Smart watches as tools...
Distractions are a challenge in any workplace, and technology not mindfully used can add to those challenges. Email and chat tools interrupt deep work constantly unless directly managed by blocking out work time or limiting who can notify you.

I wear a FitBit Flex 2 band. It's a good example of "calm technology", a design methodology where technology is designed to create awareness through the senses. Think haptic feedback or a series of LED indicators that can be glanced at and attention returned to the world.

The Flex's health tracking dates back to 2013, and technology has advanced greatly since then. I was interested in more closely tracking my sleep quality and other metrics, and decided to replace it.

I bought a Google Pixel Watch 3. I was concerned about introducing another distraction into my day, but if treated wisely, technology's distraction can be minimized. And, hey, it was on sale at 40% of the cost of the latest model!

After getting my watch, the first step was to turn off all notifications - this was a radio button on the watch app. I selectively turned on notifications for phone calls as these notifications differ - there's a person on the other end of that notification trying to connect with you directly. With other notifications, they're either applications trying to get your attention or asynchronous means of communication that don't have an intrinsic need to interrupt what you're doing.

I've listened to phones ringing all my life, so I'm not concerned about it. Surprisingly, I realized I could take a call from my watch, something I wasn't aware I could do.

The other notification I allow is a reminder to move - during the day, if i haven't walked 250 steps in an hour, my watch will remind me to get up and take a walk. That notification happens at most, once an hour - and if I'm intentionally active, never happens!

I found a watch face that includes the time, battery charge, steps, heart rate and other information on the main screen. With that, I can turn my wrist and see the time and any other information I'm interested in at a glance. That minimizes the interruptions caused by the watch and puts all of the information I'd want in one place, so I don't have to navigate tiny menus for the majority of my interaction with it.

With a swipe up I can use the screen as a flashlight, silence the watch and darken the display for cinema mode. Holding a button accesses Google Gemini, and I have a stopwatch, alarm, and timer feature one swipe away.

With a little tweaking a "smart watch" replete with distractions can be an effective "tool watch" with minimal distractions and features available when needed. I'll still keep my Flex 2 charged and wearable in case I decide to wear a dress watch...

posted Sat, 02 May 2026
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Looking back...
Refreshing this site has been an entertaining exercise. I've rediscovered rusty HTML skills, wrote some pretty compact markup, played with cgi scripts, and even pulled out some nostalgia bits from the Web v1 days, like a web counter and the "Created with Vim" buttons I most likely had on my sites back in 2000.

Back then, I ran a Red Hat linux box on a 384K DSL line. The box was a web site, firewall, mail host and DNS server for my domain. I used Blogger for my blog, and it FTPed static HTML files to my site.

Not long after I set my blog up, I discovered RSS feeds, and I could aggregate the feeds from all the sites I was interested in and read them in one place. It seemed like the future would be all RSS.

For about 10 years, it seems, blogs ruled the earth - first, hand-hacked blogs, then Blogger-driven blogs, Livejournal, then Moveable Type and Wordpress.

It's nice to go back to the basics and see that they still work. At the end of the day, it's about a means of expression - and still is.

posted Wed, 29 Apr 2026
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Having fun with old tech
I spent a lazy sunday playing with blosxom, the blogging software I use here. It's old, like 2003-old, and most of the plugins available are out of date. In an ironic mix of old and new, I tried using Claude to update old code to be compatible with newer versions of PERL - I made some headway but am still running into issues.

Simple things you take for granted, like pagination are built using plugins. For the time being, if someone *really* wanted to read my whole blog, they could use the archive links.

It is fun diving back into HTML again. I was never great at it, but could hack my way around a page when needed.

posted Mon, 27 Apr 2026
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Today's coffee report
Today's coffee report comes from honeylux coffee in Watsonville, nestled in a nice little enclave of cafes near the airport. Nice vibe, all locally-sourced coffee, teas and pastries.

They said they source their coffee from 11th Hour, but I don't recall a roast with this aroma. Maybe they're doing some blending on their own? A double espresso came out tasting a little bitter at first, but with a lemony finish that made me think I'd left a lemon peel in there. All in all, a nice shot.

More information online and on the owner's YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@spacecatcadet

They also had Standart magazine - my new favorite coffee culture magazine, on a table for browsing. Great writing, wonderful artwork, and a free coffee sample with each issue.

posted Mon, 27 Apr 2026
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The Slow Web?
This blog post regarding the "Slow Web" struck a chord with me. It's from 2014 (and I think I modeled my WordPress template after this site!), The notion of a Slow Web as a more mindful web reminded me of how the web used to be - instead of rapid dopamine hits of half-truths.

The Slow Web would be more like a book, retaining many of the elements of the Popular Web, but unhurried, re-considered, additive. Research would no longer be restricted to rapid responders. Conclusions would be intentionally postponed until sufficiently noodled-with. Writers could budget sufficient dream-time before setting pixel to page. Fresh thinking would no longer have to happen in real time.

I've been reading up on the "smol web" movement for some time - authors going back to self-publishing blogs, syndicating by choice, and choosing to post to independent sites. I've run this blog since 2001, and it's taken on several incarnations - a daily blog a la LiveJournal, a photoblog, a landing page for my consulting business, and a place for me to store information I thought might fall off the web.

I started a mostly-text blog on my tilde using Blosxom, a blogging platform I'd played with back in the 2000s. While it's an interesting exercise, it mostly serves as an echo of what my LiveJournal was.

posted Sun, 22 Mar 2026
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Hot Weather...
I'd been unseasonably hot and taking temperatures in my homelab, they're creeping up into the 80s. My hardware is old to begin with, not looking forward to heat decreasing the lifespan of my stuff.

What I really need to do is bite the bullet and run some more ethernet cable into my storage space. It's under the house and cool - the only downside is that it's damp - 70-80% humidity. I suppose my servers would help dehumidify the space, but I've never run servers in that humid of an environment.

posted Sun, 22 Mar 2026
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Why did I wait?

I finally got around to swapping out my cable modem for one that I own. I don't know why I was concerned -- if my company-owned modem failed, I'd still need to drive to their store for a replacement. If mine fails, I'll do the same.

I bought this modem at a local thrift shop a year ago and never got around to swapping it out. I tried, once, and didn't have the local password needed to switch it into bridge mode. Did a bit of googling to find that the vendor had changed from the admin/password credentials to a newer, slightly more secure standard. Since my internet was down for the third time yesterday, I had time to sort things out.

I'd tried with a modem I bought on Craigslist years ago, only to find out that it was Comcast property and they wouldn't reconfigure it.

$14.99 a month. Shoulda done this earlier.

Now, to find a way to hide the modem and my router, looking for a small cabinet with an open back.

posted Sat, 17 Jan 2026
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The 2000s...

I'm writing this blog the way I blogged in my younger days - hand hacking html in a console window. Using an FTP client to copy images to the server. Long forgotten bits of HTML coming back to me, vi commands burned into muscle memory.

It's the way we did it back in the late '90s and early 2000s. I was working in SOMA at the time, a center of the internet boom. First, with Multimedia Gulch, then later in streaming media and gaming. The web was a new form of self-expression powered by blogs - first, the lucky few who could hide a box in a colocation facility or worked for a company that offered home pages on one of their Apache servers. Then came Blogger. I always wanted one of their hoodies. Blogger begat Moveable Type, which inspired other blog platforms, including Wordpress, which now runs a good portion of the internet.

Then, there was Livejournal. Social networking, but long-form and creative. Twitter without the character limit. MySpace without the design limitations. LJ had a pretty decent templating system, the ability to create multiple friend groups, granular posting security and third-party editor support.

I was quite active on LiveJournal, looking for film photography groups and keeping in touch with friends. LJ had a knack for getting people to open up sharing amongst friends - I suppose we were young enough and naive enough to not worry about sharing on the internet. The age of data plundering was yet to come.

I went to LiveJournal to check out my old account. My friends list is still active, and one person was posting as of last week! Sadly, two of my closest LJ friends (and one my oldest friend in real life) have passed away. Their journals are still online, and I was vain enough to think that one post dated in 2003 was about me.

I don't know if I miss the environment or miss the people we were. It was exciting, but we were all wide-eyed at the new world unfolding before us.

posted Thu, 15 Jan 2026
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Beep Beep...
I woke up this morning to a beeping noise from my NAS - turns out one of the drives in my RAID array failed a data scrub operation. I replaced all of the drives in 2024, and ordered a spare drive to keep as a backup.

The drives have a 5 year warranty, so opened the spare drive, swapped drives, put the failed drive in the box and filed an RMA request. We'll see how long it takes for a replacement.

The drive failed at 20,000 hours - I replaced the previous drives in 2024 with an average of 50,000 hours!

I love RAID.

not my home lab...

posted Thu, 15 Jan 2026
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Cleaning up the homelab
I received a couple of 120mm USB fans yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised to find one of them fits nicely in a hole cut into the back of my server cabinet as an exhaust fan. An unused bookend made a nice stand for it. I was concerned about heat buildup, this should go a long way to resolving that. I have another fan I can use to bring cold air into the enclosure, once I figure how to route air into a 100 year-old chinese cabinet.

Woke up early this morning, finally resolved a backup issue - one of my containers couldn't write to the backup file. The container was non-priveliged, the backup directory owned by root. I needed to change the NFS mapping on the drive to allow non-root users to write there. One problem solved.

I was running Proxmox Backup server, until the server running it died. I went back to native backup, which should work fine enough. Set up my critical VMs on a weekly rotation, I realized that my backup job was limited to one server only, so when I juggled VMs between servers, they'd stopped backing up. Made a new backup job covering both servers so moving VMs shouldn't block backups. Two down.

Thirdly, I deleted 4 or 5 test VMs I didn't need anymore. Cleaned up the display and reclaimed some space.

I had 2 NFS mounts mapped to Proxmox, one of which was confusing because the mount name meant something else outside of NFS. Got rid of the confusing mount name, realized I had a VM running over NFS. Moved the disk image, deleted any stale CD-ROM references to it and unmounted it from the servers.

I noticed that Proxmox's management server was released yesterday, I have 2 VMWare servers I'm looking to upgrade and am seriously considering Proxmox instead.

posted Sun, 07 Dec 2025
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