Summer Break

Instead of enjoying three unfettered weeks of vacation, I ended up having a chunk of that time blown out by numerous unscheduled events, so there wasn’t much time to hang around at the beach.

Also, I decided I’d completely ignore work, to the extent where I wiped Outlook from all my mobile devices (only checked my work e-mail yesterday), muted a bunch of work-related Twitter accounts and RSS feeds, and put my work machines in storage for the duration.

So here’s an unsorted list of what I ended up doing, besides dealing with various housekeeping and family affairs:

• Finally upgraded my ODROID-U2 to Ubuntu 16.04. Sadly, I would need to reflash uBoot to get it to run a kernel that is good enough to run Docker with the network layers I would prefer, but the one it’s stuck at is good enough to run a brand new SSH bastion and a few other things I’m working on.
• Since I was on a roll, I also upgraded the Plex container I use for my new home media setup.
• Swapped the battery on my iPhone 6, which was dying at 30% capacity and complaining about requiring maintenance. I think it was a good investment considering that I’m on the fence about buying a new one this year.
• Read around a dozen books (between leisure and technology), topping off the list with Neil Gaiman’s brilliant Norse Mythology.
• Bought a new printer to replace our OfficeJet 4500, which stopped being able to feed paper through due to what appears to be a worn down €2 bit of plastic (more on this later, if I can manage to muster enough vitriol).
• Swapped my home office chair for a Nilserik stool/support, because my back has been killing me and I have a feeling I’ll be getting a standing desk at home as soon as I can afford it.
• Bought a Lightdow LD6000 for the kids to use during vacation, which turned out to be quite good value for money although it obviously doesn’t hold a candle to the Canon SX710 I took along.
• Both cameras yielded around 400 photographs, which I’m sorting through and processing using darktable – which, incidentally, is brilliant. I intend to write about that as well, since it is going to force me to make quite a few changes to my photo workflow due to the .xmp sidecar files. But darktable is certainly the best thing I’ve come across in photography this year, and it’s cross-platform to boot. I even got it to run on my Surface using the Windows Subsystem for Linux and an X server.
• Finally updated my HOWTO on switching to the Mac, partly because it’s been five years since the last update and partly because I ended up caving in to the number of people who asked me to do something about it over the past year¹.

Tomorrow I’m going back to work, so updates on the above might take a good while. But at least these highlights will provide me with a to-do list of sorts for my next few posts (as soon as iPhone seasonal fever dies down, that is).