Ryan Boswell

Colorization in progress

Ryan Boswell — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For most of the last 15 years my site has the same basic color scheme: a vibrant blue on a dark background. Last year I diverged from that for the first time by introducing a secret color theme switcher, allowing for visitors to select a white background instead.

Earlier this year I started my worrystone and began tweaking my site more. I adjusted the blue color to soften it and improve the color contrast for both light and dark backgrounds, finally admitting the poor accessiability combination of the color I'd originally chosen. I even added an visible theme switcher to make toggling between themes easier. Go ahead, click on the sun/moon icon.

But I stopped short of making any real changes to the color palette.

For last month I've had a nagging feeling about my site and my urge for a change took over. I started playing with more colors, thinking I would settle on a new primary color. Try as I might, no one set of colors felt like "home".

And now for experimenting in public. There will be a few variations exhibited on the site while I play around and see what I like the most and fine tune the contrast for accessibility.

To start, I've got 6 color pairs, with a "bright" and a "dark" version of each. For extra fun, the color theme for the site will rotate between them every day, with blue appearing twice per week.

For posterity, the original swatch is encoded below along with the days of the week they're currently assigned. Clicking on any of the colors will temporarily change the theme on this page so you can see what it looks like without having to come back.

Sunday
Wednesday

Monday

Tuesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Self-hosted Obsidian vaults

Ryan Boswell — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been using Obsidian for a while as my main notes app, after many years of being faithful to Apple's Notes app for it's simplicity and native syncing. Initially, I put my Obsidian vaults in iCloud to keep cross-device syncing nice and simple, and avoid paying extra for the first-party sync tool.

But as I forged on with my self-hosted journey I kept wondering if there was a better option. Finally last week I looked up options for a self-hosted vault sync. Wanting to keep things simple, I was aimed for either an easy self-hosted app to broker the sync and serve as centralized storage or something I could hook up to an S3 bucket.

The first option I tried was Obsidian LiveSync, which seems mostly to support CouchDB with some experimental S3 support. CouchDB wasn't something I was overly interested in starting with, so I tried the S3 support. Initially things seemed to go well on my first device. I saw it sync files into the S3 bucket, but when I went to setup a second device it failed to ever sync anything. Somehow I ended up with entirely separate vaults syncing to the same place and just missing each other.

I found better luck on my second try, with Remotely Sync. Setup was easy and after waiting a few minutes for the initial sync to wrap up, I was able to get my second device syncing without much trouble.

The main sticking point was having to reset the sync history on my second device and force a sync, before that it just kinda sat there with an empty vault.

And now, I've got my Obsidian notes syncing between all my devices, with end-to-end encryption, and all on storage and services I control. Another one bites the public cloud dust and I am one step closer to owning everything in my digital domain.

Albums, Assemble!

Ryan Boswell — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As a teenager on through college I had quite an expansive music collection. All nicely digitized into iTunes to listen anywhere or when I wanted. My collection was a combination of CDs I'd purchased myself, CDs I'd borrwed from my dad's extensive collection (somewhere north of 200 CDs at the time) and digital downloads I'd bought from iTunes.

Then came Spotify, and my limited college-age budget decided that a few bucks a month to rent any music I wanted was better than spending $50-100/month to purchase it outright. In the ensuing years, my iTunes library was abandoned and slowly decayed as it moved from one external hard drive to another - fortunately my archivist tendancies were strong even then.

After ditching Spotify for ethical reasons a few years ago, I opted for Apple Music as a stop-gap streaming service to allow myself time to build back up my old music library and still get to enjoy the more recent music I'd become fond of. Sadly, for reasons I am not entirely clear on, a lot of the track, album, and artist metadata in the files I had left in my old library were missing or incomplete, leaving me to a very slow and tedious process of reconstructing everything by hand. Fortunately the "Artist/Album/Track Name" directory and file naming was intact. Mid-way through 2024 I finally got far enough to set my library up in Jellyfin and start streaming it for more than an occasional track. Finding a solid Jellyfin music app for my phone has been a challenge, but so far Manet is my go-to.

As it stands today, my efforts have shifted and are now two-fold: finish cleaning up the remaining ~ 40% of my original library and start filling in the gaps of newer albums and artists I've enjoyed in the decade+ of streaming. For now, I've settled on a $50/month budget for now to purchase DRM-free music from online music stores (Bandcamp and Beatport are my go-tos right now). I rely on my Apple Music "Replay" playlists from the last few years to identify and prioritize the albums I listen to most for shopping list. My goal is to build up my library enough by the end of 2025 to cancel my Apple Music subscription and go fully independent once more.

Major hat tip to Cory Dransfeldt's journey in self-hosting his music and escape the streaming trap for the continued inspiration the last few years. I've nearly lost my motivation at a few points, but then Cory drops some new blog post about his efforts and I see the light at the end of the tunnel once more.

Old hobbies made new

Ryan Boswell — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A two-week trip to South Africa and Kruger National Park in February was both a much-needed break from the world and an opportunity to re-ignite my old passion/hobby of photography that had all but ended with the advent of COVID and the end of my regular travel habit. Even as traveling as picked up in recent years, I've only used my DSLR camera a handful of times since 2020. But being surrounded by nature and wildlife was an awesome experience and really helped me fall back in love with taking photos again (mentally I distinguish taking photos with my DSLR versus taking quick snaps with my iPhone, it doesn't feel the same).

Already on the trip I was fantasizing about upgrading my camera, now 8 and half years old, and maybe going mirrorless. But that's quite the expense, and for now I want to make sure I'm actually still invested in continuing the hobby before dropping a bunch of cash on a new toy.

The next step will be sorting through the nearly 4,000 photos I took on the trip and starting to edit the highlights to share with friends and family. We'll see how much I still enjoy the hobby after a few weeks of that 😅.

Hello world, again

Ryan Boswell — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

tap tap Is this thing on?

After something like 10 years since I last had a blog, I've gotten the itch once again to share more complete thoughts than a microblogging platform like Mastodon is suited for.

This isn't a challenge to suddenly start blogging every day, or week, or even every month. But eventually there'll be things I share here to have a longer-term home. Driven a bit by the current state of the world, and my increasing discomfort with allowing my thoughts, photos, and other things I've shared be "owned" by someone else's platform.

This site is going to be a testing ground for slowly taking back ownership and hosting of the things that are most important to me. Through the blog I'll share some of that journey for my own refernece and the benefit of any others who want to take their own journey down this road.

And who knows, maybe at some point I'll dig through my archives and bring back some favorites from my old blog that got scrubbed a decade ago.