Getting started with Aider

Last night, I got Aider properly set up on my laptop, both in the terminal and in neovim. It is remarkable. I honestly see how people get into a lot of trouble with vibe coding using tools like this. It’s a world of difference from chatting with Claude.ai via the web, or using GitHub Copilot… Continue reading Getting started with Aider

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Categorized as ai, aider

Curious about Aider

Someone I rather respect (both as a programmer and as a librarian) recently described the period of time after he got properly set up with LLM-enhanced coding tools as “the most productive two weeks of my life.” In a fit of enthusiasm, he completed a ton of previously unfinished projects in very quick succession. Despite… Continue reading Curious about Aider

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Categorized as ai, aider

Against IMRaD

In my opinion, the scholarly literature of librarianship has an IMRaD problem. IMRaD is an acronym that stands for “Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion.” Along with some variants, it is the standard paper structure for much of the sciences and social sciences. Wikipedia includes a visualization of IMRaD that looks like this: To be fair,… Continue reading Against IMRaD

🚨 Call for editors 🚨

Apply by September 15th, 2025 Humanities Methods in Librarianship – a new, no-fee, open access journal – is looking for editors to join our talented editorial team! The journal publishes high quality, peer-reviewed research, creative works, and book reviews. We aim to broaden the scholarly conversation by encouraging submissions that deploy methods from the humanities… Continue reading 🚨 Call for editors 🚨

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Categorized as journal

Return to XPS 13

In a previous post, I talked about reviving an old Dell XPS 13 9360 that I had accidentally smashed several years ago. I am glad I revived it; it is a lovely machine, though very obviously showing its age, as it is almost 10 years old now. It now runs Debian serviceably, and I’ve been… Continue reading Return to XPS 13

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Categorized as dell, xps

DNS, part 2

Earlier this week, I wanted to set up a root domain to point at a subdomain. The obvious reason for this is that I wanted a page to load whether a user types in example.org or www.example.org. I had tried this back in 2019 with my projects page, albeit with no success. This may have… Continue reading DNS, part 2

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Categorized as dns

Blogroll

Inspired by @fsvo, I’ve added a “Blogroll” tab to the top of these blog pages. Blogrolls were a popular late 1990s/early 2000s way to recommend content. The idea is that you include a list of links to other blogs on your own blog, so that people can discover new, related content. It’s basically low-tech relevance… Continue reading Blogroll

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Categorized as blog, smol

Hardware necromancy

I had an old, broken Dell XPS 13 9360 sitting around for quite some time. It was a computer that I really liked, but I dropped it off a table at one point, and the hinge of the monitor broke so badly that it became unusable. Anyhow, I didn’t want to throw it away, because… Continue reading Hardware necromancy

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Categorized as hardware