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The 2024 holiday season is about to come to a close, or has already depending on how you look at it. I traveled and stayed with family, and will be returning home soon. It's been a good break from work, a change of scenery, and an opportunity to see new people.

It's also kind of tiring. Yes and no – I get to sleep in, but also have had a few late nights this time around. This is something I'd like to avoid going forward. I also brought projects with me, thinking I'd make progress on them with all that free time I'll have. Well, sort of. I have made progress on some things, but have completely ignored others. That's usually how it goes. I didn't spend enough time before I left on the mental calculation of what I'd actually be likely to look at; had I done so, it may have taken some of the pressure off.

Still, I'm happy I made it out. It's a little adventure. And, we had snow for Christmas! Years ago that wouldn't have been as much of a surprise, but it kind of has been more and more lately.

I have a longish drive to go here/return, but nothing I'm not used to. A few hours. Friends of mine have longer commutes on the order of 1-2 days, and so only make it to our hometown for major holidays.

January is still a little bit of a break. Work shouldn't be too bad, and some other things I'm involve in ramp down a little. It will likely be cold, despite misgivings about climate change and Christmas time, but also cozy in a way. Plus the days get longer.

Projects

Let's see, I'm posting here, which comes with some strife about whether I should make this my primary blog or not. It's a lot simpler than Wordpress, and mentally has a lower barrier, so there's that. A static site generator, however, is somewhere on the list, but we'll see.

The Solar Pi is something I'd like to get running this year. It's just a Raspberry Pi running a simple website, powered (mostly) when the sun is out. There's a good bit to explore there, but it's kind of a concept art project.

Microgrids – specifically DC ones – are something else. Basically, power converters that can share power bidirectionally, between different semi-independent systems. Like, an off-grid PV system that dumps some excess power into running network gear. Yes, grid-tied PV handily solves this, but this should be more fun.

The inverter – something I've had in my head for a decade – is another. That should be fun.

Animals

I thought I might be ending up with a dog, but things didn't work out as I'd imagined. Maybe this year.

In the mean time I enjoy the antics of George, and his feline relatives (through adoption) when he comes with me to visit my parents. The journey is tough for him, but he's happy being with the other cats which is nice.

The nature center I volunteer with is taking a break for the season, but that's always fun.

And That's It

That's all I have right now.

I'd like to attempt writing a Fediverse bot. I have a GoToSocial instance which works fairly well, even if it's still alpha software, and managed to create a bot account and post using a curl command.

I was thinking of using it for posting statuses from my hobbyist off-grid system. Basically, voltage, current, power, and/or energy readings taken off of the charge controller. I already have some scripts in place to do this, so I can read various things over SSH from across my LAN, so it's not that huge of a stretch.

Perhaps it would post once a day, or every hour. I'd probably be the main one to follow it, but it would fun to leave it open for others to as well. One would have to be careful of giving away too much information, but maybe something like daily production would suffice.

I think there's a good bit of potential with bots like this, especially ones you could interact with. That combined with GoToSocial, which has made running a small instance fairly easy (although not entirely trivial) opens a lot of possibilities.

I treat this as sort of like Fediverse microblogging, but slightly bigger. I just wanted to play around with the software, and I like it. But I'm not sure about giving up Wordpress. I mean, I kind of planned on doing that anyways, in favor of a static site of some sort, which I haven't done yet. And yes, I know Wordpress can interact with the Fediverse now.

Every time I think about what I'd like to do with my web presence, I face decision paralysis, enabled by wondering what exactly I would like to write about. So I end up putting it off, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I sit on a few domains, and post here and there, and maybe that's enough.

Now I think I'm going to go eat lunch.

New Ubuntu coming out soon. I've more or less settled on it as my daily driver, or variations thereof. For example I have Kubuntu on one machine, and Ubuntu Studio on another. Servers I tend to favor Debian. I've accumulated a few computers, and tend to have them in different areas, depending on what I do. Eg, my main desktop runs Ubuntu, and I have an older laptop I leave in my kitchen, and a more powerful laptop I use wherever.

Ubuntu works for the most part. I'm not the hugest fan of snaps, but it works. I've used Redhat-based distros in the past, but using Debian for servers makes it easier to just use Debian-based distros on the desktop as well, not that it's a huge deal. I've used Mint before, and it's nice. Maybe a little better for someone coming from Windows.

I used to distro-hop, especially back when I was starting with Linux. It was kind of fun, but after a while it became apparent that it's mostly the same group of software. Some things are different, and of course you can go nuts with customizing a slightly off-the-beaten-path window manager. But for the most part, the differences are minimal, and I just kept using Ubuntu.

A pet peeve of mine is responsiveness. Things like applications starting up quick and responding to user actions, not just sheer performance. There are also other little usability things I think common desktop environments could improve on. You can go a long ways without touching the command line on Linux (although it's useful and still IMHO a big part of using a Linux environment), but it would be helpful to have more options enumerated in the GUI. Along with ironing out some inconsistencies in GUIs... Using Digikam on normal Ubuntu (with Gnome) changes the cursor, for instance.

Sometimes you see changes like that in a different distro, other times not. So I don't obsess too much. Now, distros like NixOS are different, and look interesting. Same with something like GoboLinux. But unless I feel like experimenting with one of those, I stick to what seems to work.

My house isn't too dirty, but it's not very tidy right now. I go in cycles of managing to clean it, put things in their place, find a place for things that don't have one, or just throwing them out. That's along with actual cleaning, as the kitchen floor needs right now.

Cat hair builds up of course, as does dust. Then I get water in the basement when it rains, which requires something to the effect of squeegeeing or pumping to manage this. Luckily it's not a lot, maybe a quarter inch of total accumulation down there, but frustratingly it doesn't all flow to the sump pump.

We had a wind storm recently, so I have another round of tree branches down. Good future firewood, yes, but requiring of some work to chop up. And then there are things I'm planning to bring some contractors in for...

Whatever, 'tis all good. My home is comfortable, and looks nice once the cleaning/tidying cycle comes around.