Jay Little

YouTube Version So yeah its been a few weeks since I’ve published any blog posts and I’ll be honest as to why: It’s because I’m tired of being negative.

YouTube Version So we are a mere six weeks out from a midterm election here in the United States.

YouTube Version So as I’ve been predicting my own demise for awhile on this blog (among others), I recently experienced an unexpected bump on the road to obscurity and obsolescence that necessitated an update here.

YouTube Version As it so happens, the other day I happened to click on a YouTube video entitled, “Meet The Silicon Valley Billionaire Ruining The World” and as it turns out it made a very compelling argument that Marc Andreessen may in fact he one of the…

YouTube Version So as I’m sure you all have noticed, PC hardware has gotten way more expensive.

YouTube Version Sometime over the last weekend I was confronted with a thought that hadn’t occurred to me before.

YouTube Version I am writing this post because I had quite the day at work a few days ago.

YouTube Version Today is July the 4th and as it so happens this is the 250th anniversary of the day that our founding fathers declared their independence from their former parent nation, Great Britain.

YouTube Version So here I am sitting at a communal table in the lobby of the Sonesta Charlotte Lower South End hotel near the end of Southeast Linuxfest 2026 (aka SELF) pondering this weekends experience and I gotta say: It was a bit depressing.

YouTube Version I have effectively been exiled from Big Tech.

YouTube Version So before we get into today’s spicey and ultimately divisive discussion topic, I just want to say to those of you who have been following this blog for awhile, thank you.

This year has been a painful one.

On Friday morning September 27th 2024, Hurricane Helene introduced itself to the Southeastern United States.

Well after nearly 23 years of largely uninterrupted and admirable service, the time has come to officially retire the custom Content Management System that has powered it all: Presentation Engine.

So it’s that time of year and I spent last weekend at SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) 2024 in Charlotte, NC.

As some of you may have noticed, I have been rather quiet over the last few months.

So as most of you know, I tend to take the last few weeks of every year off.

Yesterday I almost died.

Today’s post is about a subject near and dear to my heart: Laptops with Linux preinstalled.

While most of my readers probably think of me as being some kind of massive die hard Linux loving Penguin, the reality is that outside of servers, laptops and desktops I don’t use Linux very much.

As some of you undoubtedly have heard Unity, the company behind one of the most prolific game engines of our time called Unity Engine, recently announced some changes to their pricing.

As regular readers know, I have long questioned the value of social media and I have struggled with the question of how involved I should be with it.

If you’ve worked in tech and have any degree of actual talent, you have run into the following scenario: You are on a team and that team has at least one member that isn’t pulling their weight.

So over the last few weeks, I have been re-watching one of my favorite television shows of all time, The Wire.

This post is the culmination of years of accumulated professional frustration.

So this morning I was listening to one of the Linux related podcasts, Coder Radio and the hosts read feedback from a listener who claimed that he was “bored” with PHP and ready to try something else.

I’ve been a Linux fan for almost 30 years, yet in all of that time, I never actually attended a Linux event (ignoring a handful of local Linux User Group (LUG) events here and there).

As of late it has become rather fashionable for established tech orgs running established platforms to attempt to make their platforms profitable.

Back in 2016, a younger and mildly more optimistic Jay heard about a Kickstarter Campaign for a remake of the classic title, System Shock.

Everybody knows I got a big mouth.

I’ve been writing custom software for a long time and one of the things that annoys me most is when a client adopts the position that there is a silver bullet which will reduce or remove the inherent complexity of this task.

Anybody even remotely invested in keeping up with current events here in America, knows that TikTok is on the verge of being banned.

Compared to most coders I work with, I’ve been coding a long time.

Much text has been written in recent weeks on the topic of the ChatGPT chat bot, its forthcoming integration into Bing and how it will change the world as we know it.

I recently took a new job and my new employer gave me a choice between a Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows and an M1 Macbook Pro with MacOS.

I’ve spent a lot of time debating on whether or not I should even write this blog post.

There is no great way to put this without a certain segment of my readers recoiling in horror, so I’m just going to say it.

To those who don’t already know: I will be starting a new job next week.

The point of today’s post, or diatribe if you prefer, is to push back against the notion that once you have a piece of tech integrated into a workflow, you are pretty much good to go barring any sort of critical failure.

Before I launch into this month’s diatribe I want to offer my readers a word of warning: I’ve been feeling very pessimistic about tech in general as of late and this piece will expose a large portion of that to my audience.

Well two and a half weeks ago I finally put on my big boy pants and took Annette down to the local Apple Store… and bought two iPhones.

So its been a few months since I have posted anything here and the reason why is simple: I just haven’t been feeling all that chatty lately.

Some weeks it sure seems like things are always changing, doesn’t it?

So ya’ll have been following me on my hardware journey for awhile now and you have probably noticed that I keep focusing on different facets of the hardware experience.

This is a post that I will probably come to regret writing and publishing in the future.

So long time readers will remember that about four years back, I posted a diatribe entitled “Repeat after me: Games are supposed to be fun” that basically railed against the realization that a lot of the new games floating around weren’t actually all that…

So anybody who is even remotely paying attention to processors knows that Intel is in some really deep shit.

As some of you may have heard, yesterday Microsoft announced the upcoming release of Windows 11.

I assume most of you didn’t already know this, so I’m going to clarify it up front.

Anybody who has spent any amount of time reading my content over the past few years knows what my small server project is.