Mo'menths September 2026: Upgrades

September, the beginning of the end of the year and the first of the "Ember Months". It's a month that feels like a soft reset: the start of a new academic year, the evenings starting to pull in, and the year quietly turning its last corner. Apparently the "official" start of autumn is 1st September, but as far as I'm concerned it doesn't start until the autumn equinox, which fell on the 23rd. This month's interesting fact hits a bit closer to home: in Nigeria and parts of West Africa, September through December is known as the "Ember Months," a stretch widely believed to be spiritually charged and dangerous. The belief holds that as the year winds down, unseen forces make one last push, which folk wisdom offers as the explanation for the up-tick in accidents, sudden deaths, and general misfortune people associate with this stretch of the calendar. It's why midnight prayers, fasting, and full "spiritual warfare" tend to pick up through these months, all aimed at making it to January in one piece. That's a lot of spiritual weight to put on four months whose names simply mean seven, eight, nine, and ten.

• Part three of the London to Brighton cycle ride, and the slowest one yet
• A timely RAM upgrade for the NAS, and a Google Timeline replacement after an unfortunate month-long data loss
• A record 21 films in a single month

Another year, another climb up Ditchling Beacon, and this time it proved to be a lot tougher. I had to stop a couple of times because walking up any hill is quite simply not an option. Alright, back to the beginning: this year's edition of London to Brighton was done with a friend whom I met randomly in the summer, and it also marked the first time I have ridden with someone. It was an interesting experience because on one hand there is a comfort in knowing there's someone around and you have each other's backs, but on the other hand, I have been riding alone for so long (sans group rides, which I haven't done in a while anyway, or the odd rides through London) that it feels almost wrong to disrupt that.

The event itself was great, I went in with the goal of beating my last time, let's just say it didn't happen and at the risk of making excuses, I attribute it to my increased frequency in driving in the past year. That has been a bit of a problem even financially and apparently speedicially (yes it's a made up word; all words are made up); I will need to fix/replace Deathtrap (my other bike) because lord knows I am not locking Tardis II (the newer more expensive bike) in a public place unattended any more, not after the great thieving incident of 2025. With the event one more medal was added to the growing collection, till next year!

September was a month of "the thing that's supposed to fix itself... didn't."

It started with a routine update on the NAS. The update restarted a bunch of background services, which normally come back on their own within a minute. This time most of them just sat there, and the system's own status check told me everything was fine. It was not fine. My ad-blocker had come back up with no network connection at all while its dashboard happily claimed it was healthy, and I didn't notice for a week because of the triple redundancy, which quietly covered for it. It only surfaced when an app failed to check for updates because its internet lookup had been broken the whole time. Redundancy is great right up until it hides a failure from you. The audiobook sync joined in around the same time, refusing to work and citing a vague "try again in 24-48 hours" message. That turned out to be a red herring: the real problem was an authentication issue, and the error message had nothing to do with it. While tidying up file shares, I also deleted a folder that looked empty and turned out to be a live connection point for my media library, which broke movie and TV downloads for an evening. No data was lost, and the real culprit was me, for having a random empty folder sitting there with no documentation saying why. It was a good scare.

The real story of the month was the RAM upgrade, which I had been planning for a while. Computer components are very expensive these days, and I had a hard ceiling on what I was willing to spend. Amazon was out of the question, Facebook Marketplace looked too good to be true, and thankfully eBay came in clutch. The NAS went from a tight 8GB to a very spacious 64GB.

After pulling the trigger, I did some setup while I waited. It made no real difference, since the dashboard still isn't live, but I like knowing a service can run on its own before I move on to the next thing. My wish list before the upgrade was just the dashboard and single sign-on, but with that much headroom it grew: a replacement for Google Timeline, a finance tracker of my own (the one I currently pay for turned out to be pretty fragile when it came to data retention), and a replacement for Google Analytics and Simple Analytics.

The Timeline replacement was the one I cared about most, because Google Timeline had lost a whole month of my location data for no apparent reason. The backup overwrites itself every day, so by the time I noticed the data was gone, there was nothing left to restore from. A four-week black hole in my own movements bothered me more than it probably should have, so I rebuilt a lot of it from the Samsung Health app. It was a lot of work, but it's done, and I can now switch Timeline off and keep all that sweet data on my own private cloud.

Once the memory arrived, one big day saw several things go live at once: my own analytics tool (replacing Google Analytics and Simple Analytics), a self-hosted map lookup service (replacing three different paid ones that kept failing or hitting limits), and the finance tracker.

The single sign-on system was the last to go live, and it turned out to be far less scary than I thought it would be. The point is that it now serves as the authentication layer for every service on the NAS, which is great in practice. Everything lives under the same internal domain, so my password manager lists all of it, and finding the right login used to mean 30 seconds of scrolling. That's not much of a problem for the internet at large, but it gets annoying internally. Think of having 20 Google accounts where the only way to tell them apart is the name you gave them. Now I press the "Sign in with..." button we all know and love, and I'm in. It's up and running on a couple of services so far.

That said, my issues with Microsoft's personal account SSO system (which needs to be banned) have left me with a healthy distrust of any SSO platform. It is ultimately a single point of failure: if the app falls over, it takes everything it's protecting down with it. Even though I'm in control of the entire thing, I would still rather not leave it to chance, so there's a fallback: separate logins on a separate local domain, and if that fails too, there's always the local IP addresses.

In films this month, I set a new personal record with 21 films watched, the most I've watched in a single month so far, bringing the running total to 148. The month opened with a rewatch of De Gaulle: Résistance on the 1st, followed by De Gaulle: Liberté on the 20th, which wrapped up that two-parter and was somehow even better than the first. Odeon has been running the Hunger Games franchise weekly, so I've been going along: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay – Part 1, with Mockingjay – Part 2 this coming Wednesday 7th October. It's all in preparation for the new one coming out in November, and beyond the prequel I'm going in pretty much blind. Resident Evil was a highlight too: tense enough to leave me a little stressed out, with Austin Abrams carrying it so well that I felt for him the entire time, and a slow, methodical reveal of the monsters that made it feel like we were all experiencing it for the first time. It gave me Evil Dead Rise energy in how the creatures were done, and it's great to finally get a Resident Evil movie that's much closer to what the games offer. And then there's Avengers: Endgame, a rewatch that reminded me it's lightning in a bottle, probably the most human, grounded, and fantastical thing Marvel has ever made. Doomsday tickets are on sale now, and in another timeline, I would have pounced on them. Not this time, I don't have faith they can reach the level that Endgame was.

In theatre, I went to watch Arcadia again because I saw that it has a different home now at the Duke of York's Theatre. I had to experience it again without the strained neck and prolonged standing I had to endure during my first experience of it (this time with an actual seat). It was a great time with the characters again, especially Thomasina, an absolutely brilliant girl ahead of her time, whose life was cut too short. I do find stories like Arcadia fascinating because the way they are so upfront with each other is not something that would really happen today, but on the other hand it is also a play that needs to get its message across as clearly as possible within the constraints of time. Would I go and watch it again in the future? Absolutely yes!!!

In books, this month, there was only Dungeon Crawler Carl book five, The Butcher's Masquerade by Matt Dinniman, which was quite the explosive action with a god getting inflicted with "Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea" which is as bad as it sounds, but couldn't have happened to a worse person. It ended in quite the shower of literal blood and gore, skipping the 7th floor straight to the 8th and a reveal that will be very much devastating down the line. I would have finished book six by now if I hadn't lost one of my earbuds in the car park, but I can't use that as an excuse forever.

In music, this month was dominated by Westlife and Backstreet Boys, mainly because they accompanied me throughout the ride to Brighton, and to be honest I have very much missed listening to them, so it's nice to finally obsess over them again. As for the top album, that goes to Battlefield 1 (Original Soundtrack) by Johan Söderqvist, with 77 plays. The game is set in WWI, but the soundtrack is fantastic and fits the WWI and WWII era so well that the De Gaulle screenings sent me straight back to it.

The planned theatre trip is to Oh, Mary!, which I have always wanted to see because it starred Catherine Tate, emphasis on "starred", but I am sure it will be great regardless. As for movies, the main one is Digger, which I have seen already and (spoilers!) is fantastic. Uprising, which stars Andrew Garfield, looks like it will be amazing, and there's something about Wildwood that I think will blow me away.

On the lab front, the dashboard is next. It's a huge job, but it should mean I notice a quietly broken service within a day instead of a week. After that, it's a case of moving more of the NAS's services behind the single sign-on, one at a time. I also need to properly plan out the full Forgejo migration, which is not going to be easy and will break a few things, but sometimes something needs to break in order to build it back better.

This is the ninth entry in Mo'menths. October follows. You will be upgraded!