Captain’s Log, 2026.01

I may be coming back to life.

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. But the last few months I spent powered down do seem to have helped, or be helping, and with the arrival of the new year I’m feeling inspired to spend more time in the captain’s chair.

Let’s get to it!

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 good 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) 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.

• 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 them as soon as I put them online, I know, let me have this moment of peace.

I macOS-ified my Linux box.

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 prefer the macOS approach of separate Command (for system shortcuts) and Control (for application shortcuts) keys.

Since I’m working on making Linux my daily driver (see decorporatizing), I thought to have a go at setting up my preferred macOS-like key bindings. When I started I mostly just wanted to see if it was even possible, but thanks to Raheman Vaiya’s keyd I was able to get pretty close!

This seems like something other people might find useful, so I tidied it up and put it out on my new Codeberg account. There’s still more I’d like to do with it, but the most common Command and Option shortcuts now behave as you’d expect; see the comments on the keyd script for more details on what I was able to get working.

• 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 entirely too corporate and Big Brother-ish. They are clearly 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.

Jellyfin is not a drop-in replacement for Plex. The media server was easy to set up and seems quite good. The player situation is messy. The built-in web client looks nice and plays most of the things I throw at it, but struggles to remember my favorited songs and shows. On mobile, the official player works okay until you hit the power button to turn off the screen, at which point the music turns off too. Finamp (see what they did there?) works well on iOS but won’t connect to the server on GrapheneOS. On tvOS, the language and subtitle controls of the official client doesn’t seem to work, and it only provides video, not music. The third-party Infuse does a better job with multiple audio tracks but it also doesn’t do music, and I’ve yet to find a decent app that does (but I’m still looking).

But Jellyfin is open source and self-hosted and actively developed and 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 of (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 lowest). 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% 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.