It is amazingly sunny and cold here 
today. I walked down to the store at 
lunch. The sun was great and the wind 
was ... invigorating. I used my hood 
on the way home.

I haven't spent enough time outside 
this year, so I'm making an effort to 
correct that. There are two shopping 
areas within a 15-minute walk from my 
house, so I've been attempting to 
avoid taking the car. So far, I'm at 
the three-day mark. It's easy when 
it's so beautiful outside and there's 
not much snow on the ground. We'll see 
how it goes if the weather takes a 
turn for the worse.

The XMPP server has been back up since 
Friday. I did a bunch of tests over 
the first couple of days -- and 
experimented with different 
configurations -- so there were 
frequent restarts. One of the things I 
was toying with was file transfers. If 
anyone wants them activated, I'll do 
so, since the server has a lot of 
unused bandwidth. It's 500GB/month and 
I don't recall ever using more than 
about 2% of that with the old XMPP 
server, even when we had Shizaru on 
it, serving the www pages for 
circumlunar.space.

I've also been considering setting up 
a very small private social network 
for my family. Epicyon looks 
interesting, but Alex Schroeder 
reported heavy CPU use with it[1]. I 
guess Pleroma would be the next 
alternative. Something light would be 
best. If anyone's got any 
recommendations, feel free to send 
them my way.


[1] see the comments section on the 
following page:
https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2019-11-09_Epicyon_needs_Python_3.6_which_needs_a_Debian_upgrade