Three years ago my son was born. He is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. Something changed that day though. Everything I had enjoyed doing like playing video games, hanging out with my friends, taking photos, and fishing was suddenly thrown to the side. There was no longer any time to enjoy those things. It’s almost as if the day he was born the part of my life that made me happy died. Which don’t get me wrong that was a very dramatic way to word it but it’s true.

You may be wondering why I’m even bringing this up. No I’m not trying to make you feel bad for me. Things are actually going okay for me right now. My girlfriend and I have built a great life together and I have a job that I can’t really complain about. The reason I bring it up is to provide some context for what I’m about to do and why I feel like I need to write about it. I’m going on a journey to try and figure out who I am as an individual again. It’s a scary thing and sure I could just do it myself but I sorta like the idea of doing it in public. Who knows maybe someone else feels the same and it will be something that helps them out. Also mens mental health is a really strange topic to talk about online and I want to destigmatize it a little.

The point of all this is to try and find hobbies that make me feel like myself again while documenting the process. That can either be revisiting old hobbies or trying something completely new. While doing these projects I’ll take notes and write my thoughts down at the end. Hopefully the act of purposefully trying to do things for myself will make me feel like more of a complete and individual person.

NOTE: I will be updating this page as I go so it can be used as a table of contents.

searching for something new one hobby at a time

Starting Somewhere - A Search for Something

Cutting Out The Nonsense


RSS has always interested me in a morbid curiosity kind of way. I've taken a stab at it in the past. Mainly just with dev blogs of people I like but nothing has really kept me there. It's not something that I checked every day so eventually it became an out of site out of mind scenario. Recently though Reddit has announced their new API changes and pricing. Which is more or less going to shut down every 3rd party app on the market and you won't catch me dead using the official one. It's slow, ugly, and navigating it is an absolute nightmare. This is the moment RSS slid back into my life.

All subreddits have an RSS feed. Seeing as how I browse Reddit by visiting specific subreddits this worked out perfectly. All you have to do is take your favorite subreddit and add a ".rss" to the end of it. Boom now you can drop it in your favorite RSS reader.


Now I'm a self hosted software kind of guy. If I don't have to spend money on something I usually won't. There's a Lenovo Thinkcentre sitting under my tv and I thought to myself "alright let's see what we can do here". Could I use something like feedly? Yes! Would it be anywhere near as fun? Not at all. So here's a run down of the stack I went about using for this it's nothing crazy.
- FreshRSS - This allows me to manage and sync my RSS feeds and read status between devices. This comes in handy as I use a laptop as well.
- NetNewsWire - Absolute gem of an app. It's free, looks nice, and truly feels like a native app
- Tailscale - Let's me use all my self hosted stuff from anywhere. It allows me to talk to FreshRSS even when I'm not at home.


Setting up FreshRSS is easy. The best way to do it is using the 

. Follow those instructions to get it setup. There's a couple things you need to configure first before you can use it with NetNewsWire. First you have to turn on "Enable api access". You can find the option for it under settings -> administration -> authentication.

Then you need to go to Profile and set an API password. IMPORTANT: The password you set here is the one you'll be using on the mobile app not the password you set for the web interface. The password for the web interface will not allow you to login.


NetNewsWire is the best RSS reader I've tried out. Getting it connected to FreshRSS was real easy. It's under the connections screen. Like I said before though make sure you use your api key that you set and not your web interface password. Your username will be the same as your web interface one though. It's a little confusing to setup but not bad.


Reddit rss feeds are easy to setup all you have to do is add '.rss' to the end of the url for the subreddit you want.

I throw all the subreddits I regularly visit into a folder labeled 'reddit'. That way you can kinda browse reddit without using the awful mobile app. The odds that the RSS feeds stay around especially with the API changes coming up is slim. We'll have to wait and see what happens.


RSS is super simple to use. Whether you have one source or 100 this setup should last you a while. If you're looking for a place to start you can take a peak at my 

 file. It'll give you a good place to start!

RSS is old but man does it get the job done. Here's my setup!

I'm Loving RSS

At the beginning of the year when I first started seriously getting back into chess I had a problem. Every game I played felt like I was fighting for my life. Every move my opponents made I would sit there and over calculate. Eventually over thinking it and playing the wrong move. Turns out the right move to play was the first thing that came to my head but hindsight is 2020 right? I would spend so much time trying to figure out the right move that by the time I finished a 15+10 game I would be exhausted. I'd play maybe one more game and that would be it for the night. Any mental energy I had just wouldn't exist anymore.

Things are a much different now and I credit a lot of it to a throw away Lichess account I have. One night I was sitting in bed and I couldn't sleep so I hopped on my phone and played a handful of games on Lichess. There was something fun about playing on an account where I didn't really care about the rating but I still got to play good chess. I did this more and more, eventually the act of just playing a bunch of games made everything click with me. 

Another thing that really helped is playing blitz. I'm well aware that blitz doesn't do anything to help your game. I'm not tricking myself into thinking it's helping, trust me. The thing it does help me with is being comfortable with the chess as a whole. How are you supposed to improve at something if you're not comfortable with it? The act of playing short quick games lets me play twice as many as normal. Which in turn allows me to see more positions and get familiar with them. 

Now when I hop on and play a 15+10 game after work it is no where near as exhausting and I can play way more games before I'm tired out for the night. It really lets me appreciate this game more than I was able to before. If you want to get good at something get comfortable with being bad at it. You can only learn by failing. Over and over and over again. 

Failing is never fun you need to be okay with failure to improve

Comfort Comes With Time, Especially In Chess!

I've spent my fair share of time jumping around between a variety of different games over the years. Long phases where all I would do for fun is play the same game for an extended period. Lots of them were multiplayer games I would play with my buddies. Destiny, Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, and even Forza. You name it and I probably had a phase in my life where that's all I played. While I miss some of those games specifically R6 and Hearthstone those two will always hold a special place in my heart. I've found that once you fall off of them it's super hard to get back into them unless you have a ton of time to play and catch up on whatever the current meta is. Maybe you'll figure it out but once you do it's time to learn everything again and that has always been my fundamental problem with games like that. Live service games hold you hostage and just won't let you go and if you decide to leave there's no going back. Now that I have a family and full-time job it's even harder to play catch up.

Back when my buddies and I would play games all the time there was always a weird phase in between each one where there was nothing to play. What we were playing would get boring and stale. Either the meta would be un-fun or the content would just dry up as we had done everything we could do. During those dry periods, I always found myself playing a few games of chess. Usually, on a Lichess account, I didn't care about but non the less I was still playing. I was playing chess on and off since 2016.

The beginning of February in 2023 was when I started getting back into chess. I was browsing around Tik Tok and Gotham Chess kept showing up on my FYP. I had watched his content in the past and completely forgot he existed. Instantly the algorithm sucked me in. Almost every other video was a chess video and I thought to myself "You know what? Why not give it another go! I don't have much free time for other stuff but I could squeeze a 15-minute game in here and there". Oh, boy was that a mistake. I was sucked into it almost as hard as Destiny grabbed me. I played a handful of 10 minute games and half a dozen dailies and I found that I kept losing. No matter what I was doing I would lose the game and my rating was already pretty bad. There was no way I was about to have my rating bottom out at 100 so I started grinding. There's a large collection of free chess content online and I consumed almost all of it. Every youtube video, a variety of chessable courses, and 

the one thing that made all the difference was playing a slower time control

. I switched over to 15+10 and started actually anylazing my games. Turns out that when you take the time to dig into what you did wrong it changes things.

Since the beginning of February, my rapid rating has gone up 151 points. From 268 to where it's sitting right now at 419. Currently, I have a 56% win rate. Which is right where I would want it to be. Realistically I'd want it to sit at 60% but 56% is still really close to where I need it to be. Another thing that probably doesn't help Is I'm not playing any specific opening. I generally just play e4 Kf4. Then I just freestyle it from there. It's not the best thing in the world but hey if it ain't broke don't fix it. I'm also sure that I would have a lot more growth if I had time to play more games.

Why I’m Playing Chess In 2023

While hosting a Minecraft server isn’t difficult it can be tricky. I’ll be using Docker and a reverse proxy to show you how to setup and host your Minecraft server safe and securely! This all came about because while I thought it was going to be easy it ended up being a lot harder than it should have been. Especially when it came to setting up the reverse proxy.

Before we get started you’ll need the following.

The ability to port forward on your router

A domain name (for this example we’ll be using ‘mc.minecraftexample.com’ as the domain name)

The ability to setup A records on that domain (I recommend Cloudflare but it’s up to you)

First we need to setup a Minecraft server. I’ll be using the 

 as it is extremely flexible and allows for a lot of customization with mods. Create a file called ‘docker-compose.yml’ this is where we will be deploying the containers. Paste the following into your docker compose file.

This will create a vanilla server and start it with the eula accepted. Take note of the container name that will be important later. Did you notice we didn’t expose any ports on this container? That’s because Infrared is going to be taking care of that!

Now run the following command this will spin up the server and generate the world. Do this before the next step so you can double check and make sure that the container starts up correctly.

For infrared to work you need a couple things. You need to forward port 25565 on your router as udp/tcp. I will not be getting into that here because it is out of the scope of this article. It’s easy to do. A quick google search will send you down the right path. Once you have that setup come back!

You’ll need to know your public IP I will not be sharing mine here but you can use 

Now that we have forwarded a port and know our public IP address we can setup our DNS records. For this example I’ll be using Cloudflare. Let’s go ahead and create our A record.

Set the “name” to the subdomain of your choosing for the example I’ll use the be using “mc”. Set the value to your public IP address.

Make sure the ipv4 address points to your public ip and if you’re using Cloudflare that the proxy is turned off. I haven’t been able to get the proxy feature to work with it on sadly.

Now here comes the fun part. We’re going to setup 

. It’s a really neat reverse proxy that sits on top of your Minecraft server. It then forwards the traffic to your server depending on the request made to it. It even lets you auto shutdown the server if there’s no traffic to it and it even starts it up when a request is made! This allows you to host multiple Minecraft servers on one system and have them all use a single entry port. No more opening a bunch of random ports!

Now that we know what it is and what it does it’s time to add it to our docker compose. Delete everything you have in there and copy and paste this in.

Don’t start it yet! If you’ve been paying attention you’ll notice there is a volume mapped for infrared configs. Now this is where all the magic happens. Go ahead and create a folder to put them in. Once you do that create a file called mc.minecraftserver.com.json. Paste the following in.

Let’s go over what we’re looking at here. The first line “domainName” is what domain name the server is under. This is where the A record you setup earlier comes in handy. The second line “proxyTo” tells infrared what server to send the traffic to. This is where the magic of Dockers DNS comes in handy. I kept getting hung up here because even if I set it to my devices ip I would run into issues. The only way I was able to get it to work is if I set it to the containers name. Which in my opinion is a cleaner way of handling it. The third line “listenTo” tells infrared what ip to listen to for incoming connections.

Now that everything is all setup up correctly all you have to do is run.

This will spin up both containers. After a few minutes open Minecraft and try connecting to your server at mc.minecraftexample.com and boom! It should all be working perfectly. I recommend checking out the documentation for both the 

 containers. They have lots of config options that are super handy. Infrared even has an API server that lets you dynamically add entries to it. Enjoy your server and have fun playing!

Use Infrared a reverse proxy for Minecraft to host all of your servers off a single port and a custom domain name for each!

Noah Vaillancourt