I used GnuCash religiously from around 2005 until 2011. Every transaction, every account, credit cards, the works. I was the kind of person who reconciled to the penny every month and felt vaguely anxious if I didn’t.
Then life had other plans.
Continue Reading
Since I started writing code in the early 80s I’ve always had a notebook with me. In high school and college it was a spiral notebook. I’d sit in the cafeteria between classes with a cup of coffee and literally write code by hand to transcribe and edit when I got home. At the office it was a steno pad. Once I wasn’t in school, it was just the steno pad. I used to buy them in bulk at Costco.
The steno pad stuck around for decades. Smaller than a spiral notebook, the top spiral meant flipping pages didn’t cover my keyboard or mouse. No organization system, no hierarchy, no folders. Just notes, most recent at the bottom, flip through to find what you need. It worked. I still have a desk drawer with half a dozen steno pads in it.
That’s what I wanted to build.
Continue Reading
What happens when a doctor gives instructions to an arguably neuro-spicy middle-aged developer and said developer can’t find an app that suits them?
They write their own of course.
Continue Reading
I’ve been self-hosting my own calendar infrastructure for a while now. CalDAV, Radicale, the whole stack. It works. But the one thing I could never get right was the client. Every calendar app I tried either wanted me to route everything through their servers, locked me into a single ecosystem, or just didn’t handle shared calendars well.
So I built one.
Continue Reading
New month, new scam attempt. I’m certain this is also because I’ve put my number out there a lot recently, but today I got a call from someone claiming to be a sheriff from my actual county.
It started out with him announcing that he was from the [Actual] County Sheriff’s office, his name, and his badge number very quickly. He followed up by telling me that the reason for his call was that I missed a scheduled jury duty appearance today. The “sheriff” knew my name and county, but those are both public record for anyone willing to look.
Continue Reading
Over the past few months, I’ve been increasing my visibility — more blogging, more conversation on LinkedIn, and generally showing up again after some time off. It was paying off: more profile views, more engagement, more conversations.
With additional visibility to actual people, that same visibility increased for scammers. They’ve always been part of life, but this time they showed up looking polished, professional, and perhaps even dangerously convincing.
Continue Reading