Mo'menths October 2026: Taking It Back

October, the month where autumn really starts, with its beautiful orange highlights everywhere from the leaves to the breathtaking sunsets, of which I do not have a picture, although I'd argue it's one of those experiences that's best had in the moment. There is also the main downside... the darkness that comes with it. I forget the exact day but I remember heading out for work and there was that switch of, "damn, it's dark this morning", and then the feeling of coming out of the cinema after going in when it's light out, only to come out in the darkness and I could swear I was only in there for a few hours. The fun fact for this month: the day went from 11 hours 37 minutes of daylight on the 1st to 9 hours 43 minutes on the 31st, with the sunset sliding from 6:38pm to 4:35pm. So it wasn't just me.

• Got the Microsoft account back after 144 days, 5 letters, and a whole lot of emails back and forth.
• Migrated a charity's website from DreamHost to WordPress and realised I'd bitten off more than I could chew.
• Built the blog editor this very post was drafted in.

On the assertive side, it really comes down to the Microsoft of it all. Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to be at the other end of my Microsoft rants knows how much I very much dislike the company and by extension all the big corporations that ultimately run the world; they hold far too much power and there needs to be checks and balances. It took 144 days to fight my way back into an account that was locked by a system not built for a world moving to passwordless authentication such as passkeys, authenticator apps and biometrics. I wouldn't have been nearly as angry if it had taken two months and hadn't felt designed to frustrate you into giving up: after the first recovery questionnaire I was told the information wasn't enough, I had exhausted all avenues and there was nothing that could be done, which was nowhere near a good enough answer. Friends and a lawyer even suggested I grovel on social media about how great Microsoft is and hope it goes viral. I refuse: it keeps the cogs turning by not shining a light on how much better account recovery could be. Epic Games had an actual form with questions about the account, including one that can only be retrieved while logged in, which is exactly what sign-up should remind you to keep safe outside the account (yes, I have mine stored now).

As for the tired part, it always feels like there's something to do, and I found myself thinking about how I had the time to play video games, only to realise I had just replaced it with Project Homelab and an increase in trips to the cinema, and for better or worse, neither is going anywhere. This month I also volunteered to migrate a website from DreamHost to WordPress for a charity I do some IT work for here and there, which is the first time I'm mentioning it here. It seemed straightforward enough at first; after all, I had done something similar when this website went from version 2 to version 3, only for me to slowly realise I had bitten off more than I could chew. The migration was successful, but between the homelab and my "me" time, something has to give because there just isn't enough time in the day.

I finally got around to setting up Grafana. If the online guides were anything to go by, it would have taken me a heck of a long time to get even a quarter of what the dashboard shows me now, but with Claude's help I had it up and spitting out data in a couple of hours, and it paid off quickly. I used it to diagnose the swap issue on the laptop I have running Proxmox (swap went from 6 GB to zero in one evening), and to work out that the noise coming from the NAS hard drives was a routine RAID 5 scrub, not something going wrong.

Dawarich, my Google Timeline replacement, was the other big-ticket item. It started on shaky ground, but I stuck with it, even when it labelled every journey as cycling. Then the upgrade from 1.18 to 1.19 wiped my hand corrections and replaced the labels on 15 years of Google Timeline data with its own highly inaccurate guesses. After restoring everything from backup, it was clear I needed something better, so with Claude's help I trained my own classifier. It looks at speed, time of day and OpenStreetMap's rail and bus stop data to label the trips Google never covered. On its first run it matched Google's labels about 80% of the time, where Dawarich managed about 37%, and a bit of tuning got it to about 85%. It only applies a label when it's at least 80% confident, and it now runs every night on its own.

The website also got some quality-of-life work, a rework of how I edit it, and it has made a significant difference to how I draft these Moments. I had integrated Decap CMS to edit on the go, but I never used it beyond my "Currently reading" list because of all the custom MDX components the blog relies on. I had to remember and type out the syntax, and every edit needed a full commit (which triggers a build) if I wanted to pick up on another device, and a build only succeeds if I don't make a mistake. So I drafted in Obsidian and put posts together in VSCodium, and eventually ripped Decap out.

That got me wondering whether I could edit without pushing to GitHub at all. I also wanted my adopted sister to be able to edit the website I manage for her hair business, so I used this site as a test case and built a small custom CMS for the "Currently reading" list. It worked so well that the next day I expanded it into a blog editor, and by that afternoon the editorial page was born. Drafts now live on the website itself, so I can pick them up on any device and see them looking close to the final post, the components are a tap away instead of from memory, and only hitting publish commits to GitHub and kicks off a build. It is still early days, but it is already a significantly better experience than Obsidian and VSCodium ever were, and I have done a lot of edits on my phone while out and about. Now I just have to implement it on her website as well.

In films this month, the magic number is 18, bringing the current total to 166. It was a month of a couple of fantastic movies that unfortunately didn't do well at the cinema. The first is Digger, which I describe as "A documentary disguised as a movie disguised as a play about an adaptation of a real event." Tom Cruise did an amazing job playing the role of an oil baron with more power than anyone has the right to have. The second is Wildwood, a stop-motion animation about magic and how far one can go for the ones we love, which is even more sad because of the labour of love it takes to create something so special and beautiful. I hope it's able to recoup its cost so that we can get more from the crew behind it. I closed out the month with a double dose of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish because it came up in a conversation and I resolved to watch it again. It turned out I gave it three stars the first time I saw it, which was incongruent with the amount of praise I give it when it comes up in a conversation.

In theatre, this month's show was Oh, Mary! at Trafalgar Theatre. This is one that I had wanted to see because Catherine Tate was playing the titular character, but unfortunately by the time I got around to booking it, it was too late. That's not to say Lolly Adefope (the current Mary Todd) was a slouch; she did a great job, playing the drunk, miserable, self-obsessed wife of Abraham Lincoln. It was genuinely funny and as someone who generally has no problem with swearing, it was very strange hearing that much swearing in a show in general (my pearls were firmly clutched at times), which isn't to say it made for a bad experience; quite the opposite, it made a lot of the scenes more jaw-dropping and hilarious than they would have been otherwise, like how can these people talk to each other like that!

In music, this month The Emotion by BØRNS was the obsession this time, even as I write this, I have the overwhelming urge to listen to it and gosh darn I shall! Woodkid took the artist and album crown this month with The Golden Age, I really love this album. My initial exposure to Woodkid was years ago with the release of the Assassin's Creed: Revelations trailer, which has the song Iron and I am nothing if not a sucker for seeing what other songs in the album I would like, well I Love You clearly came out on top!

Daniel Pemberton's Project Hail Mary soundtrack is quite simply amazing and I can't get enough of it. A Moment is the standout, with a soprano voice and the best crescendo in the world, played at a point in the movie that is as beautiful as it is literally out of this world.

Anne Hathaway and Mother Mary also snuck back into the top 5 after a month's hiatus. The moment I feel like listening to it, I find I have gone through the whole album and it's started again. Cut Ties came out on top, probably because of that melancholic rhythm, from the guitar to the choir, but the more I think about it, the more I think it's a coincidence because I really do love every song on the album.