David Eisinger

Dispatch #42 (August 2026)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 01:26:36 -0400

August 2026 marks two big personal anniversaries: 25 years in Durham and 10 years in this house. Who would’ve thought? Certainly not Duke freshman Dave. Couldn’t be happier to be right here right now, though I might have made some different decisions had I known I’d be raising two small children in these increasingly cramped quarters. But that’s not how things work, is it?

In July, we went down to Lake Norman for the Fourth. The highlight was hooking an inflatable raft up to one of the kayaks and towing the kids and their cousin Sully around. Otherwise, laid pretty low: museums, pools, farmers’ markets, Eno River, just classic summertime shit. Work was a bit stressful (tricky client situation) but I think we’re mostly through the woods there. My folks came down at the end of the month to celebrate my mom’s birthday.

Here’s a new track, called “Asdreno Dreams” (title by my coworker’s young son, who makes fictitious track listings for fun):

Apologies to Claire for having to listen to this on loop for two months while I figured out those bass and lead lines. Thanks for letting me be me.

Decluttering

I finished Adam Savage’s Every Tool’s a Hammer, most of which is a love letter to tools and workshops. That plus a post I read on a knife blog I follow have me itching to overhaul my basement space. The problem is that there is so much crap down here. Just an unbelievable amount of crap.

I started a new book, Decluttering at the Speed of Life (via), which isn’t exactly groundbreaking stuff, but has given me permission to approach a cluttered space with a trash bag and a donation box and start getting stuff out. When I feel guilty about throwing something away, I just have to tell myself: David, it’s already trash. That pile of paint cans that was here when you moved in, and you haven’t looked at since? Already trash. That it’s in your house instead of the dump does not change its trash nature. Get it out.

I still think about this post I read some months ago:

“This is why decluttering is so hard. It’s not really about tidiness. It’s about deciding which past selves get to stay.”

Sure I haven’t ridden my fancy road bike since the kids were born, but it’s so tempting to think that could still be a part of my life if I just prioritized things a bit differently (e.g. became a 5AM guy instead of a 2AM guy). But, let’s face our current (and wonderful!) reality, sell the bike, and if I decide I want to get back into long rides in 2040, buy something new and goddamn incredible.

Eteink XTC Converter

Last month I mentioned my Xteink X3 pocket e-reader and how it uses a custom e-book format (“XTC”). I wasn’t happy with the results generated by my Calibre plugin when I converted the decluttering book. I found this web tool which creates much nicer files (margins, typography, etc.), but I didn’t really want a random, unattributed website as part of my reading workflow.

I pointed Codex at the URL and asked if it could perhaps find the source online. It could not, but it did reveal that the entire conversion process takes place in the browser using WebAssembly. I had it download and analyze the source and then build a command-line version. Then I used Bun to compile a standalone executable and set it up to read my preferred settings from a config file. Now I can just xtcconv /path/to/book.epub.

I can’t in good conscience open source this project, since it’s just stolen code and vibes. But if you’re interested, slap these three paragraphs into your coding agent and I bet you’ll get good results. What a time to be a nerd.

This Month

Adventure: Long weekend in Napa with some of Claire’s college friends then our annual trip to Rehoboth Beach
Project: decluttering, maybe start thinking about a better setup for my woodworking tools + 3D printer
Skill: I’ve run the same half-marathon in mid-October for the last four years; gotta decide if I’m going to go for five, and if so, get serious about training

Reading & Listening

Fiction: The Burning God, R. F. Kuang – I am ready for this series to be over; the characters aren’t likeable and nothing good ever happens. I’m holding out hope for a strong ending. Then back to CARL.
Non-fiction: Decluttering at the Speed of Life, Dana K. White
Music:
- A-Meow-Zing Music, Gabby’s Dollhouse – Nev loves this show, and now Claire and I unironically love the songs (tell me this doesn’t slap)
- Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Flaming Lips – I’ve always loved this album (Fight Test is an all-time favorite), but it’s only recently occurred to me that it’s also a synth masterpiece

Links

OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened

OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model’s guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the model broke its way out of OpenAI’s sandbox, then found exploits to break in to Hugging Face, all so it could cheat on the test by stealing the answers.
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making — Ludicity (via)

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and it’s impossible to have rational conversations with them about it. I can’t name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.
llm-wiki · GitHub

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs. This is an idea file, it is designed to be copy pasted to your own LLM Agent (e.g. OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode / Pi, or etc.). Its goal is to communicate the high level idea, but your agent will build out the specifics in collaboration with you.
Review: Xteink X3 is the little e-reader the world’s not quite ready for – Six Colors (via)

Not unlike in music, the problem is that in order for someone to actually to consume your music or books, they must possess the means to unlock it.
I own my books | Michael Harley (via)

So I backup my books to an open standard, ePUB, with the DRM stripped off. If eBooks.com folds tomorrow, or Kobo decides my account is a problem, or I want to read on hardware nobody has invented yet, my library still works. I don’t care what their fine print says. I bought this book. It’s my book. I’ll read it where I like, TYVM.

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Dispatch #41 (July 2026)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 01:27:26 -0400

Nico turned two in June. What the hell! Where’s my baby boy, and who’s this sassy little dude running around my house. We threw him a farm-themed birthday (my man loves cows), then took the kids up to see their cousins in Richmond. The next weekend, we went camping with Claire’s family at Carolina Hemlocks Recreation Area. This was awesome – bit of a haul for sure, and the boy couldn’t handle the switchbacks on the way up the mountain, but we were rewarded with a beautiful campsite with river views and temperatures a good 20°F cooler than around here.

In what’s surely a sign of a creatively unfulfilling month, here are my thoughts about a few recent purchases:

Aventon Pace 5 REC

We ordered Claire a new bike after hers was stolen last month. This thing is sweet, some nice upgrades from the previous version. I’m jealous of some of the tech, and especially the power to get up the bigger hills around here. At the same time, I’m pretty chuffed with how much mileage I’ve gotten out of my low-tech, single-speed e-bike; there’s something very pure and utilitarian about it that I appreciate.

DOIO KB16 Triple Knob Macro Pad Keyboard

I got absolutely sniped by this post about macro keyboards (via) and ended up picking this thing up. Physically, it is a well-made object and pairs nicely with my keyboard. I appreciate a good thwack, so I ordered some nice clicky switches (and actually swapped out the switches in my main keyboard as well, which makes typing this sentence quite satisfying) as well as some transparent keycaps inspired by that original post. I also printed a stand which puts it at a better angle and also somehow makes it feel more “mine.”

In terms of what to do with a whole bunch of new buttons, I’m still figuring that out. I’ve got a few set up to do some common work tasks (join my next meeting, start a new Harvest timer, etc.) and some window management things (full/half/quarter screen). I’m trying to be mindful of annoying things I do frequently that take more than a few keystrokes.

Xteink X3 Pocket eReader

I ordered this tiny e-reader after reading a few too many gushing blog posts and comments in Installer. My initial experience was pretty bad – it’s marketed as something you stick onto the back of your phone with magnets, but my phone (an iPhone 13 Mini I’m loathe to give up) is pretty small and it didn’t really work. What’s more, it couldn’t handle the first e-book I loaded onto it. (It has a bunch of images? Not sure but it just sort of bugged out and then locked up.)

I put it away for a few days until I stumbled on this post, which described a few alternate firmwares and led me to Inx, which is much smoother and could actually load my book, though it still struggled on the pages with photos. I printed a simple case in my favorite dark gray, giving it a little bit of protection and, again, putting my stamp on it. Then I found some software to convert EPUB files to the device’s native format (and even made a simple bug fix), which has resolved the image issues and improved the reading experience overall.

Now things are working well – I’m happy with the device and I’m finally making good progress in Every Tool’s a Hammer. It’s nice to have something to grab when I’m looking for a distraction that isn’t my phone. It’s neat that there’s such a robust community of folks making things for this device, but I’d be hard pressed to recommend it to someone who doesn’t want to tinker.

This Month

Adventure: Lake Norman for the Fourth, otherwise laying low and staying in the air conditioning
Project: I’ve got a half-finished track I’d like to do something with, and I need to finally finish that write-up of that AprilTag project
Skill: my appetite for self-improvement is low these days

Reading & Listening

Fiction: The Dragon Republic, R. F. Kuang
Non-fiction: Every Tool’s a Hammer, Adam Savage
Music: Season One, Peninsula Recordings

Links

My Enjoyment From Engagement With Media Deepens As I Grow Older | Brain Baking

One of the most protective things you can do against the negative consequences of ageing is learning a craft when you are young and keep on practising it. The second best thing you can do is learning something new when you are older.
Golden Hour | Ian Ewing | Radio Juicy

Radio Juicy is happy to present Golden Hour, a six‑track journey from beatsmith Ian Ewing, who channels pure nostalgia through organic drums, warm analog tones, and melodies that drift like memories.
Accidental anonymity - macwright.com (via)

My other reaction is that I don’t know anything about these people. They haven’t put themselves out there. They haven’t said anything true.
Just Be Normal About Things - by JA Westenberg - WESTENBERG (via)

Be normal, and opt out of the deranged belief that the only way to take something seriously is to take it to the most extreme possible conclusion.
Home | mise-en-place (via)

One tool to manage languages, env vars, and tasks per project, reproducibly.

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Dispatch #40 (June 2026)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:18:00 -0400

April bled straight into May, so it felt like a three-week month and flew right by. We celebrated Claire’s birthday and spent Memorial Day weekend at Lake Norman. Then summer kicked in – ran the Running of the Bulls 8K with the kids and a friend of mine, and went to our local pool for the first time this year.

Claire’s bike got stolen – someone just walked off with it while we were over at a friends house. What the hell. Real bummer, and because it has a throttle, our home insurance was no help (I guess they consider it a moped or something). Aventon was nice enough to give us a discount, so we’ve got a replacement on the way, and I’ll for sure invest in some additional security.

Here’s some new music:

I used Ableton’s new MIDI generation feature to come up with that bass line, which I find to be the hardest part of putting these tracks together. Set the key and some basic parameters, and then have it start generating different ideas to use as a starting point.

This Month

Adventure: my little man turns two!; family camping trip
Project: publish an article about my 3D printing project from last month
Skill: I’d like to read the manual for my Bass Station 2 – I use it for everything, and while it’s relatively intuitive, I don’t really understand how a few of the knobs (“mod env depth”) affect the sound

Reading & Listening

Fiction: The Poppy War, R. F. Kuang
Non-fiction: Every Tool’s a Hammer, Adam Savage
Music: Modal Soul, Nujabes

Links

It’s time to talk about my writerdeck (via)

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to convert my old laptop into a writerdeck, a dedicated writing device free from the distractions of the modern internet.
Resident: vibe coding firmware (our new sandbox library for ESP32 devices) (Interconnected)

We’re open sourcing Resident, our library for running AI-authored code on microcontrollers – with no compile step and no firmware flashing.
Key, in sight – Aresluna (via)

It’s fun to slam big keys without thinking, and it’s fun to experience the mastery of precise combinations of meticulous keyboard shortcuts. It’s great to see things on the screen that react to what you’ve done, especially if those are things that really understand how you work. And it’s magical to watch your fingers do things seemingly on their own while you’re preoccupied with deeper things, just because you set up something that allowed motor memory to blossom.

Inspired me to order one of these; TBD what I’ll do with it.
The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book | Brain Baking

This was a lovely month project that rewarded me with a physical artefact of an ever-evolving digital medium, solidifying words, sentences, and paragraphs in a way that perhaps might even envy The Internet Archive. As a hopeless sentimental person, flipping through the book, looking at the figures and reading the text makes me happy.

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Dispatch #39 (May 2026)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Tue, 12 May 2026 01:32:16 -0400

Man, what a month. Rich with the stuff of life. THICK. High highs (Nev’s first ballet recital, an incredible trip to Asheville), low lows (the death of our next door neighbor Joel, a major health scare – don’t worry, everyone’s alright). Impossible to capture the feeling of it as I sit here, and frankly it feels silly to document all the dumb stuff I get into alongside the heavy shit, but I’m committed to this project. Let’s go.

We headed down to Lake Norman for Easter weekend. Good to get some time with our little nephew Sully, who’s just a few months younger than Nico. I ran the Tar Heel 10 Miler (result, certificate), which went okay. Happy enough with my overall time at sub-9 minutes/mile, but I thought I might do a little better until I hit the final climb.

Between the race and an ill-fated outing to see the Savannah Bananas, we spent a good bit of time in Chapel Hill, where Claire went to school. Neat for her to be able to show the kids around. I sort of take for granted that we live where I went to college (though the main campus is rather separate and not somewhere we ever go).

Asheville

At the end of the month, we headed to Asheville for our company’s annual gathering, which was awesome. We took over The Restoration hotel right in the heart of the city. I did a live performance of my song Asperitas, which was well-received and something I’ve never done before. And we unveiled the project we built as part of the hackathon in February, which went over so well it gets its own section below.

After the rest of the company departed, my parents (bless them) brought the kids out, and we got to take them around the city for a few days. Highlights included the Asheville Museum of Science, WNC Nature Center, and Highland Brewing.

Mystery Project

Right, so in February, I pitched this concept of a 3D-printed name tag tied to a digital product that would encourage people to connect in real life. I worked with a team to build a prototype, but the mechanics still needed fleshing out and the name tag/keychain thing needed refinement. In the subsequent months, my coworker Steven continued iterating on the keychain, eventually getting to a slick design featuring a print-in-place hinge and embedded magnets.

About a week before the event, I decided to get serious about the digital updates. I worked with Codex to overhaul the character/inventory system, replacing the AI-generated avatars with a character builder based on the LPC Spritesheet Character Generator so that people could equip the items they picked up and have that reflected on their avatar. And I added the concept of “item tags,” standalone AprilTags that I 3D printed that could then be associated with items.

The game was a big hit. The keychains were distributed in everyone’s welcome bags along with a little explainer card. People were already playing when we got to Asheville (which was a relief as we’d never done a full end-to-end test). We created new items throughout the event (Daft Punk Helmet, Grogu, etc.), associated them with the item tags, and had a lot of fun hiding them at the different event locations. Major props to Claire for running with that side of things.

I don’t know if we’ll revisit this concept or if it’ll be a one-time thing. I definitely need to write a comprehensive post about it. Look for that next month.

Gridfinity

Still having a blast with the 3D printer. My latest obsession is the Gridfinity organization system, printing little bins for all of our stuff.

If you’re into this sort of thing, check out this desktop organizer set and this wall system you can connect to a Gridfinity base with this adapter (and a ton of little magnets).

Deck Project

Finally, we’re in the early stages of replacing our rotted-out deck with a screened-in porch. We met with an architect who showed us some sketches:

Exciting stuff! This month’s looking busy, but I’m feeling relatively unencumbered with all of those obligations out of the way. Looking forward to getting back into music and kicking off the summer with a trip to the lake for Memorial Day and the Running of the Bulls 8K in downtown Durham.

This Month

Adventure: Lake for Memorial Day; Running of the Bulls
Project: make some new music
Skill: I’ve been having a lot of fun finger drumming on my sampler while ChatGPT does my job for me – might try to incorporate that into the new piece

Reading & Listening

Fiction: Operation Bounce House, Matt Dinniman
Non-fiction: Every Tool’s a Hammer, Adam Savage
Music: Ecology Division, Bastard Jazz Compilations

Links

Optimism is not a personality flaw (via)

Whoever can list the most reasons something won’t work gets treated as the smartest person in the room. If you say “I think this could go well,” you get ~the look. That slight tilt of the head. Optimism is treated like a belief in astrology. Pessimism reads as intelligence now. Optimism reads as naivety. This has gotten so baked into educated Western culture that most people don’t notice they’re doing it. But it’s toxic, all the same.
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I’d like

There are a whole bunch of reasons I’m not scared that my career as a software engineer is over now that computers can write their own code, partly because these things are amplifiers of existing experience. If you know what you’re doing, you can run so much faster with them.
Open Source Gave Me Everything Until I Had Nothing Left to Give - Kenneth Reitz (via)

I wish someone had told me this when I was twenty-three and staying up for three days straight because the code was flowing so beautifully. The code was beautiful. I was in trouble.

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Dispatch #38 (April 2026)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:40:13 -0400

Finally warming up around here (though we did get hit by the largest 24-hour temperature drop in recorded history while we were up visiting my folks). We took the kids to a Holi celebration, which was a huge mess and a ton of fun. The colors don’t come through here but I think the joy does.

Then we drove up to DC, left the kids with my folks, and took the train to Baltimore to catch my friend’s show and spend a little bit of time in the city. We stayed at the Pendry which was super nice. We’ll be back. Sold the old car while were up there – 🪦 legend.

I did my yearly trip to Vegas to watch basketball with some old friends. Great times, and my one single bet hit (you can tell how much I like the actual gambling part of the trip). We had dinner one night at Mott 32 at the Venetian, and I’m not really a fine dining guy but this was killer.

Claire went to visit a friend out in California, and I picked up a double trailer off CraigsList so I could take both kids around on the bike. We passed a couple as we were riding downtown and Nev yelled, “Look at us! We’re the luckiest kids in the world!” which I’m writing down here to remember forever.

April’s looking much calmer. I’ve got a race in a few weeks, feeling pretty good about that. I’d like to get to where I’m doing 3-4 big races a year; I struggle to get up off the couch without some kind of deadline. Otherwise, prepping that hackathon project I mentioned last month for our big reveal in early May, biking around town, and Gridfinity-ing my entire house.

This Month

Adventure: Tar Heel 10 Miler
Project: finish that hackathon project – a teammate’s doing incredible work on the hardware side; I need to make sure the software is equally compelling
Skill: live music performance (that concert we went to in Baltimore inspired me to sign up for a talent show, which I better get serious about in short order)

Reading & Listening

Fiction: The Strength of the Few, James Islington (still loving this but it is a complex tale he is weaving; don’t pull a Rothfuss on me man)
Non-fiction: I’m not reading much non-fiction these days; open to suggestions
Music: Tanto Tiempo, Bebel Gilberto

Links

The Brand Age (via)

That’s not why brand age watches look strange. Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it’s not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things. The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it’s going to be a weird, bad world.
The Kindness Of Familiar Faces | Defector

None of that happens if the internet exists. Instead of fleeing to Seattle in search of a purpose in life, Kurt Cobain would’ve joined a subreddit that made living in Aberdeen three percent more bearable, he would have expressed his jadedness with society on Thought Catalog, and he would have uploaded rough demos to his SoundCloud as his attempt at making it in the biz. He wouldn’t have met any of the people who either inspired his music or directly made it with him. More important, the Seattle scene itself never would have materialized. The internet disincentivizes people young and old from going out into the world, from making necessary human connections, and from forging a collective artistic voice together. That’s why there’s never gonna be another Cobain.
Digital culture and entertainment insights daily: The feeling of the old world fading away (via)

To be clear, this sorrow is not about nostalgia or “getting older”, this is about living in a moment when the question, “Has the world changed or have I?” is irrelevant because the separation of the self and the world no longer makes any sense.
Why I Got Out Of The Gambling Business | Defector

Though the damage I did while at the company cannot be undone, I can sleep a little easier now knowing I am no longer a part of that rotten business. I encourage everyone else working at these companies to do the same as I did, and quit. The job can be walked away from; the casino, on the other hand, follows you everywhere.
Stop Sloppypasta: Don’t paste raw LLM output at people

slop·py·pas·ta n. Verbatim LLM output copy-pasted at someone, unread, unrefined, and unrequested. From slop (low-quality AI-generated content) + copypasta (text copied and pasted, often as a meme, without critical thought). It is considered rude because it asks the recipient to do work the sender did not bother to do themselves.

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Dispatch #37 (March 2026)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:26:29 -0400

February was quick but full. We had a few things hit all at the same time – some good friends visiting from Canada, our company hackathon, and an extended visit from my family. It was hectic but we made it all work, and the month went by in a flash.

New Car

As mentioned last month, our faithful Honda CR-V gave up the ghost in January, and we bought a new (to us) Toyota Rav4 Prime in early February. It’s cool – about 50 miles of electric range before the gas motor kicks in. We don’t presently have a way to charge it at home, but there are chargers near our office and Central Park, and between those, we were able to go an entire month before needing to fill up.

I’ll avoid thinking about what percent of my life is keeping things charged. Claire calls me “the charging fairy,” flitting around the house, plugging things in.

Pointless Palooza

We did our annual company hackathon, and for the first time, I pitched an original idea and lead a team instead of contributing to someone else’s concept. We built a pretty cool thing, a 3D printed keychain that contains a QR code and two AprilTags that make up a sort of public/private key pair. The QR code launches a web app, and then uploading a photo of the two tags lets you claim a profile. Then, scanning your private tag with someone else’s public tag lets you connect with them. We built a Diablo-esque inventory/leveling system where each connection you make grants you an additional level and a piece of gear.

This was fun to build, and pretty novel – a web app with no real notion of login state; your identity is solely a physical thing you have in your possession. The team is going to continue iterating on the concept and roll it out to the company at large at our big event in May. More to come on that.

The whole hackathon was pretty nuts in terms of what folks were able to do with AI. In years prior, a team’s success (in terms of ability to ship a working product) was pretty closely correlated with how many developers were on the team. Not so this year – every team was able to ship polished, working software. Claire built this game. I’m glad I was able to make something a little bit different. The ability to come up with original concepts and execute on them will be increasingly important as AI gets more capable of building the sort of CRUD apps that defined my earlier career.

3D printing

Still loving the 3D printer. Valentine’s Day is a big deal at my kids’ school. We printed a bunch of these stegos for Nev’s class, these cars for Nico’s, and some custom stencils made with OpenSCAD. Otherwise just making stuff for the office and kitchen, toys for the kids and their friends (check out this robot and motorcycle), and generally just the little plastic bits and bobs that make life run a little more smoothly (like this buckle to secure the straps on Nev’s bike seat).

This Month

Adventure: Baltimore for a friend’s concert; Vegas for my annual basketball trip
Project: make some new music + rework one of my old tracks into something I can perform live
Skill: live performance; perhaps some 3D modeling

Reading & Listening

Fiction: The Strength of the Few, James Islington (the first book in this series was a bit of a slog – I’ve read too many books about magic high schools for one lifetime – but the ending got me pretty good, and this one’s a pretty big departure)
Non-fiction: The Magic of Code, Samuel Arbesman (via)
Music: Polymood, L’Eclair

Links

Everything is awesome (why I’m an optimist) (via)

I’m going to argue that the pessimists have the best narratives and the worst track record. The doom scenarios require assumptions that don’t survive contact with economic history, and the psychological posture you bring to this moment actually matters for how it turns out.
Dan Simmons Is Dead So It’s Time To Read ‘Hyperion’ | Defector

All that stuff (besides The Terror, which I truly love) might be an acquired taste for non-genre fans. Which brings us to the entire purpose of this blog: me telling you to read Hyperion, and then you coming back later and saying thank you.
How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene | Pitchfork

It’s likely that as AI advances and makes reasonable facsimiles of even more genres, there’ll be a reverse push for realness—akin to listeners obsessing over vinyl or obscure formats, the human touch could become a boutique feature, like raw milk at the farmer’s market. Lo-AI hasn’t won the battle yet; it means too much to these people. “When things get so bleak with lo-fi or just the world, right, it’s very easy to enter a state of nihilism. Like, why should I do any of it, when it’s all so fruitless?” Reade said. “You do it for yourself. That’s the core thing with art and music for me.”
Musical Beings Tembo: this magnetic drum machine turns the whole family into beatmakers

Musical Beings Tembo is a new family-friendly drum machine with real-time sampling capabilities, programmed with magnets.

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Dispatch #36 (February 2026)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:26:33 -0500

Greetings from frigid Durham, North Carolina. We’ve had an uncharacteristic amount of winter precipitation this month (mostly ice last weekend but a few inches of snow this one). On the one hand, our work is pretty flexible and we’ve gotten plenty of extra time with the kids. On the other, my home office and all my hobbies are in the basement, where it’s presently around 40°F, so I’m about ready for things to get back to normal.

I spent a few days in Miami for a company leadership retreat. Highlights included a run along the Miami Beach Beachwalk and beers at Abbey Brewing Company. Then we headed up to DC for a friend’s baby shower and some time with my folks.

While we were up there, our car finally gave up the ghost. It’s been struggling to start for a while now, so it wasn’t completely unexpected, but I’d hoped to replace it by choice rather than by necessity. We’ve got a Toyota Rav4 plug-in hybrid headed our way. I’m pretty psyched for this, getting around town on electric power but still being able to fill up with gas when we travel.

Voice Note Shortcut

I’m constantly thinking of, and then promptly forgetting, things I need to do, groceries to buy, ideas for these blog posts, etc. I’ve been on the hunt for some way to quickly capture these fleeting thoughts. I like the idea of a ring that can record voice memos, but this one requires a $10/mo subscription, and this one just … turns into trash after 12-15 hours of recording.

Instead, I played around in the iOS Shortcuts app and made a shortcut that captures text from speech, then looks for a note named for today’s date (creating it if necessary) and appends the dictated text to it. Then I made it so that double-tapping the back of the phone launches the shortcut (shout out Viget friend Max Myers). I’m getting a ton of utility from this, using it throughout my day. Here’s the shortcut if you want to give it a shot.

3D Printing

Still having a blast with the 3D printer (though, again, too cold to operate it at present). Made a ton of toys for the kids, stuff for the house, and (of course) accessories for the printer itself.

Friend of the blog Tim Hårek linked to this post about OpenSCAD, which lets you define 3D models with code. I had Codex help me make a stencil for Nev to use for her Valentine’s Day cards. Then I ordered this Crayola airbrush kit, which works shockingly well. She’s been having a blast with it.

We’re doing our company hackathon in a few weeks, and I’m planning to use the printer to make something with both physical and digital components (probably involving AprilTags).

Finally, RIP Dan McQuade. 43 years old. What the hell. I’m off to hug my family.

This Month

Adventure: keeping it local this month (though I guess I need to get up to DC to deal with the car at some point) but lots of friends and family visiting
Project: aforementioned hackathon
Skill: I predict I’m going to struggle to meet all of my commitments this month, so I’m going to give myself a little bit of grace on this one

Reading & Listening

Fiction: The Will of the Many, James Islington (via)
Non-fiction: The Magic of Code, Samuel Arbesman (via)
Music: I’ve got a bit of a backlog here; gonna spend some time with the records I already have rather than buying something new

Links

Things you’re allowed to do (via)

This is a list of things you’re allowed to do that you thought you weren’t, or didn’t even know you could.
The Dilbert Afterlife - by Scott Alexander (via)

Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the other will pile on you so massively and traumatically that it will force you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security.
Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why – On my Om (via)

Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity.
ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering (via)

Recently, I’ve been spending my time building an image-to-ASCII renderer. Below is the result — try dragging it around, the demo is interactive!
Fascists Are Pathetic | Defector

In Trump’s second term, the federal government has intentionally rid itself of the capacity to do anything but make things worse; it has quite literally traded Ph.D scientists and dedicated civil servants for the chance to hastily stand up this expansion team from the waiver wire flotsam of the violence worker community.

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Dispatch #35 (January 2026)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:27:32 -0500

Happy new year! Big month. My girl turned four, which is somehow both shockingly old and young. Sometimes I look at her and think, I can’t believe you’re not still two. Other times she says things and I think, I can’t believe you’re not, like, twelve. We threw her a party at Hyper Kidz, then my folks took her to Asheville for a few days.

We spent Christmas in Greensboro with Claire’s family. In addition to all the good family time, the highlight was Winter Wonderlights at the Greensboro Science Center (and so many presents). Then we spent a few days down at Lake Norman with Claire’s grandmother. We went to a Gabby’s Dollhouse interactive experience, which is pretty big in our house these days.

Music

Here’s a track I made in December, called “Signal Drift”:

I’m pretty happy with the last few things I’ve recorded. I can hear a real progression from the stuff I was making a year ago. Getting comfortable in Ableton has been a big boost, having discrete creation and refinement phases.

I also made this little medley for a company event:

I tracked everything out on my synths, but then, rather than recording the audio, I just sent the MIDI data into Ableton and played it through this Magical 8bit Plug which really nails the Nintendo sound from my childhood.

I have a bass guitar I’m borrowing from my father-in-law, but I’ve never done much with it. I picked up a cheap bass multi-effect pedal so I can at least get some decent sounds out of it. I hope to incorporate it into my music – there’s a level of subtlety and expression that’s hard to replicate with synths. It’s a whole new thing, though, and whatever guitar skills I have (i.e. strumming bar chords) don’t really transfer.

3D Printing

My lovely wife got me a Bambu Lab P1S 3D printer for Christmas, and it’s basically been running non-stop since I got it set up. This thing is amazing! It’s whirring away making a pink fox as I type this.

I’ve started dabbling a bit with Blender to design and print custom stuff. Here’s my first project – the, ahem, “crap catcher” – designed to keep Claire’s fancy kitchen knives free of parrot detritus:

Print-on-demand toys are awesome, but there is something really cool about watching a thing you designed enter the real world, layer by layer. I’m keen to try out OpenSCAD (via), which lets you design models with code instead of visually.

Misc.

I found this post (via), “Home is where my stuff is,” deeply resonant:

Here’s what I’ve realized: every object I own is a fossil. A little sediment left by a past version of myself.

This is why decluttering is so hard. It’s not really about tidiness. It’s about deciding which past selves get to stay.

Pairs nicely with another one of my favorites from 2025.

I gave a talk at work about my use of ChatGPT Codex over the last six months. The big takeaways:

These tools don’t replace thinking (and in fact reward good & clear thinking)
Good software development practices still apply (and you need to be able to describe them rather than just having an intuitive sense)
Abundance mindset over zero-sum (these tools aren’t taking work from software developers, they’re letting us do more)

Finally, I’d like to take health and exercise a bit more seriously in 2026, and plan to do a separate blog series about it. Look out for that in the next week or so.

That’s all for now. I hope 2026 treats you well, from my adorable family to yours.

This Month

Adventure: up to DC for a friend’s baby shower and some family time
Project: custom shelving unit for our kitchen
Skill: 3D modeling; slappin’ the bass

Reading & Listening

Fiction: The Will of the Many, James Islington (via)
Non-fiction: The Magic of Code, Samuel Arbesman (via)
Music: Septet, John Carroll Kirby (via, though one track is on my Lisbon playlist)

Links

My 2026 Q1 Planning and Moving to a New Planner – Writing at Large

That’s it. There are no stickers in my planner, no highlighters, illustrations and such. It’s a practical tool for me. I won’t photograph it for the blog or social media because it’s so personal, and that’s its job – to work for me, not to generate content or likes. It isn’t pretty, but boy is it functional. I reference it at least one or two time a day every day. From it stems my daily to-do list, my weekly review, my long and short term plans. It’s an investment that’s paid dividends over the years, and from what I can tell my new format promises to pay me back even more.
Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life (via)

The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.
A blog is a biography | Dries Buytaert (via)

If that idea feels compelling, this might be a good time to start a blog or a website. Not to build a large audience, but just to leave a trail. Future you may be grateful you began.
This life gives you nothing - Blackbird Spyplane (via)

When we do this, we don’t just find ourselves with more time on our hands, but with more life on our hands, too. Because we set things back in motion. The world remains the same, but the way we see it changes.

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Dispatch #34 (December 2025)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:34:59 -0500

We took a quick trip down to Lake Norman to visit Claire’s grandmother, but the big travel in November was up to New York for Thanksgiving. We did a long weekend in NYC then spent a week at my sister’s house. The kids loved the big city (especially the Statue of Liberty cruise, Bluey’s House, and this giant indoor playground). I just loved soaking up the city – we were there a few months ago, but that was mostly in Brooklyn, which is a pretty distinct thing from being in Lower Manhattan. We’ll be back.

I did the Troy Turkey Trot 10K Thanksgiving morning. Felt pretty good! Happy with my result, though I came out a little hot and faded down the stretch. My family joined me for the mile walk afterward.

At work, I built a simple tool in Go to extract content from our HR platform, consolidate it, and upload it to Google Drive. I showed it to a couple other managers who seemed interested in using it, but then I had the problem of how to distribute it and get non-devs set up (installing dependencies, managing config files, etc.). Codex (my AI coding agent of choice) was super helpful here: it suggested and implemented a few subcommands to help with initial configuration, then set up GoReleaser to build the program and distribute it via Homebrew. Super cool, and simple enough that I had it create Homebrew formulas for some of my personal apps.

I’ve never been great about adding alt text to the photos I put on this site, and decided to see if I could farm it out to AI. I tried a few local models with limited success, then figured I’d see how Codex could do. Pretty well, turns out – inspect the photos above to see the results. I already have a shell script to encrypt images, and I added a few lines to have Codex generate a description before encrypting. I promise this will be the only AI-generated content ever featured in these posts.

Finally, my sister’s been working on a secret project for the last few months, and it’s finally been released to the public. It’s a short Kill Bill / Fortnite film of a scene that didn’t make the original movies. It rips. Here’s a post from Kottke with more information.

This Month

Adventure: my girl turns FOUR; Christmas in Greensboro
Project: couple music things – an animated music video for a work event + a chill collaboration
Skill: Santa’s got me down for a 3D printer, pretty psyched for that

Reading & Listening

Fiction: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, Matt Dinniman
Non-fiction: The Magic of Code, Samuel Arbesman
Music: Please Don’t Judge Me, Gas-Lab

Links

Software Development in the Time of Strange New Angels (via)

Those that succeed in making this transition are going to be those with higher-order skills and larger vision. Those who have really absorbed what it means to be engineers first and computer guys second. That means knowing what to build, and why. That means being able to understand the second- and third-order effects of their decisions. That means recognizing bad ideas early, and giving business recommendations backed by solid evidence.
Naz Hamid • Million-Mile Tech

A deeper appreciation and intimacy grows as you hold onto something longer and longer. There’s a point at which it evolves from the shiny new thing into a tool you love. You’ve cultivated a lopsided fondness for a material possession that’s now a well-worn friend. May all of the things we care for outlive us.
Software is supply-constrained (for now) | justin․searls․co

It’s long been my view that the appropriate response to the current moment is to ride this walrus and leverage coding agents to increase the scope of our ambitions.
Five Months of Journalling • Robb Knight (via)

I am going to continue with this, tweaking things as needed. As long as I’m keeping up with the things I want to get done, whatever that ends up looking like in my journal, I’m happy.
xkcd: Fifteen Years (via)

“Want to feel old?” “Yes.”

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Dispatch #33 (November 2025)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 22:43:42 -0500

I fear the days of Big Baby Nico are coming to a close. My man’s walking, talking, making his desires known. It was a good run, 17 months almost. It felt like Nev sort of skipped this phase, so this was a novel experience, and Tiny Toddler Nico is awesome. The best is when we’re putting on a fresh diaper and he looks down, waves, and says, “bye bye my penis.”

Microcosm

Claire got me my first effects pedal, a Hologram Electronics Microcosm. This thing is righteous. A normal pedal affects the sound in predictable ways (reverb, distortion, etc.). This one takes the sound in and starts chopping, repitching, looping, generally generating pleasant randomness. Here’s a short track I made with it:

I’m running my electric piano through it (as well as my Prophet synth for the outro). I think effect is really nice – gives my grid-based music a less rigid, more organic feel.

Marky

I was putting together a team presentation about ChatGPT Codex and decided to see if I could build a simple web bookmarking API in under an hour. With that done, I asked it to take a stab at a web UI, and was frankly blown away by the result. I continued iterating on it for about a week, and I’ve now deployed it to the same server running this site and have been using it as my bookmark manager for the better part of a month. You can view my public links here. Here’s what it looks like when you’re logged in:

It’s not perfect – it trips on websites with really restrictive anti-crawler measures, and some of Vue.js-based dynamic behavior is a little janky. I also can’t really comment on the code quality as I’ve barely looked at it. That said, it is exactly what I want in a bookmark manager, with features like plaintext archiving, full-text search, and referrer tracking. It’s exciting to imagine a future where, if you have the right skills, the bar for creating software is much lower and all kinds of new stuff comes to life.

It’s long been my view that the appropriate response to the current moment is to ride this walrus and leverage coding agents to increase the scope of our ambitions.

– Justin Searls

If you’re interested, you can look at the source code and run Marky yourself, but I’d instead encourage you to install Codex and make that thing you always wanted.

I took my e-bike to our local shop for a tune-up and some upgrades: a rack, kickstand, and this nifty frame lock. These were big in Copenhagen; you don’t really see them here in the states but the guys at the shop were able to run one down. It won’t stop someone from picking the bike up and walking away with it, but at least someone can’t hop on, turn the throttle, and go. I’d been eyeing other bikes but, with these upgrades in place, I’m feeling content with the one I have.

I ran the Bull City Race Fest half-marathon for the fourth year in a row. I didn’t do great, coming in something like eight minutes slower than last year (result, certificate), but 9:22/mile feels about right given my level of preparation. And now I feel GREAT, routinely going on easy runs without the stress of training.

We did a weekend at Fairy Stone State Park with a bunch of Durham friends. Great times, wholesome family fun.

I went to Nashville for a team offsite last week. Highlights included Third Man Records, Jack White’s record shop/recording studio (I picked up a live recording from one of my favorite bands) and this ridiculously good cover band.

This Month

Adventure: NYC, then upstate NY for Thanksgiving; Troy Turkey Trot
Project: keep jamming with my Microcosm, produce another track
Skill: live playing (guitar or keys)

Reading & Listening

Fiction: Gate of the Feral Gods, Matt Dinniman – this series rips so hard
Non-fiction: The Notebook, Roland Allen
Music: Ambivalence Avenue, Bibio

Links

Why engineers can’t be rational about programming languages | spf13 (via)

Every time an engineer evaluates a language that isn’t “theirs,” their brain is literally working against them. They’re not just analyzing technical trade offs, they’re contemplating a version of themselves that doesn’t exist yet, that feels threatening to the version that does. The Python developer reads case studies about Go’s performance and their amygdala quietly marks each one as a threat to be neutralized. The Rust advocate looks at identical problems and their Default Mode Network constructs narratives about why “only” Rust can solve them.
Scripts I wrote that I use all the time (via)

In my decade-plus of maintaining my dotfiles, I’ve written a lot of little shell scripts. Here’s a big list of my personal favorites.
What if people don’t want to create things - macwright.com

When I look back on TileMill in 2010, Mapbox Studio, Observable, the whole arc: I can’t help but worry about the supply of creativity in society. In particular: If we give everyone the tools to build their dreams, very few people will use them.
Just Talk To It - the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering | Peter Steinberger (via)

The benchmarks only tell half the story. IMO agentic engineering moved from “this is crap” to “this is good” around May with the release of Sonnet 4.0, and we hit an even bigger leap from good to “this is amazing” with gpt-5-codex.
Vibe engineering

I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to how the code actually works. This leaves us with a terminology gap: what should we call the other end of the spectrum, where seasoned professionals accelerate their work with LLMs while staying proudly and confidently accountable for the software they produce?

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