I’ve tried a lot of note-taking and knowledge-management systems over the years — different apps, different tools, different organizing principles, each one adopted with real enthusiasm. None of them stuck. Looking back, I think the reason is the same every time: the friction of capturing a thought, then organizing it, then periodically re-organizing everything as my sense of the “right” structure changed, was just enough to make the initial burst of enthusiasm fade. The system would keep working; I’d just quietly stop feeding it, and a few months later I’d have a knowledge base gathering dust instead of a second brain.

Organizing information using folders and topic tags eventually breaks, because the thing that determines where information belongs isn't what it's about; It's how you'll need it back. Here is a small classification schema whose types are built around how information in a knowledge base is actually retrieved.

I am a self-hosting hobbyist. In a moment of madness, I signed up for a cheap IPv6-only Virtual Private Server (VPS). The consequences of being ipv6-only were a bit more than I had naïvely assumed (although obvious in retrospect). This blog post describes the steps needed to prepare the VPS for my self-hosting adventures.

Read along if you are into self-hosting but new to IPv6.

“Are you a human being or a chatbot?” “We are a chat agent”

This was an actual chat conversation snippet between me and a customer service .. entity! Did I just interact with chatbot or a human being who was constrained to following a strict script? Was I stupid enough that I failed a Turing test? I have so many questions! Maybe you, dear reader, can figure this one out?

I just got a new UM790 Pro Mini PC (barebones with RAM and SSDs separately purchased and installed). This blog post describes some fixes to improve WiFi and Bluetooth performance (range, speeds, reliability etc.) as well as cooling and fan noise.

This post explains how I built a Network Attached Storage (NAS) for home use in August 2023. The various hardware build steps are carefully document with lots of photos.

Seafile is a secure, reliable, and performant file sync and share solution. I have been using it since about 2014, occasionally trying out other solutions, but keep returning to Seafile. It has a fairly large feature list and works on every major OS/mobile-device. Self-hosting it has been painless and performance is rock solid. This post describes one particular feature that is useful to me and is present ONLY in Seafile (to the best of my knowledge).

(I am not associated with Seafile in any way. Just a happy user.)

“If you already know some programming language/framework X, what are effective ways to rapidly learn a possibly similar new language/framework?” I found myself pondering this question recently. Wouldn’t it be nice to discover a system to learn something new that optimally exploits what you already know?

This site is built using the Hugo static site generator. Hugo is awesome. Its documentation is not. That is my personal opinion :) This post explains why I find the existing documentation so frustrating and how it could be improved.

Over the last few years, I have tried a number of productivity apps for todos and task management: Todoist, Trello, Things 3, Google Keep, Evernote, OneNote, Emacs org-mode, etc. but nothing stuck. The pattern is: In an initial burst of enthusiasm, I create a large-ish initial todo list by making a brain dump of tasks in a productivity app. The list then languishes. Rinse and repeat when I come across (yet) another promising app. Why does this happen?