My September ‘26 in Review

And here we go again; another month has passed, and the year is flying by.

Now that it’s getting colder again, even though there were a few warm days in between, I’ve only gone on my bike a few times. Let’s see if I can use all my cold-weather cycling gear again soon.

Instead, I’ve dedicated more time to my tech passion and bought some new equipment. After buying the DJI Mic 3 in August, I made two more audio-related purchases this month. First, I bought the soundcore AeroClip (first generation) for work. They’re a bit more comfortable to wear for long periods than the soundcore AeroFit 2. However, I like to switch between them at work, sometimes using one pair of headphones, sometimes the other.

In addition, I also bought the new Anker (soundcore) Liberty Buds 2, mainly for travel. The noise-canceling is noticeably better than on my Liberty 3 Pro, and the battery in the charging case has also degraded significantly.

All these new headphones have also made me listen to more music again. Especially when I’m working, I sometimes get into a flow faster with music, at least if the tasks aren’t too complex. The increased amount of music listening has now prompted me to also tackle the topic of music self-hosting with Navidrome, partly to become more independent of all the subscriptions. If the system becomes more established with me, I might write another post about it at some point.

But I haven’t just added music streaming to my self-hosting setup; I’ve also automated my self-hosting setup more. Every day, Renovate runs to look for updates and create pull requests. When I then merge them or commit other changes, they are automatically deployed to my VPS or my home server. In addition to a cron job that does this once a day even without changes to ensure that the Docker images are up-to-date, self-built container images are rebuilt once a week and also automatically deployed.

Otherwise, September was, of course, also full of politics. First, there were the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, which predictably caused a shock. Then I voted in the local elections in Lower Saxony, followed by the runoff election two weeks later. And then there were the elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin. My left-green heart was both pleased and very saddened. I was especially surprised by the media outrage over the Left Party and, on the other hand, the lack of media outrage over the Nazis, and it brought back memories of the campaigns against the Greens.