september+october 2025
the homelab and a notepad 📔
it’s been a busy september and october. as a result, i’ve had to miss september’s edition of this newsletter (exactly how it happened last year actually).
why is the end of summer so busy? even though i’m not going back to school it feels like i’m prepping for it. stressful.
i wish the last two weeks of august would last for four weeks.
journaling
i’ve been keeping up with my journaling.
actually, that’s where most of my words go these days. i’ve started writing multiple paragraphs daily instead of just one sentence.
the increased output might be due to this addition at the top of my journal:
Focus on feeling. how did you feel today
this helps trigger a bunch of stuff - mostly reflection. actually thinking about my day instead of just recounting what’s happened.
that specific line originated on a walk. I was thinking how memories stick much better when i associate them with how i felt at the time.
i think emotion is one of the best triggers for memory i have. perhaps this is not unique to me.
homelab
it’s been tough to write for this newsletter lately. in fact, i was just going to publish some of my journal entries and call it a day.
these days, whenever i manage to sit in front of my laptop, i spend most of my time working on my homelab.
i’ve been in the process of adding many internal services. this means applications/websites that only i have access to on my network (my tailnet).
essentially, i’ve been docker-composing anything i can find online that looks cool.
the services i use are:
immich
a service that backs up all my photos and makes them available over the web.
pi-hole
a DNS server that blocks ads on my network.
jellyfin
a media server for the movies/tv i download.
home assistant
a service to centralize my home automation stuff (mostly lights).
all these things require having a “server”. this could be an EC2 instance in some data center in virginia, but that’s not very fun (or private). so I have a Lenovo M900 setup in our closet.
i hope to do a more in-depth explanation of all this later.
notepad
another laptop activity has been building a notepad tool. i decided to build this because i’m annoyed at how long it takes to synchronize text between my laptop and my phone and my android tablet.
essentially, i want a tool that instantly syncs a text document between any client i want (could be a smart fridge).
you might be saying
kahvi! this exists already! just use google docs or notion!
you are right. but those things store my words on some server in virginia. that’s too far away! i have a server at home that is much closer - and private (i don’t want their ai models to train on my content).
i want an instant, private, plain-text, cross-platform sync!!
well.......clearly services exist to do this, but the good ones are paid and i can’t deal with paying for that kind of thing until i’ve tried to build it myself.
you can keep track of my progress here!
bonus round
my endeavours in september also included performing with my band twice. both times were:
exhilarating
nerve-wracking
gratifying
we’re playing a gig next week, november 22nd at the pheonix in victoria!
wrap up
additionally, i:
joined the Victoria Makerspace
learned about the 90-9-1 principle
felt sad about the Blue Jays’ loss
that’s it! thanks for reading this far :)
see you next month 🦧