oatfingers.

ski season ends

2026-04-01T00:00:00-07:00

It seems like I’m settling into a slightly-more-than-monthly cadence with writing. To be honest, I’d like to write more than that, but I’m practicing meeting myself where I am this year, so. I don’t have a topic in mind today, so I’m just gonna write and see what happens.

Ski season is nearly over. Arguably, it is over, but we’re still going up this weekend to get the last couple turns we can. These pics are from a couple weeks ago when we were already skiing in t-shirts. It’s been rainy and cold this week though, so we’re hoping there’s some snow up on the mountains.

Going on the last ski trip of the season is always a little sad, but a little relieving. I love skiing (snowboarding - I just grew up saying “going skiing” and never really changed even though I changed sports), being in the mountains and being gone from the city and my laptop for the weekend. On the other hand, the drive is exhausting, and not being home for 2/3 of the weekends in the winter makes it hard to stay on top of life stuff. So it’s a bit of a relief when I know I don’t have to do the drive again for several months, even though I’ll miss the snow and the mountains.

For years, I’ve wanted some sort of outdoor hobby to replace skiing in the summer time. This year, I think my partner and I are going to take up rollerblading (her) and longboarding (me), either in the park or down by the beach. I’m hoping it’ll scratch the itch to zoom and be outside and see some trees during the summer - and as a bonus, I’ll only need to drive across the city instead of across the state :)

every project can't be a winner 🤷‍♂️

2026-03-17T00:00:00-07:00

i spend a lot of time on random side projects. sometimes they evolve into things that are almost ready to share with the world (though i have yet to “finish” or “release” a project), like Pomelo, or MelonFit (my fitness tracker, named after my dog), or MelonHabits (two guesses what that does).

other times, they’re just little scripts or toys for myself - like the smb rescanner, or a script i wrote recently to help manage all the services i run on my home server.

but sometimes, they just don’t work out.

i really like rss. i follow a bunch of feeds - blogs, magazines, news, whatever. i love checking NetNewsWire in the morning and skimming through new album reviews, essays, art, comics…ever since i uninstalled Instagram, it’s the main place i scroll.

rss readers almost all sort stories chronologically. lots of people hail this as one of the best parts of rss - no algorithms, just a chronological feed. that’s fine, but personally, i’d rather have a good variety of stories to scroll through (feeeed does a great job of this, but there’s no desktop client, and using the iPad client on desktop is not great, and it doesn’t integrate with miniflux).

so i figured, what if i built a service that would connect to my miniflux instance, and look just like a miniflux server, except that when you went to pull the entries, I could sort them however I wanted? that way, i could keep all my feed subscriptions in miniflux, and i could use whatever rss reader i wanted and see my feed sorted however i wanted.

and honestly, it basically worked - it connected to miniflux, remixed the feeds into one feed that i could sort however i wanted - but the old Google Reader API that NNN uses to connect to miniflux is so convoluted, and rss readers cache so aggressively (for good reason) that testing and iterating was no fun, and eventually i got to a point where it was not quite close enough to working to be satisfactory (i couldn’t get all the items reliably, i couldn’t mark things read reliably, i couldn’t format stuff the way i wanted…) and i wasn’t having any fun working on it anymore. so i shut it down, and went back to scrolling :)

making the call to scrap the project (well, not literally - it’s still on my drive. just in case i pick it up again.) sucked. i spent like 6 hours on it over the past couple days, and calling it quits made that feel like wasted time - especially because i don’t feel like i learned a ton from working on it - it was mostly just frustrating. in some ways, i wish i had called it quits earlier - but i guess i already didn’t do that.

this whole thing reminds me of something that happened when i was in highschool - i decided i wanted to find the perfect web browser. Chrome didn’t exist yet. i had probably been using Firefox for a long time (in 8th grade my backpack was from the Firefox merch store), but i had recently gotten my first MacBook, and Safari was pretty cool too…and then I found Shiira (rest in peace, coolest logo ever), and then over the course of probably two weeks, i tried out every browser i could get my hands on - not out of curiosity, but out of this driving need to find the perfect browser, like a compulsion. eventually, weeks later, i kept using Firefox. i guess, what i can say about this rss side quest is that at least it didn’t take weeks for me to come back around to

really exploring the classics lately.

leaving tech

2026-02-25T00:00:00-08:00

a week or so ago, i had an somewhat of an epiphany - i don’t think i want to work in tech anymore.

i’ve been very lucky in my career (well, and in life in general, to be honest) - i always sort of assumed that after i graduated college, i’d get a job in a cafe and try to make ends meet while tinkering with Ableton Live. instead, i was offered my first software engineering job before i even graduated, and things sort of progressed from there.

i’ve been programming and tinkering with computers since i was about 7 years old, when my dad brought a busted old windows pc home from work and helped me fix it up and make it work. i never really thought i could get a job doing programming - i had very little formal education in it, i didn’t think i was really that good at it, and it just seemed, i dunno, worlds away from what was possible for me.

as it turned out, i’m actually pretty damn good at programming, and ultimately, it wasn’t really very hard to get any of the jobs i’ve had in my career so far. this isn’t meant to be boastful - like i said, i’ve been quite lucky - just a reflection.

around the same time that i built that first computer, i also started taking guitar lessons. along with messing with computers, music has been the other constant in my life for the past two and a half decades. i wrote my own songs on guitar, played in a low-skill high-energy punk band, interned at a recording studio in high school, and started learning music production from a friend of a friend in college.

i’ve learned that i really enjoy the engineering part of music. when i did that internship in high school, i learned for the first time about the most basic production techniques - how to use eq, compression, reverb, etc - and immediately started applying them to my bedroom recordings. it was (and still is) so much fun (and frustrating) to take a raw recording and carefully tweak and sculpt it into what i hear in my head. and as i was walking the dog the other day, realizing that i might not want to continue my tech career, i also realized that “audio engineer” is a job, and that i could do that job.

i’ve never really thought i could make a living off music - i have almost no formal education in it, i don’t really think i’m that good at it, and it really does seem worlds away from what’s possible for me. but all of that feels eerily familiar…

at the moment, i don’t have a concrete plan or a even much of an idea what this will look like. i imagine i’ll be at my current job for at least a couple more years (although, who knows). i worry about money when i don’t have a moderately cushy tech salary anymore. i wonder if i’ll enjoy working in the field, or if making it a career will ruin it for me. but mostly, i’m excited, and surprisingly (for me) confident that it will work out somehow…

something for nothing (if you've got the money)

2026-02-17T00:00:00-08:00

From Cory Doctorow’s excellent piece on gig work and minimum wage today:

In other words, Seattle’s PayUp “minimum wage” has shifted some of the expense associated with operating a gig platform from workers back onto their bosses. With fewer drivers available on the app, waiting times for customers will necessarily go up. Some of those customers will take the bus, or get a livery cab, or defrost a pizza, or walk to the corner cafe. For the gig platforms to win those customers back, they will have to reduce waiting times, and the most reliable way to do that is to increase the wages paid to their workers.

I think it bears emphasizing that the unpaid time gig workers spend waiting for a job does provide value to the employer (in the form of shorter wait times), and the employee is not compensated for that value.

pomelo + album collage generator

2026-02-11T00:00:00-08:00

the main thing I’m excited about today is a new plugin I wrote for pomelo which can generate collages of album covers based on recent listening data from your Plex server. but I realized I haven’t actually introduced pomelo at all, so i guess i’ll do that:

pomelo is one of the many projects that i’ve been building on and off for a couple years now. it’s a man-in-the-middle proxy that hijacks requests to and responses from your Plex server and allows you to add and tweak functionality. all of pomelo’s capabilities are supplied by plugins, and most of them are focused on music libraries, because that’s most of what I use Plex for. the current plugin lineup is:

AnyRadios, which lets you define custom shuffle algorithms as different “stations” on your server. I built this because I wanted a way to shuffle an even mix of songs I had rated highly and songs I had never heard before, but it’s been really fun to keep coming up with new ways to shuffle my library.
AnyHubs, which allows you to create custom sections on your library’s home page that show items from your library based on criteria you define. I use it to add sections to Plexamp that show what albums I was listening to this time last year, and the year before.
BetterTrackRadio and ExploreRadio, both of which are similar to AnyRadios, but less configurable, and more or less deprecated at this point.
YoutubeVideos, which allows you to add YouTube videos to the “Extras” section for on movies, tv show and music artists in your library. You can define custom YouTube searches - for example, I have “{moveTitle} making of”. This one only works on the web client; getting YouTube videos to stream on the other clients has been quite hairy.
finally, AlbumCollage, which is like Topsters or other album collage / 5x5 generators, except that it’s built into your Plex server and uses your Plex play history instead of Last.FM or any other third party service.

Until now, I’ve been using Topsters to make the album collages on these posts, but today’s post links to the /collage endpoint on my Plex server, with some query params to define the size & dates to build the collage for.

This was a fun project, and was way quicker to implement than I expected, honestly. Partially because (humblebrag) the plugin framework I’ve set up in pomelo is pretty quick to work with, and partially because the Pillow library is very easy to use.

One day pomelo will be in a state that I can put it out into the world, but for now it’s pretty messy…

Coheed & Cambria - GAIBSIV: Never listened to this whole album before, it was sick.

Die Spitz - Something to Consume: Really cool, all-femme band, doing a little bit of punk, a little bit of metal, a little doom. Big fan. Thanks to Zak for the rec.

La Dispute - Wildlife: King Park is a classic; the rest of the album didn't hit me quite the same, but I did enjoy it.

Coheed & Cambria - In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3: I'm working my way through the whole Amory Wars tetralogy. It's cool to see the story and the band evolve through the albums.

Trash Boat - Don't You Feel Amazing?: He's So Good is a banger, the rest of the album felt a little meh.

Jean Dawson - Pixel Bath: I wanted to like this album more than I did. A couple of the tracks are great, most are felt a little same-y.

CVLTE - praystation 2: Love the aesthetic; thought the music would be a fun guilty pleasure, but aside from the single it didn't do much for me.

Ray LaMontagne - Gossip in the Grain: Realized the only track on this album I'd ever heard was You Are the Best Thing - the album hits a ton of different styles, which surprised me.

At The Gates - Slaughter of the Soul: This album is famous for sort of inspiring a lot of American metalcore - which I was really into for a bit in high school and college. It was cool to see the roots of metalcore, but I don't know how often I'll go back to this album.

sick

2026-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

i’m sick. have been for like four or five days now. sucks. i’ve had a couple ideas of things i want to write about: - minneapolis / america’s state of emergency - a buddy of mine trying to convince me to use claude code / why i’m not interested - the pottery class we took a couple weeks back / a quote i heard on another friend’s podcast about how clay gets worse the more you touch it so you try to make your thing in the fewest moves possible

but i haven’t really had the energy to write, or code or write music… i did watch the entire first season of yellowjackets though, which was pretty fun.

the new Danny Brown album fucks

just discovered Thou, been enjoying them

that Stick to Your Guns album was a fun throwback

plex-smb-rescanner

2026-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

I wrote this over the weekend: https://github.com/oatmeaI/plex-smb-rescanner

I recently bought a NAS, and migrated my Plex media from two different USB external drives to the NAS (that migration was a whole other story, but it’s done now). The Plex server still runs on my Mac Mini that I use a server for a couple different miscellaneous things - which means that Plex is now accessing the media library over an SMB share, rather than an external drive. No biggie, right?

Plex has a feature which watches the filesystem and automatically adds / removes / updates media from its library as the files are added / removed / changed on disk - but Plex is unable to watch for filesystem changes on an SMB share. Which means that every time I download a new album, I have to go trigger a full rescan of the entire music library. Which takes a while, and is annoying.

After lots of googling and tweaking the hell out of my /etc/nsmb.conf, I decided I was going to have to fix this myself: I found a Python script which watches an SMB mount for SMB change notifications, and I found some Plex documentation on how to trigger scans via the Plex Media Server REST API. Smash the two together, and voila - I get partial library rescans anytime I make changes to the filesystem where my media library is stored.

It seems like almost no one else has their Plex server set up the way I do, so maybe this won’t be useful to anyone else…but just in case it is, I did my best to make the script configurable and reusable.

no homework

2026-01-13T00:00:00-08:00

one of my “resolutions” (in quotes because I use the term loosely - more like “general ideas I’m thinking about”) for 2026 is to stop giving myself homework.

I have a lot of hobbies (or as my partner would say, I’m “quite hobby-pilled”), and I’ve got a tendency to turn them into chores for myself. even things as mundane as “listening to music” - at some point I decided every song in my music library had to have been played at least once, so I made a smart playlist of everything I haven’t listened to before, and before long listening to music became homework - I wasn’t picking songs or albums based on what I wanted to listen to, but based on the assignment I’d given myself.

this can happen with nearly everything I like to do - watching TV (finish that series! - even if I’m in the mood for something stupider), playing music (finish writing that song, even if I’m bored of it!), reading books…

I think there’s a good side to this - I’m glad that I’m able to stick to things, see them through, finish them up - but everything in moderation, I guess.

so yeah, 2026, stop giving myself homework.

hello world

2026-01-05T00:00:00-08:00

i’ve thought about starting a blog on and off for a couple years now. the last time i blogged was on blogger, in…2005? as pre-teen, i didn’t really get the hype, but i wanted to be *~involved~* on the web. it didn’t last long. i didn’t feel like i had much to say.

frankly, i’m not sure it’ll stick this time either, but it’s been sitting in the back of my mind long enough that i figured i’d give it a shot. i’ve got a couple thoughts about what i might want to write about:

journaling: a friend of mine recently mentioned that she’s been journaling every day for two years now. i don’t think i’ll be that consistent, but i do think journaling is a nice idea. i’ve done it on and off in the past; i often turn it into a chore for myself, which i’d like to avoid.
projects i’m working on: i have a handful of different projects i’m always working on - pomelo, melonfit, melonhabits …and my partner can only listen to me talk about them so much
thoughts about work, life, etc.
pictures of my dog
movies, music, books & tv that i’m enjoying.

we’ll see how it goes! this feels like the digital equivalent of a jan 1st gym membership.