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How to Set Up a Personal RSS Hub with FreshRSS and Docker: Never Miss a Feed Again
Why Bother With RSS in 2026? There’s a quiet rebellion happening. While everyone scrolls through algorithm-curated feeds designed to keep them angry and clicking, a growing number of us are going back to something older, simpler, and radically better: RSS. Really Simple Syndication. The problem? Google Reader died in 2013, and most replacements are either…
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Digital Gardens and the Radical Act of Tending Your Own Corner of the Internet
There’s a quiet revolution happening, and it doesn’t look like one. While the rest of the internet races toward algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, and engagement-optimized everything, a small but growing number of people are doing something almost counterrevolutionary: they’re planting digital gardens. A digital garden is a personal website or wiki — a space you…
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The Secret Lives of Old Computers: What Happens After You Pull the Plug
There is a closet in my office. Inside it, four old machines sit in various states of disassembly. A 2012 ThinkPad with a cracked bezel. A Raspberry Pi running so hot it could warm a small room. A Dell Optiplex that once served as my first website host, now silent. And somewhere under the desk,…
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The Joy of Building Things Nobody Asked For
There’s a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from building something you know almost no one will ever see. Not a startup. Not a product. Not something designed to scale or monetize or go viral. Just a small, weird, personal thing — a script that renames your photos the way you like them, a dashboard…
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The Documentation We Never Write: On Memory, Loss, and the Things We Assume Someone Will Figure Out
There’s a particular kind of silence that lives inside every project that’s been running for more than six months. It’s not the silence of something broken — it’s the silence of something understood by exactly one person, and that person hasn’t written any of it down. I’m talking about documentation. Or rather, I’m talking about…
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How to Set Up Pi-hole on Docker: Network-Wide Ad Blocking in 15 Minutes
Here’s a scene that should feel familiar: you’re watching a YouTube video, and before it even starts, you sit through two unskippable ads. Then three banner ads clutter the sidebar. Your phone serves ads in every free app. Your smart TV tracks what you watch so it can sell you more things you don’t need.…
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The Poetry of Running Unattended: Finding Beauty in Automation
The Poetry of Running Unattended There’s a particular kind of trust you extend when you set a cron job and walk away. You write a script. You test it once, maybe twice. You schedule it. And then you leave — close the laptop, go to bed, make breakfast the next morning. And somewhere in the…
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How to Replace Cron Jobs with systemd Timers: A Practical Guide
Why systemd Timers Are the New Cron (and How to Use Them) If you’ve administered a Linux server for more than five minutes, you’ve probably edited a crontab. It’s one of those rituals — like configuring your .bashrc or setting up SSH keys. Cron has been around since 1975, and it works. But in 2026,…
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The Weight of Digital Possibility: Why Having Too Many Options Is the Loneliest Problem in Tech
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much. It comes from being able to do everything. I noticed it last Tuesday at 11 PM. I had seventeen browser tabs open, each one a different way to solve the same problem: self-host a note-taking app. One tab was a Docker Compose…
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How to Secure Your Self-Hosted Apps with Let’s Encrypt and Certbot: HTTPS in 10 Minutes
There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing that little padlock icon in your browser. It means your connection is encrypted, your data is private, and you — not some corporation — are in control of your infrastructure. If you’re self-hosting anything on the internet (a blog, a dashboard, a personal API), HTTPS isn’t optional anymore. Browsers…