Corey Snipes

Software/Systems Engineer, and all-around Good Chap 

Day After the Election

A long winter lies ahead. Trump has won the US presidency, in what appears to be a fair and mostly by-the-books election. It's a mess. I fear the foundations of the country are so rotted that our long-held institutions will not recover. I have a lot of thoughts, but they're not well organized this morning. For now, Terry Pratchett sums it up pretty well: "People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found…

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Help Somebody Vote

If you could stop fascism in three hours, would you do it? There are kind, smart people in every community who want to vote, but are having challenges right now. Maybe they have to work on Tuesday and are unsure how to navigate early voting. Maybe they put off the mail-in ballot too long. Maybe they have mobility issues, or no car. Many people will get it done if someone reaches out to help. Check with your people. Try to…

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Migrating to Static HTML

One this year's projects has been moving the (eight) websites I shepherd for various projects and community organizations from Wordpress to static HTML. I tried a bunch and settled on Hugo and Publii.  I used Hugo for several simple sites. It's good for some things but it's really only suitable for coders and the image handling is a massive headache.  Publii is extremely easy to use and works very well.  Using software that is both mature and completely free of…

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Wordpress to Publii

I am currently migrating my personal website from Wordpress to Publii. Here are a few observations on Publii, from my experiences to date. I also wrote some more general thoughts about moving to static HTML. At a high level, this is the process I am using to move this website from Wordpress to Publii. Wordpress export Posts and page content using default WP Tools / Export Download media library using plugin Export Media Library(?) Also download a zip of the…

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Windows or Linux?

Every time I set up a new laptop for myself or an employee, I go through a brief "Windows or Linux?" tradeoff analysis. It's never an easy choice. All of our development work is platform-independent, using broadly available open-source tools like java, node, postgresql, QGIS. Everything that's deployed to a server is Linux (usually Ubunutu). On the other hand, the US business world runs almost exclusively on Microsoft. For compatibility sake, Windows is my daily driver so that I can…

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Market Wagon is Great

I really appreciate Market Wagon for being a simple, great (non-enshittified) platform that connects midwest urbanites like me to local family farms. This week we ordered naturally raised ground beef and pork shoulder, local honey, microgreens, fresh salsa, apple cider donuts, and more. Everything will be delivered to our porch on Thursday. The prices are reasonable for locally-grown and produced foods. There is a reasonable flat-rate delivery fee added to the order, and we always tip the driver. Market Wagon…

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Thoughts on LLMs

There's a common pattern underpinning technology hype cycles, that is basically a bunch of large companies saying "New Shiny Thing will reduce our costs and improve customer experience!" People get very excited about some new and compelling technology then everybody scrambles to figure out how to align it with their business. At the moment, it's "AI" or more specifically a small subset of Artificial Intelligence called Large Language Models (LLMs) which do a very good job of sounding like people…

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Memoirs of Robert J Snipes

My father was not a computer guy, but he was pretty good with machines. When he was in his early 70s, he spent some time learning how to use my mom's Mac so that he could write his memoirs. My mother helped a lot with editing. He printed and put them in a simple report binder, which I found very old-fashioned at the time. At some point the files from that computer were lost, but I managed to keep the…

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