Well, well, well. Despite always promising I’d be back sooner, I never am. So it goes. Last time I wrote on here, it was the 2021 NBA Playoffs. Now, it’s the 2022 NBA Playoffs. It’s full circle, in a sense. The Celtics are still scaring me, writing this after a nailbiting game six against the Milwaukee Bucks. There’s still a reason to be optimistic though.
Regardless, I saw a post on Twitter by Jack Rhysider of Darknet Diaries that said people in IT should just blog. It came with a slew of reasons why you should and things you could say but I figure I should just follow my own voice and simply put some “pen to paper”. For this, I’m putting this post together. It’s just a short one but something to get posted to the internet to sharpen my mind a little bit.
Last time, I was posting about a few projects:
- Migrating the last service from an old account to a new one (jansen.sh landing page).
- Try getting calibre-web’s Kobo sync to work. As of now, it’s just showing an empty JSON entry.
- Clean up some of my NAS box’s extra services since it’s a bit of a mess.
- Maybe spin up a CalDAV task instance for temporary usage since I’m trying to avoid paying for another year of Todoist (even though the service is nice).
I was able to migrate jansen.sh to a simple LinkFree page, a static HTML page I can host on my existing Nginx instance rather than using Linktree. The calibre-web instance is going well but I was never able to get Kobo sync to work properly. It just keeps returning blank JSON and wasn’t really worth the headache. Instead, I loaded Koreader and have been having a really nice time with that. It’s got better customization features while taking a little bit more out of the battery but ereaders are great on battery life as it is.
The NAS did get cleaned up, mostly just deleting things that weren’t really helpful. Never wanted to go ahead with a CalDAV instance but I did find Vikunja which looks fairly close to an open source replacement of Todoist. So far, so good. Just some wonkiness on which CalDAV syncs it supports and no great options on iOS. That’ll likely change and the PWA is good enough. Only thing missing is a share feature which I’d use frequently to brain dump into Todoist. Once I polish this process a bit more, I’ll probably write something about the way of sorting data. An evergreen topic for nerds.
Honestly, this has all been the result of spending too much time on Reddit’s r/selfhosted subreddit. Sometimes, it can be a bit too far out there with folks obsessed with selfhosting everything. I do love the open source community and think owning your own data is empowering but there are always caveats with selfhosting. Particularly, a higher risk tolerance and the potential for losing personal data if you’re not well planned out.
That’s it for now but I’ve gotta leave you folks with a few recommendations based on my recent habits:
Watching: Severance on Apple TV+
It all starts with the idea of a worker’s brain being “severed”, having a different you in the workplace than the one who is at home with no crossover. It reminds me a bit of an idea that popped up in Snow Crash but heads in a wildly different direction with timeless vignettes, curious encounters, and a twisting plot that kept me dialed in.
Reading: The Listeners by Brian Hochman
While it came out this year, it has a very particular focus in understanding wiretapping in America up until September 11, 2001. There’s a lot of academic and journalstic work to assess surveillance since then although not a lot of consideration of attitudes towards wiretapping prior. I’ve gotta say that this is a real treat of a read to get that understanding of the “dirty work” Americans had viewed wiretapping as and the way that it was a bit of a cat and mouse between criminals and police, both wiretapping for gain.
Listening: The Lamest Show on Earth by TrueAnon
A three-part podcast about the conditions that gave rise to Tesla Motors and the questionable moves that allowed it to continue its ascent. If you ever find yourself viewing Elon Musk as some kind of savant, just give this a listen to throw a bucket of water on those expectations. From outright lies and stock pumping to tax credits solely sustaining the companies profitability, it’s a hell of a ride that’s actually interesting. They even get into the quality control issues with these cars including the ways in which people were killed while driving.