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Authentication Series Introduction

Key and LockHey there friends, I've decided to do something outside of my normal one-off posts and talk about something near and dear to me. Authentication.

What can I say, it's a passion.



What's the point of this series?

Permalink to “What's the point of this series?” #

I was inspired to write this series by Mayank on Mastodon when they commented about the lack of how-to guides on the bare metal portions of authentication. I've spent a lot of time thinking about authentication, authorization, and access... Read More

Ergonomic Static Site Blogging

Shutterstock #2298461049 by One Photo

I've been blogging a lot the last couple of weeks across both 11ty and Ghost, and it's no secret that I really like Ghost's authoring experience. I'd love to replicate that in a static site, and get a little closer to functionality parity, but I'm still searching for a great way to do this.



😈 Sidebar, I love everything about that stock photo. Not only is it a tablet with an Apple Keyboard in front of an apple laptop, there's a calculator to the side, a... Read More

Riding Amtrak from PDX to LAX

Superliner Train CarsI've always wanted to travel the slow way across the country, taking a train somewhere overnight. Watching the scenery go by the window when I'm in no particular hurry to get anywhere. I had the opportunity to do just that this past week riding on the Amtrak Coast Starlight down to LA to visit the in-laws. Obstensibly, I can call this a research trip, as my in-progress TTRPG Nix Noctis (working title maybe permanent title) features a post-post apocalyptic train line that encompasses the southern... Read More

11ty and Ghost

Ghost/11tyI run two separate blogs which I post to regularly (well, for this blog semi-regularly): This site (https://alextheward.com) and my TTRPG / LLC blog Cthonic Studios. AlextheWard is running 11ty hosted on Netlify while Cthonic Studios is running Ghost hosted on a VPS that I rent from one of several hosting providers.



😈 Really, I use Hetzner for a lot of things, but I've also got stuff floating around on Racknerd (an OVH reseller), Digital Ocean, AWS, Vultr, etc.



I'm constantly on the search... Read More

Putting Manjaro on a 2015 Macbook Air

Manjaro on a MBA 11As the world hurtles more towards shoving Generative AI into absolutely everything to make investors happy, I've been looking more into hardware sustainability and the viability of running things for longer (especially if they don't try to bake generative AI right into the operating system).

Something that's been chewing at the back of my brain for a while is the 11" Macbook Air. The form factor on that tiny laptop is awesome for how portable it is, but it was underpowered at the time for... Read More

Self Driving Car Update

About 10 years ago, I got up on a stage to give a lightning talk about self-driving cars. If you want to relive that person I was, it’s still up on Youtube (and my talks page, so I can’t be accused of hiding stuff). Here’s an embed:



Now, the idealistic person I was in that talk made a fair number of points that I still generally believe:



Dedicating a ton of space to cars that are not in active use rather than human-centric infrastructure is bad.

We should, as a society, work to reduce traffic... Read More