David Eisinger

Dispatch #44 (October 2026)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 02:29:07 -0400

Rough start to the month: new school year started (Nev’s last before kindergarten 😭), but within the first two weeks we had a hospital visit (Nev scratched her eye in a way that presented as a potential brain injury) then both kids caught COVID. We recovered in time to make it down to Lake Norman for Labor Day, then celebrated my 44th birthday with a sitter (rare for us) and a night out at Red Phone Booth and Little Bull (delicious).

Construction on our new deck started in earnest. The old, rotted deck is gone, and the concrete footings are in place. Framing work should start in the next few days. Exciting stuff! Throughout the process, I’ve been a bit too concerned with the price, but as the various crews have started showing up, it’s been cool to think that we’re not just exchanging some amount of money for an addition to our house, but instead providing work for all these different people with all these different skills, investing in our house and our community.

At the end of the month, we decided to head down to Wilmington for our nephew’s second birthday, and rather than crash with family, we rented a small house right on Carolina Beach. This was incredible, some combination of the accommodations, the weather, and just sort of … not having any of the normal expectations or pressure that usually accompany travel. They offered to let us extend our stay an extra day, and we happily obliged.

I’ve been working on a new track for the last few weeks, but was never quite happy with it until I managed to capture a decent recording of the kids frolicking in the waves the night we arrived at the beach and added it to the music. I think it works well, though it does fill me with a strange melancholy, like I’m looking backwards from some point in the far future.

Finally, some choice quotes from my children:

It’s not me. It’s you. It’s you farting.

– Nico, when asked if perhaps he’d soiled his diaper

More kchr, old man.

– Nev, requesting additional whipped cream for her waffle (she, and by extension the entire family, refer to whipped cream by the sound it makes coming out of the can)

Nerd Stuff

As I mentioned last month, SourceHut has adopted a strict no-AI policy, which doesn’t mesh with the way I develop software these days. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do long-term, but I did stand up a static site with Stagit at git.davideisinger.com. It’s not a forge – you can’t clone from it or open pull requests or anything – but it does give me a nice place to link to code, and I like the overall vibe.

I’ve been quietly mirroring this site as a Gemini capsule at gemini.davideisinger.com. I had Codex make some updates to the Hugo templates responsible for reformatting my posts as gemtext, and I think it’s looking pretty good. If you’re terminally inclined:

brew install amfora
amfora gemini://gemini.davideisinger.com/

I put Dank Linux on my old ThinkPad and have been slowly getting it set up do some real computing. Dank Linux is cool because it doesn’t do too much, just a nice modern Linux experience on top of Ubuntu, unlike what DHH is doing with his thing. I don’t see myself switching away from Macs any time soon, this is mostly just a hobby, though I could see Apple locking things down further and further as people start installing agents on their computers and being surprised at the results.

I had to retire my old friend SizeUp – I guess they never updated for Apple Silicon, and the latest version of MacOS got rid of whatever was keeping it alive. I switched to the free version of Rectangle, and it is perfectly fine. No notes. I’m also trying out the Helium browser as a replacement for Brave after seeing it mentioned in this post (about, ironically, switching to Brave). It’s nice, missing a few features from Brave that I liked, but also missing the weird political and crypto baggage.

TV

We’ve watched a bunch of TV this month, new seasons of some old favorites (Reacher and Slow Horses), plus Furious which goes hard and features my favorite character since Stringer Bell. But really I just want to shout out Sealook, an animated show about fat seals. Nev and I love it, though opinions are split on this guy. She can’t stand him; I think he is the best.

This Month

Adventure: headed up to DC for some work stuff + family time, annual trip to Fairy Stone
Project: I’d like to finish one more track before the end of the year and then wrap everything up into some sort of album or EP; couple blogging efforts I’d like to finally ship out
Skill: work some electric guitar into my music

Reading & Listening

Fiction: The Blacktongue Thief, Christopher Buehlman – this is a romp
Non-fiction: The Magic of Code, Samuel Arbesman (via) – this isn’t really speaking to me, much as I want it to, but I have a hard time DNF’ing books
Music: mostly my own synth loops, honestly

Links

In Praise of dhh (via)

Whatever happened to dhh? I regret to inform you that, after a long struggle, he eventually lost his fight against the parasitic fungus that was taking over his brain, and died. The exact timeline is unclear, but we suspect he succumbed to his illness sometime in 2020.
‘Ask for what you want’ is a key skill for the 21st century

For me, the aim is always a finished, standalone program — NOT a process still dependent upon AI agents. The prospect of a permanent tether makes me feel itchy. A distant API could fail, and you’d be … unable to do … anything?? Or, the distant API could suddenly cost more. Or, the quality of its responses could change. Sorry, but that’s the kind of unreliable computing I am trying to escape.
A day is short, a life is long - overkill.wtf (via)

I can travel. I can buy books. I can buy a stupidly expensive pair of headphones because for three months I suddenly decide headphones are the most interesting objects ever invented (heh!). There is a mortgage, and it gets paid. There is food in the fridge. I can save some money. I can invest some money. So what am I working ten more hours for? To watch big number go big?
It was really just life hacks all along | hi, it’s mike

I don’t make them public because I don’t write the code and I’m not willing to stand behind them or manage PRs for them. That would be irresponsible. Which is pretty much like what we’ve all been doing with commodity scripting languages for years: Making things that just go in a directory and get used to solve problems particular to us, in the way we prefer to think about the problem.
Goodbye SourceHut - Tim Hårek

I was not prepared for this. I have been using LLMs to help me do a lot of grunt work for my projects, proof-reading my prose, helping me plan out migrations, and much more, and I don’t plan on stopping. Not all of it goes against the new terms, but I don’t want to second-guess where the line is every time I push something.

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Dispatch #43 (September 2026)

hello@davideisinger.com (David Eisinger) — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 17:20:49 -0400

We had a couple trips essentially back-to-back in August, which made for a choppy, whirlwind month. First up, we flew out to California to spend a long weekend in Napa with some of Claire’s friends. Highlights included renting e-bikes and riding the Napa Valley Vine trail and visiting Muir Woods. The kids did great on the flight; guess they’re old pros at this point. Then we headed up to Delaware for our annual Rehoboth Beach trip. Even managed to make it onto the beach a few times, unlike some years past (the kids are generally much more excited about the arcade and candy store).

I picked up a macropad a couple months ago and set up some nice automations:

MeetingBar to join my next meeting
FrostCam to pause my video
toggleMute to mute my mic
As well as a few others that didn’t stick

In setting this stuff up, I discovered that my main keyboard uses the same software to remap keys that the macropad does, and ended up repurposing the keys along the upper right (del/ins/pgup/etc.) for these frequently used shortcuts. I’m in the process of turning the macropad into a sort of notification/control center, inspired by the Codex Micro that OpenAI came out with a few months ago. I had Codex write some new firmware and a corresponding CLI so I can control colors and effects on a per-key basis. Now I just need to figure out what integrations I want and how to wire it all together.

I’ve been slowly working my way through The Magic of Code by Samuel Arbesman (via), which includes this gem:

Software consists of spells of crystallized thought.

It conjured up a memory: I’m probably seven or eight, and I’d typed in some BASIC program from a magazine, a simple rotation cipher. My dad gets home from his job at IBM and – just off the top of his head, no internet at this point – updates the code to accept flags to decrypt and adjust the amount of rotation. And I remember thinking, are you a wizard?

Our big deck project continues. We’ve yet break ground, but we’re getting close. We’re excited, but it has gotten expensive and the price seems to increase by tens of thousands of dollars every time we talk to our contractors. Do we like this house enough to make a major investment in it? Bit of a chicken-and-egg situation in that we hope we’ll like it a whole lot more once this work is done.

Finally, Nev and I discovered this gem on Netflix: Bad Dinosaurs. It’s scary and hilarious, disgusting and heartfelt. Right up our collective alley. Too bad there’s only one season, but what a season it is.

This Month

Adventure: Lake Norman for Labor Day weekend (looking at it right now!); turning 44 i.e. the end of my early 40s.
Project: I’ve got a nice piano loop I’d like to turn into a finished track (perhaps using some of advice and plugins from this article); blog about my synth setup and, as ever, that 3D printing project I did earlier this year
Skill: getting better sounds out of my Prophet polysynth; I feel like this really should be the centerpiece of my setup, but I struggle to make patches I really like and wind up leaning on simpler instruments

Reading & Listening

Fiction: A Parade of Horribles, Matt Dinniman
Non-fiction: The Magic of Code, Samuel Arbesman (via)
Music: had a bunch of pre-orders finally show up at the end of the month, so nothing new until I’ve had the chance to spend time with those

Links

The joy of making stuff with a 3D printer | Note to Self (via)

Once I discovered Gridfinity, I went to town. When life feels out of control, there are few things more soothing than organizing small objects in little boxes.
Tiny E-Reader Is the Best Piece of Technology in Years - The Atlantic

In person, the Xteink is many things: plasticky. Flawed. Finicky. Nevertheless, it is the single best piece of technology that I have purchased in years. In the two months before getting this cartoonishly tiny e-reader, I finished only one book. In one month with the X3, I read three books without even really trying—and my iPhone’s average daily screen time dipped by 25 minutes.
Spring clean, fall prune – amanda untangled

Since it’s the first of September and I can literally feel autumn in my bones, I wanted to spend some time today talking about a routine that my family and I came up with over the last several years. It’s a rhythm that we’ve really come to enjoy at the turn of the season, every spring and fall equinox.
Changes to SourceHut’s terms of service regarding LLMs

The use of LLMs or other generative AI tools to produce or assist with the production of source code, assets, tickets, emails, and so on, will no longer be permitted on SourceHut once these terms take effect.

My git forge of choice came out pretty hard against AI-generated code. I’m still processing this – I’ve mostly stopped open-sourcing my slops, but I certainly use Codex for some of the tooling on this site, which appears to be against the letter of the TOS.
ArtLung: Chuck Tingle and the Internet ~ 23 Aug 2026 (via)

The promise of the internet was that it was beautiful. “Charlie bit my finger” is such a fascinating thing. (The internet) was great but then the hand of capitalism evolved it against what it started as–human fostering human connection–and capitalism works to crushes connection. But the inertia of the universe is love, and sincerity is good. I think we can cycle back to that beautiful fostering of human connection.

I asked ChatGPT to confirm the origin of “trot your own trot,” a phrase I borrowed from Chuck Tingle that Claire and I say with some frequency. It told me, “Ha — this appears to be you. Searching the exact phrase ’trot your own trot,’ the earliest clear indexed use I can find is a 2017 Viget article by David Eisinger, Using Microcosm Presenters to Manage Complex Features.” Which is hilarious and utterly false.
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird (via)

In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness. There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context … But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence.

I found this pretty insightful in terms of how easy it is to talk to people about things that suck (politics, climate change, etc.) and harder to talk about things that are going well (the rest of my life).

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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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