Normally, it takes until about the middle of February for me to get sick of Winter. Usually, in mid-December we still see some 40 degree days. Almost never are we under 20 degrees. This year, we’ve seen -8 Degrees (these are all in Fahrenheit). More than once. It has been effin’ cold. And we have a ton of snow on the ground. In some places near me, we’ve already had 50 inches of snow, which is damn near unheard of here in the lower peninsula. The UP, sure. Those backwoods mofos are used to this kind of shit. Down here, we’re basically Florida.

Another week gone past. The year is almost over. How’d that happen?

Programming

This week was focused on Checkbox. It is very slow going. I’ve spent basically the entire week on native language scheduling. First, I tried an existing crate that someone else developed that looks for date creation. I thought that would do well enough, but the issue is that I will end up having to account for every permutation of a date that exists. That is a ton of work, and obviously opens up problems with those expressions that I didn’t hard code into the app.

I use FreshRSS to manage all of my RSS feeds. It is wonderful. Maybe the best thing I use on a daily basis. I adore being able to use the internet in this way, for many reasons. I’ve talked about my eternal love of RSS before, so I don’t need to get all gushy over it here. But damn is it good.

But I have a problem. Back in August, I participated in Blaugust 2025 along with a couple hundred of my fellow bloggers. My silly ass decided to subscribe to every single participant’s RSS feed. Now, I’ve spent months weeding them out to just those that I’m actually interested in. But I’ve found a ton of new content thanks to that mass subscribe.

I’ve been working on making it so I can self host my own music library over the last few months. This has entailed buying some music from Bandcamp and pulling in some tracks from a seafaring friend. Do I feel guilty for sailing the seven seas? A little, but most of the stuff I’ve downloaded that way is stuff that I’ve bought before. Sometimes twice. I’m mostly re-downloading this stuff so I can guarantee everything is the same quality. A lot of my older purchased stuff is from the late 90s and early 2000s when ripping was new, meaning it was all of dubious quality.

With my recent unemployment, I’m returning to a blog post idea I had a few months ago. I wrote this idea down and just didn’t know how it fit, as it was during the time when I started to think more carefully about my health and getting older. Life happens, we all know this. Good things, bad things, and all the things in between. All of those things add up to make life what it is.

So, I’ve been working on my music collection and it is really coming along. I’ve downloaded a metric shit ton of music in the last month. My biggest problem remains, however. Metadata is crap. Even though now all of my files are meticulously named and organized, the so-called metadata search only works about 80% of the time. Why it is so hard, I’m not sure. These people have databases, right? All my folders have album.nfo files in them already, so the metadata shouldn’t even need to be looked up. It’s just an odd thing.

I’ve changed the naming scheme a little. I stole the idea from Justin Vollmer. Yoink.

Programming

I have started yet another project. I’m calling it Checkbox, and it’s a todo list application that will one day replace TickTick for me.

It is written in Rust (btw) and GTK4. I’m learning Rust rabidly, but I still suck at it. So there’s a lot of error codes coming my way that I then have to go look up or ask Claude. It’s been enormously fun.