Jan 26, 2026
Where Have I Been?
Table of Contents
This is going to be a somewhat long post about where I have been, what I have been up to over the past year or so, why I haven't posted anything new, and what's going to happen with the blog moving forward. It's been almost 2 years since my last blog post! I did have a few posts that I started but never finished, but I haven't really touched this blog at all or really any programming things for that matter.
Computers
Back at my last blog post I was self-hosting a lot of stuff on my own using a collection of Raspberry Pi Zero 2W computers and trying to move those services to another stack of Mango Pi MQ Pro D1 boards as they use around 1W of power. I never did get that completed as my self-hosted services were all on OpenBSD and those machines wouldn't boot on OpenBSD. I did open a mailing list thread for it Here but I haven't looked back to see if it's been supported since.
I started getting back into collecting hardware as well which was keeping me away from the blog. For those of you that don't know me I have these weird fascination with computer hardware. I am super interested in using hardware and getting the most out of it. I bought a few machines that I was playing with firstly, a Blue and White PowerMac G3 with the 300MHz chip and I added 1GB of Ram. The second machine was a PowerMac G4 MDD Dual Proccesor 1.25GHz machine with 2GB of Ram. The third machine was a PowerMac G5 Dual Proccesor 2.3GHz with 6GB of Ram the DDR model not the newer DDR2 model. The last machine I was playing with is the only one left I still own due to life changes, is the PowerBook G4 12" with the 1.25GHz Processor and the stock soldered 768MB of Ram, it's in a little rough shape maybe 6/10. I added a 512GB Samsung 860 EVO SSD to each machine with the Startech IDE to SATA Adapter.
With these I was determined to run something on them in the modern day and make them usable. I don't want to get into a huge rant, but many companies obsolete old hardware for very little reason other than to sell you more stuff. You need to set your expectations with older hardware correctly, obviously these around going to be editing 4K Videos and watching YouTube streamed through a bloated web browser. In fact no major browser works anymore on these even on Linux and BSD. I was able to get the G4 to watch YouTube at 480p smooth no stutters with the stock AMD GPU through mpv-yt-dlp and the G5 could even playback 720p no problem and even 1080p on NetBSD. It's very impressive considering when that G5 came out the main used resolution was 1280 x 1024 which was a 720p display but taller kinda like 16:10 displays that were popular after that and are becoming more common again now. Keep in mind however with YouTube you aren't just playing video at 720p your also streaming it which adds load to the network and CPU.
With these old machines they are running basically as they were designed to do once you remove the bloated web. The modern web is filled with poorly designed websites using Javascript for literally everything and super bloated web browsers. I fell victim to this same trap as well when I started this blog I used a version of React known as NextJS. It was more convinent than the setup I have now but also more bloated with a million libraries. I will talk more about this later, actually.
I ended up using NetBSD more than OpenBSD due to the Linux being well Linux... they like to drop support for old hardware. arch/powerpc still exists today in the kernel, but almost all distros have stopped supporting it except for the obvious like Gentoo. Even FreeBSD 15 has dropped support for it (and every other 32 bit CPU)1. Linux has already dropped support for a newer platform Itanium 64 bit in kernel 6.7 and patches are in place already to remove some other popular 32 bit platforms i486 and i586. i586 is basically 1 generation older than the G3 and it's a shame to see it get dropped.
I was able to run things like Krita on the G4 and even some Kdenlive so it shows they can still edit photos and videos, of course at a lower resolution. I ended up moving the G3 to MacOS 9 and the G4 to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) with the 10.4.12 fixes for security and the Shuriken mod fixes. The G5 ran best on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) with the Snow Leopard mod which I think is pretty well known at this point. Finding older software on Macintosh Repository and Macintosh Garden I could install Final Cut and as expected all works well. I hate seeing old machines end up in the landfill, but I did have to end up selling them in the end due to changes in my life.
My personal machine when I last wrote this blog was a Framework 13 with the 1370P chip and 64GB of Ram. This was my 2nd Framework and I really don't like the quality control of the company at all. The expansion cards didn't line up fully, the hinge always felt rough, I had a battery die prematurely and even broke off one of the studs for the screws to mount to because for some reason it's made of plastic. My last laptop before this was a 2019 Macbook Pro 16" with the 2.3GHz i9 9980H and 32GB of Ram. The level of quality on that machine changed my mind about past gaming laptops I had in the past, and it was also my last large laptop at 16" or more.
I decided to pick on a Macbook Pro 14" to replace the framework, I wanted the M4 Max chip, but the cost increase was too much, so I maxed out the base chip. It's running the base M4 with 32GB Ram and the 2TB SSD with the Matte Display. I really like it, and I'm actually enjoying MacOS again. I talked about things a bit through different blog posts, but I switched from Gentoo to OpenBSD as my full time OS as I didn't want to deal with compilation errors anymore and the time it takes to compile. I will forever love Gentoo I think it's a great Distro and arguably one of the easiest to understand for me, but I was looking to simplify my life to make time for other things. I Did try running KISS Linux for maybe 3 months and while the base system had minimal packages, I had to manually create the packages and then troubleshoot compilation errors without the help of portage which made it not as simplified as I would like. OpenBSD on the other hand while similar the Kernel was compact compared to Linux and the amount of packages was smaller depsite not being able to remove some dependencies without compiling the entire system was slow. The File System, FFS2 while reliable is very slow even on PCIe Gen 4 SSDs like my 980 PRO.
I am still enjoying the Macbook I have again now and have even moved from my GrapheneOS based Pixel to an iPhone again. I just don't really want to spend all this time trying to create this perfect setup. MacOS is great has a standard ZSH shell that works with oh-my-zsh like on any other UNIX Based OS and I can still install almost everything through a package manager like on Linux and BSD by using brew.
Why no posts?
Ok, so switching computers around and playing with older machines isn't really enough to distract me from this blog alone. Besides the life stuff I won't get into here, the other thing holding me back was a Bitcoin tutorial blog I was working on. These don't show up on my GitHub commits yet as the repo is private for now, but I was doing some work on that and wrote around 10 full pages explaining some things. It's nowhere near done and the time it takes to type up each page and gather all the research is a lot and can be overwhelming. The idea is for it to explain things and reference the code base directly to back up what is being said for a non-biased explanation not the crypto bro style talking about making money and how this is the future, etc. The last commit I did for this was April 3rd 2024 but the repo I have saved on an external drive shows the last edit as May 2025.
The other main thing I have been doing has been re-doing my highschool. During my original time in highschool I was mostly building computers, overclocking and playing a lot of video games. I'm at the point in my life where I want to go back and re-do what I missed the first time and learn all the things I need to know. This has been a hard learning curve for me as I don't really have the know how to study and the time management skils to focus. I want to be able to mess around less with computers now and focus more on this instead of spending my time compiling packages for a slightly lighter OS.
It's been very hard for me to do as I enjoy doing these things on the computer, but I've done it all already, I've done Linux From Scratch, I've daily driven Gentoo which taught me a ton about the inner workings of the system. I've made my own packages for KISS Linux and even edited some build scripts for Gentoo musl. I've self-hosted a bunch of services I use day to day learning about Port Forwarding, and I've even had this blog self-hosted and had to learn all about that. There is not much more I can really do that's new besides going to school to learn more about how the hardware playing with works at the PCB level more than I already know. I've set top records in overclocking, most of my life I overclocked my machines for personal FPS in games, but I finally did make a HWBOT account and attempted to touch a top record with the knowledge I have about Electrical Arcing and how having more PCB layers is good when dealing with higher voltages or how to tune Cas Latency on your memory to make it faster (in terms of latency) while running at the same frequency. I really love hardware the high end the low end and the older classic stuff. It's really been an internal challenge to try to step away from and focus on the school work for me. I will try to keep posting while doing the other things I want to get done, but it won't be as frequent as 2023 was.
The Future of the Blog
So what's next for the Blog? I have a lot of ideas I want to do with it. The first thing I want to touch on is Javascript. So this blog started out being programmed in NextJS, and it was much easier to write posts for with a proper template. As I used more vintage hardware I wanted to accomodate my personal website to a less bloated web as let's be honest this blog isn't very intensive. I moved the Blog over to PHP once I used OpenBSD as NextJS wouldn't work properly when trying to run locally to see my changes in real time. PHP had kept the similar template style but still had a few dependencies and I still needed to run a constant local server to see the website in real time. I eventually converted the website to full HTML + CSS with JS for buttons only and this took me time during both of the conversions away from making posts. I am happy with the website in simple HTML + CSS, but the template system is completing gone. I tried using iframes, and it didn't work at all how I wanted. There is a person who I have been following for a few years named sewn. They are very smart and have been in the KISS Linux space for years, you can find their blog here. But sewn has this script which looks like it generates an HTML file with the template done already. I might look into making something like this, but I have also moved from Neovim to VSCodium since I'm back on macOS and wanted to save time setting up my IDE. I might be able to set up something similar with some extension in VSCode. The end point being I want to make it simpler to make a blog post without needing to copy the template I've already made from older posts.
The other thing is moving the website to openbsd.amsterdam this was actually done already back in April 2025. I liked self-hosting on OpenBSD and I think it's more lightweight and secure than Linux, so I wanted to keep using it. Not a lot of providers offer OpenBSD as an option and OpenBSD Amsterdam donates some money to the OpenBSD Foundation which I liked to help to the development. This is a simple httpd setup without relayd.
When I started this website I was focused on making guides for people to try to help the others gain knowledge and grow the community of UNIX Based Operating Systems. This goal has not changed, but it has shifted a bit as I want to expand the website to more of a blog. I want to write stuff like this post, just talking about my thoughts on something. Just because I'm using a Mac right now doesn't mean I still don't care about Linux and BSD, like I said this blog is running on OpenBSD. I may bash Linux or the BSDs from time to time for something because nothing is perfect not even macOS, they all have issues.
For example what I mentioned earlier about Linux dropping Itanium could be a blog post in itself a couple paragraphs of my thoughts. I understand why it was removed due to low users, it wasn't a popular platform even when new. But it's kind of hypocritical consider the AMD GPU Driver will just add 500K lines of code, and it's accepted no problem. Would people even be interested in hearing about this... I don't know.
Another thing I was working on before I took a break was looking into how to set up an RSS Feed for this website. I haven't looked into it since, but ideally I want to not have some API JS plugin just for RSS. I want something organic ideally that just works without a 3rd party if possible. I'd also like to make some type of organic system to do a thumbs up or down on a post. This will likely involve storing a cookie in the browser to count as a vote. So technically you could thumb up in multiple browsers or by clearing cookies, but for a blog post I don't think that really matters. But I guess you never know maybe someone wants to put in enough effort to do that to downvote something, haha.
The last thing I really need to implement is a whole UI redesign and making a mobile version that matches the desktop version. I want to take some UI design course or something to learn what is most appealing to the end user, and then try to design something myself while still using HTML + CSS.
I don't know when the next post will be from here, but I want to try to commit to at least a post a month going forward. On what I'm doing, learning or just my opinions on something going on in the computing space.