Welcome to my personal site. Here you will find ramblings and musings. I would not expect you to find anything of interest but I have been known to be wrong.
Interests
- Technology – I love technology and I really thing that it has greatly improved our lives in so many ways. Ever since I got my first computer, a Tandy 1000, I have had a draw to technology. I used to ready old copies of PC Magazine that my grandfather got me, carefully writing out the QBasic games they included in every copy line for line. I would then begin tinkering with it figuring out how every piece of it worked. That was many years ago but that really has never changed – to this day I still love to learn new things about technology and tinker with everything I can. I self host (almost) every service that I can, learning how to properly manage and tweak it to suit my exact needs. Sometimes these projects end up with me realizing that they aren’t useful and getting shut down, but it’s that thirst for in the knowledge of how they work that has never gone away in me.
- FOSS – I’m a big advocate for using and supporting open source software. I regularly contribute code to open source projects where I can and have been donating whenever I can’t. Virtually all of the software I use on a day to day basis is open source and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The projects out there that people have created are really amazing and I am so glad to see FOSS world continuing to grow. Everything I write gets published to my Gitea instances here, though I will admit most of it is just hobby projects, websites or automation tools that I write.
- Privacy + Digital Rights – I have been a huge advocate for our right to privacy and digital rights for many years. I have watched the the internet grow from something small and quirky to the dystopian nightmare it is today. Huge mega-corps that gobble up every bit of data about you to sell to other companies. Companies like Facebook and Amazon have proven time and time again that they do not value your rights as a person and only as a means to make more money. Huge companies that leak massive amounts of information about you due to negligence and face nearly no consequence for it. Governments who opposed the will of the people by spying on it’s own citizens and continuously passing inept legislation that goes against us. I believe it’s time we start fighting back and an easy way to do that is by helping great organizations like the EFF.
- Self-sustainability – I am a big proponent of always driving to become more self sustainable. I think though sometimes the idea gets conflated with the principal that you have to do everything yourself though, and to me that isn’t the correct idea. Self-sustainability should being able to have a broad understanding while still building a community of skills. No one person can do everything and this lone-man mentality is just wrong. Society as a whole has driven so much towards globalization, especially in food production, that it is not sustainable. Food production itself needs to be moved closer to home and we need to stop trying to produce food for the world and focus on how we can improve food production in a localized way. This might be more idealist than realistic but it’s always good to try.