Dispatches¶

T.J.

Audio Disclaimer

Lyrics: Original | Audio: AI-Generated

I am a songwriter and a musician, but I am not the voice meant to inhabit these verses.

I've used AI to bridge the gap for the concept demos, crafted to serve as blueprints that capture the genre, tone, and weary soul I hear for each song.

They exist as an invitation, offered in the hope that these lyrics will eventually reach the hands of an artist and storyteller who can bring them fully into the light.

Until then, they remain as they were born: quiet reflections on the grit and grace found just north of the county line.

Setting up RDP on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

I still use RDP when I want a remote desktop on another machine. On Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Desktop (Resolute Raccoon, April 2026) the built-in path is Settings → System → Remote Desktop, matching what Canonical has documented since 24.04.

The steps below walk through the toggles, ufw, and how to connect with a client.

Procedure

Open Remote Desktop in Settings

1. Open Settings.
2. Navigate to System.

3. Open Remote Desktop.

   Tip

   If you don't see it, click the search control at the top of Settings, type remote, and open the match under System.

   

Select and Enable a Connection Method

You'll see two tabs that aren't interchangeable.

• Desktop Sharing: View or control the desktop while you're logged in. Someone joins your live session. Resolution follows your local session, so the client can look a little soft.

• Remote Login: Connect when the account isn't in use, closer to a headless workstation login. Resolution follows the client window, so it tends to look sharp. If you're already logged in locally, a remote user may get offered the nuclear option to end your session.

  Tip

  Generally, I use the Remote Login method.

• Select the tab for the path you want.

• Turn on the main toggle at the top of that tab.

  Tip

  You may need to click Unlock and enter your password before the toggle will stick.

Fast Local Checks, Trusted CI: Pre-commit and GitHub Actions for Go

For small Go projects, it's easy to tell yourself that gofmt, go mod tidy, and golangci-lint are habits, not policy. That usually works right up until a pull request fails because generated files changed, go.sum drifted, or a formatter was only run on one laptop.

The pattern I keep coming back to is simple: define the validation contract once, usually in a Makefile or Taskfile.yml, then let pre-commit provide fast local feedback and GitHub Actions enforce the same expectations for everyone else. Local hooks keep the loop short. CI keeps the rules shared, visible, and hard to accidentally bypass.

This isn't the only way to validate a Go repository, and it isn't always necessary. But for Go projects with generated code, multiple contributors, or public pull requests, it's a very practical baseline.

Dependabot vs. Renovate: Dependency Management on GitHub

Dependency updates are easy to picture one repo at a time. They get political fast when the count is hundreds or thousands: security response, CI minutes, reviewer attention, repo standards, and how much supply-chain theater your org is willing to run.

Most organizations and users will start with Dependabot on GitHub. It's an obvious choice: first-party, no extra service to stand up. Plenty of teams still reach for Renovate when policy, monorepos, or odd manifests stop fitting Dependabot's mold.

Blunt matrix:

Capability	Dependabot	Renovate
GitHub integration	First-party, tight dependency graph and advisory wiring	Strong GitHub support, but you run it as an app, Action, or your own worker
Configuration model	Simple repository-local YAML	Layered policy model with presets and package rules
Custom dependency extraction	Limited to supported ecosystems	Strong, especially with custom regex managers
Monorepo handling	Good for straightforward layouts	Better for large, mixed, policy-heavy monorepos
Pull request grouping	Useful but bounded	Very granular by manager, package, path, dependency type, and update type
Automerge policy	Usually implemented with GitHub Actions and branch protection	First-class Renovate policy, still gated by GitHub rules
Security updates	Best native GitHub Advisory Database integration	More programmable, but integration depends on deployment model
Fleet-scale operations	Low operational burden, fewer controls	More operational burden, much more control

Out on Highway 84

Reflection

This song isn’t a true history, but it is rooted in a true place and the kind of hunger that only bites when you’re young, reckless, and willing to work.

My brother and I spent our summers hauling watermelons and cantaloupes off our Granddaddy’s farm, stacking them into a trailer hitched to an old Massey that had seen better decades. We’d sit for hours on the shoulder of the road under a hand-painted sign, watching the heat shimmer off the asphalt and dreaming the day away once the heavy lifting was done.

There was a jagged kind of freedom in those afternoons. It was the independence of cash in a pocket and the quiet pride of having something the world actually wanted during in the middle of a long, hot day.

This song takes that truth and stretches it until it’s a little more dangerous, landing somewhere in the haze between a memory and a myth. It’s a nod to a specific kind of freedom that you have to earn with your hands and a tribute to South Georgia in July, where the humidity makes the world feel like it’s liquefying around you and you’re just trying to white-knuckle the things that keep you moving.

Audio Disclaimer

Lyrics: Original | Audio: AI-Generated

I am a songwriter and a musician, but I am not the voice meant to inhabit these verses.

I've used AI to bridge the gap for the concept demos, crafted to serve as blueprints that capture the genre, tone, and weary soul I hear for each song.

They exist as an invitation, offered in the hope that these lyrics will eventually reach the hands of an artist and storyteller who can bring them fully into the light.

Until then, they remain as they were born: quiet reflections on the grit and grace found just north of the county line.

Ghostty: The Terminal Emulator That Refuses to Compromise

Most terminal emulators ask you to make peace with an awkward tradeoff. You can have something fast but austere, polished but slow, powerful but painfully non-native. Ghostty, created by Mitchell Hashimoto, is interesting because it doesn't merely try to improve one side of that triangle. It tries to make the tradeoff smaller. The result is a terminal that is GPU-accelerated, deeply configurable, standards-aware, and designed to feel like a first-class citizen on the platform it runs on.

At the highest level, Ghostty is a modern terminal emulator for macOS and Linux. That sounds ordinary right up until you look at how it positions itself. The project is explicitly built around three goals:

• Fast
• Feature-rich
• Native

The third goal is where the project gets interesting.

There are plenty of fast terminals. There are plenty of featureful terminals. There are also terminals that feel at home on a specific operating system. Very few try to be genuinely strong in all three categories at once, because that is much harder than slapping a fast renderer on a cross-platform UI toolkit and calling it a day.

Ghostty takes the harder path. On macOS, it uses real Apple frameworks. On Linux, it integrates with GTK4 and the surrounding desktop environment. Underneath those platform-specific shells is a shared Zig core that handles terminal emulation, rendering, and the heavy lifting that makes Ghostty feel so absurdly responsive.

If you spend a good chunk of your day in a shell, an editor, a multiplexer, or a remote session, that combination matters more than it may seem on paper.

GitHub Milestones as Release Payloads

Issues and pull requests accumulate quickly on any active project. Without structure, a repository becomes a flat list of work with no clear sense of what belongs together, what's blocking a release, or how close you're to shipping. Milestones give that structure: lightweight containers that define the payload of a release, track progress automatically, and surface what remains without requiring a separate project board or external tool.

This post covers how milestones work, how to name and manage them, how to operate them through the UI, the GitHub CLI, and the REST API, and how to automate the tedious parts with GitHub Actions. It's opinionated: these are the practices that work in production open source repositories, not a neutral survey of every option.

A milestone is a named container attached to a repository. It holds issues and pull requests, carries an optional description and due date, and displays a live progress bar computed from the ratio of closed to total items. Nothing more. That simplicity is the point.

How to Inspect Code in PyCharm and GoLand

Most developers first encounter JetBrains code inspections as red underlines and yellow warnings inside the editor. That live feedback is the same inspection engine behind Problems, batch runs, and shared profiles, even when the UI says "problem" in places. It's useful, but it isn't the real power move. Instead, learn how to run a deliberate inspection pass across a file, package, module, or whole project before you commit your changes and open a pull request.

That workflow lives in Problems, Project Errors, Code | Inspect Code, scope selection, and inspection profiles. Once you start using this, PyCharm and GoLand stop being fancy editors and become a code quality gate.

By the time a problem reaches CI/CD, you've already paid the context-switch tax:

• You wrote the code.
• You staged it.
• You pushed it.
• You waited for the pipeline.
• You reopened the work.

By contrast, when PyCharm or GoLand finds the issue locally, you can usually fix it while the code is still fresh in your head.

That's the value of leaning on inspections end to end. The IDE isn't only marking mistakes in the current file as you type. It can also run structured inspection passes against broader scopes of code and show you the results in one place, grouped, triaged, and ready to fix.

For a lot of Python and Go developers, that second part is the missing piece.

It also does something more subtle over time: It teaches you patterns.

If you keep paying attention to the same warnings, quick fixes, and inspection results, you start to internalize better habits before the IDE has to remind you.