Recent content on Matt's Blog
This is something that I’ve been thinking about for awhile. How do you think of the Internet? Is it social for you? A source of information? A simple tool? A burden? A toxic place filled with assholes? All of the above? For me, I have a hard time narrowing down what the Internet even is . Oh, I know the technologies behind it, the hardware and software that are actually “The…
Last year, it was comments . This year it’s AI. Now, I think if you’re going to blog, you should do it yourself. Using AI for inspiration, I suppose, is okay, but the actual writing? Why bother having a blog if you’re not going to do the writing yourself? The entire point of blogging is to express yourself. That doesn’t happen if Chatty Jeeps does the work for you.…
So, I’m taking part in Blaugust again. I’m not even going to try to do 30 this month. I’ll be happy with 5 or 10. But this is #1, so it’s a start. The last time I wrote something, I talked about how I was considering going back to music subscription services simply because I missed their music discovery options. Self hosting was just not doing it for me in that regard. I…
So, awhile back, I decided to start self hosting my music collection. I’m sure I’ve at least mentioned it somewhere here on the blog. I re-downloaded my entire collection and more beyond that. Nearly 5TB of new music was stored on my various hard drives. It took months. And by the end, I was pretty damn proud of it. I’ve been using that system now for months, and I’ve…
Last October I posted a review of 11/22/63 . In that post I wrote: This was 900 pages of wasted time. I enjoyed most of it. But the ending ruined every good feeling I had about this book. Why did I read it? Nothing changed at the end of the story. Nobody got a happy ending; not even a smidge of one. It feels like a betrayal. It feels like a sucker punch right to the face. If you go back and read…
Video: https://youtu.be/13yIfxczLpc?si=pWqw95Ux3LBUI3Nu This one really hit home. The part that really got me was “watching other people do the things I want to do.” That is so me.
There is a lot of hype around Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, and I’ve always wondered why. I knew from the summary that it was LitRPG, and those are hardly ever “mainstream.” I’ll be honest and say that I was never really won over by the hype or the concept of the books themselves, despite having a soft spot for LitRPG novels. I just couldn’t really get myself…
I use AI for some things. I’m putting that out there right from the start because it will get rid of those people who are so unreasonable that they can’t even be arsed to hear me out. I get most of the arguments against “Artificial Intelligence”. In fact, I agree with a lot of them. From the environmental and human costs to the apocalyptic possibilities, the arguments make…
Awhile back, Joel wrote about his Inoassis Y1 which is a little iPod-like thing that you can buy to play music. As with most things in life, I aspire to be Joel, so I bought one too. (Seriously, Joel is cool and has tons of ideas, so he gets me into a ton of bad habits like fountain pens. I should probably stop following his blog, I spend too much money as is). The Y1 is a cool little piece of kit…
One of the things I’m trying to do with my life is lower the amount of money I spend on things I don’t really need. I call it The Don’t Buy Shit Challenge . I’m actually doing really well with that so far, which I’m proud of. I do have several yearly subscriptions, however, that I still need to figure out what to do with. One of those is TickTick Pro. TickTick is a…
I am not a people person. Despite being a YouTuber and now a “professor”, I would much rather be away from people as much as possible. Of course, that’s not very healthy, so I try to put myself out there as much as I’m comfortable with. But each time I have interactions with someone else, I get very anxious beforehand. I deal with it because I must, but it’s something…
I’m in a bit of a reading slump and have been for almost a month. It’s not unusual, I’ve talked about it a few times before, as I do tend to go through these from time to time. This time I seem to be conducting a little self reflection experiment. As I find myself less and less interested in reading, I find myself spending more time taking in shortform content on TikTok and…
So, yesterday I wrote more about pens and how I keep buying them . I need to stop buying stuff, not just pens. I’ve tried to do the low-buy or no-buy challenges in the past , but I’ve failed every time. This time is going to be different. I hope, anyway. My goal is to go at least the next six months without buying anything I don’t absolutely need. And by absolutely need, I mean…
Soon, I’m going to issue a challenge. The “Don’t Buy Shit” Challenge. I’ll write more about that tomorrow, but for now you need to understand what has prompted that challenge. I’ve bought “some” fountain pens. I’ve talked about this new hobby of mine before and I’ve mentioned it several times on the podcast, but it’s worse than I…
Times are dark. There’s war (I’d call it a stupid war, but all wars are stupid, this one just happens to be more idiotic than most), and a horrible economy. There’s all sorts of horribleness going on around the world. It is very hard to watch or read the news and not be super depressed about everything. Now the rest of this post is going to sound really trite, but we’re all…
I have an odd situationship when it comes to audiobooks. I used to swear by them. I still enjoyed actually reading the words, but when I worked out in the public, I would almost always have an audiobook playing in the background. But now I work from home, and I don’t use my audiobooks as much as I used to. (On a side note, I also don’t listen to podcasts as often as I used to either).…
You may have noticed a lack of content from me lately. My Internet has been super unreliable for ages, and these last two weeks it has been even worse. And it’s not like it has been down. Instead we’ve been having these periods (almost every day) where our upload speed goes down to nothing. The way the internet works is, packets are exchanged between you and the server you’re…
Got myself in an odd thought spiral tonight while listening to some oldies. What would the world be like if Buddy Holly had lived? What would the world be like if Hank Williams Sr. had lived? There are so many artists out there that died long before their time, men and women who were genre defining artists. Elvis may be the biggest name there. If he’d stayed away from the drugs? He might…
Discord has ruined itself for me. I actually liked Discord a lot, which feels like a minority opinion most days. I liked it because I have cultivated an awesome community on there with almost 2500 wonderful souls. The TLC Discord server is one of the highlights of my day. Even if I’m only lurking, I still interact with people damn near every single day of the week. And then Discord decided…
I too wonder why this is so. FFS, would a few more inches really cost so much? And the first person who says “that’s what she said” gets banned. lol Link: https://forkingmad.blog/cables-are-never-long-enough/
I have a long history of adoring long books. When I first started reading, I quickly moved away from kids books to what I charmingly called “chapter books, mama”. I read my first Tom Clancy book in fourth grade. Why did I choose it? Because it was big. There was something in my brain that was quite impressed with myself for reading a book that was almost too heavy for me to carry. That…
A few days late just means there is more to cover, right? Programming and Scripting This week I worked on my homepage quite a bit. I added a ListenBrainz widget and fixed quite a few bugs that have been bugging me for a while. I also worked on Mattrix , but I’m thinking about scrapping it. Between Claude and me, we’re pretty stuck on the encryption thing. It either needs to be…
The NVMe in my big HP Workstation died yesterday. I’m not sure why other than it was cheap and used from eBay. I, however, decided to treat this as an opportunity instead of crying in my beard. Something I’ve planned for a while now, but had been putting off, is a significant refactoring of my home lab. My setup consisted of a huge HP workstation with a Xeon processor and 128GB of ECC…
I wrote somewhere (probably in a Newsletter), about how sick I am of Winter. I think that was December. It is now March and WINTER IS STILL FUCKING HERE. I’m soooooooo sick of cold weather and snow. I’m not an outdoors type guy, but I’m sick of being cooped up in the house. I need Spring to get here fast or I’m going to lose it and move to Florida.
I use my phone more than Aleem does. Way more. There is a part of me that feels the same, that I use it too much and that I should try to slow it down. The other part of me knows exactly what I’m doing and is okay with it. I use my phone for everything, some of them even productive. It’s the non-productive things I need to watch out for. Link:…
I spent the last day or so completely redesigning the Music page here on the blog. I took inspiration from the week view on Last FM. It’s not as colorful, and I still have some work to do (the background of the div containers are not right), but it’s pretty great. LastFM provides quite a bit of info via their API. I hate relying on LastFM, so I’ll probably eventually grab the…
I wrote a little while ago , that I planned to stop blogging every day. I stated in that post that it had started to feel like an obligation, and that it had stopped being fun because I was forcing it. Since then, I’ve had a problem in that I’m not blogging at all. I’ve only posted 19 times since that post and that was three months ago. I’ve also felt like I’ve lost…
My sleeping habits are all over the place. This getting up early thing is going to take awhile to set in. Some days I do well, and I’m up and at ’em early. Other days, I still sleep until late morning and it feels like the day is over too early. But I’m working on it. Programming and Scripting I made a python script that adds metadata to the Manga I’ve been downloading, but…
I’ve had a few days where I’ve been super productive. I’ve gotten up earlier, gone to bed earlier, and accomplished a lot of stuff. I even finally cleaned my desk and computer, something I’ve been meaning to do for ages . But today, I have a list of things to do, and no interest in doing any of them. One of them was to make a blog post, so here I am, making a blog post…
This has been a very odd week. I’ve long been a night owl. I go to sleep sometime in the 3-4AM range, and then sleep until around 11AM. I’ve been working this last week to be a little more normal. To sleep before 2AM and then up around 9AM. It has been easier than I thought it would be. Anyway, here’s this week’s newsletter. Programming and Scripting I worked on sonic-tui a…
So, on Mastodon last night, I saw someone say something along the line of “I couldn’t finish this book, I’m so sorry. No hate on the author, it’s a great book!” This pissed me off. I read a lot. I read many books that are good, many that are bad. I DNF books all the time because they’re not something I want to finish. Never, not a single time, did I think about…
So, I’m a well known note taker. I’ve talked about it many times on this here blog. I will undoubtedly talk about it many more times. I’m a bit of a note taking junkie. But, I’ve moved between platforms so much over the years, my organization is a bloody mess. For example, I have multiple folders titled a variation of “ideas”. These all have subfolders and…
Okay, so I haven’t done one of these in almost two months. But it’s time to get back on the wagon. Work Yes. Work. I got a job. Well, I’m hired at least. I don’t actually start until this summer, but it’s a done deal. I start some online training in early March. What is the gig? I’m going to be a teacher? Yeah, it’s crazy. I’m going to be teaching…
I hate everything. I used to really love technology. And I guess I still do, but I hate what a lot of tech, especially software, has become. It used to be either an app was free or it wasn’t. Usually the free stuff came with some other way to monetize itself (remember the bars that used to be forced on you when you downloaded a Windows app?) The paid stuff, you paid for and that was it.…
Back in August, I took part in Blaugust along with a large community of bloggers. The idea is to write every day during the month of August. It was wonderful. Perhaps the best part of that experience wasn’t the writing, but the discovery of so many new blogs to read. I wrote about the upsides and downsides of that here . At that point I had over 4000 unread blog posts to read. Obviously…
I have a thing for notebooks. I have way too many blank notebooks. I’m steadily filling them up, but I have enough to last me for… a while. But there’s always more to look at when it comes to stationary and notebooks. I’ve gotten into the fountain pen hobby, so now I’m on the lookout for some pocket sized notebooks that work well with fountain pens. Preferably ones…
Blog rolls are important. I have one . If you consider yourself a part of the “IndieWeb,” you should have one too. Because the IndieWeb dies without people spreading the word. The thing is, Google sucks donkey balls, and not the good kind. You can’t go search for my blog here unless you know it exists or you know my name, which is probably not something normal people know. Other…
I’ve been gainfully employed every single minute of my life since I was 15 years old. For the record, that was 25 years ago. I started out bagging groceries, and then moved to making pizza, and then to another grocery store, and finally to a historical magazine. Now, I’m unemployed. I was pretty fine with it when it happened. Well, not fine. I thought I was prepared for it. I thought I…
After my lukewarm experience with Mistborn I didn’t really think I’d ever go back to Brandon Sanderson. But Tress of the Emerald Sea was really good, so I decided to get back out of The Cosmere, and go back to Sanderson’s Special Projects, this time with The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England . This book is much more science fiction than fantasy, which…
I’m not calling these resolutions. Resolutions never work, they never stick. These are goals. They say that to reach towards the stars, you must first extend your hand. This is me doing just that. Lose 150 Pounds - Ambitious, for sure, but it can and will be done. This is the year Matt gets less fat. Get to 100k subscribers on YouTube for TLC - setting a goal for something you have no…
The last day of the year is here, so it’s time to look back. Work I lost my job this year. I knew it was coming for most of this year, but it has been surprisingly painful. It took a while to sink in, but it has definitely affected my mental health more than I thought it would. I thought I was prepared. But I wasn’t. I do have an interview in January, and I’ve had a couple…
I like to read. I like to listen to music. I like to watch other people build stuff and make cool things. I have a lot of likes. I think that’s true of everyone. The question I’ve been asking myself recently, however, is what am I passionate about? This feels like the wrong time to ask myself “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But that is essentially the question.…
As someone who just went through the process of digitizing and redownloading a ton of music so I could officially get away from streaming services, this post made a lot of sense to me. I will say I do hoard music. But I enjoy going through my library and finding new things, and that can’t be done if I don’t have things I’ve never listened to before. Link:…
The sad truth of the matter is, you don’t matter. I don’t matter. In the grand scheme of things, our lives are meaningless. Now if that isn’t the most fucking depressing start to a blog post that anyone has ever written, then I don’t know what is. But I do have a point, but I need to talk about some personal stuff to make it. The health of my family has been on my mind a…
My lack of blogging recently has bothered me. Part of it was that I was a little burnt out . I just had very little to talk about. But there was something else. Around that same time Umami decided to go to version 3.0. For those of you who don’t know, Umami is a Google Analytics alternative that is self hostable and privacy focused. The problem is, the new update is garbage. The new UI is…
Yes, this is late. It has been a busy few days. Work Wait. Work? Yeah, kinda. I got a call back a few days ago, and now have an interview scheduled for January. I received another call back today, but no interview with that one yet, they had some questions about the C/V. I’m honestly surprised about both of these given the time of year and how shit the economy is. Programming I worked on a…
I was so close, y’all. I promised myself that I would blog every day from mid-September to the end of the year. But I’ve failed. I wanted to write yesterday, but I had nothing to write about. Same with today. It’s not like I have no ideas, but nothing that I’m motivated to actually take up. I’ve learned a few things during this process. First, forcing it is a bad…
This is an awesome post. I may end up doing something similar to Alex, though I’m not sure my drivel on social media over the last twenty years is really all the effort. It’d still be a type of online digital journal, so it might be worth doing. Link: https://alexwlchan.net/2025/social-media-scrapbook/?ref=rss
Normally, it takes until about the middle of February for me to get sick of Winter. Usually, in mid-December we still see some 40 degree days. Almost never are we under 20 degrees. This year, we’ve seen -8 Degrees (these are all in Fahrenheit). More than once. It has been effin’ cold. And we have a ton of snow on the ground. In some places near me, we’ve already had 50 inches of…
Video: https://youtu.be/bcYJY7Ci9i8?si=vmNhbY8XkmErkgUf Taylor Bell Running the NYC Marathon I couldn’t walk a mile if you paid me to do so. But I found this video incredibly inspiring.