Blog

📌 Saturday night in Gourock, the Firth black under a sky that never quite committed to rain all day, The Protomen's Act III: This City Made Us loud in the headphones - a record twenty years in the making, the third act of a rock opera about robots refusing to accept that nothing can be changed. I spent the evening replacing my homepage. Not a glamorous job. But somewhere around the third broken certificate I realised I was building, one more time, a small machine whose only purpose is to stand between me and the platforms.

📌 Sunday evening in Gourock, the Firth gone the same flat grey as the sky, Katatonia's Sky Void of Stars low in the headphones, one of the cats asleep across the amrchair. The plan was to do nothing in particular. Instead I spent the evening watching my own YouTube front-end fall over, because somebody in Mountain View renamed a key in a JSON object and a whole class of software stopped working at once. Btw: Chuck Severance started an amazing series about AI coding. Amazing...

📌 Thursday evening in Gourock. Simone Simons' Vermillion in the headphones - that voice I've known across twelve Epica records, finally on its own, no longer sharing the room with a wall of guitars. On the desk a 2014 LG G Watch, awake, alive, with a night-themed wallpaper I just pushed onto it by hand over adb and a heartbeat icon pulsing as though it hadn't been sitting in a drawer for six months doing nothing.

📌 Late Thursday in Gourock. Heating still off for the season, the desk lamp on the warm setting, Blut Aus Nord's 777 - Sect(s) in the headphones because the album's drone matches the mood of reading a kernel changelog at midnight. The kind of evening I was going to spend reading a novel and instead spent reading apt-cache policy linux-image-amd64.

📌 More than one night in Gourock, the heating off, the UM690L breathing hard. Xandria's The Wonders Still Awaiting in the headphones throughout - Reborn on loop while qwen3.6 spent four hundred seconds explaining itself to me one bash script at a time.

📌 Two nights, no sleep, and a novel finished. David Townsend in the headphones throughout.

📌 "The best time to degoogle was more than ten years ago. The second best time is before they make it impossible." - nobody famous, but somebody right -

📌 Soen in the headphones. NextDNS finally off the shelf.

📌 Spent the night writing about the homelab paradox. It will be published — sometime — on an external outlet. Listening Ghost, mostly. The playlist tracked the mood.

📌 Migrated this site from MkDocs Material to Zola tonight. The trigger was simple: MkDocs feels like a project running on inertia. Faun playing in the headphones throughout.

📌 pfSense. Installed months ago. Never touched. Tonight that changed.

📌 Sent the letter to the solicitor this evening. Green Lung in the headphones throughout.

📌 Spent the night building centralised authentication for the homelab. Blind Guardian in the headphones. The goal: one LDAP source of truth for every host, no more per-machine root access.

📌 Updated wg-easy tonight. Twenty-two months of accumulated bit rot, compressed into a thirty-minute session. Kreator in the headphones throughout.

📌 Built a network monitoring setup tonight. Two LXC containers on Proxmox, ntopng for traffic analysis, ntfy for push notifications. Sakis Tolis in the headphones throughout.

📌 The site has two new pages now - Music and Books. Not because anyone asked, but because a personal site without those feels incomplete. They say more about a person than any CV ever could.

Speaking of which - the CV is coming. Soon. Probably after the next sleepless night. Or maybe not...