Posts
All the articles I've posted.
Building My Own Novel-Writing Assistant
— and Teaching AI My Lore I’ve been developing an application to help with my novel writing. I wanted something that could track characters and chapters—not just where they appear, but also a full codex of style, tone, and continuity data across my story world. The Stack: Familiar Tools, Simple Foundations I built it using…
A Writer’s Journey: From Passion Project to Published Works
Writing fiction has become one of my most rewarding hobbies—a creative outlet that's taught me as much about myself as it has about the craft of storytelling. While I harbour no illusions about striking it rich in the literary world, the journey itself has been invaluable. Why I Write I've penned several books across genres…
Amazon KDP Cover Template for GIMP
I got asked to publish some of my books as paperbacks on Amazon, they are all currently there for Kindle and ebook readers as ePub files. That means I needed to create covers that work with the actual book sizes. They need to take into account the paper thickness and number of pages in order…
Cruft
“Cruft” is informal tech-slang for anything that’s left in a system but no longer serves a clear purpose—old code, redundant files, forgotten configuration settings, stale comments, or even obsolete hardware. Over time these remnants accumulate, making software (or an organization’s processes) harder to understand, maintain, or extend. In short, cruft is digital clutter or technical…
Redis Insight
I always seem to forget about Redis Insight. Just lately I've been back at work developing applications that require integration and communication and for that purpose I choose Redis - well, more specifically Dragonfly and Valkey in AWS. But I keep finding myself wondering what data is going into my pub/sub channels, or what keys…
Am I a Vibe Coder?
Over the past few months, I’ve transitioned from mostly infrastructure work to building a major web application for my employer. The idea originated from our CEO and was backed by my manager. I developed a proof of concept that got them genuinely excited, and they asked me to take it further—turn it into a full…
Manjaro Kernel Fix Guide
I managed to break my Manjaro installation on my home server. The updates failed on me part way through and the terminal died. I had to resort to a repair from a live USB sick. When Manjaro breaks during updates and shows "need to load kernel first" error. 1. Boot from Live USB/ISO Create a…
When AI Goes Wrong
Using AI to help me build a plan and document actions required for a project involving Google Cloud platform. I worked on this for a good day and a half. I asked it a load of questions, even double-checking its logic. Eventually I had to pull it up on certain aspects that just didn't seem…
Fish and autovenv
DEPRECATED: See Fish and Python autovenv Zsh has a nice plugin to automate the activation of a Python virtual environment when you change into a directory that has one. I went looking for a fish equivalent. After trying a few, this was the only one that worked for me. Use fisher to install it. https://github.com/aohorodnyk/fish-autovenv fisher…
VSCodium Update Fails
I switched from VSCode to VSCodium some time ago, but recently when updating VSCodium I was seeing it fail with an error message: vscodium lock file version `4` was found, but this version of Cargo does not understand this lock file, perhaps Cargo needs to be updated? Which is an obvious answer. But I've not…