AlextheWard Blog

The title pretty much says it all!

Shutterstock #2041259501 and Asahi Logo Over on Mastodon I mentioned, offhand, that I'd been daily driving (meaning, using daily but not as my primary machine) Asahi on a Macbook Air M2 (15") and some folks were curious what kind of experience I was getti…

So, I've been watching a bunch of folks whom otherwise have reasonable takes about LLMs who, under very specific circumstances, have extremely weird takes about how much an LLM is helping them do a thing, and their internal justifications for them.

Shutterstock #1956259915 In an ongoing series of my disappointment with this AI bubble, Mozilla has gone all-in on the AI Hype Train.

breakermaximus @ Shutterstock #1832963167 😈 While this is a post about Big tech, it's also an indictment of privately run social commons in general.

A garbage fire seemed like an appropriate cover image. konstantinos69 @ Shutterstock #1442040206 This is going to be a rant.

😈 Don't mind the messy desk...

Welcome to the last post in my end-of-2024 Auth series.

I'm apparently obliged to tell you: The passkey icon is a trademark of FIDO Alliance, Inc Here we are again!

Right!

Welcome to part 2 of the rambling journey through how to do authentication systems yourself (or at least understand how they work).

Hello and welcome to the first part of a multipart post series where I'll dig through the depths of authentication knowledge and share all of that with you, including some deep lore of how we got from the early days of the internet to today (though, I'm a…

Design by me, affinity designer.

Shutterstock #2298461049 by One Photo I've been blogging a lot the last couple of weeks across both 11ty and Ghost, and it's no secret that I really like Ghost's authoring experience.

I've always wanted to travel the slow way across the country, taking a train somewhere overnight.

I run two separate blogs which I post to regularly (well, for this blog semi-regularly): This site (https://alextheward.com) and my TTRPG / LLC blog Cthonic Studios.

As the world hurtles more towards shoving Generative AI into absolutely everything to make investors happy, I've been looking more into hardware sustainability and the viability of running things for longer (especially if they don't try to bake generative…

About 10 years ago, I got up on a stage to give a lightning talk about self-driving cars.

This is a follow-up post to Putting Bluefin on a Surface Go In my quest to put Linux on absolutely everything that used to run Windows that I can, I’ve already moved my Framework 13 over to Bazzite, my Surface Go to Aurora, and now the Aya Neo Air over to…

tl;dr I’m no longer recommending Proton services to anyone and have moved off to other services.

Right, so here we are again, just another step in my journey to find a way to opt out of all the “shove generative AI into everything” trend in my personal life.

So, since Microsoft decided to shove AI into everything, destroying what little trust I had left in them in the process, I’ve been giving Linux another go!

Update June 17th, 2024 - Ed Zitron has a pretty great take on this where in he argues that the ChatGPT integration is a mere footnote and it doesn't seem like Apple thinks it's going to be useful.

80's Child @ Shutterstock #1235192320 …and you should disable it.

The International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real good is now over and I watched it live.

Owlie Productions @ Shutterstock #2372381633 Update 7-13-24: The tl;dr of this post is "You shouldn't use these, it's not worth it", in case that's unclear.

Lidiia Lohinova @ Shutterstock #2425460383 Also known as the “Plausible Sentence Generator” and “Art Approximator” This post is only about Generative AI.

Andrey Suslov @ Shutterstock #1199480788 We've got a problem decades in the making Permalink to “We've got a problem decades in the making” # Not too long ago Anil Dash wrote a piece for Rolling Stone titled “The Internet Is About To Get Weird Again” and…

Kit8.net @ Shutterstock #1498637465 The other day, a friend asked me a complicated question wrapped in what seems like a simple question: “How long would it take to make some simple mini-games that you could slap on a web page?”

Update: 04-26-24 - whooboy, so apparently I've missed some marketing nonsense around Passkeys.

I've made a new review about the Asus ROG Ally over in the reviews section, but due to an artifact of how I set up the RSS feed, you won't know about it unless I make a stub here.

So!

tl;dr - If you're most people, get a Steam Deck.

Just a quick note for the blog that I've added a self-hosted copy of Plausible analytics.

So I've added 3 new earbuds to my Earbuds Review Page: Anker Soundcore Space A40, Anker Soundcore VR P10, and Apple Airpods Pro v2.

I've fallen down a super deep Fediverse rabbit hole.

So thanks to the RSS Plugin for 11ty I now have these posts available via RSS!

Today I'm happy to reveal something I've been working on for the past month or so: an Icon Pack specifically for Old School Revival RPGs!

I ran across something while working on updating Stencil tests to use puppeteer, and figured I'd put it down to paper while I'm thinking about it.

Hey there!

So!

Metalsmith Rework Permalink to “Metalsmith Rework” # I recently got the bug to try something new and run my site using a static site generator instead of Drupal.

What's all this then?

So it has been a while since I first talked about creating amandaharlin_v2, and I figured it was time for an update.I originally spun up _v2 on Digital Ocean (which is what is hosting this blog), and everything worked out pretty well.

Today while I was talking in #techlahoma, the topic of chatbots came up.

I recently decided to get an IRC server up and running to see how complicated it would be compared to installing ejabberd.

So, I was working on getting a particular view which rattles off a list of categories working to link off to another view that has a Contextual Filter on said category field to list off all matching content items with said value in the field.

Just a very quick note, as I had to do a bit of hunting to find where the heck Aegir was generating my virtualhosts for all of the domains I was managing through it.

Yesterday, during a conversation with my coworkers on how Dependency Injection works with the Service Locator pattern, we were talking through what would happen with cyclical dependencies.

My last post was about using ab and jmeter to get some performance benchmarks on a website.