Daily - Feb. 3, 2026

Previously…

Today’s recap

I am feeling the need to end this hibernation. I am ready to get back to work. Yes, its been nice to be home and I’m sure a month from now I’ll want to be back in hibernation. Right now I’m feeling cooped up. I’m getting stir crazy. We have at least one stop booked for most of next week, so its coming.

I spent all morning finishing up my truck organization. After I worked on my monthly backups.

That’s it. That is all I did today, other than hang with the family and shitpost on Mastodon.

Oh, I did chat with my buddy Mike about his appearance on Linux for Everyone with Jason Evangelho. Its so rad Mike is getting so much traction with NixbookOS and his charity work.

Probably finish Dabangg 3 tonight.

Projects

First up was wrapping up my VEDC organization. I’m happy with the layout and I don’t feel like I’m buried under a bunch of crap. Honestly, while sitting in the truck you can hardly notice anything. I have a ton of room left for whatever comes up while working and I can literally live in my truck for a week with few compromises. The last bits I needed to do today was organize zone 2, which is behind the drivers seat. The VEDC organizer my wife got me a fantastic. I’m only using about half of it right now. I do need to figure out how I’m going to store items in zone 3 to protect it from the weather, so that is on hold for now.

I really gotta figure something out with these backups. I know I keep saying that. But, I have like 3 drives in various “kits” that are encrypted and offline, so I need to manually move files around. It takes forever. What I need to do is simplify the number of places. The time to run backups was extended today because I ran into some other issues that weren’t part of the backups, but I fixed them at the same time.

Let’s make this a next month problem.

Daily gratitude

• Super happy for Mike, he’s an amazing dude doing heroic work. Grateful for his friendship.
• My sister gave me this fold out desk I use the garage and its awesome. Her father-in-law made it by hand. Its been getting a ton of use the last few days.
• Seeing my truck organized feels good.

Tomorrow’s big thing(s)

I need to lower the spare tire on the truck, check it for problems, and give the jack a whirl to make sure all is good in case I get a flat.

Loose thoughts

I’ve been seeing a lot of folks post on the homelab hashtag on Mastodon talking about taking on self-hosting to save themselves money. I think this is the wrong mindset and a recipe for disappointment. Yes, you can save money. But if you’re in it to save money you’re gonna hate the system maintenance. You’re gonna hate the boring work, like testing backups. This is doubly true if you’re trying to cut out Apple subscriptions. Apple makes it really fucking hard to get things working, like background sync, where it just works when you use iCloud. Then you’re also trying to onboard other friends and family who want things to just work and not have to constantly open a app to make sure its running or always have Tailscale running and remember to start it on reboots. If you’re in it only to save money now its not a homelab, its a home-prod and critical to your daily life. That carries different weight.

I read about systemd quadlets and using them for running rootless Podman containers. Yeah, not for me.

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