December 2023 Retrospective

Here is what I’ve been up to for the last month and what items had my attention. It is a mix of home, health, holidays, movies, and lots of article/blog reading.

December is the first month of my extended “vacation” and I spent the entire time at home. It has been nice to be here and be a part of the day-to-day activities. It also means I help more with the household chores and tackle some projects I won’t have time for in the sunny months.

The holidays are fun, but I’m glad they are over. In addition to the stress of the holiday season, it is compounded by high inflation and limited budgets this year. All in all I think everyone had a great holiday, got some cool stuff, and spent a lot of time together. It is probably the last holiday season where our oldest child will be living with us, which weighed heavily on my wife and I throughout the month.

I also took care of some health issues this month. I have extreme GERD and have had it for many years. Over the last few months I’ve been struggling to swallow at any meal. I have severely cut back on eating and have been limiting myself to only certain foods that are easier to swallow. I went to a specialist at the beginning of the month and they performed an endoscopy. They found some minor issues and performed a “throat stretching”, but nothing that was obvious for my other health issues, such as swallowing.

I will hopefully be able to see them again for an x-ray on my neck and start to understand what is happening. In general I am feeling better and having less panic attacks while eating, fearing that I will choke with every bite. At the end of November it was really severe and since my stretching things have been good enough for me to eat most meals without issues.

Home & Garden

I am an avid gardener and I have had a vegetable garden for many years at this house. When we moved to Arizona we lived in a place with no yard and I desperately missed gardening. When we moved back the first thing I did was build two raised beds.

After years of growing veggies I have decided I want to have a diversified garden, with flowers, shrubs, trees, mixed with some edible plants, covering the backyard. We have a small yard and I don’t want it dedicated to just veggies any more. I want a space that the dogs and kids can go out and play. We also love inviting nature into our yard, so I want it to be friendly to the local ecosystem. This spring I plan on essentially over-planting the yard and letting things take off.

So, I decided December was the right time to disassemble a raised bed and spread out the dirt. After doing this I remembered I live in an area that gets 200+ days of rain a year and it immediately turned in to a giant mud pit.

Whoops.

In my boredom at home, I pulled out all the appliances and cleaned under and around them. I also cleaned the coils on the refrigerator so it will run more efficiently. These are tasks I typically do this time of year with my extra time.

Tech projects

Server rebuild

If you follow this blog you’ll know that recently I had to completely rebuild my home server. It went way better than I thought it would and I wrote up the story in my first blog of the new year. Check it out if you want to see the story.

The day my homelab kerploded

Self-hosted additions

I also started self-hosting an instance of SearXNG metasearch engine for an overall better search experience. More notes on how that is going here:

A check-in on self-hosting SearXNG metasearch engine

I then decided to host my own Mastodon instance using GoToSocial. It was way easier than I thought it would be to get started and now almost a month into it, things are great! Read more notes about setting up a single user instance here.

Getting On with GoToSocial

A new gift!

My wife knows me well. Rather than any new PC or computer components, my wife bought me a used Microsoft Surface RT (from goodwillfinds.com, a digital storefront for many Goodwill stores) knowing I love to hack away on old devices. Originally released in 2012, this device is fascinating. It has a 32-bit armv7 Nvidia Tegra CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and Windows 8.1 installed. It is not a standard Windows 8 install either, it is their arm version of Windows that locked apps being installed from the Windows Store.

I turned it on and used Windows 8.1 for a couple days and I can see why everyone hated it. I haven’t used Windows regularly since Windows 7, so I had no idea. Windows 8 is hot, hot garbage. But, using it as a dedicated thin client device and connected rdp to something better worked fine.

Of course I never wanted to keep Windows on this thing (I’m actually writing this blog from the Surface RT), I found a group that has been hacking away on these devices, getting Windows 10, Postmarket OS, and Raspberry Pi OS installed on it. I decided to go with Raspberry Pi OS, based on Debian 12.

I thought hard about what project I wanted to do first with this Surface RT and I decided to make it into a thin client-like device, connecting to my iKoolCore R1 mini PC and streaming apps using x2go so it feels like they are integrated to the Surface. Now I can use any app I want, plus use the terminal, to get a full desktop experience.

I will write up a longer blog post about what I’m using and how it works later. Roughly, here’s how it is now:

• Using x2go Published Applications to stream things like Firefox and Discord desktop apps.
• Configured vnc to stream the full desktop as necessary.
• Setup more than a dozen TUI commandline applications and then ssh from the Surface to the iKoolCore PC and access them.

So far, so good. I’m pretty impressed at this workflow and I use it constantly while sitting on the couch in the evenings.

Watch for more info later.

Annual backups

I keep an offsite and completely offline backup of my data at my brother’s house on an encrypted drive, encased in protection from the elements. I spent the last few days of the year preparing the backup and shuffling it over to his house way, way across town. Since I only do it once a year, it is an emergency only backup.

I also performed the rest of my backups, both locally and in “the cloud”. At this point I think I’m running a 6-5-4-3-2-1 strategy.

Movies

• Hard Ticket to Hawaii
  • A truly terrible move and easily on our list of worst movies ever made. It was so much fun!
• Red Heat
  • Arnie and Belushi in a buddy cop movie? How can I say no?
• Garfield Thanksgiving/Xmas
• Funny Farm
• Mickey Mouse Christmas Carol
• Muppet Family Christmas
  • We got this on DVD many years ago and it is a tradition to watch it every Christmas Eve.
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas - both new and old
• Lethal Weapon
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
  • Probably my favorite Val Kilmer role. I know, he’s great as Doc Holliday. But I love Perry and wish we got more of him.
• Ernest Saves Christmas
  • I grew up watching every Ernest movie. I apologize for nothing!
• Silent Night, Deadly Night 1 & 2
  • The first Silent Night, Deadly night is an all time Christmas classic. The second is alright. It is just mostly flashback scenes.
  • Naughty! 🪓
• Expendables 4
  • I wish I didn’t watch it.
• Dabangg 2
  • We like to watch Salman Khan movies. What can I say?
• A Christmas Story
  • A tradition every Christmas morning.
• National Lampoons Christmas Vacation
• Elf
• Polar Express

Articles

• 23andMe admits hackers accessed 6.9 million users’ DNA Relatives data - The Verge
  • Not only do these DNA services fail to protect your privacy, it is also a disaster for other family members who never wanted anything to do with it. I have a father I’ve never met and I’d like to keep it that way. DNA services make it so that might get ruined one day.
• Microsoft’s new Outlook client quietly moves your email to the cloud
  • I truly don’t understand anyone using any Microsoft products.
• Apple admits to secretly giving governments push notification data | Ars Technica
• What It’s Like Living With Limited Access to Internet in the Black Rural South  – The Markup
• Jakarta, Indonesia’s Capital, is Sinking into the Sea? Can it be saved?
  • An absolutely fascinating article and worth your time.
• Inside Foxconn’s India iPhone factory expansion - Rest of World
  • Another interesting read and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Definitely read.
• R.L. Dane - Don’t use what works for you
  • Down with pragmatism. Do what you think is ethically right, not what is easiest.
• Looking back at 2058
  • A fictional look at what things could be like in 25 years. Frankly, it felt a little too real.

Games

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

I received a very nice gift in an Xbox gift card from my daughters boyfriend. Using it I picked up this game and played for an hour or two. So far its… Okay. It is full of toxic gamer behavior, but the gameplay is good. I would have put in more time, but I got distracted by another game.

Power Wash Simulator

I actually purchased this game for my wife as a gift. She does play it and loves it. However, I decided to give it a go and I am hooked! In fact, when I finish writing this post the first thing I’m going to do is play some Power Wash Simulator.

That’s all for this time. Bye, pals.

- - - - -

Did you like this post? Give it an upvote by clicking on the arrows below! Sending me an upvote is like you and I giving each other a high five.

🙏 😎

If you enjoy the random stuff I write here, post to Mastodon, or watch on YouTube, and are feeling generous, I am open to tips of Ko-fi.