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Using the internet like it's 1999
A blog, notes, gallery, lifestyle and fully conglomerated posts from Joshua.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 662 posts.
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The intracies of modern camera lens repair (2024)
I stumbled across a broken Sigma 45mm f/2.8 Art lens for a very cool $58.65 USD that I simply could not resist. I've been eyeing an AF lens in the 50mm range for my recent endeavors with L-mount cameras and this looked like the perfect fit. This lens is commonly found as a kit with the very excellent full-frame Sigma…
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Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
Unattributed is a former IT person, discovering life after work.
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A Programmer's Loss of Identity
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me . In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be…
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Have Taken Up Farming
ex program, en farm
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Another Day Has Come
If you agree that Apple itself was It’s hard to imagine a more orderly, confidence-inspiring, exciting-but-not-at-all-surprising, this-feels-right way to do this.
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I analysed 20 years of my chats
Importing 1.2 million messages from Telegram, VK, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter into a structured Obsidian vault with local LLM inference - to measure how my friendships work with decay curves, vocabulary shifts, directional sentiment, and conflict rates.
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Reasons I didn't become an EMT, ranked
Here are 21 reasons I delayed getting my EMT licensed, sorted loosely by ridiculousness.
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Childhood Computing
I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing . It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life.
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Poor Man's Polaroid
How to build a poor man's Polaroid camera - a DIY instant camera project with parts, assembly and photos.
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Should you wash your solar panels?
I have a small solar farm and the panels have got visibly dusty. Is cleaning them worthwhile? How much difference does it make? Let's find out.
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Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)
Short answer: because math. Longer answer: because prime numbers don’t divide into each other evenly. To understand what follows, you need to know some facts about the physics of vibrating st…
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Dostoyevsky isn't difficult
Other than the names. The names are difficult.
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Punch yourself in the face with reality
Who can punch themselves in the face with reality the most? This is who will win in the age of AI.
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As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program
A blog about software craft and quality
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What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025
Throughout 2025, I spoke a few times about our home energy solution, including our grid usage, our solar array and our Tesla Powerwall batteries. Now that I have a full year of data, I wanted to take a look at exactly how everything is working out, and, in alignment with
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He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
Ask ChatGPT to estimate the carbs in your lunch. Now ask it again. And again. Five hundred times. You’d expect the same answer each time. It’s the same photo, the same model, the same question. But you won’t get the same answer. Not even close — and the differences are large enough to cause a
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A Lament for Aperture
I'm an old Mac-head at heart, and I've been using Macs since the mid 1990s (the first Mac I used was an LC II with System 7.1 installed on it). I don't tend to think that the computing experience was better in the olden days — sure, there's a thing to be said about the simplicity of older software, but most of my…
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I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned
Driven by curiosity, I decided to find out what the IndieWeb tag that kept showing up on some blogs and Mastodon toots was all about. I quickly…
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I made my phone slow on purpose
I bought a brand new iPhone and immediately made it slow on purpose.
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A Kantian Critique of "Sorry" by Justin Bieber
Justin Bieber's "Sorry" is a song about regret, asking for forgiveness, and wanting another chance after having hurt someone. But philosophically speaking, what exactly makes an apology morally meaningful?
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A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny ...
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The value of not getting to the point (2015)
I read somewhere recently, I forget where, that the purpose of people getting together for a conversation over a beer or coffee or lunch or dinner is that it the food and drink spare us from the burden of needing to have something to say throughout the whole conversation.
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Repair a ship’s hull still in the river in -50˚C (2022)
Despite these hard times, we continue our work saving the world from all manner of cyber-maliciousness. We adapt; we carry on. Meanwhile, I hope my travel notes and photos will bring a little cheeriness to all who view them – because there’s hardly a better way to do that than with the beauty of nature
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The Dark Night of Mathematics
What are we really doing?
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I Miss Terry Pratchett
On reading Terry Pratchett at sixteen, in the back of a French classroom, and a sentence that has been kicking over the furniture in my head ever since.
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For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work.
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Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet
Why controlling total luminance is a better bet