Nostalgia is not about how things were

Nostalgia is not about how things were: It’s about how we remember them. I think we like to believe nostalgia is a faithful archive – a clean backup of the past we can mount and browse at will. But it isn’t. It’s more like a compressed snapshot: lossy, selective, and quietly edited over time. What we remember is rarely the full system state. The frustration, delays, the things that didn’t work out – they all get filtered out. What remains are the highlights: the warmth of a familiar routine, the excitement of discovery, the comfort of things that felt simpler […]

“Homelabbing” (not what you think)

Most of us have several hobbies and I am no exception. It is probably no surprise that – given my job – one of my hobbies is IT related. I am, what one would call, an avid “Homelabber”. Now, before you start thinking about a “Walter White” and Jesse Pinkman-like “home lab” this kind of homelabbing is probably not what you might think it is. What is “homelabbing”? Homelabbing is the practice of setting up personal servers, networking gear, and storage devices in your house to act as a private IT laboratory. It allows enthusiasts – like myself – to […]

When documentation fails aka: How to Enable Last.fm Scrobbling Natively in AzuraCast

The official AzuraCast documentation provides the raw Liquidsoap code block and notes that the platform supports native Last.fm scrobbling right before add_skip_command(radio). However, it doesn’t elaborate on the specific UI layout, where to bypass global security restrictions, or how to safely initialize the backend processing. If you attempt to add this by directly editing your station’s liquidsoap.liq file via terminal, it will be completely wiped out and reset whenever your station restarts or updates. This is because AzuraCast treats that file as temporary generated output, not the source of truth. To set up Last.fm scrobbling so that it permanently survives […]

State of the Blog

With so much going on in the world and in life, it’s a good thing to pick up blogging again. The last year I have spend a lot of time on my homelab and I think it’s cool to start writing about that (and other things). So I figured out I should get my site up and going again. So first order of business was to finally install a valid SSL again, which I did using Certkit.io. Which proved easier than I thought. So here we are: SSL up and running again. Well that’s all the exiting stuff for now. […]