
<figure>
![🌅 🌸](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2024-09-20.jpg)

<figcaption>_Blue Sky Thinking — [09/20/24](/sketches-2024-09-20)_</figcaption>
</figure>

I had a blast spending time [creating digital paintings](/blog/chris%20Learns%20Digital%20Painting) this year!

A couple of years ago, I was overcome with the desire to _really_ learn to draw. I made crude comics as a kid, but I was itching to really figure out how it's done. And so I did, and [I learned a lot about art and creativity from it](/lessonsfromdrawing2023)!

This year I turned my focus to the world of color and texture through digital painting. It was quite the leap! From single toned, line driven analog art making in a sketchbook — over to color and shape based painting through a digital medium.

Much of what I have to say this year is a revisiting of ideas I came across last year. Only this time the context has changed. A bit of a variation on a theme!

<figure>
![💡](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2024-05-04.jpg)
<figcaption>_Still Life — [5/4/24](/sketches-2024-05-04)_</figcaption>
</figure>

## Changing the Way You See the World

> I also love to listen to skaters talk about how they see the world. Skateboarding seems to reconfigure your molecules and changes the way you look and the kind of attention you pay to the world. (Exactly what we hope for when practicing any art.)
>
> — [Austin Kleon](https://austinkleon.com/2022/11/07/drawing-at-the-skate-park/)

Drawing with line art, especially in a stylized way, involves a great deal of abstraction and reduction. I spent time simplifying a form to only a few strokes and basic shapes. It changed how I saw the world. But more in a way of capturing shorthand. I was looking for the simplified essence.

Learning to see color through painting had the _exact opposite effect_! When I started studying color and light as well as doing direct-painting still lifes, it's as if I was starting to see for the first time.

A pot is just "orange" until you take a closer look at the texture, the lighting, the chips and smudges across its surface. There's a humbling amount of color in everyday life that gets simplified and overlooked.

Miranda and I went to a couple of art museums this year. Paintings are already captivating when you're not an artist. They're then astonishingly rich and awe inspiring once you know the attention to detail that goes into them!

The process of painting is great fun. Though, my favorite takeaway from picking up the craft is now how I see the world. You won't believe how something as simple as looking into someone's eyes will bring out a world of beauty hiding in plain sight!

<figure>

![Sweet little Lucy loving on this pretty sky](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2024-03-09.jpg)

<figcaption>_Pup at Twilight — [3/9/24](/sketches-2024-03-09)_</figcaption>

</figure>

## Balancing Projects with Play

After a few years, I've largely gotten better about balancing [play and study](https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/2). The boundary for me has become really clear since painting has been an entirely new medium requiring _lots_ of study, master copies, and reading up on how the brush engine works.

Even still — When I work on a digital painting project for myself, I'd call it play. But it's not entirely in that category. I realized something was missing.

It wasn't until I picked my physical sketchbook back up and started fooling around that things clicked into place. Unsurprisingly, having an analog, private, free space with no large end goal helped keep my spirit up when I returned to the digital canvas.

I've since deviated from needing a hard boundary, a la [the 50% rule](https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/2/50percent). These days my energy level is a good indicator of whether today is painting day or a fool around in the sketch book day.

If I were to package this up into advice: Be mindful of the project driven work, study, and time
spent fooling around.

Actually, that lines up nicely with Robertryan Cory's recommended routine for artists from [his CalArts lecture](https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.833375406677877): "Educational, Disciplinary, Experimental. Drawing should be divided into a sustainable work routine."

<figure>

![🌅 🌸](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2023-09-24.jpg)

<figcaption>_An early swing at digital painting — [09/24/23](/sketches-2023-09-24)_</figcaption>

</figure>

## In Pursuit of Truth

In music, the major scale is derived from the harmonic series: a natural occurring phenomena that represents mathematical divisions of any given frequency. (For one of the best demonstrations of this, look no further than [the Bernstein Norton Lectures](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HjEAtJXssc&ab_channel=LeonardBernstein).)

It's a major reason why tonal music is universal. It's what makes music a pursuit of Truth. [In Harmonic Experience](/bookshelf#HarmonicExperience), W. A. Mathieu walks readers through singing exercises where you experience the balance of these sounds firsthand. It's an eye opening journey.

I'm not as well-read on light as I am acoustics, but I know this much: colors themselves are different wavelengths of light. Violet is a short wavelength, red a long one.

It's one thing to know that intellectually. And a wholly other thing to experience it.

At some point, after working at a still life, spending an hour closely trying to match the color of a dull pot, I stepped outside. It was a clear day, mid afternoon. A rich blue sky, I observed. High in saturation today.

As my gaze came downward, I saw the leaves on the tree. And while it's hard to explain in writing — a resonance occurred. I started seeing the green of the leaves as a continuation of the blue in the sky. Not in an intellectual way, but on something much more deep and personal.

In the same way that each tone of music contains a multitude of different sounds, I made the connection that light was working in that same way. Obvious to some, I'm sure, but a revelation to me.

There are plenty of reasons to paint. Maybe one of the most worthwhile, though, is that — just like studying sound — you spend time with another Truth in the world. This time, through color and light.

<figure>
![🌳🌳🌳](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2024-07-06.jpg)

<figcaption>_Campion Trail – [07/06/24](/sketches-2024-07-06)_</figcaption>
</figure>


Lessons From a Year of Painting



I came across Maggie Appleton's tremendous post ["A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden"](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history)! 

I've heard of the publishing philosophy in passing and found the term itself to resonate. A counter to high-production, corporate leaning purposes for owning a domain name, a digital garden assumes work in progress, a broad spectrum of topics and interests, and an ever evolving space online where ideas and things of beauty can blossom. _Lovely!_

There are a few patterns that show up with folks that have taken on the spirit of digital gardening. One that caught my eye was "Topography over Timelines." 

> Gardens are organized around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others.
> 
> This runs counter to the time-based structure of traditional blogs: posts presented in reverse chronological order based on publication date.
> 
> Gardens don't consider publication dates the most important detail of a piece of writing. Dates might be included on posts, but they aren't the structural basis of how you navigate around the garden. Posts are connected to other by posts through related themes, topics, and shared context.
> 
> One of the best ways to do this is **through Bi-Directional Links** – links that make both the destination page and the source page visible to the reader. This makes it easy to move between related content.
> 
> Because garden notes are densely linked, a garden explorer can enter at any location and follow any trail they link through the content, rather than being dumped into a "most recent” feed.


_Love it!_ My favorite discoveries are with sites that link well. It's a blast hopping around, continuing the conversation from page to page. Wikis are the prime example of this. Tough, some bloggers like [Austin Kleon](https://austinkleon.com/) also do this particularly well.

So! Why only be bound by linking in one chronological direction? I took to the idea and whipped up a script to employ this myself!

## Developing Bi-Directional Linking

[This site uses markdown](/parsemd) for posts. So doing this job is largely about text parsing. Much of the logic, in fact, is similar to [how I parse my posts to display an art grid](/artgrid).


I'll start by writing the function to actually get the url value from my links. The regex is looking for the value with parenthesis in the typical markdown shorthand for links: `![alt text](link)`

```JavaScript
// api.js

export const getInternalLinksFromMarkdown = (md) => {
  const regex =
    /(?:__|[*#])|\[(.*?)\]$\/(.*?)$/g;
  return Array.from(md.matchAll(regex)).map((res) => {
    if (res && res.length > 1) {
      return res[2];
    }
  });
};

```

The value of index 2 of the array will give me the capture group I've targeted because that's [how it's done in Node](/noderegex)!

From here, I'll then pass in my posts and systematically generate an object that grabs both the targeted url as well as the current post url.

```JavaScript
// api.js

export function getAllPostRefs(
  fields = ['content', 'slug', 'title'],
  options = {}
) {
  const slugs = getPostSlugs();
  let posts = slugs
    .map((slug) => getPostBySlug(slug, fields))
    // Filter false values (.DS_STORE)
    .filter((post) => post)
    // sort posts by date in descending order
    .sort((post1, post2) => (post1.date > post2.date ? -1 : 1));

  const links = {}
  posts.forEach((post) => {
    const postLinks = getInternalLinksFromMarkdown(post.content);
    postLinks.forEach((src) => {
      if (src && !src.includes('/')) {
        if (!links[src]) {
          links[src] = [];
        }
        if (!links[src].find(entry => entry.slug === post.slug))
        links[src].push({
          slug: post.slug,
          title: post.title,
        })
      }
    });
  })

  return links;
}

```

A Set data structure would be ideal for keeping duplicates out of the list, but we'll be converting this to JSON, and I'd rather avoid the hassle of bringing in a library for the conversion.

Finally, I'll call this function and save the results to a JSON file for refference.

```JavaScript
biDirectionalLink.js

import { getAllPostRefs } from "./api"
const FileSystem = require("fs");

export const getRefs = () => {
	const links = getAllPostRefs();
	FileSystem.writeFile('_cache/backlinks.json', JSON.stringify(links), (error) => {
    if (error) throw error;
  });
}

```

Here's an snippet of what it generates:

```
{
	"30": [
		{
			"slug": "2022",
			"title": "2022"
		},
		{
			"slug": "iwataonpeople",
			"title": "Iwata on Creative People"
		},
		{
			"slug": "transcience",
			"title": "Transience"
		},
		{
			"slug": "web2000",
			"title": "A Love Letter to 2000s Websites"
		}
	],
	"2022": [
		{
			"slug": "testingandwriting",
			"title": "Testing Software for the Same Reason You Write Notes"
		}
	],
	
	...
}
```

Voilà! Now I have the data of pages that are referenced. I can now call this method anytime the site regenerates and use this as the source of truth for back-linking.

To consume this in Next.js, I'm going to read the file in `getStaticProps` (or in an RSC if I were using the App Router)

```
// [slug].js

export async function getStaticProps({ params }) {
  if (post) {
    const file = await fs.readFile(process.cwd() + '/_cache/backlinks.json', 'utf8');
    const backlinks = JSON.parse(file);
    let pagesLinkingBackTo = null;

    if (backlinks[params.slug]) {
      pagesLinkingBackTo = backlinks[params.slug];
    }
```

And, following some prop drilling, I can now programmatically display these on matching pages:

```
// backLinkSection.js

import React from 'react';
import NextLink from './NextLink';

const BacklinksSection = ({pagesLinkingBackTo}) => {
	if (!pagesLinkingBackTo) return <></>
	return (
		<aside>
			<h4>
				Pages referencing this post:
				<ul>

				{pagesLinkingBackTo.map(link => (
					<li><NextLink href={link.slug}>{link.title}</NextLink> </li>
				))}
				</ul>
			</h4>
		</aside>
	);
};

export default BacklinksSection;
```

Assuming I haven't link to this page yet, you can see this in action at the bottom of my [Parsing Mardkown in Node](/parsemd) post. Now with handy links to click and explore related topics.

I'm excited to keep tending the garden! I've already seen themes emerge through the regular tags I use. Here's to a great harvest someday!

Generating Back Links For Optimal Digital Gardening

Jimmy Van Heusen – Polka Dots and Moonbeams


![🌱](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/pratchettonenglishgardens.jpg)

I revisited a passage from Sir Terry Pratchett's ["A Slip of the Keyboard."](https://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/books/a-slip-of-the-keyboard/) The essay "Magic Kingdoms" illustrates the English dedication to maintaining a garden in any environment. Pratchett uses this as an exemplification for how the garden is a portal to another world, and a widespread fascination with planting a garden is why fantasy is part of the fabric of the culture. 

> I remember a back garden I used to see from the train. It was a very small garden for a very small house, and it was sandwiched between the thundering railway line, a billboard, and a near-derelict factory.
> 
> I don't know what a Frenchman or an Italian would have made of it. A terrace, probably, with a few potted plants and some trellis to conceal the worst of postindustrial squalor. But this was an Englishman's garden, so he'd set out to grow, if not Jerusalem, then at least Jerusalem artichokes. There was a rockery, made of carefully placed concrete lumps (the concrete lump rockery is a great British contribution to horticulture, and I hope one is preserved in some outdoor museum somewhere) There was a pond; the fish probably had to get out to turn around. There were roses. There was a tiny greenhouse made of old window frames nailed together (another great British invention). Never was an area so thoroughly gardened, in fact, as that patch of cat infested soil. 
> 
> No attempt had been made to screen off the dark satanic mills, unless the runner beans counted. To the gardener, in the garden, they did not exist. They were in another world. 

For me there's another comfort in the scene. Even if we're not nurturing plants, we all have the means to cultivate our own creative gardens. A sketchbook, journal, blog, a song. And it doesn't matter how humble! A jar of soil and basil goes a long way for bringing life to a space. So it is with strumming strings and moving the pencil.



Pratchett on English Gardens


That equation feels right.

This comes from the legendary Disney animator and teacher Walt Stanchfield (A lead character animator for the Aristocats, to name one.) I've written before about how Walt Describes [the curious act of performing with no audience](/stanchfield). This equation come in context from [his handouts for gesture drawing](https://ia601302.us.archive.org/15/items/Gesture_Drawing_for_Animation/Gesture_Drawing_for_Animation.pdf):

(Here, Walt is talking about the benefits of staying healthy enough to have the energy to create, another juicy point)

> You must create. The injunction of life is to create or perish. Good physical and mental
> conditioning are necessary to do this. Remember this: the creative energy that created the
> Universe, created you and its creative power is in you now, motivating you, urging you on -
> always in the direction of creative expression. I have a formula: "Impression minus expression
> equals depression". This is especially applicable to artists. We have trained ourselves to be
> impressed (aware) of all the things around us, and in the natural course of our lives those
> impressions cry out to be expressed - on paper, on canvas, in music, in poetry, in an
> animated film. So shape up.

Ain't that the truth?

It's still worth the reminder. When you do professionally creative work (like animation or software!) you are still constantly taking in the world and are falling in love with all sorts of things - books, music, stories, and technologies.

The best way to express that love is through getting down to business and making something.


Impression Minus Expression Equals Depression


I don't always find the inspiration I'm looking for from the bios and stories of full time artists. Those select few who can spend most of their week in the studio. Winston Churchill, who was surprisingly an enthusiastic, self proclaimed hobby painter, can speak much more clearly to the situation of having to find time to be creative in the nooks and crannies of the day.

![And a surprisingly sensitive painter, at that!!](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/images/churchillpainting_Large.jpg)

I've been rattling in my mind all the different reasons I like drawing/piano/guitar/writing music/blogging, and why someone else might like to do them too.

To Churchill, it was no contest comparing painting to more typical leisure activities:

> Even at the advanced age of Forty! It would be a sad pity to shuffle or scramble along through one's playtime with golf and bridge, pottering, loitering, shifting from one heel to the other, wondering what on earth to do – as perhaps is the fate of some unhappy beings – when all the while, if you only knew, there is close at hand a wonderful new world of thought and craft, a sunlit garden gleaming with light and colour of which you have the key in your waistcoat pocket. Inexpensive independence, a mobile and perennial pleasure apparatus, new mental food and exercise, the old harmonies and symmetries in an entirely different language, an added interest to every common scene, an occupation for every idle hour, an unceasing voyage of entrancing discovery – these are high prizes.

A particularly sobering passage acknowledges that, as a hobbyist, you won't reach the same great heights of technique as the life-long, full time painters. It's a problem I find myself wrestling with frequently, but Churchill brings it up so matter-of-factly and without much concern:

> But if, on the contrary, you are inclined – late in life though it be – to reconnoitre a foreign sphere of limitless extent, then be persuaded that the first quality that is needed is Audacity. There really is no time for the deliberate approach. Two years of drawing-lessons, three years of copying woodcuts, five years of plaster casts – these are for the young. They have enough time to bear. And this thorough grounding is for those who, hearing the call in the morning of their days, are able to make painting their paramount lifelong vocation. The truth and beauty of line and form which by the slightest touch or twist of the brush a real artist imparts to every feature of his design must be founded on long, hard, persevering apprenticeship and a practice so habitual that it has become instinctive. We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paintbox. And for this Audacity is the only ticket.

![These trees ❤️](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/images/winston-churchill-art-collection-pr-0518-1600x800.jpg)

It's still worth the pursuit all the same. The rewards for that Audacity are many:

> I have written in this way to show how varied are the delights which may be gained by those who enter hopefully and thoughtfully upon the pathway of painting; how enriched they will be in their daily vision, how fortified in their independence, how happy in their leisure. Whether you feel that your soul is pleased by the conceptions or contemplation of harmonies, or that your mind is stimulated by the aspect of magnificent problems, or whether you are content to find fun in trying to observe and depict the jolly things you see, the vistas of possibility are limited only by the shortness of life. Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

So beautifully said. It all rings true for me:

- Playing with shapes and sound, their interaction with one another, is fun unto itself
- Creation is largely puzzle solving. Even playing piano is a finger puzzle
- There's no better way to express love for the world than to try to recapture it as you see it
- Progress, itself, is a joy! Learning an instrument more intimately or refining a line stroke, they all lead to small victories
- There are infinite paths to explore. None right or wrong, only guided by your curiosity and interest

And why wait? The time to plant a garden is now:

> Try it, then, before it is too late and before you mock at me. Try it while there is time to overcome the preliminary difficulties. Learn enough of the language in your prime to open this new literature to your age. Plant a garden in which you can sit when digging days are done. It may be only a small garden, but you will see it grow. Year by year it will bloom and ripen. Year by year it will be better cultivated. The weeds will be cast out. The fruit-trees will be pruned and trained. The flowers will bloom in more beautiful combinations. There will be sunshine there even in the winter-time, and cool shade, and the play of shadow on the pathway in the shining days of June.

While the earlier, the better for overcoming the initial hurdle of learning the vocabulary, it's never too late. Thankfully, the barrier to entry is not technique or years of experience. Just Audacity!

![☁️](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/images/churchillpainting.jpg)


Winston Churchill on Painting as a Pastime

Phone Lines

Goose Creek

Hike

Cloud Covered Mountains

Cycling

⋆.˚🐠‧₊ _Frutiger Aero inspired music!_ ˚✩ ₊˚🫧⊹♡

Late 2000s tech had a unique vibrancy that made it feel almost magical. A new wave of color and light, glowing portals that illuminated worlds imagined and real. It was truly alive, how you interacted with it was so novel. More intuitive than ever before.

The anticipation for this promised future was at it's strongest as you began to load up that new system you brought home. Powering it on. Walking through the startup process. Being greeted to something wholly new...

SkyBox

Installation

Mostly Sunny

Cool guitar driven music for hot summer days.

Largely inspired by the great Masayoshi Takanaka.

Snow Cones

Watermelon

Raspberry

Collectathon Island's magical power-orbs have been scattered all over the place! We need a lovable 3D anthropomorphic mascot to use their signature jumping and running abilities to return them all.

Inspired by Richard Jacques, David Wise, and countless summers playing platformers.

Jam 3D

Collectathon Island

Bonus Stage Dimension

Video Game inspired Drum and Bass! Influenced by Soichi Terada and Jun Chikuma.

Space Cowboy Forrest Frog pilots his galaxy F-5 aircraft in search of the Hyper Fragment — a now rare material used to power warp speed travel. A group called the Black Hole Herons has aggressively taken control over the mines in the Lake Lenticular Galaxy, and there's only one gunman for the job!

Space Frog 64

Lily Pad Sector

Hyper Fragment


From _The Heart Aroused_:

> The abiding image of a diverse and rich ecology is the Amazon rainforest. As human beings, we look at the rainforest and see an ecology made up of thousands of species that fit together exquisitely. The image is so satisfying to us, because when we see the forest, and all the disparate forms, odors, and cries that make it up, we intuit a life where all our own strange and eccentrically exotic parts can fit too. A place where the cross-grain of experience makes not a disconnect, but a mysterious, embracing pattern. A balanced, intricate ecology, in effect, asks us to stop choosing between parts of ourselves, according to what we think belongs and what does not. A mature ecology needs its microscopic leaf molds as much as its panthers. It does not make a choice between them, saying, “I’ll take three dozen of those gorgeous Panthers, and cancel the tacky leaf molds.” If it did, the rainforest would soon, as the metaphor goes, be out of business. No leaf molds, no compost. No compost, no life.


David Whyte — Rainforest


From _The Art of Kiki's Delivery Service_, Hayao Miyazaki on Ursula's painting:

> “It doesn’t matter what Ursula paints as long as it’s spirited. Given how her painting is thematically related to the film, the actual paintings had to be powerful. The paintings convey the life of a secluded female artist more than they do some message. I was looking forward to drawing them myself once I was done with the storyboards [_laughs_]. When I couldn’t afford to do so, I recalled the print, ‘Ship Flying Over the Rainbow.’ The print was made by a teacher at a school for the disabled, Hachinohe City Minato Special Junior High School. We obtained permission from the instructor and added a face to the original illustration. Replacing the horse’s face with Kiki’s would have been inconceivable.”

The original illustration wasn't colored, so credits in the film show:

> _"Ship Flying Over The Rainbow"_
>
> Painted by students of Hachinohe City Minato Special Junior High School Handicapped Children's Class

_Lovely_.


Ursula's Painting


<figure>
  ![Perspective grid on paper](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/images/PerspectiveStudy.png)
  <figcaption>A very calming time drawing this perspective grid study.</figcaption>
</figure>

From Walt Stanchfield's Gesture Drawing for Animation, a favorite around here:

> It all starts with preparation, which is the “open sesame” of all genius. Even the geniuses
> admit it’s 99% hard work and 1% genius.

In context, this is talking about capturing "The Essence" of an image. For the layman to a craft, it's what they would imagine is _most_ of the work going into the piece. The emotion, the story, the idea.

Starting to learn drawing a few years ago, I thought ideas would be the hard part. Turned out that I had ideas pouring out of my ears! Enough so that I couldn't keep up with them all.

And so the idea is the easy part. Most of the time is spent in the trenches, working with craft.

A gesture is accomplished through a complex array of skills working in tandem: composition, perspective, anatomy, construction, expression, draftsmanship, inking, shading, and value. And each of those are sophistications unto itself.

This is, mostly, relieving. Craft can be improved, and craft is much more sustainable to work at over a long stretch of time. I find craft to be grounding; it's the thing that aligns you with the beauty of it all, and it's the way we become the image, the piece, and so on.

I write this as I'm slowing the pace of output on this ol' dot com so I can spend more time learning and honing craft. I'm trading finished works for etude books and study material. It's a quiet learning sabbatical, with occasional transmissions from the underground where the roots are being laid. With time, some nice fruit should bloom from it. But until then, on with craft.


99% Perspiration


<figure className="reset">
  <video
    autobuffer
    loop
    type="video/mp4"
    playsInline
    controls
    className="full-width"
  >
    <source
      src="https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/video/AlfredStraightJig480p.mp4"
      type="video/mp4"
    />
  </video>
</figure>

Getting jiggy with it!


Manus — Straight Jig


I'm dipping my toes into the rabbit hole of Home Labbing (or, perhaps, am tripping down the loose gravel that is rapidly dropping me down into the vast expanse of it!)

I've seen discourse around Synology setups, home NAS systems, and really sophisticated data back up stragies. This just seemed right up my alley — the intersection of managing apps, data, and oh — by the way — that data can include all sorts of stuff I care about: my ripped CDs from the 2000s, my collection of ebooks, _and_ pictures from all of my vacations??

I'll hit the highlights — my _laughably minimal setup_ as I'm just getting started, the apps I'm running, and my two cents on the experience so far.

## The Setup — Keeping It Simple

So far, the number of people who care about this in my household is 1 — me. I have little need for the N in NAS (Network-Attached Storage) and am having fun setting things up on my laptop.

That said, a DAS (Direct-attached Storage) box is out of the budget while I'm just experimenting. A NAS can run $1,000, while a DAS trails behind _slightly_. Not the price point for a maiden voyage.

Those deeply entrenched in this hobby may scoff at this, but my current solution is — drum roll please — _an external hard drive_. I simply slap this into my computer directly, run all my apps on my machine, and then access them on the same machine.

This skips over a lot of what looks fun for a maturing setup: building a machine, ordering parts, setting up the network, getting an Uninterruptible Power Supply, etc. But I was starting to get educated with all of this only to realize it was keeping me from getting started in the first place.

So yes, I'm excited to eventually have hardware to talk about and neat networking approaches at a later time. But for now, keeping it simple is keeping me moving.

Worth saying: I have employed for [a while now](/databackup) the [3-2-1 backup strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup). I have a primary drive, a mirrored drive, and have the primary backed up to the cloud via [BackBlaze](https://www.backblaze.com/). Wes Bos gives a great pitch for [why he uses BackBlaze on Syntax](https://syntax.fm/show/220/the-synology-show-backups-and-home-server).

Now is also a good time to shout out [FreeFileSync](https://freefilesync.org/), a handy bit of OSS that I've used since 2010. This helped with migrating files and currently makes keeping drives in sync painless. It's manual, but it still works wonderfully. I've also picked up [DaisyDisk](https://daisydiskapp.com/) for getting a visual on what's taking up how much space on any given drive.

## Apps!

Pretty much all of these are run as Docker Containers on my machine, keeping themselves contained and incredibly simple to set up. I'm just wrapping up getting each populated with data, and for the most part, all you need to do is point it to the directory you want data pulled from, and then you're done. There was no issue with having the app on my machine and the data on another drive, so long as it's connected, of course.

Here's what I've got so far:

- **[📸 Immich](https://immich.app/)**: _The_ alternative for Apple Photos and Google Photos. I've enjoyed it so far. The face-detection AI for grouping photos by person is a slick feature.
- **[📺 Tube Archivist](https://www.tubearchivist.com/)**: Designed for backing up YouTube videos. I was previously doing this manually with yt-dlp, but this app sits on top and enables a very clever way of managing multiple downloads with plenty of automation baked in. Includes an interface for watching, as well. One of my favorites!
- **[🪼 Jellyfin](https://jellyfin.org/)**: Plex is the popular choice for media streaming, but I was interested in going forward on all OSS, so Jellyfin was the pick for hosting movies, shows, and my music library. In addition to the web client, it comes with native mobile apps that support downloading locally. I... don't actually watch a ton of movies or shows. But it's been great for hosting my music library!
- **[📖 Kavita](https://www.kavitareader.com/)**: I gave [BookLore](https://github.com/herraristotle/BookLore) a try, but it seems to be collapsing rapidly. As a comics enjoyer, I liked the looks of Kavita. It groups books within a series rather nicely. And, of course, handles books of words just as well.
- **[🐼 Monica](https://www.monicahq.com/)**: Monica is a CRM for friends and family. Having a personal database is a great container for keeping track of the people that matter most in your life. For a while now, I've taken [Derek's advice](https://sive.rs/dbt) on this practice, and Monica is actually one of his recommended solutions. Have only used it lightly so far, but it's been the most fulfilling hands down.

## How It's Going So Far

This has been supremely enjoyable on many fronts!

Parsing data, collecting it, reorganizing it, and digging deep into my own personal archive has been naturally nostalgic. Plenty of "wow, I forgot all about this!" arose along the way. This goes for my personal photos, [music collection](/alifetimeofmusiclistening), and even YouTube series that I previously enjoyed. [Tending the garden](/makingtagpages) allows us to "live twice," enjoying the highlights all over again.

Data loss is something I've been burned by before. Growing up, my own technical experiments pushed our Windows 98 machine to breaking a few times, to the point where the only solution was a clean install. On the subject of YouTube in particular, I've been frustrated to see videos disappear for one reason or another. Setting up this homelab of sorts only further solidified my own backup strategy, and now more easily facilitates backing up other ephemeral media.

On top of that — I'm much more likely to actually engage with what's stored as well! These apps provide an enjoyable interface that actual keeps me coming back. A huge improvement from finder!

And, of course, as a technologist, the setup is the most fun part. Along the way, I've spun up Docker Containers, written migration scripts, used new CLI apps, and just had a ball on the computer! It's exciting (daunting? terrifying?) that there's much more to do in the realm of hardware in this space, and I'm looking forward to branching out that way when the time comes!

I share this not to impress anyone with how tricked out my setup is (clearly), but to encourage you. If you're looking to get going, you don't have to wait for hardware. Roll up your sleeves and start tinkering!


Forays Into Home Lab Apps


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Nothing says spooky like the chromatic scale!


Hey, I'm Chris!

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