Notes

The scanner that was never broken

pacman -Qq | grep -iE 'sane|scan' returned exactly one package: hyprwayland-scanner, which is a Hyprland build tool and nothing to do with scanners. That was the whole diagnosis. The scan half of my HP OfficeJet Pro 8710 had never worked from this machine, I’d assumed that meant a driver I hadn’t installed, and the truth was that nothing at all had ever been installed to talk to it. The printer’s side had been ready the entire time. Its IPP record advertises Scan=T and mopria-certified=1.3, and http://192.168.1.3/eSCL/ScannerCapabilities answers 200 with eSCL 2.5, offering the flatbed, the document feeder, and duplex. It had been offering for as long as it had been on the network. Nobody was listening.

Sunday, August 30, 2026 | 5 minutes Read

The 144 Hz monitor that preferred 60

hyprctl monitors said [email protected]. hyprctl monitors all listed 143.86Hz, 119.88Hz and 69.92Hz as available on the same output. An HP 27xq on DisplayPort, a 144 Hz panel, running at 60 because that is what it had been asked for. This is the trap I owed a post to when I wrote about where the distro hopping stopped; it turned out to have two more acts. Here is the line that asked for it, as Omarchy shipped it in ~/.config/hypr/monitors.lua:

Friday, August 28, 2026 | 7 minutes Read

Where the distro hopping stopped

I’ve been distro hopping for a while now. Ubuntu first, because that’s where everyone starts. Zorin when I wanted it to look nicer. CachyOS when I wanted it to go faster. And now Omarchy. Two days in - the fastfetch below still shows an OS age you can count on one finger - and I’m calling it early: this is where the hopping stops. Wallpaper: Solace by thaomaoh

Monday, August 24, 2026 | 4 minutes Read

I wrote the lesson down. I broke it two days later.

My competition platform keeps a lessons-learned file. On 31 July I wrote a new entry into it: fix the shape, not the instance - when a bug is a pattern, hunt down every copy instead of patching the one that got reported. On 2 August the profile page went down for every athlete with an approved entry - a handful of people at that point, which is the only reason it wasn’t worse. Same bug class I’d fixed a week earlier on the leaderboard: a margin > 0 comparison with no guard, sitting in a second hand-written copy of the same formatting logic that nobody remembered existed.

Wednesday, August 5, 2026 | 5 minutes Read

My GitHub recovery codes lived on GitHub

Found github-recovery-codes.txt in my vault this weekend, in a folder called Important Docs. The vault is an Obsidian setup that auto-commits every ten minutes and pushes to a private GitHub repo. So the codes for getting back into GitHub were sitting behind the GitHub login. Think about the day I actually need them - phone gone, authenticator gone, sessions expired. Can’t clone the repo. Can’t open the site. The codes might as well not exist.

Sunday, August 2, 2026 | 3 minutes Read

OneDrive and git fought over my vault. Both lost.

Over two days my Obsidian vault appeared to delete itself, git recorded 146 file deletions that never happened, and OneDrive spawned 120 conflict copies of notes I had just restored. Not one byte of a note was lost. Every failure traces back to a single sentence: two sync systems each believed they owned the same tree, and each interpreted the other’s behaviour as changes to sync. I have written this shape of post before. RAID1 saved my data but not the state around it, and a trap I had published a warning about caught my own app the same day. This one belongs to both families: the data was never in danger, the state lied about it, and the limit that made it all worse was documented in a workbook I had read and dismissed as something that happens to other people.

Friday, July 31, 2026 | 7 minutes Read

Hugo's module.mounts quietly replaced my static directory

This site had a bug that survived several deploys unnoticed: the whole site worked, except that the OpenGraph card, the image that link previews show when you paste a URL into WhatsApp or LinkedIn, returned 404 in production. Browsers never load that file when you visit a page, so nothing looked broken. Every build was green. The file was in the repository. And the URL was dead. If you want the ending first: declaring any entry under module.mounts for a target root replaces Hugo’s default mount for that root. I had mounted one subfolder of static, and in doing so had silently unmounted everything else in it.

Thursday, July 23, 2026 | 3 minutes Read

Johnny Decimal for the files, Zettelkasten for the thoughts

Every organisation system dies the same death: you stop trusting it, so you stop filing into it, so it rots, which proves you were right not to trust it. Mine has survived a few years now, and the reason is that it is actually two systems with a clear division of labour. Johnny Decimal answers “where does this file go?” and Zettelkasten answers “where does this thought go?”. Neither is asked to do the other’s job.

Monday, August 25, 2025 | 4 minutes Read

Installing Hugo on WSL

If you develop on Windows but want a Linux toolchain, Hugo runs happily under WSL. Here is the quick version, plus the one gotcha worth knowing. The quick way (often out of date) Update your package list and install from apt: sudo apt update sudo apt install hugo This works, but Ubuntu and Debian package a version of Hugo that usually lags well behind the current release. Themes move quickly, and plenty of them need a newer Hugo than apt will give you. If a theme’s build complains about your Hugo version, this is why.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025 | 1 minute Read