🗓️ Weeknote 2026-W20

2026-05-17 20:06

I put out my back on Tuesday, so had the remainder of the week off, seeing docs and physios, lying down, light exercises and popping anti-inflams. My spondylolisthesis on the L5 S1 has given me grief since 2005 when I first put it out as a landscape gardener. I've been in maintenance mode ever since. I let the ball drop recently, and with my physical job, it is no wonder it tweaked again. I'll be back at work tomorrow, but it's not 100% just yet.

My uncle is visiting. It is good to catch up. Good chats. We are doing a little bit on the pergola, but only light work as I'm mindful of the back.

Bracing added to the corners

On Saturday We walked Sawpit Gully in Arrowtown, a short 7km loop which is my go-to for visitors. It is the time of year when it gets a bit treacherous with ice on the trails out that way.

Frosty Arrowtown

Today we walked the Tiki trail, which is a bit more sheltered, but straight up. It was a good amount of exercise for our battered bodies.

Love this trail
Queenstown views

With the time off work, I baked the sourdough finally. I forgot about the timing of things. You need to plan for 24 hours of folding, resting, refridgerating, baking. I ended up baking it at 9pm last night because thats how the time aligned. For a Sunday morning bake, I think I need to start Friday evening with the first "feed". I'll work on the routine.

It was like a brick

Weather is fresh but sunny. Not many leaves left on the trees. Winter is very close.

Golden tree tops becoming golden carpet

I installed Debian 13 Trixie. It was a pretty straight forward upgrade from 12. As part of it I tried out some new backup methods which I will use carrying forward.

💻 Tools

  • Galculator - Simple calculator. Surprised Xfce doesn't come with it pre-installed.

  • BorgBackup - Simple CLI backup utility with tight documentation. Can be used on both client and server machines. It is impressively quick to both backup and retrieve, recognises file changes so reduces duplication. A lot of front-ends to go with it, like BorgWarehouse below, but for my laptop as the client, this is perfect.

  • BorgWarehouse - Server side web GUI for BorgBackup. Has minimal functions which is great. Just set up a repository and share a key. Was available in the TrueNAS community application list too so it was a no-brainer for me.

  • GNU Stow - Symlink farm manager which I've started using for storing dotfiles/config files/systemd service files in the one place. Still wrapping my head around the best process to stow when folders exist and cause conflict. Creating a reverse-stow shell script (rstow.sh) helped me get files and folders into the original stow directory, rather than manually creating the paths.

📺 Watched

  • Cold Echoes (2025) - My kiwi cousin plays the lead bad dude in this Icelandic film. It was fun to watch, but the script was pretty bad.

  • Industry (Season 1) - It's ok. Not enough likeable characters.