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1 State of the Projects

A lot of things have gone no where, especially over the last year. However, I've made a lot of progress in terms of self-improvement. And professionally and academically I'm progressing.

1.1 fenrisg

When I wrote it, I had certain ambitions in mind and I was working on a project to maintain a lot of shell scripts from a monolith written decades ago. But over the last two years I've had so many different projects that do not use shell scripts that I no longer care.

The other factor of fenrisg was when I briefly took over forgefed. I wanted something consistent, so I built it over pandoc. I know this goes off into a tangent, but over the last year I've been using pandoc a lot less and pdflatex/pdftex a lot more.

I have further criticisms I have about fenrisg, some of which is rooted in pandoc. I do not like the metadata block or the lua processing, the additional script for building the homepage, or the static light/dark modes. Just for the latter, which is not related to pandoc, contemporary CSS allows for prefers light and dark from the browser which can also follow the system, which is amazing. Not surprising, but just plain great. Why wasn't it like that before! =D

That said, fenrisg works fine, though I think I'd like to start a new version, migrate to another language, or even migrate to an existing project, possibly back to pelican. When I still used pelican in the past, there were a few things I didn't like about it. Perhaps I can create some kind of a meta project that handles some of that. I think overall I would prefer just migrating to another language.

1.2 Novel Ideas

Most of my career has been maintaining old code. I went through some kind of a golden age maybe in the mid to late 2010s when I was fortunate to work on several green field projects. But most of those have been replaced or amandoned. People have moved on, employers have retired, gone out of business, or passed on. And even though I let every one of them know that I prefer free software/open source/(commerical) creative commons, none of that has really worked out.

My work in the free software world has progressed differently, but mostly ended up in the same place. I spent a lot of time on gnusocial, more than anything else during my stewardship of the dot-no site. I wish I could get that time back. Ultimately both the effort and the social connections fizzled out. The same goes for MED, and though the social connections have faded, I am glad for the time spent there.

I have one thing that I am currently helping to maintain that might be worth contributing to. There's a project called myinfo which is basically self-service IdM with a few other features that was freed at some point during development. The current repo I maintain still has the MIT license included. I have found some other forks of the project aside from the repo from the former lead developer. On the other hand, I don't know who would use it. I think if I could point anyone to anything IAM-related I would suggest Internet2/Incommon projects.

I feel like this is turning into a rant about how freeing code and dogfooding is a bad idea. Maybe that can happen, but that's not what I really mean.

2 Misc

I had a recently change my monofont to work properly with Starship (and my terminal). I don't really know what happened; probably some system default changed.

3 Reading

3.1 Current Events

3.2 git

3.3 History

3.4 Maths and Applied

3.5 Misc

3.6 Programming

3.7 User Experience (UX)