Category: <span>Journal</span>
Thursday 11 June 2026
6.17pm
I am pretty sure I hve ADHD when it comes to projects. I get one going and the next thing you know it’s “Ohh!Bright shuny thing” and I ending moving to something else.
I have a server than has been reloaded three times the past 3 days. Each time I think “yeah, this is a good use for this system” and then, nope, something else pops up and I start it over. That same system now is doing nothing and my weird ass brain is trying to find something to do with it. Forget “do you even need it”.. hell no, SOMETHING needs to be on it! 🙂
I need to quit coming up with new projects and actually finish a bunch that I have started. I have quite a few of those. I think I am a planner and a builder and deep down I’m afraid they will get completed and then I’ll be like, “OK, thats that now what?” But that might not be bad… I don’t know.. Definitely ADD when comes to this stuff!!
Tuesday 9 June 2026
7.52am
I always start journals with good intentions. Document what I am feeling, what is going on, give my thoughts a voice, etc. Maybe a week of back to back posts, then a couple days in between, then a month in between and then poof silence.
I am REALLY trying not to do that here, bu I also don’t want to post journal entries for the sake of posting. In lief I am that guy that talks when I have something to say, not just to hear myself.
It’s been four days since my last journal entry. Now granted I have a handful of twtxt tweets in between (those are simple and easy, so glad I have them available) and I have been doing things that I should probably journal, even if no one ever reads my offgridholdout page. But here I am four days later and just slowly getting around to it.
So, I will just hit the Cliff Notes version of the weekend.
Proxmox was a bust. Is it cool? Absolutely. But I have more power and resources on my desktop than the i5, 16GB spare PC I was hosting it on. Really eaier for me to setup OS labs in VirtualBox or 86Box, maintain snapshots, and not worry about resources or being about to setup a OLD OS (like OS/2Warp) or something smi complicated like Gentoo. So, it’s gone, that system repurposed with Debian 13 headless and a Minecraft server and a simple Apache/PHP server to serve the associated website. The idea is cooler too. A small adult Minecraft community for historical building, research, and storytelling. Recreate places, compare sources, and turn each build into something visitors can learn from. Still in the early config stages, byt he Minecraft server is up and running.
I also decided to expand my Historical fiction/Short Story site and weaved in a historiogrpahy portion from an old blog I ran years ago called “Historical Interpreter” that has historical essays, historiography, research library, KB, Bibliographies, Source Guides, etc. It is the “how to” of all things history, and really is fine addition to the historical fiction I write on my site. Again, this is still in the works, but my maon page of short stories and novels is still up and running as before at https://nburchett.com
Other projects have started and not made traction. Verja (is a community operating system for small, durable, member-owned groups) and is in beta user testing, but honestly, I am not feeling the vibe of this one… started with good intentions, but community driver sites are HARD to get off the ground in the modern world. This also goes for Independent Web Almanac, but it is less community and more information, support, resource oriented. It’s jsut on pause because all my smaller “quick” projects take over.
Speaking of which, there have been small projects. My 15,000 song music library reorganization project, my novel writing system tweaks, posting articles on my history site, my author site, and dipping in now and then to my DOS/9 project (which is very alive, just waiting on some actual REAL retro Pentium II hardware to test) and then doing research into learning paths for BSD and Plan9.
So, it turns out I have more to say than I thought I did. Part of Saturday was spent relaxing with a friend, which my body and soul needed, and defintely slowed my hyperactive brain down for a good chunk of the day.
I’m going to try an be more diligent with these journal entries… instead of throwing it all out there, I’m going to keep them shorter and maybe that will make them easier to keep up with!
Friday 5 June 2026
3.17pm
Where to even start. I have an old HP i5, 16GB RAM computer sitting around and decided to do soemthing with it. So, I wiped it and installed Proxmox to use as a home lab to learn various OS’s and in the future, who knows what!
The installation was pretty straight forward. I then created a plan so I am not just willy nilly installing OS’s. The first one I intalled was OpenBSD, as that is the one I decided I wanted to learn how to administer first. That was an ordeal. Not just configuring the VM with the right settings, but not being familiar with BSD’s install process. I’ll admit, I had to tag Codex a few times to get through it. But now I have a fully functional OpenBSD environment to use as a learning lab! And, I also documented the process so I can repeat it in the future!
I then decided to try another install and went with OS/2Warp4. THAT was a mistake. Not only is Proxmox not really geared for an OS that old, I have never installed OS/2 and finally just gave up. HOWEVER, I do have 86Box isntalled on my ssytem and found the right old hardware settings to install OS/2 and got it to boot, but again, had to tag Codex for some assists. Now, I have a VM running with old school IBM OS/2Warp4!
Today, I’ve been reviewing a writing projhect that I want to have go in a different direction. Not going to say much about it right now, because it’s still in the planning phase and may change. But honestly, I think it’s going to be a pretty cool project. I have feelers out on the web getting some opinions. So while those are coming in, I thought I would try another Proxmox VM and decided to dig WAY back to my early Linux days and try installing Gentoo. Back in the early 2000’s it was REALLY difficult to install. I tried many times and gave up equally as many times. Today, the handbook is considerably easier to follow with better descriptions. I am currently sitting in a SSH isntance of Gentoo configuring it. And that my friends is where I am sitting right now at 3:15PM on a Friday afternoon!
Wednesday 3 June 2026
8.13am
My apologies to William Shakespeare 😂
To publish, or not to publish, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler to dwell within
The walled gardens of the mighty platforms,
There to harvest likes and fleeting notice,
Or to take up domain, server, and editor
Against a sea of convenience,
And by persistence build a place of one’s own.
To write, to host, no more. And by a host to say
We end the tyranny of engagement,
The heartache of algorithms,
And the thousand manufactured urgencies
That modern creators suffer.
To write, to host. To host, perchance to matter.
Ay, there’s the hope.
For in that quiet corner of the Net
What conversations may yet bloom,
When we have shrugged off metrics, trends, and reach,
Must give us courage.
That is the spirit
That keeps the small web alive.
Tuesday 2 June 2026
8.28pm
Pretty much have this website designed and just need to do some minor tweaks and populate some info.
The nice thing is that in Brave browser, with Shields Up, I get 0 trackers, ads and more blocked!
That is the goal of my presence here. A safe, smallweb friendly, secure, comfortable place on the edges ofg the internet!
Tuesday 2 June 2026
4.10pm
Thank you to the 56 current users of Gemcities! The comments I get are always positive and I love that people are taking back their own voice! #geminiprotocol #smallweb #slowpint #indieweb
gemini://offgridholdout.org/~calvusrex/
Tuesday 2 June 2026
4.03pm
Convince me I am wrong: “The Fediverse proved millions will leave commercial platforms when given a reason. But Mastodon, Lemmy, PeerTube, and the rest mostly recreated the same social architecture people wanted to escape: timelines, follower counts, virality, engagement loops… just federated. The migration was sociological, not architectural. People wanted out, but what they got was ‘Twitter, but federated,’ not a fundamentally different shape of online life.”
