Jonathon Lacher

My little blog

Recent posts

Feb 12, 2025
Mill glaze

I built a wood fence this past summer, and the stain I used made a big deal about mill glaze. This was a new term for me, so I had to look it up.

Nov 17, 2024
Planes Overhead

For seeing what planes are overhead, I’ve been using ADS-B Exchange since its a free-er version of the more commercial apps.

Nov 17, 2024
DOD Contracts

Apparently most (all?) new DOD contracts are posted to this page?

Oct 26, 2023
Kinesis update

It’s much more difficult to learn a new keyboard that I thought. The multi-key shortcuts are the hardest to re-learn.

Jul 27, 2023
Day 1 trying the Kinesis Advantage 2

Why am I trying an ergo keyboard? Was starting to feel some mild hand pain, and I’ve never bought my own keyboard before, so this seemed like a good excuse to try something new.

Jan 19, 2023
Book notes: A Philosophy of Software Design, Chapters 1-3

This is the first in a series of posts of my notes on the book A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.

Nov 29, 2020
Winter heating

We bought a house, it was built in the 1920s and the main floor uses hot water radiators as the primary heat source (boiler is a Weil-McLain CG-4). I also have a three zone Mitsubishi mini-split system, with two zones upstairs and one on the main floor. The upstairs also has electric baseboard heat in all rooms.

Aug 4, 2020
Network debugging with MTR

I’ve been dealing with intermittent packet loss at my current home connection. I initially wasn’t sure if the issue was with my home router/switch or my ISP. With MTR, I found the issue wasn’t with my home equipment, but somewhere after my ISP’s router.

Jul 23, 2020
Why I don't listen to white noise (An ode to brown noise)

When I need to focus in a distracting or noisy environment, I use a combination of noise canceling headphones and brownian (brown) noise.

Jul 16, 2020
Where I get my weather forecasts

I’ve been an Android user for the last 10 years, and for the last 3-4 years I’ve been using the Dark Sky weather app.