…are a soldering iron and a hot glue gun. Seriously, nothing beats the feeling of handing your kid a previously broken toy that you fixed yourself. Tonight’s surgery involved a light up fan thing that had fallen, breaking the plastic shaft and pulling the wires out. Came out good as new after some glue and solder!
I got bit by the self-hosting bug this weekend, and boy it's been fun! You see, I've had a Synology DS923+ and HP Victus 15L that have been sitting around gathering dust in the basement. In a desire to stop spending subscription fees to Apple and Google for photo storage, I decided to move the machines to my upstairs office and put them to use. I added a new router to direct connect the HP and Synology with my laptop dock. From there, I imaged the HP with Ubuntu Server and got it setup with Dockge. I mounted the Synology via NFS so I have direct access to it's storage on the HP. My new "server rack" So far I've installed two services that I absolutely love. First is a Google Photos alternative called Immich . It supports local facial detection, mobile backup and features a really nice app available on F-Droid. I can create public share links, organize into albums and view photos I've taken on a map. The Immich app is so good Second, I installed Memos , basically a personal Twitter feed to dump thoughts, notes, images and tasks. I built a dead simple CLI app that connects via the API so I can just run . You can organize by tags, separate spaces and tasks. You can even post publicly to turn it into a microblog of sorts (which I very well might do). Both of these services are behind a Caddy reverse proxy. I forwarded HTTP(S) ports through my UniFi Dream Machine to the HP and added subdomains to to support the services. Caddy takes care of SSL certs automatically! I'll probably add Jellyfin in the near future, especially since the HP is rocking a pretty decent graphics card for transcoding media. I'll likely move this blog off of my DigitalOcean VPS onto the HP as well to save a few extra bucks every month. If anyone has additional suggestions on services I should install, let me know!
One day when we were in China we had to spend a few hours in an appliance store with the kids. Asking my 4-year old to sit still and learn the ins and outs of ductless AC units obviously wasn't going to happen. He quickly took to running around the store, whizzing in and out of washers, refrigerators and automatic toilets that would raise their lids in a salute to his craziness. He played hide and seek among the displays, laughing all the while. As an American parent, it stressed me the hell out. Not because I thought he would get hurt or cause damage, there was very little chance of that. Rather, it was my expectation of being yelled at. Having some elderly shopper give a lecture, or a sales associate call a manager to deal with us. In the USA, a kid being allowed to run around and have fun in a store just isn't something that's allowed to happen. It's too disruptive, too "dangerous", too filled with "what ifs". Later that day he fell asleep at a bike shop, having spent all his energy in the appliance store My wife told me to chill out and said "nobody here gives a shit". And sure enough, my son was completely ignored. At one point, another kid joined in while his parents reviewed refrigerators. The only time employees got involved was when my son got so bored he started throwing a fit. Suddenly 4 associates descended on him, each offering various sweets and snacks to cheer him up. That day has been stuck in my mind since returning home. America is filled to the brim with rules to be followed, least you risk being told off. Not to say China is without rules, far from it, but there's a strong culture "who gives a shit" when it comes to small things.
Nothing beats breakfast outside on a crisp, 54F morning with a warm cup of coffee!
The past two weeks I've developed a problem. Almost every other day I've been switching between two tech extremes, my MacBook + iPad Pro + iPhone + Apple Watch setup and my Ubuntu ThinkPad + GrapheneOS Pixel + Supernote Nomad + Fitbit/Pixel Watch setup. It's gotten to the point that I imagine someone at Google Fi must be looking at my insane amount of eSim transfers and just thinking "what the hell is wrong with this guy?". I think there's a number of reasons why my mind has been causing me to do this, but it all comes down to one goal: dumping Apple once and for all. There's the obvious case for privacy, escaping the walled garden and freeing myself from iCloud subscriptions. I also want to get out of such an expensive line of products, and open myself up to more Chinese domestic products (Xiaomi, Huawei, etc) in case I do end up moving to the country. Finally, I just find my Linux based computing devices to be faster. Somehow my Pixel 9 Pro is leagues snappier than my iPhone 17 Pro Max, and my ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 (feels like) it can run circles around my MacBook M1 Pro. Ever since Liquid Glass, my Apple devices just feel sluggish. But then why do I keep switching back to Apple? Primarily guilt, I spent too much on these damn Apple devices to not use them. Maybe someday I'll just bite the bullet and sell the Apple devices, until then, sorry Google Fi, I'm gonna need some more eSims provisioned.
Yesterday was Labor Day in the United States. Traditionally I’ve attended a cycling event called the “Ox Roast Ride” out of a small town called West Jefferson. It’s a great event that ends in a festival featuring pit-cooked ox roast sandwiches and live music. This event was where I did my first century (100-mile ride) in 2024 (the year I started cycling). Rest stop during my century ride at the Ox Roast Unfortunately, this year the Ox Roast ride was cancelled due to a lack of volunteers. To make up for it, a buddy and I did our own metric century ride (62-miles), ending in a brewery. It was mostly a trail ride with beautiful scenery as the first signs of fall have started creeping in. We had a fairly strong headwind on the way back, so our average pace was pretty low, but it was great to be out in the beautiful weather! Fingers crossed the Ox Roast Ride returns next year! I’m thankful I was at least able to join another ride hosted by the same group (Friends of Madison County), the Strawberry Ride, this year. They always have the best homemade Belgium Waffles at the rest stops!
I fell for the hype for a bit and was playing around with Omarchy on my ThinkPad. While I did like some of the opioniated setup (the theming system is very cool), a number of things bothered me. First and foremost, the controversy surrounding DHH is hard to ignore. I wasn't particularly well versed in it, but after doing some research I didn't feel great about using the distro. The second issue was the amount of AI. I said in my original article that some of the AI integration was pretty cool, and I still think so. Debugging a system crash with a model or leveraging AI to understand complex config files is a great use. But the problem is that everything is AI. It's a vibe coded Arch config, and that doesn't instill a ton of confidence when it comes to a daily driver. All that to say, I'm now testing out Pop_OS! with the new Cosmic desktop. I've used Pop_OS! before, back when it was basically a GNOME shell extension. I even own a System76 laptop and Launch Heavy keyboard. I support what the company is doing, and their CEO as done actual good (like fighting against age verification in OSS). It's a product I can feel good about supporting. So far, I'm pretty impressed! Cosmic has come a long way since the last time I tried out a beta. The theming is goregous and very customizable, workspaces is done very well, and the tiling is better than what's on offer in Omarchy land. I love that things were crafted rather than slopped together, and being built on Rust is a strong foundation. There's still some things missing, but overall I look forward to daily driving Pop_OS! and Cosmic. Heck, I might even try revitalizing my interest in coding by creating a app or two using their UI kit!
For as long as I can remember, computers have been a creative hobby for me. As a kid, I “hacked” programs with ResEdit on Macintosh System 9. I wrote programs in C++ on a Palm Pilot and built apps in Chipmunk BASIC on our iMac G3. Through high school, college and my career I’ve always been working on some side project. Something I could get lost in, solving problems while building something I felt proud of. One of my earliest personal websites (I had a geocities but can't find it) That’s gone now. The robots have extinguished the spark. I still grab my laptop in downtime, only to stare at the desktop, unsure what to do with it. The curiosity, creativity and thrill of solving problems is gone. What's the point when you can build anything with a sentence? It’s a weird feeling, a state of mourning almost. Losing a hobby, a part of me, that I’ve had since I was 12. And to be honest, I’m starting to feel the same way in regards to maintaining and writing on this site. Not sure how much longer this blog will stay, I just don’t think the internet and tech is a place for me anymore. It's good I have cycling, a sort of replacement hobby (that comes with social groups), but still, it hurts.
During our time in China I’ve been amazed by the number of EVs on the roads. Nearly every car you see is rocking a green license plate, signifying it’s powered by electricity. There’s two big driving factors behind the Chinese EV push. First off, getting vehicle registration is much faster in some cities if you are registering an EV. It can be a difference of waiting a year or more for a gas car versus a few months for an EV. The other contributing factor is the domestic car manufacturing industry. There are a massive number of domestic car brands, including offerings from electronics giants like Huawei and Xiaomi. These cars are good to, much better than what country’s like the US are able to offer, not to mention more affordable as well. It makes the automotive industry in the US look like prehistoric times.
If you’ve followed me on RSS for any amount of time, first off, thank you so much! Second, you may not have noticed how often this site changes. RSS protects you from the near-monthly changes that my mad scientist side makes to this site. This year alone, ThatAlexGuy.dev has been powered by 11ty, Hugo, plain HTML, Bear, Micro.blog , and Pure Blog. My files have sat on OpenBSD Amsterdam, DigitalOcean, and a Laravel Forge VPS. I’ve written new articles and lost old articles in migrations. My site has switched appearance more frequently than a Bian Lian (变脸) performer! I’ve come to realize I’ve been seeking both an identity and a voice. I want an outlet that reflects my interests, my background, and my day-to-day, but that’s more than what I could accomplish on something like Mastodon. All that brings us here, iteration 4 (or 8, or 15, or 16, I can’t remember). There are a few key differences and intentional choices that reflect where I want ThatAlexGuy to go. Building a new experience that will stick and satisfy the goals in my head won’t be easy, but here are the guiding pillars that are to shape what’s coming next. I have a desire to create in-depth, well-researched, and potentially interactive content. Many of my current posts come with a “1-minute read” tag. I want to change that. I’ll be digging into topics with greater detail, cross-referencing multiple sources, and (hopefully) interviewing others. As a result, I’ll be posting less frequently, but my new goal is quality over quantity. Regulars on my site will be aware of my “Photo Journal” series in which I posted a set of photos around a theme (macro, nature, Gameboy Camera ). I want to continue building my photography skills through the incorporation of high-quality photos in my articles. While text sets the tone, visuals set the atmosphere in an article. Here’s the big tomato, as they say (nobody says that): defining what this site represents. That means setting the tone and defining how topics string together to form a consistent narrative. I’ll be figuring this out for a while, but I want to leverage my interests such as indie technology, vintage computing, time away from the screen, photography, and Chinese culture. So what’s changed so far? Quite a bit! First, ThatAlexGuy.dev is now run by Ghost.org . For myself, this means less time in the technical weeds and more focus on writing. For readers, it opens the doors to a wider audience. Email newsletters are a more accessible way to stay up-to-date on new articles. Don’t worry though, RSS isn’t going anywhere! In fact, I managed to fix the broken RSS feed URLs from previous migrations (hopefully)! I’ve started to define the personality of the new site. I pulled background and accent colors from one of my favorite atmospheres in a game (Sprout Tower in Pokémon Gold). Using my iPad, I’ll be creating article images that give a calligraphy + hand-painted vibe. I’ve also brought in my Chinese name for the logo（小艾 - Little Alex). I’m working on my first longer-form article. It probably won’t be great, but first attempts never are. From there, I hope to refine my writing, researching, and supporting photography.
Back in the days of Geocities, I spent a lot of time hacking away on raw HTML and CSS. I enjoyed tweaking things, making it just right and experimenting with random ideas I had. I’d sketch things out, then turn them into a close(ish) version on the web. “Under construction” gifs would hide my unlinked, mad scientist HTML files. As I grew older, the idea of “hustle” culture slowly killed out this mindset. Instead of having fun, I felt everything I do on the web had to serve a purpose. If I wasn’t building something that might make money, I was wasting my time. And guess what? In 15ish years of operating under that mindset, I’ve made maybe $500 online. Pretty terrible investment if you ask me. I’m willing to bet I’m not alone in this mindset, it seems embedded into the millennial DNA. We’ve grown up with stories of dot com entrepreneurs making it big while sipping Mojitos on the beaches of Chiang Mai. You’re always just a few more late nights from quitting your job, joining NomadsList and traveling the world! The truth is, you’d probably have a better chance winning the lottery, so why waste your time chasing the impossible? Why turn an artistic, creative outlet into a second job that doesn’t put food on the table? Embrace the web as a hobby. Like pencils, paintbrushes and clay, the web is a way to give “physical” form to the images in your head with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. When you stop building for scale, potential customers and imagined profit, you free yourself to have fun. Build silly, build simple and above all else, build for the sake of creativity.
Today I wiped my MacBook Pro to factory defaults. I love the feeling of a freshly wiped computer, a blank slate to start fresh with. A chance to break away from bad file organization habits, remove unneeded login items and cleanup the menu bar. A hope that my now ancient M1 Pro can still be productive (especially when my new iPad absolutely smokes it). Thanks to iCloud, setting up a fresh copy of Mac OS is very fast. I’ve been pushing myself to stick with default apps more, so most things just resume syncing right away (Reminders, Notes, Calendar, Mail, Messages, iCloud Drive, etc). Outside of the defaults, I’m being intentional with what gets installed this time around. I’d like to have a max of 1 app in each category (ie not 5 code editors). I’m replacing iTerm with the stock terminal, Zed with Nova, Claude with Antigravity CLI, Fish with the default Zsh install. Here’s to a fresh start install!
Kev and Amit both talk about building software for themselves rather than for others. Solving their personal needs and making something that is exactly what they want. I love this, software should be personal and customized to the user. Building your own software brings out the “personal” in personal computing, and it’s how home computing started in the first place! In the days of the Commodore 64 or Atari 800, you were encouraged to write personal software. You turn on the Commodore and it gives you a blank canvas, ready for whatever BASIC program you can think of. If you built something you were especially proud of, you’d mail in the source code to “Compute!” or a similar publication to share with the world. The timing to bring back personal computing has never been better. In the age of subscriptions and enshittification, it’s never been easier to choose a different path. LLMs make building your own solutions more accessible. There’s nothing quite like building for yourself and iteratively improving it while you use it in your day-to-day.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my new iPad , it’s pretty much replaced my personal laptop in my day-to-day. Surprisingly it’s also replaced my need for a desktop computer. Through the use of my USB-C dock and Apple wireless keyboard/trackpad, this little iPad works perfectly as a desktop machine. It drives my 32” Ultrawide perfectly, and the windowed multi-tasking is excellent. It can even use my webcam! The only downside I’ve really run into is my monitor is pretty old, so the refresh rate is much lower than the iPad making my mouse feel laggy when moving between the two.
There’s a huge golf tournament happening near the co-working spot I work from, the Riverside U.S. Senior Open 2026. It’s been cool seeing the course prepare for this event over the past 2 months. First the fences went up, then they started constructing bleachers and now there’s TV camera towers dotting the landscape. I think the tournament starts today or tomorrow, but there’s been a lot of golfers practicing on the course the past 2 days. The roads are filled with police guarding each entrance and potential parking spot. There’s cop cars from districts all over Ohio, which isn’t surprising. Upper Arlington, the host district, is rather small so there’s no way they’d have a big enough force to cover the event. I did quickly check out the player roster, despite not really being into golf. I didn’t recognize any names, but to be fair I pretty much skimmed it to see if Tigers Woods was there (I don’t even know if he still plays).
I’ve never been great at dealing with stress. I have a tendency to overthink, assume the worst and constantly worry, it’s a great combination! This summer has been the most stressful of my life. My sleep has been terrible, I often feel ill and can’t get the knot out of my chest. It’s tiring to say the least. This has been compounded by a loss of time/interest for my hobbies. Cycling has mostly fell to the wayside and programming no longer captures my attention. Video games haven’t really stuck for a while now (though I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise). All to say, these are the reasons things have slowed down on here and also the driving force behind deleting most of my online presence. I’m hopeful things will calm down after August, fingers crossed!
After my last post , I pulled the trigger and went with an iPad Pro 11” with Apple Pencil Pro and Magic Keyboard case. Thankfully I got it the night before the massive Apple price hikes (although it still cost way too much). I gotta say, I love this thing! Obviously it’s a huge upgrade, I jumped forward 6 years in tech from my last iPad. The form factor is much nicer as well, the 12.9” was simply too big. 11” is perfect for getting work done, sketching, gaming and using it as an e-reader. I’m planning to sell off my Kindle Oasis and Supernote Nomad, the new iPad has easily replaced both. In addition to the iPad, I super splurged and grabbed a new lens for my Sony camera. Both purchases are in preparation for our trip to China in August. My goal is to pack light, since we’ll be traveling with two kids. The iPad replaces the need for a computer + e-reader + game console (hey, it’s a long trip)! The camera lens is significantly smaller and less bulky than my other lenses, increasing the likelihood I’ll carry the camera and snap more photos. I’ve already tested out photo editing on the iPad with Pixelmator Pro and the RAW files from my Sony. The experience is excellent, especially with the Apple Pencil in the mix. The M5 processor rips through any task I throw at it (it’s funny my iPad is now significantly more powerful than my MacBook Pro). Outside of our trip, I expect my traditional computers (desktop + laptops) will see a lot less usage. At this stage in my life, the iPad does 90% of what I need. For example, my entire blog publishing flow is now possible on this tablet. I can connect my SD card, edit photos with Pixelmator Pro, write the post and upload a draft with iA Writer, then attach the photos and publish via the Micro Blog website (yes, I changed again in preparation for the trip). I’m excited to use this setup in the “field”. I’ll have to find a nice cafe in Baotou to write and edit photos from 😜.
The London Ohio Strawberry Tour has been on my radar for years. Yesterday I finally got a chance to participate! I opted for the 44 mile route as I'm not nearly as in-shape as previous years. It was a really nice, mostly flat ride. The first stop was well stocked with everything from home-made Belgian waffles (a staple of all Friend's of Madison County events) and chocolate covered strawberries! Stop 2 was a simple water stop, but I had some fun conversations with other riders as we filled up our bottles. Remember kids, don't waffle while biking! This year's ride was special as the money was used to help finish the Ohio to Erie trail gap in London, Ohio. Presently the trail ends in the south of London, forcing riders to traverse the streets to rejoin the trail on the other side of town. From what one of the volunteer's was telling me, the contract has been secured to finish the trail and (if all goes well), it should be done in about 1.5 years! Mmmm, chocolate covered strawberries. The Ohio to Erie trail is one of the most impressive things Ohio has to offer (in my opinion). It's a 326 mile trail, 245 of which is dedicated, paved bike path. It connects Ohio's 3 major cities, Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland. There's also branch trails leading to places like Yellow Springs. The trail is dotted with beautiful small towns, free campsites and guest houses. <video controls width="250" class="mb-8"> <source src="/images/2026-london-tour/IMG_0609.MOV" type="video/mp4" /> </video> While there's a lot of terrible things about my country, the Ohio to Erie trail and events put on by volunteer organizations to maintain and expand the trail are truly incredible and give me hope. A well stocked rest stop manned by volunteers. Thanks for reading on RSS, you're awesome! If you want to be notified of new posts even faster, I have a newsletter as well, you can signup here!
I recently moved my blog to Astro . Since then I’ve been having an absolute blast with the static site generation process! I love being able to hydrate the site with dynamic data while keeping things fast on the server. It reminds me of HotSyncing data onto a Palm Pilot (how could I not reference Palm Pilots after my last post ). Here’s a few cool things that happen when my site is built: I started using GoatCounter (awesome service) and have been leveraging their API to show stats on my site via a custom build plugin. My analytics page now shows statically generated graphs of the analytics data as of the last site build. Additionally, posts now feature a “readers” count in the header. The previous iteration of my blog featured dithered images. While this was partly an aesthetic choice, it also greatly reduces the size of images. The downside was the amount of work involved in manually dithering images via ImageMagick for each post. Thanks to my new build process I was able to build a custom plugin that creates dithered copies of every image across all posts. It replaces images with a dithered copy, and then wraps the image with a link that points to the original full color version. I also have an escape hatch where I can specify a front matter flag in a post to skip dithering. This functionality came out of the box with my theme ( Astro Sienna ). Webmentions are fetched during build and displayed on the relevant post. I haven't seen this in action yet since I don't have any webmentions, but it's still super cool! Another plugin that came with my theme is the dynamic generation of meta images for sharing on social media. The plugin gathers info from the post and dynamically generates a png image at build time. Very cool! It’s been a lot of fun messing around with my new toy, maybe this means I’ll go longer than 2 months without changing my entire site! ...maybe... Thanks for reading on RSS, you're awesome! If you want to be notified of new posts even faster, I have a newsletter as well, you can signup here!
While most of my posts work great in RSS readers, this post contains elements that do not work so well! Please view the post on my site here: https://thatalexguy.dev/posts/interactive-dive-into-memos/ Join me on an interactive look at the user experience of "Memos" on Palm OS! Thanks for reading on RSS, you're awesome! If you want to be notified of new posts even faster, I have a newsletter as well, you can signup here!
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