Shom's GeoCities Tribute Page

About Shom

I like people, dogs, photography, scuba-diving, computers, open-source software, privacy, and generally improving things where I can.

Get Started Guides

Long form guides on esoteric topics like themeing, keyboard mapping, etc.

Film Photography

Collection of photos shot with manual film cameras.

Recent Blog Posts

A PineNote only 5-day weekend I went away this weekend to visit a friend and to experience hanami (the appreciation of the transient beauty of cherry blossoms, a cherished memory from living in Japan). A perfect scenario to bring only the PineNote on this five day trip. TL;DR: PineNote was exactly the right device for this and I have no complaints. April 7, 2025 · 3 min
How I accidentally got better at self-hosting and FOSS contributing A year ago (April 3rd, 2024) I started a webring with the System Crafters Community, building the web I wanted to see instead of lamenting its absence. Craftering has motivated others to write and share more, which in itself is very rewarding, but what I didn’t anticipate is how it improved my self-hosting and FOSS contributions. April 2, 2025 · 5 min
Slimming the site slightly I was looking into how Caddy serves pre-compressed files (html/css/js), it’s pretty straightforward, I just need to generate the compressed files after Hugo builds the site. However, that is small fraction of the total payload since a lot of my posts have images. So I’m tackling that first. March 26, 2025 · 3 min
PineNote - Day One I’ve been eye’ing the PineNote for years and recently decided to check up on it. The community has been hard at work it starting to look ready for prime now. I would LOVE an ebook reader and note taker but do not want to be tied into proprietary walled gardens (tempted most by the Remarkable 2 / Paper Pro). I didn’t find much review type information on the PineNote since it’s original developer edition release several years ago. So I decided to be the change I wanted to see and bought one. It’s Open-Hardware, Free Open Source Software (FOSS), and the main distro is purely community built, the purchase justifications just write themselves! March 8, 2025 · 6 min
Python, FastHTML, and Yak-shaving I wanted to save my barely passable Python scripting from total extinction and write something quick/useful. So what had happened was… March 2, 2025 · 2 min
2024 in review I’m not that big on marking milestones but I’m also realizing that I don’t always remember, appreciate, and am grateful for the seasons of life. So a little retrospection is in order. December 31, 2024 · 4 min
Hosting a Valheim Plus server on a VPS with Podman and docker-compose One of the best parts of being a self-hoster is being able to host a game server for your friends, right? Well, yes but also it can go sideways and not only because you’re a system admin for more than yourself. There are many ways but Podman, docker-compose, and Syncthing can help! August 18, 2024 · 5 min
To our own detriment This post alleging extortion from CloudFlare is plausible/cautionary. Market monopolies/tech mono-cultures suck so it’s tempting to just be outraged at CF. May 27, 2024 · 1 min
Enshittification protests beget more enshittification Like many others, I am frustrated by corporations that have ingested immense amounts of user generated content and are using/selling it to train LLMs1. However, deleting the content now is counter productive, let’s protest more effectively by building a better web. May 7, 2024 · 3 min
In appreciation of podcasts I’ve seen several posts and threads lately on the fediverse that take a rather pessimistic view of podcasts and advocate for written media instead. I guess here’s my hot take about it because no one asked! April 30, 2024 · 2 min