When the clouds cleared at Beebe Lake, I took a chance at Triphammer Falls on Cornell's campus.

Chasing the perfect waterfall photograph rarely goes to plan.

This week: Caribbean parrots facing extinction due to laughably small fines, Apple possibly overpaying for a mediocre F1 streaming deal, Seth Godin on creative collaboration, and the surprising complexity of keeping the AWS cloud running.

I've used 1Password since 2008. When they released the SSH Agent feature, I ignored it for years. Not because it looked bad, but because I didn't trust it. This sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud. I trusted 1Password with my bank passwords, my email passwords, my entire digital life. But SSH keys? Those felt different. More critical somehow. I worried about getting locked out of servers. I worried about the integration breaking. I worried about problems I couldn't even name clearly. So I kept generating SSH keys in Terminal and managing them manually, the way I'd always done.

Waiting for the dive.

Two Green Herons patrol the rocks at Carnegie Lake Dam, practising the art of perfect stillness.

Dipan and Falguni brought back beans from Kahawa Migombani, a small coffee farm on Kilimanjaro’s slopes.

Happy Diwali from my family to yours—may the season bring light, joy, health, wealth, prosperity and peace.

A brief intersection of local breeders and northern migrants, all passing through July together.

A tiny spider rebuilds its web on the deck, prompting an unexpected pause between tasks.

Bruce Schneier's latest essays offer a bracing tour of our dystopian tech future.

It’s easy to forget that place names carry stories. Montgomery Township, where I live, is one of those names that quietly points back to a person: General Richard Montgomery. He died young, at age 37, in the snow-covered streets outside Quebec City in 1775, trying to take the city from British control. He didn’t succeed, but his death—swift and dramatic—turned him into something rare: a hero who never saw the outcome of the cause he fought for. After the American Revolution, his name started to appear everywhere. Streets, towns, even counties.

Vegetables become more than garnish. Grains become more than filler.

The old pharaohs built monuments of stone. The new ones build pyramids of data.

Apple likes to blur the line between simplicity and control. The Notes app is a perfect example. It now imports and exports Markdown files, but that doesn’t make it a Markdown editor. When you drop a .md file into Notes, it doesn’t keep your neat **bold** or # Heading syntax—it translates it all into rich text. You get the look, but lose the bones. Export works the same way. You can turn a note into Markdown, but it’s like photocopying a painting—you get an image of the thing, not the layers that made it.

Here are a few bits of text I read recently.

Here are a few bits of text I read recently.

Today, as the Free Software Foundation (FSF) celebrates its 40th anniversary, I find myself reflecting on just how much open-source software has shaped my career—and, more importantly, how it has shaped the world. Between the late ’90s and early 2000s, open source wasn’t just a set of tools for me—it was an entire philosophy. It was about freedom, control, and the ability to learn by doing. With Linux and FreeBSD, I wasn’t just using an operating system—I was compiling kernels, tweaking configurations, and shaping my environment to fit my needs. GCC gave me the power to compile from source, fine-tuning performance in ways that proprietary systems would never allow.

I've released Cornerstone, a WordPress theme built for the IndieWeb community. It's now available on GitHub under the GPL v2 licence.

After properly configuring Apache with Redis and Brotli compression, I realised JetPack Boost was doing more harm than good.

This week I learned a new word: *workslop*.

I’ve mapped out a 5-year plan that tries to reduce the certificaiton treadmill and focuses on the skills that actually matter for what’s coming next.

Looking back at 20 years of blogging through the lens of Jetpack Stats — nearly 800,000 views, countless surprises, and the strange afterlife of old posts.