Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>
That's me!
About Me
TL;DR: he / him; old adhd cat dad; tinkerer; serial enthusiast; editor-at-large for lmorchard.com
This page collects a bunch of the stuff I do online. If you feel like it, send me an email at
me@lmorchard.com, send a toot to
@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town, or find me in one of
the other usual places below:
Blog (blog.lmorchard.com)
Links
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24 minutes ago
Decentralizing My Smartphone With Single Purpose Devices | Amberâs Rambles
Below is a photo of some of the Single Purpose Devices I have been using more so that I can use my smartphone less.
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1 hour ago
Turns Out They Didnât Really Want You To Bring Your Whole Self To Work | Techdirt
So no, they didnât really want you to bring your whole self to work. They wanted you to bring the parts that were useful to them, for exactly as long as it was useful to them. The âwhole selfâ thing was just the price of admission in a sellerâs market. Now that itâs a buyerâs market, theyâd prefer you just shut up and (use AI to write) code. The irony is that employees who actually believe in what theyâre building tend to build better things. These executives may have just taught an entire generation of workers that the relationship is purely transactional. When the labor market tightens againâand it willâthey might find that lesson stuck.
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1 day ago
Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle â Dmitry Brant
Thatâs right â this little device is what stood between me and the ability to run an even older piece of software that I recently unearthed during an expedition of software archaeology. For a bit more background, I was recently involved in helping a friendâs accounting firm to move away from using an extremely legacy software package that they had locked themselves into using for the last four decades.
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3 days ago
Making a Factory Out Of LEGO That Builds LEGO - YouTube
After spending two videos building a LEGO car factory, I knew that the machine had the potential to pick up and place down most individual LEGO pieces, so I wanted to try turning it into a more general pick-and-place machine to see what kinds of things it would be able to construct.
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4 days ago
Paperless-ngx
Paperless-ngx is a community-supported open-source document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, less paper.
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4 days ago
AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian
AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the datacenters will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind? We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We will have a lot of cheap GPUs, which will be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who will be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we will have the open-source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images; summarizing documents; and automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing â such as removing backgrounds or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of.
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5 days ago
The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory â Dan Shapiro's Blog
Iâve now seen dozens of companies struggling to put AI to work writing code, and each one has moved through five clear tiers of automation. That felt familiar, and I realized that the federal government had been there first â but for cars.
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5 days ago
Phantom Obligation | Terry Godier
So let me start with a question that's been nagging at me: why do RSS readers look like email clients?
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5 days ago
Computer History Museum Launches Digital Portal to Its Vast Collection - CHM
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. â January 21, 2026 â The Computer History Museum (CHM), a leader in decoding technologyâits computing past, digital present, and future impact on humanityâannounced the launch of OpenCHM, a new digital portal providing global access to its unparalleled collection.
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5 days ago
Please Donât Say Mean Things about the AI That I Just Invested a Billion Dollars In - McSweeneyâs Internet Tendency
Guys, enough is enough. Bullying is a serious issue, and itâs time for me to speak out. Thereâs an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society. This slander is totally unwarranted, and I would really appreciate it if everyone would stop being so mean about this thing I just invested a billion dollars in.
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5 days ago
Kroki!
Kroki provides a unified API with support for BlockDiag (BlockDiag, SeqDiag, ActDiag, NwDiag, PacketDiag, RackDiag), BPMN, Bytefield, C4 (with PlantUML), D2, DBML, Ditaa, Erd, Excalidraw, GraphViz, Mermaid, Nomnoml, Pikchr, PlantUML, Structurizr, SvgBob, Symbolator, TikZ, UMLet, Vega, Vega-Lite, WaveDrom, WireViz... and more to come!
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5 days ago
lukilabs/beautiful-mermaid
Mermaid is the de facto standard for text-based diagrams. It's brilliant. But the default renderer has problems: Aesthetics â Might be personal preference, but wished they looked more professional Complex theming â Customizing colors requires wrestling with CSS classes No terminal output â Can't render to ASCII for CLI tools Heavy dependencies â Pulls in a lot of code for simple diagrams We built beautiful-mermaid at Craft to power diagrams in Craft Agents. It's fast, beautiful, and works everywhereâfrom rich UIs to plain terminals.
@lmorchard@masto.hackers.town
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2 hours ago
Content warning:mental health; adhd update: I didn't miss the appointment (yay )
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4 hours ago
Content warning:mental health; adhd I have 30 minutes between a work meeting and a meeting with my therapist to talk about my ADHD. I am fighting for my life not to get distracted doing things in the gap and miss the appointment. You know, because of the ADHD
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14 hours ago
Ope, wait: I got Dagoth Ur working in Skyrim on Linux. But it's still bedtime
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15 hours ago
I think it's a cognitohazard for me to learn a game has mods
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15 hours ago
I seem to recall the last time I played Skyrim about 5 years ago, I installed like 100 mods, giggled at it, then wandered off entirely
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15 hours ago
Spoiler alert: Skyrim works but I can't get any mods to work and now it's bedtime
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15 hours ago
Why did my brain convince me it would be fun tonight to try to get Skyrim running on Linux with the Dagoth Ur follower mod installed?
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16 hours ago
The YouTubes threw this ancient Information Society live show at me. It's pretty keen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HRxyH1rupw
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20 hours ago
"Quantum Fiber is now part of the AT&T family." oh for fucks' sake.
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1 day ago
My wife bought a bag of like 50 small soft mice cat toys and dumped them all out in the living room. I think Miss Biscuits spent all night gradually distributing them throughout the house. I just threw three down the hall and I think it blew her mind trying to figure out which one to chase
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1 day ago
Lately, I've been hiding little printed critters around the house. Out of the reach of cats but my wife likes finding them #3dprinting
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3 days ago
Content warning:us politics And now I got to the "post-credits" section of @TechConnectify's latest video and I'm just like hell yeah
Github (@lmorchard)
- 6 days ago pushed 6e5fff0 to lmorchard/feedspool-go ( main ): Fix future-dated items: clamp to first_seen instead of now()
- 6 days ago submitted Pull Request #35 to lmorchard/feedspool-go :
- 6 days ago pushed 6e5fff0 to lmorchard/feedspool-go ( moar-future-published-item-fixes ): Fix future-dated items: clamp to first_seen instead of now()
- 6 days ago submitted Pull Request #35 to lmorchard/feedspool-go :
- 6 days ago created branch moar-future-published-item-fixes on lmorchard/feedspool-go
- 6 days ago pushed 8e43dbe to lmorchard/feedspool-go ( main ): Fix feed sorting to use published_date instead of first_seen
- 6 days ago submitted Pull Request #34 to lmorchard/feedspool-go :
YouTube Videos (lmorchard)
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Adding limit switches to a 3018 CNC machine?
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Assembling the Why Em-Ulator Module for RC2014
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing Sonoff S31 AC (again)
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Clip: Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing a Sonoff S31 with Tasmota to control an AC outlet with Home
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - Reflashing a Sonoff S31 with Tasmota to control an AC outlet with Home Assis
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Pi Pico Terminal and Real Time Clock modules
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Digital I/O board part 2
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, Digital I/O board
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 wifi module assembly
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 wifi module repair & firmware update
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, again again?
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Chiptunes & Tinkering - RC2014 assembly, again?
Pocket Casts
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NPR News: 02-03-2026 12PM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
5 hours ago
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Millions of books died so Claude could live
from
The Vergecast: Ad-Free Edition
12 hours ago
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Government Shutdown Day 4, US-Iran Nuclear Talks, Guthrie Investigation
from
Up First from NPR
11 hours ago
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NPR News: 02-03-2026 10AM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
7 hours ago
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MBMBaM 798: Round and Swallowable
from
My Brother, My Brother And Me
1 week ago
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Tim Cook is destroying his own legacy
from
The Vergecast: Ad-Free Edition
4 days ago
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NPR News: 02-02-2026 11AM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
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RSA February 2nd 2026
from
RSAudio
3 days ago
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In My Head I Have 3 Buckets - Moltbook Becomes a Surreal AI Agent Social Network
from
This Week in Tech (Audio)
1 day ago
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House Shutdown Vote, Minneapolis Immigration Operations, Trump Kennedy Center Closure
from
Up First from NPR
1 day ago
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NPR News: 02-02-2026 9AM EST
from
Unknown Podcast
1 day ago
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Minnesota Breaks the ICE
from
Lovett or Leave It
3 days ago
Spotify ( Les Orchard )
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Into the Void on Chroma by Buzz Kull 6 hours ago
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Hold & Dissolve on Fragments by Bootblacks 6 hours ago
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Medea's Revenge on Mother Solitude and Other Dark Tales by Echoberyl 6 hours ago
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Frozen Landscape on Wasted Reflektions by Night in Athens 6 hours ago
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Tired Eyes Tired Feet on I Saw Nothing Good so I Left by Bragolin 6 hours ago
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Resolution on Resolution by Vogue.Noir 6 hours ago
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Fer-De-Lance on Linea Aspera by Linea Aspera 6 hours ago
Colophon
This is a static web page hosted on Amazon S3. It is periodically updated via a scheduled Github Action that fetches data from many sources on the web.
- Source code:
- https://github.com/lmorchard/about-me
- Last fetched:
- 2026-02-03T22:18:13.085Z
- Last rendered:
- 2026-02-03T22:18:23.752Z