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I’ve recently been inspired by the Indie Web. It is a movement where individuals are creating their own web pages away from traditional social media. It is a reconnection with the old days of Internet. Many of them look like something from back then too. And it’s awesome!

One would think this blog was inspired by that in the first place. Truth be told, I hadn’t dug that far into the rabbit hole at that point. I was trying to get away from X and Instagram, and I stumbled onto Mastodon, a social media platform on the Fediverse.

I didn’t like the vibe for some reason. The idea of communities being able to Defederate each other and police content/users they don’t agree with just feels like an even more unhinged version of Facebook.

I landed on my own personal blog but wasn’t sure what to do with it. At first I was trying to be all minimal and sleek. I thought the blog would be more like a log for any and all things I wanted to save or comment on. It still IS that, but I want more of ME in it.

So now I’m working on decor.

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I’m not a good writer, but I’m trying to be. A big reason I made this blog was to exercise that muscle and get used to putting my thoughts into words.

It isn’t as easy as it looks. Just throwing thoughts onto a page makes no fucking sense unless you figure out a way to order the words and lead the reader along a path that’s understandable.

The work of the writer comes in stringing together thoughts in a relatable way using widely understood language, verbose, meaning, the everything to the reader.

Not to be too highbrow about it, but the ability to write is powerful. I don’t want to lose it to having AI do it for me. Even if I’m not as good.

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I’ve been on a anti-streaming platform tirade as of late. The latest target has been music. Since discovering the platform SoulSeek I’ve been gathering all the tunes from nostalgia and my current Spotify lists.

With this, I’ve been listening to music locally using Fooyin. I went through a few media players, even terminal based MPD ones. Fooyin just worked with no fuss.

A side effect of local listening is that I’ve been listening to music in terms of “albums” and not assorted songs on a playlist. At first, I didn’t like it.

That was until the other day when I went back and listened to 2000s Ohio band Hawthorne Heights. They were one of those bands I had my favorite songs added to some lists, but never the whole album.

I played some games and threw the album on to discover several songs I just forgot, then found ones I’ve never heard that I enjoyed. Hell, I listened to a whole 2008 album that I never realized existed. I liked it too!

Listening to the entire album from start to finish is an interesting experience that I think a lot of us (at least me) have strayed away from.

It reminded me of the time before instant accessibility when you would buy a CD for one song but listen to the entire album because it’s all you had.

We gave artists the attention to hear their whole vision. Albums had intros to set a theme. They included interludes. Most of the time there is a goofy song thats a little different than the bands usual sound. It was special.

Now, we have condensed artists into their top songs. Most people save a few songs from an artist and move on to the next. Playlists are compilations of a vibe.

If you haven’t in a while, spin up one of your favorite albums and just listen to the whole thing, start to finish.

Here is a few that I’ve been listening to:

Hawthorne Heights – If Only You Were Lonely (2006)
Sugar Ray – 14:59 (1999)
Post Malone – F1-Trillion (2024)
Unleash The Archers – Time Stands Still (2015)

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In my last post, I talked about having issues with my homelab setup after returning from vacation. The main culprit being authentication on Vaultwarden and Joplin.

My homelab is a local only setup, and I am just now understanding the role caddy plays in the homelab acting as a reverse proxy. But for some reason, in my arrogance, I thought just buying a domain name and routing everything through a VPN would be fairly simple. Wrong.

This took me down a rabbit hole of DNS, Cloudflare Tunneling, Twin something-or-other, and more. Wayyyyy too much for me at this point in time.

I gave up with Vaultwarden and went with hosting my passwords back on Nord. For one, I hosted my passwords there before with no issues. Second, when my homelab went down and I had no access to passwords, it was incredibly inconvenient and not worth the hassle at this time.

Not to say I wouldn’t try hosting Vaultwarden again once I understand how to give it a legit SSL cert. This was a decision for my mental health haha.

Joplin on the other hand, I found a fix that I was a little proud of. Since the Joplin server was giving me so much fuss over authentication, I used a simpler method. Syncthing.

Syncthing’s easy, no-nonsense setup paired with Joplin’s File System synchronization option made a perfect match to get my notes from my PC to my phone.

The catch is that I have to run Syncthing also on any device I need my Joplin notes synced on.

Throughout all this I found Portainer to be a much more useful application. Up until now I was doing everything via terminal. I’m grateful to have learned it that way, but Portainer became necessary for managing the Docker containers.

Finally, just to have a little growth in the homelab after all these issues, I added LinkAce and SearXNG which I’m already in love with. 

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I have a love hate relationship with my Linux home lab right now. When it works I feel like 90s movie hacker. When it doesn’t I slam my head into the keyboard.

Since experimenting with homelab stuff, there is a few applications that have become invaluable to me. Specifically VaultWarden and Joplin.

I went on a short vacation with my wife and when I returned I began to have login issues. Joplin was telling me I had an invalid username and pass and Vaultwarden would connect via browser but not with my Brave extension.

Running “docker ps” showed all the containers were running, so that left a authentication certificate issue. Not that I understand a whole lot about how caddy works, but I suspected it to be the issue.

Up till now I was accessing my apps by using a .local address. So for the sake of doing it “right” I purchased a new domain just for my homelab to link to.

I don’t know. Its still broke. So we’ll see.

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I discovered a new artist that I LOVE. Her name is Maphra. She is a vocalist who has posted a few covers on YouTube.

Maphra’s cover of Bring Me To The Horizon’s Doom popped on my feed so I casually gave it a listen only to be stunned by her voice. She has a haunting angelic-ness with amazing screaming.

The song is great, she is great, but that isn’t quite what I wanted to share here.

With all viral videos come comments. While a lot of comments are great and supportive I couldn’t help but notice the “hater” ones.

Sprinkled throughout is a few comments that just seem to come from a place of “Wow I hate that everyone else liked this, so now I’m going to shit on it a little”

Its not to say that you can’t be critical of an online video or have a negative opinion, but this drive by hateful Internet commentary kinda just pisses me off sometimes.

The kind of people that behave this way are never content creators themselves.

There is so much content available and our dopamine receptors are so fucked at this point we can’t recognize and appreciate normal everyday talent.

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I’ve been deep diving into the topic of digital minimalism. For me, it has been the re-acquaintance with technology in a healthier more structured way.

This feeling started when I switched to Linux. Having total control of my computer and it just doing what I want felt nostalgic. I never realize how much Windows fought tooth and nail against the user to protect itself.

The total control of my PC led me to consider my interaction with social media so I switched to following RSS feeds of websites I wanted to see.

I realized through some sort of withdrawal reaction my phone became a bigger distraction for me. Short form content is like crack for me.

Instagram reels were my worst. I deleted the app altogether only to find myself on X’s version of shorts. Hell I even started watching them on Facebook.

Switching my phone to Linux is something I considered, but I have enough problems still on my desktop I don’t want to risk it. So for the moment I installed a minimalist open source launcher OLauncher.

So far all these changes have felt great and I’ve had the feeling of more control and purpose of my time. I’m continuing this trend with a revamp of my entire file system to the PARA method developed by Tiago Forte.

All of this is really to say what I’ve been up to last few weeks.

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I woke up yesterday morning and shuffled through my routine. It was time to make coffee. I loaded up the filter, filled the water reservoir, and then nothing.

The Keurig I bought for my wife and I less than six months ago was completely unresponsive.

The Keurig Duo Essentials Gen 2 was the third Keurig coffee machine I’ve purchased. My wife uses K-cups. I’m old fashioned and make a full pot each morning. The Duo made sense because it handled both.

Our first Keurig was one of the original models and only supported K-cups. It lasted several years before needing replacement. I didn’t think much of it at the time and upgraded to one of the first Duos.

That first Duo only lasted a year. Frustrating, but the convenience kept me hooked. So, on September 9th, 2025, I bought another Keurig, and it was dead by January 2nd, 2026.

The short lifespan alone is bad enough, but what really turned me off was how Keurig handled it.

The troubleshooting process is basically non-existent. Plug it in. Does it work? Plug in another device — does that work? Yes? Okay, nothing else to check. We’ll send a replacement.

These machines cost anywhere from $75–$200 and that’s the extent of the effort? Keurig knows these units are disposable. They expect customers to keep replacing them. And the dead ones? They end up in a landfill. What a waste.

It occurred to me that I’ve probably brewed more coffee with a $15 Mr. Coffee maker from 20 years ago than with all the Keurigs I’ve owned combined.

Many Keurig owners have traced the failure to a thermal fuse switch that simply dies. The machines aren’t designed to be easily repaired, but some frugal DIYers have taken it upon themselves to revive what are otherwise throwaway appliances.

I’ll use the warranty replacement Keurig is sending me until it fails. I may even try to fix the dead machine sitting on my counter, if only to prove a point. But after this, I’m done buying Keurigs.

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On December 21st, my wife and I celebrated the Winter Solstice with her sister’s family.

It is something small we started last year. We went out to the most wooded part of our land, made a campfire, cooked food, and wrote down some resolutions to toss in the fire.

There is a un-explainable intimacy to writing out a wish for yourself and watching it burn. I feel it carries more weight somehow.

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I was compelled to share this wholesome Final Fantasy community event where players lined up to meet Santa. Posted by user brybryx3 on X.

Seeing this was a reminder of how great the community was on this MMO. I remember playing when Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama passed and players held a vigil in the city of Ul’Dah.

I’ve had the itch to get back into a MMORPG again, maybe this was a sign.

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brybryx3 X