Weeknotes #2

Got off of my six-day workweek last week and dove straight into a day and a half of cleaning the house and getting the yard back into shape. I was dead tired after, but this week has been more-ish relaxing, thankfully.

I got a wonderful email from a reader and fellow blogger (Check out Joel’s blog here.) I’m sure he would say it isn’t much, but I do really appreciate the contact. It’s amazing how much motivation just one message gave me to keep going. We’ve since been carrying on a longer conversation back and forth. I hope I can forge similar friendships with other bloggers around both the Worst Garbage Online community and in the wider ’net as a whole.

I had three interviews this week. The first was with a law firm. I think I did well on it. The second was with a Managed Service Provider over the phone. I must have done well with it because they wanted to schedule a video interview the very next day. That video interview was the third one. The same company that wanted a video interview right away reached out again and I’m now going in to the office to speak to them in person Monday. I had a fourth interview scheduled for a penetration testing company, but the rep dropped out last minute. I guess a meeting went over time. Hopefully we can re-connect sometime next week.

Taming Knots has a new home! I love Pika.page, but I was interested in seeing what self-hosting a site would look like. Then I realized site hosting and email hosting are the two things I really don’t want to do on my home server because they’re annoying to set up and my ISP probably won’t like me hosting on my personal connection. I opted for using Hugo with GitHub Pages instead. I don’t love hosting it on GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, but the documentation is just so much better when working with GitHub, so I’m kind of stuck. The nice thing is that storage space is not really a concern, especially given how light Hugo’s sites are and as long as I stay under 30,000 files, I won’t draw the ire of GitHub, so for now on a technical level, it’s the perfect host for my little project, especially since the hosting is free.

I’ve set up local mail clients both on my PC and on my phone. In addition, I’ve started using PGP encryption on email. I am still using Gmail, but I’d like to eventually move away from the service along with most other Google stuff. I know using encryption for something like Email makes me seem a bit like a crank, but to be honest it’s boilerplate privacy tech. I’ll probably go over PGP basics in a future Embracing Open Source post, but for now if you want my pub key, just ask!

I’m back on my bullshit again, playing Dark Cloud 2. It’s like a comfy warm blanket of a game to me at this point. I normally am very much against upscaled texture packs for old games, but I figured I’d try it this time just to see. So far, everything looks pretty great except for the inventory icons, which are still jagged and low resolution. There’s probably just not enough detail there for an algorithm to upscale them while still looking nice.

My wife and I finished Season 1 of Twin Peaks, so now we’re on to Season 2. I’m fully in new stuff I’ve never seen before, so I’m excited to go through it.