Writers Block
Back from a break. An omnibus of things making my neurons fire lately. A hand-built xeyes widget, engineering blogs, LLM internals, and interesting code bases.
Posts
NeXT Users Guide
Living with OpenStep day to day. mail, NFS, file manager, tuning preferences on finished NeXT appliance.
nextcube, Part 2 – Finishing the OpenStep 4.2 Appliance
Completing the OpenStep 4.2 VirtualBox build — developer tools, modern shells, GNU utilities, X11R6, and a nostalgia-fueled network scan.
NeXT/OpenStep 4.2 VM in 2025
A practical, reproducible OpenStep 4.2 VM on modern hardware—stable networking, fast boots, and sane defaults.
SchemaSpy with LocalDB (SQL Server)
How to get SchemaSpy working with SQL Server LocalDB — the quirks of named pipes, the right driver, and a working example.
Tcpdump Survival Guide
A practical survival guide to tcpdump, the Swiss Army knife of packet capture. Covers how to capture clean traces, pick the right interface, grab mobile traffic, and filter for relevance.
Unix Users Handbook
A practical Unix user accounts guide with history, concepts, and a task-based cheatsheet covering inspection, creation, modification, groups, sudo, and troubleshooting.
Git Customization
Bend Git to your will with custom configs, aliases, and colors.
Git-Fu
A practical Git guide with clear explanations, a task-based cheatsheet, and helper scripts to make version control less scary.
SchemaSpy with SQLite
How to get SchemaSpy working with SQLite — the correct driver, the right flags, and a working example.