January 21, 2026: Ice Cream Success at Home

Mostly just a work day. More work on getting my storage project working. Always the first stage goes so far then fixing the little problems takes forever. Project name is currently Freehold, but I think it needs to be like Freehold Cloud or Freehold Storage.

As always, ended up being a decently busy day, but not terribly. But due to lots of problems with my tooling today, it was not very productive.

I continue to be really happy with my as-of-yet unnamed Chat application. We’ve had it in production for an entire week now and it is really getting smooth. Having it installed on mobile is making all of the difference, we really are back to parity with RocketChat which we were generally happy with previously. That’s very excited to have one of my software platforms get put into production so quickly and to be working so well.

This afternoon after some toxic troll got a little too much community sympathy I decided that my time spent on the Expat forum on WhatsApp just wasn’t good for my mental health and while I definitely feel that a lot of people appreciate my time on there, the amount of time and work that it takes to keep the group moderated and to deal with the inevitable, and often paid, trolls who are sent to make it unpleasant just isn’t worth it. I hate that I can’t be there to assist people, but they can post on my YouTube channel and there are other people to help them. It’s unfortunate that a tiny few had to ruin it for everyone, but the other option is heavy moderation and that would make me feel bad and people to be upset with me. So the only good answer was to recuse myself. And much like leaving Facebook and Twitter, it’s a weight lifted.

Tonight Luciana and I finished making the peanut butter ice cream and jelly custard that we prepped last night. This is definitely our best success yet. We’ve made ice cream before but we weren’t too impressed. And we’ve gotten making frozen yoghurt (froyo) down pretty well and make that regularly. But the peanut butter ice cream was very good, better than any ice cream we’ve managed to buy in the country thus far. And the jelly custard was, acceptable but weird. Jelly is just a bizarre concept for ice cream and it didn’t work that well. When mixed with the peanut butter, it was okay. But I feel that the custard aspect of it was very good. The texture was excellent. I want to try that with vanilla.

The girls played Hades (Liesl) and Animal Crossing (Luciana) while I did some work late night on Freehold before finally going to bed around one in the morning.