I've had an interest in Zen Buddhism since my college years. Initially this was a rather silly and superficial thing: samurai were cool, and they practiced Zen. I think the first Zen-inspired book I read was The Unfettered Mind: Writings from the Zen Master to the Swordsman. Over the years …

Like many people in the 2020s, I travel a lot. I work in a different city to the one I live in, and spend a few days in one place and a few days in the other. I don't really mind travelling, but it comes with a few inconveniences.

One …

I recently bought a few spiral-bound notebooks from Muji - two for work, and two for personal use. My intention for the personal notebooks was to use them as a destination for inconsequential thoughts, schemes, grocery lists, todo lists, and so on. In digital note-taking software these are often called 'fleeting …

When writing a web service in Rust you may be tempted to do careful research based on your use case, to tailor your code to fit the needs of a typed language with strict memory safety, and to take a pragmatic approach to development. Doing things this way might make …

If you've hung out in Linux enthusiast circles lately, you'll have heard whispers that Arch Linux is no longer hot product. Instead, all the cool kids are using something called NixOS.

Since I bricked my Debian setup in an unfortunate accident involving compiling from source, I decided to give NixOS …

If you just want the VirtualBox VM for this article without the philosophising, skip to the appendix.

We live in a world full of distractions. In the modern "attention economy" it's more of a challenge to avoid content and advertising than it is to find it.

Nowhere is this more …

Wouldn't it be great if you could type out an article on your computer, push a couple of buttons, and have it appear on the web? No clunky page builders, no admin logins, and no mandatory updates.

With the right setup for your website, this is possible.

I wrote about …

Simple websites are better than beautiful ones.

I'll repeat that for the folks in the back.

Simple websites are better than beautiful ones.

Let me be clear what I mean by a simple website. I don't mean a Wordpress site with a minimalist theme. I also don't mean a Substack …

In a previous article I discussed the power of todo lists and their use in organising your tasks. I have a confession: for a long time I didn't use task lists. This is because of some practical issues which plagued me as a user of those tools. And when I …

After writing the lexer I could turn any math expression into a set of tokens. However, they were still organised as a list and couldn't be used to do any useful work. To go from a list of tokens to a program, I needed to write a parser.

The goal …