Enhancements 1.0
July 2026, halfway through the year, and I’ve recently made some incremental quality of life improvements in my daily life.
First, on the topic of health and habits, I’ve always had an incredibly difficult time sleeping. Typically, I need complete silence and darkness to sleep, and I’ve frequently woken up throughout the night and never quite hit the REM stage. Throughout the last few years I’ve found that taping up all the LEDs in my room, closing all blinds and curtains, alongside using Nature Made Melatonin Pills at 3mg and 5mg dosages (deliberately not using melatonin gummies), combined with my 10mg allergy medication, which has an over the counter equivalent of Zyrtec, has occasionally provided me with a restful sleep, but this would only be about four days of the week.
A few weekends ago, one of my close friends recommended ZzzQuil Sleep Nasal Strips to me, and I’ve combined them with using a saline nasal spray before bed, in addition to the previously mentioned methods, and it’s proved quite helpful. Out of the last seven days, I only had one day of restless sleep.
Secondly, I set up a Jellyfin Media server, after finding out that my living room’s Samsung TV’s app store has recently added Jellyfin as an app available for download. Currently, it serves as a local network stream of my media collection from my external HDD connected to my bedroom desktop to the Samsung TV in the living room.
Future plans for this server involve adding the ability to directly find any media available online via an embedded ‘internet search’ function, and then from there setting up some way to access this server online from anywhere that can support running the Jellyfin application.
Additionally, I’ll need to move this server off my external HDD and onto a dedicated server or computer.
The last update is on the gaming side. Over the previous weekend, I opened up a dedicated online server for DayZ utilizing the GTX Gaming hosting service. While yes, I am capable of configuring and self-hosting the server myself on a second device, which I do already possess, I know for a fact that the trade-offs are not worth it. The GTX server is just over ten USD per month, which in my opinion is a extremely fair price, and if I were to self-host, the cost I would pay in electricity, not to mention the noise and heat the server would generate would not only outweigh the cost of the GTX hosting, but would also take a toll on my sleep once again due to the server’s location in my bedroom.
The gameplay experience on the server has been a ton of fun. It’s currently a private passworded server for my friends, averaging between two and eight players, on a map called Melkart (a reimagining of the real-life Block Island, in Rhode Island). The playable area is 25 km² and has one major city, one major airfield, six military bases, three towns, and several small civilian and military encampments. It’s a good enough size to not always feel threatened, but a small enough size to still have encounters with other players. I’m still making small configurations to the server files to tweak the experience to be more enjoyable for a small group, but overall, it’s been a really pleasant, refreshing experience.
Until next time…
