The Universe of Joshua Blais
The Universe of Joshua Blais
Joshua Blais
Welcome to my Hub on the Worldwide Web. It serves as the central and canonical point of truth for all activities, writings, videos, works, and content.
Latest Posts
I logged into IRC this morning to see this message: “Don’t take this the wrong way but does anyone else find Joshua Blais’ blog posts and twitter feeds a rabbit hole?” I had a laugh and then thought about a response (my friend that wrote...
If you work in text, make everything you possibly can a git repository. This means that if you work in front of a computer, this post is for you. Stop being that person with 50 variations of the same file scattered across your desktop....
It feels as if 2025 has flown by. Looking back it always interesting around this time, so let’s see what this year has brought. Personal# This year was a great one for our family. We… took a trip to Hawaii in November got formally...
Ah, programming language choices - the great philosophical debate of our time. While I am sure I will have a gazillion comments about “why not X?” or “why X?” - I figured I would still put out there the languages I am pursuing and...
I had the pleasure to collaborate with tony-btw on a Christmas stream, where we discussed all things free and open source, Nix, Guix, BSD, programming languages, screens, philosophy and more. You can follow Tony here. Merry Christmas to...
As I write this, there is a retired couple sitting in the coffee shop across from me reading books together. I can only hope to one day be doing the same! Reading together and conversing about those ideas is still possible. It is an act...
When choosing a machine, you face the Trilemma Of Choice: The Computing Constraint Trilemma# Portability - weight, battery life, form factor Performance - CPU headroom, GPU capability, thermal sustained load Economy - initial cost,...
I recently took my old workstation out of storage, booted it and found it running Fedora 40 - so of course it was time to put NixOS on the machine and bring it into the fleet. I’ve probably been sleeping on the machine as a...
I’ve built and released my first colorscheme: Compline, with its companion light theme Lauds. Compline: from the Latin “completorium” - completion. The final prayer of the Catholic Liturgical Hours, a time for deep contemplation, to be...
The other day on twitter, I saw the question posed: “What are your favourite drugs/escapes from reality?” After going down that path in my 20s and finding no reprieve, I would say to my friend that asked the question: the goal is not to...
Emacs has holistically become my daily computing environment. My efforts have been focused on building emacs into the workflow of essentially everything I do, as long as it doesn’t involve heavy video or media, I try my very best to...
Table of Contents# For those of you with custom keyboards, the in-built laptop keyboard is and will always be a second class citizen. Even with kmonad, I still vastly prefer my chocofi 36 key (board) - very often sitting it on top of the...
I got the Supernote A6X2 Nomad almost a year ago, and have been using it off and on for that entire time, deciding if it has a place in my workflow. TLDR;# I thought it a great writing tablet - nicer than pen and paper in a lot of cases....
I apologize for my absence in the blogging world as of late - as my last post showed, I have been going down the Nix/NixOS rabbit hole and working on some personal business projects that will be out in the coming months. There has been...
When you first start into the rabbit hole that is Linux, you see that there are hundreds if not thousands of distributions that you can pick to use. While this can be quite intimidating, there are only a select few that are the root of...