Uses this 2024

Keywords: icloud plan, main rack, management, box, swift, software, server, router, gave, air, nas, immich, pretty. Powered by TextRank.

Hardware

Client

Not much has changed in the HW department from last year. I bought a new MacBook Pro with the M3 processor and gave my MacBook Air to my wife. The main reason for this was the RAM on the Air was not enough. The external screens remain the same and the keyboards have been exclusively the integrated keyboards on the computers and the track pad.

Server

Still got my rack running. I haven't turned on the Buffalo NAS as I have a lot of disk space left. I think I overestimated my needs there. My DNS box died so I migrated that over to the main rack as well. My Synology box is still going strong but I have moved most of the media content to a data center in Europe and use the NAS for backup. I also located this box to the room that has the router and it's now connected to the router instead of the switch in my office. The slow network problem persists because I'm too lazy to go up in the attic and run some ethernet cables and too cheap to pay someone to do it for me.

Software

Nothing to report on this end for this year either expect for maybe a couple of new self-hosted services. On the mac/iOS I'm still using DEVONThink as my data/document management platform. I keep the storage backend on my nextcloud instance with encryption enabled and this is something that other platforms do not provide. I have peace of mind knowing that even if my server is breached the data is useless.

I'm experimenting with different management systems rather than different software at this point. I gave the PARA method a go but I think it doesn't cover my needs as I find it pretty difficult to classify things in resources vs areas. I moved from the default reminders app that comes with the OS to org-mode. I find that just tagging blocks within a file vs tagging the file it self is pretty useful and lowers friction when taking todo item notes. One thing that always bothers me with emacs is the number of key chords you need to memorize in order to use it efficiently but I've been leaning into pi.ai for that.

Services

Biggest chance in services is that I've installed and migrated to immich for photo and video hosting. I've cancelled my Google paid plan and downgraded to 50GB on my iCloud plan. Depending on how immich performs I might cancel the iCloud plan as well. I stopped using Portainer for container management as they seem to be getting commercial heavy and using ssh and docker-compose is simple enough to automate with Jenkins.

I've written a new static site generator in Swift that builds these pages and added some nice machine learned features to it like similar post suggestion and keyword extract. The idea is to learn these algorithms and Swift and not to have a fully fledged site generator. The hardest part was probably parsing the Markdown.

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