Stavros' Stuff Latest Posts

I couldn't wait for a TRMNL device, so I made my own

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 02:50:39 +0000

My obsession with e-ink displays continues

Some time ago, my friend George linked me to TRMNL, a new battery-powered e-ink display with an associated service that generates the images that the display will actually show. It looks really well-made, and I have an irrational attraction to e-ink displays, so naturally I had to pre-orde

Why is everything so scalable?

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 03:13:47 +0000

Everyone is a FAANG engineer

I’m entirely convinced that basically every developer alive today heard the adage “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” and figured that, since they always wear jeans and a t-shirt anyway, they might as well apply it to their systems’ architecture. This explains why the stack of every single company I’ve seen is invariably AWS/GCP with at least thirty microservices (how else will you keep the code tidy?), a distributed datastore

Making the Strofara

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 16:14:27 +0000

I made yet another silly thing

This is going to be pretty specific to a Greek audience, as it’s all based on a Greek meme video, but I’ll try to explain. Watch the video first so you know what I’m talking about while I describe it:

Two guys are driving on a road near a remote village

Saving SSH passphrases on KDE

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 14:51:12 +0000

I hate technology

I now notice I haven’t written anything in almost a year, which nobody else seems to have noticed, so I guess it’s just as well. I have, though, broken my unintentional hiatus to post something that reminds me why I hate technology so much: All UX is bad.

I’ve been a Linux user for more than a decade now, but the latest Ubu

The UX people

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 16:09:36 +0000

Who are they?

Today, at work, I was debating with other engineers on what the wording of the message should be, when a patient tries to register an already-registered blood test kit. The specifics (or the people) aren’t really important here, but what struck a chord was when someone said “this is up to the UX people”.

We don’t have “UX people”. “UX people” don’t exist.

The UX people

The unspoken assumption here is that