Blog
How to use an iCloud custom domain email address in Windows Mail
by Joby
I use a custom domain name for my email, because it means I can port my whole address around. I do not want to try and run my own email server though, because that's a whole can of worms that I simply do not want to deal with (thanks, spam). So at the moment I use iCloud to host my email, because it's "free" (since I'm already paying for Apple One and would be either way), and
Mystery counting grid pattern
by Joby
So I was watching this Vihart video (which I highly recommend, by the way), and there's a bit at the end where she's just filling up space on a page by writing out the natural numbers, one per line, looping back to the top when she gets to the bottom and appending the continued ones onto each line. Then she highlighted the different digits in different colors, and a somewhat interesting pattern started
Idea for a passively heated and cooled house
by Joby
The following was originally posted in 2010, but as I've been migrating some old blog posts I thought it was worth resurrecting and reposting as a current idea. Building a house is still on my mind here in 2022, but jfc they just keep making it harder to do anything, don't they? It's also worth noting that this whole entire idea is optimized for our particular latitude. The
Apparently client-side analytics do have to suck though
by Joby
Not too long ago I was so proud that I'd put together an open-source analytics server and was gonna start getting nice analytics using only my own servers and software I control. Lol. Just kidding.
Matomo took a shit and borked itself on the very first automated update. This was a totally vanilla install. Nothing unusual. Extremely light system load. Not a single plugin. Should be
Client-side analytics - they don't have to be creepy
by Joby
Edit: apparently they do suck though
I did it. I broke down and added some Javascript analytics code here. I just want to have fancier stats than I get from Apache logs, okay? I promise it's not actually spooky though, and I hope to hold this forth as a demonstration that you can actually have decent real-time analytics without going full panopticon. As usual you just have to care about privacy
Pixel{pile} logo and branding
by Joby
Originally posted some time in 2014, clearly I have not started my own digital design shop. Probably because I've got a pretty nice day job now and it's much more pleasant than hustling for freelance work.
Developed as a side project, for my aspirations of founding my own digital design shop. Someday I might even get it off the ground.
Logo and primary color schemes
The really cool thing about
Javascript sandpile model
by Joby
Originally posted some time around 2016 or so, and just recently dug up from old web archives. I thought it was neat though. Even if it does clearly have some problems.
These models work by dropping "grains" on random spots on the grid. They stack up, and once a spot has 4 grains it "collapses" and distributes its 4 grains to its cardinal neighbors.
One very interesting property of this
Unearthing relics
by Joby
Well, not only is my site back up, but I've got some fancy new tools added to let me get things integrated that used to live on my old experimental.byjoby.com domain. There are a few interesting projects back there, rattling around in various archives and backups. I'd like to get them back online, even if only for posterity.
In the name of that, I've added a some spiffy tools to this site that'll let me
Update to my ideal Apache VirtualHost settings for automatic subdomains
by Joby
I've updated my Apache config since the post I made yesterday about creating subdomains based on directory names. The revisions are fairly small, but important. Since yesterday I moved my DNS nameservers to a new provider who doesn't offer redirects the way Namecheap did, so I had to get my own configuration to gracefully handle redirecting byjoby.com
Apache: Automatic subdomains with SSL from directory names
by Joby
So I've solved part of this particular problem about a gazillion times, and I just now had reason to solve it again so I decided to write it down. I run this main site of mine, and several other subdomains that do ... other things ... off one Apache server, and I've gotten sick of configuring subdomains whenever I want to add a new one.
Until now I've been manually adding an