Inktober 2026 5, The Smack

Log entry, Day 5

Captain’s log. Day 5 out.

Space is empty. That’s the whole point of it, and I’d got used to it. Four days of nothing on the scope, and the crew had started saying the odds were with us.

At 02:14 ship time, they ran out.

It was a hard knock, felt through the deck plates, then the alarm. Something small and fast hit the port nacelle housing and went through the outer skin. The scope shows a vapour trail where it came in. We’re venting coolant from the damage.

Inktober 2026 4, Cactus

Scrubbers at 87%. Cactus at 100%.

Chief Engineer’s quarters are the only place on the ship with a plant, and technically it shouldn’t be there. The mass allocation sheet lists it as “personal effects, 0.4 kg, non-essential.” The pot is a standard-issue ceramic planter, orange from the factory, bolted to the desk with two repurposed cable clamps.

The cactus is a prickly pear. He’s had it longer than the posting. It’s flowered twice, and both times it was a surprise. Nobody has ever been able to tell him why it flowers now and then.

Inktober 2026 3, Miniature

Captain’s personal log, day 3

Tea’s gone cold again. The Pennywhistle is parked next to the mug, where she’s sat since we left dock. She’s about as long as my forearm, and she’s held together with solder and stubbornness.

She was my first command, a Class-4 cargo tug. Eleven years of hauling ore pods through the belt in a hull that rattled and leaked and stank of coolant and old coffee.

A random sketchbook drawing, nothing to do with Inktober this time. It’s three cacti in ink and paint pens: a prickly pear, a pair of tall ribbed stems and a round barrel cactus, each with a few red flowers.

Inktober 2026 2, Relic

Mission Log, Day 2: No Signal Required

Chief Engineer Okafor’s family has carried this phone for six generations. It has no battery and no signal, and it’s held together with gaffer tape. She keeps it in her pocket for luck. When the long-range array died again, she spliced it into the comms trunk. The signal came back clean. Nobody can explain it, and she isn’t taking it out.

Inktober 2026 1, Apple

Mission Log, Day 1: Last Fresh Fruit

One apple, already bitten, sits on the console beside the launch checklist. It’s the last fresh fruit aboard before we leave the ground behind. After launch it’s freeze-dried and foil pouches for the duration. The cables are strapped down, the gauges are alive, and the ship is ready. I’m giving the apple a few more minutes.

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.