What I Did in March

Osawi Typeset

Around the start of this month, jan Ke Tami put out an unabridged toki pona translation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and I very quickly got very excited by the idea of reading it in physical form.

To this end, I hastily put together a typeset of it using Typst! I got rid of the illustrations, to save myself time, money, and spoilers, added some sitelen pona drop caps, which I've always loved the idea of, and sent it off to Lulu so I could get a copy printed!

It's not a super visual update this month, so enjoy these few photos!

It turned out pretty okay, though with some (huge) flaws. It's been very lovely to slowly read through it! You can find my source files here, if you like. (You'll need to view a version from before around March 10, as I've been messing with them since.)

pakala suli mi

Self Hosting Adventures

After setting up a pi-hole for my household last month, I wanted to try out some more self-hosting projects! I transfered the pi-hole onto an old laptop (with a very janky install process featuring a USB to SATA cable), and set up two additional projects:

Navidrome

I thought it would be fun to try out a music server, to potentially move away from Spotify (I keep hearing that Spotify is very evil lol). To me, it seems an awesome idea to replace a music streaming subscription fee with purchases on Bandcamp Fridays (at the same approximate rate of spending).

With that in mind, I set up a Navidrome server, which was super easy, as well a mesh VPN (for free!) with Tailscale, so I can access it from anywhere. On my phone, I access the server with Tempus - my first time installing an Android app from not-the-play-store, which was surprisingly easy!

ilo soweli

Chord Trainer

Ever since I was a kid, each time I've played piano (or other instruments), I've always focused on plodding through memorising sheet music, one note at a time, rather than building any connection between my head, hands and music theory.

These days, my dream piano skill level is being able to simply accompany myself as I sing, because singing is super fun! I want to be able to more easily play from lead-sheet style notation, the sort you might find on Ultimate Guitar.

To that end, I put together a quick tool that generates lists and lists of chords (or intervals!) in random order, to practice finding them quickly, and to build familiarity with them all. Since building it, I've been playing some songs from Ghost Quartet and having just an absolute blast.

Bought a Domain

Tiny little entry, but this site used to use a free GitHub Pages URL, and now it's on a custom domain! It was way easier and cheaper to set up than I thought it would be! (I used Porkbun cause it seemed cheap and good.) Cool!

Shrunk A Shirt

Ever since I snagged a sewing machine at a thrift store for $15, I've wanted to do more sewing projects, and I took a stab at one of those this month.

I have a lot of slightly baggy print t-shirts with cool designs, and a few baby tees (in this case $4 kids shirts from Big W), which fit me well, and so I've been thinking about taking in the print tees to fit more like baby tees.

I gave that idea a practice go, bought an XL shirt from a thrift store and turned it into an XS! (Following this tutorial.) There were parts where I got super frustrated, and the permanence of cutting off the excess fabric was scary, but I pulled through and now it's the best fitting shirt I own! Maybe I'll do this to more shirts in the future!

Wrote a Blog Post

Usually, my immune system is pretty goated, like the only illness I suffer from is hayfever, but apparently that's been out the window recently! I got tonsilitis and I did not do anything for a week! (Should have gone to the doctor wayyy sooner than I did.)

Near the end of that week, I wanted to do something that could go in this update post - it's grounding to make something cool, however small, to send out into the world and perhaps make it (or peoples' days, at least) a little bit better. So I wrote a blog post!

It was super fun - I want to write more! It is about a novel name writing system for sitelen pona and you can check it out here!

Want to know what this means? Read the blog post :p

And That's It!

At the end of last month, I said there were exciting things I was working on, which might appear in this update, but I don't remember what they were! Maybe they did make it in? I'm working on some cool things right now, too, but who knows if they'll make the next one. :p

Chat to you at the end of April!