nico’s blog


the long update

Wow, yeah, it's been a while. Welcome back, me.

A lot's happened since my last(real) post and I can't really remember everything, so I'll go over the highlights. inhales

got my finances under control

You may remember I posted on my blog that I was $22k in credit card debt. I'm happy to announce that I was able to roll about $14k of that into much lower interest rate personal loans, and they're being paid every month with my balance decreasing regularly. I'm still paying interest, but I'm finally making tangible forward progress.

I've also got my YNAB budget zipped up and clean as a whistle, and deleted most of my banking apps from my phone so I have to pay attention to the budget. It's worked really well so far and I'm saving more money than ever.

happy birthday to me

My birthday is coming up soon, and I traded my Steam Deck LCD to a friend for some money, and ordered myself a Steam Deck OLED Limited Edition. Happy birthday to me - I may be 27 and still have no clue what I'm doing with my life, but at least I have portable gaming!

deployed way, way more family services

You can look forward to way more of a write up on this, but I've deployed Keycloak for SSO authentication, a wiki, a Vaultwarden instance, and more for my family on the Gallus server. I'd like to do at least a few blog posts detailing how I deployed this and how you can too!

built a new server

My home server Nero was a shitty old Dell Optiplex I fished out of a dumpster, and it was starting to crash and stop processes randomly. I used some spare parts from around the house to build a new server and get a bit of an upgrade. Again I'd like to do a write up on this at some point.

deployed Pi-hole

I heard that Google is going ahead with Manifest V3. Well, Google can kiss my ass, and I deployed a Pi-hole for my parent's Wi-Fi using my old NanoPi Neo3. I also did one for myself, but that one runs in Mikrotik's Containers system, so basically it's Docker on my router. That also deserves a write-up of its own.

ordered some of the last Pad & Quill, ever

I've been a big fan of Pad & Quill leather products over the years - I used to rock a wallet case of theirs on my iPhone, I wear a watchband, and my trusty iPad is clad in their leather. I was saddened to hear they'll be going out of business, so I placed a final order for one more watchband and their adorable Little Brief AirPods Pro case. Rest easy, Mr. PQ.

RIP MKUltra

My favorite mechanical keyboard supply store, MK Ultra, has also gone out of business. Damn! In a blog post, the owner said it was due to health issues that suddenly arose, so I wish them and their family the best. My fingers continue to love typing because of what you've sold me over the years, and your stickers were all top-notch.

Learning Proxmox

I installed Proxmox on an old Mac Mini of mine and am experimenting with it, it might replace Fedora Server on Gallus if and when I ever reimage it.

The trimmings

There's so much more that I've done that I should write about that I'll just bullet here:

What's next

Wow, that was a lot. Much of that I'd like to write more about and elaborate, so keep an eye out for more posts coming soon. As always, old school internet is cool and you can subscribe via RSS(thanks to Robb I was able to get https://cropp.blog to expose it!).

--Nico

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