@Ree@Dreamwidth.org

(Originally posted June 25th, 2009, on LiveJournal.)

My mother.

I don't know where to begin to describe her. She's a lofty example to aspire to: an excellent cook; a careful, safe driver; the best mother I could have.

I mean that, though I'm not sure she quite believes me. There are other mothers who are better equipped to handle a child who is profoundly disabled, or to help a child discover disparate parts of their racial identity, or shield a child against paparazzi. But I am not any of those children. I don't need those particular protections. For who I am, I could not ask for a better mother. I would want no other mother.

She has embraced me when I was at my lowest ebbs and cheered me on toward my highest peaks. Somehow she still loves me, despite knowing me better than anyone else knows. I live in awe of her selflessness and compassion. She's more than just the best mother I could have: she is also my friend, one whom I prize.

There is not an inch of my skin that is not written with my mother's genes, not a memory in my head that is not somehow shaped by the way my mother raised me, and I know that I am much improved for it. If I am sometimes petty or cruel, it is in spite of her teaching and her example; she raised to me know better, although I sometimes shamefully ignore that. And if I am occasionally caring, diligent, or generous, it is because my mother taught it to me.

If girls learn to mother from their mothers, then I know that I would be a strong, loving mother. Following her example could achieve no less.

If I thought it would make my mother happy to hear me yelling her praises from the rooftops, I would do it even now, at three in the morning in the pouring rain and pounding thunder. My mother did teach me to be sensible, however; if I must yell, I will wait for a saner hour and a drier roof.

I wish that I could write her a poem declaring the wonder I feel for her, something beautiful and rhythmic and worthy of her. But my poetic talent is insufficient. Anything I write would not be good enough to adequately convey the way I feel. Even as I write this piece, I keenly feel its flaws, but I hope it conveys what I mean regardless.

Someday, Mom, I will get things collated into that poem you deserve. In lieu of that, you have my endless admiration.

I love you, Mom. Thank you so much for being Mom.

I've been having some fun. Last year I set up a Jellyfin server on my humble home computer. It works pretty well—very well, for a totally free product that connects many sorts of devices to your self-installed server—but I had a few friction points that I wanted to satisfy more completely, so I have been trying some stuff.

(Not so much stuff, because a bunch of things that otherwise sounded neat turned out to require Java, and I don't particularly want to reinstall Java on my computer after taking a silly amount of joy in getting to remove it quite some time ago. But still.)

Anyway, I was hoping to find a free, open-source music server that would support the Subsonic API, so that I could use one of many Android apps to stream music to my phone and cache it there for future re-listens. (Jellyfin, especially Gelli, works nicely for music, but neither has any support for downloading more than one track at a time, and both only work when connected to a server - no playback from offline cache, unless I've missed something lately.) All the main Subsonic forks are Java based, but I stumbled upon Navidrome, a separate project that supports the same API. I'm liking it a lot. Mind, I turned out to have a loooooot of work to do sorting and tagging my music correctly so that Navidrome could parse it correctly (don't even talk to me about Starmen.net's Mother 1 soundtrack and its several embedded typos), but I finally seem to have got it all Picarded up.

After trying several Subsonic API clients, I think I've settled on Ultrasonic as my fave so far. It's not as pretty as Gelli (none of the Subsonic clients I found are; they seem to range from "maybe a little dated" to "this storefront's version has not been updated since 2013"), but it works for me and isn't years out of date.

The other difficulty I had with Jellyfin was ebooks. Jellyfin persistently misidentified a subset of mine: it thought that a slice-of-life humour comic book was a true crime story; that a Hugo-winning time travel novel was about football; that a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was instead a biography of Shelley; that a supernatural romance was a Mickey Spillane noir. I could correct these mistakes when I found them, but I could not prevent Jellyfin from doing the initital misidentification.

And then I updated my Jellyfin install, and it re-pulled metadata for everything, even the books it had gotten wrong which I had specifically ordered it to never do again. So I had to trawl through every subfolder, again, looking for and correcting mistakes, again.

And if I want a way to get Jellyfin to start automatically when booting my computer, it will require me to re-scan everything from scratch. Including all the books, which I would need to search and correct. Again. That's because of a mistake I made early on with Jellyfin, but there's no correcting it now without embracing the hassle.

So now instead of Jellyfin, I have my ebooks folder set as a Windows (SMB) share. I can access it on my phone through Material Files, which had already become my default Android file manager even before I found it would solve this problem for me. Pretty sweet. Not at all fancy, no metadata search, no browsing through covers - and no snarling at Jellyfin, because the only mistakes lying within are ones I made myself. Plus it also helps me keep space free on my phone, since anything I download to it can be promptly shunted to my much larger PC hard drive. (I am pretty sure I have some sort of linguistic badness happening in that previous sentence, but I'm too tired to figure how to fix it and I just want to get a thing written here so I can be done and stop.)

Technology can be a pretty good helper sometimes.