David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #44 (October 2026)

Posted 2026-10-08 under #dispatch

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.