Look at this beautiful mess. a physical representation of all the blood sweat and tears (not to mention credit card balances) I have poured into creating my own digital appendage.

Call it insanity.

Call it a waste of time.

but don’t call me…ever

where was I?

As the world burns

Let’s just say the last couple of years have not been great for my mental health. If you have been paying attention to anything., I think you can understand why.

On top of the things I can’t control, I have a serious case of clinically certified, professionally verified splash of neurodivergence.

That’s just a silly way of me, saying that my brain does not work well under the society and culture that our lovely ancestors have built for us.

In order for me to actually participate in society and contribute in any meaningful way (other than being a genuinely funny and ridiculously good looking person), I have to externalize my brain.

Notes, calendars, reminders, alarms, journaling, planning, automations.

So here’s where I’m at:

I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time and money setting up my home network with Ubiquiti gear. I went all out on VLAN configurations, dabbled in VPS and reverse proxy setups so I can access my self-hosted services from outside my home network—mostly just for myself, which is kind of hilarious when you think about it.

I dropped a bunch of cash on a Ugreen NAS. Should’ve probably spent a little more because it’s pretty basic. My dream is to upgrade to the 4-bay Plus version (or whatever they’re calling it) that supports more memory. I want to run Immich on it.

But right now? I’m running Immich in Docker on my Mac Studio. Yeah. Let that sink in. I’m using a absolute beast of a machine—a computer meant for serious video editing and coding projects, not to mention hosting my local LLM—to serve photos. The Mac Studio has no business being a server. That’s not why it’s there.

I put my music production on hold. I’ve been using my MacBook Pro to basically run my homelab, and I ran into this whole mess with iZotope and NI instruments. I’ve got tons of VSTs and config files from four years ago, and I updated everything, and now it’s just… disorganized chaos.

The plan was simple: get the homelab sorted, then wipe the MacBook Pro and turn it into a dedicated music production machine.

Except it’s taking forever. And I haven’t touched Ableton in a while.
I still practice guitar and drums every day. But I haven’t actually recorded or produced anything in a long time. And that’s the thing—music production is my main gig. My main muse.

And here I am, spending all this time on my homelab, which is great and all, but I want to get back to music production because that’s really the whole reason I’m doing any of this.

It all started back in October. I was in a deep funk—and I think we’re going to call it what it is: depression. It dawned on me that I’d lost myself, and I needed to figure out how to get back on track. So I came up with this idea. I called it Project Looking Glass at first.

It was a good start, but the more I brainstormed about it, the more I realized—oh no, this is just the beginning.

Project Looking Glass was just a sliver of what’s in my imagination. It’s my journaling and reflection system: tracking my emotions, moods, thoughts by writing them down and organizing everything in software like Obsidian.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized: wait, I like learning. I’m disorganized. I need project management. I’m always losing things. I don’t know how else to do this.

Then I got into PKM (personal knowledge management). And that’s when Project Aurora was born.

Multiple iterations, starting from Obsidian, and it’s just getting more and more complicated. I had to expand my tools. So now I’m using Obsidian, this beast of an application called DEVONthink, and I think that’s a pretty good start.

I have a Moleskine notebook that I constantly write in, and I’m going to start scanning pages into my phone, applying OCR, and storing everything on my NAS.

See how hard it is to stay focused? I’m all over the place trying to describe it.

So yeah. After getting into this and spending so much time trying to conceptualize what I want my homelab to look like and how it all functions, I feel this need to document and broadcast my progress and thoughts along the way.

So I spun up a WordPress instance on a computer I call Lazarus. Lazarus is an old computer my grandpa gave me for free because he thought he needed a brand new one thanks to that whole Windows telling him his PC was obsolete thing—but that’s a separate story.

I’m hoping that by documenting and writing about my progress in Project Aurora, I’ll organize my thoughts so I’m not as messy as I am now.

I’m going to try to update this at least weekly. But I’ll shoot for daily. I’m going to try to add pictures and little blurbs and make it fun.

Because even with everything I just said in this post? It’s not even the full picture.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ (Lazarus is back in the tomb, and we are a ghost family now)