December 16, 2021

I was able to complete all of the tasks I had assigned myself this entire year.

This is saying something because I’m a pretty motivated person, and am surprised I got through all of those tasks. Seriously.

Recently, I got the following tasks complete:

• Pretty much almost sold the old Odroid HC-4 I bought since it was such a hassle to figure out how to setup with Open Media Vault –> Don’t buy one, just don’t. They are a waste of time, and there are better SBC’s out there for this kind of thing.
• Got ‘Ventoy’ (https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html) to work with a spare 1TB external HDD to add a ton of cool Linux Live DVD ISOs to try out
• Installed Open Media Vault on a spare 128GB USB Flash Drive to basically turn my old Desktop into a mega, multi-HDD SAMBA machine
• Completely hacked the Nintendo Switch I had laying around with up-to-date GitHub patches, which is awesome
• Made a slew of work based projects on the work-based GitHub account, and have plans to put more of my own projects on my personal GitHub
• Going through most of the ‘Watts Atelier’ art course videos, which has been pretty good
• Completed a ‘Haynes MK1-2K16’ synth kit to build a functional monophonic synth
• Completed the guitar build kit from Fretwire.com, which still needs the neck to be secured in, and the bridge to be fastened
• Getting into figuring out how to do Demoscene art, which will be mega fun to do with ‘Grafx2’
• Installed ‘Manjaro’ Linux on my Thinkpad X230 as well, since I previously only had it on my Desktop spare HDD
• Converted my old Raspberry Pi 3B+ into a SAMBA share with ‘psx-pi’ which now serves Sony PS2 games DIRECTLY to my slim Sony PS2 via ethernet, which is amazing
• Got both Anbernic ‘RG351MP’ and ‘RG351V’ handheld devices, and put ‘351Elec’ (‘https://351elec.de/') on them both to make them into emulation powerhouse machines. Very fun devices to have around, and man, the form factor as well as the aspect ratios are on point!
• Learned how to transfer saves from Virtual Console games from the 3DS to extract the ‘.dat’ files to just rename them to .srm files for later use in Retroarch on the Anbernic handhelds I got, and the saves transferred beautifully
• Finally swapped out the 2032 CMOS clock battery in the Dell Optiplex file server I have since it never remembered the correct boot option to boot properly into ‘Fedora Server’ without a new one

Other than this, I plan on making more digital art illustrations going forward. I have shifted my mentality to really train on the fundamentals Mon to Wed, and just have fun with it for the rest of the week.

I might also try hosting a ‘BBS’ on a spare machine, specifically on a ‘VM’ within ‘Cockpit’ on ‘Fedora’. Maybe that or a slew of game servers in some VPS instances.

The only other thing I could think of is to maybe get ‘Batocera’ working on a spare USB flash drive or something. Might convert over to Puppy Linux via a USB flash drive if I get bored of Manjaro though.

As long as Emacs works on any distro I’m on, I’m good :)

Overall, a decent end to the year.

~ Sam