Captain’s Log, 2025.11

This month’s theme was (unintentionally) taking back ownership of my online presence.

• Hello Cheryl! I’ve been curious about the feasibility of building a little network appliance that could provide less-technical people a way to safely self-host their data. At the same time I am very much interested in self-hosting my own data. Cheryl is a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16Gb of RAM and a 4Tb SDD, in a cute little aftermarket enclosure. I have it sitting next to the Comcast gateway, where it barely takes up any room at all.

  • Turns out I set this up just in the nick of time: RAM prices have skyrocketed since.

• Moved all my DNS registrations from SquareSpace (formally Google Domains) to Hover as part of decorporatizing.

• Played around with YunoHost. What a cool little box of toys this is! And once installed it absolutely works as advertised: press a button and your new service is up and running! I love the idea, but I don’t love not knowing how things are configured, and where things are living, and why. I want to be learning and getting my hands dirty. So while YunoHost is very cool and I would absolutely recommend it to others, I think I’m going go install and configure the individual services directly for now, and learn as I go.

• Set up an account on Codeberg. Another step toward decorporatizing, I’ll be moving my public projects from GitHub to Codeberg. Nothing much here yet, as time allows. I’m sure all my code has already been fed into their training sets anyway.

• Got a private code forge running with Forgejo, the same system that powers Codeberg. Getting is set up and accessible on the LAN was straightforward just following the directions. The Xfinity mobile app actually makes it surprisingly easy to set up a port forward from the gateway to the Pi, (( and NGINX and Certbot ))

  • I haven’t tried to do any kind of automated dynamic DNS yet, just manually pointed a subdomain at from my registrar (Hover). It’s been up and running a couple of months now and the IP hasn’t changed so I’m just going to let it ride while I work on other things.

• Played around with godot-midi. Indulging my desire to play around with rhythm game types of ideas.

• Continued the Wednesday night writing clubs. That’s where I’m writing these logs, and if you’re reading them, it’s because of the club. At the time I’m writing this I’m still not entirely sure what their final form will be, if any. But I am enjoying the process of revisiting my journals and finding these steady little wins. 10/10 would retrospect again.

• Designed a couple of t-shirts. Don’t know if I’ll have them printed or not but had fun playing around with ideas. I would really enjoying having some kind of outlet with a physical presence, and not all only existing inside the computers.

• Dealt with a few rounds of separation anxiety. Normal and expected, if less fun. I’m at a place now where I can look at it academically, at least a times. It doesn’t have to be a “bad” experience. It can be just “another experience”. And from that perspective, I can appreciate, just a little, the opportunity to experience it. A little. Sometimes.

  • It did cause me to miss that weeks’s community potluck though, and it was the first one with a dance party, and the Bartender made vanilla manhattans or something crazy like that, so it was hard not to be a little disappointed even if I knew it was the right thing to do.
  • It’s partly the feeling of losing my old home, long-time home while not yet feeling fully settled into my new place. It’s also partly that in the quiet I find myself missing my mom more, especially when I’m cooking. All of this is an experience I would have liked to have shared with more directly, or more interactively, or you know what I mean.
  • Oh, and the holidays starting, and all the thoughts around that.

• Transgiving! A new tradition and extension of the community potlucks. A place for anyone that wants one on the US holiday.

  • Catered by our favorite local BBQ place, the amazing Sophie’s! They smoked a turkey for us, along with their oh-so-good BBQ and sides.

• …and still with the burnout. Ugh.

• Upgraded the GGC. Microsoft announced “Game AI” and I am so off this ride. So I switched to Bazzite, but it favors AMD hardware and my existing box wasn’t and MicroCenter had an in-house built system on clearance and now it is mine.

  • The old system, monitor and all, went to a nibling who is delighted to get a chance to playe Cyberpunk: 2048, which the 2070 can still handle just fine.
  • I discovered after the fact that Assetto Corsa does not cloud save your career mode, oops. No matter, I’m having fun role playing amateur sports car racer girl. And now 100+ FPS at 4K so still very much a win.

• Completed another step on on the LEGOs.

Insights & Advice

• Not my circus, not my monkeys. I am so bad at not taking on the troubles of other people.

• Don’t burn tomorrow’s fuel. A correlary to “don’t borrow tomorrow’s troubles”. I do this more often than I would like: I get excited by some idea and I want to stay up all night chasing it, and then I’m dragging for days after. I need to trust my systems, having fun with the idea, and know that future me will be there for it.

Random Links

• Eurotrip. I can’t believe this is one of her favorite movies (but then I remember that Pootie Tang is one of mine so “lest thee be judged”).