Q1 2026

Q1 turned out to be busier than I expected. Eight posts published, three projects shipped or significantly advanced, and a privacy thread running through nearly everything. I didn’t plan for it to cohere like that. It just did.

Work

Highs and lows. By the end of March it felt like things were starting to normalise, which is a welcome change after the turbulence of Q4. The rhythm I was hoping to find this year is taking shape, slowly.

Projects

May is the one I’m most proud of this quarter. It’s a self-hosted vehicle management application: fuel logs, expenses, reminders, maintenance records. Named to complete the Top Gear presenter trio alongside Clarkson and Hammond. It’s now at v0.14.0, has 512 tests, and a full CI pipeline. It started as a scratch-your-own-itch tool and has become the most substantial open source project I’ve built.

Bluehood was built over a weekend in January. It passively scans for nearby Bluetooth devices and reveals what’s being broadcast in range. I built it because I wanted to see what I was leaking, and the results were uncomfortable enough to write about.

Casey got finished off during Q1: a calm productivity app for daily journaling, task management, and idea resurfacing. Named after Casey Newton of the Hard Fork podcast. It’s running, it works, and I don’t think about it much, which is exactly the point.

The tools page also got a rebuild: live GitHub star counts, restyled cards, and a cleaner layout.

Life

Michael Bazzell’s Extreme Privacy has been the backdrop to most of the quarter. It’s thorough to the point of being uncomfortable, in the way that good privacy writing tends to be, and it has a way of making previously comfortable compromises feel worth revisiting.

From there, several things followed. I enabled Lockdown Mode on my iOS devices. The impact on daily use has been minimal: some occasional friction with specific sites, nothing I’d call disruptive. I set up a personal XMPP server running Prosody in Docker, for federated messaging that lives on my own hardware. I switched to Vivaldi on all my personal devices and signed up for Kagi as my primary search engine. LinkedIn and Instagram came off the phone. I’ve also started running BleachBit on my Omarchy laptop weekly, clearing cache files and metadata that accumulate without anyone asking.

I also spent a few weeks trialling OpenClaw, an AI assistant with some genuinely impressive capabilities. The security posture didn’t hold up to scrutiny though, so it’s now isolated to a dedicated VM rather than running on anything I care about. Claude is catching up on many of the functions that made it interesting, so I’ll revisit OpenClaw in a few months and see where both stand.

The analog watch search is ongoing. I’ve been wearing a smartwatch for years and I’m increasingly unsure it’s earning its place. I’ve also started going for walks without my phone or watch entirely, which sounds unremarkable until you realise you haven’t done it since childhood. Strange for about a week. Not strange anymore.

Photos moved from Google Photos to Ente, backed up to Proton Drive. Ente has been genuinely impressive: feature-rich, well thought through, and clearly built by people who care about it. Proton Drive is not quite there yet, but the backup exists and that’s what matters.

I went to see Project Hail Mary at the cinema this quarter. Like the book, it was fantastic. The hype around this one is real, and for once I think it’s deserved. There’s already talk of a sequel or prequel, and I hope they don’t. It was great. Leave it alone.

The self-hosted music setup from Q4 didn’t survive the quarter. I’m back on YouTube Music. I’ve tried to reduce my dependence on YouTube in various ways this year, but it turns out that’s the one I actually can’t give up.

The home network from Q4 is now fully bedded in: 2.5Gbps throughout, the GL.iNet Flint 3 as the ISP replacement, and NextDNS on DNS duty after I moved away from AdGuard for performance reasons.

What’s Next

Blood bikes. I did far fewer shifts than I wanted in Q4 and Q1, and Q2 is about putting that right. I’ve also got a two-day training course with Rapid Training coming up, which I’m looking forward to.

The privacy work will keep going at its own pace. There’s no finish line to any of it.