What have I done recently? What am I doing? What do I plan to do in the near future?
As a kid every day was a learning experience. While life wasn't "tough"; I had food, shelter, caring parents, etc..., it wasn't easy either. Difficulty is subjective, and to a kid, where each day brings something new and challenging life "feels" hard. It probably feels harder than it does to an adult. What those challenges meant though, was that I was constantly learning. There was little need to sit down and take stock of my educational life. There was little time for it.
As I've pointed in before, I feel like as we age we grow full of ourselves and accomplishments and become complacent. I have time to sit here and write this. 10 year old me wouldn't have had the time. 10 year old me would be out doing something and learning from it.
Mid-30s me? Well, if I looked for it, I could find time everywhere except when I'm working or in the typically brief and well spaced out planned events surrounding it.
So, I want to start talking about what I've done recently, what I'm doing and what I would like to start doing. And hopefully, by keeping a focus on these things I'll actually start some of the unstarted ones and finish some others.
Starting with the recent past. I've done a lot of posts about Linux, because I had two goals tied to that. Seeing if I could get openHAB up and running, and getting back into Linux in some capacity. I finished both of those within the last month or so. My fascination with openHAB stemmed from two things; IKEAs slow support of Google Home and the cluster of devices required to run a smart home. I've considering buying a NUC or Raspberry PI and using that, amongst other things, as a low power server to help run those sorts of things in the house with a centralized interface.
But, I don't want to invest money in either if I wasn't going to find the motivation to figure out how to do. After my rants about never learning anything, I through Linux on a VM and got something mostly working. But, VM's aren't ideal. I don't leave my laptop or desktop on all the time, and making sure the ports work, etc... is a freakin' nightmare, and it all takes up precious drive space.
I had also wanted to get back into using Linux. I still have and use Windows. And I will likely do so for the foreseeable future. Originally I was trying to get my shitty Dell tablet running it. But the silly thing flat out refuses to recognize my USB keys on boot up. And the thing dies the second the power cable comes out. A few days on while pondering a Windows 10 update, I noticed my laptop was running out of space. Mostly due to Windows backups from previous updates. And, despite running a Core i5 processor and having 8GB of RAM, my laptop ran like junk.
I decided to tackle two things at once. Throw Linux on the laptop, and build out openHAB properly. This laptop hasn't seen a Windows installation in over a month. IKEA started supporting GH 3 days after I figured openHAB out. But, I never really wanted a power hungry laptop for that purpose and openHAB still has value a unification platform. Also, openHABs integration with GH works 100 times better than IKEAs AND works remotely. So, the effort was not wasted. I probably will pick up a Pi device in the near future.
My only current learning project is Japanese. It is a large topic. But, it doesn't fill my time. I can only tackle so much in a day before I feel the need to switch to something else.
As for future tasks. Python seems to be a language growing in popularity. It was always popular in the Linux community. Now that I have a Linux environment, it seems like the perfect time to start learning some Python. I'm fairly certain I'm going to actually do this one to some degree.
Some less certain items I'd like to tackle:
As I've pointed in before, I feel like as we age we grow full of ourselves and accomplishments and become complacent. I have time to sit here and write this. 10 year old me wouldn't have had the time. 10 year old me would be out doing something and learning from it.
Mid-30s me? Well, if I looked for it, I could find time everywhere except when I'm working or in the typically brief and well spaced out planned events surrounding it.
So, I want to start talking about what I've done recently, what I'm doing and what I would like to start doing. And hopefully, by keeping a focus on these things I'll actually start some of the unstarted ones and finish some others.
Starting with the recent past. I've done a lot of posts about Linux, because I had two goals tied to that. Seeing if I could get openHAB up and running, and getting back into Linux in some capacity. I finished both of those within the last month or so. My fascination with openHAB stemmed from two things; IKEAs slow support of Google Home and the cluster of devices required to run a smart home. I've considering buying a NUC or Raspberry PI and using that, amongst other things, as a low power server to help run those sorts of things in the house with a centralized interface.
But, I don't want to invest money in either if I wasn't going to find the motivation to figure out how to do. After my rants about never learning anything, I through Linux on a VM and got something mostly working. But, VM's aren't ideal. I don't leave my laptop or desktop on all the time, and making sure the ports work, etc... is a freakin' nightmare, and it all takes up precious drive space.
I had also wanted to get back into using Linux. I still have and use Windows. And I will likely do so for the foreseeable future. Originally I was trying to get my shitty Dell tablet running it. But the silly thing flat out refuses to recognize my USB keys on boot up. And the thing dies the second the power cable comes out. A few days on while pondering a Windows 10 update, I noticed my laptop was running out of space. Mostly due to Windows backups from previous updates. And, despite running a Core i5 processor and having 8GB of RAM, my laptop ran like junk.
I decided to tackle two things at once. Throw Linux on the laptop, and build out openHAB properly. This laptop hasn't seen a Windows installation in over a month. IKEA started supporting GH 3 days after I figured openHAB out. But, I never really wanted a power hungry laptop for that purpose and openHAB still has value a unification platform. Also, openHABs integration with GH works 100 times better than IKEAs AND works remotely. So, the effort was not wasted. I probably will pick up a Pi device in the near future.
My only current learning project is Japanese. It is a large topic. But, it doesn't fill my time. I can only tackle so much in a day before I feel the need to switch to something else.
As for future tasks. Python seems to be a language growing in popularity. It was always popular in the Linux community. Now that I have a Linux environment, it seems like the perfect time to start learning some Python. I'm fairly certain I'm going to actually do this one to some degree.
Some less certain items I'd like to tackle:
- Building a "home control system". Think of it like a front end to the openHAB work with added support for displaying information like weather, time and scheduled events. Not sure if I want to do it as a web site or some other technology. I might take the openHAB source and either modify it, or add a UI plug-in. Or it might a standalone web site which can talk to openHab, or some other full screen application.
- 3D modeling.
- Start a YouTube channel
And there you have it. I have more ambitions than that. But, I want to keep the lists concise and realistic. Even the less certain items are limited to things which I've thought about a lot and could theoretically start any time. I've left off things like other languages because, even though I'm reasonably sure I'll learn another, I don't know when or which (though it will probably be French).
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