Spent some of my vacation time fiddling with the backend tech that I use to organize the digital bits of my life (the foundation of my personal technology stack as it were).
- Resized my $10/month Linode down to a $5/month instance.
- Migrated my personal website from WordPress to Ghost because staying on top of the WordPress upgrades was tedious and I wanted to try something different. In fact, most of this maintenance was precipitated by my son’s WordPress instance getting hacked on my Linode on account of running old wordpress plugins, forcing me to do all sorts of restoration and reconsidering.
- Moved my bookmark manager (Shaarli) from my old host to my new server.
- Moved from Apache to Nginx.
- Got Navidrome up and running on a headless NUC. This, I’ll note got really complicated as I could not for the life of me get my external USB SSD drive to mount in anything but read-only mode which meant I couldn’t add any new FLAC Matrix recordings to it. I finally gave up, reformatted to EXT4 and restored a backup of all my media files to the (now-writeable) USB drive. What a hassle. Everything I remember not liking about futzing with Linux. But now that it’s done, I’ll forget about the frustration until next time.
- Modified a Python script to apply metadata to Hunter’s Trix FLACs and copy them over to my external drive. This was a fun programming project. It’s been so long since I focused on solving a problem using Python. I wish I could say the syntax came back to me easily but that’s what google is for. Though it now occurs to me that as I try to add some new features to the the script I may try ChatGPT as a helper. I will clean this script up and share it once I get it dialed in.
