I have a bad habit of forgetting about holidays - so I took advantage of the fact that I'm building a PKM app to add a banner to daily journal notes for holidays. Simple & thoughtful touches like this can make software so much more useful.

For users of YAWAST / yawast-ng: The project has moved to a new location, and will have a major feature update next week, with plugins, new injection testing, automation & performance improvements, and more. It'll be the biggest release in years. github.com/adcaudill/ya...

Rough morning for the GitHub folks. And everyone trying to work.

For those that enjoy my short stories, here's the latest: "Sweet Dreams" - an exploration of technology & human motivations, and the nature of escapism. adamcaudill.com/writing/2026...

If you use a PKM tool (Logseq, Obsidian, etc), what do you like? What do you hate? What needs do you have that aren't being met? I'm working on a new PKM, and I want to make sure that I'm hitting the key points early in development.

Is it just me, or are GitHub Actions seriously lagging again? 20+ minutes before jobs are even being queued, and then a lag before starting.

I must be listening to too many YouTube videos with narrators from the UK. I'm starting to think of "Z" as "zed" instead of "zee."

Hugs to those being impacted by Amazon's latest round of layoffs. A loss of a reported 16,000 jobs is painful, but especially so in this market. I wish all impacted the best of luck.

It's amusing(?) to see a popular account mine carefully articulated points I made on a topic, for pithy social media posts - unacknowledged, naturally. I guess I should just be happy that the points resonated.

Roughly 15 years ago, I ran a speed test with Speedtest[.]net, and it generated this image URL to share the result. Much to my amazement, the URL still works: www.speedtest.net/result/12119... That's honestly pretty impressive. And make me wonder how much storage are they wasting?

The worst part of writing in a dream: rushing to your computer at 6AM so that you don't forget that one great line, when you'd much rather still be sleeping.

I'm tempted to write an article on how the lessons learned from the WWII-era US Mark 14 torpedo (and the disastrous Mark 6 exploder) can be applied to security. I wonder if it would land with people, or be too niche and only appeal to those with an interest in both security and naval history.

For the last week I've been building out my own PKM app - I've long loved Logseq, but the sharp edges were getting to me, especially the fact that it doesn't work well for long-form writing. Building something that's meeting my needs from Logseq, iA Writer, &c. is working out so nicely.

Photo by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another Photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.

Just astonishing good news. We are on the way to end Multiple Sclerosis. University research delivers. Always has. Now a cabal in the White House is shattering it.

This is utterly insane, almost unheard of. This morning, the FBI *searched the home* of a Washington Post reporter, and seized her phone and smart watch, as part of an investigation into an alleged leak of classified info. by a government employee. (The federal case appears to be 1:26-mj-00045.)

AI & IAM: Focus on Fundamentals - On the need to address fundamental issues when integrating new technologies. adamcaudill.com/2026/01/09/a...

I really wish markdown supported footnotes for footnotes. There are so many times I want to add an aside to a footnote. For those that read anything I write, it's probably a good thing that it doesn't.

If you regularly work on Hugo sites and want a VS Code syntax highlighting plugin that's less broken - I fixed up the abandoned one, available here: github.com/adcaudill/la...

On Privacy Nihilism - After receiving yet another data breach notification, I've been thinking about privacy, the feeling of futility, and the still urgent need to do more to protect data. adamcaudill.com/2026/01/06/o...

“Why would free money make people work more? Because it takes money to make money. Basic income acts like venture capital for regular people.”

Dynamic Social Media Images for Hugo - If you have a Hugo site, here's am approach to smartly selecting and generating social media / OpenGraph images. adamcaudill.com/2026/01/06/d...

Happy New Year! In about a week or so, I’m going to put my Etsy store on a long term (2-3 month) hiatus. So if there’s anything you want, now is the time to grab it! thegarbagefile.etsy.com

If your company is looking for a seasoned security leader or principal-level security engineer / consultant, I'm looking for my next challenge. (US/Remote) My resume is available here: adamcaudill.com/resume/

The `<meta name="generator" ` tag is one of my favourite places to slip in easter eggs to the sites I build. For example, on my personal site, the current value for that is "Generated by MomCorp SiteBuilder 3000 Enterprise Edition" - my site is full of Futurama references.

Everything You Need to Know About Email Encryption in 2026 If you think about emails as if they're anything but the digital equivalent of a postcard--that is to say, they provide zero confidentiality--then someone lied to you and I'm sorry you had to find out from a furry blog that sometimes talks…

A grammar-checking tool suggested *adding* a comma to something I wrote. I honestly can't think of the last time that happened. Most of the time, a grammar-checker's reaction is best summed up as "how have you not worn out your comma key yet?!?"

If your company is looking for a seasoned security leader or principal-level security engineer / consultant, I'm looking for my next challenge. (US/Remote) My resume is available here: adamcaudill.com/resume/

500 posts, 20 years, 267k words. A look back at what I've written over the last 2 decades, and why now, in the age of AI, it's more important than ever that we write and share knowledge. adamcaudill.com/2026/01/02/f...

New: "Whose Monkeys Are These?" or, "The 'Somebody Else's Problem' Problem in Leadership" - a look at the challenges for people that can't ignore a problem once they see it. adamcaudill.com/2026/01/01/w...

After decades of grammar checking tools complaining about using "an" with words that start with H (e.g. "an horse" vs. "a horse"), I continue to stubbornly ignore them. It may be archaic, but so were the books I read as a child, the books through which I learned English. Not using "an" sounds wrong.

Happy New Year! I wish everyone a new year full of hope and happiness, strength and resilience, optimism and success. May the toils, wounds, pain, and losses of the past be left behind for a new and better year.

For fans of dystopian fiction and oppressive city-scapes, my latest short story, "Isle Civitas", is now available. This story explores survival in a city that only allows a few to thrive. adamcaudill.com/writing/2025...

I really love stats, so years ago I added a stats page to my site: adamcaudill.com/stats/ I've been working to extend this to get extra insight. An interesting one is that between creating content and building the site itself, I've invested roughly 94,592 minutes into that site. 1,577 hours.

(ICYMI) For fans of near-term sci-fi, space exploration, & supply-chain security: my latest short-story, Welcoming Kessler, is live. This story explores the consequences of compute in orbit, satellite constellations, & how things go wrong. adamcaudill.com/writing/2025...

Is Long-form Writing Dead? - My latest, explores the state of long-form writing, reading, the failures of the education system (from failed teaching methods to college students that can't read books), and the impact of social media. adamcaudill.com/2025/12/29/i...

Downside of waking up at 2:30AM: Being half asleep and apologising to a plant for bumping into it. Upside: There's chocolate cake. Chocolate cake makes everything better.

New blog post, by me: "Why I Will Never Write With AI" - A nuanced look at the importance of the journey in writing, and how using AI to generate writing is a cheat code that just cheats everyone. adamcaudill.com/2025/12/27/w...

New, by me: "25% Unemployment in Tech? - A look at the Tech Industry, Economy, & Unemployment" - An analysis of an informal unemployment poll, a look at the state of employment in the US, hiring, and the challenges we're facing in the tech industry. adamcaudill.com/2025/12/23/2...

I wonder how many corporate secrets are being leaked via the "AI checker" tools people are using to see if something is AI generated. Building a naive checker to make it look effective would be simple, making it easy to look legit, while collecting data for later review & use.

New, by me: "25% Unemployment in Tech? - A look at the Tech Industry, Economy, & Unemployment" - An analysis of an informal unemployment poll, a look at the state of employment in the US, hiring, and the challenges we're facing in the tech industry. adamcaudill.com/2025/12/23/2...

"the researchers found that withdrawing support for rapidly advancing mRNA vaccine technology could result in over 49,000 preventable deaths annually among patients diagnosed with four major cancers"

New short story, by me: "Welcoming Kessler" - A fairly short story about satellite constellations, building because we can, foreseeable but ignored consequences, and supply chain security. adamcaudill.com/writing/2025...

New short story, by me: "Welcoming Kessler" - A fairly short story about satellite constellations, building because we can, foreseeable but ignored consequences, and supply chain security. adamcaudill.com/writing/2025...

For no particular reason...

Announcing Key Transparency for the Fediverse soatok.blog/2025/12/15/a... #fediverse #e2ee #keytrans #keytransparency #key-transparency #crypto #cryptography #privacy #opensource

I'm toying with an update to the design of my site. Darker colour scheme (when in dark mode), and adding a header image to the page. A photo I took of a colonial-era building near Savannah, GA. Thoughts? Is this better? Too dark?

1. Don't crime. 2. Signal can't help you when you add a fed to your group. 3. Don't talk about crimes on Signal or anything else. It just creates evidence. 4. Seriously, unless you're rich enough to pay for a pardon, don't crime.

Great post: “[T]his makes our job predicting the future of which [cryptographic] algorithm is likely to break and which ones are likely to last, very, very hard. We are not looking at nice, predictable trends, but instead are mostly looking at a process that jumps in huge steps every few decades.”

A very close family member of mine is fighting a battle against Pancreatic Cancer right now and I am absolutely apoplectic about stuff like this.