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Jim Mendenhall

Founder and Editor, Starry Hope

Jim Mendenhall registered starryhope.com in 1998. The site started as a web hosting platform and morphed into a blog in the early 2000s, where it has stayed ever since: a long-running, independent tech publication based in Indiana.

For about twenty years (2005 to 2025) he ran Ubuntu almost exclusively, both at work and at home. Recent work demands and the pace of AI tooling pushed him onto macOS as the primary daily driver, but he still uses Ubuntu, Fedora, and ChromeOS on a weekly basis. He has been covering Chromebooks since the first generation shipped, and using one as a daily secondary machine for lighter tasks since 2011.

Today Starry Hope covers Chromebooks, Mini PCs, Linux, and Mac, with growing coverage of AI and how it’s reshaping personal computing. Much of Jim’s own focus has been on AI integration: putting it to work in his daily workflow at home and at work, and writing about how it actually changes what these machines are useful for rather than what the marketing claims.

His background is hands-on rather than theoretical, with years administering Ubuntu servers, Ruby on Rails development, and a long history of rebuilding the Starry Hope site itself. The current iteration runs on Astro, TypeScript, and Cloudflare Workers. The Starry Hope YouTube channel covers some of the same ground in video form.

Articles by Jim Mendenhall

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