Published: February 22, 2026 at 02:45 AM
Tags: fromgravelhill, blog, audio-archive, tech, website-updates, hymnbook, grief, projects
It feels like the gap between posts has become the rule instead of the exception. I keep telling myself I’ll “write something soon,” and then a few more weeks quietly go by while life chugs on in the background.
Still, even in the quiet, a lot has been happening, just not always the kind of thing that looks exciting on paper.
When the Tape Deck Starts Dragging
Most of my recent “excitement” has involved a cassette player and a lot of rewinding.
For quite a while I’d been using a little cassette deck to digitize ministry recordings. At first everything seemed fine. Then I started noticing that some of the newer recordings sounded deeper, like everyone had suddenly developed a cold and slowed down half a step.
At first I blamed the tapes themselves. They’re old, well-used, and not always stored in ideal conditions. Stretching and wear are expected. But after a while it became obvious something else was going on. The pattern was too consistent.
Eventually I realised the problem wasn’t the tapes, it was the player. The motor had started to slow down, just enough to drop the pitch and drag the tempo. If you didn’t know the voices well you might not notice, but if you do, it feels wrong immediately.
So, I ended up ordering a new cassette player. It cost more than I really wanted to spend, but so far it’s working properly. Between the hardware, the software, and the hosting, this whole digitizing project is not cheap, but it really is a labour of love. The thought of preserving these messages for future use makes the receipts a bit easier to swallow.
The process itself is still slow. I need to be nearby while a tape runs, in case it chews, jams, or suddenly squeals. And the laptop doing the recording is the same one I need for other things, including…
VHS, Gigabytes, and the Coming Hard Drive Shortage
Digitizing VHS has been going about as well as one can expect when dealing with aging plastic and magnetic tape. The biggest surprise has been the file sizes. Some of these recordings are huge. A single tape can turn into a 24 gigabyte, or larger, file without trying.
I can see a new hard drive looming on the horizon. Not a fancy “nice-to-have” one, more the “if you don’t get this, the project stops” type.
With that in mind, I’ve been doing some early spring cleaning across the drives I already own. Some files are easy to delete: things that will never be used again and are easy to replace if needed. A few old shows and movies are on the “watch and delete” list.
Then there’s the third category: semi-rare things. Those I’ve been slowly uploading to archive.org. I’ve grown pretty fond of that site, it feels like a safe place to tuck away odds and ends that might be valuable to someone down the road, even if that “someone” is mostly me.
The big catch, of course, is my home internet. If you ever want to know how bad your upload speed really is, just try pushing dozens of gigabytes online. There’s a higher tier available from my provider, but the cost jump doesn’t quite feel justified for the small bump in speed. So for now, I wait, watch the progress bars crawl, and wonder why we can’t get decent upload speeds in 2026 without selling a kidney.
At last count I’m sitting on roughly 30 terabytes of assorted files across several external drives. Sifting through it all is slow work. Some things are quick decisions, others I have to think about. And then there’s one drive I won’t touch at all.
The Hard Drive I Won’t Clean
One of those external drives is, for now, completely off limits.
It’s full of shows that Emily used to go back to over and over again. They were her comfort watches, something to have on in the background while she worked on crafts or just needed noise in the room.
I don’t watch them myself. They’re not “my” shows in that sense. And yet, even three years later, the idea of wiping that drive clean feels wrong. I can sort and reorganize every other piece of storage I own, but that one stays as it is.
I’m sure there are proper psychological explanations for all of this, but for now I’m not especially interested in dissecting it. That little block of plastic and circuitry gets to sit on the shelf as it is. Not everything needs to be optimized.
An Office Stuck Between Mess and Order
Speaking of things that aren’t optimized: the office.
I keep trying to get that room to a point where it’s actually usable, and I keep stalling. The main sticking point is the books. I need to decide whether to do the job properly, pull everything off the shelves, reorganize from scratch, and make it all make sense, or to take the lazy route and just wedge the newer books into any open space I can find.
One option is quick but ugly. The other looks better but takes time and energy. You can probably guess which option my brain prefers and which one it knows is right. The result is a kind of stalemate where nothing moves at all.
The good news is that the computer parts situation is slowly improving. With the exception of my main machines and one box I’m still trying to resurrect, I’ve decided that most of the older pieces need to go. A lot of it is badly outdated at this point. If a motherboard has survived multiple complete waves of hardware generations, I probably don’t need it “just in case.”
Now I just have to actually follow through and get rid of it instead of letting it sit in a bin for another year.
A Simple Site for a Faraway Place
On the more encouraging side, there have been a few smaller digital projects that remind me why I enjoy all this in the first place.
One of them is a simple website I put together for the parents of a friend/acquaintance from the Gospel Hall. They’re missionaries up in Pond Inlet, in the far north of Canada. He wanted a small site he could link to using a QR code on verse images he plans to distribute.
So I put together a clean little page: some scriptures, short explanations, and his photography of the north, stark, beautiful, and different from anything I see here on the Island.
You can see it here if you’re curious:
https://pondinletgospel.github.io/
Nothing fancy, just a quiet corner of the internet pointing to the Lord in a place where daylight, weather, and daily life look very different from mine.
Wrestling with Links and Themes on the Gospel Site
The main Gospel site - https://gospel.fromgravelhill.ca/ - has also seen some behind-the-scenes work.
I realised that the way I had originally set up links meant the categories were being pulled directly into the URLs. That didn’t seem like a problem at first, but now that I’ve been adding more categories to make it easier to search for messages by speaker, some of those links had become monstrous. Long, unwieldy, and not exactly user-friendly.
So I’ve been reworking things: stripping the categories out of the URLs, adding clearer slugs, and then going back to repair links that were already shared in different places. Not the most thrilling job in the world, but necessary if I want the site to be usable long-term.
On top of that, I think I’ve finally settled on a theme I want to start moving the site over to. It’s not a perfect match to what I picture in my head, but I suspect it’ll be easier to customise into what I want than the design I’m using now.
I’d love to say I’m excited about diving into the work of rebuilding the look and structure of the site. In reality, I’m more “quietly resigned” about it. I do want the site to look and function better; I’m just not particularly eager for the hours of testing, tweaking, and breaking things that come with the change.
But it needs to be done, so eventually I’ll roll up my sleeves and get into it.
Dusting Off the Hymn Book Project
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I also opened up the old project for a hymn book site.
Last year I had built a first version that technically “worked” but never felt right. It functioned, kind of, but it wasn’t smooth or pleasant to use. I knew it needed to be rethought, and instead of tackling that at the time, I quietly let it drift into the background.
Recently I decided to start over from the ground up: new layout, new way of handling the text, new approach to how a user would move through the hymns. I haven’t pushed anything public yet, this is mostly me experimenting to see if I can get the structure and the feel where I want it.
If it turns into something useful for others, great. For now, it’s more of a personal challenge: “Can I build this properly this time?”
The Usual Ending: Half a Memory, Half a Promise
I’m sure there are other things I could write about, bits of life, conversations, small answers to prayer, but this is what comes to mind tonight.
Once again I’ve waited so long between posts that I’ve likely forgotten half of what would have been worth recording. By the time I sit down to type, the details start to blur and I end up rushing past things that probably deserve more space.
Maybe one of these days I’ll get better at this, at jotting things down while they’re still fresh instead of letting weeks stack up behind me. Maybe someone will give me the extra nudge I need. Or maybe it’ll continue on like this: occasional long updates scattered between stretches of silence.
Either way, even if I’m the only one who ever reads these entries, it still feels worth pressing “publish.” It’s a record of where the Lord has me, surrounded by tapes and drives, half-sorted offices, small websites, and bigger feelings than I always know how to handle, and somehow still carried along by His grace in the middle of it all.