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Monthly Meanderings: August 2026

2026-09-01T00:00:00Z

Another month, another edition of “What’s Chris been up to?”. Fun fact: I very nearly published this post with a “[intro]” placeholder here instead of this paragraph, despite proofreading it multiple times. “Yep, that’s where the intro will go, all good”. Now instead we have this weirdly meta introduction.

Website updates and other projects

A few website updates this month, and one of them neatly addresses the “other projects” bit too. First, I’ve added a new fitness page which has some stats and information about my cycling and running. I’ve also added some fitness-related widgets to support that page and these monthly summaries, and a new music one you can see a bit further down.

I’ve also added what I think is quite a fun new feature: a post feed builder that lets you build RSS feeds containing only posts that are semantically similar (or dissimilar) to other posts. So if you want to only hear about my fitness journey you can pin a few of those posts, or if you want to exclude posts that talk about LLMs you can exclude a few of those. It’s basically super-charged fuzzy tags, but it means I don’t have to actually tag things.

I blogged about building a family of single-user services which is where most of my coding energy went this month. Those projects were almost entirely authored by LLMs, and I’m not hating the process. The models have got a lot better at coding, and I enjoyed getting to focus on the bigger picture aspects rather than getting bogged down in details. Rest assured, all the writing on my website is still 100% me. I am the load-bearing seam, here.

Entertainment

Back in March I said ‘I can’t do “what I listened to last month” stats until next month’, and then for the next four months completely forgot about it. Well, not any more! Now I come equipped with some stats about my monthly music habits:

	Album	Artist	Unique tracks played	Total tracks played
1	Fallen	Evanescence	8	40
2	Love, Drugs & Misery	Eva Under Fire	12	32
3	NEON VOID	Sumo Cyco	6	23
4	The Strange Case of…	Halestorm	11	21
5	Coming in Hot	DIAMANTE	9	20
6	Everest	Halestorm	7	20
7	Glory Days	Little Mix	5	20
8	From Zero	Linkin Park	9	19
9	KPop Demon Hunters (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film)	KPop Demon Hunters Cast	7	19
10	No Need to Argue	The Cranberries	6	19

I suspect I won’t show this every month, as it’s probably going to be quite same-y. I, shockingly, tend to play music that I like more than that which I don’t. I’ll usually either put on my “favourites” playlist, or my “daily mix” playlist which biases higher-rated tracks over lower ones. So effectively this just becomes a noisy view over how highly I’ve rated the tracks in an album. Maybe I can control for that, but then I’m not sure what it’d actually be showing… “Here are all the albums I played this month that I don’t usually play because I don’t like them as much as the other albums I’m not showing any more”? It’s a bit wordy. Back to the drawing board with that idea, I think.

I was away for a few weeks this month, including a few days at a small LAN event. Being at a computer gaming event meant that we, naturally, played some board games. Apparently I hit an h-index of 23 from these plays. That’s 23 games I’ve played at least 23 times each. I’ve been at 22 since December last year: obviously the higher the number goes, the harder it is to reach. I also go on and off games (and the whole hobby at times), which doesn’t help on that front. Anyway, here’s ~~Wonderwall~~ the plays for this month:

6 plays
3 plays
3 plays
1 play
1 play

No films this month, but my World of Warcraft habit has picked back up with the launch of the new season. They’ve made Mistweaver Monk, my previous specialisation, a lot less fun to play, so I’m focusing on one of my many alts: a Restoration Shaman:

Level 90

Female Dwarf

Restoration Shaman

309 average item level

Hirameth-Terenas

Professions

Midnight Blacksmithing		41/100
Midnight Inscription		72/100
Midnight Fishing		35/300

Mythic+

Altar of Fangs	+10	23:10	329
Den of Nalorakk	+10	27:36	325
Kings' Rest	+12	28:57	370
Murder Row	+12	28:37	371
Ruby Life Pools	+11	24:28	340
Temple of Sethraliss	+10	30:57	321
The Blinding Vale	+10	24:38	327
Voidscar Arena	+10	22:37	329
Total M+ rating	2711

View on blizzard.com View on raider.io

I don’t quite like it as much as Mistweaver in season 1, but it’s a lot nicer than Mistweaver in season 2. You can actually make health bars move when you press your healing buttons, rather than ignoring half of them because they’re not worth using.

Fitness

My running kick is still going. I’ve “officially” finished the couch-to-5k programme I was doing, and I actually hit 5k on the last day of the programme. I didn’t actually mean to do that: I was saving the 5k run for this week, but by the time I noticed I’d run “too far” it was close enough that I just kept going. I have an actual 5k race coming up this month, which is exciting. Once that’s over I’m planning to work my way up to 10k. I’ve added a few widgets to keep track of some stats:

activities

6h 5m

total time

103.6km

total distance

42.3km

longest distance

🏆️ New PB 1km 2:17 1:52
🏆️ New PB 2km 5:34 4:13
🏆️ New PB 5km 14:51 12:32
🏆️ New PB 10km 36:00 27:21
🏆️ New PB 20km 1:43:33 1:13:24
🏆️ New PB 30km no previous 1:54:25
🏆️ New PB 40km no previous 2:55:52

activities

6h 16m

total time

43.1km

total distance

5km

longest distance

🏆️ New PB 800m 5:56 6:02
🏆️ New PB 1km 7:35 7:36
🏆️ New PB 1 mile 12:28 12:16
🏆️ New PB 2km 15:35 15:16
🏆️ New PB 3km 24:32 23:05
🏆️ New PB 5km no previous 38:40

As well as the running, I did a couple of long (for me) cycle rides, clocking in at around 40 km. It’s a fun loop, but both times I did it I started flagging towards the end. The second time I made sure to eat and drink plenty along the way, and my legs still raised objections about halfway round. My next goal is 50 km which would let me get to the next town over and back but the route has a lot more elevation to go with its increased length, so it’s probably going to be quite a bit more taxing. I’m not sure when I’ll attempt that, as the weather is starting to turn. I was previously bemused when people mentioned “cycling seasons” and switching to indoor trainers. Then I wanted to go out when it was raining, and suddenly I understood. Running in the rain: surprisingly pleasant; cycling in the rain: no thank you.

Around the web

Hacker News In Uncompromised Detail

When I first read the title my gut reaction was “I know everything I need to know about Hacker News, right?”. The title is accurate though. There’s so much interesting stuff, presented really cleanly. It’s a good read.

A proposal for new Netflix content rating icons

Another dry sounding title, another fun article. It starts with a treatise on rating systems and ends with a lovely satirical list of rating ideas.

Find Git commits by commit message text

I like to think I’m relatively well versed in how to use Git. I can do an interactive rebase and everything! This tip from Ham was new to me, though, and is incredibly useful.

Novice Marathon Training Plan

Hal Higdon has a whole bunch of training plans. He literally wrote the book on marathon training. I’ll hopefully be following this plan next year, assuming I manage the 5k, 10k and half-marathon training! This would be the perfect plan for someone who’s run a half marathon a while ago, and is tempted to join me in my “marathon before I’m 40” goal…

Building a family of single-user services

2026-08-27T00:00:00Z

Last month I made and wrote about a personal service to track my workouts and record personal bests. Since then, things have escalated. I now have eight different services running in the same “family”:

Name	Purpose
Collegiate Room	Simple weather overview for my current location
German Mall	LLM broker for use by other services
Gloss White	Weight tracking
Olive Crosses	Central service hub
Pompei Band	Workout and personal best tracking
Speed Carp	Spaced repetition system
Tiger Island	Reading history and library tracking
Typical Horse	Location history and analytics

The names are all anagrams of something related to their function. Finding those anagrams brings me an unreasonable amount of joy. Unscrambling them is an exercise left to the reader. On top of those eight, I currently have four other service ideas sat in my todo list. It’s going to be a big family.

A postmortem on the previous hodge-podge

Most of this functionality isn’t new to me. When I started out playing around with LLMs, I created a “personal data aggregator” that just kept getting things bolted on. I said at the time:

My biggest just-for-me project is a web app that I started to help me aggregate film recommendations. It’s since morphed into a general personal data aggregation service: it deals with data from GitHub, Todoist, Letterboxd, TMDB, Healthkit, and others. It also lets me make re-orderable lists, store recipes, and more. Parts of this could definitely be open sourced, and I might carve them out at some point, but it’s mostly a glorious hodge-podge of things specific to me. Having all these services in one place lets me make quick and dirty automations, for example: when I create a Todoist note on my phone or watch, I often forget to set the due date, so it doesn’t show up in the “Today” view. It was literally a few lines of code to plumb things together so any inbox task without a due date gets set to today automatically.

In a twist that nobody could see coming, it turns out that a “glorious hodge-podge” is actually quite hard to maintain and very annoying to work with. It didn’t help that it had a fairly extensive Svelte frontend and I really am not a fan of JavaScript. I ended up using it less and less just because it wasn’t fun to use or work on, and I didn’t want to waste the limited LLM tokens on doing massive refactors or reworks.

I’ve got almost two decades of professional software development experience under my belt, so you’d think I would have learnt the lessons on how to write maintainable software. Hell, my CV even mentions that as something I’m particularly good at. So what went wrong?

There were a few factors. One of the obvious things to blame is that it was written mostly with LLMs. Most of that blame isn’t very honest, though. In the year or so since, LLMs have definitely got better at writing good code; but I was manually reviewing all the code at the time, and telling it quite carefully what to implement and how to do it. So the buck really stops with me.

I think it’s actually more because it was my first larger project using LLMs. It’s a bit like learning a new programming language. I don’t think the first sizable project I’ve written in any language has ever been any good. You can read and learn as much as you want, but you need to actually run into some problems headfirst to get a grip on how the language works. Or at least I do. LLM coding agents are basically the same deal.

What the LLMs actually did was mask several problems. The architecture wasn’t right for how the service developed. It started out as a single-purpose app and gradually got things bolted on, without any major changes. Everything ended up in horizontal slices: a massive database layer with every query used by every part of the app, a massive HTTP layer, and so on. Working on a single feature became a tap dance all over the source tree. This sort of friction is normally quite apparent when you’re writing code by hand, and at some point it hurts enough that you throw in the towel and do some refactoring. But the LLM will happily plod on without exposing that pain, so the project needed a more active kind of architecture management that it just didn’t get.

The other problem they covered up was how brittle and unmaintainable the JavaScript frontend was. I’m not even sure how I ended up with a Svelte frontend in hindsight. It’s my preferred framework, but I still only reach for it as a last resort when there’s no other way to avoid using one. It seems like there were lots of ways to avoid it here, but I seem to have… well… avoided them. Anyway, each feature got its own slew of Svelte components, without much thought to reusability, shared patterns, or anything sensible. Some of them were just thin wrappers around data supplied by Go, others had vast swathes of logic in them, with no real rhyme or reason as to which way that would fall. It’s the same issue as before: a human would look at it, say “WTF?” and suggest tidying it up; instead, the LLM just gets on with what you tell it to do.

There’s also a big non-LLM factor: one of the primary reasons all of this unrelated functionality got tossed into the same app was that I’d previously worked on a few projects with a microservice architecture and really didn’t like it. My conclusion was they only really worked in large environments where you can dedicate people or teams to working on all the boilerplate that happens from maintaining lots of interconnected projects. Dumping everything and the kitchen sink into one badly architected monolith was, perhaps, not the best rebound from that.

Pompei Band and beyond

When I wanted to implement ~~Strava at home~~ my PB tracking app, it seemed fairly natural to build it out as a new service, rather than bolt it on to the slowly decomposing hodge-podge that was giving off a funny smell. Then when I wanted a weather dashboard, why not do it in the same style as Pompei Band? The same serving architecture, the same page layout… I could even come up with a similar weird two-word name!

Then wouldn’t it be nice if the weather dashboard knew where I was, so it could show the local weather? I could just build that functionality in, but it’d also be a good opportunity to carve out the location history feature from my old service and make a new, shinier one. Then basically every time I even thought about going near the old service, I mentally sketched out a replacement service.

Olive Crosses showing links to the other services

At one point I had the thought that it’d be nice if the services could all link to one another, but I didn’t want to have to touch every service whenever I added a new one. So I made a “hub” service, which maintains the One True Catalogue, and provides a bit of JavaScript the others can all embed to add a navigation sidebar.

So after complaining about microservices and JavaScript, it sounds like I have landed on microservices (or at least miniservices) and JavaScript? Sort of yes, but sort of no. Each service is still its own thing and makes sense independent of the others. There are some cross-service dependencies, but they’re very simple and don’t have the same cognitive or boilerplate overhead as a login service that talks to an authentication service that queries a user manager and so on. And as for the JavaScript, it’s almost exclusively used for progressive enhancement and a few limited client-side visual things like maps and graphs. All of the logic lives in Go, which is a lot easier to maintain and test, and all of the pages are simple Go templates.

Having these services built in a way that I actually like has motivated me to play around a lot more with new features:

My workout tracking app pulls photos from my private Immich server that were taken during workouts, and shows them alongside. Now I can see all my obligatory end-of-run selfies in one place.
The location history app can detect trips away from home, and get an LLM to automatically title them. My most recent, very exotic, trip has the title “A fortnight in Milton Keynes and Coventry”. Each trip gets its own little map, and in the future I want to pull in images like with workouts.
My weight tracking app now exports weigh-ins to Garmin, as it doesn’t fully integrate with Apple Health (it will export its own weights, but not import others, like the ones from my Withings scales). Stupid walled gardens, but thankfully I can fix it myself.
My book tracking app automatically cleans up the titles of books from the nonsense provided by Amazon to something more palatable. “Killing Eve: Long Shot: A twist on obsession, betrayal and revenge from Luke Jennings, author of the TV sensation Killing Eve” becomes “Long Shot (Killing Eve #5)”. It does this by passing the title to an LLM with a bunch of rules.
The hub generates me a snippet of Tailscale configuration that defines the minimal grants needed to allow the intra-service dependencies to work.

The LLM integrations were inspired by my friend Shane who recently demonstrated an inventory tracking app he’d made, which used Haiku to process images of boxes and describe the contents. I’ve dabbled with LLM integration before, and always disliked the process of fiddling with the prompts, and debugging when the LLM gave a nonsensical response. So I built German Mall, which makes it a lot easier. It lets me define a “workflow” consisting of a system prompt, initial message, and expected response format. I can browse past runs, tweak the prompt, rerun them to see the change, all without touching the services using them. Quick iteration loops are the best. German Mall also provides markdown documentation for each workflow, so integrating it downstream is simply a case of pointing a coding agent at the right documentation endpoint.

The “tidy book titles” workflow in German Mall

It’s not all fun and games: having a bunch of services all following the same pattern means you need to do cross-cutting maintenance on them now and then. But that’s surprisingly easy with LLMs. I put all the projects in a common folder, and I launch cross-cutting tasks from that folder. Usually I’ll make the change in one project, and then the cross-cutting task is simply “Look at commit XYZ in ./foo, make the same change to the other projects”.

I’ve also ended up with a shared library used by all the projects to cut down on some boilerplate. That’s normally something I’d resist, especially with personal projects, just because the extra overhead of working in a separate project, managing releases of it, and so on, is a bit annoying. But, again, LLMs can do almost all of that grunt work. They effectively reduce the “cost” of maintaining separate services to a negligible level, leaving me to focus on the more fun aspects like coming up with new names.

Monthly Meanderings: January 2026

2026-02-01T00:00:00Z

Welcome to the second edition of my monthly meanderings. For a bit of context, you can check out the introduction to the first edition.

Website updates

It’s been a pretty busy month for chameth.com. Three blog posts: The Meaning of Life — an entry into the IndieWeb carnival where I mostly review a book on Stoicism — Surge Protectors: Marketing vs Reality which is a dump of a research rabbit hole I fell into, and An Interesting Tailscale + Docker Gotcha which documents a fun problem I encountered.

I’ve also made a new films section, which is basically my Letterboxd data but free range instead of cooped up in a silo. I imported my 200-odd reviews, and for the last few I wrote the review on my site and then copied it over to Letterboxd. That’s what the IndieWeb folks call POSSE: publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. I like the idea that my website is the canonical source of truth for all the public things I generate. I want to expand this to some other areas in the future: music, video games, board games, etc.

I made most of the film components into “shortcodes”, so I can drop them into arbitrary pages or posts, like so:

Watched films ranked

Every film I’ve watched since I started logging, ranked.

Obviously super subjective, and subject to change often and arbitrarily.

264 films

Finally, I added a new widget to the bottom of most pages: a “nod” button. It’s effectively a “like” or “kudos” button but deliberately does not track how many times it’s been pressed, has no social network connotations, and won’t flood my inbox or hit rate limits if it gets spammed. If you click the button, it simply sends a message to a private IRC channel that says “Someone nodded at $URL”. I’ll probably write a bit more about it in a blog post in the future.

Other projects

I only have one small non-chameth.com update: a new project called pigeonhole which provides a really basic web service that lets you leave messages in a named cubby, and retrieve them at a later date. I’m using it to automate adding things to my Obsidian notes from my Apple Watch. There’s lots of reasons why that isn’t as simple as it sounds. I went through a bunch of iterations to try and make it work before just writing code to fix it.

I wanted to do this because I’m trying to replace Todoist with just having tasks in Obsidian. I already used Obsidian for longer form notes, but I’ve now also started using it for drafting blog posts (I’m typing this in Obsidian right now!), and trying to keep more useful day-to-day notes. I’ll probably write a blog post with more details once I’ve figured everything out.

Finally, I’ve been moving a bunch of projects to a private Forgejo instance, with the ultimate goal of having all of my projects live there. I’m going to mirror the contents out to GitHub and maybe other places, but Forgejo will be the single source of truth, and where all the workflows/dependency wrangling/etc happens. I’ve got Renovate configured to do dependency bumps, and I’m very much liking the whole setup so far. I’m saying it a lot but again: I’ll blog about it in more detail when it’s a bit further along.

Entertainment

I mentioned last month that I was playing Hogwarts: Legacy. I finished that off, and have been struggling to find something to scratch the same itch. I’ve tried a whole bunch of open world games, and basically none of them work for me. They have cumbersome control schemes (yay console ports), really awkward or sluggish movement, and so on. I think I’m just too fussy, but if I’m going to sink dozens of hours into a game it shouldn’t feel annoying or like a chore!

I did play through Thank Goodness You’re Here, which is delightfully funny but sadly only took 3.6 hours to finish with 100% of the achievements. Still highly recommend picking it up, especially when it’s on sale for under ‘10 bob’. I’ve also started playing through Control, and I’m enjoying the ambience. There’s an insanely sharp difficulty spike for the first boss, though, which nearly made me put it down.

In other entertainment, I’ve been playing a load of turn-based games on Board Game Arena , and I’ve watched a bunch of films after barely watching any last month. Here’s another of those shortcodes to show them off:

Around the web

Remotely unlocking an encrypted hard disk

A fun post documenting using Tailscale in a very weird way to solve a relatable problem. Very much my cup of tea.

I charged $18,000 for a static HTML page

This one’s actually from 2019, but it’s the first time I’ve come across it, and it’s a fun story. As a contractor, deciding what to bill for and what not to can be a bit messy. Downtime between meetings? The ten minutes in the shower you spent thinking through a bug? It’s a lot more clear cut if the client wants you to sit in an office, twiddling your thumbs, though.

Oxide RFD: Using LLMs at Oxide

A wonderfully well thought out piece about using LLMs in a respectful, sensible manner. I’d been thinking about writing something similar, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as well crafted as this. While I basically agree with it all, the part about LLM-generated text really resonates:

LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion.

Your app subscription is now my weekend project

Roberto points out that monthly SaaS subscriptions start looking even less appealing when you can just prompt an alternative into existence. I talked a bit about using LLMs for one-person software before, and it becomes even more appealing when the alternative is paying monthly for a service that keeps shoe-horning in features you don’t want, making you agree to share data with 329 “trusted partners”, and/or repeatedly ratcheting up the price.

Ekul’s Internet Space

I love the aesthetics of this personal site, and the data tracking that goes along with it. I’m also slightly aghast at the amount of Monster consumed! Makes me want to track more things and expose them on my own site.

Securing all the things with 1Password

2025-11-26T00:00:00Z

For many years I’ve been a keen user of Bitwarden. Recently I’ve had a lot of small paper-cut problems. The browser extension was redesigned and just doesn’t quite work how I expect any more. The prompt to save new login info misfired more than it worked. The mobile app stopped background refreshing properly. No one issue was enough to make me want to leave Bitwarden, but it definitely wasn’t sparking joy. Then there were rumblings about a price increase. I don’t think they’ve announced anything, but the numbers I saw were a jump from $10/year to $24/year. A nearly 2.5x price increase for a tool that was actively getting worse over time did not seem like a good deal to me¹.

I spent a while looking at alternatives, but there were very few that met my needs. Nordpass is highly praised but doesn’t support saving TOTP codes on personal plans². All the nice open-source/self-hosted solutions fall down when you want reliable synchronisation to an iOS device (which is fair enough). Proton Pass looked like it had all the features, but the pricing was asinine. Different pages showed different prices, the prices were introductory rates that jumped up on renewal, but that was hidden away in small print, etc. Yuck. The prices are also pretty high. More or less the same as 1Password, which I’d been discounting due to the cost, until now…

After eliminating basically every other option, I took a serious look at 1Password. It seemed to tick all the right boxes, I’d often heard good things about it, and it wouldn’t actually be much more expensive than Bitwarden if they went ahead with the rumoured price increase. I started a trial to give it a test.

Initial impressions

1Password is — as you’d expect for something that originated as a Mac app — very pretty. But it’s also highly functional. The looks don’t get in the way, they’re nice extras on top. When it’s locked, you get a large version of the 1Password logo, which is a front-on view of the barrel of a lock, next to the password input. When you authenticate, the barrel turns as though you’d put a key in and rotated it, and then the background splits in two and opens like a vault door. Does a password manager need to do that? No. Does it make me a little bit happy every time I see it? Yes. Look at it, it’s amazing!

The design philosophy carries through the rest of the app. Despite using Bitwarden daily, I often clicked on the wrong thing when I wanted to do anything other than autofill; in about a month of using 1Password I don’t think I’ve ever misclicked or been confused about the UI. The browser extension just feels snappier than Bitwarden, too. I’m not sure if it’s actually faster or if the design just makes it feel that way.

Functionality-wise, 1Password does everything Bitwarden did for me but slightly better. Bitwarden kicked you to its web interface for some operations (like checking compromised passwords); 1Password has that all built into the app. Instead of editing entries in a fiddly little browser popup, 1Password just summons forth the desktop app and you edit it there. It does a good job of detecting QR codes for TOTPs and offering to save them. I think the only small complaint I have is that the browser extension doesn’t have an autofill keybind. You can rig that up via the desktop app, but it feels like 1Password leans towards you using the UI it adds on login forms. To be fair, that UI works really well, and is very useful when you have multiple accounts on a site. My muscle memory for autofilling is strong, though.

Diving deeper

At this point I’d decided to switch fully to 1Password, so I started digging into what else it could do. The “Watchtower” feature combines a bunch of reporting about passwords (weak, breached, reused, and so on), but also lists sites where 1Password knows you can use passkeys or 2FA and don’t have them set up. I’d previously disabled passkey support in Bitwarden because it just appeared one day and got in the way of me trying to use a YubiKey, but decided to give them a go with 1Password. “Passkeys” is basically just a marketing term for FIDO2’s WebAuthn with automatic discovery bolted on top. The big problem is how you synchronise or export them. It’s all well and good letting your iPhone create a passkey when the Amazon app arbitrarily prompts it to, but what happens when you log in on a different device, or swap to Android, or whatever? Having 1Password deal with them fixes that³.

The passkey flow is very smooth: 1Password pops up an account selector, with obvious options to create a new account or pass the request through to another device like a YubiKey. It’s smart enough to guess the right account most times, even when you’ve got 17 different Google accounts for $reasons. Using them is equally simple: it just shows a popup and you tap to confirm you want to use the passkey. The Watchtower functionality made it really easy to go through and add passkeys everywhere that supports them. The thing I really appreciate is that they make the data that powers it public. It’s obviously partially a marketing thing for them, but it’s also a useful resource they could have kept proprietary.

Passkeys are a bit basic, though. 1Password has many more fun offerings. There’s an entire developer section with various goodies. At first I thought “that’s nice but I won’t use it”, but now I’m using basically everything it offers. The first thing to draw me in was the CLI. It’s pretty straightforward, but like the browser extensions it can nicely integrate with the desktop app so you unlock them all at once, deal with auth prompts in the GUI, and so forth. I have a couple of command-line tools that need passwords (e.g. for dealing with encrypted backups); now instead of prompting for the passwords, they shell out to op read and I authorise it via a popup in the 1Password app. Simple, but a nice quality of life improvement.

Next up there’s a beta feature called “Environments”. This lets you define groups of environment variables within 1Password, and have them exported automatically to certain destinations. At the minute it supports exporting to the AWS SecretsManager, and local .env files. When making a local file it actually makes a named pipe, so the credentials aren’t just sitting on disk (and won’t end up accidentally committed to anything). When the 1Password vault is locked, anything trying to read from the file will cause an authentication popup, much like with the CLI tool. I used to have the mentality that if something could read arbitrary files on disk, it was basically “game over” from a security point of view. Recent events made me realise there’s some value in defence-in-depth there, though, and 1Password provides a nice solution.

Fingerprints + Linux = Sadness

One feature of 1Password had me feeling a bit left out. Instead of entering your vault password to unlock it every time, you can have it invoke the system authentication library. On an iPhone this uses Face ID, on a Mac it can invoke Touch ID, and on Linux it uses Polkit. In the default configuration, Polkit just asks for your local user password, which is not much of an improvement. A fingerprint scanner seemed like the obvious solution here: it’s both a lot more convenient than typing a long password, and provides some assurance that it’s actually me doing the action⁴. Unfortunately, fingerprint readers on Linux seem to be a bit of a sorry affair.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s support. libfprint has a big list of supported devices, but I found it almost impossible to actually find a device I could buy that had one of the listed sensors. Most of them seem to be exclusively built into laptops. A lot of the cheaper devices just use whatever sensor they can get their hands on, so it’s pot luck if you receive a version that will work with libfprint or one that won’t. There’s also not a lot of information beyond that published by libfprint. I guess it makes sense: external fingerprint readers just aren’t a thing most people care about. While that makes me feel all special, it’s somewhat prohibitive to getting an actual working solution.

I’d given up on finding an answer to this when I stumbled upon an article by Scott Laird. He uses a YubiKey Bio to do it, via pam_u2f. The Bio isn’t actually a fingerprint reader: it just has an on-board reader to secure the credentials. The OS doesn’t get involved in the process. But because it can provide a fingerprint-secured U2F key, and pam_u2f can require that key to perform system operations, you basically get the same result. Maybe it’s actually even better than using a “real” fingerprint reader, as the data is secured on the hardware device…

The YubiKey Bio was a bit more pricey than I really wanted, coming in at around £90, but it felt like a worthy investment to add a bit of security and avoid typing a password dozens of times a day. The setup was simple: the official app that you use to enrol fingerprints is packaged in the Arch User Repository, and it worked perfectly. I already had pam_u2f set up as I used a (non-Bio) YubiKey to gate access to sudo, so I just generated a new key on the Bio, updated my config to use that, and added it to the Polkit policy. Now when I need to unlock 1Password or authenticate something, it prompts me to scan my fingerprint. Perfect!

Biometric all the things \o/

One of the other things Scott mentioned in that article was SSH keys. I’d seen 1Password supports acting as an SSH agent, but didn’t really see why I’d want it to. I used a resident key on my old YubiKey, so I didn’t have much to gain from a security point of view. Scott’s article made me realise I could have some big convenience gains, though. Currently every time I need to use the key, I enter a PIN and then physically touch it. I don’t mind this for the most part, but it turns out git-lfs does something like four different requests every time you do a git operation, none of which reuse the same SSH connection for some reason. That gets painful when each request involves a PIN and a touch. I also liked the idea of using pam_rssh for sudo authentication, but didn’t want to have to do the PIN-and-touch dance every time I used it.

You can probably see where this is going: I generated an SSH key in 1Password, and then… spent literal hours disabling all the other SSH agents that were running on my system, and trying to figure out where SSH_AUTH_SOCK was being populated. I didn’t manage to figure that out in the end⁵, and ended up just overriding it to point at 1Password’s agent socket. I added the new key to GitHub, and did the usual ssh git@github.com test, and it worked perfectly. 1Password prompts to allow access to the key, showing the process requesting access, and authorising it requires a fingerprint read:

can haz ssh key?

I’m not sure why Kitty doesn’t get an icon in the prompt; other applications do. You can expand the details section to see the key fingerprint being requested, as well as the exact process name and PID requesting the key. With the proof of concept done, I generated a couple more keys: one for normal SSH, and one for gaining root access using pam_rssh. Using different keys ensures I get prompted for them separately, and means a malicious app couldn’t sneakily ask for a Git key but actually pivot to SSH into a server. Not sure that’s ever likely to be a problem, but it’s basically no additional work for a bit more defence-in-depth, so why not?

I also took a moment to configure pam_u2f for both lightdm and xfce4-screensaver, so I can now log in and unlock my PC with my fingerprint. It’s not quite as smooth as Touch ID on a Mac, but it’s pretty close.

As an aside: this is not the first time I’ve been in this situation. Both Spotify and Todoist have focused on features I don’t want or need (including, but not limited to, pretty much everything branded “AI”), and then hiked the price up afterwards. It’s not quite standard enshittification, but it’s clear that our incentives no longer align properly. ↩︎
Or didn’t, at the time I looked. It now says “All plans” on the website but the docs only exist for business accounts, and there doesn’t seem to be any announcement explaining the change. ↩︎
Having Bitwarden deal with them would also have fixed that, but it got in my way instead of helping me, so… ↩︎
or it’s not me, but I’ll be busy dealing with the presumably-undesired removal of one of my digits, so probably won’t care about whatever is happening on the computer. ↩︎
Although I’m pretty sure the answer starts and ends with “systemd, somehow”. ↩︎

Escaping Spotify the hard way

2025-07-25T00:00:00Z

I realised my media consumption was too close to this for comfort.

For the longest time I used Spotify for all my music needs. And I listen to a lot of music: sometimes actively, but mostly passively as background noise. I cancelled my premium subscription last December, and stopped using the service entirely. Why? There’s a bunch of reasons.

Let’s talk about the money first. Spotify launched at £9.99/month, and stayed that way for over a decade. Then in 2023 it went up to £10.99/month. That’s probably fair: the economy was in the toilet, and they haven’t changed their price in so long. Then in 2024 they upped it again to £11.99/month. Hmm. The service they were providing me didn’t improve in that time. I didn’t want audiobooks in my music player, I didn’t want an AI DJ that spouted inane comments at me. Paying them more money to do things I didn’t want seemed silly, and the money that actually goes to the artists is both so small and gets split in such a convoluted way that it’s not worth even thinking about.

My bigger concern was how uninvolved I became in choosing what to listen to. I leaned hard on their algorithmic playlists like “Discover Weekly” instead of manually curating playlists. But they ended up developing this weird feedback loop where it kept playing a country band¹ that I didn’t particularly like, but also didn’t dislike enough to skip. That acted as positive reinforcement, and they kept coming up everywhere. There were definitely ways to solve that by changing how I used Spotify, but the realisation that I was basically just consuming whatever was fed to me made me want to try something completely different. So I decided to go back to buying music instead. Which is where things got… complicated.

Getting some MP3s will be easy, right?

I figured with the money I was no longer giving to Spotify, I could just buy an album or two a month and slowly build up a nice music collection. I already had some music kicking around from before the streaming era, so there would at least be some variety in my listening while I got started. Where to buy music from, though?

Amazon used to do DRM-free music, but as far as I can tell it all got folded up into their own streaming service. Some smaller bands are on Bandcamp, but you won’t be able to grab Taylor Swift’s latest album from there. Qobuz have a good catalogue, but some of the stuff is pricey². It’d be cheaper to buy CDs and rip them like it was 1998 again.

I finally stumbled across an unlikely answer: the iTunes store³. This is still somehow separate from the behemoth of Apple Music, and if you fire up the iTunes software you can indeed buy reasonably priced, DRM free music. For comparison, 1989 (Taylor’s Version)⁴ is £12.89 (plus delivery) on CD from Taylor’s official website, £16.79 in CD quality from Qobuz, and £12.99 from iTunes.

Now, I use Linux, so using iTunes isn’t exactly easy. I ended up running a virtual machine with Windows on it. Every time I wanted to buy an album, I’d boot the VM, open iTunes, search for the album, press the buy button, enter my password, wait for it to download, copy all the files to a shared drive, and then back on Linux copy those files into my music directory. Smooth, right? But it worked. Earlier in the year I switched computers, though, and didn’t want to bother with the VM rigamarole. Spoiler alert: I didn’t make things any simpler.

Do you guys not have phones?

I tried a lot of things to avoid setting up a Windows VM again. I’m pretty sure I went through most of the 7 stages of grief in the process. I tried to get Apple Music to work, because that was obviously where all their development was focused, but you can’t actually buy music there (at least not on any version I could run on Linux). I tried running iTunes under Wine, but it just wouldn’t work. I looked into third-party clients, but unsurprisingly they didn’t go anywhere near payment flows.

I eventually realised that I have an Apple device in my pocket. After a bit of searching, it turns out there is actually still an iTunes app for iOS⁵. I bought an album⁶ to see if I could exfiltrate it. I connected my phone to the computer, paired it with idevicepair and then mounted the storage using ifuse⁷. Looking around, I could see a bunch of m4a files, and I could play them. Success!

Except… the file names were random hex strings, and they had no metadata. Yuck. I grabbed a copy of MusicBrainz Picard and had it sort out the mess. I stuck with this process for a while, but matching albums in Picard was sometimes a pain. MusicBrainz does a great job of figuring out what the tracks are, but it struggles to tie those back to a single edition of an album. I wasn’t aware how many subtly different versions of albums there were until I had to manually find the one iTunes had given me. Not fun. Eventually I got so fed up with this that I did something about it.

Plists all the way down

Armed with an instance of Claude Code, I set out to see if I could write some Go code to import the files properly. There were plists in the directory with the m4a files, and I know enough to know that they’re where all the juicy metadata lives on iOS. Maybe we can parse them and do something useful?

There’s a nice plist parser written in Go already, so I got Claude to write a program to dump the contents of one of the many plist files in the directory. Inside was all the metadata for one of the tracks. Yay! Just one small problem: there’s no way to link the plist file to the audio file. There’s one plist file that has a real name, though: StorePurchasesInfo.plist. I had Claude translate it to JSON and found that it contained a data field with a bunch of binary data. Huh.

I thought this was probably a dead end, but stuck the base64’d data into CyberChef and fiddled around a bit to get a hexdump of the binary. Six characters jumped out at me: bplist. I went back to Claude and suggested this might be a plist-in-a-plist scenario. Claude then got very confused because it couldn’t understand where the base64 was coming from⁸. After some LLM-induced suffering, I eventually got the contents of the inner-plist, and for each track it had a list of the audio file, the metadata, and the album art. Yay!

With the data figured out, it was fairly simple to get Claude to write code to parse everything and link them together, and after that move the files into their correct place in my library. I also had it take the metadata from the track’s plist file and write it into tags on the m4a so my media player didn’t have to understand Apple nonsense. I looked around for a Go library to do this, but couldn’t find one supporting m4a files, so ended up just shelling out to exiftool.

As a bonus, I made the tool automatically make a temporary directory and use ifuse to mount the phone, then unmount it when it’s finished. So now all I have to do is plug my phone in, and run import-music on the command line⁹. It’s a very nice quality-of-life upgrade that I probably wouldn’t have bothered with if I didn’t have Claude Code to speed the process up¹⁰.

Sometimes I actually play music too

With all this talk about buying and sorting music, I almost forgot about the most important bit: listening! I use Tauon, and it looks like this:

Tauon, showing off a wide range of different music in my library.

I tried a bunch of different music players, but Tauon hits the sweet spot of being simple enough to use but capable enough in the right places. I particularly like the playlist generators. My “Music” playlist just auto-imports all music in my “Music” folder, then I have a “Classical” playlist with a generator of s"Music" g"classical" auto. That makes it use the “Music” playlist as a source, filter on tracks that have “classical” in their genre, and automatically update when the base playlist changes¹¹. The “Disliked” playlist does the same but filters on rating: s"Music" a rat=0.5 auto. That takes all tracks (a) from the Music playlist, then filters it down to only those that have a rating of 0.5 out of 5¹². Finally, the “Normal” playlist imports everything from “Music” that’s not in one of the others. It sounds a bit clunky, but it works well in practice and I like the way it works.

Tauon in general just seems to work the way I’d expect it to, which is refreshing. You can just start typing anywhere to search for a track, hit enter, and it starts playing. It has keyboard shortcuts for other operations, and standard features like reporting to last.fm and other sites.

Tauon also supports transcoding and copying tracks to a music player or a phone. I use this to sync my main playlist to my phone. I’ll give you a minute to just bask in the glory of the rube goldberg machine I’ve created to move music from my phone, to my computer, and ultimately back to my phone. This does actually serve a purpose, though: it lets me control which tracks are on my phone. I don’t have to deal with excluding genres or tracks I dislike on the phone in addition to the computer. In the future I might opt to just sync a subset of my tracks to keep the storage size down. I’m telling you it makes sense! Stop looking at me like that!

Paying Attention Pays Off

I mentioned one of my aims for getting away from Spotify was to feel less like I was just consuming whatever’s in front of me. The corollary to that is how do you discover new music without an algorithm to feed it to you? I’ve ended up subscribing to a few blogs, paying more attention to music-related news, and being more aware of songs on the radio and from other sources.

When I find a song I like these days, I tend to listen to a few other tracks on the album (via YouTube, normally, as it’s the least friction) and decide if I want to buy it. When I do, I sit down and listen to the whole thing in order. It’s a radically different experience to just hearing a song now and then. There are themes and connections between tracks that you just miss if you listen to songs at random. Of course, you could do that on Spotify, but I don’t think it really lent itself to it.

My favourite example of this is my rediscovery of Linkin Park¹³. I’m of the age where they were around as I was growing up. I knew a couple of their big hits but younger-me wasn’t that into rock¹⁴, so I didn’t pay them much attention. Then I caught Up From the Bottom on the radio, and from there ended up buying and listening to all of From Zero. It’s an amazing album. The Emptiness Machine has become my favourite song: not only is it a great tune, performed well, it’s also a fantastic introduction to a new era for the band and to Emily Armstrong as the new vocalist. The rest of the album then builds on it to show off what they can do.

I’ve since gone back and reconnected with a lot of Linkin Park’s older albums, too. And from there discovered a lot of other rock bands I really like. Could this have happened with Spotify? Maybe, but it seems unlikely. It had me in a country-band-I-can’t-remember filter bubble, it seems pretty unlikely it’d drop some Linkin Park on me out of nowhere. And the passivity that came along with it would have meant that I probably wouldn’t have paid enough attention when I heard it from elsewhere.

Would I recommend that everyone runs out and cancels their Spotify subscriptions? Eh, probably not. If it works for you, that’s fine. Discovering recursive plists is fun for me, but I appreciate it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. What I would recommend is being a bit more deliberate in your choice of music. Don’t just tune in to a random playlist, or let the ‘DJ’ decide what to play. Find something, and actually listen to it. Then recommend it to me. I want more music!

I can’t even remember the name of the band, that’s how much I was into them. ↩︎
And they’re annoyingly deceptive about it. All the prices are “From £x”, where x is the discounted price you’d get if you paid them £15/month. ↩︎
I’d link to it, but… there isn’t a website. That’s not how things were done in the 1990s, silly. ↩︎
I don’t know why I’m so hung up on Taylor Swift in this post. ↩︎
Again, unrelated to the Apple Music app. ↩︎
It probably wasn’t a Taylor Swift album. Maybe. ↩︎
The Arch wiki has a useful page on this (of course). ↩︎
We were translating the plists to JSON, and if you serialise a byte array to JSON in Go it ends up as a base64-encoded string. Claude was then adamant it needed to base64 decode the binary plist. It did not. ↩︎
I just had the sudden realisation that I can probably automate running the import-music tool whenever I plug my phone in using systemd… ↩︎
I feel like I say that a lot lately. ↩︎
I like classical music, but it’s a mood, and I’m often not in that mood. ↩︎
I basically use this to filter out those introduction/bridge tracks on albums that are just talking and not singing. ↩︎
Surprise! My library isn’t actually just Taylor Swift songs. ↩︎
Younger-me was a dumbass, in some ways. ↩︎