Happy New Year? I dearly hope it’s better than the last one for all of us, but time and reality is gradually sanding the corners off my innate and irrepressible optimism.

I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but this is how the end part of the last year was for me, and what 2026 looks like.

Since getting back into running NixOS, I have been having a whale of a time configuring my Linux machine. The declarative life is somewhat addictive. However, I felt that I could be improving my configuration in a couple of ways. First, while I was learning how to configure NixOS, I had tended to scatter bits of code about randomly, and so it started to become a challenge to find what I needed. Second, I was getting the itch to bring some of the benefits of declarative configuration to my macOS machines. You obviously have less control there (even with nix-darwin), but I have tailored my Emacs, Neovim and shell environment just the way I like them, and every time I use macOS, it irks me that I don’t have access to the nice configuration that is set up on my Linux box.

In my browsing around, I came across Denix, which solves both problems very nicely.

The incident I’m about to tell you about happened a few weeks ago, but life is busy, so I’ve only just got around to writing about it. Prepare yourself for The Tale of the Train Seat Incident!

My ZSA Voyager keyboard has a new travelling companion: a ZSA Navigator. I love using it, but it has taken a bit of time to figure out the best configuration for me.

As I wrote in my previous post, the other main hobby I practised during my recent holiday was tinkering more with my Linux box. This post will be a bit piecemeal, but I wanted to write about a few changes I have made recently.

This year, we did not go away when I booked my annual leave. It was a decision that arose out of a combination of not wanting to leave our elderly cat in a cattery, the fact that I was so exhausted from ME fatigue that I felt the work involved in going somewhere on holiday might be counter-productive, but also — if I’m honest — the fact that neither of us got things together sufficiently to book anywhere.

Never mind. A change of scenery might have been nice, but the opportunity to potter around and rest was very welcome. We did go out for a couple of day trips which were lovely, but much of the time I immersed myself in hobbies: my favourite things. This post will be about the fibre hobbies (sewing and knitting), and the next will be about changes I have made to my Linux setup.

Friday morning did not start well. I swung a leg out of bed, and made gentle contact with our 18-year-old cat Bianca, who was crouched miserably by the side of the bed. Then I noticed spots of blood. Lots of them. I checked her and the clues in the blood-spattered environment over carefully, and — long story short — the blood was coming from her urinary tract.

I have been thinking about setting up network attached storage (a NAS) for a while. The largest collection of files in my home folder on all my machines is in the Music and Photos folders, and since they are on both my Linux box and my Mac mini, that felt like unnecessary duplication and complexity. I need to sync the contents of both and back them up separately, which — given their size — is not a trivial matter. Moving these folders to a NAS share and then mounting the share on each of the computers that needed access would make much more sense, and I could also point my Roon Server at the Music folder to play local files.

My first thought was just to buy one of the well known pre-built NAS units (Synology or QNAP), but then I found out that there are several software projects to enable you to run a NAS on almost any hardware. Shortly after that, I discovered that small business servers (meant for small businesses, but also physically small) go for very reasonable prices used on ebay. And so, a plan formed. I would semi-DIY a NAS.

I spent a bit of time over the Easter break getting my editors configured on NixOS. Yes, editors plural. Yes, it is overkill. But I can, so I have.

Since my last update on my desktop Linux adventures, some fairly fundamental changes have happened. I had been getting very comfortable with Gnome, but had also gone back to Hyprland to fix and update some things, and was enjoying (all over again) the snappiness and keyboard navigability (if that is a word) of a tiling window manager. As an aside, one of the things I love about Linux is that you can essentially have two completely different front ends for all your applications and files, and switch between them at will. Mostly I like the tiling interface, but every now and again I’m in a ‘point and click’ kind of mood, and I can log out and log in to Gnome with very little effort.

Arch Linux is great, but — like many Linux distros — it offers you plenty of opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot. A couple of weeks ago, even though I knew better, I managed to take up that opportunity.

Long story short, it turns out that accidentally uninstalling your login shell is a Bad Thing. In my defence, I was tired and in a hurry, but that is really no excuse, and it is certainly not a problem with Arch. I had btrfs boot snapshots enabled, so I was able to roll back to a snapshot before my fateful sudo pacman -R fish-git incident, but in trying to figure out how to make that snapshot permanent and current, I messed things up even more.

I had a backup of all my user files, so it was time to format the drive and start again.