marcusb.org on Marcus Butler

If there is one easy, low-effort thing that most of my vendors could do that would instantly make me a happier customer, its this: email me a receipt.

The ZSA Moonlander is a pre-built columnar, split ergonomic 72-key keyboard.

If you’ve been around electronics long enough, you’ll have a few magic smoke moments: sometimes you’ll hear a pop, maybe see some smoke, and usually smell ozone and burning plastic in the air.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Aged from Completely Destroying The World Like a lot of people1, I think elected representatives should be like airline pilots: made to retire at 65.

To help manage RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury,) in my pinky fingers (Emacs Pinky) I’ve swapped my key switch springs for the lightest springs I think will allow the key switches to return properly: Sprit MX Supreme 25 S springs.

Click to view full size image Caption: Installed keycaps; left side After not touching my keyboard layout in any real way for a while, I decided to buy a set of printed key caps to match my layout.

Reading Hacker News Hug of Deaf, I was reminded of a time I built a custom notification system of sorts.

The Free Our Feeds initiative (hereafter, “FoF”) has been seeing a lot of discussion over the past few days.

There are a bunch of fun numerical facts1 about 2025: 2025 is a perfect square (45^2 = 2025) Which you can also write as: (20 + 25) * (20 + 25) = 2025 Or (0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)^2 = 2025 1936 (44^2) was the previous perfect-square year; 21…

I use Chezmoi to manage my dot files and scripts.

Table of Contents Overview Download Quixotic Installation and Configuration Linkmaze Installation and Configuration License Overview Quixotic is a program that will feed fake content to bots and robots.txt-ignoring LLM scrapers.

One of the more difficult things to deal with when enabling a strict Content Security Policy is inline stylesheets.

This Christmas, my daughter and I are building a computer together.

I absolutely love chili, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years dialing in my recipe.

Oversubscription in a network is a state where there is not enough bandwidth at one or more devices (or ports) in the network to support all of the other ports (or devices) using their full bandwidth.

It is very fashionable on certain parts of the Internet to dunk on self-driving cars.

If you want to set Emacs File Variables in your Hugo markdown files but not have the Emacs variables visible in your rendered content you have a couple of options: Option 1 – use an HTML comment Include the file variables in an HTML comment – that will be…

Getting old sucks, as they say.

I’ve recently bought a few Small Form Factor PCs on eBay to use as part of my backup setup.

I published my backup scripts here; this post is a bit more about how I use these scripts to manage my backups and my rationale for why I do backups the way I do.

Table of Contents Overview Features Installation Special Considerations for the Maintenance Script License Overview Backup Tools is a pair of scripts for creating and managing append-only backups made with Borg and Restic.

Click to view full size image Caption: No thanks Cory Doctorow wrote a book recently called The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, which I like and think everyone should read.

Updates July-2024 (5 month) update - no failures on any drives.

Passwords are terrible, but Yubikeys are awesome, especially for reducing the number of passwords you need to remember and the risk of those passwords being stolen.

Overview Tinyimages is an image render hook and gallery shortcode meant to be used with Tinyblog.

Table of Contents Overview Features Design Goals Installation Proof of Work System TODO License Overview Tinycomments is a small self-hosted commenting engine designed to be used with Tinyblog, although it could be used with any website with some adaptati…

Click to view full size image Caption: Front of case Click to view full size image Caption: Side view of case After a long absence (circa 2006) from using Linux as my daily computing environment, I decided to build a new Linux workstation.

Overview Idlewatcher will execute a command after a specified idle timeout period.

Usually, for quick hacks, its easier to define a keyboard macro in Emacs than create a custom Emacs Lisp function.

I’ve participated in many Disaster Recovery (“DR”) planning events over the years, and I generally was left with the impression that, whether the exercise was successful1 or not, the people running the exercise were never really left with an understanding…

Tinyblog is a hyper minimalist theme for Hugo.

I sometimes see questions on Hacker News or other forums that are asking how early dialup ISPs worked (or some specific aspect thereof,) so I thought I’d write up what these systems were like.

Overview I wanted a way to secure my SSH private key on a hardware token, so I configured a Yubikey to store the key.