Not dead yet

Hi, pals. It has been a minute since I blogged and I wanted to confirm I am, in fact, not dead. This is a quick overview of what I’ve been up to over the last few months.

Personal status

I have had some folks reach out and check in, which was very nice. Thank you.

Depression is still thoroughly kicking my ass. However, reducing my world has been helpful. I still check the news to frequently, once a day should be enough, but I find myself checking 4-5 times and even before bed. A bad habit I’m still trying to kick. What has been helpful is not absorbing all of the world’s stress, all the time. When on social media I was soaking up not just the horrible state of the world, but also everyone’s individual stresses they post about on Mastodon, etc. Nothing against the folks who post about their troubles. I just couldn’t process the US news, my own family stress, personal depression, running a business, and strangers drama. I can’t control my personal stressors, but I can sure as hell check out on the news and randos.

In good news our business is busier than its ever been. We continue to pick up new clients and are booked for months. I’ve brought my son on permanently in a part-time capacity and as a three-man team we are kicking ass. Inflation and fuel prices has impacted our profitability. Currently we are making up for that in volume. I am already thinking about the end of the year and taxes, so we are planning our EOY spend on equipment and closely watching the launch of the Slate Truck. I’d love to eliminate the need for gasoline.

If you read my daily posts a while back you’ll know my nephew was born with a heart condition. He recently had open heart surgery and is still recovering in the CICU. The surgery went well, but he is now suffering from complications and will be in the hospital for at least a month. Obviously this has been hard on my sisters family and everyone in their orbit. I can’t wait to see him.

My 44th. birthday is next week and I’m on mid-season vacation until then. I have a big list of home projects this week. I’m really, really bad at relaxing.

Tech upgrades

Although I haven’t been blogging about my projects, they continue unabated.

The major change is I finally bought a new phone. With business booming I was able to justify purchasing a new phone and ditching that iPhone I was using. I primarily use my phone in the business, so I could make it a business expense. I picked up a Samsung XCover7 Pro and I’m loving it. Its as close as I could get to having a clone of my beloved Galaxy S10e with a SD card slot, side fingerprint sensor, USB-C alt-mode, Dex mode, and best of all, a simple, user removable battery. I wish it had more onboard storage (only 128GB) and support for the new Linux Terminal. But, I have zero complaints. It has had an overall positive impact on my life. I fucking hated that iPhone. I’ve never hated a piece of tech more than that fucking iPhone. I love, love, love this XCover7 Pro.

I ended up ditching my desktop, or at least not using it at my desk and storing it away. I got tired of having mutliple machines and trying to sync all my data around them. I wanted the ability to work anywhere, like work on the couch and continue at my desk, without having to wait for data to sync. Initially I setup my Panasonic Let’s Note CF-SZ5 with my standard desktop (Debian + XFCE). I used that for about a month and now I using the Dell Lattitude 7490 with a new configuration. I am enjoying switching devices and configuring them differently for short runs.

For this Lattitude 7490 I wanted to take some new swings at Debian. Instead of XFCE I went with OpenBox after finding a rad person who publishes an install script that makes an actual usable desktop with tons of tools I already love to use (like rofi) and a lovely polybar config. I also love the keyboard shortcuts. I have since heavily customized several things and changed the default apps to my preferred items and tracking all my changes to a fork in m y personal git repo so I can replicate this install on any machine. Honestly, I don’t think I’m going back to XFCE. I still love XFCE. But now that I’m maintaining my own custom DE and its tuned exactly the way I want it, I think I’m here for a long time.

In addition to it being a custom setup, it sips RAM. At idle, with some various utilities running on boot, this machine idles at about 600MB of RAM. In my opinion, there is no reason any DE to use more than 1GB of RAM at idle. This is a hill I’m willing to die on. I’ve said this before and got replies from folks that modern desktops do so much now that its just not feasible to use less than 1GB of RAM. To that I say those desktops are simply lazy and wasteful. That is a mindset that people should upgrade their hardware all the time and there’s essentially unlimited RAM and storage. Well, now that those things have astromical costs, its time for other DE’s (like Gnome and KDE) to respect users and trim their shit. But, that’s the best part of Linux. There isn’t just one desktop. I can setup my stuff however I want.

My setup is more than just a new window manager. I’ve also enabled zswap and I’m using XanMod custom kernel. The system is fast and I love it.

Closing

I’ve been feeling the urge to blog again, so hopefully there will be more posts coming soon. But don’t count on anything. I have a busy summer and my oldest is getting married in the autumn, so my focus is in other places. Please email or message on Signal if you wanna chat, I’d be happy to share more from this post.

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