Posts on Widgita

Posts on Widgitahttps://widgita.xyz/posts/Recent content in Posts on WidgitaHugoen-usTue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000Dissonance Fatigue, Or Why "Being Aware of the Gap" Is Itself Exhaustinghttps://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/dissonance-fatigue-or-why-being-aware-of-the-gap-is-itself-exhausting/Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/dissonance-fatigue-or-why-being-aware-of-the-gap-is-itself-exhausting/<p>I stumbled on a term the other day - “dissonance fatigue” - and the more I read about it, the more it clicked into place for a feeling I’ve had on and off for years without ever having a name for it. I don’t think I’ve seen a tidier description of <em>that specific flavour of tiredness</em> you get when nothing in particular is wrong, but you’re quietly aware that you’re not quite the version of yourself you’d like to be. So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole, and I want to write it down while it’s fresh, mostly for myself, but also because I suspect a few other people will recognise the shape of it.</p>Voice Notes to Obsidian, via iCloud, rclone, Modal, and WhisperXhttps://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/voice-notes-to-obsidian-via-icloud-rclone-modal-and-whisperx/Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/voice-notes-to-obsidian-via-icloud-rclone-modal-and-whisperx/<p>I think out loud. That has always worked better for me than sitting in front of a blank page, which means I end up with a lot of <a href="https://www.openplanetsoftware.com/just-press-record/">Just Press Record</a> voice memos sitting on an iPhone - a few seconds at a time, sometimes a two-hour walking monologue, rarely anything in between. They sync to iCloud, and then nothing happens to them. I have yet to voluntarily scrub through a ninety-minute audio file to find the one sentence I cared about at minute 43.</p>Immich, or How I Stopped Taking Google Photos as the Truthhttps://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/immich-or-how-i-stopped-taking-google-photos-as-the-truth/Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/immich-or-how-i-stopped-taking-google-photos-as-the-truth/<p>I’ve been a Google Photos user for the better part of a decade, and for most of that time I made peace with the trade-off: Google gets to look at every photo I take, in exchange for <em>all of my photos automatically backed up, searchable, and accessible from anywhere</em>. That trade-off felt fine in 2016. It feels less fine now. The free tier got worse, the AI features got noisier, and every so often I’d notice another “just check that this is the right person” prompt and remember that Google has been quietly building a face graph of everyone I’ve ever photographed.</p>noise.widgita.xyz - A Noise Map With Sliders You Actually Wanthttps://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/noise.widgita.xyz-a-noise-map-with-sliders-you-actually-want/Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/noise.widgita.xyz-a-noise-map-with-sliders-you-actually-want/<p>I wanted a “how noisy is this neighbourhood, roughly?” map that I could pull up before picking a short-term rental, before agreeing to view a flat, or just out of curiosity when walking somewhere new. There are a few of these around, but they all either (a) hide the interesting bit behind an account, (b) are locked to one country, or (c) are essentially a screenshot of a PDF pretending to be a web map. I wanted something that loads instantly, works globally, respects my data, and lets me <em>see</em> the trade-off between “noisy road” and “quiet rail” without squinting.</p>A CUDA Occupancy Calculator You Can Just Pull Uphttps://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/a-cuda-occupancy-calculator-you-can-just-pull-up/Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/a-cuda-occupancy-calculator-you-can-just-pull-up/<p>If you’ve ever tuned a CUDA kernel, you know the dance: pick a block size, count registers per thread (or let <code>nvcc</code> tell you with <code>--ptxas-options=-v</code>), figure out how much shared memory you’re using, and then work out how many of those blocks can actually live on an SM at once. NVIDIA used to ship a spreadsheet for this - it was great, but a spreadsheet is exactly the friction I don’t want when I’m halfway through optimising a kernel and just want a quick “is the limiting factor <em>registers</em> or <em>shared memory</em> here?” answer.</p>A JWT Decoder That Doesn't Phone Homehttps://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/a-jwt-decoder-that-doesnt-phone-home/Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/a-jwt-decoder-that-doesnt-phone-home/<p>Every now and then I need to peek inside a JWT - debugging an auth flow, sanity-checking what scopes a CI service account actually has, or figuring out <em>why</em> a token is being rejected at 23:00 the night before a release. And every time, I’d catch myself reaching for whatever JWT decoder Google surfaced first, pasting in a token, and then immediately feeling slightly icky about it. That token might be a service credential. It might still be valid for another six hours. And I just handed it to some random subdomain.</p>Automated Folder Watchinghttps://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/automated-folder-watching/Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/automated-folder-watching/<p>I used file watching loops for almost my entire career (professionally and personally). It’s always been a <code>for</code> loop or <code>os.walk</code> or similar (C/C++/Python/SBCL/…), and it was always lots of boilerplate code. Not difficult, just a bunch of lines to maintain and make sure they catch all corner cases.</p> <p>While setting up this blogging pipeline (thank goodness I can just concentrate on the <em>typing</em> part and deployment happens automagically) I got to learn about gorakhargosh’s <code>watchdog</code> Python library. You should totally check out <a href="https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog">their GitHub page</a> for the project! It’s a bit dated, but does the job perfectly fine!</p>Converting Between JSON, YAML, and TOML Without the Awkwardnesshttps://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/converting-between-json-yaml-and-toml-without-the-awkwardness/Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/converting-between-json-yaml-and-toml-without-the-awkwardness/<p>Half my life as an engineer is moving things between configuration formats. A Helm chart wants YAML, the Rust crate wants TOML, the GitHub Action wants YAML again (but a slightly different dialect, naturally), and the thing I’m shipping it all into wants JSON. I always end up doing one of two things: opening some random web converter and pasting in a config that probably contains internal hostnames, or writing a five-line Python snippet that I’ll write again next week because I never bother to save it.</p>How Much Will Serving This LLM Actually Cost?https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/how-much-will-serving-this-llm-actually-cost/Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/how-much-will-serving-this-llm-actually-cost/<p>The question I get asked most often when someone wants to ship an LLM-powered feature is, basically, “okay but what’s this going to cost?” And the honest answer is <em>it depends on a lot of things you haven’t decided yet</em>: which model, what precision, how many tokens per request, how many requests per second at peak, whether you self-host or pay an API provider per token, and whether you can tolerate the cold-start of a serverless GPU. Most of those have order-of-magnitude effects, so a back-of-envelope number can be off by 10x in either direction.</p>Posting Pipeline All Set Uphttps://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/posting-pipeline-all-set-up/Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/posting-pipeline-all-set-up/<p>Welcome to Widgita. This first post confirms that the Hugo pipeline picks up Markdown straight from my Obsidian vault and deploys it to my blog.</p> <p>I always wanted to try out this level of automation, and I love the fact that it integrates well with my favourite tools.</p> <p>This blog will be my personal scratchpad for any experiments, tryouts, developments, projects, etc. that I do. Mainly for my half personal/half professional growth; and maybe someone else finds interesting crumbs of knowledge, tooling links, or inspiration in it.</p>Stop Second-Guessing Cron Expressionshttps://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/stop-second-guessing-cron-expressions/Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://widgita.xyz/posts/2026/04/stop-second-guessing-cron-expressions/<p>Cron is one of those things I’ve been using for twenty-odd years and still occasionally stare at for thirty seconds before committing. Is <code>*/15 9-17 * * 1-5</code> what I think it is? Does <code>0 0 * * 0</code> fire at midnight Sunday or Monday? And does that depend on the box’s timezone or UTC? Most of the time you can squint and reason your way through it, but “most of the time” is exactly the kind of confidence level you don’t want when the cron in question is the nightly DB backup.</p>