Notes on Week 22 of 2026

Memorial Day in the US was Monday this week. We spent a liesurely day around the house. I hacked a bunch on this website, played some music, and drew some dragons with Erin.

I recently tested for Shodan at my Iaidō dōjō and passed. I got my certificate this weekend.

Zeal is an open source offline documentation viewer. I have used Dash for years on macOS, and recently had need of a similar tool for non-Mac operating systems.

I spent some of my free time this week learning about jails on FreeBSD. Jails are a concept I’ve known about for years, but haven’t taken the time to dig into. I discovered Bastille, a utility for managing jails built on top of FreeBSD’s native tools. Apparently it requires knowing a thing or two about pf(4) and NAT too.

I’ve also spent some time exploring a few Linux distros in preparation for the arrival of a Framework Laptop 13" Pro". (I’m batch 13, hopefully arriving in September.) It’s been a long time since I spent much time in the Linux community, so I’ve been getting reacquainted. Fedora and Ubuntu are the two supported distros for Framework systems, so I’ve been focused on those.

I spent a little time thinking about horizontal space in web design this week.

I was sad to hear that the Hands flagship store in Shibuya is closing. It has been there for decades. On my first trip to Japan, Tess and I wandered through. It has a fascinating assortment of things for DIY repairs and other projects.

This letter Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother when he heard the news of the birth of their son. At the time, he was living in a mental asylum in Saint-Rémy and painting constantly. Despite his tremendous struggles with mental health, he took the time to write and to paint a picture of almond branches for his new born nephew.