Really thinking about the new iPad. Just iPad that was released recently. I have an iPad Pro from 2016 that’s showing its age. As a benefit, more storage (128gb) and no Apple Intelligence. Win/Win.
Playing a game of how long can I go between hearing the President’s voice.
Days so far.
Books. Walks. Video games. Homelab tinkering. All far better for my mental health than hanging on every headline.
As I watch my coworkers families lose their jobs and get thrown into chaos. And wonder when.
We had a good bit of F.A. Now it’s F.O. Day and the trucks are in motion.
I’m really enjoying the subtitles of Alone Australia turning “saw sedge” into sausage.
They’re not out here making traps out of sausage.
Fix local DNS when upgrading pihole and using unbound for your homelab
Now that I’ve gotten my pi-hole instance working, I realized I wasn’t able to load any of my local DNS entries.
I have a domain.com that I use for a couple of things that are exposed to the world. Mainly my RSS reader. I also keep a *.lab.domain.com wildcard domain so I can have wiki.lab.domain.com internally so I can make notes to myself without worry about the outside world seeing them.
Well, nothing on my lab subdomain wasn’t loading. It’s DNS. It’s always DNS.
It has been documented by the pi-hole team, but I had no idea where to find these options they showed. V6 – Post release fixes and findings – Pi-hole
Either enable misc.etc_dnsmasq_d to restore the “old” behaviour, or if you have only a few lines you can add them directly to the misc.dnsmasq_lines setting instead. Both of these settings can be found in either the toml file, or on the web interface under All Settings -> Misc
Login to your pi-hole install. You may need to use the IP address instead of the domain name if that’s also broken for you. First, you need to go to the Settings in your pihole. Second, locate the *Basic button and slide it to Expert.
The button should be up near the System Settings header.
Once you do this, you will see an extra option under Settings menu, All settings.
Moving the slider to Expert is the option I had to figure out on my own, as it wasn’t mentioned when accessing the All settings menu. So I’m telling you now.
Now that you have the menu, click it.
On the All Settings page, click Miscellaneous to filter the results. Now look for misc.etc_dnsmasq_d
Once you find it, enable it. Click Save & Apply.
Now you should be able to access your local DNS entries again.
Fix pi-hole login behind nginx proxy manager after upgrading to pi-hole V6
If you’re running pi-hole behind a reverse proxy and upgrading to pi-hole 6 you are not able to login. You need to make one change in your reverse proxy.
I use nginx proxy manager and you need to expose the /api.
You should have already added /admin to your reverse proxy. You need to click the add location button at the top and then add /api to port 80 on the IP address of your pi-hole.
Credit to jclendineng in this thread: How to configure Nginx Proxy Manager correctly to use v6? - Help / Community Help - Pi-hole Userspace reported the same problem and then, like a hero, came back to report their fix: Edit: you have to expose /api
Trying out Finch as a way to track some habits. And furnish my little house and bird friend.
On the way to the pig. And the pig. From the Brandywine Museum of Art
After seeing the embroidery of Solitaire and minesweeper on Instagram we learned the show was going on currently in Delaware. So off we went and the entire museum was incredible.
There are so many Teslas near us. We counted a dozen just going down a mile or two. And I see a Cybertruck nearly everyday.
Passed a protest today at our local Tesla dealership. Probably 40-50 people with antifascism science shouting and making noise. Lots of signs and shouting. #TeslaProtest
Finished reading: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman 📚
A unique story that tosses you right into the pit and leaves you there. A very dark, dystopian book that’s a dark as it is mysterious.
Saying I enjoyed reading it feels wrong. But I was riveted by the story and could not put it down.
My niece just released a cover of Bon Iver’s Roslyn that is incredible.
The Fifth Light is her band and she’s incredible.
We had some freezing rain overnight which iced over the trees, shrubs, cars and everything else. It’s beautiful but treacherous.
I picked this game up with my wife on Xbox and we tried it out… and have now spent 22 hours playing it. Most of it over the past two days. It’s perfect.
Crafting. Questing. Friendship. Courtship. Adventuring. Farming.
Do you remember A Softer World? This is one of their comics that sticks with me.
This is delightful. Open it in your browser and enjoy the beautiful pixel art.
This is a beautiful piece about local art museums.
The Wonder Of The Regional Art Museum
Visiting a small art museum on Maryland’s Eastern Shore led me to a university art museum for an embroidery exhibition it and another in Roanoke, VA earlier this year.
Every museum in is its own treat.
Roast some really good chick peas tonight. Washed. Dried thoroughly Then roasted for an hour at 400. Olive oil and salt. Spices are for later. Once I get the timing down.
They came out very crispy and I can’t stop snacking on them.
Junk Journalling has given me a place for all my scraps and stickers and neat things I’ve wanted to keep but didn’t have a home for.
It’s also a great place for last year’s calendar photos.
The crows left their marks today. With the other sparrows, wrens, finches and grackles.
I got a whole $7.44 from Equifax doing something illegal on a virtual debit card.
I went to Amazon and bought a gift card for $7.44 and sent it to myself.
Redeemed it minutes later and now the money is somewhere useful.
And I completed the dumbest sequences of events.
My $5 from Verizon is next.
One sandwich. One new video game. One new TV show.
Today has been such a peaceful day where the highlight of it was buying a nice sandwich for lunch trying out a new video game and finding a new show to watch with my wife in the evening by the fire.
Jersey Mike’s was the provider of my sandwich. A Club Supreme which is Roast beef, turkey, swiss, applewood smoked bacon and mayo with lettuce, onions, pickles and oil.
Overthrown in early access was the video game which I really enjoyed. It’s open world city building with a silly twist of being able to pick up anything in the game.
Portrait Artist of the Year on Sky, which we watched via YouTube is the TV show. We picked a couple episodes at random and just seeing different people‘s art styles and how they choose to paint where they have four hours to sit and paint or draw or carve in some cases there model Was really enjoyable to watch seeing their process seeing how the work came together.
Now I am sitting by the embers of the fire under a blanket not wanting to head up to bed because that means today is over and tomorrow will be coming.
Played this for a ton of hours with my wife back in the Laurel and Yanny time period. Picked it back up today and started to relearn it. It’s a good alternative when I get burned out in Stardew Valley.
Eulogy for the last fun social media
I’m going to miss TikTok.
It’s light years ahead of any other platform for storytelling. Mixing videos together. Allowing conversations via stitching.
I will miss 8 musicians coming together to play a single song from their own rooms.
I will miss the absolutely unhinged skits. I will miss the funny stories, stupid trends and the general positive vibes of every comment section.
And for all the selling, a relative lack of ads.
TikTok was a platform of “dancing girls” until you sign up and create an account.
I watched the service try out content on me to see what I responded to.
It learned quickly and served me what I can only call a truly “for you” page that I built brick by brick.
On the best of days it was like attending a live screening of your favorite podcast over and over.
A comedy show. A Moth Radio Hour. A poetry slam. And a thousand views of The Eras Tour. And I watched them all.
I never posted I only consumed. But there is nothing out there like it.
This week has been like watching the series finale of your favorite TV show.
It was the most fun social network. The comments were full of support and jokes and positivity.
I never saw spam comments. I rarely saw mean comments. The ability to respond to a comment with a video and to shame the trolls into deleting their accounts and slithering back under their rocks likely helped
YouTube is informative. But it’s not fun. Instagrams Reels… are reruns of TikTok’s. And the comments are mean and rude and often trying to tear the creator down instead of being in on the joke, they’re just mean.
Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are as different as LinkedIn and Facebook. The vibe is just off. Hostile and cruel.
And the ads. The amount of garbage ads I see and the “recommended” content.
For all of Meta’s collected data on me, why do you offer garbage? Same to YouTube. I’ve given you far more hours and years of data.
Why does TikTok outperform you with showing me what I want?
If you’re going to slurp up every last byte of data on me, at least do a good job giving me what I want.
But I know it’s not about me. It’s about you. Trying to push me towards what you want to show me. It was never about what I want to see.
Tiktok served the viewer. TikTok learned what I wanted to see and pushed me to people and content I enjoyed.
Instagram serves AI slop and ads. YouTube serves you pizza after you order pizza. Twitter doesnt deserve a mention.
I’ll miss my friends on TikTok. Their stories. The snippets of their lives.
It’s been a fun ride. Maybe the US can create something fun that won’t be bought, ruined or both.
But I’m not holding my breath.
