Dear Diary. January 2022.

I saw Paul Barker work on an ambitious weekly diary and told myself I might be able to enjoy doing it too, though monthly is probably more realistic for me :) So here we are, first (and last?) entry for this year's diary.

What I read in January:

• https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html like most people I assume. Cynical TL;DR: web3 = downsides of web1 + downsides of web2.
• https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0513/ and https://hashman.ca/pycon-2019/ehashman-pycon2019-slides.pdf about Python binary packages.
• Aaaand... I should have bookmarked the stuff I read :)
• Wishing to find more time and motivation to read "IRL" books in the next few weeks/months.

What I cooked/baked in January:

• Bread (once a week :) ).
• Savory porridge with wallnuts, wallnut oil, shiro miso and an egg. 3/5 stars. I have a picky stomach in the morning.
• French crêpes.
• Karaage (japanese; double-fried chicken). Twice. I like it. A lot.
• Started my own kimchi (korean; spicy fermented nappa cabbage). Fermented alright, container almost exploded to my face after 2 days. Tasting session in a few months :)
• Tried "slow"-cooking a pork loin (seared in pan then put into 80-90°C oven til center reaches 66°C). Still a bit overcooked but getting there.

What I worked on in January:

• stretching almost daily since I challenged myself to do a front split by the end of the year.
• keeping up with my daily yoga morning routine: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLui6Eyny-Uzyp5P3Vcuv5qCHQOC8W6grN.
• released a new alpha version for récitale which fixes a few things, publishes a container image per new release, shows a progress bar while reencoding video/audio files, adds some unit tests and other stuff. See https://github.com/recitale/recitale/releases/tag/v2.0.0a2.
• finally started to upstream some patches for the Linux kernel, feels good to be back :) simple DTS fixes for now.
• trying to find a shop that sells a Ryzen 5300GE or 5600GE to build myself a new, more powerful, NAS with the same power consumption as today's. Didn't manage to yet, impossible to find the GE variants for some reason.

What I discovered/learned in January:

• that my work laptop wasn't using Wayland for everything /o\ dmenu (the default app finder on sway) is using XWayland so I switched to bemenu instead.
• that sway needs to be configured correctly so that it does not get killed by systemd-oom when compiling Yocto images/Buildroot images/Linux kernel. I use sway-systemd right now. See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1933494.
• that sway does not detect my NVIDIA GPU (nouveau driver of course :) ) on my work laptop. Not that it's a big deal since the iGPU from Intel is doing its job quite ok.
• that Firefox and Thunderbird both use X11/XWayland by default. Install (and run!) thunderbird-wayland and firefox-wayland on Fedora to use Wayland instead.
• how to switch Chromium flatpak from X11/XWayland to Wayland: flatpak run org.chromium.Chromium --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland. Note: Chromium crashes every now and then. Since I use it only to connect to the awful Microsoft Teams website, I don't care too much when it does crash.
• how to also allow screencasting in Chromium flatpak: flatpak run org.chromium.Chromium --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer.
• how to connect my Jabra Elite 85h via Bluetooth and use as a headset on Linux. It is not perfect but it works okay. I just need to switch between profiles to be able to use the embedded microphones but doing so switches the audio output to mono of bad quality.
• WirePlumber to manage my sound devices (mainly used right now to switch between headset and headphone modes my Jabra Elite 85h). wpctl status and wpctl set-profile DEVICE_ID MODE_ID.
• how to have git hooks specific to a git worktree: git config extensions.worktreeConfig true and git config --worktree core.hooksPath /some/path. The goal was to have a directory with all upstream source code checked out and then use worktrees per customer/project. One project is using Gerrit though, so I needed its git pre-commit hook to add the Change-Id but didn't want the Change-Id to make it to my patches destined for upstream.
• that Python binary packages pip can fetch only get fetched for glibc-based distribution... which Alpine isn't (musl-based). This means that pip will fetch the source of the Python package and build it locally on those distros. This results in tons of additional dependencies and an increased build time. So I based the container image I built for récitale off a slim Debian instead.
• that Python binary packages for musl-based distributions are in fact now possible! See the musllinux tag from PEP-656. It's still very new but hopefully more packages over time will be available for that kind of distros.
• an unofficial, pre-PEP656, Python package index for musl-compatible Python binary packages: https://alpine-wheels.github.io/index (to be used with pip's --extra-index-url) https://github.com/alpine-wheels
• https://caniuse.com/ for CSS/HTML features support list per browser and browser version (and their market share). Will come in handy when working on récitale :)

What entertained me in January:

• Finished The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
• First season of Arcane. Looking forward to the second :)
• 7th season of American Horror Story. Really liked the first part of the season, which is really the kind of thriller I'm interested in, less for the remaining.
• American Psycho. Forced myself to read all the 40% of the book before giving up a few years back. Movie was as uninteresting to me as the book was.
• Last Night in Soho. Really liked it... except for the ending.
• Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts. Had a nice time, so much nostalgy :)
• The Book of Boba Fett. Same musical ambiance and story rythm as The Mandalorian so I really like the hour or so I spend watching it :)
• Trumbo. I'm always baffled by historically-inspired movies. You really think some things could never had happened, yet.. here we are, about 50 years later after the event.

What I'm excited about for February (and later):

• Bought myself a pasta machine/rolling mill. Fresh lasagna, fresh tortellini, fresh ravioli, fresh Maultaschen, fresh tagliatelle, fresh puff-pastry dough (the one sold in Austrian supermarkets is HORRENDOUS).
• I ordered two Seeed XIAO BLE SBCs to play with Zephyr, BLE and Zigbee and try to setup some home "automation" this year.
• Stumbled upon the new (?) module from Olimex based on an RK3328 SoC from Rockchip which looks kinda perfect in terms of perf and budget for my forever-dream of building my own motorcycle GPS.
• Starship to replace oh-my-zsh.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Master Quest. Just started :)
• More improvements to come to récitale :)
• Finding a place closer to work so the commute is less time-consuming.