Sergio-101's Blog

Twenty Years of Postcrossing

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been involved in Postcrossing for twenty years now. I’m not super active. But every so often I get into a groove where I’m sending out a few postcards a week, and it’s a lot of fun.

Why I like it

I love getting mail from all over the world. The stamps are cool, the images are cool, and the postmarks and cancellations are cool. Best of all, I get to hear from people who live in cultures completely different from mine.

Building the Bagel Concert Finder

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Bagel Concert Finder is a small site that tells you when bands played on BAGeL Radio are coming to your town. I built it for myself. It turns out a lot of other people wanted it too.

The inspiration

I found BAGeL Radio years ago, back when it was a station on SomaFM. It’s about as music-centric as radio gets, and it was obvious pretty quickly that the people listening were complete music dorks. I mean that in the most affectionate and loving way possible. That seemed like a crowd worth talking to. If you want good conversation, good music suggestions, and good concert tips, you go where the music nerds are.

Hardening a Raspberry Pi for the 44net

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A while back, I learned that licensed amateur radio operators can access real, publicly routable IP addresses on the 44net, also called AMPRNet. That’s the 44.128.0.0/8 block that was set aside for amateur radio back in 1981. Today it’s managed by Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC), and you request an allocation through the AMPRNet portal once your license is verified. The general info lives at ampr.org.

That’s pretty great. It’s also a little scary.

Turning Meeting Notes into Tasks: My Plaud, Obisidian, and OmniFocus Workflow

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I attend an inordinate number of meetings each day, and a huge amount of information gets transferred. Much of it needs to be turned into tasks and managed as projects, and sometimes days go by before I can process the meeting notes.

In the past few months, I’ve been using Plaud as a note-taking device so I can focus on what’s being said in the meeting rather than capture everything in writing.

Installing Haiku OS on a MacBook Pro

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Back in the ’90s, I was totally enthralled with BeOS . Every now and then, I would check to see if it had come back and if we could run it somehow, but I never had much luck getting it installed. About twenty years ago, I switched to macOS, and I’ve had a different Mac over the years. For the past decade or so, I’ve had a MacBook Pro and haven’t had much luck getting it installed.

Thoughts on including paywalled links

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I put this post together because the one I was actually planning to write references something behind a paywall.

This situation led me to consider the implications of posting content on the Fediverse that links to paywalled material. I am uncertain about the general sentiment towards this practice, and even about my own feelings, as I am still thinking through these ideas.

The original post would have cited valuable and interesting information held behind a paywall, likely appealing to current subscribers of that service. Therefore, I plan to link back to this post whenever I mention paywalled content in future writings, serving as a marker for “here’s one of those.”

Two-Way Links with Hookmark

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I want to start writing about the tools that hold my work together, not just the ones I use to produce it. First up: Hookmark.

What Hookmark actually does

Hookmark is a macOS app for bookmarking things — an OmniFocus task, an Obsidian note, a DEVONthink document, a file on disk, a browser tab, almost anything with a URL or a stable address — and then “hooking” two of those bookmarks to each other. The link runs both ways. Hook a task to a note, and the note carries a link back to the task, while the task carries a link back to the note. Neither side is the “primary” copy; they’re just connected.

About

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a senior software engineer. I design and build the systems other teams depend on — but what actually gets me out of bed is the automation side: finding the tedious, repetitive part of someone’s workflow and making it disappear.

Outside of work, I collect fountain pens and good paper, and I still write by hand more than most people who code for a living. I also collect music and go to as many concerts as I can talk myself into, and I’m a licensed amateur radio operator (KB8QPT) — active on CW and two-meter packet radio in my area.

Why I Love the Gemini Protocol

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This site has a twin. Alongside the HTML version you’re reading now, every post here also gets published as a Gemini capsule — a mirror of this blog reachable over the Gemini protocol instead of HTTP.

What Gemini actually is

Gemini is a small, deliberately limited internet protocol from 2019, sitting somewhere between Gopher and HTTP in ambition. A Gemini server responds to a request with plain text formatted in “gemtext” — headings, links, lists, quotes, and paragraphs, and nothing else. No inline bold or italics. No embedded images. No client-side scripting, because there’s no scripting layer to have. Every link lives on its own line. That’s most of the spec.