Daily - 2025-12-01

Previously…

Yesterday recap

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, so everyone was moving slowly throughout the day. In the morning I worked on getting my truck ready for the week and did my Sunday chores. Then the boy came downstairs and we watched some NFL football while wife took the gorls to the store for a little treat.

This was my first real day with using the new HTPC and it worked exactly as I hoped. I still have some edges to sand down, mostly getting a better remote control. For the time being I still have the Android TV setup and the HTPC. We will see how this week goes and if we can handle going full time HTPC. Honestly, we don’t watch it a lot. A movie at night after the gorls go to bed and maybe some YouTube during the day is 99% of the use case. I hate that it takes up so much of my time and energy for just that.

In the afternoon I went through the pantry and collected the food that was getting close to expiring and made a list of some of the other foods that should be in our emergency kit.

I ended up not replacing that outlet simply because I didn’t feel like doing it. I’ll do it today.

The youngest gorl is a rabid gamer and is always looking for new games. We have Amazon Prime through my brother so I figured we could try Amazon Luna and would be a new source of games for her. I thought for sure our family login would bounce us out, but it didn’t and she was able to stream some games. The game streaming worked surprisingly well. Another place for her to check once a month to see what new games she can play.

In the evening I read about and tested Webtop from the LSIO team, including the new Sealskin container. It is all interesting, but I don’t think it is for me. I straddle this weird line with this kind of tech. I don’t do it for a living and never will. There are some things - like remote virtual desktops, thin clients, centralized workstation deployments - that I have to determine if it is worth learning for me since it is only out of personal curiosity. Yes, it is interesting and I would learn something new. But, I will never, ever use it for any purpose other than personal curiosity. Not saying being curious isn’t worth it, but is it worth my attention and time.

At the moment, Webtop is not. However, I am happy I spent some time exploring.

Dinner, gorls bedtime, and then we started watching Die Hard 2: Die Harder.

How are you feeling today?

Better. The slow week last week has helped me physically recover and I’m feeling the urge to get outside and get the muscles moving.

Gratitude

We have a good pantry and it feels good to know we always have a lot of food around. Who knows what the winter will bring or what will happen next year. But, we always have food and I’m grateful for that.

Todo

Chores

• Appointment for lab work. I couldn’t do this last week due to the holiday and the technician taking the week off. Technically I already went and I’m writing this after.
• Carry over: Replace outlet in sons room.
• Edit and share our family photo from Thanksgiving.
• Xmas shopping for wife. I like giving gifts, I hate shopping.

Fun

• WWE Monday Night Raw with the fam.
• Finish Die Hard 2 with wife.

Projects

I have burned through a lot of smaller projects in the last couple weeks, so I’m out of ideas at the moment. I will admit I’ve been thinking about my homelab setup, which happens every winter when I have extra time. Yesterday, when I was looking through Webtop, I thought it would be nice to have higher potential compute for the lab. I know that comes with higher energy use and a higher bill, which is why I always try to keep the lab to the absolute lowest energy use. But, I’ve been seeing more projects that would need me to scale up from an Intel N100 and 16GB of RAM.

We really can’t afford higher energy bills, so I know this will go nowhere.

I think I’m going to spend time this week looking at my Firefox setup, especially using Firefox Containers. Now that I’m not using the Chromebook I’m fully on Firefox for all my machines. I should spend time getting everything situated.

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