Monthly Recap: June 2025

Posted • in life

Tagged: personal now site updates

What’s going on, Internet? It’s been two weeks since the final move and drive up the North Island of Aotearoa. I’m finally reunited with my family and settled in Tāmaki Makaurau and settling back into the family routine, all the while in a new city in our temporary accommodation. Lots of learning and getting familiar with a new space for everyone.

The move was such a drawn out process but it’s done.

I spent June travelling back and forth between Te Awa Kairangi and Tāmaki Makaurau to spend time with the family on the weekends and continue to finish packing up the house and working during the week.

During the weekend visits we took advantage of a long weekend and took on what Tāmaki Makaurau had on offer. Over the past month we’ve visited the Maritime Museum, The Ministry of Transport and Technology (MOTAT), and the Zoo.

My wife and I have managed to get out of the house once the kids have gone to bed and start exploring the local restaurants. The perks of living with family is the easy baby sitting. We’ve managed to eat out at cafes or restaurants more times than we have over the past four years since having the kids.

Inbetween the eating out, and family activities we’ve also been checking out open homes across the many suburbs around central Auckland to get a feel for where we might want to settle. There are pluses and minuses for each of them and there will be some trade offs for wherever we finally decide to settle down for the next couple years.

I’ve not managed to get to the driving range or hit the course for a casual 9 holes yet but looking forward to doing that soon.

I’ve not been able to set up my work from home space yet which has been a pain, but have enjoyed working out of my brother-n-law’s office during the week while I wait for the space at home to become available. This is has somewhat impacted my ability to focus on the website (excuses, excuses, right?), but you know how it is. I’m one of those people who need a comfy environment to focus.

Blogging

I managed to knock out a couple posts during the move. Book Report: The Dream Hotel was one I had to get out of my head right away after finishing the book. Even though it was a fictional story, it seems too close to reality at the moment.

I also started Hitting Up The Gym Again while waiting to move up north, it feels really good to be back in a gym with a range of equipment again.

Finally, after delaying for months I shared How I Use Kagi. The post proved quite popular and I enjoyed all the feedback I recieved about it. I’ve got some changes to make how I present the lists, so watch out for that. Kagi liked the post too, sharing it on the Kagi Changeling under the “Kagi around the web” section. Be sure to look out for the updates if you enjoyed the first one.

Reading

With a couple drives up and down the island and time to myself walking around the old neighbourhood for the last time I managed to finish a few good books. Click through to read my thoughts.

Music

June seemed like vinyl season for me with five new records being added to the collection. A combination of pre-orders finally shipping, new releases from some favourite artists and some gift cards landing in my hands I went to town.

Gaming

Warcraft is officially on hold. I want to jump in and get stuck into the collectors bounty event and pick up some rare mounts but I have nowhere to setting up gaming rig at the moment. I’ll see if I can do some casual mount farming on the laptop.

I continued to work my way through Cyberpunk before the gaming rig was packed up. I’ll be continuing once I get set up again.

Not even paying attention to the Steam Summer sale. There are a couple games on my wish list that can wait another year or two. No buying games until I finish what I’ve already got (and want to play).

Bookmarks

I managed to sit down and sort through my open tabs. Pocket’s on it’s way out so I started having a go with Instapaper for saving articles to read later. I’ll have to revisit the old [Surfing The Web And Sharing What I Find](/posts/surfing-the-web-and-sharing-what-i-find/) post. Here are some of the interesting finds from June:

Website

I’m happy I managed to get this sorted. I’ve been happily deploying fLaMEd fury to a shared hosting server for over a year now until recently some changes on their side have caused my deploys from Github to fail. I’m not entirely sure what the actual failure was, but it seems like a combination of the IP ranges of the Action Runners changing and changes to the hosting providers firewalling and IP whitelisting. Whatever it was we were not able to resolve it so I finally took the plunge to spin up a VPS.

I had a go with Coolify but this didn’t end up being what I expected. After having a go and running into problems, and realising I wasn’t a fan of deploying docker containers to serve my website I ditched the idea. I kept my VPS and gave Caddy a go. This was relatively straight forward after watching a couple videos and reading a couple guides. So, as of right now we’re serving from a locally hosted VPS with Caddy.

I’m currently manually deploying with rsync which is super quick but will look into sorting something automated outside of Github later on once I’m better setup up here.

Happening around the web

I have no idea what’s going on around the web at the moment. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do over on the forums. If you’re in the northern hemisphere, the next web weaving workshop is happening 21 July. Jay and James will be hosting again.

The omg.lol community has also kicked off a new website directory, url.town. A community driven web directory curated by many people. The goal is to capture many interesting sites, and everyone is encouraged to submit as many interesting websites they can, not just their own. Because of that, it’s not just a directory of personal websites (they are there), but a directory of fun and interesting websites all across the independent web. I need to make sure I get in and submit some of my favourites.

Sweeet, catch you up, laterz 👋

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