I Still Use This Website

Yet another large gap in my posts, and the only answer I can provide to you is lack of time and motivation to do anything about it. However, I have told myself that I should hold myself accountable for posting and doing research on the things that I love. If some of that becomes interesting enough to put on this site, then I can do that! Maybe, just maybe, I could get myself to setup an account on https://lobste.rs/ and post there!

With all of this thinking, I put together some goals to hit that will further my professional soft skills and get me active in the open-source community. If I wanted my dream job of working for a company that was truly focusing on finding ways to combat climate change, save our various indigenous wildlife and people, or provide for those who cannot provide for themselves…then I need to think outside of the box on putting myself out there.

The Plan

Weekly Posts on Productivity/Finds/NixOS

Distro hopping is one of my worst hobbies, and has actually prevented me from working on things like my github projects and this website. When Pop!OS Cosmic Alpha was available to the public, I jumped on to test it out. As expected, it was really buggy and I could not use it as a main driver. I was using Ubuntu 24.04 at the same time as well, but that too seemed to have too many issues (I had some serious performance issues just using Nautilus). Not to mention, my Lemur’s wifi card has been flakey since I bought it, and no, I never replaced it. Why? because some distros work just fine with the card. Ubuntu, on the other hand, never liked my wifi card.

So, I didn’t want to go with the older Pop!OS, I considered Fedora, but I really started to fall in love with KDE while using my SteamDeck in desktop mode. Therefore, I looked at NixOS again and….went right back into it. As of posting, I am happily back on NixOS.

The point of this goal is to write posts on things that I found interesting for the week. This could be apps, pieces of news and my thoughts on it, or maybe a tool/thing I wrote that could help someone out there. I told myself the post does not need to be super dense, but to avoid fluff and be more to the point. And links, lots of links.

Contribute to Open Source

This is a loaded goal as there are several ways I could contribute to a project. I could provide professional advice on database structure and design, help write queries, and even write playbooks/terraform modules if needed.

Additionally, I could contribute by doing something completely different from my professional work. I have been enjoying getting more involved in devops related work, especially IaC and configuration management. This also includes writing more python scripts and applications to help with random tasks.

Either way, I need to start committing things to other public repos (other than mine). I have a few in mind, so that’s good.

Post on Projects

Since moving to Idaho, I have not had a chance to really work on projects. My weather stations are up and running, and I really want to get to building a dashboard for aggregating the data from both of them. In that same area, I have ideas on getting more home automation setup and get ADS-B radar up to start tracking flights that come through Boise (and over my house!)

Document my “make cool stuff” adventures

I do not think I need to really talk much about this other than I have so many hobbies that I should just document my journey. Heck, I am considering getting a GoPro and taking that with me on my trail runs.

Accountability and End of Post

One of the first things I want to work on is documenting and organizing my thoughts on what to do first. Which, ironically, means trying out various productivity apps and note taking apps. Luckily, these are some of my favorite apps to test out and see how it stands against my ADHD brain. You might be hearing alot of logseq from me in the coming posts.

Until next time–