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I love operating systems and geeky devices. SailfishOS still has unmatched UI and gestures, but struggles with ecosystem and value proposition. Here are my thoughts in Sept 2025.

Living out in the boonies has its charms: quiet nights, open skies, and an estate that keeps me busy, but internet choices aren’t one of them. Options are slim, and Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT) makes life rough if you want to self-host. Static, routable IPs are what you really need, but out here that’s a luxury. I didn’t want to rely on Cloudflare tunnels, ngrok, or similar middlemen. For a while, I leaned on Tailscale as a DIY SD-WAN (basically a secure mesh network overlay across your devices). It’s great, but not every service or device plays nicely over it. ...

Thanks to Anirudh for getting me started on the right path! Running Signal Desktop in a Debian VM on OpenBSD I wanted to get Signal Desktop running in a way that integrates smoothly with my OpenBSD host. Since Signal doesn’t have a native OpenBSD port, I spun up a Debian VM using vmm(4) and vmctl. Below are my notes for setting this up, including a few gotchas. Step 1: Download Debian ISO Start with the Bookworm Debian netinst ISO (I had issues with Trixie): ...

OpenBSD and Me OpenBSD holds a place near and dear to my heart. Back in the Air Force, I deployed some of the first Snort sensors in 2003/2004 to detect network traffic. I quickly became engrossed with the elegance and simplicity of OpenBSD’s build system and ongoing maintenance. I wish I could dig back through my early eBay purchases and find the little Compaq machine that powered my first home server install. In my dorm room, I built my first PF firewall and router to practice network configurations. After spending all day working on Sidewinder firewalls and Cisco gear, I was blown away by what I could accomplish with a $200 computer and some persistence. ...

There’s something delightfully analog about growing up before smartphones. We don’t have TikTok timelines or Instagram reels of high school. Our memories live on dusty Hi8 and DV tapes, glitchy, lo-fi fragments from a time before social media ruled our lives. Back in Latimer, Mississippi, our English teacher Vadis Perkins, a true visionary, gave us the green light to launch a morning news show at St. Martin High. She handed us a makeshift newsroom: a few camcorders, some clear tape, and a ton of enthusiasm. We recorded, spliced, and narrated, one linear edit at a time. ...