My story begins like many of this nature, with a mystery illness. Several friends of mine had purchased an old hotel in the Swiss mountains, and I had just arrived to spend a month helping paint some walls and do some plastering. I had been told upon arrival that there was some viral infection going around the house that was knocking people on their ass for a week at a time. This was May of 2023, and while the pandemic wasn't too far in the background, for whatever reason nobody really considered this might be covid. Sure enough, about a week into my visit, my nose started to run and my sleep ...

As most people know, I have long covid, and have had it for almost three years now. During those three years, I have watched much of the research with hope, but ongoing disappointment. The recent Recover TLC conference that was happening over the last few days mostly showed that they are still working on the plan to get to the plan, and many of the trials they envisioned last haven't even hit the recruiting phase yet. In short, in almost seven years nothing really has been produced despite over a billion dollars of funding. Like other patients, I've sort of been forced to fend for myself. I ...

Not that long ago I finished approximately 80 days of antivirals in an attempt to perturb a potential sars-cov-2 reservoir in myself, one of the leading candidates for a cause (of perhaps a few) for long covid itself. While I have no direct evidence that there is actively replicating virus inside of me, I do have a substantial amount of indirect evidence such as: My IgG antibodies for the nucleocapsid are high and have been rising over time My IgG antibodies for the spike have been declining at a snail's pace over the last two years My cytokines clearly have demonstrated active engagement with ...

I'm about 28 months out from my primary Covid19 infection that caused my hospitalization, and eventually gave me the joy of long covid. While everyone has their own unique presentation, my day to day usually involves frequent periods where I feel ill and exhausted. I like to walk, and often when I'm feeling good I can do a lap or two around the block. But more often than not, especially lately, I can go from feeling about 80% to feeling about 20% in the space of about 100m or so. When a crash happens, it sort of feels like every cell in my body just suddenly runs out of energy - my heart, my ...

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Back in October, I found out about a new initiative in Europe called Amatica Health. Instead of regular blood tests for long covid, which I have tons and tons of, they were offering a RNA sequencing covering over 20,000 genes that was hopefully going to shed some light on the entire disease and maybe lead to a cure. I paid the $1000 (or whatever it was at the time), and submitted my sample. In the time between then and when I received my results, I shared a few emails and X messages with some of the founders. Some of the things I was curious about was just how much juice we can squeeze from ...

I was a bit late to the Claude Code party, and started about six months after most of my friends. I openly admit I was pretty hesitant that AI had any shot at taking over coding, but it's slowly won me over in the last few months. Like most people, I used it at first a bit tepidly, not entirely sure of it's strengths or its weaknesses. Slowly over the first few weeks I started being able to produce decent code consistently, so I thought I should experiment with it a bit more. I started on the $20/mo plan just to get my feet wet. That's great for small code changes but you quickly run into limits. ...

I've been experimenting with AI-assisted development tools for the last couple of weeks, and Claude Code has pretty much become a permanent fixture in my workflow at this point. I've been testing a few different scenarios with running it - one on my local machine, and another running Claude on my Arch Linux server back in my office. I tend to work on multiple projects during the same day, so finding a solution that worked for both was what I was after. I trialed a lot of different shells and connection tools, but finally found a group of tools that I think works pretty well for me, so I wanted ...

Many people by now have heard of the 'miraculous' GLP1 drugs which include the original Ozempic (Semaglutide), and of course Mounjaro (Tirzatrupide). Semaglutide was the original GLP1 agonist which was released to help diabetics reduce their blood sugar and weight. Tirzatrupide is similar in how it works, but it adds a second component against GIP. The two work synergistically to reduce appetite and improve insulin handling. I'm one of those unfortunate people that has always struggled with my weight, despite trying my best to exercise lots of get outside as often as I can. Starting from about ...

In August of 2025 I decided to try and take everything we know (or don't know) about long COVID-19 and my own particular lab results and try to see if I can nudge myself back to health. My action plan, which I'll link to below, involves rougly 90 days of anti-inflammatories, JAK stat inhibitors, anti-virals, and several immune modulators. The goal is to try and address whatever it is that's causing my system to still be on high alert. Pre-Trial Labs Here is a list of my labs before starting this experiment. For a detailed overview of all of them, visit my main page. Foundational metrics: eGFR ...

Summer 2023 Hospital Visit I went to Switzerland to visit some friends in May of 2023. At some point during the trip, everyone in the co-living space got sick with some type of viral infection. I don't think anyone thought it was covid19, but none of us tested, so I really don't know. What I do now is that about a week after I got back to Spain from Switzerland, I started experience shock-like sensations in the facial nerves of my face. I had a dental x-ray the day before, and at first was worried it was too strong or something. The shocks got worse, and started hitting my optical nerve as well, ...

One of the inherent problems with getting a long covid diagnosis is immediately coming to terms with the fact that most doctors aren't comfortable treating patients with that diagnosis, and if you're lucky enough to find one, very few offer any suggestions. We've been instructed repeatedly to pace ourselves, get a good sleep, drink lots of water, take our omega 3s. But outside of that, we haven't been offered many solutions, certainly not enough for most people to regain any quality of life. After I received a long covid diagnosis here in Spain by two specialists (and here it's called covid persistente), ...

On the morning of February 17, 2024, at approximately 10am in the morning, my brain exploded. I had known it was going to happen, or at least something bad was about to happen, for a few days. On February 15th, two days prior, I woke up feeling extremely confused and agitated. I went to take out the garbage at one point, but was stuggling to figure out what I was doing and where I was. I called a taxi on my phone and got it to take me to the hospital, at which point I got a bit lost. When I finally got to see a doctor, I told her desperately that there was something wrong with my brain. They ...

I set out last week to try and build a bare-bones repository of WordPress plugins and themes and an associated management plugin. For the most part, I think I managed to get done what I wanted, although I still haven't started the actual update mechanism for it. There are already great Github updaters, including Github Updater and Repoman. But at some point I want to add the ability to verify cryptographically signed ZIP archives, and that will require some code on the client site. But the results of that marathon coding session are now available online at The Not WP Repository. Juniper/Author The ...

As most people in the community know, over the last few months things have pretty much gone to shit in WordPress-land. Every time you think it can't get any worse, it somehow manages to. WP Engine won their preliminary injunction against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, which meant that about a week ago, the status quo was mostly put back in place - that meant, amongst other things, the Advanced Custom Fields plugin was returned to its rightful owner, WP Engine, and the loyalty checkbox on WordPress.org was removed (and then strangely replaced with a pineapple on pizza pledge box instead). Most ...

A few weeks ago, I sat down with my WordPress installation to see how difficult it would be to actually use a different API endpoint entirely instead of the default WordPress.org site. As others have pointed out, there are roughly 1,500 hard-coded WordPress.org links throughout the code, pointing to various API endpoints and reference documentation. What I discovered is, despite what some people are parading online, that there is no real easy way via the code to swap out the API entirely. In fact, the HTTP API within WordPress is probably one of the least useful APIs in terms of being able to ...

I posted the other day about how, after 18 years of WordPress, I finally migrated this blog to another framework. While I started evaluating various popular frameworks like Astro and Hugo, I had some initial problems handling the type of content I had added to my website over time. Eighteen years is a long time to be writing, and WordPress itself changed quite a bit over that period of time. For example, much of my older content has various short codes intermixed within it, which doesn’t really translate well to a new system. Considering I have a bit of time on my hands while I visit some family ...

This is my first post in a long time, as you can tell. One of the reasons I'm writing an entry is due to what's been going on in the WordPress world. In case you've been living under a rock, there is currently a big public battle going on between Matt Mullenweg, the company he runs, 'Automattic', and a rival called WP Engine. I can only speculate as to the real reasons for this public spat. On its surface, one side claims it's about a trademark dispute. But based on the actions of that same side, it seems to be some poorly thought out plan to exert more control over the community, and to attempt ...

Stock is one of those things that seemed magical before I made it. I had purchased a few cooking books, and many recipes said to use ‘vegetable stock’, ‘chicken stock’, ‘beef stock’, or ‘fish stock’. At that time I was used to buying bouillon cubes to take the place of stock, but decided at some point to try making a homemade stock. Not only is making stock at home easy, but it’s a simple way to use up leftover pieces of vegetables and bones. I’ve grown accustomed now to making a chicken dinner on the weekend, and immediately afterwards putting the left over pieces into the pressure cooker to ...

The Italian Mountain range known as the Dolomites is famously home to several amazing long distance thru hikes known as the Alta Vias, the High Routes. Many of these are old trails from World War I, complete with Via Ferratas, difficult stretches of climbing where a person needs to physically link themselves to metal guide wires. It’s been on my wishlist for a few years now to actually walk one of these routes, and I may finally have the chance. A few months ago I started planning to do one of long distance hikes in Italy this summer. At the time, I wasn’t sure if the situation in Europe would ...