In the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty six I decided it was time for me to learn how to install PHP and Apache on a VPS. I kind of want to blog about it, but I also am not sure I want people following my instructions in case I've done something horrible.
Microblog
I can’t stop thinking about the fact that the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars.
I was watching the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercial where PC guy is in a wheelchair with casts on, talking about how he got knocked off a table when someone tripped on the power cord. It was an advertisement for the MagSafe feature.
I'm glad they added that back to MacBooks. And I wonder what the thought process was for those few dark years where they got rid of them.
I like my developer tools the way I like my chocolate chip cookies: GUI!
RE: https://social.lol/@bw/116881731101006901
I wanted to experiment on the cheapest machine I could find and I purchased a month of IONOS' cheapest option.
Does anyone have experience with them? Just wondering what the quality is like.
Does anybody have opinions on VPS providers? I'm a long time shared/managed hosting user who wants to try his hand at running a basic web app on a VPS.
I just realized I hadn't looked at the hard disk icon in Tahoe yet. For some reason, I thought maybe it hadn't changed. I was wrong. It sucks now.
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir on Mastodon, but I really miss the old school Mac OS X icons. Both first party and third party.
One of the first times I ever saw Mac UI was when I saw a professor connect a laptop to a projector and the only thing on the desktop was this beautiful hard disk icon, which he double-clicked and began exploring files on his machine.
For some reason I thought that was so cool.
Great piece from @ellane:
Before I die I hope to do for someone else what Leila did for me.
It’s part of why I write.
https://ellanew.com/2026/07/01/unsolicited-advice-the-right-way
Because of my disability, spinal muscular atrophy, I spend a lot of time using a computer. I decided to write about my experience and the internal struggle I have with it.
https://blakewatson.com/journal/if-i-want-more-irl-i-must-go-afk/
"AI is here to stay: possibly the most upsetting truth that’s arisen in this golden age of slop."
RE: https://social.lol/@bw/116817481492575581
I totally didn't realize that Om died two days ago. RIP
This whole essay is a poetic, sick burn.
> Every significant deployment of mythos shares the same features. It operates in a domain where evidence is unavailable or inconvenient. It names things so the answer is already inside the word. Manifest. Divine. Destiny. Mythos. It requires an inside and an outside, the trusted and the untrusted, the believers and the skeptics. That is not a security policy. That is a priesthood.
Shoot I need to write a blog post this weekend to keep my streak alive. Might have to be a state the obvious post.
Tab fatigue
I got my May blog post in with a couple of minutes to spare. https://blakewatson.com/journal/things-i-enjoy-about-dungeons-dragons/
I just wrote a parenthetical that was so much better than the sentence it was tacked onto that I had to upgrade it to a real boy (ie, I removed the parentheses).
Anyone have any recommendations for artists who do D&D character art commissions?
I used to be ashamed of preferring GUIs to CLIs, thinking it a sign that I’m not a Real Developer™. But both of these are just facilitating interaction with a program. Memorizing (and typing) commands isn’t inherently better than clicking and dragging.
My understanding of what I'm doing—merging a branch in git, say, or searching a log—is what actually matters. I could definitely be better at git, but it doesn't mean I have to like the CLI!
(The counterpoint to this is that sometimes you *only* have CLI access. But my counterpoint to that counterpoint is I will look that stuff up when I need it.)