While the AI apocalypse has annihilated self-hosters' ability to understand what a good app is (on one end you'll be installing slop that will work for a couple months on your server, on the other side you'll wind up never installing anything if you stay away from anything that lists "Claude" as a contributor on Github), there are still some old reliable standbys out there. And as we move back into the house and I rebuild my server, I have decided that even at the OS level an old standby would be the right choice. Yes, I'm ditching Unraid for openmediavault.
My first introduction to self-hosting was OMV running on a Raspberry Pi. I knew a lot less then, and it's not always friendly to noobs, but I did manage to get through it. Honestly, the worst problems I had concerned finding software that runs on a 32-bit ARM processor more than figuring out the OS.
Now, after some data loss incurred from what I'll describe as part "too much abstraction involved in Unraid" and part "old fashioned user error," I'm back. Performance is another world, and the delights of a community project with many many years behind it really make up for the lack of commercial support (which, frankly, was not that good).
I absolutely loathe the super dated Material 1.0-based UI, but does it get the job done simply? Most of the time. And I don't want to be in there tweaking shit, I want to run software.
I'll report back once I'm super frustrated and the second honeymoon is over.
I consumed some media that wasn't Minecraft lately! Some of it was entertainment, some bordered on art, I will be referring to none of it as "content." Side note, I have a lot of thoughts about Minecraft and I will write them down sometime.
Movies
The Sheep Detectives
I have come to loathe Hugh Jackman, mostly because of his associations with say, Jared and Ivanka, and how much that makes his borderline-irresistable charm seem even more surface than the average actor's. But, in his defense, he does die early in this movie. The rest of the strikes against it — mostly that there are talking animals and a few big-name actors voicing said animals — turn out to not be strikes either. This thing was fun. Delightful, even. ++
Backrooms
It was inevitable that my 13-year-old eldest would want to see it. It was less a given, though, that I would enjoy it. I think the backrooms as a concept is cool and I think Gen Z and Alpha have good instincts about horror but the one thing they can't stop doing (thanks, YouTube) is fucking Explaining Things. What's the LORE? What's Freddie Fazbear's backstory?
Here's the master with his take on "things being explained"
There are things a movie can say that aren't just worse in words, they can't be said in words. Can you write an essay on the meaning of a piece of instrumental music? Sure, but it won't convey the feeling. It's like the old quote (possibly by Steve Martin?) that "talking about music is like dancing about architecture."
But, I digress. Do I? This is relevant! Backrooms being something that came from the internet, I fully expected the YouTube-driven tendency to theorize and explain to be fully on display here. But the young director Kane Parsons has really pulled it off. The film almost stumbles into a pitfall of horror that's common but has many varied causes: blowing the ending. But it doesn't! After most of the final third threatening too much lucidity, it goes back to a dream logic that ends the film on an unnerving note. ++
Books
qntm - There Is No Anti Memetics Division (2025)
Also falling into the "it came from the internet" category, in fact the very backrooms-adjacent and super-explainy SCP Project, this was a wild ride that also surprised me. The premise is that there's a secret organization protecting us from things that literally defy understanding. Cognitohazards, creatures that make you forget them as soon as you view them, and threats so large that characters have to try to defeat them without even their own knowledge. Fun, with a lot of unexpected turns. ++
Yael Van Der Wouden - The Safekeep (2024)
There's a twist at the end of this moody, sometimes-erotic postwar drama, one that I feel like I really should've seen coming as it's almost Fight-Club-level. But even if you did see it coming, the style and the sympathetic portrayal of a harsh and difficult main character are worth it. +
Elaine Pagels - The Gnostic Gospels (1979)
This one's a classic of the genre, but it does a lot more than what I expected. It's not just about what the Nag Hammadi scrolls contain (in the decades since it was published, just reading them is a better way to learn that) or what Gnosticism means in the context of broader Christianity. It's really about the early history of the religion as a whole, and how something initially varied and full of controversies slipped into orthodoxy. +
Melissa Albert - The Hazel Wood (2018)
Every once in a while you just gotta read one of those YA adventures for misunderstood girls. It was fine. ⚬
Koji Suzuki - Ring (1991)
The first in a trilogy, the book is quite a bit different from the movie adaptation that launched the J-horror movement. It's a tense detective thriller, with the titular phone call and its death sentence providing a race against time. So the mechanics and elements are all still there, but the mood is less spooky-scary. Oddly, it works in reverse of what you might expect, with the supernatural basis being an early given, and only a jumping-off point for the case that follows. +
M. John Harrison - The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020)
Speaking of which, this one does the same trick in a different way. Here, the characters inhabit a strange Lovecraftian reality that flickers and flows in and out of the normal one, but by the end it's really a "ships in the night" story. My first Harrison, and I think I'll have to try some more. I will not be moving to rural Shropshire anytime soon, though. +
Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar (1963)
I feel like I already wrote about this one, for some reason. It's brutal. I've never seen such an accurate depiction of specifically the isolating influence of depression. ++
Music
I so rarely discover new music that actually impresses me. It's not an elitist thing, it's just pure volume of consumption. Eventually if you eat all the foods, you will find it hard to find a flavor that's really new. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy new things. I've had a lot of tacos, but some tacos are just better than others.
Andrea Taeggi - Nattdett (2024)
Here's a guy from Italy who basically makes IDM on old test equipment. It has a sonic quality that is somehow hard and impactful no matter how minimal it gets; I can see how you might find that harder to achieve on a computer or normal music hardware.
Abstract Concrete - Abstract Concrete (2023)
The great Charles Hayward makes one of his occasional dips into song-oriented music in his mid-70s. It's interesting, repetitive art-rock that rarely does anything expected, which is par for the Hayward course, but it's relatively accessible at the same time. His voice is showing its age, though he seems energized by the youth of the rest of the band. Unexpectedly cheesy at times, but never stays there long as this crew are probably just too weird.
Neurosis - An Undying Love For a Burning World (2026)
It's not just that Neurosis is back, which would be enough for me. But the album is good, IMO one of their best in many many years, and worth listening to many times.
Beyond the old good internet lies the root of it all, the Killer App (for creative professions like programming or interactive design, it really was. Much more so than spreadsheets). HyperCard‘s influence shows up in PowerPoint, Shockwave, Pages, and most obviously the web. This is a long but skimmable trip through history and even usage on an emulator. Pretty neat.
Great news for all the skaters and punks out there, Vans shoes is entering into a collaboration with Fugazi! Sounds a little strange to be saying that about 4 guys for whom "they're not that into merch" would be selling it extremely short. That's because it's the wrong Fugazi.
Imagine, 10-15ish years after the legendary group stopped recording and performing, naming your fashion brand that, and imagining that other people don't know what you're trying to do.
Now imagine being Vans, and spending decades cashing in on some form of street/punk cred to sell shoes, and not knowing exactly what you're doing. It's actually one of the few cases like this where suing someone would probably make sense. But I don't think Ian Mackaye and Dischord are the litigious types.
Here’s a list of companies who have done layoffs directly attributable to AI. Obviously most are in technology, which is distressing as that’s where so many of my friends are.
What’s possibly more distressing is the enthusiasm some of these people are showing for shooting their own feet off. I just don’t get it. No more junior developers, no more maintainable codebase, and eventually as some of them have already seen, no more job.
Side note: maybe I should get off cloudflare (1,000 employees)
Via former Weblogs guy Brett Terpstra, here's Tuna. If you used Quicksilver back in the day, the look is familiar. It's really zippy though. Raycast has a ton of options but it's not nearly as fast and it's always pushing the AI shit, so I'm trying this out. Nostalgic but current-feeling. After Alfred's privacy debacle I'm not sure I'd ever go back to them, even though they supposedly sorted it out. But I could maybe live with this one.
This is pretty much what I do, though some details are different. I use the Apple ecosystem currently, so rather than Capy (which does sit comfortably on my Boox Palma) I'm using NetNewsWire everywhere, and my backend is FreshRSS instead of Miniflux because I just like it more and it's well-supported.
I don't know why I didn't know this, but YouTube has RSS feeds!! So while RSS has once again become my choice way of "consuming content" on the internet, it's now even better. Coming to YT with the intent of watching subscribed videos and getting sucked into shorts or whatever is absolutely maddening once you realize it's happened, so I just added all those subscriptions into my RSS feeds. Magical. I haven't done any of this wizardry to get them to play in a movie player like MPV, but maybe someday.
It was quite a few years ago that I decided I no longer wanted to deal with computers onstage. It was a dogmatic decision based on fear and some random ideal of musicality, but it was also born from a frustration: I shouldn't have to use computers onstage for the things I wanted to do.
Rewinding a bit, computers had made things so much better. I carted out a desktop and CRT running FruityLoops (now FL Studio) back when MIDI controllers were just piano keyboards, because you could use your computer keyboard to "play" FruityLoops. Then there was Ableton Live, paired with specialized controllers. Suddenly the perpetual issue of how to actually play electronic music on stage rather than just play back, always difficult with traditional sequencers and tons of pre-built effects chains, was solved. Even full improvisation was possible.
But after a brief period of time when computers were both cheap and reliable enough to bring out, it seemed like stuff just kept getting worse. This is, of course, Apple and other manufacturers engaging in Cory Doctorow's famed Enshittification, but if I'm being real it was always in the back of my head. If this thing crashes, I'm fucked. For people with enough money to instantly replace a computer, no biggie. Reinstall the software on a new machine, load up your files from a backup, and you're back on track. After all, you can buy a new Macbook at a Best Buy in likely any place you're going on tour. But if you don't have the means for a new MacBook — which also happens to be the device you do your personal finances, bookmarks, blogging, and day job on — that's a different proposition.
So... after An Empty Room graduated from a two-piece to a slightly more traditional trio, I decided I wasn't gonna do computers anymore. Enter 2025, I look at my setup for SHIVERING, and in the words of a great idiot... IT'S ALL COMPUTER.
There's our digital mixer, which doesn't even have actual faders, but does have a wifi router.
And there's the MOD Dwarf, a "virtual modular" pedal that I use to create both effects and synth/sample patches that I imagine in my head, and which I strongly suspect is just a literal Raspberry Pi inside a custom German-built enclosure. It's open-source, though!
My Roland SP-404 and Monoprice DMX controller are the only things that don't strongly vibe "wait a minute, isn't this a computer?" and even they're probably just computers.
But I don't look at these things and run, panicked, back to analog synths. They're powerful, flexible, purpose-built, and fun.
Modifying the ban??
So... I guess my computer ban has become a general purpose computer ban.
Almost. I do use an iPad for MIDI-triggered live video, but I'd like to change that someday with another purpose-built (probably Raspberry-Pi-based) machine.
I don't have a point, here. Just finding it funny that I'm still swinging on the hardware-vs-computer pendulum after almost 30 years, but now I'm completely unsure of which side I'm actually on.
Via Open Culture, who apparently posted this ages ago, here is a nearly-complete archive of Alan Lomax's massively important historical field recordings. Used to be, you'd have to wander into some NPR-friendly record store or maybe Barnes & Noble and pick up a CD box set of something like this, lend it to Moby, and never see it again. Well, now you can pop online and search by a few different criteria. It's fascinating.
We've been living in temporary housing, so there are some things that just can't happen when it comes to self-hosting. But I've never regretted my server setup being a mini PC with a couple external drive bays, and that's definitely not changed now because I can use it even in the rental. Home Assistant? Not gonna happen. Jellyfin? We lack the bandwidth. But some essential services are still operational, and it helps me feel a little bit more in control of life at a not-so-controlled time.
Despite the rise in vibe-coded, unmaintainable and probably insanely insecure garbage out there in the self-hosted app space, there is plenty to love in the classics, and that's mostly what I stick with.
Navidrome. Still doing the thing. Any music I buy on Bandcamp goes in there, but CD ripping is justifiably on hold. Since I can't listen to records, it's a valuable service for sure. As a bonus, the new iOS app for fledgling developers seems to be "Subsonic API client," so there's no shortage of apps.
Docmost. This wiki tool keeps everything straight, from school to what's on the homelab (how meta).
Paperless-NGX. There's a lot of paperwork associated with an "event" like ours. I don't know how I lived before this software. It is the greatest thing, and IMO only something that could be possible when self-hosted (and only accessible in the house).
Audiobookshelf. Here's another one like Navidrome that is particularly helpful in our situation, not least because it hosts ebooks as well as audio, despite the name. Pro tip: Buy your audiobooks from a no-DRM store like Downpour. Why anyone wants to be locked in to Amazon is beyond me. And Audiobookshelf is an old-school FOSS app.
Karakeep. I used to use Raindrop, and I still think it's just about the best SaaS system out there for doing what it does, but bookmarks are another thing I like to keep in-house.
FreshRSS. This guy works with the venerable NetNewsWire and quite a few other RSS clients. Sometimes it seems like RSS is having a resurgence; whether or not that's true, you can pry it from my cold dead hands.
Mealie. We put everything in here. It's the equivalent of a Steam account where you buy everything when it goes on sale and never have time to play it. But at least it's finally in one spot.
Immich. Photos are another thing I no longer want to entrust to a company like Google. It's way too important and personal.
