Captain’s Log, 2026.01

I want to get back to it.

I started to feel better a couple of months ago, and began getting a little more creative again. I think I’ve continued to improve but it’s really slow and not at all consistent. But with the turning of the year I am really itching to back into it again.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I know this isn’t a switch that you just flip and you’re all better. Have to stay mindful, have to stay in touch.

• I’ve started reading The Body Keeps the Score, and oof. Just, oof. But it’s helping, and it’s helpful to know that some of my weird quirks actually have a reason, and it’s not just that I’m “weak” or painfully introverted or whatever. Though it is…let’s call it “disappointing” to learn that all of that could have been identified and made better long ago. Is what it is, can’t change the past, second best time to plant a tree, etc. Onward we go.

I’m making a website.

I finally—finally!—have a direction for the writing and the website. If you’ve been following along you know I’ve been chipping away at it for months without any clear idea of what to do with it, just a compulsion to do something. But after much shuffling of thoughts and paragraphs in Obsidian I finally—finally!—have something that I feel good (enough) about, and the tone finally sounds (enough) like me. Yes, it’s a bog standard blog, but it feels good to have an outlet for writing again just the same.

With that decided I spent most of the month’s creative time working on these log entries. Maybe a mistake, but I decided to take them all the way back to July, when I ended one chapter of my life and started a new one. That’s just too significant of a transition to not, really. Hopefully I haven’t set myself too much of a challenge; it turns out that I am not a fast writer.

To get this to “published!” in a reasonable timeframe (or at all), and since these log entries are time sensitive, I think I’m going to give it my focus and backburner the code projects for the moment. This, too, might be a mistake, since my particular neurodivergence tends to like skipping from project to project lest it become self-aware. But as long as the inspiration is there to push on I’ll see how it goes.

• I spun up the site on Eleventy because I’ve used it before and had some previous attempts lying around to copy from, and the whole possum thing is kind of cute. But I’m trying to use as little of it as possible because…

• This time I’m doing it as simply as possible, for real this time, no really I really mean it. This time just enough to get the words on the screen and navigable. No templates, no extra configurations, and absolutely zero styling, just straight up right outta 1996 unstyled HTML. I’ve got to be honest it’s kind of glorious. Ugly, so very ugly, but glorious. Once I have all the words down I’ll add a style or two so that no one gets hurt, but I can’t help wondering why the browser defaults are so terribly ugly?

• This is the first project on my new self-hosted code forge and I love it. It’s sitting right there on the LAN so it’s super fast. I own it so I can just throw images in there without having to worry about LFS data caps, or giant corporations sucking them up for training data. Yes, the baddies will scrape whatever I put online as soon as I hit publish, I know, let me have this moment of peace.

I macOS-ified my Linux box.

A little thing, but it brings me happiness: I figured out how use Raheman Vaiya’s keyd to remap the keyboard on Sherman to act more like macOS, with separate Command and Control keys, and similar shortcuts for cursor and tab navigation. For bonus points, I also tidied it up, added comments, and put it all out on my new Codeberg account for anyone else who might be making the same leap.

• I switch back and forth between macOS, Windows, and now Linux boxes for work, so I’m comfortable navigating the different key mappings. But if had my druthers I’d druther have the dedicated Command key for system shortcuts, leaving Control and Alt/Option free for application shortcuts. It was one of the things I knew I would miss as I move more and more toward running Linux full time; it makes me happy to know I won’t have to.

• If you are the somone else who is making the same leap, also have a look at Albert, Emote, and XBanish.

• I also tried out Elementary OS because the screenshots and the tone felt Apple inspired. But the overall experience (and key map) was similar to Linux Mint and I liked Mint better so I switched right back again but older now, wiser.

• This is my first project on Codeberg! I’m planning to either shutter or migrate all my public projects off of GitHub here as soon as I’m able.

And speaking of decorporatizing…

I got set up on Jellyfin.

I’ve been running Plex for a while, quite happily, and even purchased a lifetime membership to support them. But as time has gone on they’ve become almost entirely focused on being a streaming service, with the self-hosting feeling very much an afterthought. The experience of using their players has also become increasingly corporate, with strong overtones of monetization. It feels like they are monitoring what I watch, nagging me for reviews, offering unsolicited recommendations, and basically being everything I’m trying to get away from by decorporatizing. So lifetime membership or no, in the bin they go.

The Jellyfin media server was easy to set up and seems quite good. The website it provides looks nice and presents everything well. Both the website and the official clients have trouble remembering favorited songs and shows; I’ve found favoriting from a playlist view seems to work better than from an album listing. On tvOS the official player doesn’t seem able to switch audio tracks (there is a button, but it doesn’t do anything), and no ability to play music.The third-party Infuse handles multiple audio tracks well but it also doesn’t do music, and I’ve yet to find a decent app that does (but I’m still looking). On iOS, Finamp works great, but it won’t connect to the server on GrapheneOS. On iOS, turning off the screen while music is playing will stop the music; this doesn’t happen on any other platform. So overall, the player situation is a little messy.

But Jellyfin is open source and self-hosted and actively developed and it mostly works fine so I’m sticking with it.

• I had a devil of a time getting this running, through no fault of Jellyfin’s. It turns out the Pi 5 can’t boot if there is an unpowered external USB drive attached—a maximum power draw issue, apparently? I had to introduce a powered USB hub in order to survive a reboot. That took a while to figure out! And in the process of trying to diagnose the problem I accidentally repartioned the wrong drive after clicking through the warnings telling me that I was about to repartition the wrong drive so that took even longer. Yeah. Older. Wiser.

Odds & ends & and other stuff.

• I finished watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S2. There were a few episodes I bounced off (Rhapsody), but the Below Decks crossover was fun. Enjoyed it overall, but not as much as S1.

• I completed the Assetto Corsa N1 career stage (the first one) at 80% difficulty (the easiest). I was able to get gold on all the events, though a few took more than one attempt. I’m focusing on clean first laps and overtakes, and on slowing down. I don’t know why that’s so hard to learn: slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

• I installed YARG and loaded it up with some previously liberated Rock Band 3 tracks, but I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet. Next up: get it working with the drum kit, and then find out if I can get away with playing (electronic, but still) drums in this new apartment.

Insights & Advice

• One day at a time. “It is only when you and I add the burden of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives men mad." h/t Austin Kleon

• Give it 80%. 100% all the time isn’t sustainable.

Random Links

• The Crew is a fun co-op trick-taking card game, if that’s your kind of thing.

• Added the work “schmatonic” to my spell checker. adj. Not sexual, but not entirely platonic either.