Miles Huff's Blog

Welcome to my blog! I post a lot of random things here. Most are either things I wrote for myself that I thought others might find helpful, or thoughts I had that I thought others might find interesting. Some background: I'm an IT professional who has worked in front-end software development, systems administration, and IT itself. My degrees are a BA in Linguistics, a BA in Cognitive Science, and a Certificate in Computing. I'm an avid autodidact, and my brain works a bit differently from others (This may be from the Tourette's.), and so I often see things differently too (and not just because of the synesthesia). Various people from all walks of life have been telling me since at least 2017 to make a blog, or to start a YouTube channel. I've actually had a YouTube channel since like 2008; I don't put much up there these days. And now, I have a blog too. Disclaimers: • Please realize that this is not a formal medium, and I make no claims as to the ongoing veracity or rigorousness of the posts here. Many are simply ideas or conjectures, and in that vein they may not be perfect reflections of my actual takes on things. Regardless, I hope that these notes may be of some use or interest to someone out there on the web. • Also, please never take anything on this blog as medical advice, because it isn't; I write medical-related things for myself and sometimes share them in hopes that they'll be helpful for others, but I'm not a doctor and my word shouldn't be taken as such. • My blog is participating in the Amazon Associates Program, which means I can get commissions on things you buy from Amazon via links on my blog (This doesn't cost you anything!). I already liked to link products I use when they're relevant (I spend a lot of time finding these things, and like to share the solutions I come up with.), and I thought it would be nice to get credit for the business I drive places, especially with how hard times are anymore. So, heads-up!

In Defense of the Recorder in Irish Traditional Music

November 17, 2025•1,854 words

I play recorder at sessions, and this tends to bring one of the following reactions, in order of likelihood: *No reaction* *Stares* "What kind of whistle is that?" (I play on a Canto Mondo recorder by Vincent Bernolin; it looks like a thick whistle instead of the usual recorder aesthetic, so it often piques people's curiosities becaue they don't know what it is.) "I've been wanting to learn recorder!" / "I have a recorder!" / "My wife has a recorder!" "I've never heard a recorder sound good be...

An elegant solution for inescapable snoring

August 31, 2025•270 words

So, mom is a snorer (like her father before her). Not in an apneatic way; she's just built different. Well, turns out: sleeping around someone who snores impairs sleep architecture, apparently reducing hours of restorative sleep by around 1 each night. That's not good for dad. Well, good news is you can significantly reduce the impact of the snoring through masking: playing background noise to reduce the contrast of the snoring. I happen to have this cool thing next to my bed called the "Sound+S...

The Miles method for learning music

August 16, 2025•1,180 words

The Miles method for learning music AKA, essentially the fast version of how I accidentally taught myself to do music. It's fun because, for most of it, almost right from the start, you're playing your favorite tunes, and for the most part you learn by playing. There's no studying and there are minimal pre-playing steps. And for the non-instrument parts (like whistling and finger-tapping), you can do them passively while you're doing other things. Pitch & Melody Learn to whistle; do th...

NTP Guide

June 12, 2025•620 words

What you can do, in order of importance: Infrastructure Set your edge router to use your chosen upstream server(s), and then serve that time from your router. Configure your edge router to capture all NTP traffic and serve it locally. This forces all clients to use your router as their NTP server without you having to configure even a single client, and in doing so gives all clients the same time source. When not physically connected to your router, always VPN into it (if possible) so that y...

Linux Filesystem Guide (2025)

June 11, 2025•1,888 words

Best filesystems for various parameters Best for flashdrives with throwaway data For UEFI, DOS, Windows Vista or earlier, old MacOS: FAT32 For Windows 7 or later, MacOS BigSur or later: exFAT For purely Linux: F2FS (compression=lz4,noatime,lazytime,discard) Why only throwaway data? These filesystems do not checksum data, and they are not Copy-on-Write (meaning they overwrite files in-place). What if the data is sensitive? Use LUKS with AES-128-GCM under F2FS. Best for PCs with only HDDs...

Reflections on playing music with orchestra musicians

June 11, 2025•2,237 words

So, I'm a complete rando with minimal formal music education who picked up a stick with some holes in it 15 years ago and made noises on it until I could play tunes, and eventually I became good at doing that, and MUCH later figured out how to play in the same key as other people. The vast majority of my experience playing with other people has been in Irish sessions, and I've only been able to do it for about 2 years now. You show up, you hang out in a pub, drink a free drink, enjoy the craic,...

Many computers from the 2000s can't really stream HD video

May 25, 2025•657 words

I recently installed 32-bit Devuan onto an old Dell Optiplex 755 from 2008 because I needed to use a computer with a parallel port to pull old family photos from an Iomega Zip 100 disc. Just for fun, I decided to try streaming a recently-uploaded video from YouTube… and the computer could not handle it! Like, we're talking single-digit FPS (in a stuttery way). And while not being able to stream video seems wild to us today, this actually makes a lot of sense: This computer's CPU is a Core 2 Duo:...

Getting a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray Drive

March 24, 2025•3,796 words

Getting a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray Drive (Yet one more entry in the never-ending series of me writing guides originally for myself and then formatting them for publication on my blog.) Background My family, like many families, has a large collection of CDs and DVDs containing innumerable family photos, videos, and other high-sentimentality memorabilia. I recently put together a NAS, and am looking to back up these and my own audio CDs to that NAS. To do so, I will need a CD/DVD drive. I currently have ...

That Urge to Correct Others

March 21, 2025•281 words

I was talking recently with a friend who has an urge to correct people, just as I once did. They were struggling with how other people took these corrections. And I shared with them a couple insights that had helped me, which they found really helpful for them; and it made me think: maybe I should share these with other people, too. So, here you go: I remember once in a college botany class, some girl gave a presentation and said “cactus” originally came from Latin, and this really bothered me ...

PUFAs (Omega-3/6 Fatty Acids)

March 20, 2025•6,488 words

PUFAs (Omega-3/6 Fatty Acids) I wrote this for myself as I deep-dived polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). I find that writing documentation for something helps me learn it, and to figure out what to learn. I'm sharing this in case others find it helpful, but please remember: I'm not a doctor, and any medical advice you see in this is me talking to myself (The “you”s are to me.), not me advising you or anyone else. Also, fwiw, the source for a lot of this is me talking to ChatGPT. I wrote 100%...

Coconut Oil

March 15, 2025•348 words

As with all things on my blog, this is not medical advice, and I am not a doctor. Please don't take this for something it isn't. A couple friends recently encouraged me switch to coconut oil for cooking, saying it makes foods come out seeming "perfect" and that it enhances metabolism. As an example, one of them mentioned that a population previously dependent on coconuts (Polynesians) have become some of the most-obese out there since switching to industrialized diets, the implication being tha...

Sinus Washing

March 14, 2025•727 words

I've been struggling with a sinus infection, and my doctors recommended I start using a neti pot to help treat it. So, I did: I got a nice porcelain neti pot, since I need to use a microwave to bring the sinus rinse to body temperature, and I wasn't about to pour a bunch of microplastics and plasticizers into my nose if I could avoid it. There are apparently a lot of different kinds of nasal washes out there; but most are actually made at home. My ENT suggested a hypertonic, basic solution; I t...

Unihertz Jelly Max Guide

February 11, 2025•4,290 words

Unihertz Jelly Max Guide This is basically an "everything" guide for the Unihertz Jelly Max. I'll continue to update it as I use this phone and learn more about it. Note: I misuse "ROM" to mean "Android distro", as is common parlance in this space. I also use the term "GSI"; this is a type of ROM (more on that later). Caveat Emptor You follow this guide at your own risk. I am not responsible for anything that goes wrong as a result of your use of this guide. I wrote it primarily for myself,...

Recorder vs Tin Whistle in Irish Traditional Music

December 7, 2024•908 words

I know on paper the fingerings for Kesh on recorder probably look a bit bizarre to a tin whistler, but I think Kesh is actually better on recorder. Here's the A part of Kesh with standard Baroque fingerings on a C Soprano recorder: o|ooo|xxx|x o|ooo|xxx|x o|ooo|oxx|x o|ooo|oox|x o|ooo|oxx|x o|ooo|oxx|x o|ooo|oox|x o|ooo|oxo|o o|oxx|xxx|ø o|ooo|oxo|o o|ooo|oxo|o o|ooo|xxx|ø o|ooo|oxo|o o|ooo|oxo|o o|oxx|xxx|ø o|ooo|oxo|o o|ooo|oox|x o|ooo|oxo|o o|ooo|oox|x o|ooo|oxx|x o|ooo|xxx|x Here is the sa...

Recorder/Whistle Ornamentations

December 6, 2024•549 words

Rhythmic Cut: take lowest finger(s) off Tap: put extra finger(s) on Roll: Cut then Tap Cran: forked close-fingered Cut Click: in a keyed instrument, using the sound of the key as percussion Pulse/Accent: pushing out much more air at the start of a note Flick: a Pulse so strong it causes overblow Doublet/Triplet/etc: articulate X times during a note Staccato: articulate between every note You can get different sounds by using different articulators. Recorders habituate tonguing and whistles h...

Alfatradiol: Scam?

November 28, 2024•607 words

I don't really think alfatradiol (17α-estradiol) actually does much of anything. It's purported to help with androgenic alopecia (primarily in women) by inhibiting 5α-reductase, but mechanistically I struggle to see how this is possible. Chemically, it does not look like 5α-reductase inhibitors; and estrogens, to my knowledge, aren't known to inhibit 5α-reductase. It doesn't bind to androgen receptors, so its action can't be explained through direct anti-androgenism. And it barely even bind...

Guide to Determining Caloric and Macronutritional Needs

July 1, 2024•2,216 words

—- created_at: 2024-07-01T18:00:00-05:00 —- This is a guide written by Miles B Huff and intended to provide a comprehensive overview of figuring out your caloric and macronutritional needs. Body composition Get a DEXA scan. Everything else is just pulling guesses out its ass, and cannot be relied upon until you've had a DEXA scan and know how these simpler/cheaper/safer methods deviate from reality. Even your 3D gym scans (like Styku) are problematic; and in my case, my cheap Chinese electric...

A Fallibility of Logic

May 23, 2024•115 words

Ex falso, quodlibet — you can logically prove anything given a false premise. Insofar as humans are inherently incapable of omniscience, is it not then impossible for us to be truly without false premises in our worldviews? Would this not mean that taking any of our necessarily imperfect worldviews to their logical ends would inevitably eventually result in insanities? If so, then logic is imperfect as a tool for humans, and we, paradoxically, must temper it with imperfect heuristics and other s...

How to be a social butterfly

March 14, 2024•386 words

(Originally written in response to a friend needing advice; shared here in case it is helpful to others too.) § Be friendly, confident, and outgoing, and get really good at smalltalk. Figure out what sorts of topics work well for you, and use them as appropriate to keep the conversation going. The opening's often the hardest for me, since I try to make it somewhat seamless. It's easier in some situations than others. Like, standing in a line or being on a bus, those are pretty easy. Strangers ...

How much of knowledge is just language?

March 1, 2024•833 words

How much of knowledge is just language? We know from some cognitive and psycho-linguistics experiments that the way language encodes things can actually change what we remember, and how we remember it. One mentioned in Guy Deutscher's book, "Through the Language Glass", is (should my memory serve me right) an experiment done at the end of the 19th century with a tribe that lacked a word for "blue", instead using "green" to cover both hues (a phenomenon often referred-to as "grue"). When shown ...

Psychological concerns of our modern world

February 9, 2024•444 words

Human faces become more-attractive to us the more we see them. This feature presumably evolved to make us get along better with our tribesmen, and to find an acceptable mate with fewer options. But in the modern world, where we see so many strangers, everyone looks comparatively uglier than in days of yore, barring ofc modern fashion and makeup. This causes issues in the dating world. People swipe left on tons of people whom they would have found quite attractive had they seen them many times ...

Responses to video about monosyllabicizing English

December 19, 2023•2,187 words

About This is a collection of some rather detailled comments I left on the following YouTube video: I Removed Most of the Syllables from English and It's 30% Faster Now I have linked these where possible. Unfortunately, I did not think to copy the links when I first compiled this post, so some comments are lacking links to their origins. On the issues with the linguistics in the video 2023-12-18 This is a curation of three replies I made. The two long comments were replies to an individua...

Academic Conjectures

December 15, 2023•1,156 words

This is a list of what I feel (or at least felt at the time) to be interesting novel questions for Science. Most (or all) of these are questions I cannot, myself, answer; accordingly, I have recorded them here so that others might be inspired to research what I cannot. Psychology Is a person's brain (and gut), when started on SSRIs in childhood and discontinuing after the age of 25, wired with the expectation of having extra serotonin, such that discontinuing the SSRI will lead to an actual...

Insights on Metabolic Syndrome

December 14, 2023•1,569 words

I've learned some really groundbreaking things about the body recently, and put two-and-two together to realize: the human body can't really process fructose; like, it really doesn't know what to do with it. And fructose alone (such as in high-fructose corn syrup) seems to have good explanatory power for America's ongoing obesity epidemic (though it is certainly not the only factor; I think a decrease in sleep since the '90s is probably more-impactful). The tl;dr of this, is linking the Pers...

Miles's Overnight Porridge Idea

November 23, 2023•1,363 words

Idea: At night, put sprouted rolled barley, salted roasted peanuts, veggies/mushrooms/fruits, RO-filtered or distilled water, a dollup of skýr, and some salt into a bowl; stir; cover with a plate. Leave overnight on the counter. In the morning, press the plate against the bowl, and allow any excess water to filter out into the sink. Mix EVOO, seasoning, lecithin, and butter into the porridge. Add salt only to taste. Why: Barley was chosen as a balance between wheat and oats: Barley is...

Miles's Honey Matcha Latte

August 17, 2023•1,086 words

Ingredients 10oz Hot water 2oz Cold water 1tsp Matcha powder Salt 1/2 cup Whole milk powder Raw honey Ceylon cinnamon powder Instructions: Get a 20oz coffee mug Add 1/8 tsp cinnamon powder (can go up to 1/4 tsp if you want) Add hot water (10oz/1.25cups) Add a dash of salt Stir with frother Add cold water (2oz/0.25cups) Add 1tsp of matcha powder (can do 2tsp if you want) Stir with frother Add 1/2 cup of whole milk powder Stir with frother Add 1-2tsps of honey Stir with frother (Optional) Sp...