Terrible Things that can Happen

A running log of self-inflicted computing disasters and the small settings that would have prevented them. Entry one: how a single xkill misclick closed every terminal I had open.

Blue Chevrons That Count How Deep in ranger You Are

July 7, 2026

Six lines in my .bashrc prepend a blue chevron to my shell prompt for every level of ranger I have nested, so I always know how far down the rabbit hole goes. Plus how I captured the screenshots in a throwaway Docker container.

Chaining i3 Modes to Reach 100 Workspaces

July 7, 2026

i3 only wires up 10 workspaces out of the box. Here's my mode-chaining trick from an old install, stretched from 30 workspaces to 100, plus the generator script that makes it reproducible on the next machine.

I Optimized a Smoothie Recipe with Particle Swarm Optimization and Differential Evolution

July 7, 2026

What's the most nutritionally dense smoothie that still tastes good? I turned 37 real recipes and USDA nutrition data into a fitness function, then optimized it with two from-scratch global optimizers that agreed with each other to the third decimal place.

Label i3 Workspaces with Emojis Using a Custom PyQt6 Picker

July 3, 2026

How I built a floating emoji picker in PyQt6 that labels i3 workspaces on the fly, and the non-obvious config change that keeps Alt+number working after you rename them.

A “Practical Commits” Convention

July 2, 2026

There are some issues with "Conventional Commits" that have been left unaddressed. In this article I challenge this convention and propose my own.

Arch / EndeavourOS Issues 2026

June 20, 2026

I plan to log any issues I encounter in Arch and EndeavourOS in 2026 to this article in case my solutions are helpful for others.

WebAssembly by Hand; Easy and Fun!

July 2, 2022

An article I wrote in 2022 while learning the WASM bytecode specification