Milo Land

I made my manifesto

Sun, 1 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I made my manifesto

It's nothing crazy. I mainly just wanted to cull as many of the things that I feel like define me and craft it into some bullet points. Many experiences, people, events, and communities contributed to this, whether they or I wanted to or not.

Check it out.

I have bookmarks

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have bookmarks

I made a page of bookmarks.

It's cool stuff I want to share, but not worth a whole post. I made a very silly "spec" because it was fun, and added some scripts to convert this "putmark" file into RSS and other stuff.

putmark

ADHD Drugs Work

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

ADHD Drugs Work

I haven't taken any ADHD medication since I was super young, like 7 years old. It rendered me essentially as a zombie and I don't really remember being 7. My mom said she gave me the smallest possible dose, cutting the pill into the smallest possible chunks, and yet, it still rendered me somehow out of body.

But now, as a mid-thirties guy, 5mg of ritalin is like it turned my goopy discipline into steel. It's like I chugged 2 straight pots of black tea but it just keeps lasting and I don't have to pee as much. It's amazing.

I have avoided the drug for a while as a sort of pride or something? Honestly I don't really know why at this point. Might be because of a lack of discipline to go to a doctor or NP and get a prescription and go through all that. But here we are!

I read Limmy's autobiography a while ago and he mentioned taking anti-depressants to know what it was like to not be depressed. And then he slowly weaned himself off and used that experience as a north star to try and get that feeling without them.

Limmy's autobiography

So in that, is this better or worse than normal? Lots more data to gather, considering I only tried it in the evening and didn't interact with anyone. But the initial data is promising.

I made a chair

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I made a chair

I made possibly the simplest chair from an instructable I found. Uses one 8-foot 2"x12" and some very basic cuts.

It didn't take long, even when the truly incorrect tools of only a circular saw and an oscillating multitool. I sealed up the ends using end cut sealer and called it a day. It works great and honestly I kind of like it better than a lot of my other chairs.

I made a bike repair stand

Tue, 6 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I made a bike repair stand

I have so much scrap wood right now. I am a hoarder of trash, if anybody didn't know that already. So I've been thinking about how I can use it up.

After recently having to fix a flat in my bike tire, and having to do it while flipping my bike on the handlebars and seat, I thought making a repair stand would be great. After searching a bit, I found a good visual and tried to copy it.

DIY Bicycle Repair Stand from Scrap Wood By Diana Hansen

After a little bit of scouring my shed for proper scraps and sketching out on my notebook, I made one, and it works great!

It took about an hour, maybe, and bunch of screws. It even has some luxuries like cut up tires and tubes to rest the top tube on and a plastic to-go container to put misc tools and parts while you work! Things I learned this project:

Pilot holes make everything better.
Sketching and planning beforehand makes everything better.
Don't be a potion hoarder, just make the thing.

Conservatism

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Conservatism

On the other hand Conservatism is, as a party, secure of an existence as long as the present system lasts. It may be set down as an axiom that there will always be a Conservative party as long as there is tyranny and privilege to conserve. Hence we find the old reform parties shedding their members at both ends – the wealthier section falling over into the ranks of Conservatism, in order to strengthen the only party able to defend their monopolies, and the working class section joining hands with the Socialists as the only party embracing the cause alike of political and industrial liberty. — James Connolly

James Connolly: The New Evangel, Socialism And Political Reformers (Workers’ Republic, 8 July 1899)

Share your bookmarks

Thu, 6 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been following an RSS feed of bookmarks from somebody for years. I don't know where it came from or anything about the person, but it's an interesting almost StumbleUpon-like feed. I wanted to make one. So I made a tiny "spec" for bookmarks just to do it and included a few utilities with it, like outputting the list as gemtext or as an RSS feed.

Putmark

I integrated this into my website and gave it it's own page and RSS feed. Took an hour or so and now I can have a subscribable dumping ground of cool stuff. Neat, I love the simplicity of computers.

I learned to update my website in the obvious way

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I learned to update my website in the obvious way

Forever, I have been updating my wiki (tinybrain.fans) by pushing all of the HTML files via a `tar` call to the server.

find . -name '*.*' -type f -maxdepth 1 -not -name '.*' -print0 | xargs -0 tar -cf - \
  | ssh milofultz_milofultztest@ssh.nyc1.nearlyfreespeech.net 'tar -C /home/public/tinybrain.fans/ -xf -'

Tinybrain.fans (my wiki)

The repo

This worked, but used a ton of bandwidth and was a very ooga-booga caveman solution. I always knew it sucked, but it worked, so I left it. Today I got tired of it and decided to finally fix it. Of course it only took like five minutes.

Instead of pushing all the files, I just set up the git repo in the server and called a git pull via `ssh`.

ssh milofultz_milofultztest@ssh.nyc1.nearlyfreespeech.net 'cd tinybrain.fans; git pull origin HEAD'

Less bandwidth, much simpler. Why didn't I do this before?

Lofi Page Counters

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Lofi Page Counters

I made a (very) quick proof of concept for a page visitor counter on a non-database site. Doing this with a database seems trivial, but doing it without seemed like a fun tiny challenge.

The Code

A repo with the code

There are essentially three parts:

The counter file
The CGI script
The invocation

The counter file you need to create and make it's content a number "0".

The CGI script is a bash script that makes a lockfile and increments the number in the counter.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
lockfile=/var/tmp/mylock
counter_file="counter.txt"
HOST_NAME='foo-bar-baz.nfshost.com'

# Don't allow outside requests to increment the counter
if [[ ! $HTTP_REFERER =~ $HOST_NAME ]]; then
  echo 'Status: 401 Not Authorized'
  echo ''
  exit 1
fi

# Ensure multiple visits at once don't cause a race condition.
# I'd rather have lower counts than a corrupted file.
# From https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/22047
if (set -o noclobber; echo "$$" > "$lockfile") 2> /dev/null; then
  # If script exit early, delete lockfile before ending
  trap 'rm -f "$lockfile"; exit $?' INT TERM EXIT

  current_count="$(cat "$counter_file")"
  new_count=$(( current_count + 1 ))
  echo $new_count > "$counter_file"

  # clean up after yourself, and release your trap
  rm -f "$lockfile"
  trap - INT TERM EXIT
fi

# Return new count
echo 'Status: 200 OK'
echo 'Content-Type: text/plain'
echo ''
echo "$new_count"

The invocation is a Javascript call that returns the new count and updates the element on the page.

<body>
    <p>Some test content</p>
    <p id="counter__wrapper" style="visibility: hidden;">Visitors: <span id="counter"></span></p>
    <script>
        const getCount = async () => {
            const response = await fetch('./cgi-bin/count.cgi');
            const newCount = await response.text();
            document.getElementById('counter').textContent = newCount;
            document.getElementById('counter__wrapper').style.visibility = 'visible';
        }

        getCount();
    </script>
</body>

I learned some stuff

File locks are funny. I tried learning about `fcntl` and had the same dread I do when I approach anything in C: lots of old dads trying to explain a complex thing like it's simple with lots of assumed priors. The implementation I found above is certainly not as sexy, and likely not as effective, but it works fine.
I initially didn't have a check for the HTTP referer and realized I could call the CGI script from anywhere and increment the counter. It was fun to solve a problem that likely every developer in the 90's solved before.
I really should learn more about UNIX file permissions.
I love mucking around on file hosting platforms. It feels like magic, reminds me of when I made webpages as a kid.

Uncle Magic

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Uncle Magic

I've been getting into card tricks and sleight of hand and there are a bunch that are super easy and silly and will definitely impress your six year old nephew.

Four aces

"Is this your card"

"Topsy turvy" from "The Royal Road To Card Magic"

If you're interested in more basic card magic, this book has been really cool to dig through and is definitely the basis for more off the cuff uncle magic.

The Royal Road To Card Magic