Writings

This is mostly a list of notes, like a personal wiki. All links below go to other articles I’ve written on this site.

Operating Systems

For Personal Devices

macOS & iOS. I’m quite happy with macOS on a MacBook Pro and iOS on my iPhone. More than anything, they’re stable and reliable by default. I always have my eye on the *nix alternatives, but for now they haven’t convinced me.

For Servers

The real OS fun, however, is running a few headless servers. They are effectively my own private cloud, which means I use very few of the common subscription-based cloud software and data services. Operating systems play a big role in bringing hardware to life and I find optimizing them to meet my very specific requirements feeds my tech curiosity endlessly.

FreeBSD. FreeBSD is my favorite server OS. I’ve captured quite a few notes on why I prefer FreeBSD over Linux, and went even further to capture some detailed notes on items I think really set FreeBSD apart from alternatives:

Linux Distributions. I also like Linux. Lots of companies use it, and it has strong funding, which combined lead to it having support for more hardware sooner. So on a new laptop, it’s probably the better choice and if you’re a long-time Mac user like it’s easy to make typing feel like a Mac. But as noted, servers are my main use case, and for this I make use of Alpine Linux with ZFS-on-root. Before making the switch to ZFS, Linux’s Btrfs allowed me to ditch hardware RAID many years ago, and I used Btrfs happily for a long while.

Command Line Interface

The beauty of both FreeBSD and Linux Distributions is that I can interface with them in nearly identical ways as their command-Line interface (CLI) is very similar. I find I can have a productive and shared CLI experience with zsh, fzf, and tmux. I really love that regardless of whether I’m on my phone, a laptop, or even in a web browser, I can talk to my servers in the exact same way.

I also quite like shell scripting. I have a plethora of sh and zsh scripts to automate mundane tasks like checking SMART and file system data to see if drives are healthy.

Server Hardware

Xeons, and ODROIDs, and Raspberry Pis, oh my! All that amazing software I mentioned above is nothing without the right hardware moving electrons where they need to be.

Web

I’ve learned most of what I know about web technology by looking at what others have done, so if you’re curious, I captured a few notes on the technical details of MarkMcB.com.

Health

Quite awhile ago now, I had to deal with severe RSI hand pain. It was such an awful experience that I captured a few notes to hopefully help someone else experiencing the same.