tinker

How to get VS Code “Native Tabs” on KDE Plasma (Linux)

[drop_cap]W[/drop_cap]hen you’re juggling three repos in VS Code and a dozen browser tabs, Alt+Tab becomes a game of Russian Roulette. You’re looking for your frontend, but you end up staring at a Slack notification or a half-finished email. MacOS users get Native Tabs in VS Code. On Linux/Windows? You get one instance per workspace and […]

HeloWrite: A Minimalist Terminal Word Processor for Writers

 [drop_cap]W[/drop_cap]riting is hard. It’s messy, unresolved, chaotic. You scrape scenes out of your skull and massage syntactical turds until they shine (or get thrown out in the next rewrite). Code is different. Something either works or it doesn’t. Problems usually have clear paths to solutions. Prose has no linter. You can’t pre-compile a plot-twist to […]

Modern App Icons Missing on Win11? How a 10-Year-Old Registry Key Ghosted My Taskbar Icons

If you’re reading this, you’re in the bad place. You’ve already googled “Windows 11 taskbar icons missing,” and you’ve spent the last three hours performing the standard Microsoft-sanctioned rituals that never actually work. Certain icons just refuse to show up on taskbar. Regardless of whether they are pinned or just currently running. And yes, like […]

I Built My Own Damn Crossposter Because 2025 Social Media Is a Fragmented Hellscape

Social media is so insanely fragmented right now it’s honestly comical. Remember 2009? (15 years ago … how?) I joined Twitter and it felt like the future. Even Facebook—yes, Facebook—was kinda usable back then. Real humans having real conversations instead of performing for the algorithm. Now? It’s just oceans of AI slop, engagement-farming rage bait, […]

Strawberry 2.0: The Hebrew Letter That Breaks Every AI

The better AI models become at certain things the more fun it is to find things they horribly fail at. My new favorite low brow “benchmark”: draw the Hebrew letter Aleph in SVG format. It should be pretty simple in practice. Three lines: one long diagonal, one shorter curved line at the bottom (with optional […]

2025: The Year of the Linux Desktop (For Me, Anyway)

[drop_cap]I[/drop_cap]t’s practically a meme at this point. Any time the market share percentage on Statcounter so much as flickers, bloggers and op-ed editors pump out fresh articles proclaiming the glorious dethroning of the Mac/Windows Duopoly. “That’s it, folks! We are finally here: The Year Of the Linux Desktop!” As a ghost-Redditor wrote over a decade […]

Rebuilding the Reading Experience for a 3000-Year-Old Text

[drop_cap]T[/drop_cap]he canonical collection of Hebrew writings known as Tanakh is one of the cornerstones of human civilization. Not only is it the foundational text of the Hebrew people, but it also provides the source code the two biggest religions on the planet were forked from. If, for a moment, we step back and leave all […]

Make Your Own Spotify, With Blackjack And Hookers

[drop_cap]E[/drop_cap]arlier this year I found myself at a crossroads. Spotify’s recommendation algorithms hadn’t been what they used to be for a long time. I noticed they kept serving up the same lazy “safe picks” over and over again … When my wife kept asking me, “Hey, it keeps recommending that one song, how do I […]

Why I Built My Own EPUB Media Overlay Editor

Take an ebook. Take an audiobook. Smash the two together and you get a “TalkingBook”: synchronized text and audio that highlights what’s being spoken and lets you click phrases to trigger their audio content. In principle, it’s a simple idea. In fact, when I show it to people, it seems so intuitive: of course that’s […]