The Surprisingly Powerful One-Page Notebook That’s Always With Me
There’s a sweet little niche in the stationery world for everyday-carry (EDC) notebooks. Field Notes, Moleskine, Rite in the Rain, Leuchtturm1917, Rhodia, good ol’ Spirax, and so many more. [...] I’ve used (and loved) many of those little cuties, but there’s a new contender for paper notes that’s free of the pressure a proper notebook can imply, and it doesn’t cost a thing...
Last year I came across this super interesting article and for some reason I didn’t even bring it on my weeknotes of that week. In any case, the idea floated around in my mind since then, but I didn’t get around to it back then. It was just one of many things that seemed cool and productive, and I can’t help but be a procrastinator for those.
A few days ago I saw Alexandra share the same post on Mastodon and it sparked the idea once again. It wasn’t until today that things kind of clicked and I thought it would be fun to try it out!
I grabbed a piece of paper, folded it in 8 sections, cut in the middle to turn it into a little book, and started to write on it!
Some of the sections I added to mine this time around were:
A nice thing about this is that it’s completely reversible! So you can have both sides of the sheet at your disposal.
This is how it looks when it’s completely folded up. it’s super compact and fits on any pocket, no big deal, and yet quite useful to have.
And here is how it looks once unfolded and flat, as I mentioned, part of it is upside down, completely fine when folded, although I Ellane reminds in her article that the direction doesn’t matter at all anyway, especially on the original concept where it’s just the folded sheet without any cuts.
As most of it is on cursive and a part of it is upside down, it’s probably better to download the image and rotate it on your image viewer of choice. EDIT: you can click/tap the image to rotate it!
Of course, here’s a text version of the contents if you want to just read what it says!
ONE PAGE NOTE BOOK
March 7, 2026
written by Joel
inspired by Ellane
TO-DO LIST
MEDIA I LIKED
FOOD I ATE TODAY
Random Thought
Even though I still make mistakes, I feel much more comfortable writing in cursive by now.
Feels much more fluid and I even forgot how some block letters are written, LOL
More Random Things
How to Make
This is the last page
(A rough draft of Lea from the videogame CrossCode, making a smug face, completely ruined by the shading done with a pen)
So, how do you feel about this kind of analog productivity stuff? I keep jumping on and off, but this one seemed rather fun to me, and I may make use of it on a more regular basis, I just need to not forget about it…
If you decide to make your own, I would love to see it as well! Any advice or ideas to implement for it are welcome too, but maybe keeping it simple is the point of it all…
This is day 30 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Ever since then, I have had the itch to get some more new furniture and keep making my room look a little bit more mine.
Recently, my parents went to a pretty big city in my state, and during their visit, they went into an IKEA store. I have heard of IKEA in the past, but I hadn’t really considered them. But since my parents were there already, I asked them to look for something for me!
They didn’t dissapoint.
They sent me some píctures, and I chose a couple of things.
A cabinet, to store some things I had on some old boxes, and a new desk, for my computer!
My old desk, was one of the old style ones from the 2000s or so, with a slide-out section for the keyboard and a shelf above the monitor, as well as sections under it for the machine itself and whatever other things you may want to place there. My parents got it out of nowhere during my early years at university, when I only had an old desktop computer. It worked fine, if a bit wobbly, since the whole thing was just plywood. One of the worst mistakes done to it, was placing a printer on the top shelf, which weighed quite a lot. In the end, it was even more wobbly, and I ended up removing the top shelf section and using it like that, more stable as long as you didn’t push it from the sides.
Enough backstory. I bought those two things from IKEA, first we assembled the cabinet, which took the most time, and replaced a modular metal wire storage rack—which I passed down to my sister. The next day we assembled the desk, pretty easy and painless to me.
I won’t mention the cabinet much, it is what it is—an IKEA BRIMNES cabinet. Here’s a picture of it though, although it’s a bit of a mess inside, like all cabinets are.
The desk is also just a desk, although it is still the space I will use the most from now on. As it houses my computer, my gateway to the internet, the place where I’ll write, read and interface with the world from the comfort of my bedroom.
The dimensions are 100x45 cm, slightly less usable suface, because of the rails on the sides, but still plenty for me. I would have liked a bit more depth, but it’s good enough.
The shelf under it is a bit meh, it’s only 7cm high, and what looks like a “drawer” in the photo, is actually just a sliding door. That means that things stored all they way in are hard to reach. I put some card games and notebooks, and my handhelds when I’m not using them too. Not much space for anything else.
The space on top I decorated with a mousepad, a pencil holder, a lamp for aesthetics and some other peripherals.
To make space for the keyboard, I used the rail on the back to raise my laptop. I initially bought a stand for it but I think this works better, since it can get even further to the back, which allows more space for my palms to rest.
I had heard some things about IKEA, both good and bad, but in my experience both the desk and the cabinet were quite easy to build with the help of my sister. She’s really into LEGOs so it was like the adult version of that. I had a nice time as well, nothing that complicated happened, but I wonder how we would fare building something bigger later on. For now, this is good enough.
I wasn’t really planning on buying a new keyboard, I have never been interested on mechanical keyboards before, and while my desk is much bigger than my previous one, I didn’t really think I had the space for it anyway.
However, I made the mistake of just looking it up, and I saw one for very cheap, and with colors I really liked, so I had no choice but to cave in and get it anyway.
The Machenike K500 is a budget keyboard, plastic body and all. Honestly, I couldn’t care less. I have zero experience in this little world and I don’t know if I really want to get into it any further.
Regardless, it just arrived a few hours ago as of the writing of this piece, and this is the first chunk of text written on it.
They keyboard feels nice to me, I don’t know about lube, or sensitivity, or if the sound it makes is super satisfying. It has a numpad and full arrow keys, and that’s really all I needed. The only key I really miss right now is the Delete key, but I will survive.
The keyboard is also “hot swap” capable, it comes with some Cherry MX Red clones and RGB too. I set it up so only the keys I press light up in white, nothing too fancy. It has some software to setup profiles or customize things further, but it’s proprietary and I don’t really care much.
The layout I got is the standard Latin Spanish one, with an ñ and some different key placements, which are the same as my laptop’s, so I’m used to it. The font is more standard than what I saw on reviews with the US layout, with which was a bit too gamer for my taste. My first impressions are quite positive, I am satisfied with my purchase so far.
Getting to really customize my space how I want is something that I couldn’t really afford when I was a student, it’s one of those nice adult things I get to do with my own money and it’s honestly kind of awesome.
The keyboard I got feels good so far, I’ve never really had issues with thin laptop keyabords, I actually kind of liked them—I admit that I barely used other keyboards but the cheap ones at school. I am liking the feel it has while typing all of this. I hope I don’t get the itch to really get into mechanical keyboards, it’s too expensive, and scary—send help.
In the end, I am really happy with how everything turned out! From assemtly to decorating everything, I had a nice time.
This is day 71 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Anyway, sometimes my mom would give me her old barely used agendas and I would fill them for a bit with the few contacts I had from primary school or whatever, until I got bored, or forgot about it.
On and off I have used notebooks to take notes, to write about books I’ve read or just because school wanted me to write down short stories, essays, or any tasks I had to do.
Nowadays I don’t really write much with pen and paper I mean, and I do most of my productivity and tracking on my phone—mostly only tracking. I use Letterboxd for movies, Backloggd for videogames, Bookrastinating for books, Anilist for anime and manga, and ActivityWatch for device and app usage.
Recently, probably because I read a bunch of Analogue Office’s archives, I got the itch to do something that I could keep track of on paper. Funnily enough, I had a goal to read the New Testament from the Bible in 90 days, using a Bible app plan. So, I happened to find a PDF printable to use instead, and see if I would find it useful.
There is something about ticking off that checkbox every day that feels weirdly satisfying, maybe I will try and look for some more printable files for tracking my general reading progress, or maybe I’ll end up getting a notebook for that purpose. It might be fun!
On a bit of a sidenote: it had been a while since I had used a sheet of paper for something that wasn’t a form, quick note, drawing, or doing origami. So yeah, fun.
If you make use of some of notebooks, journals or other similar analogue tools please let me know! Its nice to see how other people approach these things.
This is day 11 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>This makes it so typing on a phone is not so bad of an experience, but the other factor is GBoard.
As a FOSS enthusiast, I tend to favor using FOSS apps on my phone. The reality is that quite a bunch of the alternative keyboards simply aren’t good enough, it wasn’t always that way though…
I’ll skip the T9 keyboards and the non-android phones, I already wrote about the phones I’ve had. All I remember is that at some point I tried predictive T9 and it was so fast it was amazing, but those times are long gone now.
In the beginning, the weird Chinese phone I had was the worst thing ever, it wasn’t a modern touch screen, I could push too hard and it would leave a mark, it also had no multi-touch functionality at all. I just used the default keyboard because the thing only had like 512 MB of storage.
The HTC Status had a pretty decent physical keyboard, it was not bad, but the keys were kinda mushy and it was getting worse over time. Regardless, it was pretty nifty and I was able to program all the keys on a GBA emulator and play games like that. It kinda sucked but I did it anyways, and for a turn based rpg like Pokemon, it didn’t matter how responsive those things were.
From there I got a Galaxy S3 mini, handed down by my dad. This phone was where I explored a bunch of different keyboard options all the time. The thing was rooted and modded to oblivion, it actually died because of that. Back then, my favorite keyboard was Fleksy, the ability to hide the space bar and use just gestures to move around was fantastic because of the small screen factor and the responsiveness of it all.
Sadly, later updates have made some random changes that I am not a fan of, they started trying to implement swipe typing (like most keyboards) instead of improving their existing gesture method, and it kinda broke it all.
After Fleksy, I became a huge fan of Openboard, it had some of the nice gestures of Gboard without all the fuss, it worked wonderfully and I didn’t have a need for much else for quite a while. However, something started to change…
I started to write in English more. After I started to interact on more diverse places like Discord and eventually Mastodon, I had the need to switch between keyboard languages, and Openboard or Fleksy just didn’t cut it anymore, nothing did.
That’s when GBoard won. Swiftkey was a contender and I’ve tried it multiple times, for months, but I just love the features and the smoothness GBoard brings. The Material You theming, the predictions and suggestions, and of course the fact that I don’t need to set my keyboard in a language or another, it will just work as I expect it to do so.
I would love to tell you I have it all locked down and without internet access, but honestly I just install it and don’t think much about that. It respects the privacy mode while filling password fields or using certain apps and the word suggestions just get better and better. The clipboard feature is also pretty good, as well as the built-in translator. So far it’s been a few years old things working just fine…
I still keep an eye on the FOSS alternatives, but it is how it is. 🤷♂️
This is post 70 of #100DaysToOffload. Have a good rest of your day, fellow reader. 😊
]]>Besides, I have Nextcloud installed and I have to admit I pretty much just use it to sync my contacts and a couple of folders in my phone. I may as well just be using Syncthing, but I decided to at least put it to use a bit more, although I’ve also considered switching to something simpler like Baikal and freeing up some resources on my Raspberry Pi server.
So yeah, things such as feeding my dogs at a certain hour, taking a medicine, and taking out the trash, etc. I hope with time I get used to being told to do this by a notification. And who knows? maybe it becomes kinda useful for me, and if I miss doing something, I will know that its purely because I am being lazy, or extremely inspired writing my blog.
Ultimately, I decided to play around a little more with vdirsyncer. I’ve been curious about any clients other than Khard and Khal that also happen to use vdirs. I discovered Orage, a super simple calendar that’s a part of the XFCE family. It is super minimal, but after a simple article I followed, I got it working quite nicely. The tutorial explains how to sync with Google Calendar, but extrapolating the information and applying it with any other service is quite easy. The official documentation has a general tutorial too.
Eventually, my brain realized that I could just add khal calendar to my .bashrc to have a quick overview of my events everyday, since I open my terminal on a daily basis! Still, if you like GUI tools, you may like Orage, its super simple and minimal, it reminds me of Claws Mail simplicity.
This is day 28 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>This is why a blogpost by @bbhltz about Claws Mail, made me want to try it out once again, since it’s a graphical email client with a really minimal set of features, as he said:
It does email. It can do some other things, but really, it is all about email.
And ain’t that enough!? I’ve used and enjoyed Thunderbird in the past, but I am not a fan of its current metamorphosis phase, I know its quickly evolving, but right now having a sidebar and tabs in the same view, displaying the same thing, as well as other small UX details, keep me away from it, for now.
Thanks to Claws Mail I can quickly move stuff around and sort it however I please. Its so light and simple, at least with normal IMAP and SMTP accounts.
To organize my email, I mostly just sort by Sender and delete in bulk whatever comes from subjects like “no-reply” emails and the like. I can also drag and drop threads and conversations to some special folders I made for them.
I use Disroot as my email provider, and it lets me create filters using their web interface to automatically categorize my email as I want.
Back to Claws, I had a bit of trouble setting up Google accounts with their OAuth options. But I barely get any emails there anyway, I could go using an App Password, but I don’t feel like logging in to it to be honest. Decent email providers are quite easy to setup, as with any Desktop client.
I think one of my goals this year will be to understand Neomutt more, for stuff such as selecting multiple emails, moving them around and swapping between inboxes. But for now, both programs are extremely light, and I don’t feel too bad about keeping them installed in my system.
In other news, I read a couple of old email threads once again, reliving moments like the first time I sent an encrypted email, that one time I sent an email to Kev and I didn’t refer to him as Kev (mistake), as well as those few times I’ve gotten emails related to my blogposts (and not how borked my website is sometimes).
So yeah, Neomutt, Claws Mail, whatever. Everytime I mention email there’s always someone mentioning its outdated and insecure.
Look. For me, there’s something about reading old threads, with a subject, with a good bottom posting nicely quoted style and a simple plain text view, without feeling forced to reply as soon as I open it, that makes it quite appealing to me from time to time. I know, I know.
You don’t know how many good conversations I’ve lost in my phone, for so long I ignorantly used WhatsApp, still the king of messaging in my country, and many times I ended up losing conversations, that I’ll admit, are probably super cringe for me today, but still memories I would like to have back. Email is just there, and we even got subject lines and stuff. Just plain cool.
This is day of 9 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>The nearest neighbor algorithm is a simple algorithm that can be used to find the shortest path through a set of points. The algorithm starts at a given point and chooses the point that is nearest to the current point as the next point in the path. This process is repeated until all points have been visited.
cat code.g | grep G00 | grep Y | awk '{print $2, $3}' | sed 's/X//g ' | sed 's/Y//g'
The OpenAI assistant was a lifesaver! It provided me with a Python code snippet that was exactly what I needed to extract the coordinates from the G code file. The code was a breeze to use - just give it the G code file, and it’ll read each line, find the x and y coordinates, and spit out the results like a champ. It was like magic!
Next, I needed some help with implementing the nearest neighbor algorithm in Python. I turned to the trusty OpenAI assistant, and it didn’t disappoint! It provided me with a Python code snippet that used the scipy library to implement the algorithm. Just give it a list of points, and it’ll rearrange them in the order in which they would be visited by the nearest neighbor algorithm. It was like having a personal tutor by my side! Thanks, OpenAI assistant!
Finally, I asked the OpenAI assistant how to plot the coordinates and their path using the matplotlib library. It provided me with a Python code snippet that used matplotlib to plot the x and y coordinates as a line plot. This was exactly what I needed to visualize the data and complete the assignment. I was so grateful for the help of the OpenAI assistant - it truly made my homework a breeze!
Overall, I was impressed with the knowledge and helpfulness of the OpenAI assistant. I was able to use the code snippets provided by the assistant to complete my homework assignment and learn more about working with G code and the nearest neighbor algorithm. Thanks, OpenAI!
But what really impressed me was the assistant’s ability to help me write a blog post about my experience in a fun and engaging manner. It was able to take my dull and boring sentences and turn them into lively and interesting prose. Thanks to the OpenAI assistant, my blog post was a hit and I was able to share it with my friends.
If you need help with your homework or just want to write a fun blog post, I highly recommend giving the OpenAI assistant a try. It’s an amazing resource that can help you learn and succeed. Thanks, OpenAI!
Did you notice it? I didn’t write a thing up until now!
Guys, this is insane. I actually did all of the things I mentioned and now I got a blog post generated for free for me!
How cool is this? How freaky? This is a game changer. Seriously. I am so scared and so excited to play around with this thing. I wonder how many people noticed the weird writing style. Funnily enough I was able to tell the assistant to reword some things and avoid mentioning other bits. It had a weird obsesion with mentioning how my professor was impressed even though I haven’t even shown him this code yet.
Anyway, I am so impressed and I will be back sometime soon. I will fully write the next post myself though, trust me.
]]>Fosstodon now has more than 40K users, that alone is insane, since I remember being impressed back in April at the amount of growth seen during that first wave of Twitter users migrated.
I think its important to bring up that the amount of users is still insignificant, Twitter is already the smallest of the big social network, even though it feels like a lot is shared and talked about on it, the reality is different.
My country, Mexico, is still big on Facebook and Instagram (lately, TikTok too) by an order of magnitude, that’s just how it is.
If you recently joined Mastodon or any node of the Fediverse, please do it for the right reason. I don’t like politics, I joined Fosstodon because I like software, coding, technology and the like, and I wanted to meet some like-minded people in that regard. I am not there to read about politics of foreign countries. Thankfully Mastodon is pretty useful at filtering stuff out, and I myself don’t care if I end up reading it, since I just forget about it.
I have hopes that Fosstodon will stay afloat and won’t lose its focus, some people are worried that the Twitter culture may stain the status quo of the overall community, but I think this is just momentary. And contrary to popular belief, trends and behaviour is not the same everywhere in the Fediverse, its tons of different communities interacting with each other, but there is still some independence, which makes this place more resilient than some may assume.
Besides, even though its userbase is not as big, I honestly prefer it that way.
For my Fuzzy Control class, the teacher challenged us to design a Fuzzy controller for our science fair project. I have to say, I am quite a fan of how fuzzy logic works. Being able to understand the magic behind it all was quite interesting.
We decided to use Matlab to design our system using the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox, and we also found a program online that would allow us to export that directly to code for Arduino.
We built a Temperature and Humidity controller system, be it for a room or maybe an incubator. I actually spent more time building the hardware to house our circuits and sensors when compared to the code itself.
I feel like we kinda cheated the system, but the teacher allowed us to use Matlab in the first place rather than coding from scratch, so we only expanded our toolset a bit and did it all in like, a couple hours.
When the event started we had to sit around in a place assigned to us for around 10 hours, explaining our project to whoever passed by, it was quite entertaining for me, but I couldn’t help but notice how everyone around it was tired already, I guess I like talking about stuff I like with strangers a little too much.
In the end the winners were some girls that attracted everyone’s attention, they combined extracts and chemicals to make colored markers to draw and stuff. Our place was right beside them and everyone went and drew stuff in pieces of paper that got given away by the end of the event. Some of those drawings were actually awesome, not gonna lie.
I unexpectedly started to use Discord more often, I joined a couple of interesting servers and I wanted to talk there a little more. However, notifications don’t work on a degoogled phone and I decided to try installing the Google Apps again on my device. I got told that it would work fine despite already having a ROM and apps installed. It was a lie.
I got stuck in a bootloop, thankfully a simple Factory Reset kept my internal storage intact (thanks to latest versions of TWRP being able to decrypt storage on Android 12) although I lost my app data.
Thanks to the power of being kinda careful, the biggest loss of mine was a dozen of Newpipe subscriptions and my list of read books and bookmarks (which I had already forgotten until I recalled them while writing this blogpost)
My manga progress is kept on Anilist, and I had backups enabled anyway on the Tachiyomi reader, so I didn’t have to build my library from scratch, I just imported it and logged in to my trackers.
WhatsApp Backups were enabled and since internal storage didn’t get wiped, reinstalling the app recognized the backup immediately, which was a couple hours old.
Signal Backups were enabled and no data was lost.
Passwords and 2FA were perfectly safe on a folder synced with Syncthing, but again, no data was lost anyway.
Pretty much all other apps required me to log in and stuff. I had a backup of my email accounts of K9 Mail, so readding them was not hard at all.
The saddest and biggest failure, is that I lost all my Wi-Fi passwords. Can someone tell me why is there no way to back them up already?
I decided to log in to my Google Account since I wanted to access some paid apps that I quite like. Sadly this also synced my contacts, which I had on my Nextcloud DAV already, and were annoyingly duplicating my list. Thankfully, @konstantin helped out and I quickly removed the dulplicates from my phone.
I am now waiting for Android 13 roms to become more stable, so I can degoogle my life again. Or maybe not, notifications are quite nice to be honest.
]]>The products on those videos change like every month and they are always super expensive for what they are and I never really get anything out of watching them. I decided to write this either way, but at least the stuff I use ain’t crazy expensive. You’re welcome.
I have a simple bifold wallet made of cheap looking leather that I got as a gift from a friend back in like 2018. Up until then all my wallets were made of cloth, and were quite thick. I think it costed like 6 bucks or less, and it has served me quite well, even if it does not have any fancy features. I only have my ID and University ID, some coins to take the bus, a couple bills sometimes. More than enough, and its super thin too unless I have a lot of coins.
I don’t get people who get fancy metal wallets and similar, but I can’t deny some of their mechanisms or cool designs seem great, too expensive to be worth it though.
I use a degoogled Xiaomi Redmi Note 8, a 4 year old device that still runs fairly well for a low-mid range phone. I really enjoy using it still, not planning to change it at least for another year. I plan to do a What’s On My Phone kinda thing one of these days, so I’ll expand on this later.
I know you may not carry your laptop everyday, but as a Mechatronics Engineering student, having a laptop makes a lot of things easier. I have an Asus Vivobook S15, its not really that powerful, but it has proven decent enough for my use. I don’t do a lot of super complex simulations though, I only use Matlab, LabVIEW and other programs, but nothing as complex as other Engineering fields or universities.
My current earphones are the Sony WF-C500, I think they are the cheapest TWS earphones Sony has (under 100 dollars), but that does not mean they are bad, not at all. I really enjoy how they sound even if there can be some white noise when listening to quiet songs or some podcasts, I won’t die because of it.
They do not have any fancy features, no ANC, no Transparency mode, no touch controls (just physical buttons) and I am fine with that. However, I do think they may not be the best for their price, but I don’t see a reason to change and buy a different set anytime soon either way.
Currently the Casio AE-1200, also known as the World Timer, is my current choice, it got a really cool and unique look that kinda fits with everything.
Among my favorite features is its 5 alarms that I’ve found more useful than I thought, as well as their timer function which is helpful when I want to set limits to my activities or have a quick alarm for some event in a few minutes, not to mention it keeps running in the background, so I can return to the main mode and it will just beep when the time’s up. The world time is the most known feature of this device, I have a couple friends overseas and I now know the time over there with the push of a button.
In the end, the stuff I use is not really that special, but its the stuff I actually carry with me day to day. A lot of the little gadgets and things that those videos feature aren’t really something I care about, like key holders or knives. If you like camping or handy work, or you have many keys I guess they make sense. But for me this is all fine. I do have a Rubik’s cube keychain too, usually on my backpack, which is quite nice. That’s all!
From there, I went ahead and checked out some posts and blogs written by them in my RSS reader, and I stumbled upon and article by Hyde (aka Lazybear) titled Calendars and Terminal, which really got my attention. It talks about khal and vdirsyncer, a couple of tools that can be used to access my calendars from any CalDAV server, such as my Nextcloud instance, right from my terminal.
I ended up trying it out, and it wasn’t half bad! I basically just followed his tutorial, but I also found a similar post by Hund which shows also how to manage and sync contacts with the same tool.
I haven’t really done the contacts syncing yet, but I might as well try and set it up soon.
I don’t really want this blog to turn into yet another tutorial, so please, if you want to try this out check the couple of links I shared here.
A cool thing that vdirsync has is support for pass, or any other command to get your password without just storing it in plain text, so that’s pretty cool, you can check my rather simple config in my dotfiles
Now I have added my school schedule, since I just started a new semester, and my time is not as much as before. So, this has been day 87 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I am actually quite happy of how much icons I managed to do during the days before my previous blog, since the following days after that were quite tiresome. I wonder if spending that time playing around on Inkscape affected the amount of work I got after, but there was no hurry at the time, and while there was work and projects I could have done instead, in the end there would have been no difference.
One of the assignments I got was from a teacher who is a bit of a Linux evangelist. He asked us to install a Linux distro and showcase how it works, as well as how to install a program on it. It was just an optional thing that would only score a few more points to the final grades, but since I was already using Linux, I couldn’t help but going the extra mile
Obviously, I already knew how to do all of the requirements, and the teacher said we could do it on a Virtual Machine if we wanted. However I decided to take the opportunity and switch my distro once again.
I was also having a few caveats with Void, there were some random graphical glitches, almost as if the display connector was not working anymore, sometimes the screen became just glitchy lines and I had to close my current window or switch workspace in my window manager (so it was not a hardware issue, and it has not happened since I switched).
Another “problem” was that I just could not figure out how to make cups work with my printer and stuff. In the end I realized that I was just dumb and managed to make it work, but I was already on EndeavourOS, and as I plus I managed to use the AUR to get scanning working too!
I ended up choosing EndeavourOS mostly because I wanted to experience Arch without the hassle of installing it. In the end I was quite happy, because Endeavor is almost as light as Void, it only had around 800 packages installed, which is quite less than I thought compared with the ISO’s weight.
The installation had no problems, but the online installer took a lot of time to finish up since my internet connection is not that great.
Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out and despite a few hiccups getting Jekyll running again, I managed to make it all work and it has been wonderful.
So, somehow, I managed to go overkill on all of my projects despite my severe lack of confidence on the knowledge I have acquired during this semester. I really struggled with most of the subjects and professors. I felt like most of them were lackluster in the content given each class, or maybe its just me not paying enough attention in class.
I am not really that sure of whats the best way to learn for me. I thought I would like to have online classes this time, that my teachers would learn how to manage Google Classroom, how to setup their meetings on Google Calendar, or something like that. Instead, we had to wait for their message sharing a photo taken from their phone showing the Google Meet link.
Anyways, the point is, I had to deliver two pretty big projects, one of them consists on simulating the production process of something, in my case,chose Yogurt. The second one was about the text adventure game I had to do for my Discrete Math class.
I felt quite dissapointed by having to do the first project as a simulation only. I learned about LabVIEW, a proprietary software that uses a graphical programming language known as G We learned a bit about DAQ cards, PLC’s and other protocols related to human-machine interfaces. But in the end, I only used basic algebra, booleans, event structures and for loops to “simulate” the whole process, and I didn’t know if I should be proud or sad, because it looks like my block diagram was the most complex one in the class.
I felt like I should have learned more, that I should have actually connected some PLC to my computer or setup a server somewhere. I have learned more about computers and communication protocols just by switching to Linux and setting up a blog!
Now, the second project was a bit more exciting for me. I had to make a text adventure game for my Discrete Math class. I wanted to go with full force and use Godot Engine as my working environment. I followed a tutorial series to understand the basics, but since at this moment it’s still incomplete, I had to keep going by myself, I am used to that so that was no big deal.
Most of my companions had games based on predefined choices and a small story to tell. That is alright, but I wanted to make stuff like command processing and an actual room layout where you can move, pick stuff up and unlock pathways.
I managed to get it all working just in time, and you can get the source code and binaries here. The game is in Spanish and its also quite short. But let me know what do you think of it, if you manage to complete it. I wanted to have some kinda story but I just managed to do simple descriptions and hints.
The only thing I am a bit upset about is everyone has their python and C++ binaries which are around 200kb and my files are around 40mb, but well, that’s how Godot works, and I have a full graphical interface there too.
After all, I managed to get this two big projects. I will talk more later about the second one, since I am quite happy and I have a lot to tell about it.
This was quite a long post, and I didn’t expect to write this much, so I am gonna call it here. I still have a lot of work to do for other final projects, but they have to be delivered next week, so I still have some time. Endeavor is awesome, my projects were great and I am cant wait to finish this semester.
This has been day 45 of #100DaystoOffload
]]>After watching some YouTube videos, like Ali Abdaal’s video as an experienced typist with a speed of ~145 wpm, as well as Kalle Hallden’s journey trying to learn and get to at least 80 wpm, I decided to start learning once and for all. I used to type with at least 5 or 6 fingers total, since I am a pianist, I was already used to using many fingers, but I still lacked the proper technique of using all my fingers, placing them in the home row and keeping them there.
For my first test at 10fastfingers.com I did 19 wpm, which
was terrible compared to my 55 wpm with my previous, lackluster technique mess. I
started practicing finger placement and muscle memory on keybr.com
and learned the positioning of every letter.
Now, after three days, my current record is 52 wpm, which is quite great, although my average is still on the low 40s. I am starting to catch up to my previous speed, and I hope I manage to get to at least 80 wpm with more weeks of practice. I still have a lot of trouble with punctuation, and my typing is not that precise, but I hope that some more practice allows me to improve and also to find my own style, since I also feel quite robotic sometimes. It feel pretty cool to know I am using all of my fingers, and its also epic when somehow I get one of those rushes where I get like 10 or so words typed without mistakes or pauses, which are still quite common.
This was a bit of a shorter post, but I don’t have a lot of time today, but I still wanted to publish something soon enough, since my time could be even more limited the following weeks.
This was day 38 of #100DaystoOffload
]]>I am quite a FOSS advocate, but I am also a bit pragmatic. I still use Google services often, a lot more than I would like to admit. So if I was already using them, why wouldnt I give away more of my freedom for the sake of convenience, right?
Yeah, that’s the train of thought I have sometimes. But other times, like today, I am feeling a more privacy conscious, and I decided to look for an alternative email client. I had already tried Fairemail a fairly decent app that works wonderfully. However, it contains unobtrusive, privacy friendly ads, which are not bad at all and are completely understandable, but I didn’t want to deal with them, besides, I had already tried it, and I wanted something new.
And here is where K-9 Mail comes to the rescue. The app was a bit dead, but last year, the app got a visual redesign that caught my attention and convinced me to give it a chance. I knew about the app for years, but just by looking at its icon and the screenshots showcased on F-Droid, I never installed it.
I was pleasantly surprised, setting up my Gmail account was as simple as Google lets you, using the so called “App Passwords” needed for anything that doesn’t wanna use their login authentication methods.
Adding the rest of my accounts was a piece of cake, I had to add my school account with IMAP because the domain was weird and unable to be automatically setup like my personal one, however, it was no big deal.
A Microsoft account I got had no trouble at all, although I should add 2FA to it, since it’s not active.
K-9 Mail pretty much looks like the Gmail app before they changed to Material Design 2.0 a couple years ago. And that’s a good thing for me. It has a bit of similarity to Fairemail, but I liked K-9 a bit more since its more simplistic and a bit less cluttered. Besides, the starting screen of Fairemail its their settings, and its really overwhelming, which was a reason I wanted to avoid K-9, since I thought it would be even worse. But I am quite happy with how it is.
There is a really good Dark Theme, a nice amount of settings and customization and it even applies a dark mode to the email contents, which is good for those nasty non-plain text emails that have their own styling.
It is a pretty great experience! so nice and comfy I did a whole blog about it. Like, I can’t believe I spent so many years not using this (being fair, it looked terrible 2 years ago, but still).
The only thing I disliked for a bit was the non-instant arrival of emails, which is normal for most email clients that once again don’t depend on Google immediately. I wonder if there is some way to trigger the update, but at the same time, I don’t really need email to be instant.
With this setup, I am very happy again with my FOSS mindset. It has reinspired me to check out even more alternative, free software applications. This is day 36 of #100DaystoOffload
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