A garage sale for your mind

A garage sale for your mind

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Latest — 01 Jun 2026

A Charger, a Catechism, and a Fawn

The brandless GaN charger was junk, so I landed on this UGREEN: it works great and is such a brick I half suspect they weighted it with lead. Also in this one: a bedtime lesson on prayer, and a two year old who tried to pounce on a fawn.

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Stubborn Baby

W just learned to crawl and to sit up, which means bedtime is now a battle of wills: lay him down, he pops back up, crying. We ran that cycle a few times before the crying finally stopped. Was he asleep? Yes. Was he lying down? No.

Protein, Burpees & Waterfalls

My hunt for a decent protein powder ended at Paleo Pro: twice the price, fewer ingredients, and a flavor like watered-down fake chocolate. The lesson, again: do not put things in your body that you bought on Amazon. Then I taught the kids burpees in the driveway and we walked to the waterfalls.

RAM Disk on macOS for Xcode DerivedData

Xcode spits out an unfathomable number of object files, and on a Mac with the SSD soldered to the board, that wear adds up. My fix for over ten years: a RAM disk for DerivedData. I finally benchmarked it too, and was surprised to find HFS+ beating APFS on small-file operations.

Two LLMs to Rule Them All

Once Anthropic lobotomized Opus, my all-day-in-Claude workflow stopped paying off, so I cut that subscription in half and added Codex. What has worked for weeks: Claude plus agent-os to shape specs and create tasks, then hand it all to Codex to implement, one task group at a time.

GaN Pro Desktop Fast Charger...Garbage

The brandless GaN charger I picked off Amazon had one trick: power only whatever I plugged in last, starving everything else. The replacement was barely better. My bigger-picture lesson: a company that sells a product with no brand name probably knows exactly how bad it is.

Five Books to Rule Them All

Going through ten boxes of once-vital books, I found exactly five worth shelving. On sentimentality turning into clutter, the suspiciously fifth-grade prose of 3 Body Problem, a deliberate $10 tip my bank flagged as a possible 53% error, and the strange waves of hunger during my 18-hour fasts.

Depression Hates a Moving Target

While consultants side-lined and misunderstood me over audio-only Zoom, I was outside splitting logs with a maul, more vigorously the worse they got. Churchill had his bricks. The lesson: if your feelings are taking over, get yourself a physically strenuous hobby.

Sin is Crouching at the Door

K's uncharacteristic hollering pulled me from a meeting, so we drove off to walk trails, found a leave-art-take-art box, and ate mediocre BBQ while talking about catching stress before it boils over. On lazy management, more one-on-one time, and ruling over the sin crouching at the door.

The Supportive Wife

S left a plate waiting in the fridge, knowing I'd otherwise grab something convenient over something good for my fitness goals. The little things aren't so little. Plus Dawkins refusing persuasion about Claude, and figuring out what my cheerful four-year-old tornado needs as he stops being the baby.

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