Jim Willis

  • audio & self-hosting updates

    It’s been a busy few weeks as I reorient myself from the warm-weather version of me that spends almost zero time on personal technology projects to the cold-weather version of me that spend most of my time on personal technology projects. As always, I know I contain multitudes but sometimes the difference between some of those multitudes is downright shocking.

    Anyway, I’ve setup a Jellyfin server so that I can watch a bunch of old series that I have downloaded to my media server (things like the original Tenacious D HBO episodes, Tales from the Tour Bus, etc.) This has been a fun exercise in part because I deployed it in docker and my docker-compose file has really grown over the past year or so.

    dash screen grab
    Dash. doing its monitoring of my NUC where I do most of the self-hosting.

    From a self-hosting perspective, and all running in docker, I’ve got:

    • Navidrome for my audio server. Amazing.
    • Photoprism for my photo storage and archiving so the I can just keep my favorites on my iOS devices and push the rest up to this archive
    • pi-hole – I go back and forth on the convienece of having this though being able to blacklist sites like news.google.com and such so that I don’t just thoughtless check the news is helpful
    • watchtower to keep my docker images up to date
    • homarr – a dashboard for the services that I’m self-hosting
    • dash. – monitor resources on my NUC
    • nginx proxy manager – an easy way to manage the nginx reverse proxy stuff so that I can access my music library when I’m outside of my house (using play:sub to listen to my navidrome library via CarPlay is killer).
    My Navidrome Recently-added screen

    On the audio front, I’m still really happy with the Cambridge Audio swap that I did for the NAD amp I used to have in my listening room. For the icing on the cake I used a room analysis tool (HouseCurve) and modified the PEQ/eq curve that I use for the room. As I expected there were some spikes down in the low frequency range and this tool helped me not only figure out the frequencies but gave me some guidance on how much to adjust.

    This, combined with the small eq curve adjustments I made following my AirPod listening test (shocking I don’t have more hearing loss after so many years of standing in front of stupid-loud amps), I feel like albums just sound a bit better now though that could be totally subjective.

    I recently started futzing around with Tailscale, it seems like a shockingly easy way to securely tunnel between devices but as I’ve already got reverse proxies setup for my key services, I’m not sure what I’ll use it for.

  • Freddie King

    Stumbled across this album yesterday afternoon:

    Freddie King

    The entire album is gold. After years of listening to live album (that I can’t seem to find the name of anywhere) it was great to hear some of the original studio versions.

  • Links, agh.

    Just spent 15 minutes trying to surface an article from a blog I read a couple of weeks ago. Coudn’t find it in Reader, or my Shaarli instance. Eventually found it by digging into my RSS feed reader and reviewing all of my feeds. Fortunately I pruned that number down a bit a few months ago but was still tedious. This should be easier but I’m not sure how to improve my bookmarking+feed reading+long form article reading+highlights.

    For fun, I pasted the above into Claude and asked for help, here’s the suggested solution

    This is a common challenge in personal knowledge management. Let me help break this down and suggest a more streamlined approach.

Here's a suggested system that might work better:

1. Content Capture
   - Use a read-later service like Raindrop.io or Readwise Reader as your primary collection point
   - These modern tools can handle RSS feeds, newsletters, and manual additions
   - They typically offer better search, tagging, and highlighting features

2. Processing System
   - Implement a quick triage system when content comes in
   - Use tags consistently (e.g., "to-read", "reference", "archive")
   - Add brief notes about why you're saving something
   - Consider using progressive summarization (highlighting key points when you first read)

3. Long-term Storage
   - Move important content to a knowledge management system (like Obsidian or Logseq)
   - Keep only what you'll reference again
   - Create connection points between related pieces of content

4. Search Strategy
   - Use specific tags for broad categories
   - Include contextual notes about why something was important
   - Consider adding your own summary/key points when saving

Would you like me to elaborate on any of these points or discuss specific tools that might work for your workflow?

    Food for thought, I guess.

  • Twitter

    My journal entry from 17 years ago today was a copy of a message i sent out to few friends of mine:

    So but anyway, I’m sjwillis on Twitter.

    If you’re not signed up, you should check it out. You can go to Twitter to do so or you can do it right from your cellphone by:

    – texting “help” to 40404

    – twitter will reply with some stuff.

    – reply to it with a msg like “yo”

    – twitter will reply, prompting you for a username and send you a

    message back confirming that username.

    – make a note of that name and send it to me

  • Reminders Quick Entry

    I was looking for a quick way to add reminders to Apple Reminders on my Mac similar to Things hotkey quick entry.

    There are several out there that I found through Google but ultimately landed on this one for its simplicity and natural language processing:

    https://github.com/surrealroad/alfred-reminders

  • New Releases

    A lot of new releases to check out from the past 2 weeks:

    The Windham Hill Guitar one isn’t new but I just added it to my library, the rest though, I’m excited to check out. I’ve already been really loving the new Vasen/Hawktail release. Can’t believe the Brand New Heavies album is 30 years old. Stoked to check out the Billy Strings album especially after reading the great interview from last week in GQ.

  • Jimmy Bruno has the best musical instruction channel on YouTube in case you are interested:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk2x_VVq-Do

  • Generative AI tools further the importance of quality over quantity in employee evaluation. Another key future skill: managers who can spot true excellence amid AI-enhanced mediocrity.

  • Meta/AI and wearables

    Nilay Patel and Mark Zuckerberg Podcast notes:

    – I’m on board with the idea that computing’s future is shifting away from mobile towards wearables, likely eyeglasses. Might be worth looking into Luxottica investments given their Facebook partnership.

    – The concept of companies using AI chatbots as customer-facing agents with real agency? Yes, I can see that happening. These AI instances could represent brands, proactively engaging customers through messages, ads, etc.

    – AI-generated content in social media feeds seems inevitable, but I’m not thrilled about it. It’s unlikely to match the novelty or appeal of human-created content. However, the idea that social networks’ role is to spark conversations in private channels is intriguing. Take TikTok, for instance – people watch videos there but share and discuss them in private chats elsewhere.

    – There’s definitely going to be a demand for user-friendly, private channels that offer more than just text messaging. But can anything really beat the richness of a letter with a photo? I’m not so sure.

  • Of all the new features on ios 18, the one that no one has talked about and that has made the most impact on my day-to-day life is that Siri now AutoCorrects wanna to “want to.”

Current Spins

Top Albums

Check out my album Set It All Down on your favorite streaming service.

Posts Worth Reading:

Free Internet vs Internet of Free Stuff

Letterboxd

Reading Notes

  • Read: Vision Con
    Unable, then, to see the world because I have forgotten the way of being in the world that enables vision in the deepest sense, I […]
  • Read: I Made This
    Suppose Bob writes an email to Sue, who has no existing business relationship with Bob, asking her to draw a picture of a polar bear […]
  • Read: Is It Time to Shake Up Your Coffee Routine?
    The large majority of the world’s decaffeination still happens through chemical-based processes that use things like methylene chloride or ethyl acetate. I don’t know what […]
  • Read: The Thing That Is Silence
    All the forces at play within us and without seem to be centrifugal forces, pulling us apart. I remain interested in understanding the nature of […]
  • Read: Browsing in Emacs
    FWIW, my Emacs of the moment is emacs-plus@29 installed by Homebrew: brew install emacs-plus@29 –with-mailutils –with-xwidgets \ –with-imagemagick –with-native-comp Source: Browsing in Emacs – Volume […]

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