Inspired by Derek Sivers and his nownownow.com site, I’m adding this page to my site with the best of intentions to keep it regularly updated.
I’m circling back to programming and BSD
After many years out of “the game,” I’m circling back to programming and BSD operating systems. I briefly wrote about a recent experience with OpenBSD here. Well, I’ve gone ahead and bought a couple of Lenovo Thinkpads from eBay to continue this work.
I first bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with the intent of installing NetBSD on it. Which I have. I’ve run in to some issues with it, however. More to come on that.
I then bought a Thinkpad X250 and promptly loaded OpenBSD on it. And, surprise (or maybe not) it’s worked perfectly. A few tweaks have been made but overall, OpenBSD just works on this hardware. It’s quite amazing.
I’ve also picked up the book Teach Yourself C Programming in 21 Days. Now, it’ll take me longer than 21 days to get through it, but that’s ok. I haven’t messed with C since high school, so it’s good to get a brush up. I have these delusions of grandeur that I may start contributing code to the BSDs. We’ll see.
I’ve also started following along to the Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment course. Of course this correlates to the above items.
Trying to re-focus on fitness
Before Covid (BC? Interesting…), I was hot on fitness. I was down 30 lbs, my fitness level was way up. I even went running a few miles late at night, after getting the kids to bed.
Now, not so much. I’ve gained back what was lost. I’m right back to where I started. And I’m not happy with that.
So, I’m easing my way in to changing that. And trying to remember the phrase that
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly
So rather than lamenting that I can’t get 30 minutes of exercise in and doing nothing, I can instead get 3 minutes of exercise in. Rather than kick myself for having no time to study at the end of the day, I can study for just 5 minutes. You get the idea.
Thinking more about minimalism
I came across the https://unixsheikh.com website and I instantly fell in love. It’s a thing of minimalist beauty. And the best part, it’s entirely old school HTML. No fancy CMS. No weighty PHP or PERL software in the background. Just good old fashioned HTML.
What a novel concept!
It makes me want to completely reinvent a lot of things myself. Though, I’m considering a very lightweight CMS that does markdown conversion, and write the pages in markdown. I know I know, I’m already defeating the purpose of the minimalism. But if it’s very slim and lightweight, why not?
I wrote Aneuch, and in theory there’s no reason it couldn’t fit the bill. But, it depends on a lot of “old” technologies (like the CGI module) and has a fairly heavy amount of styling/javascript (using bootstrap as the basis for theming). But, I digress.
Stay tuned for possibly more in this arena!
Updated September 11th, 2021 from Bellevue, Nebraska