Recap Jan-Feb 2026

Stuff I Did

Social Migration - I closed down my GoToSocial instance. I move my personal profile back to DMV.community, and I moved my consulting business over to Mastodon.social. It's quite sad that so many Mastodon instances are against commercial entities, and the instances designed for businesses are outdated and mainly just bot links.

Business Build - I acquired a used Dell R540 and setup TrueNAS as my personal and business server. I'm blogging about it at korora.solutions/blog.

PA Trip - Went on another trip to PA to see my parents. We visited a couple junk stores and I ended up buying a HyperX All Origins Core tenkeyless gaming keyboard. I've been wanting a smaller mechanical keyboard with a backlight and I couldn't pass this up for $3.

Ditched the Desktop - After running some speed tests on my older Dell Precision tower, and looking at the cost of trying to upgrade it vs taking the port replicator I have out of the box and using it, I made the decision to decommission the desktop and primarily work from my laptop. It didn't have any M.2 slots and was still a few generations of processor behind. Cinnamon handles plugging and unplugging the dock quite well, so I'm happily running LMDE. I do have less RAM and storage, but it was worth the trade.

Crafted - We visited Everday Saint Brewhouse in Leonardtown, MD; Eden Town Brewing in Denton, MD; and the new location of 4Dogs Brewing in Easton, MD. I've once again officially visited every craft brewery taproom in Maryland.

Libreated - I joined a new Linux and self hosted group in Baltimore and attended an introductory meetup.

Stuff I Tried

PikaOS KDE - I wanted to put the Nvidia card that was on a shelf into my desktop to play with AI a bit. I installed PikaOS 4 KDE Plasma, but there were a few bugs that prevented it from being a daily driver on my main machine and I didn't have the time to troubleshoot them. (This happened before I ditched the desktop.)

PikaOS COSMIC - Since I gave up on running PikaOS on my main machine I installed it to my new work laptop. However, Deskflow didn't work on it so I scrapped that idea.

XikeStor switch - I tried a XikeStor 10Gb switch. One SFP+ port was bad. I just opted to return it rather than replace it.

Stuff I Found

Link Dumped - shellsharks included me in their Link Dump post! Thank you!

Wearable Upgrade - AsteroidOS released v2.0 of their Linux-based OS for watches. And I found my old Ticwatch. I have not, however, had the time to try it. 

Nextcloud Peertube - Nextcloud has their own Peertube instance!

NetBird Reverse Proxy - NetBird released reverse proxy support on their self-hosted installs, and it's coming to cloud.

Debian Family Tree - TerminalTilt has a great page up with a list of distros based on Debian.

Finger on the - "Pulse is a modern, unified dashboard for monitoring your infrastructure across Proxmox, Docker, and Kubernetes. It consolidates metrics, alerts, and AI-powered insights from all your systems into a single, beautiful interface. "

The datacenter manager with the worst name - "PegaProx transforms your Proxmox VE experience with unified multi-cluster control, intelligent load balancing, seamless cross-cluster migrations, and enterprise-grade LDAP & OIDC authentication – all in one beautiful interface."

Windows impersonator - VailuxOS is a Debian-based Linux distro styled like Windows 11. I haven't tried it, yet, but most likely will in the future.

Stuff I Watched

My wife and I watched the first season of Cross. We've been watching our normal shows, High Potential, Will Trent, the Rookie, and Doc. We've started Best Medicine, but I'm not sold on it. And we watched the latest season of the Lincoln Lawyer.

We also watched Rental Family and F Valentine's Day. Both were quite good.

I finished my first ever watch of Babylon 5. I'm officially a fan. I've also been watching Starfleet Academy and finished my Big Bang Theory rewatch.