My advice to junior sysadmins. There is no “right way” just fucking do it. One persons “best practice” is another persons “OMG what the fuck did you just do”. I’m not exactly a risk taker when it comes to managing systems, but I’m not paralized with anxiety about making a decision to take action either. This is especially true if something is already broken - and I expect others (especially senior people) to be able to use their best judgement as well.

Yesterday Mozilla announced that Firefox nightly builds will be available in an APT repository with the Stable, ESR, and Beta versions coming after “a period of testing”. Here’s the announcement from the nightly blog. It’s about time? I’m personally thrilled to see an official traditional package of Firefox coming directly from Mozilla instead of one of those new fangled Flatpak’s or a Snap’s. Calm down - I don’t know a damn thing about flatpak’s I’m sure you are correct that they are the best thing since baby Jesus, I just haven’t had much luck with them, and given the choice I’ll stick with a traditional package everytime.

Where do I turn in my vim card? Every so often I get a wild hair up my ass and decide that I want to learn Emacs. A couple weeks ago one of those hairs appeared, and as a result here I am writing a blog post about Emacs, with Emacs, for people who will probably never use Emacs. Doom Emacs to be exact. I can’t be bothered to learn all the crazy Emacs keyboard bindings, truth be told I’m too old and lazy to put my fragile little pinky fingers through the torture required to become effecient with the default key bindings.

I’ve lived in Ohio my entire life. Growing up in a Catholic family, going to Catholic Schools. Having wrestled with my own faith over the 40(ish) years of my life I have a lot of varying and often contradictory opinions on abortion. At times in my life when certainties seemed easier to come by I was stunchly against abortions of any kind. Even after having walked away from most of the tenants of the faith I grew up in, something about abortion continues to raise all sorts of ethical questions in my mind.

After attending a talk by Scott McCarty over the weekend at the Ohio Linux Fest I was inspired to go through my blog and make sure that I added a Creative Commons License to all of my work. I think it’s important to let people know what they can and can’t do with your work. While at the same time help to protect a public body of knowledge and ensure that it remains free (as in freedom).

For the last 3 years or so I’ve been journaling almost daily on a Mac and iOS app called bear. A few months ago, when I started trying to commit to using my Linux laptop more often than the Mac I started looking around for a good cross platform journaling application. Finding a notetaking application is no problem at all. Finding one with a privacy policy I could live with and had the same ease of use as bear was another thing entirely.