/ blog / archive — 22 entries
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Field notes from 35+ years in the trenches. Mostly C# / .NET / Avalonia,
some Rust, rants about OOP, retro emulation, and whatever weird thing has me up at 2am.
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· 2026
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2026 // current cycle
0x08
2026.04.29
The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse
YouTube has tens of thousands of talented creators making careful, deep, useful videos. The home feed will not show them to you. There is no browse. Only a funnel, built from your laziest clicks and tuned to keep you watching, not to surface what's worth watching. A rant from inside the trap, and a sketch of the tool I'm building to climb out of it.
6′
0x07
2026.04.28
From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control, lived from inside
In April 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote Git in ten days because BitKeeper revoked its free licence to the Linux kernel. Twenty-one years later, no successor has emerged. A practitioner's history of source control from someone who used every major system since 1990, and lost code in most of them.
10′
0x0B
2026.04.27
I use Claude Code, and here is how
I adopted Claude Code about four months ago to help with code and writing. The ideas, the anecdotes, the prose, and the opinions on this site are mine. The model edits. I want to say that out loud rather than leave readers guessing, and I want to be clear about why a force multiplier is a double-edged tool.
3′
0x09
2026.04.27
Mea culpa, I shipped a draft-book feature that hid every chapter inside it
M12 said draft books are public works-in-progress. I updated the book-level visibility filter and called it done. The article-level filter, which lived in seven other queries, was a separate code path. Anonymous visitors saw the book, saw the chapters, and every chapter rendered 'no published articles'. Here's what I missed and the fix.
3′
0x06
2026.04.27
Visual Studio 2026 still ships the form designer Alan Cooper drew in 1987
Every UI framework Microsoft has shipped since WinForms (2002) was sold as its successor. WPF, Silverlight, UWP, MAUI, Blazor desktop. Twenty-four years on, WinForms is still there, on modern .NET, with a designer that any VB6 developer would recognise on sight. The Cooper and Geary form-designer architecture from 1987 is still the path of least resistance for a working line-of-business app in 2026, and that is not an accident.
12′
0x05
2026.04.26
Turning an SBC's OTG port into a real USB keyboard — and the three traps that ate days of mine
A $20 single-board computer can pretend to be a USB keyboard the host OS can't tell from real hardware — but only after you survive the descriptor cache, the layout-on-the-host gotcha, and Windows silently dropping the first keystroke. Here's the working setup, the three traps, and the warm-up that fixes them.
15′
0x04
2026.04.25
Windows 11 won't let you mix wallpaper types across virtual desktops — and the fix is one PNG
Spent thirty minutes trying to get a different background on each Windows 11 virtual desktop. Pictures work fine. The moment a solid color or slideshow joins the mix, every desktop snaps to the same setting. Here's what's actually happening, what Microsoft has admitted, and the one-pixel workaround that sidesteps it.
3′
0x03
2026.04.24
Site Update - Addressed "Cancer" fonts
One of the testers said the fonts look like cancer...
0′
0x02
2026.04.24
Building EvilGeniusLabs.ca: from mockup to production in a week
Five days from domain purchase to a live site with blog, wiki, books, authenticated comments, container registry, and CI. The stack choices, the design mockup, the milestone-driven plan, and an honest accounting of how I used AI as a pair programmer to ship it.
10′
0x01
2026.04.23
Smoke Test — First Post from Production
Verifying the production stack: CI pipeline, container registry, proxy, and database all the way down to the markdown renderer.
3′