Category: technology

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I Went on Vacation and Came Home With an App and a Dumb Viral Video Bit

I have a hard time unplugging my brain on vacation, and in fact have come up with some pretty wild ideas with my wife when we have time together to “unwind.” (Date Night Appetite, anyone?)

A 5 hour drive to the beach is apparently a very conducive environment for hairball ideas to percolate. Somewhere around hour three, as the family enjoyed their devices and Ween played on the radio, I started stewing on how every single YouTube video these days opens with the same two words.

“Hey guys.”

It’s everywhere. Every creator, every tutorial, every teenager reviewing a energy drink, all of them leading with “hey guys” like it’s a legal requirement, and it had been quietly driving me up a wall for years.

So I decided I’d make some videos that are nothing but that. Just me, in some random setting, looking at the camera and saying “hey guys” like I’m about to launch into something, and then not saying anything else at all. That’s the whole joke. There is no punchline, because the missing punchline is the punchline.

I figured maybe my kids would find it funny and a few people would see them. Instead, the it quickly started taking off. A few of shorts went mildly “viral” on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, and I spent a good chunk of the week watching the view counts climb, all based on a bit I came up with while stuck in traffic on I-26. You can see the ridiculousness over on my YouTube shorts if you want to understand my sense of humor.

Still from one of my Hey Guys shorts
One of the “Hey guys,” shorts. 

Aside from that whole distraction, the week definitely felt like a vacation. we took five straight days of 2 hour tennis clinics in the mornings, Rachael and I enjoyed some lovely chats on the balcony over a cocktail, we soaked up the sun and surf at the beach in the afternoons, where we continued to sweat and play Pro Kadima. Riding our longboards to-and-from the tennis clinics was a fun time as well, and it made me feel like we were the cool family that knew how to ride skateboards (and one scooter) together.

It was very relaxing. I want to make that known before I tell you about what else I did.

Bogey

As someone who likes to know what I’m sharing a wifi network with when traveling, I started I realized I missed having a UI for network scanning. NMAP and ARP scans are great, but sometimes it’s nice to visualize things (I think I’ve been spoiled by wiz.io).

So I built Bogey. It’s a little macOS app that shows you a live radar of your own network, figures out what each device probably is, and tells you the second something new and unfamiliar shows up. It runs entirely on your local machine. There is no root access necessary (though some root-based features are planned), there’s nothing to log into, and nothing leaves your laptop, because I cannot think of a single good reason my network map should live on somebody else’s server.

Bogey showing a live radar of devices on a home network
Bogey, watching thing.

It’s real and it’s up at getbogey.app if you want to poke at it. And that’s what I call a productive, relaxing vacation.

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Social Media Site For Vinyl Record Collectors: Wax Spinner

As you may know about me, I like to make things in what little free time I have. Often that is music, but lately it’s been apps. Since I also like collecting vinyl records, I have been making apps that fill gaps or fix annoyances along those lines.

For a while now I’ve had this small, recurring desire: I put on a record, it sound so good in the moment, and I want to tell somebody. Not broadcast it. Just tell one or two people who’d actually care that the pressing sounds incredible, or that nobody ever mentions side B and they really should.

There’s nowhere to really do that, so I started thinking about how to solve that.

Facebook groups are mostly repetitive memes and complaining people, and whatever you share is buried or removed by overzealous mods. The hashtag thing everywhere else (Bluesky, Mastodon) is a bunch of collectors posting #nowspinning into the ether, not really to each other. The gatekeeping on Reddit vinyl subs is just too ridiculous to bother with (not to mention that whole site is just a bot-filled, AI training ground these days).

So I made Wax Spinner.

Wax Spinner social feed
The Wax Spinner social feed.

It’s a small social site for people who collect vinyl. You connect your Discogs collection (no retyping your whole library, thank god), post whatever you’re playing, add a note if you feel like it, and it lands in a centralized feed with everybody else’s posts. People can like it, leave a comment, or tell you you’re wrong about liking Record Store Day releases. That last part is the entire reason it exists: the conversation. Bluesky and hashtags never gave me that.

Scr 20260627 Izxk
Example social share card

The feature I like the most, and the reason I kept at this one instead of shelving it like half my side projects: every spin you post turns into its own share card. Share the link anywhere that does previews, like Bluesky or Discord or a group text, and it pulls in the cover art, the artist, the year, your note, in a nifty feature card that links to your post. No screenshots or cropping necessary. Sharing a record finally looks like something instead of a naked URL or shitty photograph of your turntable.

When you see something in the feed you want, every spin points right back to its Discogs page, so adding it to your Wantlist is about one tap. That creates a fun way to find records you didn’t know you wanted.

But wait, there’s more

It’s completely free, and I intend to keep it that way. No ads, no selling anybody’s data, and no premium tier sitting in the wings waiting to charge you for the parts that matter. I built it because I wanted it to exist, and I’d take a small room full of actual record collectors over a growth strategy any day.

It’s brand new, so right now it lives or dies on whether people show up. If you’re into vinyl, come mess around with it. Hook up your Discogs, post what’s on the turntable, and tell me what sucks or what’s missing. I’m listening.

waxspinner.com

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How to block Reddit posts linking to a specific URL

I was getting really annoyed by posts in /r/politics that pointed to The Daily Beast, whose articles are almost always click-bait with little substance to them. Since I already use uBlock Origin in my browser, I sought after a way to fix this.
Adding this snippet to my custom filters in uBlock removes any post that links to a given URL in a given subreddit, on either the “old” Reddit or “new” Reddit layout:

www.reddit.com/r/politics##a[href*="thedailybeast.com"]:upward(.thing) www.reddit.com/r/politics##a[href*="thedailybeast.com"]:upward(shreddit-post)

If you want to block posts anywhere on Reddit linking to said URL, just do this:

www.reddit.com##a[href*="thedailybeast.com"]:upward(.thing)

You will need to use that method if you don’t want to see the posts in your home feed or /r/All or anywhere else they might surface outside of /r/politics.

This obviously only works on desktop Reddit, not in the app.

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Discogs MCP Server

I found this MCP server for querying your Discogs music collection, which is pretty handy. My primary driver for this was wanting to get a recommendation for something from my collection to play based on my mood, or a feeling, or a vibe.

For example, instead of the de-facto Discogs random album picker, I wanted to say “give me a recommendation for some chill background music while I am working” or “find an aggressive record for me to play while I work out today.”

After playing around with it for a while, I asked it “What does my Discogs collection say about me?” and it provided a pretty spot-on assessment:

Based on your collection of 753 records, here’s what stands out about you:

You’re a Serious Music Collector You have a substantial, well-curated collection spanning vinyl, CDs, and cassettes. You maintain detailed condition notes and ratings, which shows you care about quality and preservation.

Eclectic with Deep Roots in Alternative/Indie Rock Your collection shows strong love for:

    • 90s Alternative/Indie – Pixies, Weezer, Nada Surf, Grandaddy, Rilo Kiley
    • Punk/Hardcore – Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Naked Raygun, 7 Seconds
    • Math Rock/Post-Hardcore – Crain, Bitch Magnet, Circus Lupus, Bastro (you have multiple copies of some releases!)

But You’re Not One-Dimensional You also dig:

    • Bluegrass & Traditional Country – Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Stanley Brothers, Del McCoury
    • Jazz – Blue Note classics, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Grant Green, Herbie Hancock
    • Reggae/Ska – UB40, Peter Tosh, Bad Brains’ reggae side, The Frightnrs, Desmond Dekker
    • Hip-Hop – De La Soul, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Run-DMC

You Have Asheville Roots Your location and bluegrass collection suggest you’re connected to Appalachian music culture. The mix of punk and bluegrass is very Asheville.

You’re a Format Purist (Mostly Vinyl) The vast majority of your collection is vinyl, with careful attention to pressing details (you note things like “Pitman Pressing,” “Terre Haute,” condition grades).

You Value Authenticity & DIY Ethics Your collection of Dischord Records releases (Fugazi, Minor Threat, Nation of Ulysses) and small label 7″s shows you appreciate independent labels and the hardcore/punk ethos.

You’re Current But Respect History You have recent releases (beabadoobee, Clairo, Haim, Vampire Weekend) alongside classic reissues, showing you’re engaged with contemporary music while building a foundation of classics.

Verdict: You’re a thoughtful, genre-fluid collector who values both underground credibility and musical craftsmanship across decades and styles. You probably have strong opinions about music, love live shows, and appreciate both raw energy and technical skill.

Pretty cool! I like how it knew Bad Brains has a reggae side to them.

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Blogs are making a comeback?

Saw an interesting post on Hacker News today, which asserts that the personal blog has made a comeback. I, for one, could not be more thrilled. As someone who has maintained this blog for about 25 years, I thought it was a tragedy to watch the Internet lose its innocence and move on to the crowd-source social media sites. Blogs lost their way when MySpace and Facebook took over. Microblogging on Twitter and Instagram helped seal the fate of the lonesome, personal, WordPress website.

As we’ve watched journalists and people with important things to say pour their words into for-profit sinkholes that support Nazis (ahem, Substack) over the last few years, I have always hoped that someday we’d see a resurgence of the personal blog.

Has that day finally come?

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Blogging Platforms in 2025

I’m not sure how many of you readers out there have been following this blog since its inception in 2002, but it has gone through many changes over the years. In the beginning, it was a simple HTML and PHP site that I maintained by hand. I eventually learned more about databases, hosting, and various blogging platforms.

Somewhere around 2003 this blog became powered by B2/Cafelog, from which WordPress was eventually forked by Matt Mullenweg. WordPress quickly became awesome, and that is what powered this blog for decades.

About a year ago, I grew really frustrated with the WordPress ecosystem because every time I’d log into the dashboard, it was slower. I was getting spammed by plugins trying to get me to upgrade or buy related plugins. I realized that sometimes I would install a plugin and it would install other plugins without my permission.

This annoying tactic became totally unacceptable to me. So I looked for a way out and I found Ghost CMS. I set myself up over there on that platform for about four or five months, but I realized customizing it was really difficult. And it was expensive.

Spending $25+ a month for a hobby blog just didn’t feel like it was worth it to me. I do maintain the strong opinion that Ghost is an excellent alternative to Substack, which I refuse to link to, but that is a story for another day.

So I migrated away from Ghost and I found Chyrp Lite, which ran this site for about eight more months, right up until a few weeks ago. Chyrp Lite was really cool. It was a basic PHP-based, MySQL database-driven blog platform that did what it needed to simply and quickly.

It was reminiscent of something you would find around the year 2008. I thought it was pretty cool, but once again, it felt rather limited and difficult to customize. It also didn’t feel like there was a lot of ongoing development to support it.

So I had a stroke of imagination one night and started wondering about forks of WordPress to see if anyone had taken the code base, which is open source, and forked it into something less cluttered and less heavy.

Sure enough, Classic Press existed. It gets rid of the Gutenberg editor in WordPress, which was controversial when it came out in the first place and I never really cared for. Classic Press is like a modern version of WordPress from 10 years ago, but it receives updates and is secure, and it is compatible with a lot of current plugins and themes out there.

That said, I’m trying to keep it simple here and I’ve been using one of the default WordPress themes, Twenty Seventeen, and am customizing that to my liking.

So far, it’s smooth, it’s fast, it’s lean, it’s clean, and I’m not getting spammed on the admin panels. You should check it out if you’re a blogger and you’re tired of how bogged down WordPress has become with all kinds of freemium plugin spam.

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Obsidian.md and Plugin Security

Obsidian.md is an awesome note taking system. However, any third party plugin you install has access to all the files on your computer. You must hope the developer is nice or that their GitHub credentials don’t get compromised by a bad actor who then pushes out a malicious update.

The barrier to entry to get a plugin added to the Obsidian marketplace is low, and performed only once. There is not follow-up security review.

Common retorts to these statements, and my replies:

  • It’s the same thing as X app (VS Code, e.g.)
    My reply: Yes, and that is also bad.
  • Plugins with many users are safer because they have more eyes reviewing the code
    My reply: Yes, and they are the more attractive targets. A contributor need only enough time to push a bad update no one notices to infect thousands of computers. So like, 20 minutes?
  • I don’t put anything valuable or private in my notes anyway
    My reply: How about the rest of your computer? Because that’s what they have access to.

In summary, if you use Obsidian, don’t use plugins until or unless they improve this situation.

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Getting out of it what you put into it

It’s been difficult to make myself come here and blog.

Somewhere along the way, things on the internet changed. I used to enjoy writing updates in a blog post, letting friends and family know what had been going on around here, what I was up to, or even just what I was thinking. I knew that there were certain people who followed my blog pretty frequently and would often comment or even just acknowledge that I had posted something. It was a nice community feeling, and I would read other people’s blogs as well. Somewhere along the way this all shifted. I think it probably had something to do with Facebook becoming the predominant platform for people posting updates and being able to keep up with many more people in that format.

It’s a real shame though, because now I’ve gotten myself off of Facebook, off of Instagram, off of Twitter, and I’m largely just biding my time here and on Bluesky.

I find myself not wanting to share content or updates or news or anything like that. I definitely feel more more guarded about what I share online.

Perhaps it’s because of all the horror stories I’ve read about people getting stalked or swatted or whatever, just because they said something someone else didn’t like or disagreed with. I’ve been thinking often about how the internet really has precipitated the downfall of humanity. It’s pretty sad because I thought it was going to be an awesome thing for quite a while.

It definitely had an un-jaded, innocent adolescence phase. However, what happened was that once the World Wide Web became more and more accessible and was starting to be carried around in everyone’s pockets, everything started to change for the worse.

I remember back in college I took a class on how to use the World Wide Web. It was a great introduction into internet culture, what it meant to have a flame war, what spam was, and what good netiquette was.

That’s a word you don’t really hear anymore. Netiquette. It’s a shame. Everyone thinks they have the right to just get very angry at everyone else now, and it’s taken a lot of the fun out of the whole thing.

Maybe if people had been required to take lessons about the internet in order to access it, and had to learn how easily you can be fooled by misinformation and how you need to be able to discern between what’s real and what’s not, we might not be in the predicament we’re in today.

So I don’t know, maybe I’ll take this blog down in the near future. Is anyone reading it? My web statistics say “no”. So this is pretty much an exercise in talking into the ether. I’m putting things into it, but getting out nothing.

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The Toxic Utility of AI

If you’ve ever ventured onto the social media platform called BlueSky (which, I do love and is the only social platform I am on), or certain corners of other platforms like Reddit, you will likely have run across a very passionate set of people who disavow and berate anything related to artificial intelligence technology. They get so rabid in their attacks, they lose sight of the fact that AI actually has some usefulness when applied to certain situations that don’t invade privacy, don’t steal intellectual property, and don’t do things without asking you. However, if you try to point this out, you will get blocked, banned, ridiculed, and blasted for bringing it up. There seems to be no middle ground for these anti-AI people.

It’s very unfortunate. I wholly sympathize with a lot of their concerns. I don’t like the fact that AI is using intellectual property such as artwork, writing, music, and a host of other things that humans have created in order to train itself. I don’t like that this is usually done without asking anyone for their permission. And I don’t like that we’re in this situation where we have to claw back what AI has taken from us. I totally understand why that has pissed some people off entirely because it has pissed me off for the same reasons.

I recently saw someone on LinkedIn post that AI is just a glorified spell checker. And I actually agree. It’s not creative. It’s not smart. It doesn’t make decisions on its own. It relies on everything that it has been fed. So it’s really way less than it’s cracked up to be in many ways.

All of that being said, there are absolutely worthwhile use cases for artificial intelligence.
Personally, I’ve started using voice dictation with AI-assisted technology to help me speed up typing and relieve my aging fingers that have gotten slower and are usually aching by the end of a long workday. I’m enjoying that aspect of AI very much.
In fact, this whole article was written by me using a voice-to-text app called, VoiceInk. It does such an incredible job at recognizing my speech patterns, pauses, and corrections of myself. These things weren’t possible just a few years ago with any sort of voice to text application. And it does it fast.

Anyway, these are just some thoughts I’ve had bugging me and I decided to get them out there.

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Cleaning Up Apple Contacts

Apple Contacts get out-of-sync and become a mess over time, especially if you have multiple email accounts and have amassed a collection of contacts over the years. This problem was driving me nuts for quite a while, so I finally decided to sit down and fix it. Since it wasn’t simple to research, but ended up being simple to fix, I thought I’d share the solution. I am drawing upon some guidance I found on Reddit, but adding some additional tips.

The solution is to get all your devices (iPhone, Mac, iPad, etc) to only use iCloud to sync your contacts. In my case, I had contacts split across multiple email accounts I had collected over the years, and they didn’t sync up. Some cleanup is required.

Pre-requisites

You need both a computer and your phone for this.

Solution

  • Go to your iPhone Contacts app.
  • Click the top-left corner where it says “Lists”:
  • You will see all the accounts housing your contact on this page.
  • At the top of this is is “All Contacts”, which is a collection of everything you see below. Long press the “All Contacts” line (this is the merged list of all Contacts from different accounts). You’ll see an option to export all contacts.
  • Export the backup file (All Contacts.vcf) to your email or iCloud Drive or Airdrop. Whichever you choose, the goal is to send it to your computer and save it there.
  • Log in to iCloud.com from a browser on your computer. This can’t be done from your iPhone.
  • Go to Contacts in iCloud.com and click the + sign, then select Import Contact.
Click Import Contact here
  • Import the VCF file you just saved to your computer.
  • This may end up creating multiple copies of some of your contacts, which is OK, because we will soon merge and remove duplicate contacts.
  • BUT FIRST, you will need to stop syncing contacts for all the accounts you see on your iPhone and your Mac (and any other device), and only sync contacts to iCloud. Here’s what it looks like on the Mac:
  • For each account listed, open it and un-check Contacts.
  • Do the same on your other devices. Have them sync contacts only via iCloud.
  • Back on your phone, load up the Contacts app again.
  • It should notify you the duplicates it found. You can safely click Merge. It may take a little time to sync up, depending on how many contacts you have, but this should solve all of your problems!