August 2021 in review.

Ru Singh

A decent month overall. It’s always raining and a little gloomy. I like it, though.

Finished a second contract I had undertaken, and I’m super glad to have that be done. I want to write a couple of blog posts, but I’ll have to check with them first. 🙂

Still contributing around a bit even though I said I wouldn’t.

My reddit consumption, at least for now, has reduced thanks to a fantastic tool.

Anyway, here’s the overview for the rest of it.

Creative work and blogging?!

I’ve been doing a bunch of UI work. This takes away all of my creativity reservoir, and then I don’t feel like writing here at all. Or maybe it’s just this grind in a pandemic-like setting.

I don’t know. Probably both. A bit of both.

Dishing out blog posts is hard. Almost on a whim, I decided to end my participation in the #100DaysToOffload challenge.

Work gear?

The WSL2 “experiment” is going well — I have settled into it and think it works for all my use cases. I’ll be sticking with it.

I also cleaned my laptop fans and replaced the Wi-Fi (and bluetooth) card. Yay me! And you! 🤩 That’s a better Wi-Fi card with a free upgrade to Bluetooth 5.1. I love that some parts are replaceable on this machine.

Really makes me reconsider if I want a Mac ever at all! Especially given everything I’ve started to absorb from my peers…

Outdated GNU utils.
Impossible to replace hardware.
Buggy core software, a departure from the company’s standards of the past.
High repair cost and poor support in India.
Not great for development (homebrew is terrible is what I’ve been told, and to an extent, seen)
- Linux fares better here, and I am already comfortable with it.

I suppose a bunch of these are up for arguments. Let me know if you have any thoughts. At this time, I think I can only absorb and not debate.

Anyway… with those two fixes, I’ve potentially given my laptop another year or two of life and usage. Maybe even more.

Oh — and I really like that Windows 10 doesn’t flicker and do weird things when I unplug/plug in my external monitor. I thought this was really cool. It was definitely a thing last time I was on Windows.

I do miss Linux every day, still, for its own reasons. With Windows 11 being a weird OS, I think my return to Linux is imminent in a few years again, when W10 reaches end-of-life.

The email “project.”

I’m finally done. It cost me about USD 13 to get this over the line, but it’s done and for that I am happy. I’m starting to see benefits and hopefully once the organization part of it is also fully complete, email will feel nice to use again. After a decade.

From 13 inboxes to 1 or 2. Imagine the relief!

Anyone who tries to reach me on my old emails can do so for about a month or two more. I think that’s enough time. I haven’t passed these ones around a lot anyway.

Meta.

List of small changes and updates.

Nicer (and clearer) home page.
New avatar.
Updated a few old posts, such that they are no longer drafts 😇
The blog page is also easier to skim through now.
I found out Jetpack Stats was adding some JavaScript/image tracking stuff, so I disabled that promptly. Go sign up for Plausible!

Email subscriptions — yay or nah?

Also, I am considering disabling email subscriptions since I haven’t gotten even a single one until now. It’s been a while. Perhaps I am just not that popular? 🙂

Featured image by Anna Atkins on Unsplash.

I encourage you to get in touch over email by using the following convenience link for any discussion: comment via email.

An end to #100DaysToOffload.

Ru Singh

I thought it was an interesting challenge. Fourteen people have finished it as at the time of writing this. From the look of it, a ton of people participate/d, so that’s a solid win for those fourteen.

The whole point of #100DaysToOffload is to challenge people to publish 100 posts on their personal blog in a year.

Posts don’t need to be long-form, deep, meaningful, or even that well written. If there are spelling and grammar mistakes, or even if there’s no real point to the post, so what? What’s important is that you’re writing about the things you want to write about.

The 100 Days To Offload website, retrieved 2021-09-01.

I’m pretty damn happy with my personal count of 43 posts (!) starting end of January 2021 and finishing August 2021.

I don’t know if I’d have hit 100 in another 5 months. Probably? Maybe not?

That’s besides the point.

I want to start focusing a little on quality again. And write when I want to, instead of feeling forced to do it every three days or once a week. Keyword being ‘feeling’ — it’s not you, it’s me.

What now?

Maybe I’ll take a break for a few weeks. I don’t know. We’ll see.

Photo by Tobi from Pexels.

I encourage you to get in touch over email by using the following convenience link for any discussion: comment via email.