Productivity on Tom Meurs

KVM/QEMU Scripts and Aliases: Making Virtualization Actually Usable

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:17:00 +0100

I run VMs all day. A Kubernetes deployment I want to test, a distro I read about, Windows for that one stubborn application, an experiment I’d rather not run on my actual machine. KVM/QEMU is the right tool for all of it. It lives in the Linux kernel and runs close to native speed. Nothing in it phones home, and no vendor gets a say in what I do with my own hardware.

Terminal Multiplexing: tmux vs Zellij vs Screen

Thu, 14 May 2026 19:00:00 +0100

The first time it bit me I was halfway through a database migration over SSH. The train went into a tunnel, the WiFi dropped, and the process on the other end died with the connection. I sat looking at a dead prompt, wondering how much of the migration had committed.

A multiplexer would have saved me that hour. The process keeps running on the server whether I’m attached or not, so a dropped connection costs me a reconnect and nothing else. I reattach and the work is where I left it. That one property is why a multiplexer goes on every machine I touch, before the editor and before the dotfiles.

The Lost Art of Software Optimization: What Demoscene Taught Us About Sustainability

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:42:00 +0100

Most of us ship software the same way now. Pick a framework, pull in a few hundred dependencies, and the service idles at a gigabyte of RAM before it does its first useful piece of work. Nobody profiles it. If it’s slow, you scale up. Compute is cheap, your time isn’t, and the bill goes to someone else. I don’t say that as a complaint. I’ve done it, and I’ll do it again on the next deadline.

Learn the Defaults: Why Portability Beats Customization

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:47:00 +0100

TL;DR I spent years polishing a vim and tmux setup, then sat useless in front of a stock vim on a production server. So I learned the defaults I’d been overriding all along, and moved my customizations on top of them instead of in place of them. What that looks like for vim, tmux and the shell tools, and the four checks I use to find the gaps.

For years my setup was the thing I was proudest of. A dotfiles repo with commits going back further than some of my jobs, a vim config that pulled in thirty plugins, the tmux prefix moved somewhere comfortable, a prompt that took a weekend to get right. Down to the last keybinding, it was mine. On my laptop I was fast, and I hardly thought about the tools at all. Muscle memory did the work.

Dotfile Management with mise and chezmoi: The Perfect Combo

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:23:00 +0100

TL;DR Six ways of syncing dotfiles later, the one I kept is chezmoi for the files and mise for the tool versions, with the mise config living inside the chezmoi repo. Templates handle the work laptop against the personal desktop, age handles the secrets, and a fresh machine is one command and about five minutes. The walk-through goes from one managed file to the bootstrap I run for real.

My .zshrc is older than some of my coworkers’ careers. Same for my .vimrc and my tmux config. They’ve grown into a setup that does exactly what I want, and I’d be lost without them. The catch is that I run more than one machine. A laptop, a desktop, now and then a throwaway VM for testing. For years, keeping those in sync was a pile of hacks I didn’t trust.

The space container thought experiment: systems thinking for survival

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0100

You wake up. It’s dark. Somewhere a fan is humming.

Your eyes adjust. You’re in a container. Metal walls, a few small windows, and behind them stars. Just stars. No Earth anywhere.

There’s a note taped to the wall:

“You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.”

I bring this one up with friends when the evening has gone quiet enough for it. It sounds like science fiction, and the first reaction is usually a joke about the toilet. Then somebody asks what’s in the room, and we’re off. What the experiment takes away is an assumption I’d never said out loud before I ran it. That there’s an “outside” that absorbs my mistakes and refills my supplies.

Taskwarrior, Timewarrior and Vit: The Ultimate CLI Productivity Stack

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:00:00 +0100

TL;DR Taskwarrior, timewarrior and vit are my task list, my time tracking and the vim-style screen on top, all in the terminal and all plain text in ~/.task. Two commands get you started. The rest of this post is what I bolted on afterwards, from projects and dependencies to a self-hosted sync server, and you can stop at any section.

For context on how my brain works, see Working with an AuDHD Brain.

Working with an AuDHD brain: why I automate everything

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0100

For a long time I thought the problem was me.

I have AuDHD , autism and ADHD together. The ADHD is ADHD-PI, the inattentive kind, without the hyperactivity most people picture when they hear the word. For years I treated the whole thing as a defect I’d train away. I bought the planners. I read the productivity books. Every week I told myself that Monday I’d finally be disciplined.