Two-Week Update
Published on July 25, 2025
First of all, my blog is a place to not only share updates and reflections, but also for processing my thoughts and feelings. I plan future writings on topics I care about. With that said, a lot has changed in the past of two weeks since I last blogged, so today's blog post will be about those changes in my life. Without getting too personal, I'll run through some updates and some things that have interested me.
The biggest change has been a death in our family. My mother-in-law passed a few days ago. She had been suffering a broken hip and her health went down-hill from there. In the previous blog post, I mentioned us traveling to Tennessee and the sunshine causing a flare. That trip was to visit her when she was in the hospital. I don't think we're ready to go into too much detail about it, but her insurance company made it difficult to get help. Two days before her death, she wanted to go back to the rehab facility, despite it having poor care, because she was worried about her health. Her insurance provider denied it saying she needed to be in the hospital, again, for three more days before they would appprove her returning to the rehab facility.
I have also been dealing with this auto-immune flare that I spoke about in my last post. I haven't really improved much in the past two weeks, really just learning to adjust to the fatigue and pain. My employer has not been easy to work with, but that is what it is like to be employed in Kentucky. I am most likely going to be applying for disability again. I have applied in the past, but Social Security is not easy to work with, even with an attorney, and I couldn't afford to keep fighting after two years the last time. Going back to work was obviously a mistake, but being broke while applying is a real pain in the butt. We are also in the process of moving to Tennessee to help with my father-in-law. We are giving ourselves a lot of extra time to move because of my health, but it is pretty stressful and expensive. Applying for SSDI will probably wait until after the move.
I had to get a new phone after I dropped and broke mine. I had a Motorola Edge (2024), which was a good phone with the exception that Motorola and Verizon refused to allow me to unlock the bootloader. I already read that unlocking the bootloader on Motorola phones they allow will void the warranty, which is total anti-consumer BS. Can you imagine if a computer manufacturer, like Dell or HP, said your warranty was voided if you installed Linux? Not having a lot of cash, I got a used Pixel 6 from Swappa (which was a great experience) and loaded GrapheneOS. I am sure I will be posting about the benefits of GrapheneOS in the future. Basically it is a privacy focused Android based operating system that has been deGoogled. It was a super easy process that took about ten minutes and the only requirement is a Pixel 6 or newer phone. I like it a lot and highly recommend it. I posted about it here on Mastodon.
On July 14, I switched back to Debian. It just feels like home. Debian has a wonderful community. I like how powerful APT is and that I can make it work exactly the way I like. I have it exactly the way I want it, now, and I even did a little "ricing" to make it look nice. Here is the obligatory hyfetch screenshot.
I have also been working on setting up and maintaining my own homelab server running NextCloud, Jellyfin (for video), Navidrome (for audio), FreshRSS (self-hosting RSS) with some of it being accessible through my own silly domain to access when away from home and other parts of it being contained within our local network. To maintain it and for utility, I am running Grafana and Prometheus with AdGuard (for DNS control). NextCloud has been really useful for my deGoogle process. I switched our shared calendars from Google Calendar to Nextcloud. I also have setup cloud backup to be self-hosted. This is all being run on an old 6th-gen i5 with 32gb of memory running Debian (of course). Its nice being able maintain it through SSH from my desktop. I've learned a ton from tinkering with it.
With the updates to my life over the past two weeks out of the way, here are some of the topics that have interested me.
