Calvusrex - bearded fellow in a black fedora, glasses and suspenders
My small outpost beyond the algorithmic frontier.

My Journal

6.12pm

Remember two posts back when I said I was a lazy blogger?

It's been 5 days. I know I shouldn't pretend that I will ever be "regular" when it comes to adding to my journal., but in all fairness I have been doing a lot, so I'm giving myself a little gracce.

Hre's whats been going on. I decided to totally gut and refocus Offgrid Holdout as the domain for my pubnix. Yeah, I am here n envs and I have a presence on SDF as another persona, but running one myself is slefishly for me.

What I mean is that I want to learn the ins and outs of running a pubnix. I've done the sysadmin thing in in real life, but never on Linux.So, here is my chance. I also plan on keeping it VERY small...5 to 10 invited people. So far, the project has been a positive learning experience. I'm learning a lot about commands taht I knew existed, but never had any real reason to use. So, that being said, offgridholdout.org is running, but as I said, it's invite only. I have a coupel folks interested. After then sign on, we'll see how things go.

I also have been organizing my 16,000 song music library. I'not even close to being done. Tagging, cleaning up duplicates, ensuring album art is there, etc. It's a big project. But whats cool is I have some albums in my library that are out of print. So I am totally grateful to myself for digitizing those albums so that I have them. I have the library self-hosted in Navidrome, which is a pretty slick system.

That being said, I hslo moved three VM servers to a self-hosted box on my LAN and then decommissioned the VM servers. That wasn't that big of a deal, but I feel better about where htye are now.

Along with that, today I totally reorganized my work area. Moed systems and stuff around. It feels less cluttered. Next up is the big one - moving away from Cloudflared and setting up a Ubiquitous Edge Router X behind my very bland ISP modem/router. I aldready use dnsmasq, but trying to make things more efficient, and I truly think the ER-X is the ticket. I have had this little fella in a box for the past 6 years, totally forgotten, but glad I kept it! THAT project is still ongoing. So I'll post more in the future!

So, honestly, I think there are more things I've worked on, but being the lazy ass that I am, I've forgotten them!

Tags: self-hosting, lazy, journal, busy brain, music, pubnix

6.17pm

I swear I cannot make up my mind

I am pretty sure I hve ADHD when it comes to projects. I get one going and the next thing you know it's "Ohh!Bright shuny thing" and I ending moving to something else.

I have a server than has been reloaded three times the past 3 days. Each time I think "yeah, this is a good use for this system" and then, nope, something else pops up and I start it over. That same system now is doing nothing and my weird ass brain is trying to find something to do with it. Forget "do you even need it".. hell no, SOMETHING needs to be on it! :)

I need to quit coming up with new projects and actually finish a bunch that I have started. I have quite a few of those. I think I am a planner and a builder and deep down I'm afraid they will get completed and then I'll be like, "OK, thats that now what?" But that might not be bad... I don't know.. Definitely ADD when comes to this stuff!!

Tags: projects, ADHD, servers, builder, busy brain

7.52am

I'm a lazy journal poster... I admit it!

I always start journals with good intentions. Document what I am feeling, what is going on, give my thoughts a voice, etc. Maybe a week of back to back posts, then a couple days in between, then a month in between and then poof silence.

I am REALLY trying not to do that here, bu I also don't want to post journal entries for the sake of posting. In lief I am that guy that talks when I have something to say, not just to hear myself.

It's been four days since my last journal entry. Now granted I have a handful of twtxt tweets in between (those are simple and easy, so glad I have them available) and I have been doing things that I should probably journal, even if no one ever reads my envs.page. But here I am four days later and just slowly getting around to it.

So, I will just hit the Cliff Notes version of the weekend.

Proxmox was a bust. Is it cool? Absolutely. But I have more power and resources on my desktop than the i5, 16GB spare PC I was hosting it on. Really eaier for me to setup OS labs in VirtualBox or 86Box, maintain snapshots, and not worry about resources or being about to setup a OLD OS (like OS/2Warp) or something smi complicated like Gentoo. So, it's gone, that system repurposed with Debian 13 headless and a Minecraft server and a simple Apache/PHP server to serve the associated website. The idea is cooler too. A small adult Minecraft community for historical building, research, and storytelling. Recreate places, compare sources, and turn each build into something visitors can learn from. Still in the early config stages, byt he Minecraft server is up and running.

I also decided to expand my Historical fiction/Short Story site and weaved in a historiogrpahy portion from an old blog I ran years ago called "Historical Interpreter" that has historical essays, historiography, research library, KB, Bibliographies, Source Guides, etc. It is the "how to" of all things history, and really is fine addition to the historical fiction I write on my site. Again, this is still in the works, but my maon page of short stories and novels is still up and running as before at https://nburchett.com

Other projects have started and not made traction. Verja (is a community operating system for small, durable, member-owned groups) and is in beta user testing, but honestly, I am not feeling the vibe of this one... started with good intentions, but community driver sites are HARD to get off the ground in the modern world. This also goes for Independent Web Almanac, but it is less community and more information, support, resource oriented. It's jsut on pause because all my smaller "quick" projects take over.

Speaking of which, there have been small projects. My 15,000 song music library reorganization project, my novel writing system tweaks, posting articles on my history site, my author site, and dipping in now and then to my DOS/9 project (which is very alive, just waiting on some actual REAL retro Pentium II hardware to test) and then doing research into learning paths for BSD and Plan9.

So, it turns out I have more to say than I thought I did. Part of Saturday was spent relaxing with a friend, which my body and soul needed, and defintely slowed my hyperactive brain down for a good chunk of the day.

I'm going to try an be more diligent with these journal entries... instead of throwing it all out there, I'm going to keep them shorter and maybe that will make them easier to keep up with!

Tags: journal, projects, blogging, history, music, self-hosting, relaxing

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