Five months have past since my last post about personal projects and endeavours but it feels like I’ve been stagnating for much longer.
Psychology, Philosophy & Books
Language: brains
Explanation: The past few months have been devoted, more than anything,
to expanding my views on the philosophy of minds.
Considering I’m back home and have a long commute, I’ve jumped into the podcast train to turn those hours into something lucrative. I’ve been binging on the following ones:
- Philosophize this (All)
- Stuff you should know (All)
- You are not so smart (All)
- Let’s know things (All)
- Lore (Just started)
- Waking up Podcast (Most)
The list is in my current order of preference. As you can notice I’ve
listened to most if not all the episodes and now have to follow them
on weekly basis. This means I’ve got room for injecting new opinion and
educational podcasts or even audio books. So please contact me if you’ve
got any recommendations.
I’m fond of attacking controversial and novel ideas, mixing them,
hearing new things.
On the literary side, apart from articles and technical books, I’ve been reading those:
- Others in Mind - Philippe Rochat (Halfway)
- Arrival/Story of Your Life - Ted Chiang (Finished)
Others in Mind is a continuation on my reading list about developmental
psychology, the previous book was In Over Our Heads - The Mental Demands
of Modern Life - Robert Kegan. It took a while to get a hold of the book
(3 months) but it was worth it as I’m voraciously savouring every page.
I could only come up with a single new article: Hidden Hope For Control which discuses a dilemma of our life that we don’t often pay attention to but that is displayed in many of our actions, media, and preferences. The article is a conjunction between the efficiency craze, nihilism, fulfillment, competence porn, grinding in games, etc..
FAT, Thingmenu XFT, & GH Hacktoberfest
Language: C
Explanation: There are 2 programming projects I’ve worked on.
I wanted a new context-menu, instead of the oldish 9menu, that could
support XFT, the newest type of fonts.
I’ll also be working on a context-like menu using xcb. I haven’t found any that was satisfying enough. It’s going to be small, lightweight, clean, support for xft, and good looking.
So I’ve patched thingmenu to do just that:
https://github.com/venam/thingmenu-xft.
During a hackaton, MENA devs build night, I’ve had fun with implementing a FAT file system reader. I haven’t finished it entirely but it was a good occasion to put theory into practice after the podcast about Data Storage on Unix.
I’m hoping to do more of that in the coming days, that is actually
practice instead of theory. For example I’ve been thinking of implementing
a cache simulation.
Apart from those two, during the Hacktoberfest of Github I took the time
to finally contribute to thlst book about ricing.
This is also something I’m hoping to do more in the coming days.
Podcast & Newsletter
Language: Unix
Explanation: Only 2 episodes of the podcast have
been published since the last time: Data Storage On
Unix, and a rebroadcast of
Artworks and Logos, which
is not really a new episode.
However the Data Storage on Unix episode was very thorough and took an immense amount of work, I’m proud of it.
As far as the newsletter is concerned, it has reached its one
year anniversary and has 93 subscribers. A whole year, 52
issues this week.
I’m not sure in which direction I’ll go from now on.
Ascii & Drawings
Language: art
Explanation: I haven’t done a lot of drawing but I’ve done a lot of ascii.
There’s no better way to explain it than to display some of the work:
I’ve got third place in the Evoke 2017 competition with this piece:
And I’ve started a new series on flying insects, here are some examples:
I’ll post them in my ascii art section in the next few weeks.
Freelance
Language: C,C++,python,java,etc..
Explanation: I’m doing some mini-freelance jobs in my part time.
This is something I was thinking of doing for sometime but didn’t. I’m trading leisure for new source of_ passive_ income. This isn’t truly passive as it’s active work but some of those mini tasks are often interesting and takes me into topics I wouldn’t visit usually.
For instance, I’ve implemented some concurrent thread algorithms and a 3 part client/server/storage secure file sharing system in C using TCP and UDP for a custom handshake and encryption.
Mushroom Hunting
Language: pure luck
Explanation: There’s no better time than time with my significant
other. We were arguing about a random innocuous topic while walking to
try to wash away our minds out of it while we suddenly stumbled upon
some weird contraptions, mushrooms.
It was my first encounter with wild mushroom and I was bewildered and excited. Next thing you know, we found ourselves scavenging through the forest seeking if there were more, and there was.
Here are some of the species we found:
Now
As I’ve mentioned I’m back home, I’ve left the apartment that was next to work, so I’m back to the 3+ hours on the road a day.
I’m trying to juggle with my schedule at work and at home, staying late
on some days and leaving early on others to avoid the traffic.
Sunday has now become my official cooking day of the week where I prepare
all my lunches instead of doing them when I get back from work. I even
got some new cookings books with awesome recipes. This seems to be the
best scenario but it doesn’t leave me much time to work on new podcast
episodes.
On another note, I couldn’t set up the mail system yet. I’m slowly preparing it.
This is it!
As usual…
If you want something done, no one’s gonna do it for you, use your own hands.
And let’s go for a beer together sometime, or just chill.
If you want to have a more in depth discussion I'm always available by email or irc.
We can discuss and argue about what you like and dislike, about new ideas to consider, opinions, etc..
If you don't feel like "having a discussion" or are intimidated by emails
then you can simply say something small in the comment sections below
and/or share it with your friends.