What am I up to these days?

You may be wondering what I’m up to these days or months or years (I’m sure you’re not, but that’s OK). Well, I’m not going to try to sum up the last decade or so, because it’s both a lot and not much. Instead I’ll just note what I’ve been doing the past few months. Work A few years back I transitioned from regular full time work to contracting, and that has been really good for my mental and physical health because it’s easier for me to work when I want to work and the scope of my work is a lot more focused. Both factors mean I have more time to take care of myself. ...

June 6, 2025

What "we applied $0.00 to your monthly plan" means to Verizon

This is just a brief note that will (hopefully) help someone in the future. When Verizon sends you a text message that says: Verizon Msg: There is a credit on your account. We applied $0.00 to your monthly plan. Your card was not charged. What it actually means is “Six months ago your credit card expired and we’re now no longer able to charge it, so we have shut off your account. There will be no further communication on this topic.” ...

September 17, 2024

Disable mouse interactions in gnome-terminal on Debian-based systems

gnome-terminal, the default terminal on Gnome desktops, has an annoying featurebug where mouse interactions are relayed to applications running inside the terminal (e.g., vim, htop), and there’s no way to disable it. I don’t know about you, but I think this is a mistake. Based on the discussion on Gnome’s gitlab instance (Add option to disable mouse handling in gnome-terminal) it looks like there’s no intention to disable this featurebug, leaving us with only one option: rebuild from source. Here’s a quick rundown describing how to do that. ...

July 30, 2024

UE5 blueprint tools: Enabling Blueprint Assist for PaperZD

Step-by-step guide to get two useful UE5 plugins (Blueprint Assist and PaperZD) to work together.