Welcome to Arcana Labs
The best puzzles are those not intended to be solved.
-- Unknown
Providing Software, Hardware, and other Amusements, Arcana Labs is a small, independant technology exploration and development hobby shop operating out of Atlantic Canada. My past work has focused on security and disaster recovery, with present work focusing on creating toys, games, books and puzzles, such as through my flagship project, PETI. I’ve organized my projects into a few categories: hardware, software, writing projects, how-to guides, and a blog.
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Latest Updates
The Case for Internet Regression
2025-08-26 00:00:00 -0500
In a tale as old as time, it’s common among people in my rough age cohort - the Millennials and younger end of Gen X - to lament the pre-“social media” internet. I think the key problem with that is just a matter of phrasing, and a carried implication that the internet pre-social media wasn’t social - in fact, it very much was. While things like myspace and facebook pages, twitter feeds, and instagram accounts lowered the barrier for entry to having a presence on the internet from “must know a bare minimum of web design” to “has an email address”, that doesn’t change the fact that the internet before the rise of the “Five Sites” was a vibrant and highly social place.
The Case for A Lumberjack Flannel Rakusu
2025-06-12 00:00:00 -0500
There’s a genre of mastodon post that I occasionally enjoy recapitulating, and I call it my “tin cup sermon”. It’s never quite the same twice, but it usually goes as a lament that socially, our conception of what I’m going to call the “ease of zen” is exoticised. That is, when we picture zen surroundings or zen architecture or zen people, we picture the photos we have all seen of places like Antaiji or Sogenji. There is a temptation to best approve of Zen in what we perceive as its purest forms - the way it is practiced and the way that that practice looks at the great Japanese monasteries to which most North American teachers can still trace their dharma lineage today. I used to lean firmly in that direction, and it’s only been the more often I practice - the more experiences I have of finding zen at the bottom of a beat up tin camping cup - that I’ve come to change my mind about it.
Shelving PETI, Temporarily, To Save the Lab
2025-06-08 00:00:00 -0500
I haven’t really wanted to admit it to anyone, much less myself, but for a while now it’s been painfully clear that I am mentally, temporally, and financially over-committed. It wouldn’t even be wrong to say that I’ve been in that state for a few years now. But recently, something has changed in my life, and that means I need to do something I normally have the luxury of avoiding - cognitive load shedding. Unfortunately, that does mean, for a short time, work on PETI cannot continue.
Arcane Revolution Series Now Available at Kobo Store
2025-05-07 00:00:00 -0500
After the earlier-in-the-year (or was it late last year?) fracas with amazon retroactively changing their DRM policies to essentially vendor-lock their libraries to devices running their e-Reader application (or, indeed, their own line of E-Readers), I’ve been more than a little peeved with them. I’ve long held the belief that piracy costs creators a lot less than their respective industries would have you believe - if someone felt the need to steal my book, they probably were never going to pay for it anyway. For that reason, I’m really proud to announce that I’ve gone ahead and re-listed them in DRM-Free EPUB format through Rakuten Kobo. This cross-listing allows me to bring the EPUB format of the book to you without any imposed DRM, which allows you to lend it out to your friends. It’s also allowed me to opt in to their OverDrive platform, meaning that your local public library card probably grants you free access to read the book through your library, though of course that’s going to vary from place to place. And, of course, you can then read them on any device you like.
I Can't Believe It's Not Buddhism - Kishimi and Koga's 'The Courage To Be Disliked'
2025-04-28 00:00:00 -0500
I am not above judging books by their cover, and the snap impulse to snatch something up off a shelf and interrogate it deeply has brought me more joie de lire than just about any other way of discovering books; I occasionally get a good recommendation from a friend or fellow-reader, and more often than not fall down serial rabbit-holes (being an avid reader of genre fiction), but when I think of favourites from youth and beyond, I think of things like Ender’s Game, The Lord of the Rings, and Dragonlance, which you just see on a shelf and say “Hey, I’ll read that.” There are exceptions to the rule of course, but this was the rule that brought me to Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s The Courage to be Disliked.