The 2 months of Christmas in the UK have finally come an end and with it 2023 limps towards its closing stretch. It’s certainly been an interesting year, full of (at times) unpleasant surprises. Thankfully things look to be ending on more of a high note, and so I figured now would be a good time to retrospective on some of the various ongoings in my life, and look to how I can take those forward into 2024.
Home & General Goals
Overall home life has returned to a degree of stability after a somewhat disastrous Summer. We’ve managed to not kill too many plants in recent months, the leak in the ceiling seems to have finally been fixed, and I have a new job starting in January.
Grand plans for moving away from the UK have largely been shelved at this point (thanks Brexit) and I imagine I’ll probably be here for the long run at this point. Therefore it probably makes sense to start looking at getting on the property ladder at this point. I have no idea how to do this currently. So the goal over 2024 is to start some research into house buying, with the aim to maybe be buying something by the end of the year.
Side Projects
Figured now is a good time to dig out and evaluate the smattering of ‘side projects’ I’ve been involved with over the past few years, mostly on Github:
- albertlauncher/python: Quick shout out to the albert launcher, it’s awesome. I’ve been slowly getting more involved with the extension ecosystem, particularly in terms of python extensions. The goal for next year is to get a few more I’ve written myself published in some format, once I can figure out the best way to do so (either via the official repo or as seperate entities).
- bergercookie/syncall: Actually a really cool project that allows syncing of similar data across various services. I helped write the caldav integration in order to get taskwarrior to play well with my nextcloud server (and by extension, sync with my phone). I’d like to be more involved with the project, as I haven’t contributed since the initial PR, but the package as it stands it works well for my use case (albeit a little fragile under certain circumstances).
- gtd-rust-taskwarrior: A project I mostly started to have a go at writing something simple in rust. It also fills a gap in the GTD method that taskwarrior normally isn’t great at. I still use it currently, though I wouldn’t describe it as finished. Would be great to get it polished up and published sometime in the New Year.
- This blog: It’s still here! The rate of writing has fallen off a cliff since August, but I’m still here. Lots of ideas for pieces to write, with a few already in progress. If I can keep to a schedule of one article a month for the entirity of 2024, I’ll be happy.
- hostsctl: Probably the first OS project I ever forked and modified. I don’t use it anymore, but was a cool little learning exercise in a small area of networking.
- ubuntu-razer-plymouth: Similar to above, though I still use a Razer laptop, I no longer use Ubuntu (and I’m not 100% sure they still use plymouth). Either way, I regard it as a finished project, that did one job reasonably well, and was a fun exercise.
- homelabos: My fork of the HomelabOS project. I created the fork as I had my own customisations for my personal, and it was becoming cumbersome keeping up with breaking changes upstream. I still use it to administer my server at home. It’s a bit of a mess at the moment, with a lot of uncommitted work. WOuld be good to tidy up at somepoint.
Future Ideas
I have a small list of other tech related projects I’d like to make some headway on if I get the time/headspace throughout the year:
- plantee: A self-hosted plantcare app. I’d probably write it in deno/fresh to see where that end of the JS/TS world is at in terms of maturity.
- more albert plugins: I’ve already written a few plugins for web services I use, like paperless, wallabag and linkding. ALong with getting these published, have a few more services I’d like to write for along the way (e.g. Jellyfin, Nextcloud, note retrieval).
- piped kodi plugin: I use Kodi at home, and used to enjoy the YouTube plugin, until it became a completely hateful experience to setup (and flat out impossible if you don’t have a google account). I recently discovered piped as alternative, along with this project as a starting point for a Kodi integration. Would be great to have a point where I can share a YouTube URL to Kodi, and it will play it via the Piped API.
Task Management
So according to taskwarrior’s burndown graph, I’m basically a picture perfect no net fix rate. Not too much more to say about that, I’m currently generating more tasks than I’m fixing. Ironically even more so over the past few months where I’ve been without work…
This is not especially surprising, as I use taskwarrior to track a lot of different things, many of which are ongoing and unlikely to ever be finished. Indeed the idea of ever completing a TODO list seems a somewhat alien concept to me (unless you count abandoning). So I guess this is fine? Unsure what to feel about this one.
Taskwarrior suggests if I don’t add any more tasks to my list, I should be done around July time next year… Which is probably a useless statistic.
Habits
I’ve put a decent amount of focus on trying to build good habits this year. Some things have become part of my daily routine cleanly, while others have languished in Purgatory for as long as I can remember.
Going well
| Habit | Goal | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Chess | 10mins/day | Pretty solid on doing this each morning. Has had a noticeable affect on both online games and OTB |
| Languages | min 40 flash cards/day | Using anki for German vocabulary and Romanian phrases. Can be quite tough at times if I’m having a rough morning, but well tuned to not become too much of a drag |
| Coding | min 40 flash cards/day | Similar to above, but with python, rust and vim shortcuts. Anything comes up that I’m unfamiliar with is flagged for note-taking |
| Task Prioritising | Daily | Filter through task inbox and prioritise day’s work. Not too taxing, and surprisingly satisfying when done right |
Going not so well
| Habit | Goal | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Note taking | 10 mins/day | This hasn’t happened very much. Though I’m quite happy with obsidian for note writing, note retrieval isn’t good at the moment, which is hurting my motivation to write notes. Needs further thought. |
| Writing | 1 article/month | Yeah, the blog has been struggling a bit |
| Reading | 10 mins/day | This is a hard one. I’ve had periods of absolute binge reading, and then months of reading almost nothing at all. Would be good to get a regular time set to just sit down with a book (fiction or non-fiction) |
| FInger health | 10 mins/day | My fingers are generally a bit messed up from climbing. Ideally want to be doing a short 5-10 min stretching/health session for them daily |
| Stretching | 2/week | I Hate it, but I really need to do it. Starting with a couple of short sessions a week |
| Dance practice | 3/week | This one has really been struggling. I have all the material, and access to a lot of knowledge on the subject. I want the results, so I need to set the time aside and put the work in. Ideally split on 2 fundamentals, and one combinations sessions per week |
| Running | 1/week | This one has really fallen to the wayside this year. Would be good to get it back up to a more regular cycle, but baby steps to start with. |
| Climbing | 2/week | This one hasn’t actually been going so bad, as I’ve made it to the bouldering wall twice most weeks. In an ideal world would be good to add a dedicated training session at some point time allowing. |
| Acrobatics | 1/week | This one’s struggling a little due to lack of facilities available locally. Goal for January is to check out the scenes in some local cities to see what my options are going forward. |
| Weight training | 2/week | Have recently overcome a lifelong fear and started going to the gym with my partner. Have surprised myself in actually enjoying it. Would be good to keep this up going forward, but may be tricky around work and other time commitments. |
| Hobbies | ??? | Not sure if this is really a habit, but my hobby work has largely fallen to the point of “Let’s 3D print something” every couple of months. Would be good to get a bit more of a cadence to it, and maybe do something with the steadily growing pile of unassembled resin parts I have building up on my desk. |
So the general trend seems to be that daily tasks on the computer are going well, everything else is struggling to form as a habit. This would make sense as all the successful tasks are simple, happen daily and are all co-located.
The slightly less regular habits are a bit more of a challenge. While it would be great to push some more of these to become daily, I really doubt I will have the time/energy to do so (at least, not right now). I’m hoping to keep track of these habits in the New Year as a means to better hold myself to account. This will include setting fixed times of the week for those activities that I can, and keeping a habit tracker to help make sure I’m keeping to my goals.
That being said, just looking at the list above is terrifying. Coupled with the new job, fitting all this in is going to be a struggle. So I guess we’ll see how it goes over the next few months…
Conclusion
There isn’t one really.
There’s been plenty of change this year and plenty more to think about to go along with it. I’m looking forward to 2024 and all the changes it can potentially bring with it. Until then, if you’re reading this, have an amazing New Year celebration, however you choose to spend it, and best of luck for 2024!