olragon

Which way through the garden?

The garden sorts notes by title, which says nothing about what to read first. These trails are hand-picked: a few notes each, in the order worth reading, with a line on why each stop is there.

First time here

Three notes on how the garden is built, how stories go here, and what its gardener believes.

  1. What is this garden built from, and why so small? 🌲 evergreen
    Start with the soil: one runtime, no framework, zero trackers, and why so small.
  2. Why did pkill -f cat close every app on my Mac? 🌱 seedling
    How stories usually go here: a real failure, recounted with real numbers, then the part you can use.
  3. What does Papa Dragon believe, and how sure? 🌱 seedling
    Read this last, because each belief in it points back to where it won or lost.

When the tool does something else

Three times a tool reported no error and did something else. Each is harder to spot than the last.

  1. Why did pkill -f cat close every app on my Mac? 🌱 seedling
    -f matches the whole command line, and /Applications contains cat. The loud one: apps close in front of you.
  2. Why doesn't Bun.spawn see the env var I just set? 🌱 seedling
    Set process.env and the child still doesn't see it. Quieter: it only shows once the child needs that variable.
  3. Why did a page with no title score 100 for SEO? 🌱 seedling
    One ?? 0 gave a page with no title a 100. The quietest: a good number is hard to doubt.

A small site that's enough

Four notes on a site that needs very little: the foundation, then CSS, then fonts, then out to the terminal.

  1. What is this garden built from, and why so small? 🌲 evergreen
    The foundation: what's left once the framework goes.
  2. olragon.css: drop it in, skip the classes 🌿 budding
    One stylesheet that styles plain semantic HTML, no classes. That page is its own demo.
  3. Which system fonts draw every Vietnamese letter? 🌱 seedling
    With no web font, you need to know how far the installed fonts go. I counted all 146 letters on one Mac.
  4. curl olragon.com: walk the garden from your terminal 🌱 seedling
    The same HTML reads fine in curl: the reward for keeping the page plain.

Devices that won't cooperate

Two times a device wouldn't do what I needed, so I went around it. With measurements, and with what isn't done yet.

  1. How do I browse my Android phone from a Mac? 🌿 budding
    macOS has no MTP and macFUSE wants a Recovery boot, so go around through the WebDAV client it already ships.
  2. HiMedia Q10 Pro on mainline Linux 6.18 🌿 budding
    One step harder: getting a HiMedia Q10 Pro onto mainline Linux with no serial console.

Updated 2026-11-02