Miscellaneous updates

I haven’t felt like blogging lately, but here’s some updates.

Health

Yesterday I took my first dose of Repatha, which is an interesting cholesterol-reducing medication. Rather than having a direct effect on cholesterol, it works by hacking the immune system (via monoclonal antibodies) to prevent the liver from producing as much PCSK9 enzyme, which in turn allows the LDLR receptors in the liver to work longer.

It’s such a weird roundabout way of doing stuff but it also makes a lot of sense.

But anyway since this works via an immune response, it’s pretty typical for the first few days after the initial dose to feel awful with mild flu symptoms. Which I am experiencing. In particular, vague fatigue, dizziness, a slight fever, and, uh, frequent use of the bathroom, let’s say.

So I’m not really feeling all that much like doing stuff right now.

Anxiety

I had an appointment the other day to get some rescue anxiety meds again. The doctor prescribed me hydroxyzine (an antihistamine that also has an anti-anxiety effect) as a first-line treatment and lorazepam as an “in case the hydroxyzine doesn’t work” backup. Hopefully those help.

After getting off the phone I looked for my collection of keychain vials to keep the pills in, and found an old stash of lorazepam. But it’s old enough that I wouldn’t want to test it during a panic attack, and I wouldn’t want to test it outside of one either, so into the trash it goes, I guess.

Music

The choir talent show went really well! We ended up making well more than our 100% funding goal, and that means we will have no problem funding our shows for the next year. It’s a huge relief.

The talent show did get recorded but unfortunately the stream/recording audio quality isn’t great, especially on the amplified sets (like mine), so I don’t particularly want to share it (out of selfishness, really).

Technology

I was running a Nextcloud instance for syncing files between my computers and for easy sharing of large files with friends (and also for its anonymous upload/inbox thing, when I was collecting footage for Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To. But Nextcloud was taking up too much space on my webserver, and I didn’t want to pay another $20/month for a dedicated server for it, so I decided as a stopgap I’d migrate its backing storage to B2, which I already use for my NAS backups.

Hoo boy was that a mistake. Nextcloud’s object-storage backend is ridiculously inefficient, and it blew through my monthly API quota in a matter of hours.

Anyway, since I have a large NAS at home I played with using Synology Drive for a bit, and while it handles the sync aspect of Nextcloud pretty well, the file sharing aspect is kinda meh and there’s no public inbox functionality at all. So for now I’ve switched to using Syncthing for my sync stuff and I’ll probably just use, like, Dropbox (or whatever) for file sharing.

At some point I’ll figure out how to correctly set up my NAS to allow public web services to run via my home connection without dealing with a billion ports (it has a thing called “Web Station” which will supposedly help with this, basically being a GUI wrapper around Apache reverse proxying) and at that point I can probably just run Nextcloud or something similar (like Seafile) from it, but in the meantime, syncthing is working okay. It’s a little obnoxious to bootstrap your sync cluster in it (since you have to do a three-way handshake between at least two of the machines in the group whenever adding one, and when you remove a machine there’s some annoying cleanup to do everywhere too) but for now it’s working for my needs.

Also, unlike Nextcloud, syncthing actually works on Windows 11, and also isn’t a gigantic pain to set up on Linux.

Other reasons to dislike Nextcloud: it’s bloated, it’s high-maintenance, and it’s constantly reminding you to upgrade every stupid bundled app whether you use them or not.

Podcast

Last weekend I was planning on finishing episode 5 of Transformative Meditations but I was way too busy with the opera. Then this weekend I’m just feeling too sick (see above), so it’ll continue to be late.

What I need to remind myself of is that I don’t have to do all the things all at once and it’s okay to just work on things a little bit at a time, and given that podcasts are distributed via RSS to people subscribing (one of the last places where people actually use feed reader apps anymore!) it’s not a big deal if I don’t stick to a regular schedule. The only reason I was trying to be extremely weekly was with the idea that it might give me better visibility in the various podcast directories and maybe lead to more monetization opportunities, but it’s okay to do things for pleasure, too, and I don’t want to burn out on yet another thing.

Other miscellani

Every time I try to add a feature to this website I discover just how badly-factored my website templates are. I kind of want to burn them all down and redo them in a simpler, more modular way. I’m not sure if that would actually help matters though.

Similarly, every time I look into a couple of things I’m unhappy with in Publ I get lost in analysis paralysis in terms of how to fix them. Publ’s code could use a lot of refactoring.

Sometimes I feel like rewriting Publ in rust or something, but that’d just be silly.

Also my parents are visiting for a few days soon. It’ll be nice to see them.

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