December 29, 2020

I am happy to note that I have successfully moved over to Gentoo on bare metal, meaning its on my Linux laptop and no longer in a VM.

I have coupled Gentoo with Emacs Window Manager (exwm), and honestly, it is fantastic!

The fonts, and unicode characters need to be adjusted as I’m not sure if you have to RICE it via ‘~/.Xresources’ or via the Emacs config itself (but this is what the README is for I guess).

However, I even have ‘vterm’ support as well within Emacs, so that’s pretty much spot on goal-wise to even try it out.

Since I’m utilizing Emacs Window Manager though, I can easily just use urxvt as the main terminal emulator as well, which is awesome.

I decided to take the plunge as I was getting sick of using AwesomeWM for some reason. More so, because I just wanted a full screen window manager, and less bloat present. I think I’ll also switch my “Just Works” setup to be “FreeBSD” based instead of Devuan as well. Devuan’s cool and all, but honestly, I think BSD sounds even cooler since you can run both Linux AND BSD programs on BSD platforms through a compatibility layer.

I’m debating whether or not I should archive these posts from my blog or keep them as a running thing going forward to document the progress of how far I’ve come for the past few years. I think the historical record would be neat. I do though like starting fresh each year though.

I plan on overhauling the site completely for the new year, and will archive the other sections of the site to remove any unnecessary bloated sections. This includes removing any “Bootstrap” dependent pages. I’ll keep their memories alive with a “museum” section to showcase screenshots of how the site used to look, but its a bit much to host 3+ versions of this site on the same webpage. This means that it will have a more basic look and feel, but will work better for anyone accessing the site via text-based web browser like ‘Links’, or ‘w3m’. Also, I’m sick of Web 3.0 sites, and just want this page to look like an Geocities / Angelfire page as I’ve intended for quite some time this year.

I plan on having rotating color schemes that change each day as well, so it’ll be fun to implement within a CronTab job. I will be hosting a “recipes” section from my recipe based .org files, and will include an awesome “links” section as well as I’ve harvested and archived quite a few awesome links to share. I realized that this idea alone is the single greatest idea from older sites, as the web was supposed to connect individual pages where people spilled their heart out to the world.

Instead… we have only a few major sites that control content for everyone else. I think the best thing we could all do is just make our own web pages again, and link them together to keep the true spirit of the internet alive.

I did a lot of self-reflecting, especially with what I’ve done with my projects and this site, and I have got to say that I have had the most fun making useful utilities. I still aim on improving the ‘w3mBookmarkSorter’ with a related config file to match. Though it won’t be available in a major Linux distribution’s package manager because the approval process takes forever, I think the right people will find it, and find it that much more useful. I maybe could have done more cooler Twitter based bot projects tapping into API’s, but those are nichey platform specific ideas that most people won’t even find useful in a few years from now. I would love to possibly consider how to tap into Archive.org’s API to archive content though, as I think that will be a major step in helping preserve the internet before it becomes another paid cable service variant.

I still plan on hacking my Wii-U this week a bit more with a few more homebrew apps to run Wii and Gamecube backups as well, so that’s been fun. I also plan on utilizing my Raspberry Pi as a NAS device, and also to use it for RTLSDR to listen to ham radio frequencies. I’ll need the related adapters, but this should keep my interest for a bit before considering a DMR radio + PiSpot in a few months.

I’ve been plunking away at that album that I’ve worked on for quite a few months, and the main guitar and vocal parts are done. I have to add drums, and maybe some synth sections. Other than that, just basic mixing, and it should be good to go. I don’t plan on re-hosting my music on this site because of how large the bandwidth would be to stream it, but I might host it on a separate VPS as I plan on hosting my own email, and re-host other web applications. I could still just store the files and people could freely access them as intended.

I’m still glad I have the ability to create music though, as I recognize not everyone has the patience to learn an instrument. However, I am living proof that if I can learn guitar, synth, vox, and drums by myself, then anyone can.

Keeping Myself Busy On Good Old’ Gentoo :) (Very happy it worked out after the 5th install attempt this year D:)

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year :)