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Harrison Ripps

Tech and Work
    Short but great read about having a more intentional relationship with the internet: alicegg.tech/2026/09/2…

    I cannot unsee the number of em-dashes that Claude wants to put in my documents.

    I did not have “installing a Linux environment complete with dev- and container build tools on an iPad” on my bingo card, but here we are. Does it actually run podman? No, but basic scripting works. Fun and also nerdy way to spend a train ride 🤓

    Spent the day getting our latest cohort of summer interns up and running. Recovering in a delightfully chaotic Thai place.

    Long day. Spent much of it trying to explain that you can be creative AND productive.

    Spent a long time in the flow today. Wrote a file parser. Deleted Duolingo with tremendous satisfaction after rising to “diamond league”. It’s the little things.

    Went down the rabbit hole of fixing the way I organize my music tracks (including file naming) while preserving all of my playlists in the DJ software. Tools used: ruby scripting language, sqlite3 database, m3u8 playlists, and Lexicon (3rd party sync tool for DJ gear). I’m happy with the results!

    Mega appreciation post for micro.blog. The ability to manage multiple sites from one place, with per-site cross-posting to other social media platforms, and being able to automatically create newsletters based on the type of post. The capabilities are crazy powerful; cheers @manton and team!

    Big changes over the weekend for my DJ stuff. For digital presence, I’ve moved from Google Sites to micro.blog, where I can handle both social media posts and a mailing list from one place. Also shifted from Mixcloud to Twitch + Soundcloud and I’m hoping to get a lot more “foot traffic” as a result.

    Yesterday and today, back at my own drafting table. I am familiarizing myself with a previous tinkerer’s unfinished prototype, with the goal of making a working model. What is missing are the scribbled notes and earlier drawings that would tell me the story of why particular decisions were made…

    Multi-modal journey into the head office this morning. Along the way, I listened to a discussion about how things went sideways in the early 2010’s with algorithm-driven social media feeds. I agreed fully with this notion, and regret what it may have done - permanently - to those born afterwards.

    This showed up on Hacker News today; pretty amazing read on the technical construction of social engineering attacks: www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blo…

    There was a certain gloominess in the workshop today. The afternoon ice cream helped lighten the mood, and I left determined to make a brighter evening for my ensemble.

    Putting on my top hat and monocle to head into the office today. It’s a space that is new-ish to my compatriot tinkerers and yet it is also quite old. A tiny, modern workshop built within the colossal ribcage of a fallen giant.

    Regarding Social Media - Don't Split the Difference
    · 4 min read
    Posts
    I’ve been trying to figure out recently how to make social media work better for me. I am stuck between two “worlds”. On the one hand, I’ve got my IRL friends and family who are on the major platforms and don’t want to be bothered with something different. On the other hand I’ve got the professional and hobby-related communities that share my ideologies around social networking, and that have almost entirely abandoned the major platforms for decentralized, user-controlled ones.

    Tech Transfers
    · 2 min read
    Posts
    One of the hardest things that any engineering team can do is to inherit a software project from another team. And yet, my team at Red Hat has to hand off software all of the time. Because of that, we’ve had to get really good at setting up other engineering teams for success in these tech transfers.

    Supporting Grief
    · 2 min read
    Posts
    A few weeks back, one of my coworkers (we’ll call him Adam) had a major health scare and was hospitalized for a while. Another of my coworkers (we’ll call her Betty) pulled together notes of well-wishing from our team and prepared them in a really thoughtful way, adding “get well soon” messages and images to the document before sending it along. Adam is out of the hospital now, which is a huge relief for everyone.

    Meta Problems
    · 2 min read
    Posts DJing and Music
    I’ve always used Instagram to promote my DJ hobby stuff. I know it is owned by (and integrated with) Facebook, which I actively dislike, but I always viewed IG as “Evil Adjacent” rather than “Pure Evil”. But at some point along the way, FB has now “streamlined” some things between the two platforms. The result is that if you want to use a scheduling app (like Buffer or Later) to queue your IG posts ahead of time, you need an IG Business Account that must be connected to a Facebook Page. You can’t just have an IG Creator account anymore, you must also have an FB account.

    Fedora 31 on the Razer Stealth GTX (Late 2019)
    · 4 min read
    Posts
    My hunt for a shiny new laptop always starts with the best of intentions, but well-intentioned laptops usually don’t come with gaming-ready GPUs. What do I mean by a “well-intentioned” laptop? I have a lot of respect for System76 and Star Labs for their lovely Linux-first systems, and particular respect for Purism‘s holistic approach to the union of open source hardware and privacy. But I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that my ideal laptop is just as capable of running triple-A video games as it is of running Linux-based workloads…