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The moment I learned about permaculture and what is possible, I was hooked. ...

A little over five years ago I was at a friend’s Christmas party and heard about a guy there who had just completed a race at the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower), climbing up the stairwell all the way to the top. It was one of the most intriguing things ever. I had to talk to him. I had to learn more. ...

I just picked up a Rev 4 BeagleBone Black from Micro Center for ~$40 with the intent of using it as a wiki server for both my own personal notes and those for my home and family. While the BeagleBone comes with an embedded 4GB chip pre-installed with Debian, I need more space to store my notes, so I also picked up a 16GB micro SD card. Since the BeagleBone Black (BBB) is more powerful than the Raspberry Pi, I suppose you could use pretty much any wiki software that runs on the ARM architecture with reasonable performance. But, I wrote software specifically for this purpose: a Git-backed Markdown-based wiki in a single executable - Goiki. This is what I’ll be running. ...

So I was having problem with my previous server. Now that I’ve rebuilt everything I’ve realized that the problem I was having could have been easily fixed with my previous install. But, it doesn’t matter; it was time to upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 anyway. The goal of the server is simple: host two domains using Nginx. The problem I was having with the 12.04 install was that I could never get the second domain to serve up the right files; it would always serve up the first domain. This turned out to be a problem with the Nginx configuration. I thought this was the case at the time, but since the install wasn’t doing anything else anyway, I thought it was a good time to rebuild and start from scratch. ...

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. – Albert Einstein

Ahhh, new beginnings. About the only time I ever write something is when I am changing software. I suppose it’s time to change that.

I’m currently working on redoing a company website, moving from WordPress to Nanoc. Since the new website will be static, and mostly a single-pager for a while, we now have the option of moving from a traditional host to the Amazon S3 datastore. Before committing a company website to the process, I decided to go ahead and move this blog over to S3 (it uses Octopress) first. Here are a few notes that I jotted down along the way. ...

So I’m in the beginning stages of planning a whole-house automation system. Since music is pretty damn important to me, the first part of this system I’d like to get right is whole-house audio. I want to be able to play music in pretty much any room I’m in, all controlled from my phone or tablet. Since I’m already running Apple products everywhere, it just makes since to use an AirPort Express for each zone. ...

What goes well with notebooks? Pens! Since my last post was about notebooks, it only makes sense for this one to be about pens. Right? Right. ...

I’ve been on a mad hunt for the perfect notebook the last few days. Not a laptop. Certainly not one of those spiral notebooks typically used in gradeschool. No, just a regular black notebook. Oh, but with graph lines. Not blank. Not ruled. ...