Closing off 2025#

2025 was a good year for me. I went all in into Linux, I improved a lot at my hobbies, I started this blog and I still have a few projects to blog about.

I’ve talked about mostly the same topics in the blog this year: tech and gaming. No doubt I have a lot of fun messing with gadgets and playing games, but I have to admit these areas weren’t having their best moment throughout the year. Enshittification and greed haven’t been kind to us

I want to see things from a different perspective, I want to focus my energy on what has been positive rather than giving the spotlight to whoever is currently ruining the show. Metaphorically speaking, in the world where “everything is an Xbox” I want to see more Steam Decks.

2026 Wishes#

During 2025 I found out quite a few things that made me go “Wow”. That’s what I want more in 2026. And it’s not necessarily about technical innovation, it’s about usefulness, it’s about connecting to myself and the world I live in.

I want to highlight some of the best Wow moments I had this year, in the hopes that I will see many more in 2026

The Steam Deck#

The star of the show. I’m currently out of town for the holidays and It’s not feasible to take a mid tower gaming PC around. I have my Mac for working, but Macs aren’t really known for gaming.

In less than a minute I can plug the Steam Deck to the TV, connect the controller and bam portable console. Sure, the Switch is also a portable console, but the steam deck has better performance and a better system altogether. Before this trip I took sometime to setup more emulators. Now in the same device I have both my current AAA titles such as Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077, I have the PS2 classics such as God of War, I have Pokemon X and plenty of Indie Titles (specially roguelites).

And while I am praising SteamOS, the biggest thing is the form factor. I can definitely sacrifice 60fps and the best looking graphics in order to play games anywhere.

I would like more of the Steam Deck please

Copyparty#

If you’ve never heard about Copyparty before, do yourself a favor and take a look.

The timing when I found Copyparty couldn’t have been better. I was dealing with the age old problem of trying to transfer a file between 2 computers. There are options like scp, rsync, smb and others, but my requirements were very specific: I needed something that worked with Linux, iOS, MacOs and Windows. I also needed something that would allow me to edit the files in the remote computer, like sshfs, and I had a lot of trouble trying to find an App (on the iPad) that wasn’t extremely expensive and had this feature.

So this is where Copyparty shines, from their GitHub:\

turn almost any device into a file server with resumable uploads/downloads using any web browser

They support a ton of protocols, which include webdav. And I found a relatively cheap app on the iPad that could mount WebDAV servers as folders on my local filesystem. Theoretically iOS supports smb natively, but after a few hours trying to get it to work I realized my sanity was worth more than an App which got things done.

Now this is what people say when they mean “Good design is invisible”. I used this WebDAV workflow for months, I’m still using it now and I don’t need to think about Copyparty at all, it is completely out of sight, out of mind. Perfect solution

Then a few weeks ago my sister needed to print a very important document before a trip. She wrote the entire document on her phone, but she couldn’t just send it to the printer.

I’m not sure if that’s because we have an old printer, or if the iPhone doesn’t have the drivers for the printer or whatever was happening

Also the computer we usually run the print jobs on, wasn’t working. I’m not quite sure why it stopped working, but I’m already used to things related to printers failing. I quickly got a spare laptop running Arch and set it up to run the print job.

Now the printer is located far away from the WiFi AP and the laptop battery wasn’t charged enough to run the setup on the WiFi and then run back to the printer. But software packages aren’t really that big so it wasn’t difficult to get both the computer and printer ready, with one small road bump: how do we transfer the file from the iPhone to the PC?

AirDrop was out of the question. We couldn’t plug a cable and transfer. Let’s use the cloud then (on the crappy WiFi), upload the file to Google Drive and I download it on the PC. Except I had been logged out of my google account and when trying to log in I had to do 2FA. Of course there’s nothing wrong with 2FA, but google being google they decide I should’t be able to receive an SMS message, I need to open YouTube on my phone. Then when I confirm it’s me trying to log in, the page just freezes and never finishes authentication.

Lovely, it’s 2025 and I can’t transfer a PDF between 2 devices on my own network anymore. In a last effort I downloaded Copyparty on the laptop. I typed copyparty on my terminal, the console printed out a QRCode, I scan the QRCode on the iPhone, upload the file and in less than 10 seconds I have the print job running. Copyparty saved the day masterfully and since then it’s a must have installed software.

I know this was a long story, but it’s to highlight that when conditions are perfect, most software runs as intended and you can review it as good or bad. But when I’m in a pinch and I need something reliable, that’s when I truly find out what is really good and what is mostly good

Ollama#

Love it or Hate it, generative AI is inescapable. Besides the moral and ethical concerns behind AI, there is also the accessibility concern.

Today AI is distributed among some big players such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and others. Regardless of why you use AI, if it has any importance, remember: Don’t build your house on Someone Else’s land. If any of these companies go down, their AI goes along with it. Perhaps more worrying is the thought they could be (and probably are) using your data to feedback into their model or sell to their partners.

Ollama would be the open source solution for those issues. Of course training your own LLM is still as hard as ever, but with some storage space, quite a bit of ram and a decent hardware, you can get one of the Open Source ones and avoid selling your soul to the AI bubble.

Definitely avoiding the big players and experimenting on my own stack taught me a bit more about LLMs as a tool and their capabilities as well as their limitations.

In the end, if we truly are in the age of AI and have to deal with it, I rather have my own.

Jellyfin#

Don’t you love paying for a streaming subscription and then have mid roll ads in the movie or TV Show? Me neither, that’s why Jellyfin is great.

It’s essentially your own streaming platform. Drop in the movie files you have, it will download the posters and box art, optionally download subtitles, and you’re good to go. Whether you got your movies from a DRM free store, ripped the DVDs yourself or sailed the high seas, Jellyfin is judgement free.

It works on the browser, there are apps for iOS, for the amazon fire stick and a Linux native client. Also it features a quick connect mode, you type in the code on an already logged in device and it logs you in. No password needed.

It amazes me how the billion dollar Disney+ can’t figure that out and leaves me locked out of logging in on the TV

All in all, I got a few movies in my collection and now I can watch them while traveling, since they don’t region lock my access and I can watch anywhere in the world.

Adguard home#

I use Tailscale at all times, and their MagicDNS is very useful. But I also thought that if all my devices are already using Tailscale managed DNS, I can plug in my own DNS inside the tailnet and then I could have DNS Ad blocking (like Pi-Hole) for all my devices.

Once again, good design is invisible. Adguard Home works well enough that it is out of sight, out of mind basically 100% of the time.

Even if you don’t have a VPN or tailscale (although I recommend it) you can give it a try and improve your web surfing safety.

Just to be clear, I don’t think ads are inherently bad. What bothers me is how they build extremely accurate profiles based on user data, are intrusive and disrupt the user experience. If I read a blog post and they add somewhere that it was sponsored, it’s fine

Individual Expression#

The last thing I want to see more of in 2026 is individual expression. Ever see something you YouTube and think: “Wow, that video feels like it was posted 15 years ago”? That’s precisely what I wish for.

I want to see stuff made by people. It doesn’t have to be extremely well produced and put together. I’m sick and tired of rage bait, content auto generated by bots, engagement farming, memes that are just random crap. I want to see real people on the internet, not the dead internet.

It brightens my day finding an old looking website, or a raw video that someone made without ever caring about the algorithm, someone showcasing their cool project or just a silly thing.

That’s the reason I started my blog

What now?#

Will I see what I wished for? No clue, but I’m certain I’ll be doing my part to try and make that come true.

Happy 2026 and I’ll see you around