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This website has always been a means of exploring technology that I wasn't already familiar with. When it first came into being I was a college student who knew a lot about software theory, but knew next to nothing about how the internet functioned or how websites worked. Building a website from scratch provided an opportunity to get my hands dirty and learn a thing or two by doing rather than by reading. As a gainfully employed software engineer in 2026 I've been witness to a lot of hype around these tools. In just this month, big tech is cutting jobs (again), Anthropic is now considered a threat to national security by the current government, and almost everyone I've talked to is using these tools in some capacity on a daily basis....

This has been a long time coming. I've been planning on creating a relatively permanent station running JS8Call on 40 meters for many months now, but like many of my other projects it kept getting pushed off in lieu of higher priority projects. Now that I have a second desk in my office I was able to justify the horizontal real estate to dedicate to such a station. After suspending up a 40M End Fed Halfwave antenna between my office window and an extendable fly fishing rod attached to my fence, I fired up the radio to check out the background noise. Right, that's why I didn't want to try to set up a station in suburban hell. My radio is picking up anywhere between S8 and S+ background noise at all hours of the day. Despite these...

A list of peaks I'd like to climb before I expire along with personal notes on how I plan to tackle them. Mt Crocker: Currently no one has activated this remote 10+3 point peak in the Eastern Sierras. I'd like to be the first (if possible), as the summit and I technically family. My father and I hiked to the base of the summit in the summer of 2023 with the intention of reaching the peak, but at the snowline we realized how woefully unprepared we were to to traverse the ice sheets and decided it would be best to just enjoy the alpine lakes instead. Next time I'll make sure to take an ice axe as a precaution. Resources: - MountainProject page - Peakery pageIntended route: Hike to and make camp at Big McGee Lake from McGee Creek Trailhead...

After getting my feet wet activating Horn Mountain as a drive up peak, I decided it was time to shake off the rust and go on an actual hike. This particular SOTA activation required a bit of map cross-referencing as the route to the top wasn't immediately available on the Sotl.as map. After checking Google Maps I was able to confirm that the trailhead did indeed exist but the satellite image of the trail itself couldn't be followed to the summit. My usual map of choice OpenSteetMap had no trail available either. This prompted me to start scouring the web for other map websites, ultimately discovering ListsOfJohn.com. LoJ is an incredible resource that provides many different maps of a single area, with some available maps being from 1885...

While getting a Matrix chat server up and running is a relatively easy and well documented task, managing and maintaining the server is somewhat nebulous as far as existing documentation is concerned. For example, when my wife asked me to reset her password on our server, I quickly realized that I had no idea how to do such a thing. After some digging around on the net, it became apparent that other people were having similar problems. Regardless of which method used to install a Matrix server, a homeserver.db file is always present after installation. This file represents all data associated with the server such as rooms, users, their passwords, and their attributes. By default, Matrix uses sqlite3 to access this .db file....

What I'm doing now As of November 2021: Currently employed at Cohu as a Software Engineer in my hometown of San Diego, California. Now that I'm employed full time, my spark for software side projects seems to have all but vanished. Because I'm staring at a set of screens all day for extended periods of time I'm hesitant to do so at home as well. Instead, I've taken on and rediscovered old hobbies that get me outside and away from the computer like skateboarding, backpacking, and rock climbing. Current project list in order of importance: Nurture meaningful relationships Learn to kickflip Improve and add content to this website This page was inspired by nownownow.com.

In order for a user to connect to a remote SSH server, the user needs the following three bits of data: A valid username The correct password The port SSH is configured to use on the remote server As a server admin, if you are able to obfuscate any of these three items your server becomes infinitely more secure from brute-force style attacks. While this style of attacks are generally for dummies, you'd be surprised by how often they are successful. Side node: most of the time the attacking IP addresses are from the other side of the planet (which is kind of neat). As an example, here is one of many IP addresses that was constantly attempting connections to the machine running this website. If you're worried that your machine is being...

What I'm doing now As of April 2021: Currently seeking employment in the greater San Diego area, but I'm open to work remotely. If you are looking to hire a software developer or know someone who is, start a conversation with me at orion@orionc.dev Here's my most up-to-dateresume if you're interested. As of April 22nd, I have satisfied all requirements for a Bachelor's in Computer Science at Portland State. I expect to recieve my incredibly expensive piece of paper in the mail sometime in early June. Current project list: Gainful employment Albumartdb.com (coming soon!) Improve and add content to this website Maintain my 300 square foot garden Make 2021 better than 2020 This page was inspired...

Now that my degree is techinically done (more on that here), I had the free time to catch up on my project backlog. After the last site refactor utilizing PHP, I realized that I was in way too deep for the scope of this site. This is supposed to be a small personal website to write notes to myself and others, not something that needs to be overly complicated. Similar to the previous rework, I set up some goalposts for myself to work towards: Easy to write and update blog posts Written from scratch (mostly) "Just works" Looks and feels modern Keep page size and bloat to a minimum Instead of using a language like PHP that dynamically renders a markdown page each time a new page is accessed on the site, I realized that it would be much...