I am starting to realize that every other week I talk about traveling somewhere, in the midst of which I also threw in the part about being somewhat lonely and depressed when I had to be by myself in one place for a couple of weeks. This is probably giving people the impression that I love to travel and despise being a homebody, which is quite literally the exact opposite of who I really am. Hopefully this week was my last trip for the next few months and I can reclaim my nerdy homebody persona.
As hinted above, I was back home this week! My friend Rohan was getting married and I couldn’t imagine not being there, especially when our whole friend group was getting together. It was a great time, he sounded genuinely excited and happy which is all I care for. I got to see a lot of friends I haven’t met in person for over a year now, and it was very nice catching up and being a little rowdy over some drinks :)
While at home I also took the opportunity to hack some more on the homelab server and try out microvm.nix to enable running more than one instance of things on the same machine which has historically been a problem on NixOS. I intended to use all that preparatory work to try out Booklore in a microVM since it uses MariaDB which I had no plans to run on my host, but that fell through when my suspicions around the quality issues in the v2 release were validated by the revelation that the developer has let Claude run rampant over what was honestly a pretty decent bit of software. The following meltdown from the developer cemented my decision to stay away from it entirely. Instead, I set myself up with Calibre-Web.
It was quite straightforward, and most of my time tinkering with it actually went into setting up forward authentication using Caddy and Pocket ID. The end result of it can be found here, and I intend to write a post about it next week so others have to suffer a little less than I had to :')
At home, I do my gaming on Linux where I ran into a peculiar bug involving Discord and Tailscale, which didn’t let me join any voice calls. I investigated this a bit online, and apparently it was reported already and the fix was to hide the tailscale0 interface from the Discord client?? That was also how I found about firejail, and like most things there was already a NixOS module to make the setup easy.
On Saturday I flew back home via a morning flight, which is weirdly the first time I realized that the flight between Bengaluru and Hindon is closer to 3 hours than 2. Always thought otherwise, don’t know why.
I found out about IzzyOnDroid’s AI policy yesterday and since I’ve written before about using LLMs for the development of Claw, I filed an issue to ask for its removal from the repository. I massively appreciate the work they do for the FOSS ecosystem for Android (having donated a not-insignificant amount to their OpenCollective through Android Password Store) and I would hate to take that for granted and knowingly ignore their policies. There hasn’t been a decision made yet on it, but I’ve provided all the necessary context to aid the process.
Swapnil and I went to watch Boong right before I sat down to write this weeknote. Very cute and heartwarming, really loved it. It also made me realize how much I’ve missed going to the movies this past month, so I’m remedying it by watching Iron Lung tomorrow.
More meta stuff: I’ve previously talked about how my CMS does not have an integration with Cloudflare R2 as an excuse to not attach pictures of my food, which obviously meant that the feature got shipped so I have no reason to be lazy anymore. Prepare for diabolical salads next week!