A technical blog.
I pre-ordered the MKII iPod Mod Kit - MIN verson after seeing it last year and missing the last few rounds of ordering for the 1st generation or MKI . This mod kit includes parts that allow you to modernize your iPod Video (or Classic) 5th gen and up! It adds bluetooth audio support, USB-C charging, an aluminium and glass case, support for a larger battery, among other improvements. I've been…
I do not know exactly how to summarize the last few weeks. Connecting Home We started a family vacation and the tech I had prepared worked well enough. I had BAXIAL running at home and was able to access my audio library through Navidrome and my podcasts through audiobookshelf everyday. I had downloaded multiple local copies of media as a backup as well. The cruise ship's wifi worked fine for…
To prepare for our upcoming vacation, we bought some Apple AirTag™ 2's. These are the updated location tracking devices that work in the Apple™ ecosystem. We've had success with them in the past for tracking luggage. Unfortunately, the new AirTag™ 2's require that iOS devices are running iOS 26.2.1 or later . I could not add the new AirTags to my Apple account through the FindMy application. It…
After 18 months of preparation and planning. It's almost time for our family to leave on our Summer Vacation Bonanza 2026 . We're headed to Seattle and parts of Alaska and northern Canada. Then, we're crossing the Pacific to Japan, ending up back in mid-Ontario towards the end. I'm committed to blogging throughout the trip to share images and experiences. My hope is 250 words a day as a Trip Log.…
With consumer tech rising in price (with industry supply and demand) it feels like everything is stagnant. It doesn't make much sense to build a custom computer or buy new parts to refresh an existing system. Additionally, we have large language models being given increasing autonomy. They are allowed more permissions and being integrated into production systems. Depending on the setup, they can…
Off-Duty in the Hallway #5: Transporter Misfire Notice: Any similarities to persons living and/or dead is definitely intentional. The above comic panel is fan art. It is considered fair dealing for the purpose of parody under the Canadian Copyright Act ( R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42 ).
I got this idea from Chris Smith's post, Making a Font of My Handwriting . The post serves as an excellent guide and introduction to Calligraphr . I've wanted to create fonts on my own handwriting for years. I know that I've tried this at numerous times past and quickly abandoned the pursuit. I have an old wacom tablet, but it's small and not precise for handwriting. I've made a handwritten post…
I'm playing into the meme, Micro$hit Window$ is terrible. screenshot: Microshaft Winblows 98 (1998) I've been solely running Linux distributions on my personal laptop for more than seven years now. In 2024, I repurposed an old desktop with Ubuntu, for use as a server and secondary desktop. I'm realizing that I rarely use my Windows 11 desktop machine. I enjoy using Linux. Here's a rundown of my…
Off-Duty in the Hallway #4: Avoidance Notice: Any similarities to persons living and/or dead is definitely intentional. The above comic panel is fan art. It is considered fair dealing for the purpose of parody under the Canadian Copyright Act ( R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42 ).
Webcomic 3: The Talaxian in "Off-Duty in the Hallway" Notice: Any similarities to persons living and/or dead is definitely intentional. The above comic panel is fan art. It is considered fair dealing for the purpose of parody under the Canadian Copyright Act ( R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42 ).
This will be a limited webcomic series from The Only Blog Ever . Comic 2: Another Run-In with 8472 Webcomic 2: Ensign Brendan in "Off-Duty in the Hallway" Synopsis Set somewhere in the Delta Quadrant, Off-Duty in the Hallway is an exploration of the daily (mostly mundane) interactions between humans and their guests (or invaders) traveling through space. It follows the trials and tribulations of a…
Webcomic 1: Ensign Brendan in "Off-Duty in the Hallway" I do not want to offend the open source community or the developers who make these tools. If you have a program or workflow that works for you, please, let me know . Last sick-day, I tried making a vector trace image in Inkscape. The UI tool icons were hard to see against the dark window theme (I corrected this below). The tools are…
On my Framework laptop, I use the btrfs , pronounced butter-FS, filesystem. On Fedora , It has been offered as the default filesystem since Fedora 33. It supports quick snapshotting for the file system. For instance, you can get a file back that you had previously changed or deleted, if you kept an earlier btrfs snapshot. This is a reference for my workflow. I'll need this in a few months when I…
I'm not much of a keyboard aficionado. Last year, I tried buying a regular height mechanical keyboard and sold it instantly. I like low-profile mechanical keyboards with red switches (like my main logitech). I can type much faster on a low-profile keyboard than on a standard height chonker. As a bilingual writer, I'm often switching between keyboard layouts in software. When writing in English, I…
Once again, a reminder, to myself, that this is a personal blog. This weekend, was our first weekend above 25 °C in southwestern (a marketing department term) Ontario. It was also a holiday long-weekend, meaning that my family had more time to spend together and to get our household organized as we like. A pair of ethernet network jacks I installed. I had a few hours to spare. As of late, I…
This was originally a comment to Kev Quirk’s post, Is Bitwarden preparing for a sale? posted yesterday. I’ve expanded on my thoughts here. A door keeping us secure. I've side-stepped and ignored the web-based password manager revolution for years. In 2016, I spent a weekend exporting all my passwords and autofill information from multiple Google account profiles (using Google Takeout), from my…
source: Google Streetview of a gas station with the AOL mail logo superimposed, edited by author. Act 1: Life Last night, I started deleting YouTube channel subscriptions en masse from my profile. It has became less of a curated list and more a mass of pulverized chicken protein slurped out onto a conveyor belt for reshaping through an industrial extruder. I'm not sure if it's a change in the…
Last night, my father-in-law’s, MacBook Pro (2019) appeared very much broken. It's a 2019 MacBook Pro 16", identified as MacbookPro16,1 , model A2141 driven by a 2.4 GHz Intel i9, 32 GB of DDR4 RAM and 2 TB of Apple SSD on-board storage. The iPhone camera artificially brightened the above picture considerably. In real-life, the display backlight was not visible at all. It was super dark. The…
Grounding Internet links in their time and their context. In large part, this is the reasoning behind these linkdumps . See January here . Source: Internet - A first discovery book, 2000 (pub. Scholatic) Posts Everything's Getting Worse by FUTO [video] Building the future post by Cory Dransfeldt. A reflection on the current state of the tech industry. Et maintenant, quelque chose de complètement…
En toute humilité, voyant l'article de blogue de brennan.day intitulé « Brenjour! C'est moi! Sur L'identité , » j'ai dit, à haute voix, à mon épouse, "What? A blogger I admire quoted me on his blog?!" -- « Comment ça? Un auteur que j'admire m'a cité sur son blogue? » [traduction libre]. Je me permets de voler son titre. C'est donc ma place de pouvoir réfléchir, de nouveau, par écrit. Bien que…
More on my quest to reduce idle power usage and increase battery life on Linux. Read Part 1 and Part 2 . The title says it all. Following another comment on the Framework community forums, I wanted to get a solid baseline for the idle power usage on different linux distros. I downloaded a bunch of .iso files and tested power statistics of their live environments using PowerTOP. Below are the…
This post was written in fits and starts. It's a spiritual successor to my previous post. Last night, while checking PowerTOP (again). I was noticing my FW 13 (12th gen) reaching various C-States. C-States or CPU Power States are power management levels that a computer processor can use to lower power consumption when the computer is idle. Generally, the higher the number the more power savings…
A follow-up to my previous post about my experiences with the framework. Given that Framework is hosting a Next Gen livestream this afternoon and I'm a consumerist-shill , here are my thoughts. Overall, I've had a decent experience with my framework laptop. It's a Framework 13" with an Intel 12th gen i5-1240P , 64GB DDR4 RAM, and a 2TB NVMe SSD . I've written about my experiences here , here ,…
The promise of AI is the promise of a greater tomorrow? If so, what is this tomorrow? Is it full of LLMs doing the menial labour of humans who weren’t actually that efficient at completing? Is it full of drones doing automated surveillance and airstrikes? Besides, who else will they get to run those oversized ordering tablets at every fast-food chain location? Lately, as written here, I’ve been…
I have this pull, same as always, to categorize, sort, and box everything up into, over-engineered, boxes, cartons, and cases. Build a bunker [1] , label everything, put it all on a shelf, with laminated content lists and then I'll die happy. Arthur (1996) - S01E14 "Arthur the Wrecker" Much of the data organization and retention projects, about which I write, are meant to make data curation…
This post is part 2 of my journey restoring an Apple iBook G4 from 2005. Find Part 1 here . Last week, I got my 2005 iBook G4 running OS X 10.4.11. It works fine. It's a little slow, it runs hot, the battery doesn't work and the software needs updating. Having a mac computer back then, felt like being in a special club . A lot of OS X apps felt indie and niche. They had aqua styling with glossy…
Computer hardware pricing is untenable for home users. Corporate computing contracts are killing homelabbers, hobbiests, indie nerds and basement geeks. Products containing DRAM (ex., RAM sticks) have sky-rocketed in price over the past 6 months. Products containing NAND (ex., SSD's) have followed the trend. This bubble is affecting all consumer-facing tech products. Crisis All prices below are…
I don't trust myself with USB flash drives. They are small, easy to misplace and (used to be) inexpensive enough to be semi-disposable. I can load data onto a USB key and hand it off without a second thought. USB flash drives could be the modern floppy disk, but recently sky-rocketing in price, like most flash-based devices, they are no longer an inexpensive option. In 2026, we cannot hand someone…
I've heard about Navidrome for a long time, now. On a lark, I decided to spin up a docker container on BAXIAL and try it out. I currently use YouTube Music while in the car to stream music. Locally, I sync my music folder on my laptop and desktop using Syncthing and listen with Strawberry . You could say I'm replacing Spotify here, but I haven't used Spotify since 2020. Navidrome should allow…
After 6 hours of sleep, I awoke thinking about changing the site design and flow of information. I could not force myself back to a state of slumber until I had put these ideas down for a potential site refresh. Last week, I added a hero image on the index.html . It's a picture I traced and coloured as vector art. The transparent gradient overlay and resizing title and tagline are all done in CSS…
I enjoy tagging and organizing my music collection. Transferring music to a portable player, a new device, a USB drive or a compact disk, I want the ID3 tags to be consistent and to properly identify the files. As for audio formats, most modern devices play . mp3 and .flac which covers most use cases. I used to search for the proper album titles and artists manually. In the early 2000's, I used…
Voici un commentaire récent que j'ai affiché sur le site de brennan.day en réponse à ma lecture de son article de blogue qu'il a rédigé en français. Le commentaire ci-dessous est dans son format original. C'est un lien extratextuel (à un œuvre externe ). Moi, j'ai appris le français aussi de ma grand-mère et à l'école primaire. Je suis Franco-ontarien. Je suis anglophone d'origine. Une partie de…
An ordinary day becomes a retro day. According to the applefritter forums and Jeff Geerling, it's Marchintosh . Might as well restore my 20 year-old Apple iBook G4 . Caption: My stickerbombed iBook G4 (1.33 GHz, 2005) I received this iBook notebook on Christmas of 2005. I was a young teenager. I already had an iPod 4G (30 GB) and had seen the iBook featured on TechTV: the stars of The Screen…
Just hearing about the layoffs and shutdown surrounding Digg . Here's the thing though. You want to make a quality news aggregator for geeks? Digg v1.0 already did that. It had a community that made it wonderful. Twenty years ago, it was a main page full of links from around the Internet. Yes, it had issues with content moderation . Yes, it had critics and design issues. Yes, nefarious users and…
The original M$ xbox , released in 2001, was the first console I purchased for myself. I bought my original xbox in 2005, at Best Buy (in Canada), after the Xbox 360 had already been announced. Back then, it was a few hundred dollars less than the Xbox 360 and it included multiple controllers and games. Game were plentiful and cheap because of the mature development cycle. Twenty years later, I…
This blog is my blog. I enjoy writing, practising my writing, sharing projects, reviewing gear, cataloguing my life, dissecting how I spend my time, and changing or adding features to the site. There are many parts of my life that I do not share. Roles that I hold outside of the spheres of technology and the occasional opine. This is for writing and sharing what I want, when and how I want. Still…
For the past few weeks, I've been having power issues. My homelab has a APC ES 550VA UPS . It acts as a battery backup and serge protector for the computers and devices that power my office and smart-home stack. It's a ubiquitous black box that gets stuffed under a desk or behind a trashcan and neglected for years. The tangle of power cables and power bricks sit undisturbed for years... until it…
When was the last time you felt true comfort? When you felt deeply comforted and at peace before you feel asleep. Excited at the prospect of resting, in preparation for the next day of your life. For me, it was before I started my career. Before I had graduated university, when I had a simple single bed, the same sheets I had had for fifteen years, and a warm feeling that everything would be okay.…
This weekend, I spent too much time redesigning the website. Which website? This website . I now have this cool ASCII lightning bolt in the .css file! * ** *** **** ******* **** *** ** * It all started when I wanted to move the CSS from being inline (in the .html files with each page) to being externally references from it's own .css file. Once that was done, I just kept making changes. Here's a…
I watch a lot of YouTube. It's my main form of entertainment. It's on all of my devices. I follow over 900 channels and watch creators regularly. I wanted a way to track my changing tastes and watch time through my YouTube addiction. Similar to how I track music using ListenBrainz. My watch history encompasses time between December 2018 and January 2026. Note: While I did watch YouTube before…
Last night, I traced an image of myself using Affinity Designer. Working with vector tools has proven to be a meditative experience. It's all lines! I couldn't help myself.
I broke down. I've lost. I've become one with the machine. Therefore, I am its holy servant. Speak softly now, for am I weak-willed and powerless. Besides, my last post was getting lengthy. This post is an update of my scrobbling adventures. Part 1 (Scrobbling Hell) Part 2 (Scrobbling Hell II) AI Note: All of the python scripts referenced below, in the linked github, were generated using LLM AI…
I'm an avid music collector. In 2025, I exported a lot of my listening data from last.fm into ListenBrainz . I had most of my scrobbles, but not all of them. Here is an update to the original post . Note: Scrobbles or listens are individual songs you've listened to and submitted to a music tracking service like last.fm , libre.fm or (my favourite) ListenBrainz. I use the terms interchangeably in…
On an individual level, digital sovereignty means storing my own digital data on my personal computers that I control. This means that I have sole physical and digital access to the information. This security is important to me. Knowing where my tax records, photos, notes, music and bank statements are located helps me sleep soundly. It’s part of the reason I’ve been such a strong advocate for…
Recent links of interest: Cory Doctorow's Keynote Address for the Digital Government Leaders Summit in Ottawa (dated January 28, 2026). In the speech, Cory implores Canadian government officials (and elites) to allow Canadian solutions to current tech platforms. Digital sovereignty and net neutrality should be primordial for any free society. Technology Connections video about renewable energy .…
Here's my new backup strategy. It uses luks , cryptsetup and rsync . Note: This post is very Linux command-line heavy. This is a continuing series about operating a home server. Part 1 (HDD) of the saga is here. Part 2 (ZFS) can be found here. Part 3 (GPU) is found here. Part 4 (KVM) is here. Part 5 (L2ARC Cache) is here. Remember, 3-2-1: 3 copies, on 2 different physical mediums, with 1 offsite…
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch from 2018 was a Choose Your Own Adventure film. It was part of a mid-2010's effort from Netflix to creep into interactive television . In Bandersnatch's case, the full video file was over 5 hours of content. As you watched, the movie would stop and ask you to choose between two options. The options you chose would influence the scenes, you would see, moving forward. In…
Starting my holiday vacation, this year, I decided to play some DOS games from my childhood. MS-DOS was the early 1990's text-based operating system from Microsoft. In the late-nineties, it was common for Windows systems to run certain DOS programs with custom menus with simpler interfaces for new users. This post is a spiritual successor to Gered's blog post, found here: Gered's Ramblings: Island…
It's been 31 days and I've been feeling neglectful of the blog. So, to assuage this feeling, let's talk about what I've been doing tech-wise. I have had the Sony a7 iii listed on my /upgrades slashpage for a few months now. Taking advantage of black Friday sales, I ordered the camera and spent a few days with it. Coming from my Canon SL2 EOS 200D , I immediately felt the camera was too heavy. It…
One of my core beliefs about myself. Is that i am a loser and that I’m not worth the air that I breathe. I don’t know when it started. But, I have this rooted belief that I am just less than. I’ve been asking myself these three questions to gauge my feelings of self-worth: Who am I? Am I happy? and, What would it take for me to feel deserving of happiness? Now, I have a lot of stability in my…