Welcome to my website. The best way to learn is to teach, and the best motivational self-hack is public commitment. So I hereby commit myself to teaching you to become a geek powerhouse, and perhaps even your own technical co-founder. It'll take about 10-years, so we had better get started. My articles below are in reverse chronological order, so it is better to go in arranged order. Total newbies, follow this.

Graphical Sitemap From MindNode

January 28, 2012

As a daddy of a 14-month old, I find most of my discretionary time reading and writing taking place on my iPhone. I’ve been meaning to organize MikeLev.in for awhile now, and I’m thinking the MindNode iPhone app will be the way to do it. MindNode let me make the graphic and I’m using the [...]

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Working Publicly To Motivate Myself

January 27, 2012

I have two public projects in the works: a system that I developed for work, which we will be releasing for the public to use as a thought-leadership piece in the SEO and Social Media industries. With this post, I’m taking the rather dramatic step of transitioning my daily development journal over to my MikeLev.in [...]

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Abstraction and Training Wheels

December 15, 2011

That one virtuous way of which I speak of learning and mastering technology happens to be embracing Unix-like operating systems (including Linux), then stripping out as much as possible—including the GUI. My goal is teaching you the now-standard “plumbing” of most information systems on the planet, from the majority of supercomputers to the majority oh home [...]

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My Linux Distribution

December 15, 2011

Want to run Linux Server? Here it is. Download, unzip and double-click it. It’ll pop up on your desktop. Scared of what you see? Then, just “X” out of it. No problem. If you lose your mouse pointer, press Ctrl+Alt to get it back (even on Mac). This is Levinux, my derivative distribution of Linux. [...]

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Unix is Standard Plumbing

December 15, 2011

I’ve started various personal websites in the past, but none really turned into much. I never had a plan or a real direction. This time, I’m here to specifically teach you the Unix shell (more or less), the Python programming language, the vim text editor and the Mercurial revision control system—and how they work we [...]

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The Battle Against Obsolescence

December 14, 2011

As a child, I loved science art equally. Somehow over the years, I ended up in marketing—perhaps because I hated school, and followed the path of least resistance too often. In marketing, I dealt with issues that intersected art and science (the Web made that more common) and solved some very tricky problems. In doing [...]

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What is a PythonPlug?

December 14, 2011

I am going to teach you how to use cheap little under $100 mini-servers (a.k.a. PythonPlugs) as alternative to the cloud, on your way to achieving high-tech super-powers. You are not the master of your own fate unless you are also the master of your own hardware—not to say you shouldn’t use the cloud. I will [...]

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Tiny Core Linux: A Step On The Way To Mastering Linux

August 29, 2011

Old dogs have to learn new tricks in the field of information technology, and I’ve decided that the best new trick is Linux / Unix mastery. It’s going to take me many years to truly get there, but thankfully, you can be awesomely productive without mastery, and this article is about taking progressive steps through [...]

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A Virtual Machine That Runs Anywhere

August 23, 2011

Okay, most of my purposes for these tiny servers is to run simple services. I don’t need all the device support, desktop GUIs and pre-installed components that come with so many Linux distributions. Also, now I’ve repositioned myself onto FOSS for my everyday desktop platform (thank-you, CommodoreUSA), and so it was time to trim down [...]

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Jack Tramiel and Linux Torvalds Crossover

July 28, 2011

Okay, the Commodore 64 is back. And truth be told, I didn’t really even own one the first time around—even after working for Commodore for four years as a student intern with ample opportunity to score one, I was a passionate Amiga snob, and poo poo’d the C64. After all, it came out in 1982, [...]

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