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                                  | Phlog 📓|
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       A phlog about Catholicism, theology, free & open source software, &
       related matters
       
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  TEXT My 2025-2026 Lecture Series
       “Whimsically Encountering the Fathers of Mother Church”
       
       I am pleased to announce that I will be delivering a 2025-2026
       series of lectures at my current home parish, St. Cecilia
       Catholic Church in Houston, titled “Whimsically Encountering the
       Fathers of Mother Church: Ancient Voices, Modern Hearts.”
       
       In each talk, I will bridge the academic and the devotional by
       letting the Fathers themselves take charge.
       
  TEXT Void Linux with dwl:
       Minimalist Wayland (on a ThinkPad) for Daily Academic Work
       
       This tutorial (for lack of a better name) is an expanded and
       polished form of my personal notes on how to install Void Linux
       and configure my build of dwl (“dwm for Wayland”) on a Lenovo
       ThinkPad. I hope that this blog post will help at least one other
       person configure Void Linux for mobile research and writing.
       
  TEXT Sancta Missa: The Catholic husband and father’s
       typical Sunday morning experience (Fun Post)
       
       I have decided to take a break from my usual serious, 
       long-form blog posts in favor of a playful, short one.
       
       Prepare breakfast for the children. Do not prepare 
       breakfast for yourself. You are supposed to fast...
       
  TEXT Hosting a Gopher Hole on a Raspberry Pi 4 via FreeBSD 14
       and Gophernicus
       
       Previously, I have written about my intentional minimalism in
       design for this website, including my agreement with the
       hyper-minimalist ideas (not the foul language) to be found in the
       Suckless Project’s webpage “The Web Sucks.” Also, I have written
       about how simple the installation and configuration of FreeBSD on
       a Raspberry Pi 4 became with [
]
       
  TEXT OpenBSD 7.3 on a ThinkPad X270 (plus my Theological Dotfiles)
       for Scholarly Work
       
       This tutorial (for lack of a better name) is an expanded and
       polished form of my personal notes on how to install OpenBSD and
       configure my Theological Dotfiles on a Lenovo ThinkPad X270. I
       hope that these notes will help at least one other person
       configure OpenBSD for mobile research and writing.
       
  TEXT How to Extend the QuirkLogic Papyr’s Useful Life with F-Droid
       (no rooting or hacking required)
       
       Introduction In my recent deep review of the QuirkLogic Papyr
       E-Ink tablet, I purposefully focused on the device’s stock
       settings. Since I promised the folks at QuirkLogic that I would
       provide them with extensive critical feedback, I needed to keep my
       feedback focused on the device exactly as they configured it. Yet,
       each of us [
]
       
  TEXT An Asst. Professor’s Deep Review of a Stock QuirkLogic Papyr
       E-Ink Tablet
       
       I promised the folks at QuirkLogic that I would provide them with
       deep, long-term analysis. After I have used my handy Papyr as a
       full-time assistant professor regularly for seven months, I now
       share my promised review, whether or not anyone is actually still
       at QuirkLogic to read it. Is this a farewell message to a
       technological startup company that has run its course, or is it
       timely critical feedback that will help that company — in at least
       some small way — with bringing something better to market for us
       E-Ink aficionados to enjoy?
       
  TEXT DistroTube’s Interview “Theology Professor and Free Software
       Advocate, Corey Stephan Ph.D.”
       
       On October 21, 2022, I had the privilege of being interviewed by
       Derek Taylor of DistroTube about my advocacy and use of free and
       open source software as a professional Catholic theologian. Here,
       I share a full transcript of that interview.
       
  TEXT My FreeBSD Friday Lecture: The Writing Scholar’s Guide to FreeBSD
       
       The FreeBSD Foundation is a “non-profit organization dedicated to
       supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community
       worldwide.” Part of the explicit mission of the Foundation is to
       provide “workshops, educational material, and presentations to
       recruit more users and contributors to FreeBSD.” Early in the
       COVID-19 pandemic, the folks at the Foundation launched a monthly
       [
]
       
  TEXT Raspberry Pi 4 with FreeBSD 13-RELEASE:
       A Perfect Miniature Homelab
       
       In the weeks leading to 13-RELEASE, the #freebsd-arm mailing list
       was ablaze with a heroic collective effort to ensure that a
       flawless image for the Pi 4 was available on the actual release
       date. I am here to say that it was a success.
       
  TEXT After Traditionis custodes, is it time for the Vatican
       to reconsider ‘extraordinary’ ministries writ large?
       
       My observation (and, therefore, my call to correction) is that the
       Vatican is inconsistent in setting its expectations for how
       bishops ought to handle that which she officially defines as
       “extraordinary.”
       
  TEXT My FOSDEM 2021 presentation on how to optimize multisource
       historical research with tiling window managers
       
       The Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) is
       one of the world’s largest annual gatherings for free software
       advocates (like myself) and developers to share and discuss our
       work. Because the meeting was virtual this year (in response to
       the pandemic), I was blessed with the opportunity to participate
       by pre-recording a presentation. [
]
       
  TEXT Awesome Theology: a curated list of open source software for 
       Catholic theology
       
       One month ago, I launched the GitHub repository awesome-theology.
       I intend Awesome Theology to be a new contribution to the Awesome
       project. Awesome is a parent system by which “awesome lists about
       all kinds of interesting topics” are made and maintained by
       persons who are engaged in those topics. The Awesome Manifesto
       specifies that an [
]
       
  TEXT How to make Brightspace Desire2Learn (D2L) a bit less undesirable 
       
       The Learning Management System (LMS) Brightspace Desire2Learn
       (D2L) was one of a number of popular software tools that I
       condemned in my free software manifesto for Catholic institutions.
       Ideally, nobody would use non-free, closed source institutional
       spyware, including D2L. In addition to the litany of ideological
       and security-related problems that come with D2L, it also [
]
       
  TEXT With Yet Another Dotfiles Manager, dotfiles become (nearly) 
       orderly enough for this historical theologian
       
       Historical theologians and GNU/Linux geeks both crave order where
       order is hard to find. Legacy file types and minor conflicting
       precedents in the tradition cause chaos to fall as acid rain on
       the continents in which each group’s members work. One drop of
       order brings sweet, albeit temporary, relief—whether it be a
       coherent summary of [
]
       
  TEXT Electromagnetic radiation, social distancing, & good cheer
       
       As weeks of social distancing have dragged into months, good cheer
       has become scarce. Spending quality time with someone outside of
       one’s household has not been a (responsible) possibility for too
       long. Even face-to-face interactions with extended family have
       been replaced by video calls. With people trying to manage a host
       of potential daily problems—unemployment [
]
       
  TEXT Replacing Manjaro i3 with an (extremely) minimal, custom OS
       for portable work: spectrwm on Debian 10
       
       Until recently, my favorite GNU/Linux distribution was Manjaro,
       which is based on Arch Linux. Manjaro is to Arch as Ubuntu is to
       Debian—an overhaul of the parent distribution that is intended to
       be intuitive for (nearly) all users and immediately functional on
       (nearly) all desktop systems. Manjaro with i3wm—my first tiling
       window manager—remains my OS [
]
       
  TEXT On Obi-Wan, Vader, & the cultural isolation of rejecting democracy
       for true religion
       
       Immediately before what could have been the greatest battle of the
       Star Wars franchise (if not for poor dialogue and the bizarre
       setting of Mustafar)—the long-awaited first duel between Master
       Obi-Wan Kenobi and his former apprentice who had just turned to
       the Dark Side and pledged his subservience to Darth Sidious—there
       is a perplexing exchange: [
]
       
  TEXT coreystephan.com’s new minimal design (& my thanks to the Suckless
       folks for inspiration)
       
       Although I cannot endorse the hostile tone of the folks who
       participate in the Suckless project (“Software that Sucks Less”
       inasmuch as it is both free and open source and as minimal as
       possible while functioning as intended), I am grateful for their
       work. Like many GNU/Linux aficionados, I use the “Stuff that
       rocks” list [
]
       
  TEXT For remote instruction, faculty and administrators at Catholic 
       institutions should turn to free & open source software
       
       Faculty and administrators at Catholic institutions have a
       responsibility—perhaps, I dare suggest, a moral imperative—to
       employ free and open source software. That responsibility becomes
       particularly clear during a time when we are all involved in
       remote instruction as a temporary means of survival. At this
       moment, we have a unique opportunity to reevaluate our software
       choices. Let us not allow that opportunity to be wasted. Moving
       forward, we ought to use only free and open source software.
       
  TEXT CLI Bibles: Greek, Latin, & English
       
       Since the goal of making Scripture available in an array of
       formats is widespread, it is unsurprising that Christian free and
       open source software developers have blessed us with various
       command line interface (CLI) Bibles for GNU/Linux and other
       Unix-like operating systems. The three that I use regularly are
       grb, vul, and kjv, which show [
]
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       © 2024 Corey Stephan, Ph.D.
       ___________________________________________________________________
                        Gophered by Gophernicus/3.1.1 on Debian/13 x86_64