blog

happy 2026!

a look forward into a great new year, and catching up

2026-02-06

It has been a fun last few months since the last time I posted on my blog, or even on my now page! Over the next little bit, I'm going to be doing a lot more of both! I have been working on some stuff in the background both online and on the homestead since the last post, and of course, since then, we have also entered into a brand new year, and I am looking forward to seeing what 2026 brings for our projects and for life in general!

Last week, we had quite the snowstorm here in my part of the country. I didn't get a lot done during that week (though I did catch up on some gaming!). We did a lot of hanging out by the fireplace, took some snow pictures, and played some games. I finally played and beat Undertale, which was a great game. Looking forward to going back and playing through it again to go down the different paths.

I got a public server for Luanti setup, and it is running the Voxelibre game. If you haven't heard of it before, think of it as a free software alternative to Minecraft. In my opinion, thanks to the fact that it is FOSS and has a huge variety of community-made mods and games built on top of it, it is even better than Minecraft! In our Voxelibre server, I've been building up quite a bit of stuff and planning on doing a stream on the server sometime soon and inviting people to come onto the server and join in on the fun. The server is called Ravinia, and can be found from the Luanti server selection screen in the Luanti client. Feel free to stop by and build with us sometime if you ever want to give it a try!

I have also finally been playing osu!. If you have not heard of it before, it is amazing rhythm game with several different game modes. There is osu!, which is the main game mode where you click and drag circles in time with the music. There is osu!taiko, where you play the drums in time with the music. There is osu!catch, where you catch the notes with a moving platform as they fall down in time with the beats. Finally, there is osu!mania, which is kinda similar to Guitar Hero, where you use keys to play the notes as they come down the pipeline. It was a game I had been meaning to get into for a long time, it is open-source as well, has a huge amount of community-made beatmaps, and is a blast to play. It runs natively on GNU/Linux, and is an absolute blast to play! If you enjoy rhythm/music-based games, I definitely recommend giving osu! a shot.

Since the last time I posted on the blog, I have also started a new little video series on my YouTube channel. It is called the Smallweb Deep-Dive Series, and we are going through things like the Gemini protocol, independent websites, digital gardens, federated social media, indie communities, private communication platforms, and stuff like that! As you know if you've been reading this site for quite awhile, you know I'm not a big fan of the 'corpo-web', as I like to call it, and love helping people discover alternatives that are free, open, and respect your privacy online. As well as showing these things, the videos also show you how to build your own spaces online - like teaching the basics of gemtext and HTML. I want everyone to be able to build their own spot on the internet and not have to be reliant on the corpo-web platforms! I am happy to say that so far, the Smallweb Deep-Dive Series has been having a pretty good reception!

Music-wise, I have been working further on finishing up the void/null record for the x3nyth project. I have one or two more tracks I want to wrap up, and then do final mixing and mastering on the whole record, and I will have it up for download and streaming! It has been a lot of fun to write, especially after the fun I had on the previous record, autosynchronicity. I have also become a member of a music co-op called Subvert, which should be opening up soon, and my music will be available on my page there if you want to support the x3nyth project! I am looking forward to that.

Finally, aside from all of this stuff, I have also been working on naviOS (our custom Debian-based distro built around wiredWM - more to come on this project very soon!) as well as mirroring this site over to the Gemini protocol. A lot more Wiki entries are also in the pipeline that I've been writing out and looking forward to getting put up on the site.

Looking forward to seeing what this year has to bring with all of these projects, as well as the Web and tech in general. If you're reading this, then I hope you have been having a great 2026 so far as well, and a great year to come!

Until next time! :)