I haven’t been keeping up with regular posts recently, but here is a update on what I’ve been doing recently and what is going to happen moving forward.
A Change in Mentality…
Last year was a doozy, and after 2020 I’m quite sure everyone has lost the ball when it comes to time. Remote work, upcoming elections, another war, and so many things have happened in the world at large that it becomes hard to focus on the here and now – yet we endeavor to do so anyway.
2023 has not gone the way that I planned for. I expected that I would be able to finish Advent of Code this year, as well as participate in more hackathons, complete all those projects that I’ve started, and yet in such a hurry to complete so many things, I neglected stop wallowing in the details. I speak of regrets, yet they all pale in comparison to what I have actually learned.
I started this year without knowing what to do with my time and energy, spending time solving small self-contained problems with well defined, technical, algorithmic solutions. Despite knowing so much, I found it hard to apply my skill set to problems that lay outside of my realm of expertise. Through the work that I have done this year, I find myself applying a new paradigm: Learn as you go. There is a time for learning and preparation, but the tools to learn are always applicable, and you need not know everything before you begin.
No unseen problem can be sufficiently well contained that you can know everything about it. A younger me might have tried to do so much, just know everything about unknown problems, real world experience has taught me that the endeavor is futile. A unseen problem is a monolithic one, insurmountable and unassailable. It looms in the distance and mocks your ability as a piddling thing. Step up close, and it can only ever be a large problem.
A Status Update!
After the massive whirlwind of the December months have passed us by, there are some basic projects that I have been working on that I would like to finalize and release. There are several projects I am currently working on, starting with…
ESP32-C6 Sensor Kit
This project is really for myself, albeit for a simple reason. I want the ability to monitor various readings throughout my house, and there exists no all in one IoT solution that suits fit what I wanted – monitor relative humidity, temperature, light, CO2, and then send it back a local dashboard. While I can do this with most small platforms, I settled with the ESP32 series because of the built in connectivity.
RiverReeds
This project comes at the behest of my parents, who have wanted audio book read-along technology. To my knowledge, there are several projects that have attempted the same thing, but they are long abandoned, and the few that do exist are not open source. Such technology was present in earlier versions of the Kindle, but they were computer-readers using to Speech to Text rather than a true audio book.
Firewood
What do you do with an old Kindle that you don’t use anymore? Turn it into a low power status page. Even if everything is available at your fingertips now, sometimes you don’t want to click through an app just to see the time. Why not with the weather or stock tickers or server uptime? The Kindle has a display that you can turn into a status page for just about anything.
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These are all well and good, and I aim to finalize these before the start of Spring in 2024. With great ambition comes a risk of failure, but even in failure we learn and grow.
What Comes Next?
There are some projects that I would like to get started, the first of which is a weather analysis project – specifically, modeling temperature as a function of light and humidity. The second project is a method of generating meshes for moiré patterns.
Other than that, who knows? We can make predictions… and resolutions!
- Get a Six-Pack!
- Despite the ambition, I did not set this goal with the intent to ‘fail’. I have prior resolutions with ‘being fit’ but it is too amorphous to be considered a goal. Exercising in the name of vanity is much easier to justify.
- Get a Job in Software or Analytics!
- Despite my expertise as a dishwasher and line cook, white collar jobs pay significantly more and tend to be less physically demanding.
- Get a Calendar (and plan more)!
- This is self explanatory – but I’ve found my organization habits to be rather haphazard. “Winging-it” doesn’t work when you need to juggle four or five priorities at the same time.
- Everything and the Moon!
- Consistent sleep schedule
- Migrate critical sites to a VPS
- Clean the fridge (consistently)
- Build an IKEA cabinet
- Post more
I’m feeling great and looking forward to 2024!
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