A couple of years back, I began experimenting with self-hosting. I dug out an old laptop and set it up as an always on home server. It did many jobs. Stuff like acting as a file server with access to external storage and backups, automating tasks with scripts, music server, running a torrent client for my legally acquired content and more.

It worked fine. But, the added complexity of another machine bugged me slightly. Most of the tasks could be solved on my daily driver laptop. There was also the fact that it didn't run the latest software from Apple. This caused a lot of friction. I couldn't run Homebrew. It caused a lot of issues when trying to install or update packages. Most current programs would not run on my ancient version of MacOS.

These issues made me want to shut down this "server" and simplify my setup. To do so, I had to solve two problems:

• Storage space: My original motivation for setting up the home server was convenient access to more storage space. My laptop only has a 256GB drive. A 1TB external SSD solved the issue, but I move around the house a bit with my laptop, so it was rarely connected. Which meant the data on the external drive was rarely available.
• Remote access: After moving away from Spotify, being able to access my music collection from my phone on the go was convenient. My home server also ran my static site generator, meaning I could update this website on the go with my phone, if I wanted. (Happened like two times, one of which was me testing that it worked. Still, just in case, you know.)

I've solved both problems and decommissioned my old home server. The light bulb moment? Realising that my "home server" doesn't need to be a separate machine. My regular, daily driver laptop can do the job! A server is, after all, just a computer that's always on. My regular laptop can do that, too.

Let's dive into each of the specific problems mentioned above.

Storage space

As mentioned, my laptop doesn't have enough space for all my data. Using cloud storage and an external drive for local backups, I've been able to work around this limitation.

The past year I've been using a remote installation of Nextcloud for cloud storage, and much more. With the aim of simplifying my setup, I wanted a solution that required less maintenance. After considering multiple solutions, I landed on going back to Apple's iCloud.

Both my laptop and phone are Apple devices. iCloud services are neatly integrated. And, having migrated away from iCloud recently, I feel like I have a solid grasp of what my setup should look like to minimise dependency and vendor lock-in.¹ After shopping around, I also realise that the 2TB storage tier is actually reasonably priced. Lastly, it let me go back to using iCloud Photos to browse my photos and videos. It works well and I like it.

I don't want to rely solely on a third party and "the cloud" to preserve all of my data. Especially precious photos and videos. To solve this, I've landed on the following routine:

At the beginning of each month, I export all of my photos and videos from the previous month from Photos to my external drive.² I then export every other file and document stored on my cloud drive to the drive.

Is it bullet proof? No. I'm susceptible to losing as much as a month's worth of data with this approach. In contrast to a total wipe out, something I can live with.³

Remote access

Above I mentioned two specific cases of remote access that I had come to rely on:

1. Music collection.
2. Updating my website.

By setting up my laptop as a de facto server, I've solved both.

Accessing my music collection on the go

I iterated through several approaches for making my music collection available remotely. I first tried Doppler and their sync to iOS feature. While I think Doppler is hands down the best app for playing music on both Mac and iPhone,⁴ I found the sync cumbersome.

Next, I thought of using iCloud Drive as a "music server". Surely some app could watch a folder in my iCloud Drive and automatically add new files to my music library? Well, you'd think so. But no. I couldn't find any decent app(s) that solved this to my expectations. Plus, my phone doesn't really have enough storage to save my full music library locally. Which really only left me with one option: Setting a full-fledged music server.

This was the solution I had been using for the last few months, running Nextcloud Music on my Nextcloud instance. I resigned myself to the fact that I needed a remote virtual server to solve this. As I'd been wanting to test out Pikapods, I decided to try out Airsonic Advanced. It was too advanced (I have no right to be surprised) and I couldn't get it set up exactly to my liking. Instead, I switched to Navidrome and I found it an absolute delight. I couldn't believe how fast and lightweight it was!

It worked well and, as a bonus, I could continue using Amperfy which I had become comfortable with these last few months. One thing was still bothering me: Streaming and caching my music collection from a remote server, when it was already stored in full on my Mac, was incredibly wasteful. Realising I was (again) on the lookout for a music player to play music on my Mac left me feeling like I was back to square one. Eventually, though, the penny finally dropped:

"Navidrome is so lightweight, I could probably run it on my laptop without any issues!"

Using Homebrew, setting up Navidrome on my laptop was a five minute job. Configuring my laptop to automatically launch Navidrome on startup took me another five minutes. Now we're (rocking and) rolling! The native Navidrome web interface is perfect for playing music on my laptop. And all I had to do to access my music collection from Amperfy on my phone was change the server URL and authentication details.

I didn't really mind only being able to access my full library while on my home network. Amperfy has great caching and downloading the albums I want is no hassle. The only inconvenience was keeping my laptop open and awake to access my music.

Luckily, the other penny dropped at this point. This is a solved problem! I already set up a Macbook as a "home server" and there's no reason I can't do it with this particular Macbook. So, I ran the terminal command⁵ and I was off to the races. Despite decommissioning my home server, I once more had a "server" running at home. Just one that doubles as my daily driver laptop.

Remotely updating my website

With my laptop running as a server, this problem was solved as well. It was simply a matter of updating my old workflows to rely on iCloud Drive instead of my old Nextcloud instance.

Because I'm not the smartest guy around, my site generator is quite simple: A script monitors a "content" directory. When a new file appears, the site generator runs to process this file and upload all the new and modified files to the server that hosts my website. This lets me update my website from anywhere without having to worry about remote access to my home server. All I have to do is save a text file to the content directory. Whichever cloud service I'm using then does the sync magic, and my home server a.k.a. my laptop, updates my website.

Even images exist only as a file in my content directory. If I reference them in a text document, the site generator picks them up and uploads the file(s).

And that's it. I can now create posts and notes from my phone while I'm on the go. I don't know that I ever will, but at least I can rest comfortably knowing that I can. And that's the most important thing.

TL;DR

I tweaked a setting on my laptop to make sure it doesn't go to sleep when power is connected. I connect to it with my phone to listen to my music and update my website when I'm on the go.

Postscript

You didn't think I'd actually settle on not being able to access my full music collection while on the go, did you? About five minutes after thinking I could live with that, I remembered Tailscale. With my "server" running a current version of MacOS, I could actually install it and rely on it for proper remote access.

The front of the American grocery store contains a strange, liminal space: the transitional area between parking lot and checkstand, along the front exterior and interior of the building, that fills with oddball commodities.

Say one thing for Robin Hobb, say she knows how to write a trilogy.

The Tawny Man trilogy is the third three-book collection set in the "Realm of the Elderlings". After Liveship Traders took us south to the Satrap's lands of Bingtown, the Rain Wilds and Jamaillia, Tawny Man takes us back North to the Six Duchies. It was here the story kicked off with the Farseer Trilogy.

Tawny Man is a reunion. It centres around the same main cast of characters as the original trilogy, but not without adding new ones to the mix.

As with both previous trilogies, I found myself unconvinced at the outset. Hobb takes her time to set the scene. But, also as with both previous trilogies, this one grew. And grew. By the middle of the second book, I had a good idea of where the story was going. I was hooked. I didn't get many pages (or locs, to be more precise) into Fool's Fate before I was struggling to put the book down.

This is not unusual with Robin Hobb. All of the three trilogies I've read so far all have the feel of one big book split into three, rather than three distinct stories. The middle books in particular don't even pretend to be stand-alone stories. Instead, they build on the foundation of the first book and creates momentum in the story towards the eventual climax in the final third.

I think it's great.

Although Tawny Man doesn't reach the heights of Liveship Traders, it was a very enjoyable read. In terms of where it falls short, I think there's something about the first person storytelling that is limiting. You don't really get enough perspectives to make all the characters (bar one) feel as real and fully fleshed out. That said, I enjoyed getting closer to what is the most interesting character of all of them throughout these stories.

All in all, this felt like a worthy send off for both Fitz and the Fool. But I still wonder if we aren't going to get to hear more about the former's maternal origin. There's a story yet to be told there, I think, and there are some hints that we will learn more about "Keppet" in time.

I'll close with some of my highlighted quotes and passages from the books:

It could not compare to that moment of completion when minds joined and one sensed the wholeness of the world as a great entity in which one's own body was no more than a mote of dust.

Fool's Errand

Hobb has a way with framing that sense of belonging to something greater than just yourself that one can sometimes experience.

Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind.

Fool's Errand

It is a magical place.

It was a boy's thing to do, this immediate offering to share a prized possession, and my heart answered it, knowing that no matter how long or how far apart we had been, nothing important had changed between us.

Fool's Errand

That's true friendship.

His air of petulant command mimed perfectly that of a foppish dandy of the noble class.

Fool's Errand

I just loved that sentence. Poetic.

… (I) knew that, as it always would, the past had broken free of my effort to define and understand it. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

The Golden Fool

The more history I read, the more I come to agree with this world view.

How many words have I set down on paper or vellum, thinking to trap the truth thereby? And of those words, how many have I myself consigned to the flames as worthless and wrong? I do as I have done so many times. I write, I sand the wet ink, I consider my own words. Then I burn them. Perhaps when I do so, the truth goes up the chimney as smoke. Is it destroyed, or set free in the world?

Fool's Fate

More on the futility of capturing the moment, of defining it, and the truth. Doesn't mean we should stop trying. Just that we can never fully succeed.

Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world.

Fool's Fate

It is. And it can.

Give him to me, she said with a woman's weariness at a man's incompetence.

Fool's Fate

Close to home!

No man, in the fullness of his years, should have to experience afresh all the passion that a youngster is capable of embracing. Our hearts grow brittle as we age.

Fool's Fate

I've been pondering this. Is it true? Is it self defence that our emotions dwindle as we age?

Home is people. Not a place. If you back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there anymore.

Fool's Fate

Home is people.

Wildwood is an upcoming stop-motion movie by the studio Laika. I cam across the trailer earlier today, and it looks awesome. The work and passion that goes into creating a good stop-motion movie is mind boggling.

What really caught my mind, however, was one the main characters, a golden eagle (emphasis mine):

The General, voiced by Honorary Academy Award recipient Angela Bassett, a fierce warrior and leader of the skies

My cousin used to call my grandmother "The General". When I watch this movie I'll undoubtedly imagine that character a representation of my grandmother.

Can't wait!

Kev Quirk in Use the Bloody Shift Key!:

Personally, I can’t abide it. When I come across one of these posts, even if the title sounds genuinely interesting, I just can’t bring myself to read the content. Instead, I end up focusing on the obvious lack of uppercase letters. I know I’m missing out on interesting posts because of this, and that makes me sad.

I share this pet peeve with Kev. When I see someone omitting uppercase letters from their writing, I simply move on. I know it's a stylistic choice and all, but I just nope out of there. First person I remember seeing doing this was Sam Altman. That alone should be reason enough to reconsider the practice for those who engage in it.

Previously on Computers Are Bad, we discussed the early history of air traffic control in the United States. The technical demands of air traffic control are well known in computer history circles because of the prominence of SAGE, but what's less well known is that SAGE itself was not an air traffic control system at all.

Soundtrack - Radiohead - Karma Police

I just spent a week at the Consumer Electronics Show, and one word kept coming up: bullshit. 

LG, a company known for making home appliances and televisions, demonstrated a robot (named “CLOiD” for some reason) that could “fold laundry”

Alex Chan in The Good, the Bad, and the Gutters:

To help me understand how this layout works, I’m going to step through it and explain how I built the new version of the page.

You won't find a clearer and more understandable walkthrough of how to set up and style a CSS grid than this one from Alex. Making a note of their trick for fixed height for the cover images for my reading log which is crying out for exactly that.

Update: Inspired by Alex, I've updated the reading log CSS to use fixed height instead of fixed width. Looks much better!

Came across Mole: 🐹 Deep clean and optimize your Mac. today. It is an open source, command line based utility for cleaning your Mac.

I generally don't install much, and try to be pretty diligent about keeping my Mac clean. Nevertheless, I was able to clear up a few gigabytes worth of junk that was lying around.

As you may recall, circa 2022-2023 I was working on a microkernel written in Hare named Helios. Helios was largely inspired by and modelled after the design of seL4 and was my first major foray into modern OS development that was serious enough to get to a somewhat useful state of functionality, with drives for some real hardware, filesystems, and an environment for running user programs of a reasonable level of sophistication.

Helios development went strong for a while but eventually it slowed and eventually halted in a state of design hell.

Except me. I'll never leave. Not ever. I'm here until it's lights out.

Rob Beschizza in Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsoft's cloud app that steals then deletes all your files for Boing Boing:

If you want control over your files (or simply like knowing where they are and be certain they still exist) use another operating system.

Sums up in a single sentence why I'll never again use Windows on a personal computer. The enshittification is unbelievably bad. Rob continues:

And it's such a mess: an operating system packed with ads, upsells and bloat. Something about Microsoft reminds me of oil companies in the southwest: risky environment, externalized costs, nauseating conditions, cunning alignments of liability and safety, no-one cares if it works so long as money is made.

Winter finally started in earnest these last few days. Got out for my first cross country skiing session of the year today.

Crossing an ice covered lake in an otherwise quiet landscape is eerie. The ice is constantly shifting, cracking and resettling, resulting in intermittently ominous sounds.

Steph Ango in File over app:

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

This philosophy is what I hinted at in footnote 9 in my recent post about my current tech stack.

Storing data in open and accessible file formats is the way to go. It minimises lock-in and gives you great portability and freedom of choice.

Socks have always been a problem for me. I remember my mother, back when I was a kid, lamenting that I wrecked my socks too quickly. And this has remained a problem all through my life. I don't know the cause. Perhaps I drag my feet when I walk. Maybe I mess around and slide slide too much, even as a middle aged man. All I know is that when I buy two ten packs of regular cotton socks, holes start appearing a month or two later.

As a forty year old man of means¹ I've decided that enough is enough. No longer will I suffer the discomfort of walking around with holes in my socks. Instead, I will approach this problem methodically, with a twofold aim:

• Figure out which socks on the market are the cheapest per wear.
• Pinpoint the correct replacement cycle and make sure that I order new socks before holes start appearing in my current batch.

In my advanced age, I've come to prefer wool over cotton in many cases. After embarking on an exhaustive study of sock durability, I seem to be in luck. Wool blend socks appear, in general, to be more durable than cotton socks. Further, my extensive research efforts led me towards two particular brands²:

• Smartwool
• Darn Tough

There seems to be a loose consensus in sock durability awareness communities that these two brands offer the most value of any socks on the market. Well, I'll find out.

My first experiment will be pitching Smartwool's Everyday Anchor Line Crew Socks against a Norwegian market generic brand wool-blend sock.³

Now, I fully expect the Smartwool socks to outlast its opponent. But, the thing is, they also cost five times as much. For the price of three pairs of Smartwool socks, I bought fifteen pairs of the generic brand wool-blend socks. Fifteen!

I've therefore devised the following experiment:

• My sock rotation will be limited to six socks.
• When the generic brand socks start tearing, I'll replace them will three new pairs.

Will the three pairs of Smartwool socks outlast fifteen pairs of the generic brand wool socks? I have my doubts, but I will let you know. Naturally, I will also award extra points for comfort, if one or the other stands out in that regard. Like and subscribe to make sure you don't miss the results!⁴

The second phase of this experiment will be pitching the winner against Darn Tough socks to determine the ultimate winner. Whoever it is, they will, in all likelihood, gain my patronage for the remainder of my life. Well, if I can find a way to purchase Darn Tough's more anonymous colourways here in Norway. I'm just a plain socks kinda guy.

Ben Thompson in AI and the Human Condition:

Perhaps it follows, then, that the devaluing of labor Patel and Trammell warns about actually frees humans up to once again create beauty?

A person can dream. (Relevant link: The Youtube video Why is the modern world so ugly? by the Cultural Tutor.)

On the whole, I'm with Ben on his optimistic take. In a way, it would be posthumous vindication for J.M. Keynes, who thought that the eventual outcome of technological progress would be that we'd all essentially spend our days with close to endless leisure time.¹

Thanks to Robb I came across this teaser trailer confirming that Malcolm in the Middle is coming back.

I loved the original series. Can't wait for this! Hope the full cast is coming back. Looks promising based on the trailer.

Nicolas Solerieu in On wearables:

The marketing is a mishmash of sport, lifestyle, health value propositions fading in a goodness mush, rarely delivering much beyond a wrist-mounted stream of numbers.

Couldn't agree more. After a few years of wearing my sports watch 24/7, I realised that the data and the way it was presented did my head in, and had no positive effect on my health and fitness. For the past couple of years I've worn an analogue watch, only switching to my sports watch to track my actual workouts.

I am unreasonably proud of getting this right in the workout log before actually getting there and seeing that something was off.

Calendar years and ISO weeks don't really intermingle. Can't wait for the scramble at work on Monday as people start trying to figure out what's what because of this fact.

Hey all,

I'm not dropping this on the actual newsletter feed because it's a little self-indulgent and I'm not sure 88,000 or so people want an email about it.

If you want to support my work directly, please subscribe to my premium newsletter.

The last day of the year is coming to a close. As I begin drafting this post, four more hours remain until the year of our lord twenty twenty five is but a memory.

I didn't plan on writing a "year in review" for this year. Don't get me wrong, I love it when those posts pop up in my feed reader and I wish more people would write them. This was just a particularly ordinary year on my end. There isn't all that much to report.

But with the four year old in bed and asleep, and the seven year old upstairs playing Minecraft with his mother in an attempt to stay awake until the new year rolls around, I'm suddenly sat in the living room. Alone and with time to spare. So I thought I'd give myself a small challenge. Write and publish a post. Right here, right now, before the year ends. I don't know what it will become. Call it a "word vomit" inspired by Meadow and let's see what comes out.

It was a another year

There was absolutely nothing of particular note to report from my 2025. It was a year without big stories, inspirational turnarounds, remarkable comings of age and uncomfortable upheavals. A good thing, in most respects.

Kids

Both children continued to prosper and grow. At seven and four, we're now reaching that phase of their lives where they might begin to encounter problems outside the little bubble of the world their mother and I can influence. Parental duties so far have been challenging, yes, but rewarding. When their challenges are "small"¹ and manageable, you come a long way by just showing up and being there. At the same time, I know that as they continue to expand their contact surface with the world, they will begin to face challenges beyond our immediate control.

I can't help but feel ill equipped to guide them through these situations.

Watching my kids apply themselves to an activity is my favourite thing. Both are active and participate in several activities. The boy plays football and handball, while the girl (despite my continued lobbying that she should start playing football) loves dancing. To see them practice with passion and make headway gives me great joy. I have no aspirations on their behalves, I'm just there for the ups and downs and all that'll teach them.

Loss

After battling cancer for over a year, my grandmother passed this fall. It was sad and I miss her. Given she'd been living with cancer for so long, I thought it would lessen the impact of her parting. It didn't. Her passing was also the oldest kid's first real experience with mortality. He was absolutely devastated at her funeral. It was a hard day.

Savne deg, mor.

Reading

As shown in my reading log for 2025, I read 18 books this year.² Eight of them I read aloud to one of my children. Of those, the Narnia books (which I had been wanting to read for many years) were my favourites. I wrote a post with my thoughts on the series.

Of the books I read on my own, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was a particular highlight. In a post about the book I shared some of my thoughts and my favourite excerpts.

What I did not write about was the Liveship Traders books. Late last year, I read Ship of Magic before setting aside the trilogy for Wind and Truth (which left me a bit disappointed). I though Ship of Magic was OK, but it really set the scene for the rest of the story. And what a story it was! The Mad Ship was excellent before the trilogy concluded with the even better Ship of Destiny. I think these three books combined is perhaps my favourite work of fantasy writing. If you haven't read them yet, you should! Although they work fine as a stand-alone trilogy, they are part of Robin Hobb's Elderling universe. You'll probably appreciate them even more if you begin with Hobb's Farseer trilogy.

I only managed to finish two non-fiction books this year. Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing (thoughts) and Ceasar by Adrian Goldsworthy. I want to double that next year.

Physical activity

Going through my workout log for 2025 I was surprised to find that I had the most active days in a year since I began tracking my workouts in 2017. 312 active days is nine up from the previous high in 2021. My sessions are shorter on average than back then, and total active time of 323 hours is not near the 379 hours of my peak years of 2023 and 2018.

Although it was a good year of physical activity, I am not quite satisfied. I "only" managed 55 hours of strength training. Now in my forties, I think working a wide range of muscles to reduce age-induced decay will only become more important. An hour a week is a little less than where I want to be.

I caught the running bug again earlier this year. It should therefore come as no surprise that running, at 244 hours, made up the bulk of my active time. Going out for a run in quiet surroundings, on trails or a back country road, gives me great joy. I'm also acutely aware of the fact that window of opportunity for bettering my personal bests is closing quickly. Realistically, I have three to five years to do it.

That in mind, I am gearing up for giving improving my personal bests one last go. This year was all about getting back to it. I got back to regular workouts, and increased my volume significantly compared to 2024. However, I'm still around 1500 kilometres behind for the year compared to where I need to be to get close to my PBs. In 2026 I will attempt to get back to that training volume and positioning myself to run a (hopefully) fast marathon in 2027.

Work

In 2024 I transitioned to a new role internally. This year was all about fully settling and coming to grips with the expectations and deliverables of this role. It's taken longer than I'd expected, but after a year and a half, I believe I'm starting to get there. The role is quite different to what I'd expected. And, to be frank, it doesn't exactly play to my strengths. The responsibilities are less direct deliverables, and more mediation, meeting room influencing and stakeholder management than I'm comfortable with

There's a lot to learn and plenty of room to grow in a situation like this. The upside is that the team around me is great. My colleagues keep inspiring me to do my best and evolve my skills to better handle the role. That said, I find it hard to see myself in this role for the long term. If an opportunity that better matches my skill set presents itself, I will consider it. That might happen in 2026, or beyond.

The end

The new year is still two hours away. But I'm ready to go to bed. What next year brings will have to wait until tomorrow.

Happy new year!

Soundtrack: Lynyrd Skynyrd — Free Bird

This piece is over 19,000 words, and took me a great deal of writing and research.