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Monthly Meanderings: April 2026

2026-05-01T00:00:00Z

It’s apparently been a whole month since the last edition of Monthly Meanderings. Not sure when that happened. This month I’ve been to a LAN party, had an MRI, and have been trying unsuccessfully to get my doctor to change a prescription. The latter two are not doing much to help shake that middle-aged feeling I mentioned last month…

Website updates

Another pair of blog posts for this month: The Case of the Unchanging Config about a problem I had with a bind-mounted config in a Docker container, and Migrating from GitHub to Forgejo, a write-up of… well… migrating from GitHub to Forgejo. That one’s been on my to-do list for a while, so it’s nice to finally get it written up.

It’s not visible when you look at the site, but I’ve been doing a lot of refactoring this month. The existing design had a package for database operations, a package for the stylesheet, a package for shortcodes, and so on. As I bolt more and more things on this gets less and less useful: those packages get bigger and bigger, and trying to understand how, say, the music import functionality works means hopping all over the place. Instead, I’m moving towards having each feature contained in its own package. It defines its own stylesheet, database operations, HTTP handlers, and so on. They’re then all wired together at the top layer. There’s still some more to do on that front, but it’s progressing in a good direction, and I’m happier with the code.

The only actual visible change is the addition of a page dedicated to World of Warcraft that automatically imports some data from the game’s API. We’ll come back to that later!

Other projects

I made a trio of new tiny projects: pdsps, a reverse proxy for a Bluesky/ATProto PDS that overrides the age verification response so you don’t need to hand over ID; irc-adze, a plugin for irc-bot that receives and announces adze webhooks; and wow-spec-switch, a super-simple addon for World of Warcraft that lets you switch specialisation with a command.

I’ve also been working on a custom app launcher in the style of ulauncher but without requiring WebKit to render things. I’ve not yet polished it up enough to open source it, but it’s not far off.

Entertainment

Another single film month for me. It was a great one, though:

Project Hail Mary

2026-04-01

A film adaptation of a book I loved that’s actually good. Huh!

Ryan Gosling does great in what is often a solo act. Early on I thought the film was trying a bit too hard to be funny, but at some point it started working and I enjoyed it.

There are lots of parallels to The Martian, Arrival, and so on, but it’s a sufficiently different mash-up of the concepts that it’s not a problem.

I’m still enjoying SNL UK a lot more than I expected to, although I keep forgetting what day it airs. They should put it in the name or something.

The rest of my “entertainment” time has been spent playing World of Warcraft. I played an awful lot about 6-7 years ago, and have dipped in and out occasionally since. I got an MMORPG itch again recently and jumped back in, and I’m enjoying it a lot once again. I’ve been playing a healer properly for the first time (after enjoying healing in Final Fantasy XIV):

Level 90

Female Void Elf

Holy Priest

280 average item level

Methrica-Terenas

Professions

Midnight Alchemy		100/100
Midnight Engineering		92/100
Midnight Cooking		1/100
Midnight Fishing		4/300

View on blizzard.com View on raider.io

Around the web

git-history documentation

The latest release of git added this handy-seeming history subcommand. It allows you to reword a commit, or split a commit up interactively, without having to go through the interactive rebase song and dance.

Git has acquired a bunch of new commands in recent releases, but I tend to ignore them in favour of the old ones I know well. This one will definitely get use from me, though.

Git Koans by Steve Losh

Sticking with the same theme, this series of koans about Git and its various quirks had me laughing. If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably part of the target audience for it.

SQLite prefixes its temp files with etilqs_

I think I’d come across this before, but it’s still a fun anecdote. It reminds me of Daniel Stenberg’s e-mail collection; as the author of curl his name is listed on basically everything with the inevitable influx of people contacting him.

A dot a day keeps the clutter away

I love this approach to tracking how frequently things are used, and the weird sort of archaeological record you get from rotating the colours of the stickers used.

Migrating from GitHub to Forgejo

2026-04-30T00:00:00Z

When Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 my kneejerk reaction — like so many others — was to start looking for alternatives. For a while I self hosted a Gitea instance but I never totally bought into it: some repositories I still pushed to GitHub, some I pushed to Gitea and they got mirrored, and I ended up causing myself problems when I got the two confused. Part of the problem was that the GitHub UI was faster and cleaner than Gitea’s at the time; using Gitea felt like a chore compared to GitHub. I ended up not maintaining it and eventually binning it and just going back to GitHub.

An all-too familiar unicorn

Fast forward eight years, and GitHub is about what we all imagined when Microsoft bought it. If you take the most pessimistic way of counting, they have zero nines of reliability¹. If you take the most generous, they have a single nine. That’s around 30 minutes of downtime every day. It feels like it must be more than that, given how many times you see the damned unicorn.

Uptime aside, they’ve crowbarred LLMs in all over the place; they don’t have the time to maintain official GitHub actions; the ones they do maintain have Copilot running roughshod all over them²; actions themselves are slow to run³, often have weird transient failures, and there are so many footguns that I’m pretty sure GitHub actions should be an entire category in the CWE top 10.

Speaking of security, while I was drafting this post a remote code execution was reported and the details are… impressive. The actual security issue was a pretty stupid oversight. Those happen. But they end up being able to execute code as a globally shared git user with access to all the other repositories on the node. What? I can’t quite get my head around it. No sandboxing, no containers, it just runs as a git user?

So, yeah, I’m not a fan of GitHub in its current state. A few months back I took the plunge and set up Forgejo, a fork of Gitea where they did radical things like add tests and ensure that it’s community operated not twisted for commercial use. Forgejo also potentially has some fun security problems⁴, but the way I host it mitigates more-or-less all problems. It’s also slightly less shocking when an open source project has lapses in basic security versus a $2 trillion corporation.

It’s taken a bit of doing, but I’m very happy with the setup I have.

The basic setup

I run all my server software using Docker, and Forgejo is no exception. They have decent documentation on how to get it running, and publish rootless images which is nice (and diminishes my urge to make an artisanal version myself). You can set configuration options using environment variables, which is perfect for containers, although the names can end up a bit unwieldy. Like this thing: FORGEJO__repository.signing__SIGNING_NAME=Chris Smith. It gets the job done, but the environment-to-ini mapping is pretty ugly.

I didn’t want to expose Forgejo publicly, as I wanted to avoid having to try and secure it⁵, or dealing with bots scraping it, or users signing up, and so on. I wanted somewhere to store my git repositories, handle CI for me, and mirror them somewhere public for other people to see and interact with. If you’ve read some of my other posts you’ll probably guess where this is heading: Tailscale. Alongside the Forgejo container, I run a Tailscale instance with a serve.json that covers both the web frontend and the SSH listener used for git operations:

{
    "TCP": {
        "22": {
            "TCPForward": "forgejo:2222"
        },
        "443": {
            "HTTPS": true
        }
    },
    "Web": {
        "${TS_CERT_DOMAIN}:443": {
            "Handlers": {
                "/": {
                    "Proxy": "http://forgejo:3000"
                }
            }
        }
    },
    "AllowFunnel": {
        "${TS_CERT_DOMAIN}:443": false
    }
}

This allows me to interact normally with Forgejo from any of my devices or servers (which all run Tailscale), while not exposing it to the Internet at all. It also handles the TLS certificates automatically, which saves me setting up something else to do that.

For CI, I run the Forgejo runner image on the same server, and gave it a dind container to use to actually run the workloads. dind is the cutesy name for Docker-in-Docker, basically a Docker daemon running inside a Docker container. That keeps the CI workload separated nicely from the “production” workload running on the server, which is nice from both a security and a monitoring point of view.

The uncanny valley of actions

Forgejo actions are basically like GitHub actions: they run a series of steps using one or more container images. You define those steps in the exact same clunky YAML format as with GitHub. The big difference between them is that GitHub defaults to using an absolutely massive base image filled with out-of-date preinstalled software, and Forgejo leaves that for the administrator to configure. You could, of course, just use the same image as GitHub, but lugging around a multi-gigabyte image that doesn’t even have recent versions of the software I want isn’t really my style. Instead, I set about using a plain debian image as the base, and then did a face-palm when I tried to run a “normal” action and remembered they’re all written in JavaScript, so expect node to exist.

Accommodating JavaScript isn’t really my style, either, so I did the very sensible thing of writing my own suite of actions in Go. Being written in Go means they can be compiled statically, published as a container, and manage their own very limited dependencies. For example, the checkout action is built into an alpine container with git added, while the dockerbuild action uses the buildah image as a base. Each image has the tools it needs, pinned to a recent version, and nothing more. This is very much not a sensible approach to take for most people, but it made me happy. With six basic actions, I could replace almost all the ad-hoc workflows I had in GitHub⁶.

Other than the base images and my self-inflicted JavaScript machinations, everything works the same as GitHub. But faster. So much faster. Most of my CI workflows finish on Forgejo before GitHub would even have allocated a runner to the job⁷. And I can actually view the logs without them glitching out.

Step aside Dependabot, here comes Renovate

One of the boons and/or banes of hosting code on GitHub is access to Dependabot⁸. It’s a tool that monitors your dependencies, and automatically submits PRs when new versions are available. It also does security alerts, but they’re comically bad for Go at least⁹. I do like having dependencies automatically handled, especially with a cooldown, which is how I had Dependabot configured before moving.

To replace it, I’ve configured Renovate, an open source alternative. I’d seen it used a bunch before: both by projects on GitHub who prefer it over Dependabot, and by people using GitLab and other platforms where Dependabot isn’t. It mostly does the same things, but Renovate has a few very nice extras.

Firstly, it supports transcluding config from another repo. So in each of my many, many projects, I just have this stub of a renovate config:

{
  "$schema": "https://docs.renovatebot.com/renovate-schema.json",
  "extends": [
    "local>meta/renovate"
  ]
}

Then the actual config lives in a default.json in the meta/renovate repository. I mirror that repository to GitHub, if you want to have a look. This is an amazing feature. When I enabled cooldowns in my Dependabot config it was a slog to go through all my active repositories and make the same change over and over again. With Renovate I can configure that centrally. As far as I know Dependabot can’t do anything like that, even for enterprises.

Within that central config I use some of the other nice features. It has the ability to auto merge changes. I use this to automatically accept changes from trusted projects, or my own libraries:

    {
      "matchManagers": ["gomod"],
      "matchPackagePatterns": [
        "^github\\.com\\/csmith\\/",
        "^chameth\\.com\\/"
      ],
      "matchUpdateTypes": ["minor", "patch"],
      "automerge": true,
      "minimumReleaseAge": "0 days"
    },
    {
      "matchManagers": ["gomod"],
      "matchPackagePatterns": [
        "^github\\.com\\/csmith\\/",
        "^chameth\\.com\\/"
      ],
      "matchUpdateTypes": ["major"],
      "minimumReleaseAge": "0 days"
    },

This takes any minor or patch release of my libraries, and automerges it with no cooldown. For major version changes it overrides the cooldown but doesn’t automerge. To automerge Dependabot PRs you have to write an action, implement that logic yourself, and hope you’ve successfully avoided all the footguns inherent in that.

Speaking of major version updates, Renovate also has an option to automatically update the imports in Go packages when it’s offering a major update. In the config I have:

"postUpdateOptions": ["gomodTidy", "gomodUpdateImportPaths"],

Which means that every time it does an update it’ll run go mod tidy, and it’ll update the import paths. In Go, v2 of a module has a different import path to v1 (so they can coexist if transient dependencies need different versions), so usually you have to go through and find and replace those paths. Renovate handles that for me now! I still have to address whatever breaking changes are in the new version, but there’s a lot less grunt work.

It can also run custom commands¹⁰, so for example in my legotapas project I have this extra snippet in the renovate.json:

  "postUpgradeTasks": {
    "commands": [
      "sh -c 'rm plate_*.go'",
      "go run ./cmd/generate"
    ],
    "executionMode": "branch",
    "fileFilters": ["*.go"]
  }

I won’t go into the gory details, but this handles automatically regenerating a bunch of files that change every time a certain dependency is updated. Previously I had a separate action to do that on GitHub; just being able to drop commands in the config file is much nicer.

To actually run Renovate, I simply have a workflow in Forgejo on a schedule that uses their official Docker image. It also triggers if I update the config, which is nice when I add a new rule, as it’ll immediately update the open PRs to comply. Overall, Renovate has felt like a pretty big quality-of-life upgrade.

Odd problems

Not everything has been smooth sailing. Sometimes when Renovate automerged a change, it would just… disappear. The PR was closed as merged, but the commit never landed on master. It wasn’t a huge issue as the next Renovate run would just recreate it, but it would then disable the automerge and I’d get confused as to why. It turns out there was a major problem with how I had everything set up. Renovate was telling Forgejo to automerge when the required checks pass, but I had no branch protection rules set up in Forgejo, so as soon as the PR was created it was eligible to merge. As the CI was so fast I hadn’t noticed that the automerges were happening before the CI results were posted.

The disappearing commits were because the repository was getting into a bad state when Renovate tried to automerge multiple changes instantly in the same repo. Forgejo has a bunch of maintenance commands that helped to fix that problem, and I then wrote a little script to enable branch protection rules so the CI would actually run. The automerging has been smooth since.

Another issue I had early on was that merging would fail because the GPG keyring was locked. I had Forgejo configured to sign all the automatic commits, so you can verify what commits came from my infrastructure. Forgejo is the only process using the keyring, so I wasn’t sure why it was becoming locked. It turns out that GnuPG uses the hostname as part of the lockfile, and because Forgejo was running in Docker it was getting random hostnames based on the container ID. Explicitly setting a hostname made GnuPG and by extension Forgejo much happier.

Webhooks and updating

Forgejo has this amazing feature: you can add a webhook that’s called for all your repos. GitHub, for some reason, supports this for organisations but not people. Even though the two are treated the same in a lot of places. It doesn’t seem like it would be hard, and it’s such an obvious thing to want, but… no. I wrote a whole tool to add webhooks for me to get around this. Now I don’t need it, Forgejo does the right thing!

One particularly interesting use of these webhooks has been making my Docker containers auto-update when a new image is pushed. I previously had a webhook receiver for a few projects that would update them automatically, but GitHub package notifications were extremely laggy. Every other webhook fired within a minute or so of the event happening, but package webhooks would sometimes take 30-60+ minutes to fire. I opened a support case with GitHub and it got escalated to engineering and fixed about 10 weeks later¹¹. It was better for a while, and then got worse again. Trying to do continuous deployment with a 30 minute random lag was frustrating.

So now I had reliable webhooks, but the update process was a bit gross. I have a hangup about internet-facing services not having access to the Docker socket. It just feels like too big a security risk. So I had a process that received hooks, and then another that figured out if containers needed to be updated and restarted them. Adding a new container to the system meant recompiling the second process, which was a massive faff.

Fortunately, I was saved from this mess by my friend Greg. He wrote adze, a tool that receives webhooks and uses Docker Compose to update matching containers. He wrote a blog post about it. It’s all one process, but that’s no longer a blocker for me because the webhooks can be delivered privately from my Forgejo instance without exposing adze to the internet. It finds matching containers automatically based on the images they’re using¹², and combined with Forgejo not forcing me to add a webhook to every single repository makes my life so much easier. I write some code, push it to Forgejo, and within a minute or so it’s running on my dev instance.

I have IRC notifications set up for when adze does updates, and I still have some old ones that announce GitHub package webhooks. I keep seeing things like this and chuckling:

15:44:42 <@ircjag> [ADZE] chameth.com: pending updating git.yak-wall.ts.net/public/chameth.com
15:44:45 <@ircjag> [ADZE] chameth.com: success updating git.yak-wall.ts.net/public/chameth.com
17:11:54 <@ircjag> [GHCR] Container pushed to csmith/chameth.com:dev.

I pushed a change at 15:43, Forgejo built it and pushed the image (to both its own registry and to GitHub), then at 15:44 adze updated the container to the new version. An hour and a half later GitHub gets around to delivering its own webhook.

Mirroring and PRs

The final piece I had to figure out was how to actually interact with people. Most of my projects are small and don’t get a massive amount of public contributions, but the option should still be there. And ideally not involve anyone having to figure out how to e-mail patches¹³.

Mirroring outwards is simple: Forgejo supports it natively. Whenever I push to Forgejo, it pushes out to the corresponding repo on GitHub. I’ve also started mirroring some projects to Codeberg, to avoid having GitHub as my single “public” presence. But what happens when I get a pull request? If I merge it in the GitHub web UI, Forgejo will push its own branch over the top and get rid of it¹⁴. I could pull the changes, merge them, and push the result to Forgejo but then I don’t get the benefit of any CI.

I ended up writing a small private tool that deals with this for me. I give it a GitHub PR, and it effectively imports it into Forgejo for me. I created a prs organisation, and it’ll create a fork of the project in that org if it doesn’t exist. Then it pushes the PR contents to a branch, and creates a PR from the prs repo into the main one. It runs as a user which can write to the PRs org, but only submit pull requests to public repositories outside of it.

When the PR is imported, I can review it in the Forgejo UI, and then I can approve the CI workflows for that particular PR. This gives me some extra defence-in-depth in case anyone is trying to abuse one of those action footguns. Once the CI passes, I can merge it as normal in the Forgejo UI, it gets mirrored out to GitHub, and GitHub marks the PR as merged automatically. It’s not the most elegant solution, but the actual workflow is pretty smooth, especially for the low volumes of PRs I get.

With that, I have Forgejo set up to do everything I need from a git host, and I’m no longer hamstrung every time GitHub goes down.

This way of counting isn’t particularly fair, but it’s somewhat realistic. GitHub break out their uptime for things like git operations, pull requests, actions, webhooks and packages. Realistically if any of those independent things are down then my overall workflow doesn’t, well, work. ↩︎
To be clear, I’m not objecting to the use of Copilot here. It’s a tool. But if you use a tool to do something fairly simple and it spews out 35 commits, including at least 5 reverts, then either it’s a terrible tool or you’re using it very wrong. I didn’t hunt down this example, I came across it while trying to debug something and wasted a bunch of time trying to figure out what on earth was going on. ↩︎
You could self-host runners, which may help, except they’ve already threatened to charge you for the privilege of bringing your own runners. ↩︎
If people could stop finding RCEs in git services for a few days so I can stop redrafting this intro, that’d be great. ↩︎
I’m feeling pretty smug about this decision after reading about the security issues. ↩︎
There’s one holdout: my dockerfiles repo which is a very special snowflake with a very complex workflow and I’m still deciding how to handle it. ↩︎
Which is to be expected, given I’ve got a server dedicated to one person, and they’re trying to serve however-many million users at once. That doesn’t make it any less nice, though! ↩︎
I’d link to it but there’s nowhere really good to link to. It’s just been subsumed into the ‘security’ functions of GitHub, along with a bunch of copilot nonsense. ↩︎
The go project maintain a vulnerability database that includes details about which exact symbols are affected, and the govulncheck tool uses this to only report security issues in code that’s actually used. Dependabot doesn’t do that: it constantly alerts about code that’s not imported, so won’t ever be shipped. ↩︎
In the default config it doesn’t allow anything of the sort, of course. You can whitelist individual commands, but because this is a private server I can merrily whitelist .* and do whatever I like. ↩︎
The turnaround time isn’t particularly impressive, but the fact that they kept the support case open, and the (human!) support agent updated me several times is. I don’t have a lot of good things to say about GitHub, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a support experience that good from a company of a similar size. Especially as I wasn’t a paying customer at the time. ↩︎
Why didn’t I do that in the first place? It seems so obvious now… ↩︎
I really like the idea of an e-mail based workflow, but I absolutely hate actually doing it. ↩︎
This is what happened to me a lot when I was half using Gitea. ↩︎

Monthly Meanderings: February 2026

2026-03-01T00:00:00Z

It doesn’t feel like a whole month has gone past since I wrote the last instalment of Monthly Meanderings, even allowing for how short a month February is. For more context on this series, you can check out the introduction to the first edition.

Website updates

I only wrote one new blog post this month: Just a nod, which is about the “nod” button I added to the bottom of most pages. I did a lot of other little bits and pieces, though:

My blog posts are now automatically posted to a dedicated Bluesky account, and posts now include syndication links at the bottom.
The site now tracks how long each request takes to generate along with how many SQL queries were used. You can see the details for the current request by hovering/tapping over the pi symbol at the bottom right of a page. To understand why it’s a pi symbol, you should watch The Net!
Speaking of films, I redid the star rating rendering so instead of unicode stars it uses some hand-drawn pixel art stickers. They’re somewhat randomised, so they don’t look repetitive. This is what it now looks like: .
I spent some time tweaking various styles and layouts so everything works nicely on smaller screens. I try to make sure these things work when I make them, but it’s easy to miss a particular interaction, or make an innocent-seeming change that breaks tiny screens.
I added a new page that shows stats about my walks, based on my Apple Health data. I had a private view of this for a while, but decided there’s no reason it couldn’t be more public.
The films page has gained a search box, to directly find my review of a particular film. I used CSS anchor positioning for the results panel. Modern CSS is fun!
I fixed the 3D prints page being utterly broken in numerous ways. It showed up on my shiny new “how many SQL queries does each page do?” dashboard, as it was doing multiple queries for each individual print instead of just getting all the data in one go. Then I noticed a badly written redirect rule had broken all the images and download links. Whoops!
I did a lot of under-the-hood cleaning, most of which won’t be visible. Besides just making me happy, this means the contact form and nod buttons now work with Javascript disabled.
Finally, I added a page that shows my board game plays. The data comes from exports from bgstats. I have a bunch of ideas for other things to do with that data, but haven’t got around to it yet.

Phew. After writing all that out it feels like a really long month, not a short one!

Other projects

Not much going on with my other projects. The only big thing was goplum, my self-hosted monitoring/alerting tool, getting a 1.0 release. It adds a reminder feature so you can get alerted repeatedly if a service is down. It also reworks how plugins work so they’re compile-time instead of trying to be clever and dynamic, as that never really gave any benefits.

I’m still continuing my migration of projects to a private Forgejo instance. All of my personal repos are now sourced there, and mirrored out to GitHub, except one: my Dockerfiles. I’m not sure how I want to approach that yet, as the action that does the updating is pretty involved. I also have some repositories split off into their own GitHub organisations which I haven’t got around to mirroring yet.

Entertainment

Unlike the past few months, I didn’t touch many video games in February. The ones I’d been dabbling with didn’t really hook me enough to make me keep going back. I made up for it with lots of other media forms though. First up, a whole bunch of films:

I won’t write too much about them here — you can click through to read my reviews if you want — other than to call out the three excellent horror films I hadn’t seen before: Black Swan, The Cabin in the Woods, and Get Out. Not so long ago I would’ve said that I didn’t enjoy horror films, now they’re some my favourites.

I don’t have any TV show tracking on my website (yet?), as I haven’t really watched much recently. This month I started watching The Pitt though, and it rapidly become one of my favourite shows. By “started watching” I mean “watched every aired episode of both season 1 and season 2”. I highly recommend it. The only problem is that it’s hard to find anything to watch afterwards, as nothing else can quite measure up.

I’ve also been binging a book series: Beneath the Dragoneye Moons. It’s a LitRPG series: basically a fantasy setting that borrows systems from an RPG, like classes and levelling. Something about the genre really works for me, and Beneath the Dragoneye Moons is one of the more interesting series I’ve come across in the genre. I’ve been going through the series at the rate of about a book a day.

Finally, board games! Nothing particularly notable, but now I can embed a pretty display of what I actually played:

6 plays
4 plays
4 plays
4 plays
2 plays
2 plays
2 plays
2 plays
2 plays
2 plays
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play
1 play

All of these were online via Board Game Arena. I haven’t really had time for in-person games with all the TV, films and reading!

Around the web

Start all of your commands with a comma

An old post that was doing the rounds again on Hacker News. It’s an interesting idea. I recently aliased cc to launch Claude Code with some custom parameters, and it horribly backfired when I tried to compile a C program and remembered that cc was part of GCC. I haven’t transitioned all my personal commands to use a prefix yet, but I might.

Tactical tornado is the new default

An interesting post about software developers who act as “tactical tornadoes”, and how that’s basically the role that all LLMs fill. Whenever I use coding agents, I often find myself following behind them in my IDE cleaning up bits and pieces. It’s often faster than prompting them to do it. I definitely get the “cleaning up after a tornado” metaphor.

Amusingly, the agents will sometimes notice that you’re tidying up after them and ascribe it to an automated process, outputting something like “the automated linter hasn’t run yet” if you fall behind. There’s probably a deeper philosophical discussion about what it means when the agent thinks that the human is the automated part of the system…

My smart sleep mask broadcasts users’ brainwaves to an open MQTT broker

Another one for the “the ’s’ in ‘IoT’ stands for security” books. I find it hard to actually comprehend how these things get to market. Does nobody actually think about it, or do they know full well how bad it is and just launch it anyway?

The IndieWeb and Small web

Ask three people to define ‘IndieWeb’ and ‘Small web’ and you’ll get about 20 different answers. This post by Christiano almost exactly nails my own views on the terms, and explains them well. I think most personal sites (my own included) straddle both terms to some extent, but having the labels is useful in discussions.

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.

Monthly Meanderings: December 2025

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

For a while I’ve been idly thinking about a way to get smaller bits of content onto my website without it being too annoying for me, or too hard to consume. Things like interesting links, small project updates, and so on.

I didn’t immediately come up with anything I was happy with, so just sat on it. Ignoring the problem seems to work surprisingly well for things like this. I’d been meaning to redesign the about page for a while, but wasn’t sure what to do with all the interests I wanted to list. After ignoring the problem for a while I came across the interests directory and realised I could just bundle all those things into their own page.

This seems amazingly obvious in hindsight, but I think I needed a bit of a push to accept that a page just about my interests was… well… interesting. Anyway, as the end of December rolled around, I got a similar dose of inspiration: a flurry of monthly round-up posts from various blogs I follow. If I bundle up all the small bits and bobs, it’ll make something vaguely blog post shaped, and writing and consuming those is already a solved problem. Again, pretty obvious in hindsight, and again I think I just needed a nudge to shut up the little voice in my head saying “but those people all have interesting things to say… do you, really?”

So without further ado, welcome to the inaugural post in my new monthly meanderings series. If you have any feedback on the format or contents, please drop me a note with the contact form at the bottom!

Website updates

As already mentioned, I reworked the about page and split out a new interests page. The old about page had a few lists of interests show up in thought bubbles when you hovered over things, which was a cool effect on desktop, but barely worked at all on mobile. The new page gives me a lot more room for waffle, and I do like waffling.

Only a single new blog post this month: exposing game servers over Tailscale. Just a quick how-to I wrote up, having not found it documented usefully anywhere before. I have a bunch of ideas for posts I want to write, but none of them have really sparked joy quite yet, so I’m once again employing the “sit on them for a bit and maybe inspiration will strike” approach.

Other projects

I created a small collection of Docker related projects this month: containuum is a go library that helps with listing containers, and keeping that list up-to-date. On top of that I built centauri-docker-confd which generates a config for centauri (my reverse proxy) based on running Docker containers. I already had a way of doing that, but containuum is designed to be a bit more robust, and I made it so the config can be passed over a network connection instead of having to write it to disk and then signal the proxy to reload.

The next project has a bit of backstory: after reading I got hacked, my server started mining Monero this morning [warning: the article is interesting but a bit LLM-sloppy] I realised that I, too, was running a vulnerable version of Umami. Luckily, as far as I can tell, it wasn’t exploited. But it got me looking into automated vulnerability scanning. I don’t put much stock into it normally, as you get so many false alerts, but this is one case where it would have definitely helped. There didn’t seem to be any good solution for my “middle-of-the-road” approach to containers (lots of containers, but not needing Kubernetes), so I wrote purser. It takes every image used by a running container, runs them through Trivy, and generates a combined report. I’ll add some form of active notifications to it in the future.

Entertainment

This month I’ve been playing a lot of Hogwarts: Legacy, after picking it up for free on Epic Games. I grew up with the Harry Potter books coming out, and while I’m not a super-fan, it still has a special appeal to me. Obviously she-who-must-not-be-named is doing her best to out-evil Voldemort, but I think you can still enjoy the universe despite that. Especially when you don’t have to contribute any money that might go towards her.

Anyway, the game is surprisingly fun. They did a really good job of making it feel like an open world. You want to walk around from place to place to see everything, find all the various collectables, and so on. Compared to Far Cry or Cyberpunk the world is a lot smaller but that means it’s far more densely packed with stuff to do. I initially didn’t vibe with the way combat works: it’s pretty heavily reliant on dodging or shielding against incoming attacks, which reminded me a lot of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Fortunately, it’s a lot more forgiving in Hogwarts: Legacy and I got used to it after not too long.

It’s been a relatively sedate month for other forms of entertainment. I saw Fackham Hall and Wicked: For Good at the cinema. The former was a funny romp, vaguely reminiscent of Airplane or The Naked Gun, as you’d expect from something penned by Jimmy Carr. Wicked was… fine? I wasn’t overly enamoured with part one, so it’s not a surprise I didn’t vibe with the follow-up. If you smushed them into a single normal-length feature I think they would have made a really good film, but two films both over two hours long is a bit much for what actually happens.

Around the web

Wikipedia: List of citogenesis incidents

A list of incidents where (often false) information on Wikipedia has ended up becoming its own source. That led to Mark Dominus’ blog post titled Imaginary Albanian eggplant festivals… IN SPACE where he discovers that a mountain on Ceres got named after a made-up festival (and then got it fixed!)

Not relying on Wikipedia as a source was drummed into us at school, but it feels like this sort of thing is only going to get worse and worse now LLMs are on the scene. I assume we’re already at the point where LLM hallucinations are prevalent enough that they’ll find their way into the training data for future iterations.

Simon Collison’s website

I really like the design here. Both the homepage and how well every journal entry is formatted. It makes me feel bad for the many walls of text that adorn this site. The archived v4 design is also wonderful.

My Dinner with Skinner

A 43-minute-long feature film that is “just” the Steamed Hams gag from The Simpsons done in the style of My Dinner with Andre. There’s a (much shorter) behind-the-scenes video that goes over the extreme amount of effort that was put into it, too.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around this. It’s… something.

Delete Spotify? Sure, But Don’t Just Replace it With Another Subscription

A similar take to my own escaping Spotify the hard way, but it avoids getting lost in the technical weeds like I did. (In my defence, they’re very fun weeds to get lost in.) Stephanie is also one of the people that does monthly wrap-ups, and I was pleasantly surprised when the latest one popped up in my RSS reader and I saw my own site linked.