💾 Archived View for skyjake.fi › gemlog › 2023-01_entering-2023.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:28:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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📅 2023-01-01
The clock keeps ticking and calendars have again rolled back to January 1st. Here are some tidings for the New Year.
Christmas at the Skyjake Residence was a total nightmare, I'm sad to report.
Together with the 3yo, I came down with some bad virus — RSV or Influenza, I suspect — and we were both down with a fever for seven days, overlapping the Christmas weekend. It really kills the holiday spirit when one is forced to focus on various types of nasal discharge. I went on to develop a moderate sinus infection, which is only now starting to clear properly.
While I was suffering with the firstborn, my wife was getting increasingly exhausted and vexed taking care of the cranky younger baby, who has naturally chosen this moment to start teething.
Better luck next year, I guess!
Not being able to do much due to the illness, I've been playing around with improvements to the home server with the goal of cutting down monthly expenses and maybe even reducing electricity costs. After I had merged my two physical server PCs into one by converting the weaker/older PC into a VM that runs on the beefier one, and figured some other improvements could be in order, too.
I have a small Linode VPS that's been running some Doomsday Engine stuff, but I figured it could just as well host the entire dengine.net website, running WordPress, a Redmine issue tracker, and a Dokuwiki user manual in addition to the custom PHP front page. Some of these have been running off my home server, but that was a messy fallback forced by the previous webhost not supporting Rails. Now consolidated, it's much better having the entire site on a single server, with proper backups. (One of these days I'll have enough time to get back to coding Doomsday again...)
I then turned my eye toward the cloud. Specifically, the one where I keep my larger backups. These have been in a Backblaze B2 bucket, which is pretty nice, but I've been interfacing with it using a paid sync service that I initially chose to get rid of Dropbox. Now the time has come to move to self-hosted cloud storage. I chose ownCloud running on the home server, while keeping the B2 bucket for storing the large backup archive. This gets rid of the paid service while improving file access performance significantly, since most of the files are actually on the LAN now. ownCloud seems to have quite nice Windows and iOS apps, too, with native file system integration. The Mac client could use some work, but I'm sure it'll get there eventually...
There's something therapeutic about reorganizing one's digital life. It's like a Tetris where you try to fit all the pieces together in a neater pile, until entire rows of cruft disappear as they become unnecessary.
I have a short vacation coming up, so maybe I'll now get to actually relax and have some downtime. Wouldn't mind resuming my viewing of Andor...
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