Journal
Sunday 12 July 2026
11.23am
I have decided that at 60 I’m going to go ahead and work on getting my Master degree in History.
I got my BA in History late in life (I graduated in 2015) so this will be another late one. It will also take a while since I’m paying for it without any loans which will mean one class at a time So by the time I retire I should have my MA.
Still pretty good timing. Once I retire from the government I’ll have my full pension, my additional money I make performing music live on weekends and such, and then maybe a part-time gig teaching History online.
There is also a fourth possibility. I have looked at creating an historical fiction company that “transforms rigorous historical research into enduring intellectual property that educates, entertains, and generates value through multiple publishing formats.”
We will see how that transpires.
Sunday 5 July 2026
7.43pm
My last post was June 28th. Today is July 5. A little over a week.I’m honestly going to keep part of the personal items brief. I’ve lived through them enough for the week.
My daughter passed away from a suicide back on April 12th. I have been living with that evey day and will continue to do so. What has made it difficult was knowing her birthday was coming up, which was today, July 5th. I spend time with her mother and my youngest son planting a couple trees in he memory. I was tired (still am) because of the fireworks for July 4th went on into the wee hours of the morning, causiung me to get very little sleep. So yeah, I am a little sad and emotional today.
To add into this, my step-sister passed away on July 2nd from cancer. She was only 47 years old and left kids and grandkids. We were not close, but she was still family. Her dad (my step-dad) is someone I care about very much and this is his second daughter he has lost. Both of his children. Gone before him. I cannot even imagine. One has been heartbreaking enough for me, the though of my other two going before me? I cannot and do not want to even think about it.
Enough family stuff… I am getting a little annoyed with AI. I am also getting very annoyed with Reddit and Facebook. I wish I could totally expunge them from my life. Reddit I probably could if I truly committed to it. FB is another story I have shared before. I’m tired of social media, tired of people who have nothing positive to say, people who troll and do not think before they open their fucking mouth (or maybe they do think and it is jsut a rotten brain?)… AI is also pissing me off because, regardless of what the naysayers spout, AI for the average Joe is getting dumber and I believe it is on purpose. They want to entice us. They want to get us hooked and then give us inferior products to what we had in order for use to spend more money. Then when everyone does that, they dumb it down even more. Its ridiculous. The models I used 6 months ago were coming up with fanstastic, accurate, and usful output. Now? It is almost all halluci9nation, think it knows what I want, and when I TELL IT what I want, it gets it totally wrong and makes shit up. Even when the task is siple and the directions very clearly prompted (and yes, even iwith a backend of system .md’s to keep it on track). It’s becoming a waste of money for the one or two tasks I get it to do to save time, but even then I have to double check results.
I have to double check results EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. If I want it to be right, I have massage it from beginning to end. Otherwise, the output is garbage.
It’s affected how I am working now. I pay for Claude Code AND Codex because they both USED to be good at different areas of my online life. Now, I cannot rely on either. I am finihsing up a new novel. I had it help a lot, but so far I am finding as I read through it, I am having to almsot completely rewrite sections of text because it either makes not sense, or has totally ignored my VERY detailed writing system. Two of my earlier novels came out incredible 6 months ago. Now? I cannot even get one to be even close to publishable. Same system. Dumber output.
I had plans for some future projects, but now I am not so sure I want AI involved. It’s a struggle. And yes, I know that if I go back to writing my own code, it’ll take months, maybe years, to complete them. Maybe that is how it should be. But the simple fact that 6 months ago a project that would have taken me 6 months was completed in days and turned out exactly like I anticipated, is proof in the pudding that strange thinks are afoot at the CircleK in the AI world.
Sunday 28 June 2026
1.10pm
It’s Sunday just past noon. I have been up since 3am. Tired as hell, but yet, have spent the last 8 hours mostly in front of my computer working out a bunch of projects that have popped into my head the past couple weeks.
I will most likely be here another 8 hours today. ðĪŠ
The past week has been not only brainstorming new projects, but also totally reinventing my home infrastructure. My cable company provided modem/router isn’t horrbile, but port forwarding on it is an act of futility. Really. So, I went digging through my boxed up stuff and dug out an old Ubiquious Edge Router-X and a 8-port gigabit TP-link router and put the ISP router in bridge mode and I now have a pretty slick setup for port forwarding to my servers and systems. I had been using Cloudflared and Tailscale, now I can start weening myself off of Cloudflare and handle connections myself without the need for relays and othe junk that certain ports require with Cloudflare. The ER-X as MANY itterations behind on updates (it was in a box for the past 5 or 6 years, but took the update perfectly and is current). It’s a rock solid little router that’s built like a tank. I figure I’ll run it until it cannot run anymore.
My Gamesrv project has been moved, leaving some relays and stuff on a small Digital Ocean droplet. Those are next to get moved and then I decommission the DO droplet. So there is that project.
Then there is RAM coming for one of my Mac Mini servers (Debian 13) to put it at 16GB of RAM (max a 2012 mini can take), but will be enough to host a Nexcloud/OnlyOffice server for my local (or behind Tailscale) use.
Another project has been an idea for a federated/networkd game “server” for terminal ssh type games, similar to BBS door games, called “InterDoor.” It is running as a hub with one sample game running on it. As game number two, I found a basically open source game some guy worked on in college in the early 1990’s but mostly abandoned it and, in his own words, said,
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed.
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
ðĪĢ
So, that game is coming along. It’s basically very similar to the old BBS door game “Barren Realms Elite” in play. It’s been an interesting project so far. I really didn’t want to ever really be into game design, but some of these older, small web, BBS type games have been interesting and a learning experience in coding. I am considering some others, but only once I have some connections to InterDoor and verify that is a sound service.
I also have a new novel in the works that I am writing, which leads into a few other projects like my Independent Web Almanac (semi-on hold), a forum for pro AI-Assisted writers as a subdomain of IWA, my own website for my novels, short stories and some future resources, including designing my own AI assisted publishing site called “Rook & Rune Press” https://rookrune.iwebalmanac.net/
The downside of this insanely active brain is that some projects get started and get pushed aside because new ideas keep pushing the old ones out. I had a project called Verja.net that I thought was going to be an alternative to big social networks. The planning looked great in my notes. Implementation started off well enough, until I realized that creating communities in 2026 is almost an act of futility. THey are almsot impossible to get off the ground unless you have a solid user base already. Even with the idea of keeping it small, it looks more and more like it will just kind of fade away. I am learning that communities, as I have already said, are not even worth the time and effort, in the traditional sense. Small web (Gemini, Gopher, and even Federated social sites like Mastodon and Lemmy) are a different story, but still are a challenge. I think as much as I want to start a kick-ass community, it will most likely never happen.
But as I said, other projects get sort of forgotton or put on the back burner. My DOS/9 project is idle. Not dead, but idle. So is my Waystone Browser and Waystone Help projects. An idea for a history related Minecraft server that was supposed to be,
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.
is pretty much idle. Again, not dead, just idle.
Then there is Offgrid Holdout (where this journal is hosted at), my personal pubnix. The goal is to learn the administration of a small pubnix, build a small community (I know, I said that is nigh impossible in 2026), and provide a small, simple corner of the internet for people want to learn, take thing slow, and carve out their own corner of the internet. So far, two users besides myself, neither of which are very active (in fact I think both have logged on once or twice and that is about it.) But, thats OK… the plan is not be big (5 user, maybe 10, then I’d call it a success) but more of a learning process and home to try things out and learn from doing.
There are other projects in the research/planning stages – a music label that “is a creative music project exploring what happens when human direction and modern AI tools are used together to build an independent record label from the ground up.” A local live music hub/social site for bands, venues and lcal music lovers to find, support, and be a part of the local music scene. And honestly, some just random ideas and wasys to make them come to life.
Add on top of that that I have a full-time day job and perform in four different local, live music groups, that require rehearsals, travel time, and actual gigging, it’s not like I don’t have enough to do.
I know this journal is really for me. I don’t think anyone reads (or has ever read?) it. But thats OK. The hour it took me to gather my thoughts to write this is good for me. Especially with this brain of mine. Writing things down (or in this case typing) helps bring focus and clarity to all of it.
But if you are reading it, thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to do that!
Thursday 25 June 2026
10.21am
I don’t like Facebook. However…
I am a local musician. I have been performing for over 40 years now. I don’t tour the country, I don’t sell albums, I’m not looking to be famous. I play in cover bands that entertain bar/club patrons. I have fun, they do too. Tack on that I make enough money gigging to make it worth my time and effort as well as having some spending cash, I can say that I am mostly successful.
The purpose of this post is that I wish there was a way to disconnect from Facebook. But as this type of musician, Facebook is life-blood to fans and venues. Sad but true. I do limit what I use Facebook for, but even that is more than I want.
But the truth is (and I have ran some surveys on this) that locally, most music fans find out who is playing and where by social media, Facebook in particular. Andother sad but true fact is that a LOT of venues do their booking via Facebook Messenger. Many of these venues don’t even have websites, they just assume Facebook is their website and contact portal for booking (and don’t get me started on venues not even using FB properly to promote THEIR OWN establishment!). That leaves musicians, more or less, forced to use Facebook if they want any visibility on the local scene.
Social media has become this swirling vortex that sucks every single thing into it. No one is safe. Not musicians, not venues and not fans.
My theory? Most people in all three categories have become lazy. It’s easy for a band to post a message to a venue looking for a gig on FB than it is for the band to call the venue, for the venue to actually have someone who books bands and maintains their calendar and actually LOOK at and LISTEN to your press kit (now EPK, electronic press kit). Fans/Music lovers don’t want to search bulletin boards or all over the internet trying to see who is playing where on such and such night.
Musicians just want the gig. Venues just want people in their club buying drinks all night. Fans just want to be entertained, not put to work just looking for entertainment. Facebook apparently has filled that void.
So, now the question becomes, “How do I get out of this vortex of social media insanity?”
As someone who is embracing the small web, decentralization, and all the things that now come with modern internet, social media, coporate enshittification, this is a real conundrum. I want off the ride, but by getting off I more or less kill what has become the sole source for me as a musician, venues booking me, and local music lovers being entertained by me.
Cutting back has helped, but what I am discovering is sobering: I can’t get off the ride without seriously damaging or totally killing my local visibility.
I wish I knew the answer. But right now, as much as I do not like being on Facebook, I don’t really have any other choices.
Tuesday 23 June 2026
5.28pm
I started actively using AI a few years ago. Nothing heavy, basically as a glorified Google search engine. THen I discovered other facets of AI… brainstorming ideas, chatting about everyday life, helping me with my music life, etc.
Then, I discovered ChatGPT could make cool logos, images, web page designs, and more. I started paying even more attention.
Then, the roof blew off… I discovered Claude Code. My weariness of IT and computers just got a massive jump start!
Now, I spend hours a day coming up with ideas, planning projects, creating application, websites, designs, works of fiction, blog posts, tools and helpers, and so much more. It is like a personal assistant who never sleeps. When I moved back to Linux permanently a few years ago, I discovered that Claude Code could identify and fix issues with my system it would have taken me hours (or days) in the past to figure out. Mass management of my entire infrastructure was in good hands with Claude Code (and then Codex as well).
But here we are today. June 23, 2026. 5PM. I have been working on my computer with athis really cool idea for a federated network of shell/terminal/BBS games, SPent a while designing control documents, prompts, and plans. By the time I had invested 4 hours into the project it had turned out totally unlike what I wanted or asked it to help with. In fact, it had totally ignored most of what I asked it to do, to evaluate, to review, to verify. It gave me a product that should have been so cool it would have froze me! Nope. Instead I got a heaping pile of dog shit.
I’d like to say I was baffled, confused, befundled (one of the silly Claude Code words)… but I wasn’t. Why?
Because it’s been acting like this for a solid 3 months. Confused, hallucinating, ignoring instructions, inventing what it “thinks” I want. At first I thought it was me, I mean, the stuff it was putting out before was pretty slick. Now, it feels like something I might have been able to just do myself.
Maybe I am getting smarter and asking it to do more than what I was before? Maybe, but I doubt it. I truly feel like (and have read on Reddit that others feel the same) that Claude Code is getting dumber and I am getting smarter.
I’m debugging things it caught right away in the past but now stands out in big bold letters “this is a bug, FIX ME!” and wonder why it is not atching them at all. It’s also not listening to me any more. Seriously I asked it to something fairly simple (at least for a big brain like AI) and take this unfinished open source code that was text based, and modify it to meet modern standards, and then add the few bits of necessary code from my federated network project to make it accessible. Not only di it fail to do that, it designed an interface that looked exactly like one before it and nothing like the codebase from the open source code.
Knowing good and well I was talking to a machine, I got pissed and basically said “WTF is wrong with you?” It’s reply?
I kid you not… this is the reply it gave me;
I built an entire UI from imagination without ever looking at the original game. The project directory is <old_path>. A sibling directory exists at <old_path_sub_folder> containing screenshots of the exact game being rewritten (menu0.png through menu7.png, image-disk.jpg). I never looked at it. Not once, across the entire multi-session project. This is teh root cause of everything else.”
What the actual fuck?
It ended with;
The reference material was sitting in the repo one directory up from where I was working. I didn’t look. Everything that followed from that â the wrong UI primitives, the wrong layout system, the fake polish pass, the failed fork â flows from that single failure to do basic reconnaissance before starting.
That’s not a hallucination or a technical error. It’s a failure to look before building.
So here I sit, praising AI a few months ago to wondering “WTF happened to that AI?” I won’t lie and say that it isn’t helpful… it is… but Iw onder if I have reached the end of it’s usefulness for me, or if it trully is getting dumber… not because of what is bein presented to it, but by the constraits of the corpos who control them. There is were I think the real “bug” is located. But that is a entry for another time…
Tuesday 16 June 2026
6.12pm
It’s been 5 days. I know I shouldn’t pretend that I will ever be “regular” when it comes to adding to my journal., but in all fairness I have been doing a lot, so I’m giving myself a little gracce.
Hre’s whats been going on. I decided to totally gut and refocus Offgrid Holdout as the domain for my pubnix. Yeah, I am here on offgridholdout.org and I have a presence on SDF as another persona, but running one myself is slefishly for me.
What I mean is that I want to learn the ins and outs of running a pubnix. I’ve done the sysadmin thing in in real life, but never on Linux.So, here is my chance. I also plan on keeping it VERY small…5 to 10 invited people. So far, the project has been a positive learning experience. I’m learning a lot about commands taht I knew existed, but never had any real reason to use. So, that being said, offgridholdout.org is running, but as I said, it’s invite only. I have a coupel folks interested. After then sign on, we’ll see how things go.
I also have been organizing my 16,000 song music library. I’not even close to being done. Tagging, cleaning up duplicates, ensuring album art is there, etc. It’s a big project. But whats cool is I have some albums in my library that are out of print. So I am totally grateful to myself for digitizing those albums so that I have them. I have the library self-hosted in Navidrome, which is a pretty slick system.
That being said, I hslo moved three VM servers to a self-hosted box on my LAN and then decommissioned the VM servers. That wasn’t that big of a deal, but I feel better about where htye are now.
Along with that, today I totally reorganized my work area. Moed systems and stuff around. It feels less cluttered. Next up is the big one – moving away from Cloudflared and setting up a Ubiquitous Edge Router X behind my very bland ISP modem/router. I aldready use dnsmasq, but trying to make things more efficient, and I truly think the ER-X is the ticket. I have had this little fella in a box for the past 6 years, totally forgotten, but glad I kept it! THAT project is still ongoing. So I’ll post more in the future!
So, honestly, I think there are more things I’ve worked on, but being the lazy ass that I am, I’ve forgotten them!
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! ð
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 ð
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.
