Two Weeks, Part 16

August 16 to 31

I have not gone out even once with a camera in the last two weeks. It’s the longest I’ve done that in years. I was stressed about it for a few days then I kind of just…stopped caring? I was in San Francisco this past week for work and had a few moments where I wished I brought one. Otherwise it’s been fine and I think it’ll be nice to have a break before some travel in the coming week.

Related: now that I’m here writing this I realized that photography is very handy for remembering what I’ve done in the past. The last few weeks feel like a blur. I guess in lieu of photos I’ll use this post to talk about other things. An Interesting Things, August 2026 Edition. (Previously, previously.)

Books

In the last month or so I have read all five of the mainline Ian Cormac Polity novels by Neal Asher. Gridlinked, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, Polity Agent, and Line War. I’ve also read Asher’s Prador Moon, Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Vor Game, a significant portion of Pete McCarthy’s McCarthy’s Bar, and started on Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee Omnibus.

I’ve been reading a lot. Mostly because I got my ass off YouTube. I have Thoughts :tm:.

The Polity Univerise

These are plot-forward, swashbuckling, and just hard enough sci fi. There’s a good amount of tech porn too. After all the last few years of LLM this and that it’s nice to see AI that’s not just “giant prediction engine”, although I guess Asher could plausibly retcon Polity AIs to be just very fast and complete versions of today’s LLMs. But I hope not. In any case these books aren’t political or philosophical in the way the Culture novels or Revelation Space is. Which is fine! Every book is a fun romp in its own way.

Side note: The Prador in Prador Moon, much like Skellor and the Jain tech in the first few novels, are icky. Asher does a great job of making you feel the invasion, definite body horror influences.

The Vor Game

I can see why this won so many awards. I read the first few paragraphs and was hooked. The characters and political mind games are top notch. I want to read the rest of the Vor series.

McCarthy’s Bar & Xeelee Omnibus

I’m about halfway through McCarthy’s Bar and a few chapters into Xeelee. These are both my kind of books: the former is laugh out loud funny, the latter is just heavy sci-fi that drops you in and says “good luck!” Looking forward to finishing these…Omnibus is something like 900 pages, buckle up.

Games

I’ve also been playing a lot of Chained Echoes on the Steam Deck.

The game is really fun; good story, clean art and graphics, and a nice skill and leveling system. It feels like they took all of the annoying stuff from 90s JRPGs and left it out (e.g. random encounters, cardinal movement, savepoints). The combat in particular really shines for me: it feels so well tuned. The difference between win and loss is often due to buffs and debuffs. Managing the overdrive bar - an effective global buff or debuff - adds a fun layer. The skills feel varied and overall combat makes me feel like I’ve earned the win (or the loss).

That being said: I despise Sky Armor fights. The overdrive mechanism changes from being a fun thing to manage to being the only thing I’m worried about. I think this is mostly personal preference - it doesn’t ruin the game or anything - but I do kind of dread/avoid them.

Linux

I finally gave up on macOS. I ran Linux for like a decade before switching to macOS about five years ago. I don’t know if it’s going to be permanent but…man their software is rough. I love Apple hardware, but macOS specifically is pretty cavalier with user attention. Constant notifications that you cannot turn off, graphical glitches, inexplicable CPU usage, heavy-handed UI patterns. I have to use macOS on my work laptop, I do not on my personal machine. So there have been some switcheroos in the last few weeks.

First, I tried Asahi Linux on the Macbook Pro. This is a surprisingly complete experience. The hardest part was clearing enough drive space for the install! But, sadly, as great as Asahi has been it needs another few rounds on the driver side. Especially power management. Even with no Bluetooth and my screen at 20% I could never get power usage down under 10W idle. So…

Second, my ThinkPad Carbon X1 Gen 8. I’ve had this for almost five years. I do not remember why I originally ordered it. It’s been sitting on a shelf in my closet acting as a server and before that was a console-only machine for writing. Vim with power management. I pulled it out and installed Claude and said “here’s what I want” and a few hours later I have a fully built out Sway/waybar/fuzzel/foot/mpd/swaylock setup. Everything works exactly like I want it to. It pulls 2.7W at idle.

I do remember the downsides to this machine, mainly that the speakers are weak. It’s also physically smaller - maybe a 13” screen? - and significantly lighter. The lightness is nice, working around a tiny machine with my giant hands will take some getting used to.

Other

Blag Update

I spent an evening this past week switching my blog image hosting from SmugMug to Cloudflare’s R2. SmugMug’s ToS specifically outlines that it’s okay to host with them, I just always felt like I wanted something with more control. R2 doesn’t have exfil costs and having Cloudflare’s edge caching doesn’t suck. So here we are.

Claude helped me on this one too: when I write these blog posts my workflow is to paste in the SmugMug share URLs. I wanted to keep that workflow since often I’ll just work through photos in a gallery and write about it. So Claude built out mdfimages, which downloads the image and verifies it then uploads it to R2 and text replaces the URLs with the new location. Then I just run my normal static setup process. Easy enough.

Password management

When I switched to Asahi Linux on the Macbook Pro I lost access to EnPass. They do not have an ARM build. I’ve been frustrated with them for a while; the apps feel laggy and browser autocomplete often fails. So I switched to Bitwarden using a self-hosted server and vault.

The whole thing was super easy to set up. All of my devices are on a Tailnet. My home server runs both Vaultwarden for hosting the vault and Caddy to handle TLS certs. I added a DNS entry for a subdomain that points at the server’s private Tailscale IP. Bitwarden clients on my various devices point to the domain and Bob’s your uncle. As an added bonus most (all?) Bitwarden clients have a local encrypted copy of the vault so even if my server goes down I still have my passwords, I just lose sync until I can bring it back up.

Thus ends my every-other-year technical post. I’ve lost interest in having a technical blog. I’m heading off midweek on a 12 day motorcycle trip with a new camera (!) so we’ll be back to photos next time. Hopefully.