about

This blog is a place to put notes to self and general musings. Partly as a record of things I’ve found while digging into a topic, partly as a form of rubber ducking to clarify my thoughts, and partly as a way to exorcise them from my head when, as is generally the case, they were a distraction from whatever I was supposed to be doing. They’ll generally be byproducts of the learning process, and so aim to be informative rather than groundbreaking. Initially the subject matter will be mostly Rust just because I’m in the process of learning it, but other things may creep in later, and they won’t all necessarily be technical.

“Never Knowingly Undershaved”?

For anyone wondering about the name, it’s a reference to yak shaving with a side allusion to a promotional slogan (“Never Knowingly Undersold”) used by a UK retail chain. Yak shaving is very much going to be the theme here. I’m free now to pursue those temptingly hirsute bovines wherever they may roam, razor glinting keenly in the crisp clean air of the open steppe.

Format

The format is going to be fairly minimalistic. I love the concept and values of the quiet web, and my ideal design for a webpage looks suspiciously like Reader View but with slightly more yaks. There will be absolutely no ads, trackers, analytics or cookies. Anything that’s not subject matter should stay out of the way as far as possible. There’s currently no JavaScript and I don’t see that changing in the near or medium term, but I’m ambivalent about making this a hard-and-fast forever rule. For some topics interactivity makes for a better presentation of the subject matter, and sometimes it might make more sense to do that inline rather than in a linked demo.

I do like HTML’s newish <details> element as a way to capture optional digressions without breaking the flow of the main topic. I think of these as sub-yaks, fractally budding from the Great Universal Mandelyak. I still have some lingering concerns about feed reader support, but I’ve started to see other blogs use them and so am taking the plunge.

Credits

The header image had as its starting point this fine photograph by Alexandr Frolov, whose user page has a badge to show that he owns a camel. The rest of us are wasting our lives. It’s been through a lot of changes, though. (The image, not the camel.) That yak has seen things.

Everything is managed with the Zola static site generator.

I’m not (despite a deep love of Firefly) in any way affiliated with the SerenityOS people, but I do like their style.

Contact

Email is welcome at mike.capp@gmail.com. If you’re suggesting changes or corrections please indicate whether and how you’d like to be credited and/or linked. By default I’ll assume you’re OK with name and, if you’re pinging me about a blog post of your own, with a link to that.

You can also raise bug reports via the GitHub repo linked in the footer.

License

All text is © 2025 Mike Capp under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license unless otherwise attributed. Image licensing is a bit murkier depending on source, but if it’s clearly something produced by me, like a personal photo or a graph of benchmarking results, you can safely assume the same. Original code snippets are public domain via the Unlicense wherever applicable; they’re meant to be illustrative, not novel.