Latest Posts (20 found)
Alex White's Blog 5 days ago

Establishing an Identity

If you’ve followed me on RSS for any amount of time, first off, thank you so much! Second, you may not have noticed how often this site changes. RSS protects you from the near-monthly changes that my mad scientist side makes to this site. This year alone, ThatAlexGuy.dev has been powered by 11ty, Hugo, plain HTML, Bear, Micro.blog , and Pure Blog. My files have sat on OpenBSD Amsterdam, DigitalOcean, and a Laravel Forge VPS. I’ve written new articles and lost old articles in migrations. My site has switched appearance more frequently than a Bian Lian (变脸) performer! I’ve come to realize I’ve been seeking both an identity and a voice. I want an outlet that reflects my interests, my background, and my day-to-day, but that’s more than what I could accomplish on something like Mastodon. All that brings us here, iteration 4 (or 8, or 15, or 16, I can’t remember). There are a few key differences and intentional choices that reflect where I want ThatAlexGuy to go. Building a new experience that will stick and satisfy the goals in my head won’t be easy, but here are the guiding pillars that are to shape what’s coming next. I have a desire to create in-depth, well-researched, and potentially interactive content. Many of my current posts come with a “1-minute read” tag. I want to change that. I’ll be digging into topics with greater detail, cross-referencing multiple sources, and (hopefully) interviewing others. As a result, I’ll be posting less frequently, but my new goal is quality over quantity. Regulars on my site will be aware of my “Photo Journal” series in which I posted a set of photos around a theme (macro, nature, Gameboy Camera ). I want to continue building my photography skills through the incorporation of high-quality photos in my articles. While text sets the tone, visuals set the atmosphere in an article. Here’s the big tomato, as they say (nobody says that): defining what this site represents. That means setting the tone and defining how topics string together to form a consistent narrative. I’ll be figuring this out for a while, but I want to leverage my interests such as indie technology, vintage computing, time away from the screen, photography, and Chinese culture. So what’s changed so far? Quite a bit! First, ThatAlexGuy.dev is now run by Ghost.org . For myself, this means less time in the technical weeds and more focus on writing. For readers, it opens the doors to a wider audience. Email newsletters are a more accessible way to stay up-to-date on new articles. Don’t worry though, RSS isn’t going anywhere! In fact, I managed to fix the broken RSS feed URLs from previous migrations (hopefully)! I’ve started to define the personality of the new site. I pulled background and accent colors from one of my favorite atmospheres in a game (Sprout Tower in Pokémon Gold). Using my iPad, I’ll be creating article images that give a calligraphy + hand-painted vibe. I’ve also brought in my Chinese name for the logo（小艾 - Little Alex). I’m working on my first longer-form article. It probably won’t be great, but first attempts never are. From there, I hope to refine my writing, researching, and supporting photography.

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Alex White's Blog 1 weeks ago

Go have fun with the web

Back in the days of Geocities, I spent a lot of time hacking away on raw HTML and CSS. I enjoyed tweaking things, making it just right and experimenting with random ideas I had. I’d sketch things out, then turn them into a close(ish) version on the web. “Under construction” gifs would hide my unlinked, mad scientist HTML files. As I grew older, the idea of “hustle” culture slowly killed out this mindset. Instead of having fun, I felt everything I do on the web had to serve a purpose. If I wasn’t building something that might make money, I was wasting my time. And guess what? In 15ish years of operating under that mindset, I’ve made maybe $500 online. Pretty terrible investment if you ask me. I’m willing to bet I’m not alone in this mindset, it seems embedded into the millennial DNA. We’ve grown up with stories of dot com entrepreneurs making it big while sipping Mojitos on the beaches of Chiang Mai. You’re always just a few more late nights from quitting your job, joining NomadsList and traveling the world! The truth is, you’d probably have a better chance winning the lottery, so why waste your time chasing the impossible? Why turn an artistic, creative outlet into a second job that doesn’t put food on the table? Embrace the web as a hobby. Like pencils, paintbrushes and clay, the web is a way to give “physical” form to the images in your head with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. When you stop building for scale, potential customers and imagined profit, you free yourself to have fun. Build silly, build simple and above all else, build for the sake of creativity.

web-development Web Development html HTML css CSS design Design programming Programming
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Alex White's Blog 1 weeks ago

Wiping my computer

Today I wiped my MacBook Pro to factory defaults. I love the feeling of a freshly wiped computer, a blank slate to start fresh with. A chance to break away from bad file organization habits, remove unneeded login items and cleanup the menu bar. A hope that my now ancient M1 Pro can still be productive (especially when my new iPad absolutely smokes it). Thanks to iCloud, setting up a fresh copy of Mac OS is very fast. I’ve been pushing myself to stick with default apps more, so most things just resume syncing right away (Reminders, Notes, Calendar, Mail, Messages, iCloud Drive, etc). Outside of the defaults, I’m being intentional with what gets installed this time around. I’d like to have a max of 1 app in each category (ie not 5 code editors). I’m replacing iTerm with the stock terminal, Zed with Nova, Claude with Antigravity CLI, Fish with the default Zsh install. Here’s to a fresh start install!

programming Programming
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Alex White's Blog 1 weeks ago

re: Built for Exactly One

Kev and Amit both talk about building software for themselves rather than for others. Solving their personal needs and making something that is exactly what they want. I love this, software should be personal and customized to the user. Building your own software brings out the “personal” in personal computing, and it’s how home computing started in the first place! In the days of the Commodore 64 or Atari 800, you were encouraged to write personal software. You turn on the Commodore and it gives you a blank canvas, ready for whatever BASIC program you can think of. If you built something you were especially proud of, you’d mail in the source code to “Compute!” or a similar publication to share with the world. The timing to bring back personal computing has never been better. In the age of subscriptions and enshittification, it’s never been easier to choose a different path. LLMs make building your own solutions more accessible. There’s nothing quite like building for yourself and iteratively improving it while you use it in your day-to-day.

programming Programming
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Alex White's Blog 1 weeks ago

Week 2 of daily driving the iPad

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my new iPad , it’s pretty much replaced my personal laptop in my day-to-day. Surprisingly it’s also replaced my need for a desktop computer. Through the use of my USB-C dock and Apple wireless keyboard/trackpad, this little iPad works perfectly as a desktop machine. It drives my 32” Ultrawide perfectly, and the windowed multi-tasking is excellent. It can even use my webcam! The only downside I’ve really run into is my monitor is pretty old, so the refresh rate is much lower than the iPad making my mouse feel laggy when moving between the two.

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Alex White's Blog 2 weeks ago

Golf traffic

There’s a huge golf tournament happening near the co-working spot I work from, the Riverside U.S. Senior Open 2026. It’s been cool seeing the course prepare for this event over the past 2 months. First the fences went up, then they started constructing bleachers and now there’s TV camera towers dotting the landscape. I think the tournament starts today or tomorrow, but there’s been a lot of golfers practicing on the course the past 2 days. The roads are filled with police guarding each entrance and potential parking spot. There’s cop cars from districts all over Ohio, which isn’t surprising. Upper Arlington, the host district, is rather small so there’s no way they’d have a big enough force to cover the event. I did quickly check out the player roster, despite not really being into golf. I didn’t recognize any names, but to be fair I pretty much skimmed it to see if Tigers Woods was there (I don’t even know if he still plays).

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Alex White's Blog 2 weeks ago

Attempting to deal with stress

I’ve never been great at dealing with stress. I have a tendency to overthink, assume the worst and constantly worry, it’s a great combination! This summer has been the most stressful of my life. My sleep has been terrible, I often feel ill and can’t get the knot out of my chest. It’s tiring to say the least. This has been compounded by a loss of time/interest for my hobbies. Cycling has mostly fell to the wayside and programming no longer captures my attention. Video games haven’t really stuck for a while now (though I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise). All to say, these are the reasons things have slowed down on here and also the driving force behind deleting most of my online presence. I’m hopeful things will calm down after August, fingers crossed!

career Career Mental Health
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Alex White's Blog 2 weeks ago

New iPad

After my last post , I pulled the trigger and went with an iPad Pro 11” with Apple Pencil Pro and Magic Keyboard case. Thankfully I got it the night before the massive Apple price hikes (although it still cost way too much). I gotta say, I love this thing! Obviously it’s a huge upgrade, I jumped forward 6 years in tech from my last iPad. The form factor is much nicer as well, the 12.9” was simply too big. 11” is perfect for getting work done, sketching, gaming and using it as an e-reader. I’m planning to sell off my Kindle Oasis and Supernote Nomad, the new iPad has easily replaced both. In addition to the iPad, I super splurged and grabbed a new lens for my Sony camera. Both purchases are in preparation for our trip to China in August. My goal is to pack light, since we’ll be traveling with two kids. The iPad replaces the need for a computer + e-reader + game console (hey, it’s a long trip)! The camera lens is significantly smaller and less bulky than my other lenses, increasing the likelihood I’ll carry the camera and snap more photos. I’ve already tested out photo editing on the iPad with Pixelmator Pro and the RAW files from my Sony. The experience is excellent, especially with the Apple Pencil in the mix. The M5 processor rips through any task I throw at it (it’s funny my iPad is now significantly more powerful than my MacBook Pro). Outside of our trip, I expect my traditional computers (desktop + laptops) will see a lot less usage. At this stage in my life, the iPad does 90% of what I need. For example, my entire blog publishing flow is now possible on this tablet. I can connect my SD card, edit photos with Pixelmator Pro, write the post and upload a draft with iA Writer, then attach the photos and publish via the Micro Blog website (yes, I changed again in preparation for the trip). I’m excited to use this setup in the “field”. I’ll have to find a nice cafe in Baotou to write and edit photos from 😜.

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Alex White's Blog 1 months ago

2026 London Ohio strawberry bicycle tour

The London Ohio Strawberry Tour has been on my radar for years. Yesterday I finally got a chance to participate! I opted for the 44 mile route as I'm not nearly as in-shape as previous years. It was a really nice, mostly flat ride. The first stop was well stocked with everything from home-made Belgian waffles (a staple of all Friend's of Madison County events) and chocolate covered strawberries! Stop 2 was a simple water stop, but I had some fun conversations with other riders as we filled up our bottles. Remember kids, don't waffle while biking! This year's ride was special as the money was used to help finish the Ohio to Erie trail gap in London, Ohio. Presently the trail ends in the south of London, forcing riders to traverse the streets to rejoin the trail on the other side of town. From what one of the volunteer's was telling me, the contract has been secured to finish the trail and (if all goes well), it should be done in about 1.5 years! Mmmm, chocolate covered strawberries. The Ohio to Erie trail is one of the most impressive things Ohio has to offer (in my opinion). It's a 326 mile trail, 245 of which is dedicated, paved bike path. It connects Ohio's 3 major cities, Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland. There's also branch trails leading to places like Yellow Springs. The trail is dotted with beautiful small towns, free campsites and guest houses. <video controls width="250" class="mb-8"> <source src="/images/2026-london-tour/IMG_0609.MOV" type="video/mp4" /> </video> While there's a lot of terrible things about my country, the Ohio to Erie trail and events put on by volunteer organizations to maintain and expand the trail are truly incredible and give me hope. A well stocked rest stop manned by volunteers. Thanks for reading on RSS, you're awesome! If you want to be notified of new posts even faster, I have a newsletter as well, you can signup here!

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Alex White's Blog 1 months ago

Having fun with static generation

I recently moved my blog to Astro . Since then I’ve been having an absolute blast with the static site generation process! I love being able to hydrate the site with dynamic data while keeping things fast on the server. It reminds me of HotSyncing data onto a Palm Pilot (how could I not reference Palm Pilots after my last post ). Here’s a few cool things that happen when my site is built: I started using GoatCounter (awesome service) and have been leveraging their API to show stats on my site via a custom build plugin. My analytics page now shows statically generated graphs of the analytics data as of the last site build. Additionally, posts now feature a “readers” count in the header. The previous iteration of my blog featured dithered images. While this was partly an aesthetic choice, it also greatly reduces the size of images. The downside was the amount of work involved in manually dithering images via ImageMagick for each post. Thanks to my new build process I was able to build a custom plugin that creates dithered copies of every image across all posts. It replaces images with a dithered copy, and then wraps the image with a link that points to the original full color version. I also have an escape hatch where I can specify a front matter flag in a post to skip dithering. This functionality came out of the box with my theme ( Astro Sienna ). Webmentions are fetched during build and displayed on the relevant post. I haven't seen this in action yet since I don't have any webmentions, but it's still super cool! Another plugin that came with my theme is the dynamic generation of meta images for sharing on social media. The plugin gathers info from the post and dynamically generates a png image at build time. Very cool! It’s been a lot of fun messing around with my new toy, maybe this means I’ll go longer than 2 months without changing my entire site! ...maybe... Thanks for reading on RSS, you're awesome! If you want to be notified of new posts even faster, I have a newsletter as well, you can signup here!

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Alex White's Blog 1 months ago

An interactive dive into Memo Pad

While most of my posts work great in RSS readers, this post contains elements that do not work so well! Please view the post on my site here: https://thatalexguy.dev/posts/interactive-dive-into-memos/ Join me on an interactive look at the user experience of "Memos" on Palm OS! Thanks for reading on RSS, you're awesome! If you want to be notified of new posts even faster, I have a newsletter as well, you can signup here!

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Alex White's Blog 1 months ago

Music discovery

Recently stumbled upon a couple of artists that I've been enjoying, thought I'd share. It's no surprise I've been going down the rabbit hole of protest music... Masks Off - Jesse Welles Fuck your AI - Luke Nickle On a side note, I wish more indie artists would offer CDs. Jesse Welles has vinyl on his store, but no CDs.

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Alex White's Blog 1 months ago

Deleting everything but this site

I've made the decision to delete any personal online presence outside of this blog. My Mastodon & Strava accounts are gone, Tildes.net account is in process, public YouTube videos are permanently deleted. I unfortunately can't delete my LinkedIn account (turns out it's company managed), and Reddit's "delete my account" button is broken (surprise). Going forward I'll only be reachable via email .

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Alex White's Blog 2 months ago

Photo Journal - Day 7

I really enjoyed doing macro shots last time, so I did it again! To switch things up though, I swapped my Sony aIV frame with an old Nikon D5100 (my first DSLR). It was kind of a beast to work with. I used the same lens as last time, but the D5100 doesn't have focus peaking. It was an additional challenge going back to a crop sensor. The shots are from the same park as day 6 , but during a rainstorm this time. There are very few things as wonderful as hiking through a forest at the end of a rain. The smells, the sound of birds coming out of hiding...it's magical. I ended up walking just over 3 miles and it was the most relaxed I've been in awhile. Field macro photography is a fun challenge, it forces you to focus on the small, easily missed details around you. You have to balance apeture and light a lot more than usual. Capturing anything more than a tiny slice of detail requires more light, which is hard in the woods. Slowing shutter speed to compensate makes it near impossible to capture something like a spider web swaying in the breeze. When you do get the camera dialed in, the viewfinder reveals a minitature world ready for you to capture.

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Alex White's Blog 2 months ago

What Time Is It?

On Palm OS, the interface for picking the start and end time of an event is represented as two columns, hour and minutes. The hours list either starts at 8AM and shows until 7PM (covering a full business day, or it starts at the next hour (if creating an event for today). Minutes are represented for every 5 minute interval, allowing every option to be shown at once. This interface is simple and requires an extremely low cognitive load to use. It's scannable and adaptive to the current situation (today vs another day). It limits options (ie you can't set a time of 12:33) to drive simplicity. If we compare to the time picker on Android, we can see it's significantly more complex. One must first tap the hour, then tap AM/PM, then tap the minutes section and tap the minute they need. While minute intervals of 5 are shown on the screen, the user is able to select specific minutes, if they know how (one must drag the circle to get a specific minute). The interface has many more taps, states and cognitive load. How about iOS? Like Palm OS, iOS limits you to 5-minute intervals. Similar to Android though, an additional interaction is needed to pick AM/PM. Picking hour and minutes is more involved as well, you must scroll the picker to the desired value. The Palm OS UI might not be the prettiest, but it's the fastest for most use-cases. The most common options (business hours and 5-minute intervals) are presented without the need for multiple states or scrolling. Setting the time is 2 taps away!

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Alex White's Blog 2 months ago

Meet People Where They're At

There's a shopping center I sometimes walk to for lunch. It's been there long enough that it doesn't have a sidewalk (before city ordinances required sidewalks I imagine). A few years ago, a mixed-use complex was built next to it, complete with a sidewalk that ended right at the boundary of the old plaza. This new sidewalk has resulted in a path of trampled grass as people (like myself) walk to the restaurants in the old plaza. Today on my way to get some "Italian food" (it's America, nothing is authentic here), I was greeted with a new gravel path at the end of the sidewalk. The path had been placed to line up with the curve of dead grass and perfectly connected both plazas. ↑ I didn't have a camera on me, so enjoy this detailed sketch done on my Palm Pilot It seems like a small thing, but it surprised me. Just a week ago I remember wondering to myself how long it would be until a "stay off of grass" sign appeared. Instead, I was treated to a rare instance of people's needs being directly addressed. It reminded me of a similar story around Ohio State University (the university in my city). The sidewalks built across the campus green were made to follow the paths students trekked in the early days of the campus. A similar method, named Sneckdown , is used to determine where traffic calming measures are needed based on snow that has not been touched by traffic. I wish this was more common, identifying pain points and improving the situation. Instead, we spend hours in meetings figuring out how to fight people's goals because what they want isn't "sticky enough" or "doesn't meet business goals".

culture Culture
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Alex White's Blog 2 months ago

Installing JPilot on Arch

This post is a quick tip for anyone else running into issues installing the Palm Pilot desktop software, JPilot on Arch Linux. If you just try installing via , the build will fail as the dependency no longer builds on modern systems. The solution is to first install , then .

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Alex White's Blog 2 months ago

re: Hey you, start communicating!

David writes about the importance of reaching out to the author of blog posts and starting a conversation, I 100% agree! I love when something I write resonates with somebody, and more often than not it turns into a continuing conversation. I see this blog-o-sphere as it's own little world filled with friends across the world. I recently ran across a blog that belonged to a Youtuber. On the "about me" section they stated the following: NOTE: I don't answer any personal questions - Please don't send me emails. This does not sit well with me. What's the point of creating if not to spark conversation and meet others? At that point, it feels like you're just in it for the adsense revenue. The internet doesn't need that, it needs community (now more than ever). I don't have a problem with people making money off of their work, but it shouldn't be the only motivation. So reach out, send an email, even if it's just a "hello". I promise, you'll make the other person's day!

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Alex White's Blog 2 months ago

Photo Journal - Day 6

Today I returned to the park from day 4 armed with a macro lens I remembered I have. It's for a Nikon camera, and it's all manual (aperture ring and focus ring), but with an adapter it worked just fine with my Sony. I had some trouble with focusing, but I think a few of them turned out decently.

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