2026 — Year of Discipline

• The New Yearly Theme
• Hosting (Technology)
• Unsubscribing
• Tech Projects
• Other Tech Stuff
• Apartment Projects
• Hosting (Humans)
• Travel
• Social Media
• Social Real Life
• Non-Social Media
• Blog Posts
• Videos

Quick updates about the blog itself, while avoiding turning this blog into a blog about making the blog.

I fixed some mobile styling and added light and dark mode — no button, just change your device’s settings between light and dark to see it in action. I moved away from TailwindCSS to vanilla CSS — I understand why teams use it, but after trying it out, I realize that I hate it for me.¹

I’m trying to make these posts shorter and publish more than once every six months.

¶The New Yearly Theme

I started this blog with a monthly posting schedule in mind. The frequency dropped from monthly to bi-monthly, then quarterly, now semi-yearly.

Last year’s theme, The Year of the Speedrun, was successful in some unexpected ways. I didn’t finish so many projects so fast, but learned to focus on speed where it matters and internalize when to trade it for quality.

This year I landed on the Year of Discipline. It’s not that I lack discipline, but I’d like to be more consistent with non-urgent-but-important tasks like budgeting, physical and mental health, social life, family, and living space cleanliness.

This will presumably make me post more consistently. I thought the Year of the Speedrun would do that, and if I’m being honest it helped me get even those 4 posts written last year. Otherwise I‘d still be refining post 1.

I might also do seasonal themes, e.g. Spring of Socializing, Autumn of Communication, Summer of Budgeting.

¶Hosting (Technology)

This website is now hosted from a little computer called a Raspberry Pi physically located in my apartment. It’s also now static, meaning no PHP running on the backend.

This means no more $12 / month to Laravel Forge and no more ~$35 / month to host on AWS.

The recent AWS and Cloudflare outages are nudging me closer to self-hosting everything. It’s time-consuming, but at least it’s a skill-building hobby and I’m having fun. I also like having a better digital moat against enshittification by owning my own digital experiences.

Will I ever 100% self-host all digital programs that I use? That’s the dream, but the reality is more 20/80 Pareto Principle, or “What can I self-host that has the best ratio of (benefits + money saved) : (effort to set up and maintain)?”

I probably won’t leave Spotify or 100% de-Google soon, but a year ago I said the same thing about iCloud Photos, then learned about Immich, and now that’s near the top of my list.

I’m prioritizing fun, useful, important, and relatively quick to set up.

I already experienced a downside though. When my apartment building did some maintenance on the Internet cables, my website went down. This means I should set up an offsite or cloud backup that kicks in when the server gets disconnected or goes down. How long will this project take to set up and maintain? Irrelevant.

¶Unsubscribing

Subscriptions add up.

As mentioned, I unsubscribed from Laravel Forge and AWS, saving ~$35/month.² Now my website costs pennies-worth of electricity.³

I’m also unsubscribing from Google insofar as what I subscribe for running side-business things that are no longer a business. It’s unreasonably hard to suss out exactly what their business product is called. As of 2020, it’s Google Workspace, but was formerly known as, Google Apps for Your Domain, then Google Apps Premier Edition, then G Suite, then Google for Business before being renamed to Google Workspace in 2020.

My annual renewal was approaching at the end of January. I already switched to Zoho for email in May of 2025, and now I migrated my archives.

I now need to move Drive items (Google Docs, Sheets and associated Google Apps Script functions, PDFs, and Forms), Google Fi,⁴ Google Voice,⁵ and YouTube videos — there aren’t a lot and most are private, but I would like it to keep them.

I’m also unsubscribing from Hover Domains. They, too, seem to follow the cable company business plan playbook. I’m transferring to Cloudflare one at a time before they renew.⁶ Based on my domain name research, I may eventually switch to Porkbun since they’re fairly priced and people seem to like them.

I may unsubscribe from Obsidian Sync and Obsidian Publish and host my Garden on my own hardware, but it’s low priority. Obsidian Sync works very well and is actually cheap. Also, Obsidian is a good product that has only gotten better, and it’s nice to support a company like that.

I would like to break up with Spotify. Though I’m on a family plan as the manager, and with 5 people at $15/month, it works out to $3/month/person. For how much music I listen to, I get a ton of value out of $3/month. But I’m not a fan of how Spotify treats artists and they frustrate me with every app update making the experience worse. I’d rather pay artists directly and own a copy of the music.

Ideally, we would pay artists more directly than even Bandcamp does. There are some alternative music streaming services in the form of co-ops that I checked out, but nothing I’ve seen is actually federated in that the code is entirely open-source and without a central authority / 1 point of failure if the service goes down, except for maybe Funkwhale, but I need more research.

I cancelled Lyft Pink. I was subscribed through a benefit with a Chase credit card and renewed it for easy Citibike access. It remained cheap-ish for a while, but now that the taxi apps have cornered the market, they’ve raised prices without any true competition. Lyft Pink benefits are now a joke — taxis don’t really arrive more quickly, and the “discounts” are smoke and mirrors with a “base rate” higher than you would otherwise pay. I only miss the cheap(er(ish)) bike rides, but maybe it’s just time to get a bike.

Speaking of, in November I rented a bike from a real local bike shop. I rode from Midtown East through Central Park and Harlem to Inwood, then back down the west side of Manhattan. The hills uptown, especially in Washington Heights, reminded me how light a real bike is compared to a Citibike. I posted a photo album of the ride on Pixelfed.

¶Tech Projects

I’m this close to publishing a little Inflation Calculator I built in December.

NOTE: Since writing that, I published it. I’ll write more about it in the next post.

Every inflation calculator I’ve used, usually when watching a TV show set in the past, is surprisingly clunky, especially on mobile.

I wanted a more fluid and mobile-friendly experience, so I built it. I did it with vanilla, modern CSS and JavaScript. Other than Vite for compiling, it was a back-to-basics learning project to see what was possible without a framework.

I also wanted a clean error log, which meant including a favicon, which meant making a favicon.⁷ I made a “personal brand” favicon, obviously in the shape of a cloud, and this became a mini project and distraction of its own. I learned about modern favicon usage and can re-use what I made for other projects.⁸

I used GIMP for the first time in making it so I could see what all the fuss was about.

¶Other Tech Stuff

I bought a Zsa Voyager keyboard after frustration with regular keyboards. I wanted better customization than AutoHotKey, and after a ton of research, I bought the Voyager for being customizable, well-built, and travel-friendly.

I went through a period of major habit change for the fundamental way I interface with a computer and work. I now use home-row modifier keys (e.g. the f and j keys are also the Control or Command keys if held and not raised) and layers for faster, more comfortable typing. I didn’t find the learning curve to be all that steep despite everyone’s warnings. I’m still tweaking my layout on a regular basis. You can check out my layout on the Zsa website.

I finally installed Linux… on an old 2015 Macbook Pro I no longer use. It was a test run which breathed some life back into the relic. I’m this close to doing the same with my current Macbook Pro, a 2019. It feels crazy that I haven’t upgraded to the M Series yet, but the 2019 Macbook continues to meet my needs. Assuming Apple will eventually force a bloated software update, I’ll switch over soon.

I still use Neovim as my IDE and can’t imagine returning to a regular IDE. There were growing pains in setting up XDebug, but no more pains than setting up XDebug with PhpStorm. Plus, I learned what LSPs are and how they work.

I still use Firefox as my main browser, but it lacks a truly good developer experience.⁹ I’m in a weird in-between state of using a non-Chrome, Chromium browser, currently Vivaldi, for some development, but sticking with Firefox as my non-developer, user browser. Vivaldi works fine, but I want to try out Ungoogled Chromium.

¶Apartment Projects

In a studio apartment, kitchen counter space is premium real estate. If you can save countertop space by using something like a magnetic knife strip instead of a knife block, it’s well worth it. That is unless you don’t want to drill into your kitchen wall tile and your magnetic knife block falls every month no matter how many heavy-duty command strips you use. In which case, you may be tempted to just give in buy a knife block.

I bought my first apartment plant, an aloe vera plant which has been easy to keep alive so far, but they¹⁰ have been thirstier than expected.

After moving in, I wondered when my building would hire window washers. My windows transitioned from transparent to translucent to opaque. Then, my girlfriend saw a TikTok on how some New York apartment windows have a latch to move them inward for cleaning the outside. We did exactly that, and the difference was kind of literally night and day.

The college-quality mini fridge that came with my adult apartment might as well have broke last July. The temperature control was never great, but it eventually had just two modes: 1) room-temperature lunchbox or 2) freezer.

I enjoy product research, but fridge research feels like torture. I settled on one that does the job and has less functionality, so hopefully has less chance of breaking.¹¹ My fridge thermometer shows that it works fine and stays in the food safe zone, which is everything that I need from a fridge and nothing more.

I also bought a separate freezer. The freezers in these mini fridges can fit a maximum of like two ice trays, but I wanted to buy more than two days’ worth of meat at a time. It feels odd to have this separate ice chest, but it’s the efficient kind that opens from the top.

I mounted my TV to the wall and learned so much about my walls. It took hours of research and 5 visits to Home Depot,¹² but the TV hasn’t fallen after six months of hanging, so I call it a success.

I went through about 4 different assumptions about my wall materials:

1. Plaster — building built in 1931, tapping it creates no echo
2. Drywall — the inside of the wall ended up not being plaster
3. Drywall with metal studs — it was impossible to find where the studs were, but a magnet hanging from a string sometimes kind of stopped in certain areas
4. Drywall over concrete with some thin wooden studs — this turned out to be the truth (maybe, at least for where the TV hangs), but only for a section of it — the bottom half of the mount sits inside the concrete, and the top part sits in the drywall with toggle bolts

¶Hosting (Humans)

A perk of owning is never begging permission to host a friend. Since July, I’ve hosted:

• The college / model UN friend I visited in DC last year
  • He and his wife later moved to New York
• A high school friend who was in town for 2 weddings
• My girlfriend’s friend from Bolivia and her husband
• My friend from Bolivia and her husband
  • This particular friend I’ve known since high school when she did a foreign exchange semester in Sioux City

¶Travel

Being media heavy on this blog is a time sink, so I’m doing less image and gif posting for now. I’m also going to post a few less travel items here since I’ve been documenting in other ways, putting together vlogs for private viewing with friends and family.

That said, here are some travel updates.

In July, I visited Colorado for my niece’s first birthday party. It was tree-themed to celebrate her first word and appreciation of nature.

In August, my girlfriend, some friends, and I visited Puerto Rico for a Bad Bunny concert.

I appreciate Bad Bunny a lot, but not enough to buy a ticket on my own. I’m glad I did, because it was one of the best productions I’ve ever seen.

The trip put me over a threshold with United to get Premier Silver status. Maybe they’ll give me an upgrade to business class this year. But I’m not betting on it.

In October, my girlfriend and I visited Colorado and Dallas and Chicago in one trip.

Colorado was in October to visit family for all of their birthdays.¹³

We visited Dallas to explore neighborhoods and apartments for my girlfriend’s new job.

The visit coincided with the last day of the Texas State Fair.

I flew on a JSX flight from Denver to Dallas. It was cheaper than they usually are, and the Chase card I have gives some yearly JSX credits.

We visited Chicago to see my high school friend’s musical that he wrote the music for: Twihard, A Twilight Parody.

No Chicago visit is complete without a riverboat architecture tour.

In November, we didn’t travel, but stayed in New York and saw a morsel of the parade, my first time seeing it in person.

The office has some good evening views this time of year.

In December, we moved my girlfriend and her cat to Dallas on a road trip by way of Baltimore, Maryland; Roanoke, Virginia; Nashville, Tennessee; and Hot Springs, Arkansas. It was the first time really experiencing the South instead of visiting larger, hipper metropolitan cities, like Dallas or Asheville.¹⁴

It snowed for the first time in the season the day we left New York.

My model UN friend and his boyfriend in Roanoke hosted us for a quick stop.

Their cat wasn’t thrilled to share space with my girlfriend’s cat, Gucci.

We stopped for a few days in Nashville.

In Nashville, I visited Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, and the very next day visited the Bill Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock.¹⁵

We stayed in Hot Springs and briefly visited the park.

And then we eventually arrived in Dallas.

We missed the opportunity to visit Chattanooga, Tennessee and mirror the lyrics to Chattanooga Choo Choo:

You leave the Pennsylvania Station ‘bout a quarter-to-four
Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore
Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina
When you hear the whistle blowing eight to the bar
Then you know that Tennessee is not very far
Shovel all the coal in, gotta keep it rollin’
Woo woo, Chattanooga, there you are

Then we ended the year in Colorado for Christmas and New Year’s.

If you’re a close friend or family member and want more travel content, just ask!

¶Social Media

I no longer feel FOMO or get dopamine hits when I open social media. It’s like having a sip of pop¹⁶ after more than a month of abstaining and it tastes gross and overwhelming.

I miss Instagram Stories when they only showed me what my friends were up to, not served with a side of 1 million ads and suggested posts and the laziest joke copying I’ve ever seen. In other words, I miss Snapchat.¹⁷

Which is why I’ve been posting on Whatsapp Updates. WhatsApp is enshittifying like every other service, but more slowly and less intensely. I don’t get many views per story, but they’re by people who have my number in their phone. It feels like early Snapchat.

As mentioned, I made my first Pixelfed post. We’ll see if I continue.

I “cured” my YouTube addiction by following the advice in this r/nosurf post. Now when I visit YouTube, I watch the video and don’t see hyper-personalized suggested videos from more than two decades of use. The only suggested videos are related to the video I’m watching.

I ran more in the latter half of 2025 after mostly focusing on bodyweight exercise. I still enjoy Strava. It may be one of the few traditional social media platforms I’ll keep using for now.

¶Social Real Life

I’m rebuilding my social life after a few more core friends (and my girlfriend) moved away from New York. I do have friends, but haven’t had a group of “hobby friends” since around the end of college.

I started going to French conversation meetups to kill two oiseaux with one pierre for skill building and socializing.

The focused language learning meetups tend to work better for me than the general “Let’s Practice All Languages” meetups. Those tend to become “Let’s Hang Out with International People”, which is great, but conversations usually default to English. Some people take it too far and think it’s a “Try To Date Foreign People While Being Aggressive and Awkward About It“ meetup, and they kill the vibe.¹⁸

In June and July, I attended 3 weddings in the span of 4 weeks. After the wedding in Germany, my high school friend got married upstate, and a local friend had her baby shower / surprise wedding a week later.

¶Non-Social Media

I don’t have much to say about video games this time. I finally played through Super Smash Brothers Ultimate years too late. And now I haven’t picked up a controller in months.

I highly recommend 2 series I recently watched — Common Side Effects and Pluribus.

Common Side Effects is created and animated by the great Joseph Bennet¹⁹ and Mike Judge.²⁰ You may not like the animation style, but it’s worth sticking it out until the end. Plus it’s short, and the animation might grow on you. For how weird it looks, they do that style really well.

Pluribus, created by Vince Gilligan, stars Rhea Seahorn and is not a Breaking Bad spinoff. I shouldn’t need to sell it any harder than that.

I watched the old Adult Swim series Frisky Dingo. I always thought the first season of Archer felt like an Adult Swim show and now I know why. This show walked so Archer could run. I do not recommend it unless you generally like weird, mid-2000s Adult Swim humor.

Some older movies I finally watched were Uncut Gems, The Pianist, Parasite, and Children of Men.²¹ All are recommended. All are classics at this point.

I also saw The Naked Gun 2025 reboot. It was better than I expected for being a reboot, and actually nails the classic Naked Gun comedy in parts, though it kind of falls flat near the end.

The Threedom podcast episode Rainbro Bridge had me laughing out loud. Apparently Helen Mirren has a weird obsession with Kurt Cobain, of all people. Start listening at 43:47.

Look at Kurt Cobain — he hardly even saw a computer! The digital stuff that’s going on is so exciting. I’m just so curious and about what happens next.
~ Helen Mirren on Oprah, 2014

I was thinking about Kurt Cobain the other day and he died without knowing the Internet, and I’m totally blown away by that.“
~ Helen Mirren in Cosmopolitan, 2015

If I’d died at 27, the age that Kurt Cobain died in 1994, I’d never have even known there was an Internet! Incredible things are happening all the time and I can’t wait to see what comes next.“
~ Helen Mirren in The Daily Mail, 2016

I always say it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did, because he never saw GPS. GPS is the most wonderful thing, to watch my little blue spot walking down the street. I just find it completely magical and unbelievable.
~ Helen Mirren on Brave New World, 2024

In music, I’ve listened to Portugal. The Man’s latest album, Shish, about 30 times all the way through. They departed from their style from the last 10-ish years. Apparently this is because they left Atlantic Records and are indie for the first time in a long time.

The lyrics on Spotify and Genius for this album are garbage. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were auto generated with AI. It’s a perfectly fine AI use case for many songs and genres, but Portugal. The Man’s music is so atypical that a system like that would not work here.

Song 2, Pittman Ralliers, is probably the most out-of-place, but it weirdly fits with the theme of the album. If you don’t like it, skip it on first listen, but otherwise listen to the whole thing. Each song is titled after a location in Alaska or is Alaska-related. If you just listen to 2 or 3 songs, do Kokhanockers, Tanana, and/or Knik.

¶Blog Posts

Astral Codex Ten

• Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
• Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
  • Authentic vs convenient, instant food, and this dichotomy in general — little bit of Incan history
• Your Review: Ollantay - by a reader - Astral Codex Ten
  • Review of a Quechua-language play that indirectly started a failed rebellion against the Spanish occupiers
• In What Sense Is Life Suffering? - by Scott Alexander
• Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
• Against Against Boomers - by Scott Alexander

iDiallo

• How I didn’t learn Spanish with Duolingo
• Small teams should avoid Large Companies Processes
• Paying for the rides I took 8 years ago
  • How and why Uber is so much more expensive now

Uncharted Territories / Tomas Pueyo

• Why Warm Countries Are Poorer - by Tomas Pueyo
  • Landmark post — I’m surprised no one (seemingly) has come to this conclusion before.
• Climate Caused the US Civil War - by Tomas Pueyo
• Argentina Could Be a Superpower - by Tomas Pueyo
• Why Is Argentina Poor? - Uncharted Territories

Travel & Tourism

• No Country Ever Got Rich From Tourism
• Greenland is a beautiful nightmare
• Indefinite Backpack Travel – Jeremy Maluf
• Faroes - Nagarjuna Kumar
• This Scenic Coastal Amtrak Route Connecting New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, Is Finally Back, After 20 Years

Urbanism / Living

• The case for having roommates (even when you can afford to live alone)
• MSN — New York’s Airbnb Crackdown, in Force for Two Years, Hasn’t Improved Housing Supply
  • More evidence that we need to build housing
• Traveling neighborhoods - by Devon Zuegel - Supernuclear
• Why it’s worth having a community Wiki - by Nicole Reese

Technology

• Slack is extorting us with a $195k/yr bill increase
• Everything that’s wrong with Google Search in one image
• マリウス . Thoughts on Cloudflare
• AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is - Fast Company
• Vanilla CSS is all you need
• It’s Not Just You - The iOS Keyboard is Broken — Michi NekoMichi — YouTube

Other

• Square Theory | Adam Aaronson
• The Elbow Metaphor - by Duncan Sabien - Homo Sabiens
  • Who should get the armrest on a plane, and how is this figured out implicitly?
• Hector (cloud) - Wikipedia
  • A very consistent cloud off the coast of Australia that has a name. Proud of my famous relative.
• What the humans like is responsiveness - by Sasha Chapin
• Moved Back to New York Observations — X Thread
• Underrated reasons to be thankful V
• The United Nations and the Origins of Giving Tuesday

¶Videos

• “It’s a Conversation Starter“ — Please Clap Productions — YouTube
• Software is evolving backwards — TechAltar — YouTube
• The Grinch Apology Video — Trent Lenkarski — YouTube
• Is Pizza really more American than Italian? — History In Taberna — YouTube
  • Part of an ongoing debate
• How To Make Slow-Cooked Russet Potatoes That Fall Right Off The Bone — The Onion — YouTube
• How to Die in a Tornado — weatherbox studios — YouTube
• Unreal Mothership Supercell at Sunset! — Pecos Hank — YouTube
• How we treated AI in 2023 vs 2026 — Jaden Williams — YouTube
  • Whiplash reference, if you didn’t get it
• The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made — Drew Gooden — YouTube
• Caffeine is Very, Very Strange… — vlogbrothers — YouTube
• The Incredible Biology Powering Autumn Colors｜Leaf Senescence — Clockwork — YouTube
• The WEIRD Way Caffeine Works — Clockwork — YouTube
• Insensitive Alex Trebek — annabells — YouTube
• How NOT to Get Killed by Drones — Civ Div — YouTube
• Amtrak’s Subtle, Surprising Success — Wendover Productions — YouTube
• Air Bud Pt. II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (Web Exclusive) — LastWeekTonight — YouTube
• Corporate Lady How to Talk — Go Away — YouTube
• The sights and sounds of Bhutan — Wait But Why — YouTube
• Why It’s Illegal to Build in New York City — Hoog — YouTube