November 15, 2020
I tried tweaking my Gentoo VM to be able to add a different “profile” to allow it to download the [20] desktop specific option. The reason for doing this is so that I can add the necessary “USE” variable flags to be able to install xorg-server, so that I can install Emacs Window Manager. During this entire process, the SSD drive gave in, and went into read-only mode, which freaked me out to say the least, because I thought the drive died on me. I vowed to never buy into the SSD meme again, but I did re-set the power and SATA cable, and that seemed to fix the issue, even though I have to re-install Devuan on that particular drive, and re-do the entire Gentoo install. Apparently that dumb ‘read-only’ issue is typical for SSD’s unfortunately, so it’s something you just have to live with. Just so that SSD drive doesn’t go into read-only mode again, I actually might just stick with trying FreeBSD in a VM instead and to go with FreeBSD going forward, and never to try Gentoo again.
I think what I learned out of that experience is that distros like Gentoo or Slackware might put too much stress on harddrives, so even though its cool to learn the underlying components and to “tweak them” accordingly, someone like myself would be better off using something that’s bleeding edge, but works better straight from the box.
Installing Gentoo is kind of like the process of maintaining Arch for me, where it literally takes hours trying to figure out what’s broken or how it even works in the first place. I realized as I’ve gotten older that I just care about the pet projects, and as long as the underyling OS isn’t spying on me and is working as intended, my level of caring stops there. I want to customize, but don’t want to spend an entire weekend trying to wait to get something to work.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that I have got to backup my data once a month to my spare external HDD just in case.
On a more positive note, I’ve been assembling more and more Org docs with todo lists, and am planning to possibly make a Wiki out of them and to place them onto my site.
I re-learned a lot of Vim through ‘vimtutor’, and am still amazed on how good Vim is comparatively.
I’ve come to the realization that I’ll keep Emacs for Org mode TODO lists, but am more interested in pursuing more plugin options with Neovim instead.
I worked on the w3mBookmarkSorter project a bit, and thought of how to more effectively sort the links present, and will apply the same idea to the actual project sometime this week.
I also got my ElectronJS project for work to actually compile again, so I plan on learning either more NodeJS on the side, or go through a bunch for ElectronJS videos to figure out how to effectively add a feature to use HTTP requests to pull logs for one of the work apps I help support within the ElectronJS app itself.
I am in the process of learning how to use “Jami” on Linux, and will do a test run on Windoze 10 with Firefox so that family members who depend on proprietary operating systems could also use it, as I’m trying to find the best VOIP or messaging solution that’s secure, and cross-platform. This is more so because I hate having to spend minutes upon minutes for a feature phone when I have unlimited internet that can do the same exact features. Will do more Windoze related testing later this week. On Linux, “Jami” is run by using “gnome-ring”, since that was the name of the project before the name change to “Jami” a few years ago.
‘Jami’ can be found here:
Looking forward to Thanksgiving this year as we’re planning on doing some Vietnamese and Hungarian food, as the usual turkey is kinda boring and we wanted to do something different this year.
Still going strong
~ Sam