Monthly Notes February 2026

The month of February 2026

Caption: Lovely Tom Yam rice noodle soup with pork.

Note: This pace of monthly notes fits better, as there is generally chaos in the individual weeks but a month view can be more liberating.

Contents

Technology

Technology

Updated the Go article to include Go-based apps of note (there are many)
Updated the XMPP article to include Prosody implementation, which works well, once the individual steps are clarified.
Created the Prosody article
Expired my .im domain and set up Prosody/coturn on my own server using the .info domain.
- Note, that .info actually has limitations on its use, such as no gambling or pornography and not even economic use.
Open source email client for Android, a Go-based email server Mox, and Etar. For a mail client, I'm thnking of Evolution, we'll see.
Bunsenlabs latest Linux distribution looks quite promising with support for Wayland and other great tweaks.

Worked with Suno to very quickly create a 90-minute (42-track) Early Music album featuring the Viola de Gamba. I was astounded how well this worked with a four phrase prompt and a few settings. Effectively, I hit the button 21 times, then exported the 42 tracks in MP3 format, then exported everything in WAV and added a cover image initially generated in Stable Diffusion then edited in Inkscape. See the result: Alfa Musica - Opus 1.
Previous to this in early February created the ALFA FONK - Nursery Grime album of 60 minutes of nursery rhymes set to phonk/EDM style music. Enjoyable.
The A.I. haters had my McNeill Collective channel kicked off Bandcamp. What a bunch of wankers. I have 100+ appreaciating fants of the poetry and originals that I created over the past few months. This kind of descrimination is just that, a prejudice without any thought or actual listening. I will soldier on.
The EEF has a great take on these things:
- How we think about copyright and A.I. art, and
- Two Courts Rule On Generative AI and Fair Use — One Gets It Right,

Still enshittifying, especially the Trump disaster. I've lost hundreds of dollars per month to this nonsense tarriff (and removing the $800 minimum on inbound shipments). There are no publishers in the US which can publish printed cards. These machines don't exist there anymore. So what exactly is being protected? Nothing. Wanker.
I continue moving my digital tools from the US to other locales. This includes off of applications and cloud services that are in reach of the US.
Spending time thinking about resiliance, such as electricity, water, food and the like. It is largely depressing, though there are some interesting aspects, such as getting clean water out of the air aka atmospheric water harvesting.
For solar tech, Chiang Mai Solar has interesting stuff, though not cheap. I really want to see what can be doing architecturally in terms of having a root cellar or similar, and drying/smoking/aging meats and other foodstuffs.

Stopped near the end of Kitty Cat Kill Sat a generally enjoyable but in the end all-too-confusing mishmash. Interesting concepts and a nice medium-future scifi novel.
Started Long Story Short: I'm Living in the Mountains v.4.
For Anime, we've been watching Hell Mode and Reincarnated as a Dragon Hatchling. The latter has become such low-quality video that I'm astounded. The story is ok, but the visuals are laughable at this point.