Welcome

My name is Steven Merrill. I describe myself as a cyclist, weightlifter, gamer, musician, Transformer-pilled software engineer, and fermentation enthusiast.

I'm based in the Greater Boston area and currently work for Campfire Learning.

Thank you for reading.

Newest Blog Posts

1. Project Gaming Chromebook: What a difference 8 years makes September 2025

   This is the first post in my Project Gaming Chromebook series in which I chronicle getting a refurbished Acer 516 GE and turning it into the ultimate beater laptop.

   In mid-2016 I had just started at a new gig and I got the premiere web dev machine at the time, the final iteration of the pre-Touch Bar (thank goodness) 15" Retina MacBook Pro. That machine had great specs for the time:

2. Secure Erase on Modern Mac OS August 2025

   I'm currently on vacation and helping my mother out with some tech-related chores. One of her requests was to securely erase an old Mac backup volume on an external hard drive that at one time contained a good amount of personal and financial data. In years past, I would have gone to Disk Utility and chosen Erase on the volume and used the Security Options dropdown to have it write over the disk 3 or 7 times.

   It appears that modern Mac OS has completely removed this option from the Disk Utility GUI. If you are still looking to do this it can still be accomplished via the diskutil CLI. From man diskutil on Mac OS Sequoia:

3. Default Apps, 2025 Edition August 2025

   I didn't even realize that it was #blaugust until I read it on David Lyons's Mastodon, but I'm here now one day late to copy his post and chronicle the apps that I use on a daily basis.

41 more posts can be found in the archive.