There is an awesome new retro computer called the Commander X161. The X16 is Commodore 64-esque, though the assembly language stuff isn’t compatible because the X16 has a special graphics boa…| Mark Biek
I recently revamped how I manage my dotfiles1 and I thought I’d share the setup. There are a couple of different places that I work in most days: A Macbook running OSX. A Debian server. An as…| Mark Biek
Alex Frost, my long-time friend, colleague, and mentor passed away this week. It’s strange because I knew and worked with Alex for almost 15 years and I just realized I never actually met him…| Mark Biek
Inspired by my colleague Eric Binnion, I decided to ask ChatGPT to “get real” with me. With everything you know about me, what are my blind spots? I’ll start with the one-sentence…| Mark Biek
Parenting is hard. Doesn’t matter the age, it’s always challenging. Luckily, if you do it right, it’s also super fun. There’s a saying: Little kid, little problems. Big kid,…| Mark Biek
As part of my personal Own Your Data initiative, I’ve been working towards getting all of my content off Instagram. In fact, all of my existing Instagram posts now live on this site at https://mark.biek.org/photos/! To accomplish this, I wrote a very rough WordPress plugin. The plugin takes a .zip of an Instagram export file […]| Mark Biek
This week, everyone at the University of Cincinnati received this email. Dear UC Community, I write to you today to share some challenging truths about the future of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at the University of Cincinnati. As you are no doubt aware, the federal government has effectively outlawed DEI programs and practices within […]| Mark Biek
I suffer from the all-too-common problem of having a million ideas but struggling with the motivation to implement any of them. I do love getting to code all day at my job, but I’ve been stru…| Mark Biek
I’ve always liked the idea of keeping interesting links I find but not bookmarking them. The problem is that having my main blog stream be an endless series of link dumps isn’t very enj…| Mark Biek
I’ve been trying to write this post for almost a week. If you’re reading it now, I finally managed it. Last week, the world lost a spectacular human. Dan Bryan. An amazing artist across…| Mark Biek
This blog has had many incarnations over the years. The first was a hand-rolled PHP thing on It had very few features and even fewer posts. Then I got tired of my homegrown solution and switched to…| Mark Biek