Colophon

How this site was put together.

This site is thirteen files of hand-written HTML and one stylesheet, built once and served as static files from a small FreeBSD jail. There is no JavaScript. There is no build step beyond cp. All illustrations are inline SVG so that the archive renders identically whether you are reading it today or from a saved copy in 2034.

Typography

Headings are set in Space Grotesk at 700. Body text is IBM Plex Sans at 400 and 500. Code is IBM Plex Mono, because the alternative is guessing which monospace font the reader has installed, and I have made enough guesses this decade.

Palette

The palette was chosen on a grey morning in December 2019 and has changed exactly once, in 2022, when the muted grey drifted half a step warmer after someone pointed out that the original was closer to battleship than coastal.

What "stupid" means here

I use the word stupid in the archaic sense — stupidus, stunned, direct, obvious. A stupid tool is one that does not flinch. cat is a stupid tool. tee is a stupid tool. find . -print0 | xargs -0 … is a stupid incantation that has outlived most of the clever ones. The opposite of a stupid tool on this site is not a smart one; it is an interested one — a tool with opinions about how you should use it.

Glossary

bench, n.

The set of machines on which a given program has been verified to build and run. See the Bench page.

stupid-tier, adj.

Of a tool: having fewer than 1,000 lines, zero required runtime dependencies, and a single main().

ritual build, n.

A quarterly make clean && make && make test across every project in the catalog. Catches rot before rot catches me.

catalog number, n.

The four-digit identifier on each case on the Bench page, e.g. TS-0004. Internally used to tag NOTES files. Externally, meaningless.

fugue commit, n.

A commit authored between 01:00 and 04:00 local, typically with a message shorter than five words. The gallery contains several. They are not marked.

SIGPIPE audit, n.

A five-minute test consisting of piping the tool's output into head -1 and confirming it does not explode. The single highest-leverage test in my toolkit.

Revisions

• rev 47 — 14 Feb 2026 · added leakwatch; enlarged the colophon; winter-hours note on the top strip.
• rev 44 — 03 Nov 2025 · Broken-by-design page made public. Two tools moved into it from the gallery.
• rev 40 — 22 Jul 2025 · Bench page added.
• rev 33 — 19 Mar 2024 · Sidebar navigation replaced the old topbar. Apologies if you had it bookmarked.
• rev 21 — 08 Sep 2022 · Muted grey adjusted half a step warmer.
• rev 1 — 12 Jun 2019 · First publication. Three tools. One of them no longer exists.