Mark Pitblado
Mark Pitblado
Mark Pitblado
This is my little corner of the internet. This site is designed to be fast — crazy fast. It is simple by design, so that you can spend more time doing what matters to you, and less time waiting for web pages to load.
Latest Posts
On March 5th, 404Media published Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester, which generated a lot of discussion both online and in the comments of the article itself. This is a complex case, but I want to state...
Nothing is more gut-wrenching than realizing that there is an error in a dataset that was used to make a critical decision. Team members may start scrambling and ask questions like: Does this change the conclusion of the analysis? Will...
Self-hosting an e-book library was always on my radar, but there never seemed to be a solution that checked all the boxes. Mainly, I wanted the ability to read books from my Kobo (not sure if they are only a Canadian thing, they are...
About a year ago, I was sitting at a coffee shop late at night, meeting some new people. Inevitably the topic of passions came up, and I stated that I was pretty passionate about tech. “Ah, so you’re a tech bro” was one response, and I...
When working on data pipelines with python’s pandas or polars, you will often produce data artifacts for others to use, either as csv files or excel files. It can be a real hassle to exit the terminal to view these files. Two handy tools...
Earlier this year, I migrated my static sites off of Vercel and on to a VPS in Europe. At $5 CAD per month after exchange, it isn’t a bad deal, but I’ve also been paying attention to the Canadian scene to see what products are coming to...
We’ve always been able to search for details about famous people on the internet. “When was Albert Einstein born?” has always returned “March 14, 1879”. However, Google’s AI mode will also happily answer questions about every day people,...
Mkdocs is a very popular library for writing static documentation sites with python, and Material for Mkdocs is the de-facto standard theme to apply. With over 71,000 people stating they use the theme, it was a success both in how it was...
Privacy and security are too complex. One of the more complicated elements is a concept called encryption, which gets tossed around a lot, even in products that implement it quite differently. In a lot of privacy policies, companies will...
Ever since starting my own music collection I have wanted to try streaming it with Navidrome, however hosting it on a VPS was tricky for a couple of reasons. First, the bandwidth would be a lot higher because I would be streaming high...
Grey is defined as the following by The American Heritage Dictionary: adjective Of or relating to an achromatic color of any lightness between the extremes of black and white. adjective Dull or dark. adjective Lacking in cheer; gloomy...
One of the biggest problems about pkm solutions is syncing. As such, it’s usually one of the few things that you get charged for when going with something like Obsidian. Silverbullet is a simple way to self host a pkm setup. A single...
An economic chasm exists between the young and old for particular key life pillars: housing, education, and the cost of raising children. However, in other areas, particularly in areas touched by technology, things have never been...
If you drive, I want you to think back to the very first moments you got behind the wheel. Every turn, every traffic light, every approaching car, was a challenge that required your full attention. Now, you split your attention between...
What do you do if you are a huge fan of Obsidian, but want to use a text editor instead of the application interface? By operating in the terminal you will lose some of the quality of life features, particularly autocomplete for...