This site has been retired.

For over two decades, this was a place where I shared direct, fluff-free tech how-tos and guides from my own experience, along with notes and thoughts on whatever else I found worth writing about. I kept it clean and ad-free despite its costs, simply hoping it would be useful to others. Over the years it helped hundreds of thousands of people find an answer or a solution to a real problem. It was my quiet way of giving back to an internet that gave me so much.

The independent web it belonged to has been through more than one upheaval. The first was social media. It pulled the world into its feeds, and within a few years, what human connection remained was penned into walled gardens owned and shaped by a few giants. People still came here searching for answers and solutions, not scrolling for them. But this little site didn't survive because of that. It survived because I chose to keep it alive. The main show — I mean the followers, the likes, the visible growth — was happening elsewhere, and that was okay. Social media feeds were temporary, search-engine hostile, and algorithm-driven; the posts here were permanent, search-engine friendly, and intentional.

Then another change happened. Video took over text. I resisted that shift too. While video channels were far more profitable, I stayed text-based because text is simply faster, searchable, and copyable when you need the core of a solution to solve a technical problem. You shouldn't have to sit through a ten-minute video just to find one line of code or copy a single terminal command. I chose utility over profitability. But utility wasn't the whole story. Text is thought in pure words, without clickbait thumbnails, visuals, sounds, or anything else engineered to catch and keep your attention. And to be honest, I preferred expressing myself in writing rather than recording myself on camera. So I kept going, even as the landscape drastically changed around me.

But the web changed again, and this time the ground itself moved. With the rise of AI chatbots in recent years, big tech companies and startups took anything they could find, including this site, to train their AI models. The web that real people built was treated as open season. Nobody asked permission. Nobody cared about credit. As those same AI models began answering the searches that once brought people here, independent spaces like this were increasingly left to the machines. A living, breathing place built by people, once called the World Wide Web, is turning into an artificial ghost town.

I could still defend this keep despite all the tectonic shifts below us, the way I did before; but this time the change is so fundamental that it destroys the reason this place existed at all. A few still find real value here, and I'm grateful for them. But I have no interest in continuing to feed these bots whose hunger never weakens.

Maybe one day I'll open it again, in one format or another — the same weak hope cowboys like Arthur Morgan and Hosea, in the game Red Dead Redemption 2, once carried: that somewhere out west, a free, open frontier still existed to escape to, even as the sun was setting on it.

Until then, to everyone who ever found real value here over the years, thank you.