The Void

Selfhosting eMail is fun!!!

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:15:09 +0000

So as you may have noticed if you looked at the about page (or been snooping through the DNS records for this site), that I now have email under this domain.

I spent all of yesterday after work setting up an email server and some time today setting up Roundcube webmail.

Why Roundcube? because it was a simple compose file to deploy and didn’t need external database management. It also have a nice simple user interface and allows for my upstream proxy server to handle all the HTTPS.

I used docker-email-server to setup the backend as it was a simple deployment with the ability to configure it if needed.

The hardest part of all of this was setting up SPF/DKIM/DMARC so the big email servers wouldn’t instantly reject my email before the spam folder.

Oh, and getting the VPS IP off of the singular blacklist it was on as I’ve had this domain and IP for at least 3-4 years now.

It works surprisingly well considering it’s being forwarded from the VPS to my server like most of the other services I host.

Anyways, eMail isn’t as bad to selfhost anymore as it used to be in the olden days. I even have filters and my GMail set to forward to my domain so I can manage it all from the domain.

If you want to eMail me for any reason, use public@[this domain] and I will get it.

Thanks for reading :3

Some Site Changes

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 16:00:58 +0000

So you might have noticed some changes to the site, but rest assured that it is nothing major.

I primarily just changed the theme from potato-dark to Stack because I wanted something more modern looking.

Additionally, the site structure was a bit dated and I was having trouble getting the theme working. So I recreated the site and moved all the content over to start fresh.

This new theme has dark mode and light mode support, and resizes dynamically to support mobile devices and the desktop.

I may or may not implement comments, but there will be no analytics. I don’t quite care about my site stats as I’m doing this as purely a hobby project.

The new theme works prefectly fine without Javascript, however, the photo gallery implement requires it.

The stock code for the theme uses JS for the dark mode toggle, but I locally overrode it to use the prefers-dark-mode selector that is given by modern browsers.

Oh, I also added the rest of the stickers and my avatar.

Happy blogging! :3

PS: I also implemented support for comments with Remark42 hosted on the same server as the site, however, it does need JavaScript enabled.

PSA to Pixel Watch 4 Users

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:06:04 +0000

So, this is just a quick post about the Pixel Watch 4. I got it a few months ago and have used it essentially nonstop, the 41mm LTE variant.

I like the watch, but the big thing I noticed is there there is NO out of the box USB support. So adb has to be wireless, and fastboot is not possible.

The USB cable for the PW4 is available to purchase invite-only for repair shops.

In older watches, the charging dock had USB data. but with the PW4, it is only for power now. And they don’t pull an Apple with the hidden USB pins in the band mount, either.

Anyways, that was my PSA to all of you peeps. Catch ya in the next post.

New SSD

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:19:29 +0000

So, I got a “new” (new to me) SSD from the trash pile at work.

It was in an old crusty Intel-era iMac that’s been sitting out there for who knows how long (months to years), being exposed to the elements.

I took it out and cleaned it up as the SSD itself was dirty, surprisingly there was minimal water/dirt ingress to the interior.

A quick teardown and cleaning later, and it was time to test.

After plugging the SSD into my computer, turns out it still works perfectly (even after being rained on many times).

It is a 1TB Samsung 850 Evo, with DRAM. It was built 02/2015.

It only has ~8000 power on hours and ~10TBw, which isn’t bad for a 1TB SSD out of an iMac.

The disk appears to have been wiped, but I checked for “lost” partitions with testdisk and it turns out that there is an APFS partition on it.

I tried mounting it in Linux, but the experimental driver did not like it.

So off to make a macOS VM, I go.

and that sure was a challenge.

First I tried VirtualBox, but once I got the installer booted using some complex commands, it’d randomly kernel panic before the install even started.

Then I tried raw Qemu/KVM, but I couldn’t get OpenCore to recognize the disk image.

Then I tried the nice OSX-KVM project, and it works nicely. macOS Sonoma is currently installing into a VM on my desktop as I type this.

Now, the challenge is to see if it works or not.

It does, in fact, not work… It keeps kernel panicing during init and I can’t be bothered to try to diagnose it.

According to Linux, the drive is encrypted anyways. So I’m just going to properly wipe the drive, set it to 4KN sectors, and use it.

I’m mostly likely going to use it as either an L2ARC for my ZFS pool, or a 2nd drive to mirror DaServ’s root… because nVME IO errors are causing issues, and soon I will not be close enough to the server to physically reboot it.

To help avoid these issues, I just start mounting the root on DaServ with fatal_errors=panic so it will kernel panic and autoreboot if the root filesystem starts to throw IO errors.

The only reason I was able to remotely reboot the system last time, is because I happened to have a root SSH session already open. so I used the sysrq-trigger and reset the system.

Anyways, it was fun rescuing an SSD from a trash pile… I’m surprised it worked, and those SSDs are worth ~$180-200 USD brand new because of the current SSD prices. So that just saved me a good chunk of money.

Welcome Back!

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:16:23 +0000

Welcome Back!!!

It sure has been a while, hasn’t it? Just the date from the previous two posts alone would make this 8 or so YEARS since I’ve last posted (or even has this website up).

Well, a TON of changed regarding myself and my selfhosting. I have an actual server now, made from consoomer hardware but using enterprise grade storage and ZFS, which is where this site is being hosted from.

It’s been so long that the theme I was using (potato-dark), is no longer maintained and does not work with new hugo versions. I like the theme though, so I patched it and now it works great.

I’m also getting more into IRC again after having been logged off since 2019, that entire Freenode thing was crazy. Wasn’t a part of it, didn’t even know it happened until Libera.chat was founded.

Anyways, if you’re reading this from IRC, HEYYYYYY big thanks.

I hope to write more, but I’m also using this page to host several pages that aren’t posts but are just info pages.

See ya later!

We've moved to hugo!

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 23:48:31 -0500

We’ve moved to a new blogging backend as you can see, We’re using hugo with the potato-dark theme instead of wordpress.
We made this move for various reasons, the main reason being wordpress was slow and we didn’t need all that for a simple blog.

If you want to contribute to this blog you can do it here: https://github.com/jcjordyn130/blog