Daily - 2025-11-26

Previously…

Yesterday recap

Wife and I coordinated with the boy and headed out to WinCo at 6:30AM. This is the only WinCo within an hours drive to us and is always intensely busy. For those who are unfamiliar, WinCo is a grocery store that known for being cheap. From what I read, I would put it in the same category as an Aldi’s. We were going there to get the rest of our Thanksgiving food.

Wife used to do all our grocery shopping there, but I talked her out of it about a year ago. Because it is so busy, she was doing the grocery shopping late in the evening, often after 10PM. Even then, this store had lines that wrapped around the store for checkout. It is also not in the best neighborhood. Last, our van should not be making long drives like this. So, now she does our grocery shopping at our Walmart instead.

To avoid the huge crowds, especially during a food-based holiday week, we decided the best time would be to go as early as possible in the morning. We were right. When we got there there was what I would call a normal amount of people in the store, not a music festival size crowd like normally is. We got everything we needed and were home before the gorls woke up.

While driving home my wife and I were talking about the places near us that have a giving tree. We donate as much as we can and actively seek out these locations. Wife told me a story about when she was about 10 and she got gifts from one of the giving trees after her parents got divorced. During that story she unlocked a part of my brain that made me remember that I also got gifts from a giving tree as a child. I had completely forgot and I remembered one year the whole family got them, including my parents. I don’t remember what I got, but I distinctly remember what my (step)dad got. My (step)dad is a real piece of shit. An alcoholic who is also the most selfish and narcissistic person I have ever met. I remember him complaining about the work gloves he received from the giving tree.

When we got home we had breakfast and then I went to my office to balance the biz books and process payroll.

I also used this time to write up some notes about Linux multi-seat and wrote a quick blog post about it.

I then started thinking about how I might be able to use a portable drive as the source of Nextcloud data syncing between devices. I quickly gave up on it because I know that every time I go to use a computer I’m going to forget to plug in the portable drive. In fact, the drive will probably be in some random spot in the house and I’ll always be frustrated.

This brought me back to the Chromebook as being my EDC and a portable homelab. I wanted to test how well it did serving media, so setup a Jellyfin server and pointed it at TV shows and movies I had on an external drive. Worked good. I was even able to have multiple streams going from a Jellyfin instance inside Docker, running in the Linux Environment on a arm-based ChromeOS laptop. Neat!

Next I tried out running a full Linux desktop in the browser with webtop. I want my EDC to be able to run VMs, or VM-like, for testing, experiments, etc. I figured using webtop in a container, then accessing in the browser, would be a viable way on the Chromebook. Sure enough, works pretty good. I learned about proot-apps and tested running aarch64 binaries by pulling them in with stew.

Posted this on my Mastodon while working on it:

“Spent some time today pushing the Chromebook a little further. Jellyfin with multiple concurrent streams works good. Ran a full Linux desktop with webtop in Docker, desktop viewer in the browser. Works surprisingly well. Yesterday tested distrobox containers with a custom home dir. Pretty awesome what the Linux Environment and Docker or Podman can accomplish.”

I also posted some thoughts on whether this is a portable homelab or a portable desktop.

In the afternoon I did some testing on the Cat6 cable run going to my sons room. There’s gotta be something wrong with the cable. Both terminations are good, good connection to the router, but doesn’t work after testing multiple devices. So, now I gotta get on my list to chase this cable run, which is long, to see where the problem is.

Dinner, family time, bed time, and then wife and I watched Cliffhanger. In there I also practiced my magic routine.

Gratitude

We are going to have a great feast for Thanksgiving. I’m happy we can afford it and that my wife is an amazing cook who will prepare an amazing meal.

How are you feeling today?

The holiday season can really do a number on you, eh? Starting to settle down, but we will see what else gets unlocked.

Todo

Chores

• Prep for Thanksgiving. So, help wife with food prep, which is mostly me doing dishes and other kitchen clean-up while she cooks. I’m gonna do some laundry, too.
• Prep my camera and associated gear. We always take a family photo at Thanksgiving.

Fun

• Practice my magic for the talent show. Its tomorrow!

Projects

• Setup Winlator on my phone again. Since I’m not going to carry a regular laptop, my phone will handle the gaming portion of my EDC build-out. I have some regular mobile games on there, but I want some of my fave GOG games and a game or two that the gorls like to play. We will see how far I can push this S10e.

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