Spring 2026 updates

Servus from … a random hotel.

I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed in my pyjamas, laptop on my legs. Mx Liebe is sitting beside me, a reminder that he is part of my portable home.

I glance outside the window. The sun is starting to set, that small daily proof that the days are getting longer. Outside there is a large walled lorry park, all its lights turned on: a safe place for drivers to spend the night before entering their final destination. I feel akin to them in a way, perhaps a more luxurious version of a lorry driver, but with similar patterns. Around us: warehouses, factories, concrete, logistics. I don’t mind it very much. It is unusually quiet, perhaps only waiting for the early-morning rush to begin. The hotel is basic, but clean, cheap, and has Wi-Fi. Enough, at least, to download some emails.

The longer days are a reminder that a new season has inevitably arrived, at least meteorologically. Winter never truly left my heart, and the ache in my chest is still very present.

Spring came with two things: allergies, and the wind of change.

This is the season where I could potentially enjoy the sunshine, have walks without sweating too much, fly my beloved single-engine planes, and enjoy the first ice creams of the year. Just the perfect weather for me, as much as I love autumn. Except I’m allergic to the pollen that comes with the season. Long story short: while I would love to go out and enjoy the weather, I need to stay inside, a bit like a cat watching the world through the window.

Have you ever seen the movie Chocolat? The main character is compelled to move when the new wind comes, as if it is something inevitable, something written in the air before she is even ready to admit it. I always felt a connection with that image. My past came in waves, each one carrying its own wind of change, each one opening a new chapter of my life before I had fully closed the previous one.

And, as I was sensing and sharing in previous posts, the wind of change has arrived for me too: a new job, a new European city, and a return to the familiar pre-pandemic pattern of “backpack is my office, suitcase is my home”. My life now is mostly commute, work, and hotels. Weekends are for sleeping, recovering, groceries, house chores, and sometimes not even that. There is little space left for anything else.

It also means spending less time in my offline outpost, which is perhaps one of the quietest losses of this new routine.
This life is very far from the life I dreamed of: predictable routines, a cabin in the mountains, cinnamon buns and coffee in the morning.

I’m very sad, but this is what I have now. I’m trying to adapt and make peace with it.

I’m lucky to have a job in a time when the IT market feels uncertain. I can pay the bills, put food on the table, and still do work that I don’t dislike.

Before starting the new job, I was able to carry on with a couple of things.

First and foremost, I replaced the failed Fujitsu mini-PC in my colocation with a used Dell Optiplex 9020. It is a small upgrade, as it has an i7 instead of an i5. I simply replaced the Dell SSD with the one from the Fujitsu and that was basically it. That is the beauty of both Linux and FreeBSD: they adapt to the hardware they are running on. No drama.
Fun fact: would you believe that it took me four weeks, and I say four weeks, to unbox the Dell Optiplex after I bought it? Jeez, I’m so slow with everything.

All the systems are stable, upgraded to FreeBSD 15 before I left, and I made consistent ZFS snapshots and sent/received them to external USB disks.

In preparation for my new professional life on the move, I also decided to move my main home directory from the NAS in my house in Milan to the main system in the colocation. Not that I will be able to reach it from work, but at least I can turn off the NAS at home and keep it as a semi-offline replica of my data.

I definitely need to replace the switch in the colo, but for the moment I’m okay with it. Who knows, perhaps my birthday or Christmas present.

Moving my home directory also had a side effect: now the main system, moonlight, hosts my new project too.
And that brings me to the other main topic of the season.

I’ve shared in previous posts about Project Quiet Ground, and I also said somewhere between the lines that it is not just theory. It actually exists.

I started creating my own midrange environment.

Re-reading that sentence, it does feel a bit like bragging. And yes, inside me, I am a tiny bit proud. But I don’t have better words for it.

At the moment it has two components.

The first is the menu system, although it is already more than a menu. It is closer to a menu-like shell that prepares the application environment under the hood. Its roots are in the concepts of libraries and menus from IBM i, formerly AS/400. It is meant to prepare a “capsule environment” for applications, in the way a midrange or mainframe system would. Everything is driven by a simple English-like menu and environment definition file.

The second component is the Data File Utility, or DFU. It is inspired by IBM System/38 and AS/400 DFU, by dBase III+, and, in a way, also by VMS Record Management Services. It is meant to be a small Swiss Army knife for supported data types, with multiple backends, so that I can browse, view, and delete records, and eventually create and update them too, using another simple English-like definition file. It is not a full application framework. It is more like the old DFU and dBase spirit: simple data interaction without fuss. Perfect for a lazy girl like me who does not always want to code.

Although it aims high, I should put my feet back on the ground: at the moment, it can browse, view, and delete records from CSV files. And quite frankly, even if that is not much, it is already usable enough to start building applications. DFU is currently handling my flight logbook and my blood work data, for example. I am also creating small applications that fit the philosophy of Project Quiet Ground.

The target systems are Linux glibc, such as Debian and Mint, Linux musl, such as Alpine, and FreeBSD, all on x86/amd64. That fits my laptop and workstation, my PursePC project, and my “midrange” in the colocation, or really any FreeBSD system I have around. As I wrote in the storage post, the project is adapting with my life.

I will talk more about those components later. I think they deserve separate posts.

I spent much of the season researching what I call the lineage: the systems and concepts that surrounded the midrange era. Mostly IBM systems, especially the System/3 family, which eventually led to System/38 and AS/400. But also VMS RMS, which I mentioned earlier, and HP/3000 TurboIMAGE. It is a pity that much of the design documentation for those systems is hidden or simply not public. I truly wish I could talk with their creators. And I feel a little ashamed that, when I worked at IBM Rochester’s Labs, I did not yet understand the importance of the place I was standing in.

One last tiny technical bit.

I decided to prefer European-based technologies and providers as much as I can, and to decouple from US-based companies wherever feasible.

I’m currently moving my parked domains from a couple of DNS providers to Infomaniak. It is a small cloud provider in Switzerland that offers an interesting range of services. I’m only using it as a domain registrar for now, but it was a nice surprise. Recently, the provider moved under the majority control of a Swiss public-interest foundation, which feels quite key to protecting its independence and privacy commitments over the long term. It is exactly the kind of entity I want to encourage with my tiny wallet.

The zones themselves are now served by Hetzner DNS, automatically generated and maintained with an Ansible playbook. The same script also generates a virtual Postfix table with catch-all aliases that I deploy to my ISPConfig server. Eventually it will also create a catch-all courtesy web page, which is currently handled manually.

Next on my to-do list are my S3-compatible backup storage and a couple of VPS instances. Both are already on EU soil, but the providers are owned by US companies. Given the recent governance change, Infomaniak is probably the first candidate I will evaluate for the backup storage, assuming the service also fits my boring practical requirements.

Of course, let’s be real: not everything can be moved to European-based companies. I still struggle to find decent alternatives to Amazon retail and some YouTube channels, for example.

I haven’t done much else on the technical side.

What I can say is that, thanks to the huge amount of work I did in the past, now that I’m on the move and often without a proper internet connection, I can work almost completely offline. At work there is no guest Wi-Fi. I cannot connect my personal laptop or my phone, so the only place I can connect is the hotel Wi-Fi, just enough for mail and a couple of Wi-Fi calls.

All that past preparation worked like a charm. I can be offline.
I can’t say the same for my morale.

Some nice news I would love to share is that I had the chance to meet a pen pal in real life. It happened casually. He was in transit for a holiday in Italy, so he stopped by Milan, and I was able to meet him. It was really amazing to know him in real life. I have his present with me right now: a purple tulip pin. A nice reminder that pockets of kindness are still out there.

Last but not least, I hadn’t flown in a while. Since my renewal, it has basically been six months. I am aware that exhaustion could potentially affect the safety of my flights. So I would rather skip flying than potentially hurt myself or others. But I could still do that in a simulator. So, after more than a year, and after having a paycheck again, a couple of weeks ago I booked an A320 SIM session. It was a couple of hours flying Milan Linate (LIML) to Geneva (LSGG), then Geneva to Milan Malpensa (LIMC). I was very rusty and had to admit defeat and use the Flight Director. The workload was not super high, but considering the exhaustion in my body, even that session felt like a lot. But I did it. And I’m proud, even if I wasn’t at my best and it wasn’t my best flight ever.

It’s time for me to wind down. I wanted to watch a movie, but I’m too tired even for that. I’ll just lie in bed, put my headphones on, listen to lofi beats, and try to release all the accumulated tension in my body. It is unpleasant to shake from exhaustion.

A few tears are flowing down my cheeks. Everything feels like a lot right now. I wish I had Angie with me, but this is too much travel even for her. Mx Liebe, sitting on my bedside table now, reminds me that somehow I will be fine. I will survive, like I always have.

Perhaps, when I get used to this routine, there will be space again for personal projects, articles, and the small things that make me curious or happy.

See you at the next season. 🌷💜

The new Dell Optiplex 9020 is installed in the colocation. An USB disk is attached to transfer my main home directory. The systems are now stable for my new chapter in life.

Flying the Airbus 320, approaching Geneva (LSGG) from the Alps ready to intercept ILS 04.

Mx Liebe keeping watch from the bedside table, while another hotel room tries to become home for the night.