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Published on: 2021-09-16
It's been a while since my last gemlog entry. In fact it's been over a month. I don't like this long silence. It gets harder and harder for me to get back to writing as time between posts grows longer. It gets harder to return to any of my projects the longer my hiatus is. Some times it's new interests or fresh ideas that steal my time and focus. Not this time. This time I guess it's just life™ that got in the way.
My spouse and I bought an apartment this spring and have been renovating it ever since. This renovation work is coming to and end, and we've set ourselves a deadline of end of September to move in. It's an exciting time, but also a busy time. Most of construction work is complete and first rounds of furniture have started to arrive. Most of it requires some assembly, and I'm looking forward to playing with adult Lego aka stuff from Ikea.
We've lived in our current rented apartment for about seven years. By now we've made it our home. So it feels kind of sorrowful and uprooting to pack up all our things and just move. On the plus side, our new place is just around the corner; same city, same neighborhood. That helps with sense of continuity, and also makes the physical move easier.
Lastly, as this pod is running from a stay-at-home Raspberry Pi, it will go down for some time during the move. I'll definitely bring it all back once I settle down in the new place, but I can't say it will be my top priority. As a result it may be down for a couple of days as I sort out my things. Also, in case of data loss or similar issues, I may need to rebuild parts of my setup from scratch. This may include getting a new TLS certificate for the server. If I end up dong that I'll announce it on Mastodon, just in case you like to verify this sort of thing through secondary channels before trusting the new cert.
In addition to orchestrating the move I've also had some fun at work. I've moved to a new project, which is refreshing. I worked on the same problem domain for last 5 years, so it feels exciting to move to fresh problems.
I've also spoken at a dev conference last week. This was my first talk on a public event of this scale; couple of thousands of attendees. I had some previous experience with public speaking, but it definitely gave me jitters to walk up to that stage. And I did prep for it like crazy. By the end the words of the presentation were coming to me in any moments of silence, barely contained, waiting to get out. It went well in the end. I presented Deployments and Disasters, my tabletop RPG for practicing incident management.
I've also had some fun at home. With the new apartment I had an opportunity to get more into home automation and self hosting stuff in general. Firstly I had Ethernet cables installed through the walls. In my new building this is not a simple process, as walls are thick and made out of reinforced concrete. Then I bought myself one POE surveillance camera for monitoring the terrace and a couple of Zigbee powered smart bulbs and switches from Ikea. Lastly I bought a network switch to power the camera and plug all the in-wall wiring, and an old refurbished ThinkCentre PC from Lenovo to be my little home server.
While waiting for the move I've set up openmediavault and Plex server on the ThinkCentre. This took some time, but it earned me some serious spouse approval points. I'm planning to add Home Assistant and Shinobi to the mix once I have everything hooked up at the new place. I'm currently on the hunt for USB Zigbee adapter.
Finally, I kept a slow progress on Starfish, my Gemini browser. I added support for bookmarks and tabs, and am currently working on management of server certificates. After that's done I'll really need to pull a break and publish it on elementary's App Center. This was my initial goal, to go through the process of publishing an app. I've let myself get lolled into familiar safety and comfort of feature development. I need to kick myself out of it and just submit the app for review. There will be time for adding stuff in updates later on.
It's been a busy month, and busiest weeks are still ahead of me. But I hope to have more time to reflect, think and write in the near future. Living space impacts my state of mind. New projects at work may perk my imagination. I'm hoping to publish Starfish soon, so that's exciting. I hope to get back to regularly writing on this gemlog too.
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