Winter is Rough
TLDR
I haven't posted for a few months because winter messes up my brain, and bad things happened in my personal life. Here is a brief update on what I've been up to and what I intend to do next.
Personal Life
At the end of October, I lost my grandma. It was a tough time for me and my family. She was my last living grandparent and the one I was closest to. The funeral came about 2 weeks later, and it took me some time to process how I was feeling. I was not in a place to even think about blogging, let alone doing anything productive. I was taking things a day at a time and trying to take care of myself and my family. There were other losses earlier this year (most of them pets), and this loss certainly did not help. Then, of course, here comes winter and the holidays…
Winter is Rough
I think it has become abundantly clear over the last few years that I am not a fan of winter. I don't like the cold or snow, and the lack of sunlight does a number on my mental health. Not only that, but I always get into a bad pattern with winter where I intend to take vitamin D and exercise more, but it did not happen. It is now the end of January, and I am just starting to feel like myself again. I am trying to get back into a routine and take better care of myself.
What's Next?
Blogging
I have been toying around with a few ideas for blog posts and projects. I still want to post about my feelings of the current landscape of Linux and bootable containers. Furthermore, I strongly feel that projects like Bazzite show what is possible for the future of how people will interact with Linux on the desktop as well as handheld devices.
Adventures in AI
I have been playing with cloud AI tools as well as local AI tools and have some thoughts on the AI space.
Perplexity has been a game changer for how I search for information on the web. Deepseek R1 is extremely fascinating with its chain of thought reasoning model. I have always been very opposed to the black box nature of AI, and chain of thought reasoning and sources for information are strong steps in the right direction.
The local tools I have been messing with have primarily been OpenWebUI, ollama, and ComfyUI. My GPU does struggle with some workloads, so it might be time to upgrade it. (maybe I'll consider Nvidia…)
Content Creation
For my local setup, I bought a green screen, upgraded my camera, and will hopefully be getting a new boom microphone stand in the next week or so. As you can see above, I haven't written anything on my blog and my YouTube channel has been as active as my blog (as in not very...).
I am really excited for SCALE 22x. I will be giving 2 talks, one on Universal Blue and another on Bazzite. There will hopefully be some content about SCALE on my channel coming really soon. We'll see what happens, but I am excited to get back into content creation.
Matrix...
I tried playing with the service etke.cc to host a Matrix server and using bridges to other services. Their support is absolutely brilliant, would highly recommend them if you are interested in hosting a matrix server on a VPS.
I have some strong opinions about Matrix that I will blog about in the near future. Needless to say, I tried it for a few days and went back to using Discord. There is a lot to like about Matrix, but it still needs some work to convince me to switch to it as my primary communication platform.
I am still active on Matrix with my @dogphilosopher:fedora.im handle, I'm just not interested in hosting my own server at the moment.
Zen Browser
Lastly, I am still using Zen Browser. It is so cool to see how that project has progressed between when I wrote about it and now. I have even convinced a few people to switch to it. I am excited to see what the future holds for the project.
Conclusion
Thank you for taking some time to read this. I am excited to get back into blogging and content creation. Excited for 2025!