Quick update with a couple of things I’ve put up on Flickr today.

First, a close-up of the 3D printed fidget cube from the latest prints. It’s still the thing I reach for most often.

Second, a doodle I did during a Teams call this morning. Most of these end up in the bin, but I liked this one enough to keep.

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 Drafting a post, sorting front matter, fixing up a GitHub Actions workflow that’s drifted out of date, branching and PR-ing a change, merging it once it’s built cleanly — all of that used to be enough faffing about that posts would sit as unfinished drafts for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.

This follows on from my post about the Omarchy/DHH controversy — I went down a much longer rabbit hole than I expected.

I went looking for a Linux distro. I came back with a headache and a much longer reading list.

It started simply enough. I’d been eyeing my old Lenovo laptop — an i5-4300M, 16GB RAM, nothing special — as a candidate for a proper Arch + Hyprland setup. Omarchy kept coming up: slick, popular, well-documented, built by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the guy behind Ruby on Rails. Obvious choice, right?

A few people on Mastodon pointed me at something about Omarchy I’d completely missed: real controversy around its creator, DHH, and his views.

This is a follow-up to my previous post on Omarchy. If you haven’t seen the background, this article lays it out well: The Ruby community has a DHH problem.

I’ll be honest, this had totally bypassed me. I was looking at Omarchy purely through the lens of “is this a good tiling window manager setup,” and hadn’t clocked the wider context around the person behind it. That’s on me, and it’s a decent reminder that it’s worth stepping outside our news bubbles every so often and looking at the bigger picture, not just the interesting tech side of something.

I’ll admit it: I have a problem. Every time a second-hand or refurbished machine turns up cheap, I find a reason to buy it. The result is a small fleet of computers accumulating around the house, most of which I didn’t strictly need.

It’s not really about the hardware itself, though. It’s an enjoyable side hobby — each new (old) machine is an excuse to play around with a different operating system, distro, or desktop environment without any risk to the computer I actually rely on day to day. Recently that meant putting Omarchy Linux on an old laptop just to see how it held up.

I had an old laptop sitting around doing nothing, so instead of letting it gather dust I decided to put Omarchy on it and see how it held up.

Omarchy is DHH’s opinionated Arch Linux + Hyprland setup — essentially Arch with all the tedious post-install decisions already made for you: a tiling window manager, a curated set of themes, and a sensible default toolset out of the box rather than a blank Arch install you have to build up from scratch yourself.

Two more prints off the A1 Mini this week, both picked more for how they feel in the hand than how they look on a shelf.

First up is a fidget cube — small, and surprisingly satisfying to fiddle with. It’s easily become the thing I pick up and turn over without thinking while I’m reading or on a call.

The second is a Truchet tile pattern, generated from an SVG file rather than modelled by hand. Truchet tiles are simple square tiles with a repeating pattern on them — usually a pair of arcs or diagonal lines — that combine in interesting ways depending on how each tile is rotated when they’re laid out in a grid. Generating the layout as an SVG first meant I could experiment with the tiling arrangement in 2D before ever committing to a print.

Our two dogs, Sidney and Betty.