About

Hi, I’m Connor! A lifelong tinkerer and technology enjoyer, finally getting around to putting myself out there!

Interests

Linux has treated me quite well since I first started using it in 2008: so much so that I was able to replace Windows with Linux completely by 2016! Linux Mint--and it’s close cousin LMDE--has been my workhorse system for a decade, replacing Ubuntu at the turn of the GNOME 3 & Unity Desktop fallout from way back when.

Jumping from desktop to server use, I thoroughly enjoy using FreeBSD or OpenBSD over the more "traditional" Linux server distributions like Ubuntu and AlmaLinux. FreeBSD in particular began my crippling addiction to ZFS, and my filesystem preferences have never quite been the same since!

Hacking at commodity hardware has also been a massive interest of mine. It’s a rabbit hole that started with game console hacking and flashing OpenWrt and Tomato to routers, and has since progressed into breaking out the SOIC-8 clip to modify the BIOSes of various systems, be it Librebooting them outright or just giving the stock firmware an me_cleaner bath!

I’ve also been extremely passionate about digital privacy for close to two decades now: an increasingly important thing in our now always-connected world, where the old online safety adage of "never posting your personal info online" fell by the wayside the moment it became profitable to pony up that data, safety concerns be damned!

And while there’s a lot to be said about the rapid advances in tech over the last few years, my interest has always been in older—​and often more reliable—​technologies; very much in that Chesterton’s Fence vein of thought. This led me to discover and appreciate alternative systems and approaches, including the aforementioned *BSD systems!

Links

A more comprehensive list than in the site footer:

• Codeberg

• GitHub

• Contact email (PGP available)

• LinkedIn

• Old website archive

Credits

This website is hosted on the excellent OpenBSD operating system. There’s nothing quite like needing zero extra dependencies to get a full HTTPS-enabled web server up and running!

All content on this site was written in AsciiDoc, a criminally underrated markup language with an "easy to learn, hard to master" learning curve to it. I find it to be far more pleasant to work with than Markdown in nearly all applications, to say nothing of having to account for over a dozen different—​and oft-conflicting—​versions of the Markdown spec that exist in the wild!

I use Jekyll and the requisite AsciiDoc plugin to generate the entire website. The Jekyll theme I’m using is Minima--an excellent default I saw little reason to change from—​with some modifications to better display my content.

Past Website Attempts

Before employing Jekyll, I generated this website with the AsciiDoctor utility as part of a homegrown script, but my lack of HTML & CSS knowledge prevented me from dialing things in as much as I would have liked. A fact complicated further by the relative complexity—​and lacking documentation—​of the AsciiDoctor CSS themes. I may revisit the concept one day once I have some webdev knowledge under my belt!

Before deciding on AsciiDoc as my markup format of choice, I previously wrote and generated this website using the excellent Zim Desktop Wiki: a program I still use to this day for taking my notes! It’s built-in web server, HTML export, and template support gave me my first real taste of website creation. And though I no longer use it for that purpose, I still hold it in high regard. An archive of the old Zim version of the site exists here, barebones though it may be!