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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
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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
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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
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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
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The particle fade that never faded

Asteroids on boot.dev is a guided build. Its chapters cover Pygame setup, the game loop, the player, and the asteroids: enough for a working game. Everything past that is left to you, and that is where I kept going, adding momentum, a start menu, lives, scoring, and explosions. The explosions were the fun part. Shoot an asteroid and fifteen white particles fly outward and fade to nothing over half a second.

Sunday, January 26, 2025 | 4 minutes Read