My Conscious Stream

2025 mid-year update

2025-07-01T00:00:00Z

I really can’t believe I haven’t blogged in roughly six months. Then again, I know what I’ve been dealing with so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s been a lot. Many, many changes. I think they’re for the better but time will tell.

Separated and living alone

The sub-title says it all. My wife of 16.5 years and I are separated.

Folks who know us seem surprised. And why not? To outsiders, we seemed happy and content. But we weren’t. We’ve been roommates at best for several years now. And truly happy? No. Neither of us were. We had been going through motions just getting through our days rather than actually living life together to its fullest.

So in April, we made the mutual decision to part ways amicably.

I won’t get into blame because I think that’s shared 50/50. My wife may disagree with that, and that’s her choice. I can only speak for myself: I could have done better.

Regardless, the end result is that we’re separated, now living in two apartments.

Mine is only a mile from our current house; hers is an hour away, near my step-daughter, her husband and their baby. That’s where she wants to be, and I respect that.

We quickly finished up some home projects in May and put the house up for sale by June 1 for nearly double what we paid for it in 2016. Three days later we had multiple offers over the asking price.

Since accepting one of those offers we’ve been dealing with seller requests: a new HVAC system and hot water heater for example. We’ve had to manage paperwork in anticipation for the settlement later this month. And we’ve had to clean out all of our belongings from the house.

We’re in the home stretch of that process now. Both of us have everything we wanted from the house in our respective apartments.

She has a storage facility for some of her belongings. I’m a minimalist, so I don’t. That’s not a judgement, just a fact. She and I are different people with different lifestyles and expectations; nothing wrong with that.

Less is definitely more… for me

My apartment is fantastic and moving in gave me a chance to determine what I truly need. Out of the furniture and things I took from the house, I decided to take:

My 20 year old leather recliner and an end table I use next to it
The mattress I’ve been sleeping on; no bed frame as I don’t want/need one
A small desk and office chair to use for my desktop computer
A dresser with 3 drawers for my socks, underwear, shorts, and sweatpants
My dozen or so outfits hanging in the closet
A pair each of beer glasses, rocks glasses and coffee mugs

I took more small, personal items of course, but that’s the bulk of it, save for two outdoor chairs I use on my new porch. Other than those chairs and my recliner, I moved slowly over the month of June using my car.

I spent roughly $1,000 to add a new loveseat, TV stand and a pair of barstools. Basically, just things I thought I’d need. I also dropped $170 or so on a minimal set of pots and pans because my place has an induction cooktop.

I purchased plates / bowls and new kitchen utensils. Only 4 of each because… it’s just me.

I run my dishwasher once every 4 or 5 days. I do my laundry once a week. I hit the grocery store (a mile away) daily for dinner. I might have 1,000 square feet of living space, which is plenty. Life is simple. And I’m happy here.

Work is… the same, mostly

I’m still working at Wawa, which is 1.4 miles from the apartment. Not that much farther than the house was, which is 1.2 miles from Wawa. I’m consistently getting 32 hours a week, which means I should be eligible for benefits in October. My wife is graciously covering my healthcare until then.

With a simpler, more solitary life, I do have more free time. Thankfully, I have a single article freelance gig in progress.

I’ll share more detail once that effort nears a conclusion. I couldn’t pass it up because it pays almost two months rent. And it’s on a topic that I enjoy researching.

I also have the framework for a new content property fleshed out. It would be a passion project but it could also be something that provides enough income to leave Wawa in the future.

I don’t need to make six figures to pay my bills and be happy. I just need enough… and that number is relatively meager, not to mention attainable with the new content idea.

First I need to get through the home settlement and distribution of joint assets in the coming weeks. Then I can refocus on my content ideas.

A new beginning

I look at this situation as an opportunity, not a setback. It’s not something I expected, of course. I’ll roll with it, like I always do with any of life’s challenges, making the best of it.

And I appreciate the changes I’ve already made over the last five years: minimalism and Stoic philosophy are the bedrock of my daily life. Without them, I think I’d be ill-equipped to handle this new beginning.

Instead, I’m looking forward to what the next six months bring me!

Week in review - Jan. 12, 2025

2025-01-12T00:00:00Z

A downsized iPad Pro experiment

I’ve been using a 5th generation iPad Pro 12.9 tablet with keyboard for nearly four years. It’s still a great device but the battery has degraded quite a bit. That’s to be expected. I considered getting a new battery for it, but realized this was an opportunity for change.

So I traded in the big iPad Pro 12.9 with M1 chip and bought the latest iPad Pro with an M4 chip. Not the 13-inch one though. I downsized to the 11-inch iPad Pro.

Here’s my thought process. While I have a capable laptop, I tend to use the big iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard for everyday computer tasks. By that I mean email, calendar management, personal finance applications and general web browsing, to name a few. I’m writing this very post on the large old iPad, for example. So it’s a great casual computer for me.

I also watch a lot of video content on the iPad and it’s an outstanding experience. Between the bright large display and the quad speakers, I thoroughly enjoy watching live sports, streamed movies and TV shows, and YouTube videos on it. In fact, even though we have some great 4K TVs in the house, I would estimate that 98% of my video consumption is on the iPad. Not the television sets.

Why then downsize to the 11-inch iPad Pro?

While the large iPad is great as that casual computer and video consumption, it’s bulky as a tablet. When I don’t need a keyboard, I want something smaller that’s more comfortable to hold, thrown in a bag, etc…

The iPad mini is a good candidate for my “tablet mode” but it’s not great for the “casual computer” use. The larger iPad Pro is great for the latter, but pushes beyong the limits for the former. Hence: I’m trying to meet those two use cases in the middle with the 11-inch iPad Pro.

In just 24 hours with the new device, I’m confident that tablet mode is a win here. I’ve used the new slate all around the house and already find it much more portable and “tablet-like” without the keyboard. I can’t speak to the casual compute scenario because my local Apple Store didn’t have the matching Magic Keyboar for iPad Pro 11 in stock. That arrives in a few days, when I can begin to test it out.

One last note on why I spent more money than simply replacing the battery on the old iPad Pro 12.9. Apple offered me $460 for the old device to offset the cost of the new one. That’s more than half the purchase price on the new iPad Pro 11, which adds the tandem OLED display (very nice!), the M4 chip upgrade and of course, a brand new battery.

Lots of tech work stacking up

Due to work, I didn’t get much done on my technical projects and classwork this week. I did start a new folder for my personal journal / second brain thanks to the new year. Now I can write my entries for 2025 and have them in the proper place on the site.

I also installed Plex on the homelab server even though I don’t have much physical media to serve there. Still, I did watch some Plex content this week and came away impressed.

Grandbaby update

Many of you have offered support for us as our granddaughter Melani was born at 33 weeks old earlier this month. For that I thank you!

Melani is still in the NIC unit where she’ll likely stay for another 3-5 weeks. However, she’s doing great, as are her parents.
She told me to tell you all that she says “Hi!”

✌🏼

Week in review - Dec. 29, 2024

2024-12-29T00:00:00Z

Low productivity challenges

I missed updating my daily journal several times this past week. All of the non-journal days were those I worked 8 hour shifts. I’ve just been too tired to sit and write.

Something has to change, so I’ve started some new efforts.

First, I’m trying to get to sleep a little earlier. I often get up at 3:45am or 4:45am, depending on my work shift. So I’m going to be a good 30 to 60 minutes earlier than I used to.

Second, my lack of energy probably has much to do with a lack of true exercise. Sure, I walk 5 to 8 miles per shift and that’s good. But I need to do some actual, specific exercise too. Today I put in a 2 mile mix of walking and running on the treadmill, for example.

Finally, I have to update my locally hosted web app that interacts with the Markdown files in my journal / second brain. I haven’t yet deployed it to a server I can reach from anywhere; once I do, I can journal a bit during my 30 minute break at work and other free times throughout the day.

Lots of reading this week

After stumbling on to the entire 51 volume Harvard Classics for $1.99 in Kindle format, I’ve been devouring Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. It happens to be the first book in the volumes and I’ve learned so much this week.

Aside from being very interesting in general, I’m already realizing how much of Franklin’s early life led him to appreciate frugality. This isn’t a massive revelation, of course. However, it ties in nicely to the minimalism approach I use in my life.

Also, I found that I spent around an hour reading over that single cup of coffee. This might be a smart reading strategy on days I’m not working the morning shift: Read over that first cup of coffee.

A de-Googled phone (again)

About two years ago, I tried some secure, private de-Googled phones but I didn’t break away from my iPhone at the time. This week, I decided to give this solution another look.

I have a Pixel 7 that’s still running CalyxOS, which doesn’t have any of Google’s proprietary software. Yet I can still install anything from the Google Play Store (anonymously) and all of the apps I need do work.

That includes my banking apps as well as the Tesla app.

What’s kept me around on iOS is the Apple Watch. I’m not 100% sure I need the Apple Watch but if I keep it, I need an iPhone. Something for me to ponder in the coming weeks.

AI on the homelab?

I watched this great hands on video of the new $249 Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano Super and I wonder if there’s a place for this low-powered AI-centric hardware in my homelab.

Currently, I run Ollama in Linux for any AI projects but… the only device powerful enough to do so is my Lenovo gaming laptop with its Nvidia RTX 4060 mobile GPU. For $249, the Nvidia solution could be accessed from my homelab for any AI apps or projects at any time. 🤔

A Raspberry Pi could work for this but it would only generate about one token per second. The Jetson returns around 21 tokens per second, which is more than fast enough for tinkering.

There are downsides though: With only 8 GB of memory, I’d likely be limited to models with around 2B parameters. I have more RAM in the Lenovo (both dedicated and VRAM).

Still for the kinds of projects I’d do, this limitation would be acceptable. And the Jetson runs on 15W of power. The RTX 4060 in my Lenovo laptop can use up to 100W of power by itself, not including the rest of the components.

Some interesting videos I watched this week

Don’t ask why but I was on a personal flight vehicle kick.

Flying to In-N-Out on my paramotor Not only does this guy fly himself over the Arizona desert to a burger joint, but he EATS his meal while flying home! It would be neat to try one of these vehicles as they’re not crazy expensive (you can get a decent one for around five grand). But I’d never have a meal up in the air.

Flying around on my human drone Another wild video with an impressive electric-powered drone for transportation. Unfortunately, this one will set you back around $50k. Still, I’m impressed with these early personal flying machines.

Flying an eVTOL for the first time Now we’re entering into semi-practical toys for the rich because this thing will cost you around $125k. But again, it’s incredible to watch personal transportation above the ground. Would love to get in one of these although I’d probably want one of my own (even though I can’t afford it, don’t think it’s practical and don’t live in an area I could readily use it.)

Ideas, projects and to-dos

[ ] Work on Wishlist application
[ ] Investigate the difference between notes and articles using Eleventy Notes to see if this can all be tied together.
[ ] Draft out a simple web clipping service I can create and self host to save thoughts to this Github repo
[ ] Modify web app for note capture to save notes in a central folder.
[ ] Test Calibre on the home server

Week in review - Dec. 22, 2024

2024-12-22T00:00:00Z

A wild week

To say this was a crazy, stressful week would be an understatement. Aside from working 36 hours, which kept my tinkering time to a minimum, we’re dealing with a medical challenge. I found out back in June that I’d be a grandfather for the first time. My step-daughter Sydney is due in late February early March. Only nobody told the baby.

Sydney’s been in the hospital since Monday with bad contractions. With the baby only around 31 or so weeks, it’s obviously early. So the hospital is monitoring both mother and daughter in a room next door to the NIC unit. Everyone is trying to hold off on the delivery but Sydney will be in the hospital until she delivers. That could be in hours, days or weeks.

My wife has been traveling back and forth to the hospital every other day or so this week, staying over a few times. Meanwhile, I’ve been working my shifts, keeping up to date on the situation and taking care of the cat and dog.

Needless to say, everyone’s stress levels are relatively high. This is where my Stoic adoption comes in handy: Worrying only about what I can control. Right now, it’s not much, so I’m just trying to keep everyone steady and positive.

Another app for the homelab server

Today I found an amazing deal on the 51 volume Harvard Classics series for $1.99 in Amazon Kindle format. These books in hardcover cost nearly $1,400 and are some of the best titles ever written in the humanities. That led me to getting my e-Books on the homelab server.

A quick search told me that there’s a Docker image for Calibre, the fantastic open-source e-book management software. With it, I should be able to store all of my e-books locally and pull them to any of my devices as needed. I’ve only just installed the Docker image and haven’t used it yet, so stay tuned for more about using Calibre on a home server.

Mods for The Witcher 3 and my mechanical keyboard

I did have time to manage two modifications this week. One is for software and one is for hardware.

I found a nearly 12 GB set of modifications for The Witcher 3 this week and after installing them, the game looks on par with any modern AAA title. There are updated textures throughout the game, improved NPC renders, better foliage rendering, lighting effects and much, much more.

I decided to reduce the sound of my mechanical keyboard using some thin, plastic packing foam layers this week too. It only took the removal of four screws to take my Ducky keyboard apart and remove the deck. Then it was just a matter of cutting three of the foam sheets and trimming a hole for the wire connecting the PCB and keyboard deck.

I haven’t trimmed the pieces to fully fit within the keyboard yet, mainly because I may add another layer or two. While it doesn’t look good, the keyboard sounds much better!

One other small project I tackled is also keyboard related. But not for the mechanical keyboard. I run Arch Linux (…BTW) on my Dell XPS 15 and it has a fingerprint scanner in the power button. That feature doesn’t work out of the box with Arch though. By installing the fprint package and modifying some configuration files I was able to get the sensor working for basic system authentication.

I’ve enrolled a finger and can log in to Linux with a touch but I don’t yet have it working system wide, such as for passwords. That will will take a little more effort, which I hope to put in this coming week.

Some great video content I enjoyed this week:

Since I had some time to sit around in a quiet house this week, I did catch some good videos. Here’s a sampling:

Why Saudi Arabia is building a $1T city in the desert The Neom project has been in development for a few years now, so it’s interesting to see the progress. I didn’t realize they work on this 7x24. Also good to see perspective from the local nomadic tribes.
Why I disappeared I’ve always enjoyed Matt D’Avella’s take on minimalism and productivity. Then the videos stopped earlier this year. Matt explains why and I can certainly sympathize with his reasons of burnout after writing nearly 10,000 blog posts in 7 years some time ago.
You need to quit these 14 habits in 2025 (from the Stoics) Ryan Holiday is my go-to guy for learning about Stoicism. And this list of 14 habits to break is a good one. I’m already on track with some of them but I have plenty of room for improvement in 2025.
Sony’s breakthrough color TV I can’t not watch a good retro gadget or device video. So this detailed history of color TV development in general, and Sony’s creation of the Trinitron was superb. There are days I wish I could find an old Trinitron in good shape at a reasonable price.

Ideas, projects and to-dos

[ ] Work on Wishlist application
[ ] Investigage the difference between notes and articles using Eleventy Notes to see if this can all be tied together.
[ ] Draft out a simple web clipping service I can create and self host to save thoughts to this Github repo
[ ] Modify web app for note capture to save notes in a central folder.
[ ] Test Calibre on the home server

Week in review - Dec. 15, 2024

2024-12-15T00:00:00Z

Back to a regular work schedule

After two full weeks off, I went back for 32 hours this week. That really boosts my step count as I average between 4.5 and 7 miles of walking during a shift. But it also tires me out. I come home at 1pm, 2pm, or in one case, 4pm, after work and have zero energy to do the things I want to do.

I’m not sure how to mitigate this. Is it afternoon coffee? A short, 90 minute after work nap and hope for enough of a recharge to tinker? I don’t know the answer but I have to find one.

Making the second brain more portable

I’m thrilled with the value I’m getting from journaling (mostly) daily on my personal site. Yes, it’s now my personal site as I switched from a Cloudflare development site to my own domain for hosting the second brain. Chalk up at least one “to do” item done this week. I still want to add long-form content to the mix so I have an all-in-one destination for my personal knowledge, journal entries and longform thoughts.

I also want a simple way to capture notes when away from my computer. My phone is the obvious choice here. So I resurrected some old code I put together last year for a Github CMS interface and hooked it up to my second brain site.

You can see the two test notes I created using this interface: They’re just text, converted to Markdown and sent to a specific folder in a Github repo for now. It’s ugly as sin but functionally it works as an MVP, or minimum viable product.

I do have to alter where I save the text notes because I just shipped them into the December folder of my Journal entries for testing. Thinking a “Notes” or “Inbox” folder to hold these is the way to go. So I’ll keep working on that this week.

Think I’ll call this small utility “GitDatNote”. 🤓

Replacing a wireless charging system

As a minimialist, I don’t buy much. Like, at all. However, the wireless charger for my Apple devices broke a few months ago. So after a little research, I dropped $60 on this ESR Qi2 3-in-1 device. And I love it.

You don’t see the phone in the above image for two reasons. First, I wanted to highlight the small fan holes on the charger, which quietly keep the phone cooler. This lets the Qi2 charging pad maintain its fastest wireless transfer rate. Second, I used my phone to take the photo. 😉

Aside from the fast, quiet phone charging, this model charges my AirPods Pro case and my Apple Watch. And there’s what might be the most interesting aspect of this charger. It has a USB-C port where the watch charging pad goes. Included in the package was a small charging pad with a male USB-C port that plugs into the main charger here. When traveling, I can take that part with me and plug it in to any USB-C port to charge my watch. Clever and useful!

I’m not functional with functional programming

After completing my Asteroids in Python assignment for class last week, I turned to the next lesson. It’s on Functional Programming (FP). And I get the overall concept of FP: Keeping data immutable.

Yet, for the first coding assignment, I’m struggling. The example code returns an error because it’s attempting to mutate a tuple in in Python and tuples are immutable.

I only spent about an hour on the assignment and it was frustrating. Any of my coding efforts to create and append to a new tuple have resulted in errors. Obviously, I’m not sure why, or I wouldn’t be writing about it. So my plan tomorrow is to tackle this again after taking some time off from the problem.

Ideas, Projects and upcoming To-Do’s:

[ ] Work on Wishlist application
[X] Move the second brain content to my personal domain.
[ ] Investigage the difference between notes and articles using Eleventy Notes to see if this can all be tied together.
[ ] Draft out a simple web clipping service I can create and self host)
[X] Start building a web app to save thoughts to this Github repo
[ ] Modify web app for note capture to save notes in a central folder.

Week in review - Dec. 8, 2024

2024-12-08T00:00:00Z

Back to UNRAID

Last week, I mentioned I was trying TrueNAS on my homelab server. However, I find the UI a bit cumbersome and (at times) non-intuitive. So it was back to UNRAID. For some reason, it took several attempts to get the server to boot from my UNRAID USB flash drive. Eventually I got it working. Sometimes I wish UNRAID would move away from the “run this system on a flash drive” approach.

In fact, I’d like to see all of the homelab / NAS server software step it up. Most consumers will never be able to get one of these systems working to their fullest potential. And I get why. Applications aren’t simple “one click” installs. Typically, you’re looking at a containerized solution, most often with Docker.

There’s no way my non-techie friends would understand the configuration options with Docker, no matter how good the accompanying documentation is. This market segment needs to do better to abstract as much of the complexities away to make true home server appliances that more people will buy and use.

OK, soapbox rant over. Let’s look at what I installed on my fresh UNRAID device:

SearXNG, a private meta-search engine with no tracking or ads.
Wallabag for web clippings and read-it-later links. I’m not sold on this one yet though.
Immich, a Google Photos replacement. I imported my nearly 25,000 images and videos from Google, without any isues.

I may try to code my own, simple read-it-later app, which would be good programming practice.

Asteroids in Python

Speaking of programming, I tackled the last bits of my current coding assignment for class. We’re re-creating a simplified version of the classic arcade game, Asteroids, using Python. Last week, I left off trying to figure out collision detection between player bullets and asteroids. That actually wasn’t difficult since I already had collision detection code for the player itself and asteroids.

Reusing the same function, but passing bullet objects, did the trick. And then it got difficult. Each of these collisions needed to split large or medium sized asteriods into a pair of smaller ones. A little math and a random number gives direction to the new asteroids. I got this working but each bullet hit was initially spawning bunches of new asteriods, not just two.
After 30 minutes of debugging, I realized I never removed the initial bullet, so it was continuing to hit the newly spawned asteroids, which… of course, generated even more of them!

Long story short, my assignment is complete! I really enjoyed this one as it was both fun and a great learning experience. Now I can check this one off from last week’s to-dos.

Obsidian, Github and my second brain

Also on my to-list last week was to investigate the use of Obsidian and Github for my new second brain. This is where I capture useful information for later reference. I’ve expanded the idea to include a daily journal. And this latter exercise has been quite helpful. I can easily refer back to the journal entries for this weekly review. I can keep track of my projects and include reference information to keep the project moving forward. And it gives me dedicated downtime each day to reflect on life.

Initially, I set this up using the 11ty static site generator. I’m also using this Eleventy Notes theme, which is highly customizable. 11ty uses Markdown files to create the static HTML pages. Obsidian also leans heavily on Markdown. So the installation of a Git plugin for Obisidian did the trick. All of my content is stored on Github but I now have Obsidian as a nicer front end to write.

I’ll continue to use this setup daily to see how well it works for me in the long run. I have the second brain site on a developent URL with Cloudflare at the moment. However, this week, I plan to move to my kctofel.com domain. I may even use it to publish articles like this, providing a one-stop destination for journal entries, second brain knowledge and (on the front page) blog posts. Adding that to my weekly to-do list now.

Ideas, Projects and upcoming To-Do’s:

[X] Switch homelab from TrueNas to Unraid mainly because I found Unraid easier to use and it offers more apps / containers.
[X] Finish Asteroids in Python
[ ] Work on Wishlist application
[X] Look into using Obsidian as the front end for blog posts going forward. Simple setup and explanation video here.
[ ] Move the second brain content to my personal domain.
[ ] Investigage the difference between notes and articles using Eleventy Notes to see if this can all be tied together.
[ ] Draft out a simple web clipping service I can create and self host)

Week in review - Nov. 30, 2024

2024-11-30T00:00:00Z

Back to blogging

For some reason, I haven’t felt like writing in a long time. In my head, I miss it. But in practice, I haven’t seem enthusiastic to actually write. I spent some time this past week thinking about why that is and came up with a few reasons.

I won’t get into them right now. Suffice it to say, I’m rethinking my tools, my workflows and how I spend my time.

During that process, I came up with “work in progress” approach to capture daily notes. Rather than commit to sharing useful bits from those daily writings, I’m trying a week ending summary; hence, this post. More to follow on the system as it evolves.

A deeper dive into Wordpress

This week started with a website that was down. Obviously, a plethora of sites go down on a regular basis even though that’s not what we want. The diffence in this particular instance? It was a website I helped implement for a neighbor.

I worked with a talented web designer, who is also a friend of this neighbor, to setup a low-cost Wordpress site back in July. My neighbor was paying around $300 a year for the site from a managed provider. I set up a $5 monthly Linode server and we made the switch.

Unfortunately, for some unknown reason, the entire MySQL database for the site was empty this week. Very strange! Working with backup data, we restored the site but not before I rebuilt everything from scratch on the server side.

I used Linode’s automated system to get Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS on the server but opted not to use the one-click Wordpress install as I did back in June. That meant manually installing and configuring Apache, PHP, MySQL, and then Wordpress. With the server and software working, we restored the Wordpress backup and tweaked a few minor anomolies. Lastly, I installed Certbot to secure a new SSL cert as the old one had expired anyway.

Long story short: It took about 6 hours to restore the site, but now I’m confident it’s running optimally. And just to be safe, we added Linode’s server backup service for $2 a month. Just in case.

Backing up my Linux systems

The site outage and restoration process got me thinking about my own personal systems. So I installed Timeshift on both my Linux laptop and my Linux desktop. This open source solution is now maintained by the Linux Mint folks as it is included with their distro. But anyone can use it.

Effectively, it captures periodic snapshots of my systems (even my Home directory if I want) in case I ever need to restore things. I like it so far but I do wish I could save the backups on my homelab server.

Unfortunately, Timeshift doesn’t support network drives. I’ll either use another file sync solution to offload the local backups to my homelab server or I’ll look into other solutions entirely. Either way, I have a minimal solution in place for now.

My personal search engine

Speaking of my homelab, I’ve been using TrueNas lately. It’s fine but I may switch back to Unraid. Regardless of that, I installed an instance of SearXNG, which is a private personal search engine.

Technically, SearXNG is a metasearch engine, capable of getting search results from over four dozen engines. When I search, for example, I’m getting consolidated, real time results from Google, Bing, Wikipedia and a few other places that I selected in the SearXNG configuration.

The best part? None of my search queries are associated with me, making this a lot more private. Big tech isn’t getting any personal data to create a profile on me.

Additionally, there are no ads or trackers in the results. When I search on my instance of SearXNG, my server makes API queries to the various engines and renders only the infomation I’m looking for.

I already have a domain for my homelab apps, so I set this up on a subdomain called “search”. I also configured a Cloudflare Tunnel so I can access my personal search engine from any device on any network.

A few friends and my son also use it; Cloudflare has a nice authentication process to limit users. I’d open it up publicly if I was running this in the cloud, but since it’s running at home, I’ve limited access.

Programming in Python

A few weeks go, I started an assigment at Boot.dev where I learn more about Python and back-end systems. This one is actually a fun one: Creating a simplified version of the classic Asteroids video game in Python!

I stepped away from this challenge for two weeks where I left off with decent progress. I had the player and random asteroids rendering at 60fps, for example. (The asteriods are just circles; remember this is a simplified version.)

Keyboard controls were working to rotate or move the player around. And I had collision detection between the player and asteroids implemented. When the player collides with any asteroid object, the game ends.

The next step, and where I picked up this week, was to implement bullets. It took longer than I expected but I did get it working on a basic level. Pressing the space bar shoots a bullet in the player facing direction. Holding the space bar shoots a stream of bullets, limited to one every 0.3 seconds.

With the holidays this week, that’s as far as I got. So bullets pass right through asteriods at the moment. Next step is to reuse the collision detection code between bullet objects and asteroid objects.

No-spend November

As part of my minimalism lifestyle, I decide to try not spending any discretionary income on new things.
I made it through this week, when I dropped $19.99 on a video game (mentioned below). As a result of this effort no new “things” came into my home this month so far. And our cash flow for November is more in the positive than it would have been otherwise.

Entertainment

Binged Season 2 of The Big Bang Theory. The cultural references in the early seasons are comical because the series started in the era of flip-phones, MySpace and early Twitter.
Played a bit of the original Assassin’s Creed: The Director’s Cut game. It took a while to get the controller setup working properly. Using x360ce did the trick.
Started reading “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte on my Onyx Boox Palma.
Enjoyed the holiday lights event at Longwood Gardens with the family.

Ideas, Projects and upcoming To-Do’s:

Switch homelab from TrueNas to Unraid mainly because I found Unraid easier to use and it offers more apps / containers.
Finish Asteroids in Python
Work on Wishlist application
Look into using Obsidian as the front end for blog posts going forward. Simple setup and explanation video here.

Watchy case and coding in C++

2024-09-12T00:00:00Z

As mentioned in my last post, I really like the Watchy DIY smartwatch. I still don’t think it’s a viable option for most consumers because it’s less of a product and more of a tinkering platform. Sure, it’s functional, but only for the basics. I also noted that I had a new case for the watch on order.

The $35 aluminum case arrived and it’s great. Not perfect, but still excellent. By swapping over to the new case, Watchy is much thinner and more comfortable.

Downsides? This case doesn’t protect the e-paper screen ribbon cable. And I also had to spring for a new watch band. The included Watchy case measures 24mm between the lugs. The new one is 22mm. That’s a small problem easily solved by the pair of 22mm bands I bought on Amazon for roughly $10.

There are aluminum Watchy cases that offer more screen protection. They cost $45, which is fine. I opted for the less expensive one because I’d be right back to a bulky watch case with the more protective options.

Armed (🤣) with a thinner smartwatch on my wrist I started tackling one the additional features I want from Watchy.

Namely, I want my daily step count data somewhere other than on the watch. Watchy has both WiFi and Bluetooth but there’s no companion phone app. Again, this is more of a DIY platform than a mass-market product.

Watchy already uses its WiFi connection to grab my local weather from OpenWeather. And I know that such connections can be used for other functions. I also know I need a place to store my daily step data. I decided to build that first.

So I spent about an hour or so coding up a local web server with NodeJS and Express. I then added a route that reads a basic JSON data file on the server; that file will (for now) keep an array of my daily steps. I seeded the data file with two step totals and then added some code to push a new daily step count to the array.

(Note that I’m building an MVP, or minimum viable product. Once the basic functionality is working, I’ll move the data from a file on the server to a small database, add data analysis / graphs, etc…)

Effectively, this is a very basic API with a PUT request to add any incoming daily step counts to the data file. It returns the data in JSON format to the web page for testing purposes. To test the API request, I used Postman to push a few random step values and verified the updated web page displaying the JSON data. Success!

So I now have an endpoint that Watchy can send my daily steps to over an HTTP PUT request. That means it’s time to hit the C++ code. Ugh.

I made some minimal code changes in the Watchy firmware building off two already existing bits of code:

Watchy already has code that runs at midnight to reset the step count. I’ll have Watchy first send my step count to the server at midnight and then reset the step count on the watch.
Watchy sends an HTTP GET request to OpenWeather, so I have a small sense of how an HTTP client works in C++.

Unfortunately, my initial efforts to have Watchy wake up its WiFi radio and send the step count via C++ haven’t gone well. I’ve only spent 30 minutes or so working on it but the code won’t compile. Can’t say I’m surprised since C++ is out of my comfort zone.

But I’m not giving up! Over the next few days, I’ll do some research and keep plugging away.

If I can get it working, I’ll then refine and refactor as needed on both the Watchy client side and on my server. And I’ll also move the server code either to my homelab or to a cheap cloud instance. Once all of that is complete, I’ll offer the code as open source to the Watchy community. 🤓

Hello Watchy

2024-08-28T00:00:00Z

Earlier this month, I mentioned that I ordered an original Pebble watch for $22 on eBay. The watch arrived in perfect condition, save for a dead battery. No problem! I’ll just spend $18 at iFixit for a replacement, I thought.

I got the new battery and attempted to solder it to the Pebble PCB but I ended up ruining the watch. It’s a shame, really.

After lamenting over my personal e-waste contribution, I decided to order a Watchy. It’s one of the few spiritual successors to the Pebble and costs around $60.

Watchy uses an ESP32 microprocessor and true e-paper display with a 200 x 200 resolution. It’s also a watch you put together yourself.

Best of all (at least to me) the replaceable battery plugs in directly to the board. 🤣

Once I connected the battery, the Watchy’s display fired right up, albeit in dark mode. You’ll notice next to the battery indicator, there’s a WiFi icon. Yes, the ESP32 has a WiFi radio. A Bluetooth one as well, but don’t get too excited about that. There’s no companion phone app to sync data or send notifications over Bluetooth. There’s no touch functionality nor a backlight either.

Again this is a DIY project so additional features and functionality are up to you and/or the Watchy community.

That said, I think anyone can put this together. It took me all of 15 minutes with about 10 of them trying to insert the small buttons into their proper slots. The included two piece case is a little fiddly with such small parts.

After that, I configured Watchy to connect to my home’s wireless network and synchronized the time and date. Done!

The included case is bit thick for my taste at around 15mm. Early Watchy owners used a simple strap directly on the PCB and wore their device caseless. I do like that minimal look but the whole setup is bit fragile to me. Thankfully, Watchy sells thinner cases and I have one that’s around 10mm thin on the way.

The entire Watchy project is open source so you can get CAD files for the hardware and for the cases. I don’t have a 3D printer, which is why I purchased a case for $35.

Back to the DIY bit now.

As Terence Eden noted in his 2023 Watchy review, any software modifications require you to compile your code changes and upload them to the Watchy over a micro-USB cable.

Yeah, this isn’t a consumer product. You’ll be using the Arduino IDE (or similar application) to modify C++ files. And I haven’t touched C++ in two decades. 😱

Still, I like the potential possibilities here. So I grabbed my Linux laptop running Arch (…BTW), installed the Arduino IDE and got to business.

I have some ideas on what features I’d like to add on my Watchy but just getting the coding environment setup took me nearly an hour. I kept struggling to get Watchy recognized and connected to the Arduino IDE for quite a while. My eventual solution was to install the python3-pyserial package and added my Linux username to the UUCP group. 🙄

That let the Arduino IDE connect to the ESP32 board while Watchy was in bootloader mode.

Rather than try to code up some new functionality, I decided to make a minor change and switch from dark to light mode on the watch. That was a simple code tweak in one of the C++ files and a good test for modifying and uploading firmware to Watchy. And it went perfectly fine although I had to manually reboot the watch.

The Arduino IDE said it sent a reset command but nothing ever happened. That’s OK.

Some relatively easy(!) immediate changes that I want to make include:

Possibly going back to dark mode; the light mode text doesn’t look as nice
Switching from 24 to 12 hour time
Change the local temperature to Fahrenheit. Update: Done!
Use a different font. I’m a fan of JetBrains Mono although I don’t know how well it will look or render here

Long term, I’d like to use the Watchy radios to pull other data from a phone or the web.

Things like my next calendar event, Mastodon replies, weather advisory notifications or some other interesting bits of information.

If you’re a coder that needs a watch with roughly a week’s battery life, only want the basics and/or can code up some modifications, I think Watchy is a good fit for your wrist.

For normal consumers? I’d say only go for it if you want to learn more about computing and coding. C++ isn’t what I’d call ‘beginner friendly’ so there might be better learning projects out there. The semi-usable documentation on Watchy’s site is another potential gotcha for beginners as well.

I fit in the first category above and I’m quite happy with this purchase. I’ve already learned a little more about microcontrollers and C++, although I have a ways to go. Watchy provides me a simple yet practical product to expand my knowledge.

Minimalism and life update for August

2024-08-12T00:00:00Z

I haven’t posted a minimalism update since the beginning of March, mainly because I haven’t been writing. I suppose after 12,000+ blog posts over two decades, I needed a break.

So here’s what’s new and what I’ve been thinking about in terms of simplifying my digital life.

What I bought

In terms of purchases, I’ve been very intentional. That’s good! In fact, intentionality is a key part of how I view a minimal life. What did I buy in the past six months then, outside of actual everyday needs?

6 pairs of Mack Weldon underwear. It was time to replace some of my old unmentionables and even though these were expensive, I’m hoping they last several years.
A tail bag for my motorcycle to carry a few necessary items during a ride. When I ride in to work, I wear motorcycle shoes/boots, so I can carry my work shoes in the bag, for example.
An all-natural, 4-inch Japanese Shikibuton, aka: A traditional futon mattress. I sleep on the floor using this and my body feels so much better in the mornings. I used to wake up sore. No longer. I plan to purchase a tatami mat and, possibly, a chair frame to reuse the mattress for seating.
A refurbished 5th gen iPod Classic ($68 on eBay) and Koss PortaPro wired headphones ($28 on sale). I’m enjoying the intentional and undisturbed experience of music with this setup. The 160 GB iPod is stock for now, but there are kits to add larger batteries, Bluetooth radios and a USB-C port. I don’t need any of that right now (or maybe ever) but it’s nice to have those options.
3 technical T-shirts from REI, about $30 each. I already had 3 of these, so I replaced 3 older cotton shirt from my minimal wardrobe with these.

So not much spending and I didn’t buy anything that I don’t use on a daily or regular basis.

Old tech was simpler

Something else I bought that’s not on the list is an original black Pebble watch. Debuting in 2013, this was one of the first truly viable smartwatches. It doesn’t compare to today’s digital timepieces because it’s simpler and has far fewer functions. That’s actuallly what got me thinking to get one. I was able to purchase on eBay for $22 plus shipping and it arrives later this week.

Will it replace my Apple Watch LTE model? I’m not sure yet. For the price, I thought it was worth finding out. Of couse, Pebble was bought by Fitbit, which was later acquired by Google. So in 2017, the Pebble Web Services were shut down. And the Pebble companion app, needed for the watch, is no longer available.

However, a group of Pebble enthusiasts created Rebble.io, which is keeping Pebble watches alive. I did follow their instructions to sideload the old Pebble app on my iPhone so when the Pebble arrives, I’ll give it a go.

An iPhone home screen unlike iOS for simplicity

In the meantime, I decided to apply some minimalism to my iPhone 15 Pro. Using an app called Blank Spaces, my new home screen looks nothing like iOS. Here it is.

Blank Spaces is effectively a clever widget system. Each of the app links open their respective app and I keep a weather widget above those. There’s a 7-day trial of Blank Spaces and after using it for a few days, I think I’ll pay the subscription fee.

I’ve already noticed how this home screen setup has reduced my screen time. My iPhone 15 Pro is now a tool, not an appendage that distracts me throughout the day. I know that when I see tons of app icons, my mind wanders to tap some of them and my intentionality is out the window.

A super tiny phone?

I’m also considering the switch to a smaller phone. That means no iOS, which brings it’s own set of challenges. My entire smarthome is built upon Apple HomeKit devices, for example. If I keep my Apple Watch, I need an iPhone because it’s a requirement.

There’s much to think about with regards to this choice. And I’m in no rush. But if I think I can have a small phone with the tools I need when out and about – basic connectivity, a few apps, NFC support, etc – I may make the move.

At the moment, I’m looking at the Jelly Star phone (~ $200) which runs Android.

Aside from the iOS requirements in my life, it can provide the functions I need when I’m away from home. With a 3-inch touchscreen it’s usable but not so much that I’d want to doomscroll or watch hours of video on it. We’ll see…

May 10, 2024 - TIL

2024-05-10T11:05:52Z

Ollama + Obsidian?

Last week I downloaded a few LLMs and got them to run locally on my computer with the open source Ollama app. As cool as I thought that was, today I learned there are Obsidian plugins that integrate your “second brain” with Ollama. In fact, one is even called “smart second brain”.

I installed that specific plugin today and after it indexed my Obsidian notes, I asked my AI assistant something very specific: What did I eat for breakfast?

Obviously, I know what I ate. However, I also made a note of my breakfast in my Obsidian daily note today.

Yup, I ate a Strawberry Frosted donut and although it took some tweaking of settings and a few attempts, my AI recalled exactly that.

This solution doesn’t yet appear to be bulletproof. However, it shows promise as a valuable, personalized use of LLMs. As I get older I remember less and less. Jotting thoughts and memories down for a machine to index and later recall them would be amazing.

So long paper towels, hello Swedish Dishcloths

My quest for more minimalism continues as I want to rid our house of paper towels. They have to be replaced, take up too much storage space, and aren’t good for the environment.

Enter Swedish Dishcloths, something I first heard about a few months ago. These small squares are made of wood pulp and cotton, capable of absorbing more liquid than you’d imagine. They also dry fast for reuse and can be washed, in either a dishwasher or a clothes washer, up to 100 times.

I dropped $13.00 for a set of 10 earlier this month and since then I haven’t touched a paper towel. Just one of these small squares is capably doing the job.

Unofficial longest ski jump is 291m

Because this wasn’t a competition and because the venue was purpose built, a 291 meter ski jump last month won’t take the world record. That’s officially and currently 253.2 meters.

It’s still no less amazing to watch, even if it’s one of those Red Bull-backed efforts. Enjoy.

May 9, 2024 - TIL

2024-05-09T11:05:52Z

LocalSend

Given that I use an iPhone, iPad Pro, Windows and Linux, I lean towards cross-platform services. Apple’s AirDrop is awesome for shooting files to different devices but of course, it’s limited to iOS and macOS devices.

Enter LocalSend, an AirDrop-like app that works with Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux. It’s free and open source, found right here.

A quick test of sending a photo from my iPhone to a Linux laptop worked flawlessly. Definitely a must-have tool in my toolbox.

A new Lord of the Rings movie

It’s true: Peter Jackson isn’t done with LoTR just yet. Warner Brothers announced a 2026 movie called “Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum”.

I suspect this will focus on either Aragorn and/or Gandalf chasing down Gollum before the Fellowship of the Ring. That’s just a guess, of course. Andy Serkes is heavily involved (as an actor and director), which is fantastic.

More info and thoughts from the esteemed Nerd of the Rings:

r/Wawa

Who would have guessed that there’s a subReddit for a convenience store? I wouldn’t have but it’s true.

I work part time for Wawa and there’s a big online community to talk about all the Wawa things, such as:

Ok, the last item isn’t that important, but still…

Minimalism activity check for February

2024-03-01T00:00:00Z

After doing so well in the month of January by not spending much and donating some items, I’m almost ashamed to report on February. However, I committed to doing this every month and you have to take the good with the bad. I’ll rip of the bandaid and just right to it.

What I bought

I had to buy non-slip shoes for my new part-time job, so it doesn’t bother me that I spent $89.00 on some black New Balance work sneakers. I’m not thrilled that I have yet another pair of shoes but I’ll get over that.

I’m more bothered by the four new Wawa-branded polo shirts and a pair of Wawa T-shirts in my closet. I didn’t buy them. Work provided them at no cost. But my well-managed small wardobe just grew by nearly 50%.

My only other discretional expense was honestly a good deal. And I am enjoying it! (Can you tell I’m stalling because I certainly could have gotten by without this purchase?

I bought a mid-range gaming laptop last month.

It’s a Lenovo Legion 5 Slim 16-inch model, normally priced at $1,529.99. The 16-inch display isn’t the brightest but has a solid 2560 x 1600 resolution. Inside is a Ryzen 7 7840HS with 16 GB of RAM that can be expanded. A meager 512 GB SSD is included but there’s a second SSD slot, so I popped in another 1 TB M.2 stick I had. And there’s an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 with 8GB of dedicated video memory. I’ll share detailed thoughts in an upcoming review post but for now, know that I’m thrilled with this device.

Especially because I was waiting for a price-drop. I wouldn’t pay full price for this Lenovo laptop and I wouldn’t recommend you do that either. However, it was marked down by $450 in the middle of February.

I saved even more because my local Best Buy had an open-box model in excellent condition for $988. I nabbed that one and took advantage of 0% interest financing over 12 months. I can spare $100 a month out of my new paychecks to cover this expense.

Yes, I could have continued gaming on my small desktop with Radeon 680M graphics just fine. Or I could have done the same on my Dell XPS 15 with Nvidia 3050Ti GPU. Doing the latter was actually the plan!

However, using the desktop means I’m stuck in my upstairs office. And I had been having issues with a dual boot setup on the Dell: Linux for coding and Windows for gaming.

I was gaming in Linux on that machine until I started running into some game crashes. So I decided to make the Dell XPS a dedicated Linux machine for coding while the Lenovo Legion is a dedicated Windows laptop for gaming.

What went away

In my January update, I mentioned that I’d likely be selling my Steam Deck. I was already gaming more on my full computers than the Deck, so I really didn’t need it. I sold the Steam Deck to a Swappa buyer in Ohio a few weeks ago. I think they got a good deal for $330.

Having been working 28 to 30 hours a week and coding during down time, I didn’t spend much effort de-cluttering any near areas in the house. We didn’t donate or trash anything as a result.

My plan for March is to pick a focus area and go through every item in it. Anything that we need or adds value can stay. Anything else goes away.

That likely includes a Chromebook or two since I have several. At the very least my Acer Chromebook Spin 714 will be up on Swappa within a week or two for around $400 or so. If you’re interested, ping me at kevin@kctofel.com and I’ll work with you directly.

Working at Wawa

2024-02-23T00:00:00Z

Bless me blogosphere, for I have sinned. It has been more than three weeks since my last blog-fession. I made a conscious effort to lay low this month. After putting my Chromebooks site on pause, I wanted to hit my personal “reset” button. So I did until now.

That offline time gave me a chance to think through some personal challenges. And one of them, a reduced income, is now sorted out. At least to a point. Earlier this month, I got a part-time position at my local Wawa, less than one mile from my house.

What’s a Wawa?

Folks on the east coast of the US, particularly in the mid-Atlantic region can skip this section. You already know what Wawa is.

For everyone else: Wawa is a privately owned chain of convenince and fuel stores with roughly 1,000 retail locations and 45,000 employees. The company is celebrating the 60th anniversary of its first store opening this April. And it plans expansion to more states to broaden its footprint.

In many small town locations (like mine), Wawa is a very community-driven experience. Here in Harlesyville, PA, Wawa is where you bump into friends and neighbors all the time. There’s a seating area in my store and it’s not uncommon to see groups randomly meet up, sit and chat for a spell.

I think of Wawa like the bar in “Cheers”, where everybody knows your name. Instead of serving liquor though, Wawa serves lots of coffee, snacks, soups, sandwiches, pretzels, and other grab-and-go consumables. Here’s the menu of offerings if you’re curious. Our store does sell beer as well, which is relatively new.

I find the Wawa story impressive. You can read a brief but full history here. And as far as the name? “Wawa” is a native American word for the Canadian Goose, which is the logo of the company. The corporate offices are in Wawa, PA as well.

My job has nothing to do with technology

Here’s where my update may get a little surprising. I’m not blogging for Wawa or running their social media campaigns. I have nothing to do with their computer network, the touchscreen ordering kiosks or the Wawa mobile app.

Instead, I started at Wawa on the bottom rung of the ladder as a Customer Service Associate. My main role is part of the “Facilities” crew.

What does that mean? Here’s what I do:

🗑️ Empty all of the inside and outdoor trash cans as needed.
📦 Break down all of the cardboard boxes from product receipt for recycling.
⛽️ Ensure the gas pumps are working and have receipt paper. I also refill the wiper fluid and paper towels at the pumps.
🧃 Hop in the 30-degree cooler to restock all of the dairy, soda, water and other drink products.
🧹 Vacuum, sweep and mop the floors as needed.
💩 Clean the bathrooms and monitor that cleanliness throughout the day.
🌨️ Keep the outside walkways clean. This includes distributing rock salt when it snows like it did last week.

Surprised by the role? Me too! But it’s role that was open when I walked down to my local Wawa and asked if they were hiring.

It’s also a role that’s expanding. Last week I learned how to make and keep the coffee flowing during a morning rush. I was also trained on making made-to-order drinks. And next week I start register training, which leaves only the Deli / Snacks area left to learn. So I’ll be floating around as needed when not handling my Facilities duties.

Working at Wawa solves multiple problems for me

The obvious immediate benefit of working part-time at Wawa is the income. Typically, the company starts people at $15 an hour. I’m a bit more “seasoned” than most potential new hires, and was offered $17 an hour. I’ll be up for review and potentially a pay boost after 60 days.

I asked for 20-25 hours a week and have been working 24 weekly hours. However, I’m on the schedule for 28 hours next week and 32 the week after that. I guess they’re happy with me so far?

On a related note: After taxes, my first weekly paycheck was more than what my Chromebooks site earned all last month. I’d still like to be taking home around $2,500 monthly to cover expenses but this is a start.

I’m also getting much more exercise and movement now that I’m working at Wawa. I’ve been sitting on my backside for most of the past 18 years as a blogger, so this is a good thing. Maybe too much of a good thing though.

I’m averaging between 7 and 8 miles of movement during a typical 8 hour shift. My feet and back are sore. So much so that I often finish my 6am to 2pm shift by coming home to nap until 5pm. The soreness is lessening as my body gets used to the movement. But it’s still an adjustment for me.

Looking at my step count for the month, it’s pretty obvious which days are my work days:

Lastly, I’m not sitting alone in a home office any longer. I am out and about with the people in my community. I’m having actual in-person conversations with customers. People are thanking me for making the coffee because… well, Wawa is a happy place and most people enjoy the positive environment!

Am I out of tech for good?

I’m still coding and writing in my down time, so I’m not completely away from technology. In just a few weeks I cruised through a Python course after work just to learn something new. This is basically a temporary, part-time development to help pay the bills, get more exercise and gain some social interaction.

Then again, Wawa does have a fanatistic ESOP plan as the company is 40% owned by the employees. Management opportunities are off the charts as the chain expands into new areas. The benefits are fantastic if you average 30 hours weekly. So, who knows?

At this point, I’m taking things one day at a time. I’m giving Wawa 100% of my effort when I’m on the clock. I’m boosting my technical skills when I’m off the clock. And frankly, I’m much happier than I was just a month or two ago. It’s a win all-around! Well, save for a little physical soreness as I get older. 😉

Minimalism activity check for January

2024-01-31T00:00:00Z

Well that was quick. It feels like New Year’s Eve was just last week and here we are at the end of January. Yes, there’s another day left in the month, but I’m 99% confident that nothing will change in the next 24 hours. 🤓

In order to hold myself a little more accountable, I kept track of my minimalism efforts this month. I’m sharing what I bought and/or added to the home and what was removed. Sharing this information helps accomplish two things:

It puts a little more social pressure to show that I’m walking the walk and not just talking the talk.
It helps others better understand what my brand of minimalism is, giving ideas on how they can incorporate the approach.

In general, I follow this strategy:

Buy needed items rather than wanted items.
Buy high quality items that will last.
When replacing an existing item, donate the old one (if possible).

What I bought

This section should be a quick read. When it comes to using disretionary funds for purchases, I made very few in January:

A center-stand for my motorcycle. That cost me $212 delivered via eBay. Technically, this isn’t adding to the “number of things” I have because it’s getting attached to an existing thing. And it is needed for me to do some overdue maintanence on my motorcycle.
A pair of 14 ounce Yeti camp mugs, which was $22 out of pocket. These can set you back upwards of $50 each, depending on the color. I had a $20 Amazon gift card and saw the Charcoal mugs were on sale for $21 each. So I ordered two. They’re fantastic and should last a decade. As those came in, my remaining four ceramic coffee mugs went out. Now there’s more space in the kitchen cabinets and I have really good mugs that keep my coffee warm for much longer.
I did drop $11.99 on a Kindle book to continue reading Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer series. I need to get my library card renewed so I can start borrowing more Kindle books through Libby.

That’s it. Other than our bills and other living necessities, I didn’t spend much in January. I also didn’t add many “things” to our home. 🎉

What went away

I already mentioned that the four coffee mugs I had are now gone. However, I also sold my iPad mini. After buying the Onyx Boox Palma e-Ink handheld in December, I found I wasn’t using my smaller iPad at all. I do have an iPad Pro 12.9 which I use daily. That hasn’t changed. Rather than keep a device I stopped using, it just made sense to minimize and sell it.

I also gathered up enough unused clothes to fill a small garbage bag, so those items were donated. I thought I had gone through all of my clothes but realized this month I had some hanging in the home office closet. Hopefully, someone else can use them.

What’s in the plans for February

I don’t forsee any major purchases coming up in the next month. There’s nothing that I absolutely need.

I do see some more items leaving though. I have a few Chromebooks and frankly, I only need one at most. Maybe none! So I’ll be selling those at Swappa, where I sold the iPad mini.

I’m also thinking that my Steam Deck can go to a better home.

Why? I put Windows 11 back on my 2021 Dell XPS 15 recently in a dual boot mode with Linux. Gaming is actually better on that device for me. My aging eyes do better with larger displays, so the 15.6-inch panel on the Dell is easier for me to game on. And it has an Nvidia RTX 3050Ti mobile GPU, which boosts up the visuals and frame rates over the Deck.

The Steam Deck is fantastic but again, I don’t need to have multiple devices for the same use case.

And that’s a key element of minimalism. Owning one good thing that does something well is better than owning several items that do the same thing but not as good.

I love this "smart" home for minimalist retirement

2024-01-29T00:00:00Z

As my wife and I get older, we continue to debate an important decision. Should we stay in our current house or should we look for a more suitable retirement home? As a minimalist, I’m leaning towards a smaller place. And I recently saw a “smart” pre-fab home that appears ideal.

When I say this is a “smart” home, I don’t mean from a connected or IoT standpoint. Rather, the design and re-use of space is what I think makes it smart.

Check out this walkthrough

The home in question is designed and built by ZenniHome. They’re based out in Arizona. Conincidentally, that’s one of my favorite states to be in. But that’s not why I’m loving Zenni’s Citizen home. Check out the walkthrough and then I’ll explain.

I’m amazed at how much use and repurposing you get with just 640 square feet. And the base price is $125,000, which isn’t outrageous. Note that the nifty bed in the ceiling is a $15,000 option. I’d get that for sure.

I believe that the slide-out closet feature is included in the base price. At least I can’t find it listed in the options, so I’m assuming it’s included.

The size and style fits us (or at least me)

For reference, we downsized from a 3,000 square foot home with an acre of property back in 2016. I think it was the best decision we’ve ever made. It was an excessive amount of space for us and we were heating / cooling many rooms that were unused.

We saved roughly $1,200 a month by downsizing to our current 1,900 square foot townhouse. And we still have too much space. At least I think so; my wife would disagree.

Yes, 640 square feet is a vast reduction from 1,900. I get that. But again, the fact that you can repurpose a bedroom to a living room, such as with the Citizen home, helps make up for that.

Of course, you can’t have much “stuff” in a home with such a small footprint. We’d have to donate additional items we currently own, but we’re well on the path of minimalism. I’ve pointed this out prior with an image of my wardrobe and our towels. There are still more low- or no-value items to eliminate. Even so, our first floor is relatively spartan by traditional American standards.

One more key aspect

You can tell from the above image that our current townhouse has multiple floors. Our bedrooms and home office are on the second floor, so those get used daily. We also have another bedroom in the finished third floor loft. There’s also a basement. That’s a lot of stairs.

All of the rooms in Zenni’s Citizen model are on the same floor. And that’s a huge benefit as my wife and I get older. We’re perfectly fine on stairs now. It’s a non-issue today. But a decade from now?

I’d like to think I’ll be as spry as when I ran marathons at sub-7:30 per mile pace. I know that’s an unrealistic pipe dream.

Logging out of Chromebooks for a while

2024-01-28T00:00:00Z

It’s time to log out. I’ll be putting the AboutChromebooks blog on hiatus for bit. Possibly for good. I’ve already mentioned the financial challenges that led me to this decision and frankly, the month of January only continues the worsening trend.

Although it will cost me around $25 per month for hosting, I’ll leave the site up and running for a bit. There is still value there for those interested in Chromebooks and ChromeOS. However, I’ll likely shutter the comments. I don’t need reminding that the site couldn’t survive.

So what’s next?

I’ve been actively seeking a job for roughly eight months. And I’ll continue to do so. What makes it challenging is that I’m not looking to keep blogging as an occupation. And while I’ve been studying software engineering for a few years, I don’t have what employers are looking for in that space right now. I need to build up a project portfolio and gain additional experience. So that will continue.

I also recently interviewed (three times during the process) with The Verge for the Laptop Reviewer opening. I found out this week that I didn’t make it to the next round of interviews. I’m sure The Verge has picked a spectactular candidate.

And I’m OK with the situation because I think a break from writing for pay is a good thing. After 18 years of being constantly connected and following tech topics, some offline focus with my wife is sorely needed. As are more activities that have nothing to do with anything supplied by Wi-Fi or an ethernet cable.

There are bills to pay, of course, and after discussing it with my wife, I’m going to apply for some local jobs. These may or may not be tech related. In fact, one I just applied for has nothing at all to do with tech. It pays $15.00 an hour which almost an “unofficial” minimum wage where we live in Pennsylvania. The state minimum is $7.25 but many businesses do start at $15 an hour here. Being a minimalist, that salary is enough to cover the bills that my wife’s wages don’t.

A fun ride for nearly 6 years

Most people don’t know this but I actually started the AboutChromebooks sites out of boredom. Seriously. I even launched it on April Fools Day, 2018. I was already earning money from consulting but those efforts only took a few hours a week. Hence, the site’s birth. It made sense at the time since I wanted to write more. And I had just finished an 18 month stint at Google working with the Chrome Enterprise team.

Long story short, I never imagined that the site would earn enough money to help pay the bills when consulting work dried up. And it did for quite a while. Plus it was a fun topic to write about. The community was passionate and kind. All in all, it was a blast.

But this morning, I unsubscribed to the several Chromebook and ChromeOS Google Alerts emails. Later today I’ll send out the last weekly About Chromebooks newsletter to nearly 5,000 subscribers. And within 48 hours, I’ll disable the site comments.

As fun as this ride has been, I’m at peace with the decision. It’s not a happy environment when you’re checking site stats, ad revenue, Google search position rankings and more many items several times per day. At least not when in a downtrend like things have been for roughly 18 months.

I actually feel good about getting that negativity out of my daily life because I’ve let it hold me back. It’s time to move on, spend more time with my family and enjoy a more positive daily environment.

If you read or supported the site, know that I sincerely appreciate it. We may all be connected through wired and wireless connections but it’s the personal connections that mean the most.

How many towels does one person need?

2024-01-08T00:00:00Z

Let’s start the week with a personal question. No, you don’t need to share the answer. Just answer it in your head. Here we go: How many bath towels do you have?

If you’re like most people, I’m betting there are at least five bath towels per person in your house. Maybe even six or seven. That’s just a guess; I’ve never seen any official statistics on such an important question.

My wife is like most people. And I don’t mean this to be a criticism of her, or of you. I’m a goofball minimalist and I’ll share my answer to this critical question shortly.

Lots of towels take up lots of space

I’m sure this isn’t a particularly enlightening observation, but the more towels you have, the more space you need to store them. Go for thicker, luxurious bath towels and you’ll find your stored towels take up more room than my whole wardrobe. Over time, you replace some. And of course, you can’t find the exact some ones, so you end up with mishmash of different colors, sizes, and brands.

My wife currently has eight towels, seven in the closet and one in the bathroom. Here’s what they look like in our closet.

A few months ago, there were even more towels crammed into this shelf space. I couldn’t walk in the closet without fearing I’d be attacked by these cotton thugs. Thankfully, my wife has downsized to just eight towels.

My towels in comparison

About a year ago, I thought about the attack of the towels. I think it was once when I forgot to turn the closet light on. I’m not scared of the dark, but I swear I felt a towel reach out and try to grab me. Never found out which one.

Anyway, after that I tackled the towel problem. Doing some research, I found that many van-lifers used camping or backpacking towels. And I bought three of them for $17 each. They’re all 60-inches by 30-inches, so plenty big enough for me, even as my belly expands over time.

Here’s the same closet picture of my wife’s seven towels, with one of mine added to the mix. It’s at the top right.

Mine is far thinner, takes up much less space and dries me off just the same. Does it feel as luxurious? Definitely not. It does the job as a functional item without any discomfort, though.

Calling it a towel is even a stretch because it’s effectively a microfiber chamios. Only instead of being made to dry off a car, it’s for drying off a person. Admittedly, it felt weird to use after a shower at first. Within a week, it was the new normal for me.

Maybe using a traditional, towel brings you joy after every shower or bath. There’s nothing wrong that. I don’t get that feeling of joy though. So anything that can dry me off is more than good enough for me.

Yes, I only have 3 bath towels

Back to the original question. Now you know I have three bath towels. 😱

While some people shower religiously every day, or even twice on some days, I’m not one of them. I’m on more of ‘every 36 hours or so’ shower schedule.

Sometimes I’ll shower at night before bed. Unless there’s a really compelling reason to shower the next day, I’ll wait until the following morning. After that shower, I may go a full second day without another one.

This schedule, combined with just three thin towels, saves both time and resources. When I do my weekly one load of laundry, the towels go in with the clothes. There’s no load of “just towels” for me, saving water and electricity. And I’m good with clean clothes and towels for the entire week with that single load.

Aside from that, my three skinny towels are easy to manage on a small shelf. They don’t overflow past the shelf or look like they’re crammed into a small space. I can even walk past them in a dark room without fear! 🤣

I’m not suggesting you have to follow my lead. Instead, consider this as kicking off a thought experiment with your towels. Or with something else in your home that requires perhaps too much time, effort and\or space.

Some resources

🚿 Purchase Raintree Microfiber Towels (affiliate link)

📼 Raintree Microfiber Towel Video Overview

💻 How Many Towels Do You Need?

💻 The Minimalist Linen Closet

Intentional mornings make the day

2024-01-05T13:05:52Z

Earlier this week, I noted that I’d be sharing more longer form thoughts on my minimalism lifestyle. Today I want to share how important my mornings are to that lifestyle. I take very intentional actions to prepare my day. These actions effectively set up the framework of how and where I spend my waking time.

It’s taken many iterations to get the current iteration of this framework. Probably around six months of trying different approaches and tweaking along the way. But I think I’ve found a set of steps that works for me.

They may not work for you but by sharing mine, perhaps you’ll gain some ideas to help you with yours.

Intention is the key

Before sharing my morning ritual, I want to emphasize a key theme I’ve adopted in my life for the past few years. That theme is living each day with intention. It doesn’t mean I can’t be spontaneous or that I’m paralyzed when life throws the invitable curveball.

Instead, I simply focus specifically on the things that I intend to do. A perfect anti-pattern of intentional action is what can happen when looking up something on the web using a smartphone. What’s the specific intention of that action? Using a tool to specifically get some value, information or to complete a task.

In this case, it’s to find something, such as the difference between vegetarians and vegans, for example. So in an intentional situation, you search for that difference, get results and put the smartphone down. The intended task is complete.

What happens in many cases though is that unintended actions follow the second step in that example.

After reading the results of your search query, you instead see notifications from other apps. Or you open your email app to check the Inbox. Maybe without even thinking about it, you hop over to social media and start scrolling. The list goes on an on. Every one of these actions is unintentional, more of a subconscious habit. And these uninintentional minutes add up, being subtracted from the available minutes of your intentional actions.

This is mainly why I rely heavily on my Apple Watch as “minimal phone”. There are far fewer distractions available to my subsconsious with such a limited device.

The first 30-60 minutes: Try to just “be”

I start my day with an intentional amount of mindful time. Generally, it’s at least 30 minutes but I prefer around 60.

I make a cup of coffee or two during this time but it’s not a mindless activity. For example, I focus on the water and coffee measurements. I take a few seconds to smell the ground coffee before adding it to the filter. I walk to the window and slowly look around at everything outside there is to see while the water is heating up. When the coffee is ready, I don’t just drink it. Occasionally, I savor the taste as if I’ll never again have coffee, making sure there’s a strong memory of that taste. I’m not just pouring liquid down my throat. I’m having and enjoying an experience.

All of these little actions take just a few seconds. I’m not investing a huge amount of time into the morning coffee experience. Yet by being so intentional and present, the experience is far more enjoyable than otherwise. It’s not just a random, valueless blip on the timeline of my day. It’s a small but important part of my day.

I also refrain from any digital interaction during this time, with one exception. Sometimes, I do play some relaxing, ambient music on the Sonos speaker.

Here too, I try to experience the music rather that just have background noise around me. While enjoying my coffee, I’ll listen for different sounds that I may have missed on a previous listen. Just “being” and absorbing the simple pleasures around me brings clarity and calmness.

Planning the day with intention

Once the “me time” is over, I plan out my day. Every activity I intend to get done gets a time block on my calendar. I make sure to leave time between task blocks so I can get outside for a walk, excercise, read, etc…

I take and log unscheduled naps on days I slept poorly the night before. Due to medication, I often get just 3 - 5 hours of sleep at night. 🤷‍♂️

Previously, I used task management or to-do apps for tasks. I know many people do and there’s nothing wrong with that. I found that they don’t really work for me though.

I think it’s because I have all of very different things to do jumbled together. Sure you can make lists and such. That just moves tasks around into logical groups. I use a calendar for tasks because there’s only one thing that every task has in common: A time element.

Think about it. Some tasks might need specific tools such as a computer and internet connection. Other tasks have a location component. Today I have to go to the hardware store, for example. Still others require meeting a co-worker or someone else. There’s a person and their schedule involved with that. All of these contexts are different, even if some of them share one or more commonalities.

Time though? Every task has time as a requirement.

It may take me 60 minutes to write a blog post with that connected computer. I know my trip to the hardware store should be around 30 minutes; it’s a mile away and I only have to pick up two things. I’m meeting with my son tonight at a specific time for an activity. Time is the underlying resource for all of these tasks so having these efforts in blocks of time on my calendar makes sense to me.

To be clear, I still break tasks down into sub-tasks if required. But I do that within the context of the activity itself.

For example, I plan to add some missing functionality to my web-based content management system later today. What’s the functionality and how will I do that?

I could manage the answers to those questions in a task management app, of course. I don’t. Instead, I have TODO comments in my current code to manage the task requirements. I add these as they come up in the course of coding and I also block off time to review code once a week to brainstorm or add others.

When possible, the sub-tasks are then within the context of the task activity itself, rather than in an external tool or document.

The benefits of intentional planning

Again, this approach isn’t universally ideal for everyone. It works for me, however, and it brings three specific benefits:

It helps me get things done
It keeps me focused on doing the right things
It allows flexibility to shift activities as needed

I think the first two are self explanatory based on the previous section. The third one is worth a little more attention because I know we can’t plan out every second of every day. I wouldn’t want to do that, even if I could.

By focusing on just a few key things each day and blocking chunks of time for them with breaks in between, I can quickly shift my focus as the need arises.

Let’s say I didn’t budget enough time for that blog post. I can spend more time on it without negatively impacting my other intended tasks. In other words, at the end of the day, I typically still accomplish what I intended to do.

Another example might be if we have an unexpected visitor at the house. Any tasks scheduled for that time that aren’t “life or death” can be shifted to later or tomorrow. I’ve learned to be OK when something I intended to do doesn’t get done in a case like this.

Intentionality doesn’t have to be hard-core, “it must happen” approach. I don’t think it should be.Flexibility is always required as is giving yourself permission to adjust as life happens.

However, starting each day with intentions and a framework to make those intentions become reality maximizes the chance of getting things done and ensuring you’re doing the right things.

Some Resources on Intentional Living

💻 The Helpful Guide to Living an Intentional Life

📼 Habits to Maintain an Intentional Minimalist Lifestyle

💻 Living With Intention

💻 4 Simple Ways to Live With Intention (and Choose Your Own Path)

Maximum Minimalism for 2024

2024-01-02T11:05:52Z

I’ve shared bits of my minimalmism experiences over the last year or so. Occasionally, I get some confirmation or a good suggestion from other minimalists. More often though, I get a comment from someone whose interest in minimalism is piqued.

As I enjoyed some quiet time with coffee on New Year’s Day morning, I decided maybe I should share more on this topic, but in a longer form.

So that’s the plan for 2024: Regular posts offering a deeper dive into what minimalism is to me and how it impacts my life. The hope here is that others are inspired enough to dip a toe into the minimalism waters. Or even maybe they take the full plunge.

What minimalism is

Depending on who you ask, minimalism could mean many different things:

Owning as few material possessions as possible. Like few enough to travel the world with just a backpack.
Focusing your actions and surroundings on very specific things such as your family, your passions or your style.
A simple life that provides you more free time from many everyday challenges.
The ability to become detached from “things” and even people that don’t add positivity to your life.
A closet with a handful of the exact same outfits.
Sitting barefoot on the floor of a room with no furniture.

To me, there’s some truth or validation in all of these examples. But there’s no fundamental universal truth that defines minimalism. Like many spiritual or religious paths, minimalism is a personal journey.

As such, each individual should define their own path on thier minimalism journey.

I think this means you can adopt any, all or even none of the popular concepts that define minimalism. The definition and the effort you put forth are really up to you.

What minimalism is to me: An example

Having been on my own minimalism journey since late 2019, my own definitions and approaches have evolved over time.

I started out by de-cluttering, which is a fairly common first step. It doesn’t have to be, of course. However, it’s a relatively good starting point because you can immediately see tangible benefits. In my case, I ended up donating roughly a dozen large garbage bags full of clothing. (And that was just in the first pass!)

I immediately felt more relaxed when walking into the closet to select an outfit. I didn’t feel overwhelmed by rows of hanging clothes. Instead, I had more space to just “be” and carefully think about what I wanted to wear.

Eventually, I further thinned my clothing inventory to even fewer choices. And in doing so, I changed from buying some “fast fashion” outfits and items that looked good in the store but I never wore but a few times. Instead, I was more intentional in my choies, opting for higher quality, longer-lasting items.

It may sound counterintuitive but I know I’ve saved money with this approach. Rather than buy junky clothing items that didn’t hold up and needed replacing within a year, I now have clothing items that are well over three years old. They still look good and I still enjoy wearing them.

The point here is that I’ve reduced the number of clothing options I have but I love every one of those options. I don’t ever stress out when it’s time to pick an outfit. Almost everything in my closet goes with everything else, so I save time.

In turn, I don’t waste any brain cycles on selecting what to wear. Instead, I can use those cycles to focus on other, more important parts of my day. And that hits upon several of the themes I attribute to my personal minimalism lifestyle.

Simplicity, intentionality, mindfulness, a focus on what’s really important, deep relationships, happiness and satisfaction are a few of my core minimalism values and benefits.

It’s a process of steps

Don’t think that I simply cleaned out my closet, bought some new clothes and called it a day, though. Continuing the example, you’ll find there are more steps if you choose to take them. Again, it depends on what you want out of your lifestyle.

Occasionally, I do see some new article of clothing that catches my eye. The next step for me consists of several intentional (there’s that word again!) decisions:

Is this something I really need or simply want? I did add a few nice T-shirts to my closet last year, for example. The ones I had weren’t ideal for a Utah vacation where we planned to hike all week. So I chose to add three technical shirts to the closet.
Will this item last a very long time? No more investing in purchases with a short life-span if I can help it.
Am I replacing something or am I adding to the wardrobe? More often than not, I follow the rule of “when a new ‘thing’ comes in to the house, an old ‘thing’ it replaces goes out of the house.”

After that Utah vacation, I kept the three new shirts but sent the three older cotton T-shirts to a donation bin.

If you don’t follow this type of rule, you’ll just end up with more clutter and things you just don’t need all over again.

This is just one example

Rather than pushing forward with thousands of words tackling other minimalism topics, I think I’ll call it here. To be honest, this is really just the tip of the iceberg. I haven’t addressed the many other points and approaches that you may find some benefit in.

Some of those include:

Assessing the affordability of your lifestyle choices (and the two parts to that equation)
Choosing who and what to spend your time on or with
A healthy digital life
A framework for making decisions that support your definition of minimalism
Finding inspiration and your passion(s)
The value of experiences vs things
Living in house where others aren’t minimalists
Knowing when to say no and that its OK to do so

Stay tuned for more on these and other related topics. I don’t want to commit (yet) to future updates on a regularly scheduled basis; see the last bullet item above. 😉 I’m still planning out my priorities both short- and long-term for 2024 and I need to see where this fits in.

Some resources to get started

📺 Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things

💻 The Minimalists website

📔 Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Digital World (affiliate link)

📼 Matt D’Avella’s YouTube Channel

📼 Kalle Flodin’s YouTube Channel

My default apps as 2023 ends

2023-12-31T19:00:52Z

A quick look at my current default applications as of the end of 2023. Most are the same as I used in 2022 with a few exceptions.

In particular, I’ve moved away from VS Code, the default Terminal app in Linux, heavy reliance on cloud storage from Google / Apple, and the Chrome browser. Even on my Chromebooks, I no longer use Chrome as the default browser.

While inspiration for this listing comes from many sources over the past month or so, I’ve borrowed (well, really copied) the lovely looking format with emojis from Chris Coyier’s list.

📨 Mail Client: Proton Mail

📮 Mail Server: Proton

📝 Notes: Self-managed Markdown files for now

✅ To-Do: I manage tasks on my calendar by timeboxing them

📷 Photo Shooting: iPhone 15 Pro

🎨 Photo Editing: iOS Photos

📆 Calendar: Proton Calendar

📁 Cloud File Storage: Homelab server running Unraid

📖 RSS: Feedly

🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Proton Mail

🌐 Browser: Sidekick on desktop, Safari on iOS

💬 Chat: Messages, Discord

📑 Read It Later: Omnivore

📜 Word Processing: LibreOffice

📈 Spreadsheets: LibreOffice

📊 Presentations: What’s a presentation?

🛒 Shopping Lists: None, I’m a minimalist 🤓

💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Mint but will be replacing soon

📰 News: Google News, RSS

🎵 Music: Apple Music

🎤 Podcasts: iOS Podcasts

🔐 Password Management: 1Password

🏠 SmartHome: HomeAssistant

🩺 Health Tracking: Apple Health

📖 eBook Reading: Kindle

📚 Book Management: Hardcover

🐘 Mastodon: Ice Cubes

🧑‍💻 Code Editor: Neovim

💻 Terminal: Kitty

✈️ VPN: Proton VPN

✍️ Blogging / CMS: Wordpress for work, 11ty and my own CMS for personal

My minimal phone... isn't exactly a phone

2023-12-31T09:30:52Z

As a minimalist for the past five years, I’ve previously jumped on the quiet trend of finding a minimal phone. These typically just provide the basics, such as voice calls, messages, a clock and contacts. Occasionally, you’ll also see a podcast or music player and maybe some navigation features. The idea of these devices is to rid or greatly reduce all of the “noisy” apps found on modern smartphones, providing a less distracting experience.

Eventually, I found the solution for me, but my minimal phone isn’t a phone. Not exactly, anyway.

I decided to purchase an Apple Watch with LTE, although you could accomplish the same thing with a cellular-enabled wearOS watch. For me, this solution is a perfect way to accomplish the goals of a minimal phone. And its one I’ve been using for several years now. I wouldn’t change a thing about it.

How I use the Apple Watch vs my iPhone

During work hours, I certainly rely on my iPhone, although I do wear my watch all the time. The types of activities I want or need to do in this timeframe are far better served by the iPhone, if not an iPad or a computer. This isn’t a ground-braking thought; it’s fairly obvious. So from say 8am to 4 or 5pm, I’m like most of you. I interact with the web, apps and others on my phone.

Outside of those hours though? The iPhone is on a charging stand next to my bed. I really don’t use it much, if at all, outside of what I’ll call “work hours”. That includes when I’m out of the house, which I suspect is not like most of you. Everything I want or need to do from a computing perspective can be done with my Apple Watch.

Well, with one exception: I like to take photos. When I’m going to a place that I know I want to snap some shots, I do take the phone with me. In fact, during the Utah vacation I took with my wife back in June, I carried a phone on the 50+ miles of hikes we did. It was actually a Google Pixel 7 Pro. However, I didn’t have a SIM card in the phone. Essentially, it was solely a camera for those activities.

Back to the watch when I’m out and about. On my wrist, I can make and receive phone calls. I can (and do) sent messages, usually through voice rather than typing. It’s far faster and quite accurate. I have navigation and turn-by-turn directions. Effectively, I have a minimal phone on my wrist.

What I do (and don’t do) with the watch

I also have a few key apps installed, but only a few.

One, called Stats, lets my watch be the key for our car. I can fully control the car’s locks, climate system and more. So I don’t need my phone, or a key, for the car. Apple Music is installed by default and I have roughly 5 GB of music downloaded on the watch. This lets me listen to music whie away from home; no phone needed.

Apple Pay is also a default app so although I carry a wallet, I tend to pay for things with my watch. I have a slim, minimal wallet (shocking, I know) with a pair of backup payment cards and my driver’s license. I rarely need these but I carry them just in case.

I don’t mirror my iPhone notifications to my watch. This reduces the noise or things that aren’t a priority during “me time”. I have made exceptions in the past though. A good example is allowing Google Chat notifications on my watch.

Even though Chat isn’t installed on the watch, I can still receive and reply to message notificvations, again using voice rather than typing. I did this when working with Stacey on our IoT efforts for several years for a key reason. If I left home during work hours and she needed me, she could still contact me and I could still respond through the watch. We could have used text messaging but Stacey ran the business on Google Workspace, so Chat made more sense.

I do make heavy use of the watch’s health tracking features, which again are built-in by default. You can certainly track your steps and such with just a phone, of course. However, I like to track more than just those basic metrics. The watch monitors my breathing and heart rate, for example.

The only other third-party app I have installed on the watch is Home Assistant, which I use as my smarthome platform of choice. It’s useful to open the garage when I get home from a motorcycle ride. I could unlock the front door with it as well, but my Apple Watch acts as an NFC key for my connected lock. I simply tap to open, just like you’d tap to pay.

I found other minimal phone options too limited for me

All of this isn’t to suggest that my solution will work for you. I’m simply sharing my thought process, use cases and experience on my quest for a minimal phone.

Again, I researched several other options ranging from “dumbphones” to custom built basic handsets such as The Light Phone, the Punkt, the Mudita Pure and others. Yes, they would have accomplished the goals of fewer distractions that come with a minimal phone.

However, I needed a middle ground. For me, a connected watch was the answer. An LTE-enabled watch doesn’t cost much more than a bespoke phone solution. And it only adds $5 a month to my monthly phone bill. Given how I use it, that’s well worth the price of freedom, mindfulness and intentionality.

Revenue retrospect - 5 years of indie blogging

2023-12-29T17:00:00Z

Winding down 2023, I’m looking over the past year, like many others. With my primary income as an independent blogger since 2018, this year was hellacious. Annual revenues weren’t just the lowest. They were massively lower.

I’m at the point where it may be time to pull the plug on AboutChromebooks.com.

There are several reasons for this huge drop in revenue, but most of them are outside of my control.

Let’s look at the numbers

I’ll just get the hard part out of the way up front. Below are the annual site revenues for the last five full years.

Note that although I started the blog in 2018, it wasn’t a full year, so I’ve left those figures out. And there are three days left in 2023, but those won’t move the needle.

Additionally, these are advertising revenue figures only. There is a very small of revenue earned each year from affiliate links. Not in the figures are expenses, which average around a reasonable $200 a month for hosting, liability insurance, blog plug-in subscriptions, etc…

What happened over time?

I’ve been making a living by blogging since 2006. Most of those years were working for others and I really can’t complain. I was independent (with a business partner) from 2006 to mid-2008 and averaged around $15,000 a year. But, the site was purchased for a reasonable amount of money and I was earning a great salary from then on.

Again, I can’t complain. The idea of writing online and making money wasn’t something I’d ever thought possible. It was. And I’m thankful for that.

In 2019, the first full calendar year of About Chromebooks, the site did better than I expected. I ramped up my efforts, thinking both page views and revenues would grow in 2020. That didn’t happen because… COVID. Page views dropped 20% year over year. Revenue fell by roughly the same.

2021 saw a small reduction in page views compared to 2020. Very small, like less than 5%. That’s not terrible. And the ad market was still strong. Stronger than in the prior year as people were home and online more. Companies paid more to get their products and ads plastered all over the web. So 2021 revenues for my site were up even though page views had declined.

And then the site got hit with a double-whammy. The first of several Google search algorithm changes occurred, dropping the visibility of About Chromebooks in search results. Annual page views dropped by roughly 30% in 2022.

This happened as the ad market tanked. And by tanked, I mean the ad rates I used to see were diminished by 60% or more that year. And they haven’t recovered for me yet although the trend for rates has been rising. So 2022 was the beginning of a revenue downturn for two main reasons.

The trend continued in 2023. Lower ad rates and even less visibility on Google for the site. A further reduction in page views by 35% over 2022 combined with still low rates equals the just-over $10,000 figure for revenues this past year.

Now what?

As I mentioned earlier, I’m strongly considering a shutdown of the site. While I enjoy sharing my passion for Chromebooks with others and (hopefully) bringing valuable information to my fellow Chromies, I have to pay my bills. And that means investing time into something else, i.e. a “real” job.

If I felt there were factors within my control to change the financial situation of the site, I’d certainly tackle them. But I don’t control ad rates. (In fact, I hate having ads in the first place but again, I have to pay the bills.) Nor do I control the Google search algorithm. So more effort on the site isn’t going to fix the problem.

It’s not like I didn’t know this decision was coming. I was earning supplemental income through some consulting, mostly for Stacey at StaceyOnIoT.

Stacey and I made a mutual decision to step away from that effort earlier this year, however. And I’ve been applying to various open roles, mostly in the dev and tech documentation space, since May of this year. None of those applications have panned out at present. More on that in a future post although spoiler alert: I’m more of a “technology generalist” and lack the depth of skills most roles are looking for.

I’m going to give things a few weeks, maybe even a few months, before deciding what to do with my indie site.

Minimalism has helped

On a related side note, I’m so glad I started to adopt a minimalist mindset about five years ago. When I was earning more income, I took a hard look at our spending. My wife and I decided that we didn’t need the large home we had because we weren’t using half of the rooms. And the acre of land meant we were spending more time maintaining the property instead of enjoying the property.

We downsized to a more manageable townhome with a much lower mortgage payment. We also went from a two-car family to a single EV. I generally don’t buy much these days. I’ve donated away many of the “things” I had but didn’t need.

As an example of the approach, I’ve invested in a very small wardrobe of decent-quality items: 7 long-sleeve shirts, 8 short-sleeve shirts, 2 pairs of jeans, and 3 pairs of sweats for example. I have a light rain jacket, a warm vest, and a winter coat. And I haven’t had to replace any of these clothing items because again, they’re good garments.

Thankfully, this mindset has cut our expenses by quite a bit. In other words, I don’t need to make $100,000 a year to pay my bills, have what I want, and be happy. Unfortunately, the required expenses we have do mean that I need to make more than I am making. Hence the decision to keep on blogging and hope things change, or make a change and earn revenue from non-blogging activities.

Onyx Boox Palma: A great minimalist device

2023-12-19T00:00:00Z

After buying nearly every Amazon Kindle ever made, I switched to a large e-Ink Android tablet two years ago. It’s a 10.3-inch device running Android 8. As much as I like the reading experience combined with a few Android apps, it has a very slow refresh rate.

As a result, I was using it less and less. I also gave up on using an e-Ink tablet as a minimalist device, which was disappointing.

I think an e-Ink slab is ideal for digital minimalism. You can replace “digital minimalism” for “a device used solely during downtime”, if you wish.

These products are easier on your eyes for starters. More importantly, they’re often limited as compared to a smartphone. When you have a phone with a gazillion mobile apps available, plus always-on connectivity, it’s easy to get sucked into doom-scrolling, for example. It doesn’t hurt that the excellent displays on smartphones make the time wasting more enjoyable. Well, at the time, at least.

Hence my disappointment when I outgrew the large e-Ink tablet. Then, about three weeks ago, I heard about the Onyx Boox Palma.

After watching some video reviews, I decided to take a chance on this $279 e-Ink handheld.

Why? Because it has the internals of a mid-range smartphone minus the cellular connectivity.
Even better: The GPU is used to boost the display frame rate so that my “downtime” activities are actually feasible.

For example, I can:

Read my Kindle books with near instant page turns and no annoying full screen refreshes.
Read in the Google News app where scrolling through stories is nearly fluid with very little lag.
Research specific things in the browser when I intend to, again with not enough lag to make the experience unusable.
Listen to Apple Music while reading. There’s no headphone jack, but my Apple AirPods Pro paired without any issues.
View saved articles and newsletters in Omnivore, my “read it later” app.
Watch YouTube videos that I’ve saved to my “Watch Later” playlist. I do this for content that’s not work related so I can watch them while relaxing. Yes, the videos are played back in grayscale. The framerate approaches but doesn’t quite get to 30 fps. But it’s more than good enough for this context.

Here’s a demo of some brief video playback:

All of these experiences have just enough of a barrier for me to not want to use the Palma full time. That’s fine with me. I have a smart phone for when I want the “full” experience, complete with online connectivity anywhere I go.

For those curious about the Palma, here are the specs:

6.13-inch HD Carta 1200 display
824 x 1648 resolution (300 ppi)
Capacitive touch
8 core CPU with GPU
Dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0
6 GB of RAM
128 GB of local storage
USB Type-C port for charging and data transfer
Speaker, microphone, microSD card slot
3,950mAh battery

Obviously, with a fast electronic paper display, Android 11 and a capable chipset inside, I could load the Palma up with all of the smart phone apps I typically use. Obviously, again, I’m not. The whole point of this device is for an intentional, relaxing experience. I haven’t installed an email client, any messaging apps, or anything else that would interfere with my quiet time.

Effectively now, when I want to unwind and (mostly) disconnect, I shut down all tablets and computers. Then I pick up the Palma as needed to read, research, and relax. I only go online with it as needed and again, I’m very intentional about that. I currently have a Mastodon client installed but I may remove it. I’m not a social media addict but I do wonder if I need to read my curated Mastodon feed during “off hours”.

One important note considering I mentioned Kindle devices at the very start of this. Even with the smartphone sized battery in the Palma, don’t expect the battery life of a Kindle.

The GPU to boost refresh rates can’t be disabled so there’s quite a bit of juice used there. You can slow the refresh rates through several different modes. And that does help battery life. But the faster the screen refresh, the quicker the battery runs down. The same goes for using the wireless radios and/or the backlight.

I’m getting about two to three days of usage in the above scenarios, for example. And that’s with around four hours of daily usage. In other words, don’t expect weeks between a recharge.

Email in the terminal like it's 1993

2023-12-04T00:00:00Z

My quest to greatly reduce the use of a mouse or trackpad took a half-step forward this weekend. I don’t recall which of the folks I follow on Mastodon mentioned it, but someone pointed out Mutt. That was later followed with a vote for Neomutt.

These are both terminal based email clients. In 2023!

Mutt and Neomutt setup

I futzed with Mutt for a bit but found Neomutt worked a bit better for my specific needs and configuration. I also like that Neomutt included some features that required effort to use with Mutt

For most people, Mutt should be simple enough to configure. You need the IMAP and SMTP settings from your email provider. Pop those into a Mutt configuration file and you’re on your way. There are also a ton of Mutt features you can add or configure.

Of course, I’m not “most people”. I’m an oddball, having migrated away from 12 years of Gmail usage in 2020. I switched over to a paid Proton Mail account. The main draw of Proton is that your mail is fully encrypted and stored on servers in Switzerland. It’s considered a more private, secure email service in general.

With that privacy comes some “gotchas” when using anything but the Proton Mail desktop or web client. Namely, I had to install the Proton Mail Bridge for Linux on my machine. The Bridge acts an an intermediary to encrypt and decrypt all email. Neomutt configuration was minimal with the Bridge settings.

Why use email in the terminal?

I’m sure many who look at the images of my new-old mail client are wondering why anyone would subject themselves to this. The main answer is speed. While you can use keyboard shortcuts in most email clients today, there’s something to be said about terminal apps that build upon existing legacy keybindings.

I can navigate very quickly through my mail queue using the ‘j’ and ‘k’ keybinds from Vim, for example. No mouse, no trackpad, no arrow keys (although those work too). So my hands are always in the ready position to type.

A secondary benefit would be that a terminal client is using far fewer resources than a modern web client or desktop app. But if you have enough horsepower under the hood of your computer, that’s less of an issue.

There are some problems

While I’m loving the speed experience of using Neomutt, it’s not all peaches and cream. Most of the world uses HTML-based email. And that’s not going to work in the terminal by default. Thankfully, Neomutt includes a feature to open any HTML mail in a browser tab. I configured Neomutt to use my browser of choice for this case; you can set it to whatever browser you use.

When I open an email in Neomutt and it’s in HTML, I tap the ‘v’ key on my keyboard. This opens up a browser tab with the email contents. It’s then two keyboard taps to close the tab and get back to Neomutt. This doesn’t take long, obviously but if you’re used to a seamless email experience, this isn’t it.

Another issue I have is more of a challenge in setting up an address book. Abook came recommended and I was able to install it without any issues. It’s a terminal based contacts app that integrates with Neomutt.

Since my contacts are in Proton Mail, I had to download and decrypt them. Not a problem as Proton Mail makes that easy. In about 30 seconds, I had a standard .vcf file. And there’s an abook command to import may file formats for contacts, including .vcf, into an address book.

I must be doing something wrong because after running the command, I still have an empty address book. I’ll be working on solving that issue in the coming days.

Short of that, I’m really liking this setup for my mail. Thanks to the Proton Mail Bridge, which is set to run upon boot up, my mail is still secure and private. I’m less focused on checking email and more focused on getting work done. And when I need to triage or reply to messages, I’m doing so fast.

Even if it doesn’t look as pretty.

Looking at Helix over Neovim

2023-11-30T00:00:00Z

Recently, I shared on Mastodon that I was making an effort to reduce, if not eliminate, my mouse and trackpad usage. Every time your hands leave the keyboard, that’s time you’re not typing. And it adds up over time.

To that end, I stopped using VS Code and migrated over to Neovim in my terminal. While I find the configuration of Neovim daunting, LazyVim goes a long way to mitigate that. It doesn’t hurt that there’s a great LazyVim kickstarter on GitHub to configure most of the important features.

Just as I was getting settled into Neovim, I heard about Helix. Like Neovim it’s a Vi/Vim like text editor. And it’s still in the works. But after a few days of using it, I’m leaning towards Helix right now.

For starters, Helix is built in Rust. Aside from impoved memory protection, Rust apps are fast apps. I haven’t noticed much in the way of speed differences but then again, I’m not working with thousands of lines of code.

Right out of the box, Helix has many great base features. So I’m spending less time learning how to configure it. Of course, being a work in progress means it doesn’t have as many features. There’s no plug-in support yet, for example. Still, most of what I added to Neovim via plugins is already there in Helix. I just need basic features to get my work done.

Support for the Language Server Protocol is there, so you can get code autocompletion and a limited number of code snippet support. Auto-closing character pairs, such as for brackets and braces is there. Treesitter parsing is supported as is file and word fuzzy finding, similar to Telescope on Neovim. No, there’s not much more than that without plugins, but I don’t need much more personally.

At the moment, Helix is meeting my minimal needs, keeping my hands busier and simple to use. I think, for now, it’s where my development work will continue.

Moving my Linux Home directory to a second SSD

2023-11-26T00:00:00Z

I ran out of space on my laptop’s internal SSD over the weekend. Most of the storage is used by my Home directory. Ugh.

Luckily, I’m running Linux on a 2021 Dell XPS 15, which is generally fantastic. And it has two NVMe slots inside. Even better: it’s simple to crack open the laptop and add a second SSD drive.

I actually had a second one installed already. In addition to the 250 GB SSD for the operating system, I have a 512 GB SSD decided to Steam games. However, I stopped playing Steam games on the XPS 15 once I bought a Steam Deck last year.

So… I have 512 GB of storage space I can reclaim on the Dell. Using the included gnome-disk-utility Linux app on my Dell, I formatted the second SSD. And then I proceeded to make a copy of my Home directory on the second SSD.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure exactly how to do this, although I had a high level understanding of the process. Thankfully, one of my favorite Linux YouTubers shared the step-by-step approach:

I admit I was a bit scared. With Linux, your Home directory is your identity with your personal memories, as it were. And yet, by following the steps in the video, the process went flawlessly.

I went from having a 250 GB SSD with under a gigabyte free to having 221 GB free after moving my Home directory.

And I still have tons of room on the SSD with the Home directory as well.

I probably should have just set the Dell XPS 15 up with two drives this way in the first place. That would have avoided the semi-scary situation. It’s OK though. I’m all sorted now.

My personal CMS (prototype)

2023-11-25T00:00:00Z

As a developer in training for a while (too long, TBH), I don’t have a robust project portfolio. So I decided to rectify that with a personal project. It’s possible, although unlikely, others would want to use this project.

I decided that since I recently started tinkering with 11ty as an SSG, or static site generator, I would create a web-based CMS, or content management system, for it.

Basically, instead of requiring a GitHub repo of my 11ty blog content locally, writing posts in Markdown, and pushing the post to GitHub, I wanted a web app for this. This way, I could blog from any computer and not need GitHub installed on it.

There are likely several approaches that would work for this, but I decided to use the GitHub API. I don’t have enough experience working with external APIs, for starters. And it gives me the opportunity to learn more about asynchronous JavaScript.

So far, I have the bare minimum working. And I do mean bare minimum.

Right now, I can click a button to retrieve the file names of the already published blog posts. I can also publish a new blog post although I’m manually adding the front matter to the Markdown file. Removing that limitation is on my TODO list.

But it does work and I feel a little bit of self-accomplishment.

I’m using what I know, and what I want to know for this effort. That means basic web dev bits such as HTML / CSS / JavaScript. (OK, not too much of the CSS yet as you can tell by the atrocious design; I haven’t spent any time on that yet.)

I’ve also taken a React class, so I went with React for some of the components. Maybe not the best choice but it’s better than no choice. I didn’t want to focus on the stack decisions because that’s not going to build me a project for the portfolio.

In any case, I’m going to dogfood this CMS myself going forward. That makes sense since I’m writing it for me. Every post here will be published through my app, unless noted otherwise.

Oh and speaking of CSS earlier: I haven’t done anything to change the look and feel of the blog itself. This is effectively an 11ty base starter with a few color changes I made.

This is a CMS test

2023-11-14T00:00:00Z

First text of my CMS project to post a blog on my 11ty site.

Not writing anything fancy here but let’s include a link to my site to mix it up a bit.

Hopefully, this works so I can start making the GUI look a little better; I’ve been concentrating on the functionality more than anything so far.

Cheers!

This is a sixth post

2023-11-09T00:00:00Z

Adding a test post directly in GitHub.

This is just for testing purposes as my CMS project is requesting all of the post title file names. Prior to this post, I was only getting six post titles.

After publishing this post, I hope to see all of the existing post titles plus this new one.

Before:

UPDATE – After:

A test post with an image

2023-11-04T00:00:00Z

I’m writing this post in Markdown directly in Visual Studio Code.

This is a sample post with an image of Norm.

A test post

2023-11-04T00:00:00Z

I’m writing this post in Markdown directly in Visual Studio Code.

This is a sample sentence with a link to my Chromebooks site.

If this works, I’ll have a new post on the home page. This should also appear in the archives. And the link should work

This is new text added from the GitHub API

I'm tired of managing contacts. You do it!

2023-02-11T14:57:15Z

I’ve been tinkering with an idea lately in terms of big tech and contact management. This is mainly for two reasons.

One: My contacts are basically “held” by big tech. I have them with Apple, Facebook (although I’m not a regular user of that service), and Google. Outside of “big tech”, I also manage them in Proton Mail, which I switched to a few years ago from Gmail.

Two: I’m tired of managing contacts. Meaning: I want to manage my own contact information and have any updates flow out to all of my contacts. I also want to receive contact updates from my contacts automatically. And, I want to have more control over my contact information.

I might want one person to have only my email address while another person is OK to have that, plus my phone number, my Mastodon handle and perhaps, if they’re a close friend, my home address.

What does this look like?

So, I’m envisioning both a two-way flow of contact information and some gatekeeping at the client level as to who gets what, based on my personal preferences. I’ll approve you as a connected contact and I’ll say what contact information of mine that you can have.

For reason one above, I think this has to be some sort of open source solution. While I can export my current contacts from Apple and Google, I can’t put in place the solution I want through Apple or Google.

In regards to reason two, I’m wondering if there’s a potential solution as part of the Fediverse. This world already has push-pull types of action through ActivityPub, for example.

Of course being a n00b developer-in-training, I don’t know if the ActivityPub spec can be used for contact information, although I suspect it can be used for any type of data. And I do know that we have standards for contact data though: CardDAV and LDAP come to mind.

Obstacles today

Given that users would want their contact data encrypted, there’s already a potential roadblock: ActivityPub doesn’t appear to support encryption. However, there has been some communication and thought on adding it. That would have to happen for a service like this to work.

Another problem: Where is the contact data hosted? There has to be a central place, or many central places, i.e.: decentralized servers, to hold contact information.

I’m fine with trusting my Mastodon information with someone I don’t know that runs a server, Kris Nova rocks BTW, but would I feel the same with my contact data? That issue won’t be easy to overcome.

Getting that contact information to phone and email apps might be a challenge although I think it could be a minor one. Client apps to make calls or send emails typically support CardDAV at the very least, if not LDAP as well. I’m certainly no expert but I’m thinking I could “subscribe to” or access contacts on my server through client apps.

What’s the point or end result?

In today’s world of all internet data being indexed and easily searchable, it’s generally easy to find someone’s contact information. Even if you don’t want them to have it.

Don’t get me wrong. I like people. I enjoy engagement. But I’m tired of random email pitches and other communication silliness. If I want to talk to you on the phone, I want to make that decision before I give you my number. And while my door is always open to chat over coffee at home, I’ll invite you by providing the address.

To be fair, LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) does a reasonably good job here. You can’t just instantly message someone, for example. The person you want to connect with in that forum has to approve your connection request first.

And if some of my LinkedIn contacts have a new email address because of a change in employment, they don’t shoot out an email to hundreds of people saying “here’s my new address, go update your contacts!” They simply update their email address in their LinkedIn profile, assuming it was there in the first place.

That’s what I want. Not to manage all of my contacts, just to manage and control my own contact information. And in way that pushes the updated information to the contacts I’ve truly connected with. Sorry, but I don’t want to manage your contact information. Don’t take it personally. 😉

Crazy or a good idea?

You tell me.

Of course since I haven’t gotten around to creating an open source comment system here you can’t answer that question on the blog. I refuse to use Disqus or any other system that can use or sell your information.

For now, you can reach out to me on Mastodon where I do allow anyone to follow me. I’d love to hear some feedback from people smarter than me. Which is probably most of you!

So my new desktop PC was delivered in a padded envelope

2023-01-29T21:47:30Z

It’s been nearly three years since I custom build my last desktop PC. And to be honest, I love that computer. Between the more than good enough AMD Ryzen processor and an AMD Radeon 6800XT GPU, it’s fantastic for gaming. Initially, I had an NVIDIA RTX 3080 installed but recently swapped my son for his GPU. He’s more into gaming than I am.

Obviously, that much power works for everyday use as well. However, it also uses a lot of power. So I researched some of the latest mini PC options.

I bought a Beelink Mini PC

After deciding what would meet my needs at a modest cost, I spent $299 on a discounted Beelink SER5 Mini PC this past Friday. On Saturday, my new desktop PC arrived… in a padded envelope. Yes, it’s that small!

The box alone is smaller than my current GPU, for example. And the best part? While my GPU alone can use anywhere from 200 to 275W, the little Beelink tops out at 50W. More often than not, it’s using half of that wattage; the chip inside typically uses 15W, for example, although it can use up to 25W for boosting.

That. Boggles. My. Mind. I need an 850W power supply for my gaming PC due to the CPU and GPU power requirements. So when I use my custom desktop for anything but gaming, I’m drawing far more power than I need.

I’m using less electricity but getting my work done

The Beelink SER5 solves that problem because it’s quite capable. Essentially, these small desktops use laptop hardware. And as you know laptops are limited by their battery life, so there are plenty of efficient laptop components out there.

In the case of the SER5, Beelink is using an AMD Ryzen 5600U CPU with 6 cores and 12 thread capability. The clock speeds range from 2.3GHz up to 4.3GHz, as needed. The integrated GPU is an AMD Radeon chipset with 7 cores, each running at 1.8GHz. That’s plenty of horsepower for my daily webwork, coding education at Launch School and podcast recording.

This model came with Windows 11 Professional pre-installed and activated, which works perfectly fine. I prefer Linux, however, so I wiped Windows and installed PoP_OS!

I originally planned to swap out the included SSD from the Beelink so that I had a Windows install and license available in the future. I figured, I’ll just insert a blank SSD and install Linux. And it’s easy to get at the SSD, not to mention the two 8 GB memory modules in the Beelink.

Ultimately, I decided to just wipe Windows 11 and use the included SSD. I don’t think I’ll need that Windows 11 license. I know PC makers get Windows licenses at a discount but if I have to buy one, it costs $199 for Pro. That’s insane when you realize I paid $299 for the included license and the hardware itself.

So far, the Beelink is doing everything I want or need to do in my office on a desktop. I have all of my coding tools installed (Node, VS Code, Git, etc…) and they work as expected. I’ll be testing a podcast recording later this week. However, I’ve been using Audacity to record my podcasts for 17 years so I don’t anticipate any issues using it here.

Perhaps best of all? This desktop PC is nearly dead silent! I can barely hear the fan, even when doing some computational heavy tasks. Love it!

Yes you could use this as a gaming PC but…

Just for kicks, I did load up Steam and a few games. I was curious. And the results were about what I expected. To get a consistent 30fps in either The Witcher 3 or Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I had to dial down the resolution and settings quite a bit. But on a budget, these games don’t look half bad and they’re certainly playable. I won’t get into benchmarks and performance for other games because plenty of folks have already done that. Here’s a good video overview from that perspective.

Am I happy with this Mini PC? Absolutely! It’s more performant than I expected and it meets my main goal of using less electricity in my home office. For the sale price I paid, it’s well worth the money.

Speaking of performance and money, Beelink (and other Mini PC makers) already have similar options with both newer Intel and AMD chipsets. You’ll pay more, of course, but if gaming is important to you, you’ll have a better experience than I did.

There are a ton of choices but for the money, I’d probably look to the $589 Beelink SER6 and watch for a sale price. It’s currently $500, for example. You’ll get the same memory, storage and Wi-Fi 6E found in my Mini PC but you’ll get the AMD Ryzen 5 6600H. That means faster cores and better graphics, although the chipset can use up to 45W of power.

*These are Amazon affiliate links. Use 'em or not, that’s up to you.

It's been a... week

2022-12-04T23:47:31Z

What a long, busy week. I mentioned on Monday that I’m beginning to prep for my first JavaScript assessment. And I put a good 15 hours in on that effort. I also wrote five blog posts about Chromebooks, recorded an IoT podcast, and wrote the news for an IoT-related newsletter. Oh, and my own newsletter was written and published this morning.

Aside from that, we’ve been taking care of Norm, our Bichon. He took a tumble and landed awkwardly early in the week. The vet thinks he tore his ACL, so we’re carrying him around the house from spot to spot. And to top it all off, I decided to participate in this year’s Advent of Code.

The inefficient elves of this year’s Advent of Code

If you’re not familiar with the AoC, it’s a scored series of 25 daily coding challenges. The top scorers all tackle the challenge as soon as it goes live at midnight. Yeah, I’m not doing that. Instead, I get to the daily challenge when I get to it.

And unlike most of the participants, solving these problems takes me longer. Like, a lot longer because I’ve only finished my first, basic JavaScript course at Launch School. I don’t have the experience to plow through these coding problems in five minutes using advanced coding techniques.

I’m generally OK with that. But thanks to the super inefficient elves that Santa hired – all of the challenges so far revolve around them – I’ve seen up to 2,500 lines of data used to test my solution.

Here’s an example showing the reason Santa needs a better hiring manager.

It’s a little intimidating, but I’m learning a ton. And I realized after the first few days to focus my solution on a small subset of the input data. Once I “crack the code” so to speak, I can easily scale my solution up to the full data set. Regardless, these challenges have taken between 2 to 4 hours of each day.

A solution to finding exactly what I’m searching for in my notes

Earlier in the week, I also mentioned that I had 20,000 words of notes in Notion that I took during my JavaScript class. Notion is an excellent tool. However, I didn’t use it in a way that makes my notes easily searchable. Instead of really long page of notes with section toggles for my class, I probably should have created individual pages for each concept.

But I didn’t. So searching in Notion generally returns large numbers of results that I have to manually sift through. I decided to research alternatives and came across Dendron.

It’s a VS Code extension that supports Markdown notes. And it’s meant to organize your notes in a way that makes them quickly searchable. By creating each note using a programming-like “dot” notation you can use the autocomplete function of VS Code to find exactly what you need in an instant. Check the Dendron site for an overview and demo in VS Code.

One of the nice features is that Dendron can gather up all those Markdown files, which I sync to GitHub. Using those files and a Next.js template, it converts the Markdown notes to HTML pages that you can publish.

I have my own little MDN docs site started now! Here’s a brief look at the web output running locally on my Chromebook after taking just a few notes.

Again, Notion is fantastic. Had I organized my thoughts in a particular way from the get-go, I’d be using Notion for my JavaScript assessment preparations. Lesson learned!

Hello, RSS feed!

One last update that’s long overdue. Since I was on a roll with my coding this week, I added an RSS feed to this site. I write my posts using Markdown in a GitHub repo and whenever that repo is updated, Netlify creates and publishes the output using Gatsby. I did some research and found a Gatsby plug-in to create the RSS feed and once I successfully tested it on my local device, I pushed the change.

So for the three of you that asked for an RSS feed: This one’s for you! I haven’t yet added an RSS button to the site but you can add https://www.kctofel.com/rss.xml to your favorite feedr eader to follow along, going forward. I still have comments and other features to implement but they’ll have to wait. Santa’s elves are borking things up again and I have to write some code now to address that problem!

Training for the JavaScript Jedi Trials

2022-11-28T14:21:42Z

Since February of this year, I’ve been a JavaScript Padawan. If you’re not familiar with the term Padawan, it’s a reference to a Jedi-in-training, apprenticed to a Jedi Master in Star Wars.

I’m not actually apprenticed to a Jedi, although that’s a nice bucket list item. However, I have studied JavaScript 101, the first course at Launch School, for most of this year. And since the approach of Launch School is one of mastery-based learning, the whole JavaScript Padawan thing fits the situation.

Before a Padawan can become a Jedi Knight, they must pass the Jedi Trials. So too must I now pass a trial. I can’t proceed to the next Launch School class until I pass my assessment. (Will there be Jedi Knights and Masters there?)

This is the case after each course at Launch School. The idea is to ensure that you’ve mastered content from one class before starting the next class. I don’t know if every post-course assessment is the same but I do know what the JS101 assessment entails.

The first part is a timed, written assessment. Assuming that I pass that trial, I undergo a live interview with some coding problems. It’s akin to a developer job interview, but based solely on the JS101 course materials and concepts.

Now that I’ve completed the course, I can say with certainty: A JavaScript master, I am not.

Luckily, both the coursework and the assessment scheduling is all up to me. There’s no timetable to learn at Launch School. So I won’t schedule “the Trials” until I feel I’m ready. My preparation plan is a three-fold approach.

The plan

First, I’ll be re-reviewing all of the course material and my notes from the beginning.

My notes alone total more than 20,000 words in Notion, so this is a big task. However, since it’s a second pass at the materials, everything should at least look or sound familiar. I can zip through some concepts while others may take a little time. I may even re-read the pre-course book, Introduction to Programming with JavaScript. This online text is reasonably comprehensive and freely available if you’re interested.

Second, instead of taking a second set of notes, I want to start writing up some of the concepts in my own words as if I were teaching JavaScript.

If you can’t explain something to someone else, you certainly aren’t a master of that something. I may keep those writings private. Or I may turn them into blog posts here. No, the world doesn’t need yet another site to teach JavaScript. But this would be good practice for me. And it might help someone else, either at Launch School or in the wider galaxy.

Lastly, I’ll complete coding exercises.

Launch School offers its own exercises and I completed those during my Padawan training. However, I have more JavaScript tools in my toolbox to rework, re-do and/or refactor my solutions.

I’ll probably supplement these exercises with some from external sources. I need to make sure they’re relevant to what I learned in JS101 though. Although I understand recursion, having learned the practice in a Java class a few years back, that’s not a JS101 concept. So I don’t want to add any extra bits that weren’t covered in JS101.

Maybe I’ll record myself doing some coding exercises to simulate a live-coding environment. The interview part of the assessment will surely entail live coding and I know that’s a bit different than coding alone. I might even publish some of these, in case they help others.

All told, I think this approach is a solid one. At least for me. Everyone learns in different ways, of course. And at different speeds.

In hindsight, I really should have spent more hours per week into this course. Had I committed to 15 or 20 hours a week, I probably would have halved the time it took me to get through everything.

Lesson learned.

I don’t want to repeat my lack of a time commitment while preparing for this trial. Nor do I want to rush. The goal is one of preparation combined with consistent effort. So it will take as long as it takes. Let’s begin!

So ends the great Masters in CS experiment

2021-12-22T16:16:31Z

Well, my first semester in the Georgia Tech OMSCS program is over. And my first semester is also my last semester. I’ve decided to not continue this online Masters program.

My decision isn’t because of the program, it’s because of me. At least in a sense.

I’ll say upfront that I think the program is fantastic. Georgia Tech has created an affordable, top-notch advanced degree path in Computer Science. Seriously, it’s undervalued at $800 per class. And although I only took one course, I reviewed many of the syllabuses and video lectures from a bunch of other classes. They’re all available online for anyone to see. And they’re all very interesting for their respective topics.

My Human-Computer Interaction course was excellent as well. Yes, it was a lot of work, but that’s to be expected at this level. I learned a ton. More than I expected. My class notes totaled more than 18,000 words!

The professor, who is also the director of the OMSCS program, is a fantastic presenter filled with passion. He made what could have been mundane at times very interesting. And he was very responsive, both on the class forms, as well as a few personal email interactions I had with him.

Overall, I can’t complain one bit about the course materials, the lectures, nor the workload.

So why am I not going back?

Like I said it really has to do with me. In a learning environment, I thrive on educational and social engagement with my peers. It’s one of the reasons I really got involved at my local community college when taking CS classes from 2018 to 2020. Instead of watching my classmates leave campus after class (typical for a county-based commuter school), I challenged them to join me for study groups.

So I started up in the campus library with me just sitting by myself for the first week. Then one or two students joined in. Halfway through the semester, nearly half the class made regular appearances and we informally gathered a few times a week. We went from individually working out various challenges to working together as a group to help anyone who needed it. Effectively, we learned more together than we would have done alone. I loved it.

That’s difficult to do in today’s world as COVID has impacted the entire globe. Many schools have gone from in-person to hybrid learning and to online only. And to be fair to Georgia Tech, I knew when I applied that it was an asynchronous, online only program. I really thought I could deal with that.

But as the semester went on, after failed attempts to get some synchronous video chat study sessions together, I knew this wasn’t the optimal situation for me.

I think it was more of the asynchronous aspect than the online one. I say that because my final class as the community college was online. However, we did meet for class at regular times on Zoom. So there were opportunities to engage with the professor and with students in real time.

Only getting half of what I really want

Yes, the OMSCS program would get me my Masters in CS, assuming I continued on and kept doing the work. But I wouldn’t give me all that I want in such a program: More of a real-time experience as least on occasion.

As I noted, what Georgia Tech has put together in OMSCS is fantastic. As a result, we had students in the HCI class from six of the seven world continents. Probably all, or most, of the 24 world time zones as well. And while this accessibility is a strength of the program, it’s a challenge get the engaging environment that works best for me.

So for now, I’ll keep learning development on my own and with some local folks that I had class with a few years back.

I plan to increase my involvement again at the local community college, assuming there’s some in-person opportunities. And I have some coding projects that I’ve resumed since stopping them when my semester started. It’s all good!

Wish me luck (I'm gonna need it)

2021-02-28T23:11:11Z

I made a big life decision this past month. At age 51, I’ve applied to an online Masters in Computer Science program at Georgia Tech. Yeah, I’m surprised too.

See, I always wanted to teach college classes. Even before getting my B.A. in Economics back in the early '90’s, that was the plan. It didn’t work out back then and I eventually started a 15-year career in I.T. followed by another 15 years creating content online.

I got the teaching bug again not long after leaving my full-time position at Google in 2017. I left there for health reasons, so I didn’t immediately do anything after resigning. Well, other than focus on my health and watch a lot of Netflix, that is.

Once I felt I was back on track from a health perspective, my good friend and ex-Gigaom colleague, Stacey Higginbotham, offered me a chance to contribute to her StaceyOnIoT site. I was already doing the IoT Podcast with her for a few years prior, so a little writing for the site was an ideal fit. I’m an independent contractor for Stacey and she graciously enabled me to earn a little money while I was refocusing my life.

I’ve continued to contribute for Stacey and in April 2018 started my AboutChromebooks site. I was a little bored and really didn’t want do work full-time. So I decided to try making some extra money blogging about a product I knew well. This April will be three years of AboutChromebooks.com and (along with the adoption of a minimalist lifestyle) it makes just enough to pay the bills.

It also lets me have enough free time for self-learning. And in January 2018, I started taking undergraduate Computer Science classes at my local community college.

I quickly learned that as a “commuter school”, my classmates were missing out on much of the college experience I had decades earlier.

So I started running study groups for every class I took, meeting anyone who wanted to join in at the campus library a few days a week. Aside from working through the latest CS concepts, I tried to offer a “real world” perspective as well as tips/tricks that could help the students.

Git isn’t officially taught in any of my classes, so I pushed my peers to learn and use GitHub. When we had class projects, I would suggest some new (but proven) technologies that weren’t part of the curriculum: We used MongoDB ang Google Cloud / Google DataStudio for a coding project. You get the idea.

And through the last two years of doing this, I got the teaching bug again.

My CS profs are fully on-board with that, even speaking on my behalf to the college administration to have me start lecturing some intro coding classes. But the college is pretty set on requiring a Masters degree, which I can understand.

So it’s back to school I go. Again.

Well hopefully. I’ve only applied to the Geogia Tech program and won’t likely receive an admissions decision for a good month or two.

If you’re not familiar with this program, it’s pretty unique. And very challenging, apparently.

The Georgia Tech Online Masters in CS is done in partnership with Udacity and AT&T. As a result, it’s relatively inexpenive. Like $800 a class, which isn’t much more than my community college classes. There are a few specializations available and a wide array of classes to choose from.

The college boasts 10,799 registered students as of last semester, so it’s not a small program. In fact, on the first day of registration, it’s typical to get waitlisted for a class even though there were 1,000 spots for a course.

As far as the challenge and effort offered by the program, there are ton of videos and reviews out there explaining it all. I’ve probably spent 50 hours researching those already. This particular one stands out to me:

Since I’ve only taken 8 CS courses and it’s been 30 years since Calc I and II, this is a tough road to follow.

However, I’m no stranger to hard work and I’m a good independent learner in a structured environment so at least there’s a chance of success. Add in a a deep passion for the subject matter and desire to get that Masters so I can teach? My odds of success improve a little.

Regardless, it’s going to take some luck to go along with the hard work, plus a little extra luck to get an acceptance for the fall semester. If you have some, send it my way. Every little bit helps!

Hello World

2020-05-25T18:34:46Z

It works

This post suggests that I correctly have my Hugo-rendered site up and running. Check the link for more information on the Hugo open-source software, but essentially, it takes Markdown content and renders static site pages for much faster delivery than a traditional CMS with a database, such as Wordpress.

For now, I have the content being hosted for free on Netlify which does offer a reasonable amount of hosting features at no cost. My intent is to integrate the open-source Netlify CMS so I don’t have to write Markdown files in a text editor. And then at some point, I’ll likely move the entire site to GitHub Pages for free.

Why GitHub Pages

Because all of the content on this site is actually stored on GitHub.

That offers me a relatively permanent record of all the content. At the moment Netlify looks for changes to my blog repo and serves up the static pages.

Things to do

Remove/modify the default yellow SVG image for this theme
Tweak the theme so it looks how I want (I want some blurbs under each post on the home page, for example.)
~~Update About page~~ Completed, 8/10/2020
Create/add favicon
Create templates for various types of content
Find and implement an open source commenting system
~~Install/integrate the Netlify CMS~~ Completed, 5/30/2020
~~Move site to GitHub Pages~~ Decided to use Netlify
~~Point custom domain to site~~ Completed, 6/5/2020
Programmatically archive and display my Twitter history
See if I can hook the CMS into Google Photos via an API; every image I capture on my own is in Google Photos.
Look at coding an image converter (or connecting to one using JS) so all images are .webp if supported and .jpeg/.gif/.png if not
Code something up to save multiple image sizes for better responsive web experience

Thanks

Chris Stayte: Helpful videos on how to set up & use Hugo as well as Netlify

Munif Tanjam: I wanted a great looking, highly customizable minimalist theme and Munif’s Minimo is what I chose.

Dave Winer: For getting me to think about keeping my content out of silos.