About

My name is Marco Merlini. I'm from New Brunswick, Canada, and currently live in Toronto.

As of March 24 / 2026, I am a self-employed individual who does private tutoring, develops products, and writes articles+books.

My hobbies are:

• Climbing (bouldering, top-roping, lead, one day I hope to try trad)
• Sewing
• Cycling
• Portaging
  
• Knitting
• Stargazing
• Whatever happens to tickle my fancy on any given day
  

My favourite things about Toronto are:

• Trivia night at Rock On Climbing, occurring at 8:00 pm on the first Thursday of every month. Join us sometime! P.S. I often bring snacks (always vegan, often gluten free)
• The Bike Share
• Toronto Islands
• The Toronto Reference Library
  

Credits

I edit this site using Geany, my all-time favourite editor. To help with placing images, I occasionally use Kompozer. I registered this domain via hover, and I'm using a VPS from IONOS (previously, I used a VM from Google Cloud Platform). The server is running Apache2 on Ubuntu. I use the excellent tohtml.com to format code on the site. I would have liked to use SFTPDrive to edit the files from my home computer (which is how I used to do it), but nowadays I'm a little sketched out about whether that's really safe. I still need to try and figure out if it still has kernel-level code plugged in...

The domain costs me about $20 (Canadian) per year. Yes, I could probably have gotten a better price, but whatever. Google Cloud Platform used to claim that the VM I was using was in the "always free" tier, but I was billed somewhere around $5 or $6 per month (Canadian). These days I use the smallest possible VPS from IONOS, which costs me $2 per month, plus a one-time $10 setup fee. Their customer support has been really excellent so far.

Most of what I learned about HTML and CSS is from the excellent w3schools. I recently bought Web Coding & Development All-In-One by Paul McFedries for $7.49 +tax at the Value Village, and use it as a reference.