About

$whoami

I’m Jack, a Big Nerd ™ about a number of topics. A non-exhaustive list includes:

shooting sports (primarily action shooting disciplines like the InRangeTV Brutality Matches, but I also enjoy the local steel challenge as well as teaching others as a pistol and rifle instructor through various organizations.)
food and cooking (I spend a lot of time reading cookbooks, trying new recipes to expand my repertoire, and experimenting in the kitchen.)
bicycling (I’m a bike nerd but not, like, a Bike Nerd. I ride a lot because it’s fun, I work on my bike because someone has to. I’m not a racer or anything like that.)
self-hosting and homelabbing (I am a big fan of buying music and other media from creators I support and immediately throwing it on my personal media server so I can enjoy it from wherever and not worry about it disappearing.)

I’m also a big fan of the way the web used to be. Real posts, made by real people. Hand-formatted web 1.0 homepages. Not having ads and trackers polluting your screen real estate and browser cache everywhere you go. Is this a bit “old man yells at cloud”? Maybe, but dammit, sometimes the crazy old guy is on to something. I’ve been wanting my own little corner of the ether into which I can throw out my rambling soapboxes and brags about cool projects (and post-mortems on less cool projects), and I really didn’t want to do it on an existing social media platform. There’s a number of reasons for this, but in large part it boils down to three main things:

Most online communities on existing social networks are frankly unpleasant to deal with more often than is worth it. To be clear, I don’t want to equivicate between the toxicity of literal nazis on Twitter and perpetual wet blankets on Bluesky. One is certainly far worse than the other, but neither makes for a particularly pleasant place to hang out. Outside of the microblogging sites, I don’t really want to deal with reddit or tumblr. I’ve done my time with them and I don’t intend to go back for anything more than the occasional boredom-killer. I certainly don’t intend to post on either again for the foreseeable future.
I don’t want to rely on someone else to keep this little corner of the internet for myself. Sure, this site isn’t running on hardware under my roof, but it easily could be. Right now it lives on a cheap VPS, and it would be trivial to migrate to a different VPS or my own hardware should the need arise. So long as the registrars let me keep this domain name and I can keep a server online, I don’t need to worry about some random page moderator, site admin, uptight advertiser, or other annoying authority figure bothering me because I didn’t format my post according to subreddit guidelines or something. Plus, it just feels freeing to have a whole site to myself to mess around with.
This is a fun learning experience. I’ve had a fair bit of experience with systems administration and self hosting, but rarely with sites and services meant for public consumption. I have shockingly low standards for the user experience for some of the services I host only for my own use on an internal network, but I feel some need to make this website not suck and make sure the server isn’t just a low-value TryHackMe box. I expect to learn a fair bit as part of this endeavor, as minor as it may be. If you’re reading this, welcome to my quiet little attempt to reclaim a bit of what the web used to be. Don’t expect much consistency in terms of topcis I post about or the frequency with which posts are posted. If for whatever reason you want to stay informed of my posts, ~~be sure to subscribe and hit that bell~~ here is a link to an Atom feed for this blog.