Musings of an aging computer nerd hitting 0x32.
Zazzle Shop Prints, Tshirts and mugs
(c) Alastair Montgomery
Musings of an aging computer nerd hitting 0x32.
Zazzle Shop Prints, Tshirts and mugs
(c) Alastair Montgomery
Quick update rather than a full write-up: since pointing Claude Code at this blog’s repo a few weeks back, the whole loop of writing, publishing, and maintaining this site has stopped being a chore.
The biggest change isn’t any single fix — it’s that the friction just isn’t there any more. Drafting a post, sorting front matter, fixing up a GitHub Actions workflow that’s drifted out of date, branching and PR-ing a change, merging it once it’s built cleanly — all of that used to be enough faffing about that posts would sit as unfinished drafts for weeks. Now it’s a five-minute conversation and it’s live.
Follow-up to Building It the Boring Way: Arch + Hyprland From Scratch — turned out easier than I thought, once I got past one annoying snag right at the start.
The only real hiccup was WiFi from the Arch install ISO — iwctl didn’t want to cooperate at first, so getting the installer online took longer than every other step combined. Once that was sorted, the rest of the plan went pretty much exactly as laid out: archinstall for the base system, then Hyprland and the usual Wayland bits on top.
Follow-up to The Politics I Never Noticed Were There — this one’s the practical half. After all the reading about Omarchy’s baggage, I landed on the least dramatic option available: a plain Arch install, built up by hand, with someone else’s dotfiles layered on top rather than baked in.
The machine is an old Lenovo laptop that’s been kicking around doing not much — Intel i5-4300M, 16GB RAM, and (crucially) an SSD I fitted before starting, which turned out to remove basically every hardware worry from the list. I’m laying down LinuxBeginnings/Hyprland-Dots — the community-maintained continuation of the well-regarded JaKooLit dotfiles, handed off cleanly in early 2026 — via its companion installer, LinuxBeginnings/Arch-Hyprland.