I am pleased to announce that I will be delivering a 2025-2026 series of lectures at my current home parish, St. Cecilia Catholic Church in Houston, titled “Whimsically Encountering the Fathers of Mother Church: Ancient Voices, Modern Hearts.”
In each talk, I will bridge the academic and the devotional by letting the Fathers themselves take charge.
This tutorial (for lack of a better name) is an expanded and polished form of my personal notes on how to install Void Linux and configure my build of dwl (“dwm for Wayland”) on a Lenovo ThinkPad. I hope that this blog post will help at least one other person configure Void Linux for mobile research and writing.
I have decided to take a break from my usual serious, long-form blog posts in favor of a playful, short one. Prepare breakfast for the children. Do not prepare breakfast for yourself. You are supposed to fast. Your stomach growls while you smell the bananas with peanut better. Tie your bowtie. Dress the children. Your […]
Previously, I have written about my intentional minimalism in design for this website, including my agreement with the hyper-minimalist ideas (not the foul language) to be found in the Suckless Project’s webpage “The Web Sucks.” Also, I have written about how simple the installation and configuration of FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi 4 became with […]
This tutorial (for lack of a better name) is an expanded and polished form of my personal notes on how to install OpenBSD and configure my Theological Dotfiles on a Lenovo ThinkPad X270. I hope that these notes will help at least one other person configure OpenBSD for mobile research and writing.
Introduction In my recent deep review of the QuirkLogic Papyr E-Ink tablet, I purposefully focused on the device’s stock settings. Since I promised the folks at QuirkLogic that I would provide them with extensive critical feedback, I needed to keep my feedback focused on the device exactly as they configured it. Yet, each of us […]
I promised the folks at QuirkLogic that I would provide them with deep, long-term analysis. After I have used my handy Papyr as a full-time assistant professor regularly for seven months, I now share my promised review, whether or not anyone is actually still at QuirkLogic to read it. Is this a farewell message to a technological startup company that has run its course, or is it timely critical feedback that will help that company — in at least some small way — with bringing something better to market for us E-Ink aficionados to enjoy?
On October 21, 2022, I had the privilege of being interviewed by Derek Taylor of DistroTube about my advocacy and use of free and open source software as a professional Catholic theologian. Here, I share a full transcript of that interview.
The FreeBSD Foundation is a “non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide.” Part of the explicit mission of the Foundation is to provide “workshops, educational material, and presentations to recruit more users and contributors to FreeBSD.” Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the folks at the Foundation launched a monthly […]
In the weeks leading to 13-RELEASE, the #freebsd-arm mailing list was ablaze with a heroic collective effort to ensure that a flawless image for the Pi 4 was available on the actual release date. I am here to say that it was a success.
My observation (and, therefore, my call to correction) is that the Vatican is inconsistent in setting its expectations for how bishops ought to handle that which she officially defines as “extraordinary.”
The Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) is one of the world’s largest annual gatherings for free software advocates (like myself) and developers to share and discuss our work. Because the meeting was virtual this year (in response to the pandemic), I was blessed with the opportunity to participate by pre-recording a presentation. […]
One month ago, I launched the GitHub repository awesome-theology. I intend Awesome Theology to be a new contribution to the Awesome project. Awesome is a parent system by which “awesome lists about all kinds of interesting topics” are made and maintained by persons who are engaged in those topics. The Awesome Manifesto specifies that an […]
The Learning Management System (LMS) Brightspace Desire2Learn (D2L) was one of a number of popular software tools that I condemned in my free software manifesto for Catholic institutions. Ideally, nobody would use non-free, closed source institutional spyware, including D2L. In addition to the litany of ideological and security-related problems that come with D2L, it also […]
Historical theologians and GNU/Linux geeks both crave order where order is hard to find. Legacy file types and minor conflicting precedents in the tradition cause chaos to fall as acid rain on the continents in which each group’s members work. One drop of order brings sweet, albeit temporary, relief—whether it be a coherent summary of […]
As weeks of social distancing have dragged into months, good cheer has become scarce. Spending quality time with someone outside of one’s household has not been a (responsible) possibility for too long. Even face-to-face interactions with extended family have been replaced by video calls. With people trying to manage a host of potential daily problems—unemployment […]
Until recently, my favorite GNU/Linux distribution was Manjaro, which is based on Arch Linux. Manjaro is to Arch as Ubuntu is to Debian—an overhaul of the parent distribution that is intended to be intuitive for (nearly) all users and immediately functional on (nearly) all desktop systems. Manjaro with i3wm—my first tiling window manager—remains my OS […]
Immediately before what could have been the greatest battle of the Star Wars franchise (if not for poor dialogue and the bizarre setting of Mustafar)—the long-awaited first duel between Master Obi-Wan Kenobi and his former apprentice who had just turned to the Dark Side and pledged his subservience to Darth Sidious—there is a perplexing exchange: […]
Although I cannot endorse the hostile tone of the folks who participate in the Suckless project (“Software that Sucks Less” inasmuch as it is both free and open source and as minimal as possible while functioning as intended), I am grateful for their work. Like many GNU/Linux aficionados, I use the “Stuff that rocks” list […]
Faculty and administrators at Catholic institutions have a responsibility—perhaps, I dare suggest, a moral imperative—to employ free and open source software. That responsibility becomes particularly clear during a time when we are all involved in remote instruction as a temporary means of survival. At this moment, we have a unique opportunity to reevaluate our software choices. Let us not allow that opportunity to be wasted. Moving forward, we ought to use only free and open source software.
Since the goal of making Scripture available in an array of formats is widespread, it is unsurprising that Christian free and open source software developers have blessed us with various command line interface (CLI) Bibles for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The three that I use regularly are grb, vul, and kjv, which show […]