• Model M keyboards have a kind of an interesting reputation among keyboard enthusiasts. I used to use one all the time and then got away from them. Is it time to go back?

• I recorded an audioblog entry a while back, but I kept putting off posting it. I looked at it and realized that somehow over two months had gone by, so I figured that now would be a good time to post it
• Got annoyed that I can't find very many communities on the Internet that are worth joining, and how 'communities' now aren't really communities. Turned out a little bit more ranty than I intended, so I decided to stop editing it and just post the thing.
• Played with the default colors, A: To enhance readability and B: because I wanted to

I've been making a few small updates and I figured it would be a good idea to throw them all into one place instead of a billion tinier updates

• Wrote a small reminder of some info I gleaned from reading the tmux docs so I don't forget how to set up a 256-color session. I'm annoyed that I didn't bother finding this out before now.
• I also updated the game inventories. It's the time of year where companies like to release the games they've been working on all year, or clear out old stock. I figured I'd stock up on a bunch of stuff that I'll probably never play. We'll call it 'saving for retirement'
• I've been making some videos and posting them on The YouTubes. I'll start posting them here once I figure out a way to do that that doesn't cost me several fortunes.

After I set up MusicPD the other day it dawned on me that I could probably use that and some more tools to build a pseudo streaming server. So that's what I did.

People™ on The Internet® keep recommending mpd, mpc, and ncmpcpp, three of the worst-named programs I know of, to play their music collections. I decided to give it a try, but most of the tutorials, instructions, manuals, and howtos I found assumed that you're running Linux. I'm not, but I stumbled my way through an install anyway and wrote down my notes so I don't forget what I did. Maybe they'll help you, too?

I ended up writing two articles for topics that are similar enough that it almost feels like I wrote the same article twice.

• I laid out why I don't make blanket software recommendations.
• I also laid out some reasons why I don't identify with the hardware and software I use, which also leads me to not make blanket recommendations.

Could these have been combined into one article? Probably!

It's hard to tell, but I've been kind of busy writing a lot of stuff. Most of it is sitting in a drafts folder, but a couple of the articles graduated to 'posted' status today.

• I wrote down my promise to keep everything on this site free. I won't put up a paywall and I won't put up ads. Which, of course, is easy to say when this site costs practically nothing to run. I do have some plans on what I'm going to do if that ever changes (and none of them involve paywalls or ads).

• Posted a short article about the bsd-hardware.info project, showing how you can participate if you want to.

• Recorded a new installment of Episode One talking about why being hyperspecialized in one thing is actually kind of boring.

• Wrote down my notes on how I configured Nginx to serve this site. It was surprisingly easy, but kind of hard to find info on.

• Decided that I should just make a section for writing down how I did stuff. You can find the listings on the right under the heading 'howdids'. A howdid is different from a howto. A howto ostensibly teaches you how to do something (ie: it's a glorified tutorial), while a howdid is just me writing down how I did something.

  I broke the howdids into two categories, FreeBSD and Other. I could have put them all on one page, but FreeBSD doesn't get the exposure that I think it should have (for that matter, neither do OpenBSD, NetBSD, Dragonfly BSD, and lots of other operating systems, but I haven't written any howdids for them yet), so I'm doing my part to help fix that.

• Updated the NES inventory. I ventured out into the Real World™ and found some games I didn't have, so that was nice.

• I added links to the side bar for Social Media, since that seems to be Thing to Do™ these days

• I also added a link to a videos page, and I even uploaded a video. It's nothing special, it's just something that I had laying around my hard drive for unrelated reasons. I just wanted to see if I could get it to work, and I could, apparently.

  I know this goes counter to my de facto 'No Images' policy, but I'm already hosting an audioblog, so this isn't really that big of a leap, and I'm prepared to live with the consequences. It turns out that occasionally it's necessary to change your mind about something, especially in light of new evidence or circumstances.

  This might also cause some issues that I'll have to address down the road. Videos are kind of big, so storage and bandwidth might become a concern eventually. I'm sure I'll figure something out once that becomes necessary

• I just realized that the link in the last bchlog update was completely wrong and had been that way for nearly a month. Because I'm such a great payer of attention to details, I just now fixed it

• I had some time over the last few days to polish up an article I started writing a while back but never finished. Today, I finished it. I talk a little bit about the motivations I have to just ease myself out of social media, and other people's platforms in general.

• I was on vacation last week, and while I was off, I was taking some of my time to refresh some skills a bit. While I was doing that, I ran across a YouTube comment that was griping that FreeBSD will never be as popular as Windows because it isn't so easy to use that a small child who's never used a computer before could use it. That was insane on a lot of levels, but it inspired me to rant for way too long about it.

  It's not my best work, but I'll blame being on vacation for that.

• I change up my operating system on my computer way too frequently. As a side effect of that, I've gotten pretty good at installing operating systems. I just reinstalled FreeBSD and the guide I used is really out of date, so I took some notes and posted them so I can look at them later without having to try and remember the things I did.

  These notes aren't really meant to be a comprehensive guide or anything (there's plenty of those out in Cyberspace™), so if you want to follow along at home, some additional research may be required.

• As I was browsing around the web, I realized my site didn't have one of those annoying popups telling you about my cookie policy. I put a link in the sidebar for anyone who hasn't figured it out.

• Part three of my Getting My Time Back on the Internet series is now live. I describe my method for blocking sites that I waste too much time on in a futile attempt to force myself to spend time more productively. Like updating this website, for example!
• I also decided to make my block list public so I can pretend to be smug about it. The link is in the sidebar.

• I hit the 50 installment mark on Episode 1, and I started to ponder moving on to Episode 2. I haven't really decided what I'm going to do.
• I recorded a new installment of Episode 1 today, but it was kind of lousy, and, for the first time since I started recording these I decided to not publish it. I'll have to try it again some other time.

• I've been making regular entries on the audioblog, and have gone further than I really intended. I'll keep going until I either run of material or I absolutely get sick of it, whichever comes first.
• I figured out today that I had somehow fouled up the RSS Feed by somehow overwriting items in it instead of appending to it. These kinds of things happen when you do this whole thing by hand, so, 'oops', I guess. That should be fixed now, but you might see some duplicates. I'd recommend that you listen to the entries again, but that's just me. I mean, it's literally just me talking in them.

• I've made a lot of entries on the ol' audioblog. You should check it out while I'm still updating it regularly. I mean, my recommendation is that you should probably check it out anyway, but I'm biased.
• I also got part two of my Getting my Time Back on the Internet series done. I rhetorically ask if your website has a soul, and I go over why I try to minimize my time on sites without them.

• I started getting pretty serious about my YouTube channel right when life threw me a curveball and I had to stop updating it for the time being. Since I don't know when I'll be able to get back into it, I decided to concentrate more on creating things for this website. I started with the Getting my time back series (part two is partially written (really!)), but I also wanted to something multimedia related. I thought about putting videos on this site, but the cost of hosting my own video was going to be way too high (plus, most of my recording gear is in storage).

  Instead, I went and got a cheap(ish) voice recorder and decided to ramble into it for a few minutes during my commute into work. I'm not really sure how long I'll keep it up, but the friction is low enough, and the editing is easier (if I ever decide to do any) that it's a much more attractive option than video production for now.

  I'm calling the audioblog 'Episode 1' (that way nobody will be able to find it by searching the Internet), and you can find the link in the sidebar. I haven't decided if I'll make a separate RSS feed for anyone that just wants to stick it in iTunes or something.

• Added a bunch of GUIDs to the RSS feed so feed validators will quit complaining about it. That probably means that if you subscribe to the site via RSS that you got a bunch of duplicate items. Sorry about that.

• I've been on the Internet for a long time (unfortunately), and I've watched how the Internet has gone from a quirky collection of interesting material to a featureless grey morass of a timesink. I decided that I would start taking more control over how I spend time on the Internet, and I'm documenting my thoughts and process in a new series. Part one is available right now. I've started writing part two, which will be available... eventually, and I have no idea how many parts there will be in total.

• I added an RSS feed to this site a while back. At that time I had the bright idea that I would just make the RSS feed the main index, but that idea had some problems. I never really gave up the idea of styling the RSS feed, though, and I actually did style it today. That way you can either put the RSS feed in your news reader of choice or you can just look at it like a normal web page instead of looking at the raw XML.
• Added some MAD Magazine-style Department headings to the entries on the bchlog. I haven't decided yet if I'll go back and add Departments to the earlier entries, but if you're reading this in the future, I guess you can scroll down and see if I did it.

• A long time ago on another website I wrote an article moaning about how games were becoming too long, and, as a result, I could no longer keep up with the pace I had been buying games at. I decided to revisit that idea and really dig into analyzing it. I found out that, in my case, games being longer wasn't the whole reason that my backlog continues to grow.

• The beginning of a new year is traditionally a time for reflection (yeah, I know that the new year was nearly three weeks ago). One of the things I've been thinking about is how I want to use my computer and the Internet going forward. And, long story short, I decided to write an article about year of the Linux desktop has always been here and will never get here.

• I've been spending some time working on a YouTube channel that's covering an oversaturated niche. I go into some reasons why I think the niche is so ridiculously oversaturated and if I think there's any way to move past it.
• It only took me a week to realize that the headline for this entry had a typo in it. Because I pay attention to details.

• I haven't updated this front page in a couple of weeks, but that's only because I've been busy. Instead of the usual "I'm not dead!" post, I figured I'd write a little article (which turned out to be not so little) about what it means to me to be a (relatively unsuccessful) creator.
• Even though I haven't been updating the index page much, I have been keeping the collection pages updated with the games that I've acquired over the last few weeks, but it seemed silly to mention that here.

• I was going through some boxes that I forgot I had and rediscovered that I had a bunch of Atari 2600 Games and accessories. Added the Atari 2600 inventory page.
• Broke out the CSS for the inventory pages into their own CSS file. There's no sense in loading all those rules if they're not going to be used, right?

• Wrote a little bit about the trouble I have with this website showing up in search engines due to the technology that I used to power it

• I liked the idea of coloring the Virtual Boy inventory so much that I decided to extend it to all of the console inventories. Unfortunately, it turns out that a lot of the US video game consoles are some combination of black, red, and some kind of off-white-grayish, so there isn't as much variety as I would have liked.
• Added a ridiculous color gradient to items on the bchlog. It's just a coincidence that it looks like it's straight out of 90's web design.

• Despite my best efforts, I remembered that I had a Virtual Boy and a handful of games. Added the Virtual Boy inventory page.
  • Made the Virtual Boy inventory page redscale to mimic the experience of playing Virtual Boy games.

• I occasionally get meta and use my not-blog to talk about blogs in the general sense. Today's topic is why I think that making blogs the default kind of website is a bad idea, mostly because they put the new stuff on top and the old stuff may as well not exist. You might find this weird on a page where I'm doing just that, but:
  1. That's addressed in the article
  2. This isn't a blog, it's a bchlog, which is completely different
• Added some CSS rules for anyone accessing this site on a mobile phone or anyone else still rocking an SVGA monitor for some reason. It's not perfect, but it should look a whole lot better for people that refuse to browse with their phone in the horizontal position.
• Added a robots.txt file to tell web crawlers where my sitemap is since they can't seem to find it on their own.

• I take the controversial stance that not everyone should learn to program. Instead, everyone should have the opportunity to learn to program if they want to. Modern computers and operating systems make that really hard for some reason, which is especially weird since that wasn't the case 30 years ago. I go over this problem in some detail, but don't really offer any solutions. That's an article I'll write another time.

• This site doesn't have images. I originally had plans for some features that used images, but, after a while, I kind of decided that I didn't need them for the kind of content that I wanted to create for this site.

• Since I'm tired of bots asking for pages that don't exist and getting boring 404 error pages, I created a quick and dirty 404 page that should now pop up when someone types in something wrong, or a bot follows an outdated link.

• As I get ready to take on another project, I remind myself that it's okay to drop one to pick up another. Or to just drop one (or more) completely if I need to consolidate my focus.

• I had a dream last night that I added a CSS rule for noting when I talk about nice things* and I decided to make my dreams come true. Well, at least one of them.
  • No, I'm not kidding

• Wrote an article discussing whether or not I think it's possible to become a video game expert (spoiler: it's not), and what that means.

• I added a page with some details for browsers that aren't aware of things like XSLT, but I didn't like the end result of the redirect. I wrote an article with a few more details if you're into that kind of thing.
• I also added a 'Meta' section to the Thoughts page so I have a place to put articles where I go a little more in-depth than I do on the main page

• I added an RSS feed yesterday. Today, I wrote an article explaining what I think about that. Also about what I think of RSS feeds in general
• I guess that means that I have to update the FAQ, too
  • *grumble grumble*

For some reason, everyone wants feeds. I have a suspicion that that a lot of people treat RSS feeds like they do Pokémon or Facebook 'friends', they have to add them all so they can humblebrag about how many they follow.

I hand-coded a basic RSS feed that's available in the sidebar, and it just links back here. I kicked around the idea of just making the index page here an RSS feed with some fancy-pants styling so nobody could tell a difference between the current index page and the RSS-ified version, but it turns out that browsers treat RSS feeds differently from regular XML files (because of course they do), and I gave up on that idea pretty quickly

Linux turned 28 today, so I wrote a little something going over the tired old discussions that happens every time Linux gets into the tech news. Seriously, I've read the same discussion every few months for the last several years, and it's kind of annoying.

• Added categories to the Thoughts index page, partly to make it easier to browse, but mostly to figure out how <xsl:choose> and <xsl:when> work.
  • There are some limitations that I might revisit someday:
    • Currently an article can only exist in one category at a time
    • I fill out the category listings in what seems like a pretty inefficient way, I might work on that someday if I ever decide that I want to dive into sorting algorithms

• Added some styling for adding corrections since I had to update an article once I found out that my imagination is so good that I invented a thing that had already existed for nearly 20 years.

• Added a 'light mode' alternate stylesheet for weirdos that prefer looking at a bright site instead of a cool dark one. The stylesheet might lag behind the main one as I add and tweak elements because it's more difficult to test than it should be (also, I'm very lazy). You also have to pick the light mode stylesheet every time you click on a link because I couldn't find an easy way for that setting to persist.

  Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, desktop Firefox is the only desktop browser that suppports alternate stylesheets (sorry, the six people other than me that use mobile FireFox). Normally I wouldn't bother adding a feature that's only supported by one browser, but it is an HTML standard, so I don't have an issue with adding it. Besides, Chromium browsers ignore alternate stylesheets, so users of Chromium-based browsers probably won't notice that they're missing anything unless someone tells them.

  • Named the default stylesheet 'terminal' because it looks kind of like how I have the terminal on my computer configured.

• Added a sitemap that I will probably forget to update because this site keeps getting crawled by crawlers that don't know how XSLT works.
  • Added some styling to the sitemap so it actually looks okay, instead of bare XML which only kind of looks okay
  • The secret pages aren't on the sitemap because there are no secret pages

• Contrary to the notion that every website has to be either a blog or an application, this website is neither, and probably never will be as long as I'm running it.

  To be fair, though, you could probably look at this index page and conclude that it's a blog, but it's not. It's more like a changelog, or a 'chlog'. Or, since it's on the Web, a 'webchlog', or 'bchlog' for short.

• Since this bchlog is getting kind of long, I added links to each of the posts so you can easily find your place just in case you have a power failure or something while reading through it. Also probably other reasons.
• Added some CSS for noting dangerous things

• "Went a little overboard styling blockquotes" -- Me

I take the controversial stand that websites shouldn't have carte blanche to use every resource you have (computing or otherwise) just because they want to. It's rude.

As a side note, this entire website is smaller than the monstrosity of javascript code that generates one page of your second-favorite website.

I ramble a little bit about trying to make it big on the Internet, failing a lot, and changing my tack accordingly.

Added a Commodore 64 section to the inventories since I found a cache of C64 games hiding in a storage bin. I should check these things more often.

I accidentally fell down a rabbit hole of watching a bunch of video game speed runs over the last couple of weeks. I have several thoughts about that.

According to Archive.org, one of the previous owners of wyrm.org used this domain to host material that's not safe for work (seriously, if you decide to go check, maybe don't look at snapshots from 2018 anywhere where looking at that kind of thing will get you in trouble or fired).

Apparently, though, a lot of bots didn't get the memo and they're attempting to crawl this site repeatedly looking for naughty things, over and over and over again. I added some rules to my firewall to try and get them to knock it off, so if you get temp-banned, that's why. Also, don't go looking for pages that don't exist. There are no secret pages.

You shouldn't trust any website on the internet, including this one by default. I lay out a few reasons why I think blindly trusting every website you visit Bad Idea™.

It's true! This site is proof.

• Added a basic favicon to make Firefox happy.
  • Slightly concerned that I suddenly care about making Firefox happy
• Placeholder if I get anything else accomplished today.
  • I actually did make a minor change, but it's so minor that I won't tell you what it is. I think that makes it an easter egg.

• Remembered that I had a Genesis and a few games. Added the Genesis page.
• Finally finished all of the initial console inventories
  • Realized that the Super NES had a lot of games with stupidly-long titles
• Continued playing with the CSS Colors

Like everyone on the Internet, I have Opinions on Things™. Occasionally, I'll put those opinions into words, and then I'll put them in the new Articles section over on the right navbar.

I should have probably mentioned this a while ago, but if you're dead-set on looking at stuff on this site, you should be using a browser that supports client-side XSL transformations. I mean, you don't have to, but if you don't, you probably won't see much.

Since I had just gotten started and didn't have much attachment to the old name, I decided to use another domain that's an actual word (it's not all that great of a word, but it's the only four-letter word dot anything that I could find and afford). Everything is moved over (since there wasn't all that much to move), and all references to the old domain will be removed as soon as I get around to doing it.

• Cleaned up some of the XML that I used for the inventory pages so that I can use one XSL sheet for multiple inventories, and started filling out the various lists.
• Made some tweaks to the CSS to that it looks better (squashed everything into a narrower column, played with the colors, et cetera).
• Added an FAQ page.

Added a list of NES Games that I have since I have enough copies of Superspike V'Ball.

Added a list of amiibos that I have so I don't keep buying duplicates.

This site is now live. It's a place for me to learn, experiment, and to create things for my own purposes.

I'm not even sure how you got here