Quick rundown on my living situation:

• Still living with my parents. Not too proud of that as a 25 year old guy, but at least I'm able to build up my savings I suppose.
• Making some good progress on losing weight, still got ways to go though.
• Still working my 40h full-remote job. Comfy, but lots of stuff to do.
• Progress on personal projects has been kind of random, but progress has been made nonetheless.
• I'm isolating myself more and taken the opportunity to reflect on things.
• I found out a few people of the internet have somehow stumbled upon my websites.
• I got myself a very fancy piano! Now I just need to be able to play it.

Okay, now a bit more in-depth:

I have been in a bit of a Hermit Mode recently (or at least by my own metric). Still talking to friends every now and then, and I haven't turned down any invites from people I haven't talked to in a while, but I have been more passive than usual and just kind of enjoyed having quiet weekends. No idea how this will develop in the long-term; guess I will find out.

In regards to personal projects: okay-ish. I often feel like I'm rotating around the same three hobbies of mine (guitar/piano, programming, gaming), while socializing with people wants me to "recharge my batteries" and not do anything for a bit. When it comes to my programming projects, my own stuff has been a bit on-hold. I experimented with replacing git with my own very simple version control system. Proof-of-concept went fine, but when it actually came to polishing a few things and finalizing some ideas, I kind of just lost my momentum. I have streamed a few hours of my development on twitch, but that hasn't been going on either. I just don't feel like having (even the smallest of) a spotlight on me I guess.

I am helping some acquaintance out with his game project though. Nothing major from end; just small bug-fixes, simple additions, and little development tools. That has been fun, and it's nice that I'm making at least some progress on some project.

During these quiet days, I realized that my backup-situation is kind of ass. I used to have proper backups, but I kind of slacked off big time on this front. In the long run, it probably makes sense investing some money into a small NAS computer or something, but I haven't found the motivation to read into hardware/software solutions to this. Besides, my room is messy enough as is - maybe when I move out (who the fuck knows when).

At the very least, I have created a remote backup of my shit which seems to be easy enough to keep up-to-date. Previously, backing up my files involved running rsync with a lot of cryptic arguments I setup once, which just uploades my files as-is on some other local machine. With the remote machine I'm renting, I'm using a borg-frontend which simplifies stuff a lot. This also supports encryption, so I feel comfortable using a rented remote server for this. If you want to know more about this solution, I just spend some time writing my shit up on HowTheFu.cc. Once I have a local NAS I'd actually be following the 3-2-1 rule correctly. I still don't have complete system images of my drives in case my boot disk fails, and I'm not quite sure how to do that in a convenient way either [0].

Completely different topic: People have (randomly?) found and used my shit (in a good way!).

A while ago, I got a message from my thesis advisor (from two years ago) who wanted to let me know that someone wrote a paper, based on the works in bachelor thesis, and that the paper was accepted into "a top conference". Holy. At first I thought that it was just a footnote or something for the relevant works or something. But I found out, that the person has written a long form (master thesis) and a short form (paper which got accepted), and boy did I get a glazing in the master thesis. They actually used the (very crude) testing framework I setup to compare a few algorithms, as well as used some terminology my advisor and me came up with. Funniest shit was them mentioning that my shitty Bachelor Thesis was still the only non-theoretical comparison of the algorithms. I have no idea how they found my thesis in the first place (and I still think that someone at my university might have directly linked to my shit or something), but that was a nice boost to confidence nonetheless :)

Then, a few months later, I got another funny email. Someone stumbled over short post on Linux Audio and thanked me for providing a fix to the issue. I did not expect this to actually happen, given that I haven't found anyone else having this issue either. But after a quick search, I then found a link to that post stored in some public linux dot-files repository. So I at least helped out two completely random strangers by just uploading my sheet cheats / fixes to my niche problems - very cool!

Also, keep in mind: Neither p4m.dev nor howthefu.cc contain any sort of (easily accessible) contact info. Poor guy went through the troubles of looking up my domain info and using the (mandatory) mail address just to shoot me a quick thanks. I'm still thinking about whether I actually want to put out an easy way to contact me or not. So, uh, I guess feel free to use the domain-information until then.