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This is a follow-up to my post Buy, Own, Stream - The “Rip, Mix, Burn” of 2026 from earlier this month. There, I documented how I found the perfect setup for my music library and while that remains true, I also noted one part missing in the experience.

While Music Assistant has all the features I need on the backend side, like connectivity to my Navidrome (and Audiobookshelf) libraries, support for my Sonos multi-room speaker setup and rich metadata integration, the frontend is a serviceable Web UI, but that’s it. What’s missing is a really nice, native controller app for my music library and multi-room speaker setup, that utilizes the Music Assistant API and features a UX that puts my music front-and-center, while feeling familiar and native to the device’s ecosystem.

This month marks my eleventh year with Apple Music. I’ve been a customer pretty much since the service started, which back in the day finally let me get into music streaming. I was reluctant to use Spotify, mainly because of their artist payout model.

With the general streaming fatigue creeping into music for me too, I felt like I wanted to take ownership of my collection again and make growing it more intentional.

I have somewhat of a pendulum going on between iOS and GrapheneOS. But just like I switched from macOS to Linux some time ago, I want to run GrapheneOS as my daily driver as well.

Part of that is frustration with US Big Tech licking Trump’s butt. But it’s also part of a broader shift: with movements like “Digital Independence Day”, I want to take back control over my smartphone - and hopefully stick with that this time.

It’s been a while since I posted my last update on my current hardware and software setup, and there’s a good reason for that. For years, I’ve been stuck in this odd pendulum, switching between macOS and Linux every few years.

This year followed the same pattern: I daily-drove a MacBook Air for most of it, right up until I got fed up with Tim Apple’s behavior towards the orange-king administration. That was the moment I decided this switch might actually be my last - basically me voting with my money, even though I don’t even live in the US.

This is probably one of the more esoteric posts on my blog — I’m usually very technical and rational. But with the rise of “vibe coding” and the growing trend of people using AI to generate entire applications, I feel the need to share something more personal.

I’m not trying to channel Jony Ive here, but I do think there’s a fundamental truth buried beneath all the marketing buzzwords: people can sense care — and carelessness — in the things we build.

I recently switched to Brave after getting sick of trying to configure media playback to work in a reasonable way on Firefox. I don’t like everything about Brave, but with a bit of tweaking, it makes for a good, relatively Google-free, browser.

There’s little to no documentation on how to self-host the Brave Sync Server, which allows to synchronize bookmarks, tabs, settings and much more between devices.

The sync server, like the browser itself, is open source and can be found here: https://github.com/brave/go-sync.

Over Christmas, I decided to finally tackle learning Elixir. Since I learn new programming languages best by actually building something, I set out to implement a simple RSS reader/sync service, similar to Miniflux and FreshRSS.

Since I actually want to use this app, it needs to have a way to connect to my client apps (Reeder 5/Classic on iOS and macOS, as well as NewsFlash on Linux). Since the Google Reader API implementation is well-supported in most RSS clients, I set out to build an API compatible with the existing spec.

Over the Christmas holidays, I somewhat fell into a rabbit hole. It started off by Ubiquiti announcing the Unifi Express and I thought: “Hey, I could use that and replace my Amplifi HD router”. Reality already was a bit more complicated, in fact the Amplifi HD is just my apartment router and Wifi AP, while in the basement I use a EdgeRouter X to separate networks for the two apartments in my house.

It’s been more than 10 years for me writing about self-hosted infrastructure and systems that care about privacy, yet I have kept using Apple Smartphones for this whole time. While I always liked the idea of Android being fundamentally open source (as the AOSP), neither the hardware that it ran on nor the inevitable dependency on proprietary services from Google, a company that reportedly does not care about your privacy, were appealing to me. And while it was always possible to run Android completely free of Google Services, in practice it’s way harder given that most of our surroundings in the tech space are proprietary products (that oftentimes don’t care about the few people that don’t want Google Play Services). Plus, from a security perspective, running dubious custom ROMs from the xda-developer forums is a nightmare to begin with, most Android apps look horrible etc. :) It’s hard to say I’m a real fan.

Tesla’s Wall Connector (3rd Gen) does not have a integration in the Tesla App and while the cost for your monthly charge can be displayed as part of the car’s charging details, it does not exactly do a great job of displaying details and stats. Since I’m running Home Assistant, I’ve integrated some sensors to read the energy consumption of the Wallbox and set up some automations to notify me about ongoing costs and to provide a monthly summary.