Beginner

You wake up. It’s dark. You hear a soft humming — fans, somewhere. Slowly your eyes adjust to the light. You find yourself in a container. Metal walls, a few windows looking out at… stars. Only stars. No Earth in sight. There’s a note: “You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.” This is the thought experiment I regularly discuss when I’m in a philosophical mood with friends. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s actually a lens to think about systems thinking, circular processes, and — if you extrapolate — about how we treat the Earth. ...

I used KeePass for years. Then 1Password. Then Bitwarden. All decent tools, but they always felt… like too much. Too much UI, too many features, too much hassle to integrate properly into my workflow. Then I discovered pass. A password manager that does exactly what the name says: store passwords. Nothing more, nothing less. What is pass? Pass is the “standard unix password manager.” It’s a shell script of ~700 lines that stores passwords as GPG-encrypted files in a directory. That’s it. No database, no proprietary format, no built-in cloud sync. ...

GPG is one of those tools everyone “should learn someday” but nobody wants to. The documentation is overwhelming, the terminology confusing, and the error messages cryptic (pun intended). But GPG is also essential. It’s the foundation for pass, for signed git commits, for encrypted email, and for verifying software downloads. If you’re serious about security, you can’t avoid it. This is the guide I wish I had when I started. What is GPG actually? GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) is an implementation of the OpenPGP protocol. It does two things: ...

For context on how my brain works, see Working with an AuDHD Brain. This is the stack that structures my daily work: taskwarrior for task management, timewarrior for time tracking, and vit as a vim-style interface. Together they form a keyboard-first, terminal-native productivity system. No Electron apps. No cloud sync sending your data to Silicon Valley. Just plain text, local, and blazing fast. Why This Stack? I struggled with task management for years. Todoist, Things, Notion, Obsidian plugins — tried them all, eventually abandoned them all. The problem was always the same: too much friction. ...

I self-host nearly everything. Kubernetes clusters on refurbished mini-PCs. GitLab on my own hardware. Vault for secrets. Monitoring, logging, all of it. People often ask: why? Managed cloud is easier. AWS, Azure, Google do it at scale and reliably. Why put yourself through this? The short answer: agency. The long answer is this entire article. The spaceship thought experiment In my post about the space container thought experiment I describe a scenario: you wake up in a closed container in space. Everything you need to survive is present, but nothing goes in or out. ...