Weeknote 2025-46

I found a few hours free this week and did some tinkering. I’ve been paying for a Linux based VPS server for about a year now (maybe 2, I can’t remember) because at a previous Black Friday the hosting company reduced their fee down to £1.20 per month, plus VAT.

In all the time I’ve owned it I’ve used it on and off, for discrete tasks: as a place to dump a single page meme, or a file for someone specific to download that was too big for email, or to test some PHP for my brother-in-law.

This week I decided I was going to use it for something “proper” and set up FreshRSS!

It took all of about 10 minutes of tinkering with docker-compose, and another 10 minutes setting up a reverse-proxy in nginx.

Of course, I then went down a rabbit-hole trying to get TLS working correctly and playing nicely with all my other things I use the domain for.

I’ve been meaning to move my domain name away from the original registrar I used for a bunch of reasons, so I used this as the momentum, and for the first step switched my name servers to CloudFlare’s free plan to try and avoid downtime when I made the eventual registrar move.

Turns out CloudFlare’s free plan does everything I need it to right now, which is excellent, so I maintained this GitHub Pages site, and the other few things I have, and just set up TSL to the VPS.

Next step is to actually move registrar, which I haven’t yet done.

But it has been very satisfying to self-host something, and have access to my RSS feeds across all my computers, without having to pass around OPML, or pay for a SASS solution.

While I was in and RSS mood. I also modified this site to have an additional RSS feed. Previously I had separate feeds for posts and weeknotes, but now, in addition, there is a combined feed with both.

You may also have noticed something different about the site! I got fed up of staring at the blindingly bright light CSS I had here, and rebuilt it to be much similar to the TokyoNight Neovim theme (the Moon variant). I love this theme. I try and make basically every piece of software I have to use eventually converge around this colourscheme.

I bought the OnePlus 15, and the OnePlus Watch 3. I’m still in the process of switching, but my initial thoughts are positive.

Hardware is absolutely lovely, I don’t know how they’ve managed to make a matte black finish that is entirely resistant to fingerprints, but I have had this for about 2 full days as I publish this, and there is not a mark.

This is particularly surprising, because I have Eczema, so I’m always using various creams and lotions which usually destroy whatever I end up touching. I can permanently shine up a set of doubleshot PBT keycaps in a matter of days!

It feels like it’s built like a tank, and is blazing fast. Having a fingerprint scanner is so much more convenient when you have small kids compared to FaceID. Eddie often likes to run off with my phone if I leave it somewhere, but now I don’t need to worry that he’s waved it at me at the wrong angle and is now busy deleting my email.

I’m also really enjoying having a smart watch that actually looks like a watch.

After all the various pre-order discounts and launch offers, free gifts and marketing shenanigans it ended up coming out at £830 all in.

The Watch is on sale in a BFCM deal right now for £219, so that makes £611, for a flagship phone in 2025. Which is a less galling amount of money than most of the alternatives.

Battery life is amazing. I took the phone off charge at 100% at about 10pm on Saturday, and I put it on charge for 20 minutes just before midday on Monday. And the only reason I did that was because I was about to go for an hour video call and I absolutely didn’t want it failing on me (it still had 38% left at the time).

I took the Watch off the charger at the same time, and currently as of 9pm Monday night the remaining battery percentage is 70%.

WhatsApp is an absolute shit show. I installed it on the new phone, and logged in with my phone number, it showed me a QR code to scan with my old phone so I could transfer my messages. But when I tried to scan it from my old phone, it had already logged me out!

I tried to log back in again. But it had obviously already blown away the encryption key so all my messages history was gone. But regardless, I tried the transfer flow again just to see what would happen, and it turns out you can’t transfer chats from iOS to Android anyway!

Thankfully I had already come to terms with losing many years worth of WhatsApp messages because it had already deleted my history once a couple of months ago, when my phone went in for a screen repair.

In WhatsApps defense: I genuinely forgot the encryption key to restore from backup. But I was not prepared for it to just delete everything without warning after a few tries and a few days of exponential back-off.

Having F-Droid feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s got so much better since I last used it.

I’ve spoken about how I’ve been using Google Workspace for a long time (about 19 years, since it was called “Google Apps for your Domain” and was given away free in beta), so I wasn’t expecting the transition from iOS to Android to be that tough.

Can confirm that being able to delete GMail directly from the notification is game-changing. As is having full integration with the Watch.

I really want this phone to stand the test of time. I hope I’m not disappointed.

I already miss my AirTags. Research on a suitable replacment is ongoing.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this article about the ethics of consumption, and it lead me on to the economic theory of Degrowth.

I am aware of the irony of writing this after a several weeks of talking about purchasing a new phone, instead of paying for another screen replacement. Also my Waterstones wishlist has got a little longer.