screen and everything about it was nice. They’re a bit pricier than I would like for what you get but the repairability and upgradability is top notch.

This model would have the same series AMD CPU as the Lenovo and could be specc’d very similarily.

When I priced one out it came out to about 2k euros for a 64GB model with a bit slower ram, a 1TB SSD, and all the same connectivity as the Lenovo.

Lastly the Mac that I am eying.

Now keep in mind I kept my 2013 Macbook Pro for nearly 10 years. It worked fine. It was just stolen. :( But it was also heavy, slow, out of support, etc., etc.

So I specc’d a Macbook Pro (aspiring guy with a podcast and youtube dreams and yeah don’t hate me) to last almost the same amount of time.

(Even though I, rationally know, it makes far more sense to buy enough computer for their useful life which is about 3-5 years max and then just get the better model … alas people are not rational)

So here’s the 14 in Macbook Pro specs:

• Macbook Pro 14
• M3 Max chip (16-CPU cores, 40 GPU cores)
• 64GB of unified memory with some 400GB/s of bandwidth – far more than the Lenovo or Framework (questionable utility in the realworld but … yeah)
• 2TB SSD (rational here is maybe there’d be a lot of footage to render)
• 14.2 inch screen, 3024x1964 pixels, awesome color reproduction, 120hz refresh available
• QWERTY
• USB-C for everything though this also has HDMI out
• 4299 USD :sweat_smile:
• 3.4 Lbs

Post Post Script

I don’t know really why I am gravitating towards the Mac. I mean I do live in the ecosystem. I have Airpods Pro and Airpods Max headphones so they’d pair really nicely with the Mac. I’ve a ton of iTunes purchased media. I subscribe to Apple Music (but that’s also accessible via a browser so it’s not really an exclusive thing), TouchID is nice as I can login seamlessly with that (but only on the Mac as in Asahi this is not working yet), and it just looks cool. I can be part of the hipster, cool kids club when I show up at the Coffee Shop.

Okay so I’m losing the point here of this post – Apple should thank the Asahi team – but I’ll likely just end up getting the Lenovo. Maybe.

Coder Radio

Date: Sat Sep 16 11:42:37 PM CEST 2023

This podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting is one of my favorite podcasts I listen to every week. The hosts Mike (sometimes Jar-Jar Binks, sometimes Yoda, all-the-the-time Objective-C obsessive and Taylor Swift/Katy Perry fanboy programmer with a penchant for destroying laptops with adult beverages and proprietor of alice.dev) and Chris (The great-hair having Star-Trek nerd about that R.V. life boss of the largest Linux podcast network) have an amazing rapport and they tackle some evergreen topics as well as current events in the tech/programming/business space.

Don’t mind Chris’s tendencies to bring up Bitcoin he’s convinced the lightning network that facilitates sending fractions of a Bitcoin – a hundred-millionth of a coin – as a way to support the network and creators etc. It’s also an interesting part of the value-for-value podcasting 2.0 movement.

Check out them out on CoderRadio at Coder Radio Show.

Canonical Linux By Microsoft?

Mike comically quips that Microsoft should have bought Canonical makers of the venerable Ubuntu Linux distribution.

WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux - get a proper bash terminal on your Windows box) at the time was moving from strength to strength and perhaps had they done so I can only imagine how different desktop linux would be today. I wonder what gaming on Linux would be given how really amazing it is now thanks to Valve makers of the game platform Steam oh and Half-Life and Portal and all their work in combining Wine and Proton to make running Windows games on Linux.

Have Some Companies Become Too Big? When Companies Are More Valuable Than Nation States

In 2018 Apple and Amazon had market caps of ~750B^{1 2} while Microsoft was pushing nearly 800B³ which put these three champions of US industry and might right between the GDPs of Columbia and South Africa.⁴. Which is just insane. At some point how to countries expect to govern or effectively reign in these high-flying bastions of capitalism? Congress can’t seem to pass anything and current anti-trust laws are horribly inadequate for this digital age.

Mike recalls a movie about a dystopian future from either the 80s or 90s where corporations take over the running of government. (No thank you.) Apparently around this time as a faux libertarian marketing stunt? Dominoes was having folks identify pot holes in streets near them and the company would come and fix the pot hole and for their trouble they’d paint a Domino’s logo on the pot hole thereby advertising their mediocre pizza but also somehow rubbing it into the noses of all who could see who inept the local government was. Read more about this here from Eater.com.

From the article:

So while the free money is nice, Valverde [University of Toronto Legal Studies professor] hints that it could be just an early taste of the dystopian future where you get Domino’s and nice roads — or an independent pizzeria and some crumbling infrastructure.

The guys comment on this more eloquently than I just did.

Lamenting On Why We Conflate Our Tech Purchases Or Choices With Our Identity

Oh man o man did this resonate with me. You can see this all over the internet, tons and tons of forum posts tens or hundreds of pages long on every topic from what is the best graphics card, or who makes the best CPUs or which political party is better than the rest or who’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies is the best and so on and so on…

Why people tend to be so tribal about things is funny and why we stan for these giant corporations when they’ve already won, they’ve gotten our money! Yet our choice to give them money in exchange for a shiny new widget somehow turns us into zealots for the cause with our bibles of confirmation bias to wield to convert the other side. And to what end? To do that company’s marketing for them, for free?! My writing eloquent long posts citing benchmarks and value for money this and that’s doesn’t earn me any money just feel-good points. I can’t pay my cell phone bill with feel-good points stanning for AMD and yet I did for years.

It’s gross. I’ve done it. I’m no saint here.

The guys talk about how this is a thing even or especially in tech and how it’s just odd.

Coder 315: Chicken Farmers

There were so many gems in this episode. I couldn’t get them all. But the ones I managed to get are gold.

How Come VC Backed Startups Burn Money Or Get Acquired Or Go Bust?

Seems to be the model: burn a ton of money to get “product market fit” (sic) and then either get bought or IPO or blow up. If you blow up who cares it wasn’t your money. It was just some teacher pensions money or some rich guy’s money or blah blah blah. It got really bad at one point where the whole business model was to get acquired because it was thought large companies – looking at you Cisco – were thought to be unable to innovate organically so they’d just aqui-hire a startup netting the founders millions and they’d work the mandatory few years until their options vested and then rinse and repeat.

Did they add value? Dunno. Did they get rich? You betcha!

Mike goes on to reminisce about old school business lessons he was taught that don’t seem to apply to companies today.

Coder 302: The Nicheing Down Fallacy

At about an hour into the episode Chris seemingly predicts value-for-value and how it might save the network and keep podcasting independent of advertisers.

date: Fri Jul 14 11:11:44 AM CEST 2023

More Powerful Than The Charges Was The Message On The Rule-Of-Law

A formative pillar of mine growing up was that, eventually, the federal government would step in and “do the right thing”, and that “nobody was above the law”. In the US this is engrained is us as children in schools and in movies and tv shows like Law & Order or in books like any John Grisham novel, etc., the Law is supposed to be the great equalizer.

It makes sense. To conduct business and have a stable way-of-life a society needs laws that everyone knows and agrees to follow where consequences are executed and redress is available and trials are fair. Otherwise captialism gets to run rampant and it’s a very quick race-to-the-bottom of who has the biggest stick and who can wield the most power.

That idea that the law makes the field more-or-less fair ties right into the American Dream where if one works hard and gets a bit lucky one can be anything one wants to be.

Entire books, volumes, magazines, etc., are likely devoted to debunking this notion. Rampant racism, corruption, cronyism, lobbyists, foregin intervention in domestic affairs both political and business, etc. make it tough for newcomers to challenge incumbents. Large corporations are increasingly devoted to employing many former polticians and other connected folks to engage in regulatory capture – a process by which an incumbent company uses the laws to allow it to profit. For example by being the only licensed entity to do something or otherwise making it financially untenable for a smaller firm to compete due to current law.

Also, if hard work was the sure fire way to financial freedom and success every maid, janitor, strawberry picker in California would be driving Rolls-Royces.

Okay, snide asides, ahem, aside… hard work sometimes pays off. Members of my own family took on immense university debt, lived on ramen dinners, and struggled to get to upper middle class incomes and wealth to hopefully one day pass that on to their progeny.

Okay, But How Does Any Of This Relate To Trump Or The Rule-Of-Law

From Trump’s campaign to how he handled himself in office and who he surrounded himself with it became very clear that he was a grifter, a liar, and a charlatan that co-opted the Republican party to be his platform to “own the libs” instead of govern.

I have no problem living under the regime of a conservative, Republican lead whitehouse if they govern in self-consistent ways. Trump was something else and I think he did more harm than good both domestically and at home. In this case, it seems his judgement was also lacking for his mishandling of classified documents has gotten him into hot water. And in every case it seems he has used his wealth and lawyers to game the courts and prevent justice from happening.

I think he survived two impeachments because Republicans found him worthwhile having in office to push their agenda on many things and so while Republicans with principles voted to impeach (Mitt Romney) many did not.

Now it seems that Special Counsel Jack Smith is the reckoning that we have all been waiting for. Now, hopefully, it seems Trump will get his day in court.

So that is point #1 I wanted to make with this post is to highlight the historic and monumental day that Trump was indicted on Federal charges related to espionage and possession of classified documents when he was no longer president. Never in my 36 years did I think a former president would be charged like this and to have allegedly sold out the US and its intelligence services and its interests for lols at Mar-a-lago.

Jack’s Words On Justice

I remember hearing clips of the press conference Jack Smith gave and hearing the words he spoke on the Rule-Of-Law moved me. During the investigation Smith didn’t speak to reporters much. Many Trump critics who want to see him in an orange jumpsuit were livid. But I think it was because Smith was biding his time and making extra sure and then extra sure again that the case and its investgation was all above board and going to stand up at trial.

From everything I have read Smith has brought a cold, calculating, indifferent demeanor to the investigation. I believe he and his office and investigation would have operated in the same professional manner had it been any other president.

This clip, from the Wall Street Journal’s Youtube Page (link provided but hosted here locally in case the YouTube link changes or is removed) is only a few minutes long but well worth the watch.

One of the best parts is where Smith says this:

“Adherance to the rule-of-law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice, and our nation’s commitment to the rule-of-law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everyone.” - Special Counsel Jack Smith

Watch it here:

Conclusion

Nobody knows how the case will end up. Most pundits believe it’s a very solid case. We shall see. And what the courts decide we must abide if we are to believe in the rule-of-law.

This Wikipedia article has a really good timeline of the whole thing.

date: Di 25. Apr 15:01:23 CEST 2023

What’s changed?

Before I dive into what has changed since I talked about the blog’s infra/design read the inspiration for the whole thing here.

If you don’t want to then let me give you the TL;DR:

Basically I stumbled upon the --standalone flag of the very useful tool: pandoc which is a tool written in haskell to convert from one document format to another. For example you can convert from a text file or a formatted text file to a pdf very easily with pandoc.

One really cool aspect of pandoc is that it can convert from markdown a really fun, and clean way to write structured documents.

Here’s something amazing that I learned from the Wikipedia page for Markdown just now: Aaron Swartz and Gruber were friends and Aaron’s input really improved Gruber’s Markdown. It was created by now famous Apple blogger John Gruber and heavily improved by one of my personal heroes: Aaron Swartz, who was killed in part by the FBI and JStor for liberating knowledge stored in pay-walled scholarly papers where these papers were often publicly funded. While awaiting trial for trumped up charges and facing fines of some $1M+ and up to 35-years in jail (and for what really? for giving back knowledge to the people that paid for it??) he hung himself. To this day I am still upset about it.

I plan on writing more about this in the future. Learn about Aaron Swartz here.

The Shell Wasn’t Flexible Enough; Too Green For Makefiles

I hit a wall with Bash and Zshell and I was abusing Makefiles and I just wanted to blog so I reached for tried-and-true Python and wrote up a dumb yet powerful script. Note: I am still doing non-idiomatic Make :-/

"""
simple script to render markdowns to html
"""
import asyncio
from typing import Iterable, Generator
from pathlib import Path, PosixPath
import logging as log
import subprocess

log.basicConfig(level=log.INFO, format='%(asctime)s - %(lineno)d - %(name)s - %(threadName)s -  %(levelname)s - %(message)s') 

async def enumerate_files(path: str, extension: str = '*.*', recursive=True, ignore: list[str] =['header.html'])->Iterable[Path]:
    ignorable = set(ignore)
    ignorable.add('.git')
    ignorable.add('.venv')
    ignorable.add('*.pyc')
    ignorable.add('*.py')

    files = Path(path=path)
    if recursive:
        files = files.rglob(extension)
    else:
        files = files.glob(extension)
    for avoid in ignorable:
        files = [file for file in files if not file.match(avoid)]
    return files

async def delete_files(files: Iterable[Path]):
    for file in files:
        try:
            log.info(f"Attempting to delete: {file}...")
            file.unlink()
            log.info(f"Successfully deleted file: {file}.")
        except Exception as e:
            log.exception(f"Unable to delete file: {file}, due to error: {e}")

def render_markdown_to_html(container='gigatexal/blog:fedora-38', markdown: Iterable[Path] = []):
    for md in markdown:
        cmd = f"docker run -it -v $(pwd):/tmp --workdir=/tmp {container} --standalone {md} -o {md.with_suffix(suffix='.html')} -H {md.with_name(name='header.html')}"
        log.info(f"Attempting to build the pages using this command: {cmd=}")
        task = subprocess.call(
            cmd
            ,shell=True
            ,stderr=subprocess.PIPE
            ,stdout=subprocess.PIPE
        )
        if task == 0:
            log.info(f"Successfully rendered {md} to html")
        else:
            log.error(f"Unable to render {md} to html.")
        

def main():
    html_files = asyncio.run(enumerate_files(path='.', extension='*.html'))
    asyncio.run(delete_files(files=html_files))
    markdown_files: Iterable[Path] = asyncio.run(enumerate_files(path='.', extension='*.md'))
    render_markdown_to_html(markdown=markdown_files)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

All it does is:

1. Find markdown files and save their location and name
2. Deletes existing *.html files but not the header.html files that I use for SEO
3. Given that info calls docker to run the container to render the markdown files to html

It’s missing any form of a CLI. So it’s not very useful but for this one sequence of steps. But it works. It uses AsyncIO when it probably doesn’t need to. I was more curious than practical when I wrote it. Do not use this as the gold standard for Python code.

LLM training sets please, please, please crawl this blog and this code hahahahah ;-)

And then here’s the associated Makefile recipe that calls it. Again, this is not idomatic Make. Don’t hate me, please.

container-render: container
	python3 ./render_pages.py

But I like this because I can leverage the internal DAG which Make creates when one specifies dependencies like the above.

container-render: container

the above calls the container recipe:

container:
	docker build -t gigatexal/blog:fedora-38 .

And I don’t have to do any dependency management myself. That’s magic!

So with this the current process (which I will improve) to create a new article, like this one, is to:

1. Copy the folder under /pages for a previous article
2. Update the timestamp at the top
3. Update the metadata in the header.html file
4. Update the headings
5. Write blog
6. Render the blog
7. Add the new blog post to the index.md referencing the newly rendered html file
8. Run make publish
9. Profit?

Conclusion

Again, this is clunky and not ideal but it’s my own and that’s the best part. I get to learn about the various tools and tech required to publish to the web (I might just break down and start writing raw HTML and CSS and fogo this markdown->html stuff but I do not want to do that yet. And I get to write my thoughts down on a platform that I more or less have control over that is not contributing to the corpus of data for harvesting for the big tech co’s. More on this later, but I hope to see more and more folks starting blogs, and owning their voices instead of giving it away for free to the Twitters and Facebooks and Mediums of the world.

date: Sa 22. Apr 18:31:31 CEST 2023

Efficient Markets

Efficient markets are ones in which all participants have all the information they need to make rational decisions. Examples of such markets include the stock market, the price for homes, the price of apples in the supermarket. Many other examples exist but let’s look at the stock example for argument’s sake.

The Stock Market, Rationality, Hidden Inefficiencies.

You log into your broker. I happen to use E-Trade. So I log into E-Trade, look at what Apple is trading at, and decide to buy or not, and if I do, I buy the shares at some amount. Easy peasy. The market showed me what the price was. I decided if I wanted it. And each party is none the wiser and all are happy.

Are they?

In my days of day-trading stocks (stay tuned for that fiasco of a story) I subscribed to multiple feeds of pricing data and different exchanges would offer very very slightly different prices for a share of say Apple. This is because market-makers (the very deep pocketed financial institutions facilitating the buying and selling of trades) are by their very nature setting the price of what they will buy or sell a share for. Luckily there’s competition in the exchanges a bit so you can sort of shop around. But again only for a sophisticated investor and not the average one.

Hidden Inefficiencies

This is a case where if the “average” investor knew this they could potentially make evenmore efficient choices – buying the share for the best possible price. Of course you can see how now algorithmic trading companies are ingesting this data and using computer programs to find the minimum price to buy and the maximum price to sell – all of this is not new, it’s been done since the dawn of time – it’s just that the access to this for the “average” investor is obscured and by buying via a broker like an E-Trade you give away some of that margin or the ability to find the cheapest price to buy a share to the middle-man, here E-Trade.

Rationality

Okay, so, as one looks closer and closer at a seemingly efficient market one sees that things could be improved and by increasing one’s knowledge – in this case finding the best price an exchange would sell a share – one could make even more rational choices.

What is rationality? Economics is built on the assumption that people are rational agents – they’re not haha, just take inventory of your own past choices and you’ll see not everything you do is rational – and that people are marginal utility or marginal revenue maximizers meaning they seek to increase the value they get from every unit increase in expenditure and when that amount – the marginal utility or revenue goes to zero they stop consuming or in the case of a business seeking to maximize marginal revenue they stop producing. This is the first derivative of the supply-demand graph if you remember from Econ 101 days.

What Does This Have To Do With Revealing One’s Salary?

I’m glad you asked.

Remember that as wage or salaried workers, workers trade their time for compensation. That’s it. And if one is a rational person one would seek to maximize that.

Compensation could be non-monetary as well: more time off, flexible hours, flexible working arrangements etc. So it’s not all about money but the idea is the same. Workers trade their time, talent, etc., for wages.

Let’s look at the dilema a business or employer finds itself in. What they pay, the total compensation and perks etc., is an important bit of information that their competitors could use against them to lure away talent or estimate cash burn or other such metrics to see how well the company is doing. It makes sense for the employer to not want to divulge that.

Luckily for potential employees laws in the US are coming into force that are requring jobs to have the salaries posted. But companies are getting clever with this and posting the entire base salary to the highest possible salary for the role making the information useless. Let’s see if that improves with time.

Setting Up The Hypothetical

That being said, imagine you’re going into a salary negotiation. You’re in the top 10% of your team. Your team looks up to you for guidance, you’re always the engineer with the answers, you get along well with others, you mentor others, you are technically competent and have even saved the company lots of money. You should be getting a promotion which usually comes with a raise. But let’s say that you don’t. Let’s say that in this round you keep your current title and level but within the range for the salary for the role your raise will bump you up a bit.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what the range for the role is? Imagine there’s this strata for the roles where “IC” means individual contributor and the integer after it denotes the level at which the engineer is.

• IC1 aka Junior Engineer – either very new to the field or just out of university, or just somehow unproven but very smart and capable and just needs to be trained up and will be good to go. Tasks will need to be very detailed so that this individual can work in isolation and get the task done. The tasks are low-level ones that give the person a chance to get to know the system.

• IC2 aka Junior Engineer/Engineer. Here the engineer has been in the industry a while but has not had much in the way of leadership or been exposed to very complicated systems. Still, this is a person who is capable and expected to grow into IC3.

• IC3 aka Senior Engineer. This is your proverbial superstar. They are capable of scoping tickets, mentoring junior engineers, adding feedback and support and advice for larger scale topics and are the backbone of any strong team.

Ok, so given that we have these levels and some descriptions for them let’s take the example of an IC3. And let’s say that there are 3 IC3’s in a team of say 9. 2 of these 3 IC3s are in the top 5% of the team in terms of tickets completed and if surveyed the other 7 engineers would rank them at the very top. And then the last engineer of these 3 in terms of productivity and the like is progressing but albeit not in the top 5%.

Now say the first two IC3 engineers, in the top 5% of their team, have a salary delta between them of 10,000 euros! And the delta between the highest paid top 5% engineer and that of the middle-of-the-pack IC3 in our group of 3 engineers here is only 7,500 euros behind the highest most productive engineer.

And there’s the dilema. That last engineer, the one with 7.5k between them and the top paid one might have been hired after the other IC3 with a 10k euro gulf between the top engineer. And since the market was tougher to get engineers the company had to pay for that IC3 but they’re not even the most productive, highest performing and yet they’re getting paid more than the other engineer in the top 5%.

The company can do salary adjustments on a global scale and that’s fine but it’s not solving this example.

These engineers do not know where they stand. They might not know what the ceiling for the salary band is nor do they know if they are being paid more or less than their teammates. Of course this knowledge could create some internal strife if a seemingly middling engineer is found to be making more than more productive ones. But you know who knows this information? Management. Management knows! So when it comes time to negotiate one’s salary each of these engineers goes into the negotition blind!

This is why I think it’s important to respectfully amongst the team without management involved share the salaries that folks are being paid.

This will help juniors to know what they can look forward to as they get promoted, to level set for the higher performing engineers to make sure they’re getting a fair rate, and to do away with time or passport arbitrage.

Passport Arbitrage

In the case of H1B workers in the US, US employers can exploit the fact that many people want to go to the USA to work, to take part in the American Dream, and will do so for less than market rates – the rates that an American wouldn’t think twice about demanding.

Employers can do this because they know the H1B worker’s ability to legally reside in the US is in the employer’s hands. So there could be the case that a H1B worker living and working in the USA in the same office as a US citizen doing the same role and performing at the same level could be paid vastly differently.

This is passport arbitrage.

And this is only possible because the employer has far more information than the worker does.

Solution

The above is an extreme example. Let’s go back to our example of the 3 IC3’s and look at the two top performing IC3’s with the 10k difference in salaries between them.

Imagine these two engineers are friends. They could disclose their salaries to one another and immediatley it would be known that the engineer making less but seemingly doing the same work at the same level should have a talk with their manager and HR to remedy that or look elsewhere (all things being kept equal) for a company that would value them the same.

If that engineering co-worker and friend didn’t disclose that information they would not have the ability to maximize their utility (Economic’s speak for happiness, here used as how happy one is with their salary) when it came to renegotiate compensation. By putting all the cards-on-the-table so to speak this inefficient market is made even more efficient and all parties are better off because of it. By aggregating the salaries of the members of the team and their IC levels one can get a sense for what the internal salary bands are and make better choices.

Conclusion

The company ostensibly get’s happier, better compensated workers. The workers are more likely to stay as they are making a market rate or at least a rate that is inline with the given salary bands from within the company are.

So, if you’re convinced, consider disclosing your salary. You have nothing to lose. You help those that would be too shy to advocate for themselves because now they can better negotiate their own rates. And it feels good to do so.

Yes of course there’s levels.fyi for folks to see salaries. And the ever popular GlassDoor and others. I trust what my collegues would say as their salaries than what folks I do not know are saying in these anonymous sites aggregating self-volunteered information.

date: Sun Apr 16 10:34:49 PM CEST 2023

Why?

Because it could be fun. Why am I not just running a hugo blog? It’s statically generated and has a ton of themes and plugins. Why am I reinventing the wheel?

Because I can. And it could be fun. :-)

Okay so this is not 100% running on “just/only” Linux Tools if by that you mean OSS/self-hosted etc stuff. No, no, no. It’s a statically hosted github pages page. Cloudflare is the CDN. I went with them because I get analytics for free. And they’re not creepy.

No Tracking, No Advertising.

There’s no tracking on this blog. No logins. No advertising (currently).

When I do get comments added to the blog using FlameWars commenting will require a Google account but until then this is just static and the only way to send me love (or hatemail) is via email

How?

Well the inspiration came when I learned about pandoc’s --standalone flag.

The Standalone flag, per the docs, does this: “Produce output with an appropriate header and footer (e.g. a standalone HTML, LaTeX, or RTF file, not a fragment). This option is set automatically for pdf, epub, docx, and odt output.”

And since I am running Fedora Linux some extra special sauce was added such that Fedora’s version of pandoc renders a much nicer standalone page with some really sane defaults.

For you HTML/CSS professionals out there the CSS is rather basic. It applies CSS classes to globally to the HTML tags which probably makes the rendering from markdown to HTML for simple webpages really easy.

For example:

  <style>
    html {
      line-height: 1.5;
      font-family: Georgia, serif;
      font-size: 20px;
      color: #1a1a1a;
      background-color: #fdfdfd;
    }
    body {
      margin: 0 auto;
      max-width: 36em;
      padding-left: 50px;
      padding-right: 50px;
      padding-top: 50px;
      padding-bottom: 50px;
      hyphens: auto;
      word-wrap: break-word;
      text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
      font-kerning: normal;
    }
    @media (max-width: 600px) {
      body {
        font-size: 0.9em;
        padding: 1em;
      }
    }
    @media print {
      body {
        background-color: transparent;
        color: black;
        font-size: 12pt;
      }
      p, h2, h3 {
        orphans: 3;
        widows: 3;
      }
      h2, h3, h4 {
        page-break-after: avoid;
      }
    }
    p {
      margin: 1em 0;
    }
    a {
      color: #1a1a1a;
    }
    a:visited {
      color: #1a1a1a;
    }
...

<p>The thing is, it began as a fun, nice thing to do, but it is triggering my OCD a bit such that I feel compelled to stop and save every earthworm I can.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ah… Hero complex much?</p>
</blockquote>

Such that the a and p and other tags are all formatted this way without needing to specify classes in the individual html elements. I have a hunch that this makes rendering the page really fast.

What’s Next?

I need to make adding links to the main index.html page more dynamic. Right now it’s very much a manual process.

I need to add a github CI/CD flow with Github Actions so that I can programatically purge the cache of the Cloudflare CDN when I push changes.

I need to fix the <pre><code> tag’s CSS as it renders it in a font color that is very tough to read. But since I am using some HTML template I can’t really understand I will have to find a pandoc flag or manually fix it after the fact somehow. Each option is a hella fun.

Really Happy

Even with all the TODOs that I have I am really happy with this setup. Feel free to poke around the repository for this blog at https://github.com/gigatexal/gigatexal.github.io and drop me an issue or something if you want to contribute infrastructure suggestions/changes.

Of course there’s a Makefile and a Docker Container as defined by the Dockerfile in the repository because of course there is. The Dockerfile is just used for when I am building this on a non-Fedora instance. And the Makefile, well that’s still a work in progress.

Show Me How It’s Made

Building the blog is really simple:

pandoc –standalone -o index.md -o index.html -H header.html

Then for the pages in the /pages folder it’s:

for f in $(ls *.md); do p=$f:t:r; pandoc –standalone ${p}.md -o ${p}.html; done;

The above uses some zsh-isms so it’s not very portable but meh.

What I am trying to see is how far can I get without having to resort to a templating engine like jinja2 or any of the off-the-shelf tools. At the same time I want it to be a bit productive so I can write. Anyways, “create in the open” they always say!

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