Hello! I’m Naty, a tech dabbler, third-culture kid, serial hobbyist, and lifelong learner. I am keen on specialty coffee, street photography, fountain pens, self-hosting, Formula 1, and more.
BurgeonLab is where I document my mostly geeky interests and other enlightenments. I enjoy writing about FOSS/open source, privacy-focused services, blogging with Hugo (static site generator), and tech how-tos.
On the Internet, I’m also known as @eclecticpassions or @aperture2iris.
Thank you for checking out my corner of the Internet, hope you find something useful!
Embracing IndieWeb & Small Web
Ever since I learnt about content ownership, enshittification, and the IndieWeb in 2025; I’m gradually integrating small web principles and IndieWeb features into my site.
For instance, I can receive webmentions if your site supports sending them; otherwise, feel free to send me a webmention manually! Public webmention display isn’t supported yet, only I’ll be notified if you mention something from my site.
A common feature in small web communities are webrings—a collection of sites linked serially around a common theme. You can find what webrings I’m part of in the expandable list in the footer and explore other sites with the navigational links. I also collect web badges (aka 88x31 buttons) which are down there too. And while you’re at it, feel free to sign my guestbook!
In the last week of 2025, BurgeonLab gained full Micropub support through Indiekit; a self-hosted Node.js server! Explore content tagged with: #indieweb, #indiekit.
March 1, 2026: I’m in the process of a big overhaul of my Hugo theme’s CSS. There may be some breakage in the meantime, apologies!
I’m collecting feedback to make the blog better in 2026. As a reader, your opinion matters to me. Could you take my 1–2 minute anonymous questionnaire? Thank you!
Latest Blogs
Besides blog posts, you can explore these other sections: pages, weeknotes, notes (microblogs), likes and photos. Use the Explore dropdown menu at the top or direct links to common pages in the footer to discover the site.
How I fixed high latency and laggy SSH after getting a new router. Steps on how to SSH into Raspberry Pi over Ethernet with direct connection on Mac devices.
As a long-time user of LanguageTool’s offline server on macOS, I thought I’d share how I set it up. It’s a great way to get a pretty accurate grammar and spell checking / proofreading software without relying on online services. I’ll go through how to configure this open source tool, get extra optional improvements like n-gram data processing, and script shortcuts.
Quick how-to guide on setting active class to nav links in Hugo menus without pageRef. A simple string comparison method works with any content structure. Code examples included for my top nav and footer menus.
See how I enhanced my Hugo blogging workflow with Termux on Android: run a Hugo server locally, manage Git with Termux instead of relying on a separate Git client app (like PuppyGit or GitSync), resolve a fatal Hugo image processing error causing server to fail, learn to set up everything from scratch. I also share my portable computing setup.
This blog goes through the process of creating a Python script to find orphan pages (pages without internal links) on a website, Hugo static site files in this case. The script extracts all links from the site and compares it with the full list of pages to get pages which are orphaned.
Inspired by IndieWebCamp, discovered loads of cool people and their websites. Site changes and added webmention digest section, and the usual link roundup.
Revamped Pi homelab was a success, deployed public-facing Indiekit Micropub Node.js server using Docker, Compose, Tailscale and Caddy; with new Kitty terminal!
Jumping down rabbit holes and troubleshooting: fixing Mermaid/D2 diagrams, Render and Codeberg problems, learning new tools, Pi home server refresh, and more!
Participating in Hyde’s Over/Under series, HK public library resources, new Fresh Tech Finds section exploring tools like CLI/IDE, and lots of IndieWeb links!
Tested new WP theme for my secondary blog with My WordPress. Learnt more about Git branches, merge/rebase, and cherry-pick. New router excitement becomes woes.