Maximos

Touying: an extensible presentation package for Typst

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:41:03 -0400

I talked a little about Typst yesterday and some of its upsides compared to LaTeX, but I wasn’t super sure if it was capable of making presentations. I’ve been using LaTeX’s Beamer package to handle slide presentations for about 7 years now and I really didn’t want to lose that functionality. Low and behold, Typst has a fully-featured packaged called Touying!

It works remarkably well and I think it might even come out ahead of Beamer in terms of convenience and even extensibility. I walk through setting up this example in the video:

Typst utterly MOGS LaTeX

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:38:57 -0400

I discovered Typst recently. It’s a document processing language much like LaTeX, but it manages to incorporate a lot of the features without the bloat. Typst is about 40 megabytes, whereas LaTeX is almost 10 gigs!

I’m using Typst to reroll the akathist/canon book I started major work on last year. Ideally, this will be finished sometime next week, but realistically probably some time mid-July.

I forgot to listen to music for 6 months

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:36:27 -0400

I spent the last 6 months of my life being monstrously busy and because I was really interested in a couple podcasts, I totally forgot to listen to music with words. I had some classical music playing from time to time or some Byzantine chant if I was trying to learn it, but beside those two and podcasts I would normally drive/work in silence. I talk about some of the upsides of that in the video, but here’s a quick summary:

Leaving free software for good

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:32:56 -0400

I’m back to using proprietary software again! This time it’s permanent. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I’ll still be using free software tools like vim and zsh, but I’m migrating away from GNU/Linux and OpenBSD on my personal devices. I talk about it in the video, but here’s some additional lore:

I started getting into free software when I was about 16 years old, and when everything shutdown for COVID I had all the time in the world to tinker. I got deep into Gentoo, Artix, Suckless Software, OpenBSD, etc etc etc! I was taking apart used, decade old laptops and flashing Libreboot to their BIOS chips and using GrapheneOS on my phone. By 2023 I was hosting my own XMPP/Jitsi server to effectively emulate iMessage/FaceTime and I even merged my phone number to that system to make it seamless. It was really cool, but the time for that is past.

I Have Acquired Barefoot Shoes

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:27:11 -0400

I totally fell for the meme and I got a pair of barefoot sneakers a few weeks ago. I’ve switched to them exclusively — for running, hiking, running errands, etc — and there’s no looking back.

Back and foot pain are virtually gone and the posture gains are immaculate.

I’ve actually had such a good experience with them that I have gotten rid of my other shoes (this needed to happen regardless). There’s something really minimal about having one pair of sneakers and one pair of dress shoes.

School's Out

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:36:33 -0400

Good strength for the Apostles’ Fast!

The middle school I teach at has gone to summer break, so I have come across an abundance of free time. It feels so good to be on break. Aside from classroom cleanout, I’ve mainly just been resting, but I thought I’d share a few broad strokes about what I’ve been up to.

I started my week by going on a hike at the Blue Hill Reservation with a good friend of mine. We actually ended up getting lost because the conversation was so good. I’ve been on a lot of hikes in New England, but this was my first real hike within Massachusetts itself. I’m surprised at how clear the view of the city was.

Sauntering Around Pennsylvania

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 03:19:34 -0500

Recently, I’ve been making an effort to visit the monasteries on the east coast, so when I was parousing St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Monastery’s bookstore and saw that they were offering a Lenten retreat I knew that was my opportunity to check it off my list. I also hadn’t been to Pennsylvania since I was a little kid, so I was very excited to travel through the state for my little vacation.

Cheesefare February Break

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 14:10:18 -0500

The school I teach at gave us all the week of Presidents’ Day off, so I took the opportunity to recharge my spiritual batteries before Great Lent by returning to St. Dumitru Romanian Orthodox Monastery for a few days. I had previously spent a night at the monastery (I did this last May) and the experience left such an impression on me that I knew I had to go back.

Day 1

St. Dumitru’s is roughly a 4 hour drive from my house which isn’t that bad, but I have a friend who lives at about the mid-way point who I hadn’t seen in a minute. Two birds, one stone: I pulled up to his house for the day. We tried to hit up our favorite Greek restaurant in the area, but unforunately the owner is out of town for the week. We got coffee and pastries instead and toured a local library.

Feast of St. Xenia of St. Petersburg

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 21:08:46 -0500

The iconostasis of St. Xenia Russian Orthodox Church in Methuen, MA

Although many people complain about the Orthodox church using two calendars for fixed commemorations, it gave me the ability to “double dip” and celebrate the feast of one of my favorite saints, St. Xenia of St. Petersburg, twice (Jan. 24/Feb. 6)! We had vigil last night and hours/liturgy this morning. Russian services are especially beautiful, and these were no exception. Below are some (unfortunately blurry) photos I took. Blessed feast!

The World Wide Web as a Place, Not a Thing

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 22:42:55 -0400

If you know me personally, you know that a few months ago I got over my like 6-year long free software phase and started using an iPhone again. Obviously I still dabble, but I started using a MacBook, got an Apple Watch, and got into other things generally considered taboo by the free software “community”.

Nevertheless, a lot of the habits/principles/fears I have from being a free software “advocate” have, for better or worse, been ingrained in my DNA. I guess you could say this puts me into the digital minimalism camp, but I’m not a huge fan of labels. I spent some time talking about this before when I brought up what rubs me the wrong way about Instagram and Spotify.

Taking the Hope Pill on Dead Internet Theory

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 09:35:46 -0400

If you live under a rock, the dead internet theory is the idea that since about 2016 or so that the majority of social media posts, comments, and SEO manipulation are done by bots and algorithms, not by real people. Having floated around free software circles, I can say that the dead internet theory is generally taken as truth.

Put simply, the internet that felt like a free landscape when we were growing up now feels bland and lifeless.

Camp St. Joseph of Damascus

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 19:31:06 -0400

CSJ staff posing together

I spent the past week as a counselor at the inaugural session of Camp St. Joseph of Damascus. My experience there was absolutely grace-filled and I made strong connections with fellow Orthodox Christians that I know will last a life time. We were blessed to have Fr. Joseph Kimmett as our session priest and to have visits from Sayidna John and Fr. Bogdan Bucur.

A Week of Adventures

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 09:33:29 -0400

A whale skeleton at the New Bedford Whaling Museum

I spent the past two weeks travelling throughout New England: I spent two days in New Hampshire hiking the White Mountains and Flume Gorge, got to spend a day sailing with a friend, and I hit up New Bedford’s whaling museum. Here’s a few photos I took from the trip:

Quick New York Escapade

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 11:12:56 -0400

I hadn’t seen my godson in a hot minute, so we spent a day chilling. Nothin’ crazy, but this dam is nuts — seriously it looks like the Tower of Babel.

Pilgrimage to St. Dumitru's

Fri, 30 May 2025 22:42:58 -0400

The group I travelled with to St. Dumitru

A few friends and I just got back from a short pilgrimage to St. Dumitru’s Romanian Orthodox Monastery in Middletown, NY (about two hours from Albany).

This was my first time in a monastery — I really enjoyed it. The church and monastery grounds were beautiful, and the services were prayerful and somber. Although we missed the myrrh-streaming Holy Theotokos Iveron Icon, the analogion it had rested on was thoroughly soaked with extremely fragrant myrrh and we had the blessing of venerating that.

Owning physical media is more important than ever

Sat, 24 May 2025 11:38:00 -0400

Owning physical media is more important than ever; moreover, DRM is evil.

If you purchase your movies/music through Amazon, Spotify, SiriusXM, AppleTV, &c. you really only purchase a license for use that can be revoked at any time. This makes your media access fragile: your access to the things you have purchased is one inter-corporation lawsuit away from being revoked.

Whether or not you should be consuming mass-produced, copyrighted media is another question, but purchasing (i.e., legally obtaining) DRM-free versions of your media has never been easier. In fact, buying/ripping CDs or downloading music from Qobuz can be cheaper than a spotify subscription. These days, you can even play Blu-ray discs from the command line. (Generally speaking, you can find most Blu-ray disks on eBay for less than the digital asking prices for the same movies!)

Bozeman, Montana

Tue, 13 May 2025 09:46:04 -0600

The sunset in Bozeman

I got to spend some time innawoods at our cabin and I also visited the local OCA parish. There’s also a wonderful monastery in Harrison that’s tightly knit with the surrounding parishes, but unfortunately I didn’t get an opportunity to visit.

Given the time of year, the weather was outstanding — it hit 80 degrees despite snowing nearly two weeks ago! We also got to spend some time in yellowstone. It’s always great, but this time I had my iPhone’s 48MP camera with me. The photos are pretty spectacular.

Cool Pictures

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 11:59:06 -0400

The Hudson River frozen over. I almost died here waiting for a friend lol

Here’s an Instagram-like gallery showing off the aforementioned photos (click for full-res):

DRM and Attention - Spotify and Instagram

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 13:44:18 -0500

In December I resurrected my Spotify and Instagram accounts after deleting them in 2020. After two and a half months of using them both here are my observations:

Instagram

Initially things were pretty great. I was able to reconnect with some friends I hadn’t been in touch with since high school. Instagram also has a really great format for sharing trip and event photos. Nevertheless, 99.9% of what you see on Instagram is Tiktok-adjacent shortform content and ads. Even though you can add accounts to “Favorites” and “Close Friends”, there is no easy way to cut out all the cruft.