# Hi, I'm Bill. This is my personal website for things I've made, noticed, used, enjoyed, complained about, or wanted to remember. No ads, monetization, and no (intentional) tracking. ## Start here **[[getting sh-t done|Getting Sh-t Done]]** A pleasantly simple approach to productivity: no apps, no subscriptions, no Sunday evenings spent organizing things. It's been used by people from teachers to documentary producers to astronauts. **[[palm mirror|Palm Mirror]]** A tongue-in-cheek app I wrote to make the Palm Pilot screen reflective so you could see yourself in it. Somehow, it ended up being downloaded over a million times. **[[too damn tall|Too damn tall]]** Ever since my late teens, I've been too tall. For the longest time it was all fun and games, but lately I'm kind of done with it all. And no, I don't play basketball. **[[dixie westerman artist|Mom's art]] and [[bill westerman artist|Dad's art]]** Both of my parents are artists, and I grew up surrounded by art and creativity. They don't have their own websites, so I've created pages here for their work. **[[street art|Street art appreciation]]** One of my favorite things to do when traveling is look for stickers, drawings, and small bits of street art. I've geotagged a bunch of them so you can try to find them yourself, assuming they're still there. ## Things I've made Some of these are useful. Some are silly. A few are both. - **[[bespoke text editor|A plaintext journey]]**: I tried 20 note-taking apps, gave up, wrote a bespoke text editor, and eventually settled on Obsidian - **[[last-penny|The last penny]]**: a 3D-printed keychain that holds the last lucky penny I found on the street; to be replaced when (increasingly rarely) I find another lucky penny - **[[galaxy fold keyboard|Typing on the go]]**: reusing an old iPad Mini keyboard case with a Galaxy Fold via a 3D-printed insert - **Boxcard**: an infinite-canvas-meets-markdown personal information organizer that's ridiculously tailored to my likes (and led to me signing up for the $100/mo Codex plan) - **Image Edit**: a Linux app for core image adjustments like exposure, highlights, shadows, and tint in a clean, GTK-native UI - **MisterGrid**: a Linux photo-management app; think "Lightroom minus all the cruft" or "Files but for photos" ## Tech hacks, histories, and stories - **[[hacking a wii cable|Hacking a Nintendo Wii cable]]** from cardboard and twist ties to save a milestone birthday - **[[octel lookup|Octel Lookup]]**, a skunkworks corporate directory I wrote with a few friends in the 1990s that became the de facto way to find people inside Andersen Consulting - **[[powerbook 12|The Apple PowerBook 12-inch]]**, which was quite possibly the most perfect laptop ever - **[[fortune files|Login fortunes]]** were a cheeky way to start your terminal session or show a little personality back in the mainframe/BBS days - **[[transcontinental|My first transcontinental message]]**, when I first realized viscerally how the internet was going to connect the world - **[[kindle battery life|Kindle battery life]]**: Amazon’s magical-thinking bar charts, battery delusions, and the strange art of comparing apples and oranges - **[[the little garmin|The little GPS that couldn't]]**: an early Garmin standalone GPS device that got lost in the middle of a cloverleaf - **[[amazon ewaste|Amazon e-waste]]**: Amazon turned roughly half a million CloudCams into e-waste, so I took one apart in homage - **[[squeeek|Squeeek]]**: my buddy D didn’t like fingerprints on his monitor, so I solved it with a smudge ## On driving The guy ahead of you is a slowpoke, the guy trying to get around you is an asshole. I've always told my kids that the people driving recklessly are trying to get home to pee. - **[[the flipside of autonomy|The flipside of autonomy]]**: Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, Mercedes-Benz, everyone is chasing the self-driving car. But have we collectively stopped to think about the flipside of autonomy? - **[[july fourth massacre|July 4th Massacre]]**: A 1967 Ford Galaxie 500, a downhill parade route, a dance troupe straight ahead, and a $1.50 plastic elbow that picked the wrong time to fail - **[[bare knuckled|Bare-knuckled in the snow]]**: An aging Mercury Zephyr, a snowy intersection, a slippery 360, and pretending none of it happened - **[[dark and stormy|It was a dark and stormy night]]**: A flooded road, a flooded engine, absolute darkness, an attempt at a rolling start, and a brief orange-yellow explosion - **[[tech bro versus traffic|Tech bro versus traffic]]**: The joy of watching a traffic bully get what he deserves ## Things I like - **[[trying ubuntu|Ubuntu]]**, which has slowly taken over as my personal computing platform of choice. Most days. - **[[galaxy fold|Samsung Galaxy Fold]]** phones, which have largely stopped me from even looking at other things in the market - **[[android apps|Useful Android apps]]** that I’ve found over time - **[[evil overlord|The Evil Overlord ringtone]]** from the T-Mobile Sidekick, which I still use to this day ## Elsewhere - Other things on the web worth [[elsewhere|checking out]]