Middle-of-summer catching up

Haven't posted here in two months, it seems. Where have I gone? What did I do during these few weeks? What am I up to and what is the future of this site?

Last update:

Time to read: 3 minutes.

Time to relax

Phew, this was an interesting few weeks for me but I’m glad I’m more-or-less finished with everything that I needed to do. This includes preparations for the following few months; they are going to be real interesting for me (more about it later). Also, I got many personal, as well as tech-related stuff done from May until now and I can’t wait to list them all.

Here come the personal achievements

  • My girlfriend and I managed to do all the paperwork required to apply for the Erasmus program of the EU. From the middle of August, we’ll study in Finland together for 5-6 months. It’s gonna be real exciting. Got our plane ticket and arranged ourself a place to live too.
    • On this note, I started learning Finnish. I already know how to count. :D
  • I finished my fourth semester of my Computer Science degree. I only have two or three semesters to go. It depends on the amount of courses I can finish during the next few semesters.
    • Also, even though this semester was one of my most successful ones, I still managed to fail one of my courses. Fortunately, I can do it online during the time I’m abroad.
  • Went on a vacation to Venice and Verona with my girlfriend. Among other things, we visited the balcony (and tomb) of Juliet, Doge’s Palace, and we walked on The Bridge of Sighs.
  • Did some kayaking for the first time in my life (this was two days ago and my back still hurts a bit xd).
  • Hung out with friends (baths, 8-ball pool and the like, just general super-happy-fun-times).
  • Failed my driving exam two times and then passed it on my third attempt. One, I was calm as hell on the third try; two, the invigilator got out of the car in the first ten minutes of the third exam to exchange stuff with his friend and officially, that marks the end of the exam. I still drove around for a few more minutes but the teacher did not say a single word and then gave me a passed rating.
    • After this, the first-aid exam was a cakewalk. Got a driver’s license now and today, I finished my first 100+ km drive through the highway. I’m so proud of myself.

Tech/hobby stuff I did

  • Successfully set up a Monero wallet for sending anonymous donations to tech projects I like. Also tried mining some of it for fun using my laptop. It wasn’t that profitable (got literally zero Monero for ~50 hours of mining, I don’t know what I expected), so I stopped.
  • Installed Navidrome on my Pi to access all my music from the internet. It’s a gamechanger and I’m so glad it got set up. I updated the blog post about my music listening practices to include this new info.
    • My music stash went from ~400 GB to 451 GB following this change. People on Soulseek love to download from me. :D
  • Got addicted to mapping on OpenStreetMap (mainly shops, buildings and addresses). I also got a lot of value out of using Organic Maps on my on-foot navigation in Venice (finding drinking water and getting info on sights is a breeze).
    • I don’t want to talk about OSM too much here, because it might be the focus of my next blog post.
  • Researched how the TOR Network works and installed the Snowflake add-on to help people living in restrictive countries bypass censorship on the internet.
    • Slightly related: Had some fun with Tails, a portable operating system designed for journalists, activists and security-freaks like me. I keep a live USB of Tails on my keychain, partly for the memes.
  • Hopped and cheered in excitement over the fact that my favourite game, TF2 got a new update this summer.
  • Following the murder of Reddit third-party apps, I migrated to Lemmy. It’s fun and I recommend checking it out.
  • Made an RSS feed of my blog too, so if you’re into that, add this wee-little blog o’ mine to your feed reader.

Future of this site

I started this site in January of 2023 after I clicked through a bunch of personal websites (my most visited ones are on my webring page) and decided I wanted to host one myself too. It’s a lot of fun to work on it and whenever I have the urge to write a blog post, I usually jump right in. I was busy these few weeks and didn’t post much, but on my laptop, there’s a whole document dedicated to possible blog posts ideas; I have a bunch of tech-stuff to talk about, so stay tuned.