Tech

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Changelog

2026-04-02

Initial publication

Background

For many months I’ve been trying to migrate away from my Boox Palma. I’ve had it for pushing 3 years now (I think, definitely over 2 years now) and the Android updates have stopped. This worries me because the Android version is old enough now to risk going unsupported by Google. This won’t happen ‘soon’ but it will happen. For me this is A Problem. That said: I adore the Boox devices and still strongly recommend them if you’re ok with an Android based device.

Table of Contents

Changelog

2026-03-30

Initial publication

A Critical Note

I live in America, I’m a career programmer and I have horrific health problems.

Normally I’d assume folk know what that means but I need to be explicit: this means my survival requires me to have a practical, useful and ‘reasonable’ understanding of Generative AI. Particularly models that programmers use.

Table of Contents

Changelog

2026-03-10

Initial publication

Preface

This blog post is the result of two humans bringing up self-hosted search within days of each other. I was curious and ended up dancing with the Red Queen.

This post will discuss two options I find useful for self-hosted search and my thoughts regarding both. However, it must be noted: this is a wholly different approach to search than going to some big name (Google / Bing / Duck Duck Go / Others) search engine and casting about the internet.

Table of Contents

Changelog

2026-03-11

Add section about reading statistics 2026-03-07

Initial publication

Preface

I’ve been eyeing the XTeink X4 for awhile now but the whole ’no book metadata browser’ gave me significant pause for quite some time. Historically I’ve used readers like the Kobo Clara HD, Moon+ Reader Pro and Librera Reader which provide me a good way of viewing books by tags, series and similar metadata which I rely on to filter my ’to read’ list.

Table of Contents

Changelog

2025-12-07

Initial publication

Context

Historically I’ve been Not Fond of traditional telco services (sms/mms, phone calls, voicemail) as they are strongly tied to a specific device and it’s next to impossible to work with them from multiple devices. Signal, XMPP, Telegram, Matrix, Delta.Chat and others don’t suffer this problem. I can link up multiple devices and work with the data freely.

Table of Contents

Changelog

2025-08-20

Initial publication

Rose, Thorn, Bud

First some context and background before getting to my thoughts.

The Rose, Thorn, Bud mindfulness exercise is designed to get you to think about the day’s events. It’s basically a mini journal entry.

Some History

Recently a friend got me thinking about the old Palm Pilot, Sony Clie and Handspring Visor PDA’s (personal data assistant) and how they were particulary useful.

They existed prior to having the internet always at-hand, they are very focused environments, they use a stylus for text entry which mimicks writing in a notebook and there were a ton of great apps available.

They worked ridiculously well as pocket notebooks, date books, todo list managers, course work managers and a hell of a lot more. I should know, I had a Sony Clie during my Uni years and it’s the reason I didn’t wash out or fail out of Uni. I relied on the Clie heavily and it truly was a second brain for me.

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Going Digital

Given I gave up on Analog coloring and drawing due to health and living space needs, I figured it was time to really commit to figuring out digital for coloring and drawing. Note I intentionally avoided making desktop or laptop computers a requirement for my setup. I want to have this whenever/wherever in it’s simplest form.

Analog Version

This post is about the digital anti bad habit notebook. For an analog version implemented as a pocket notebook, see this post.

The Post

Not going to lie : I have a few bad habits and have used my analog anti bad habit notebook to break some in teh past.

Sadly, I can no longer reliably use analog methods for my notes and similar. Due to this I went ahead and re-implemented the anti bad habit analog notebook as an Obsidian vault. So far it’s proven very helpful for tracking a bad habit I want to break and should work well for pretty much any “bad habit” one may want to break.

What’s Within?

This post contains a breakdown of how I use a computer, laptop and phone. I’ve made some significant changes over the last few years due to worsening health hassles. Everything here has been iterated over time in order to create a compute environment that makes my life easier to manage. Especially when my my health hassles are at their worst.

Feel free to borrow ideas, adapt things and generally use the contents of this post as you see fit. As always: this is a highly individual approach to computering. Take what works, leave the rest.