Checking In – Early December 2020

I realize today that I have a handful of drafts on here that I never completed (not surprised), and I haven’t actually updated since October 8th, so 2 months ago. I actually have a lot of stuff to post, just need to focus on getting it all done.

One thing I’ve been running into, that I honestly just haven’t had a chance to look into/fix/cry about is the WordPress app that I normally use to upload pics from my phone; it seems to be fairly broken lately, or for some reason just can’t resize pics properly. I think that’s been my main hurdle in putting up some of my latest projects. As such, I figured I’d just put a text post up for now.

The roller coaster of life continues, although the hills seem to be pretty exaggerated lately. I’m mostly lamenting the fact that after 2+ decades of hosting an annual Christmas party for my friends, this will be the first year I’m actually skipping it. I’m almost considering not even taking out decorations at this point; but we’ll see.

On a lighter note, I acquired a SERIOUS amount of Franklin Institute swag, all sorts of internal newsletters and other fun stuff from the late 1940s and early 50s, from apparently a former employee. I’m getting it organized and hope to post some of it in the near future.

On the project side of things, I acquired a new to me Commodore Amiga 2000 a few weeks ago, dead and practically empty of course, so I’ve been slowly-but-surely (maybe not-so-surely) nursing it back to health. It went from being completely dead, to showing signs of life, to booting, but improper ram, to proper ram, but no bus, to now booting with working bus, and I’m working on the keyboard interface. I bought some goodies for it from Individual Computers (icomp.de) and Amigakit. Hopefully if I can work out my photo issues I’ll get a post up about that soon.

I’ve also gone head first into Apple’s Homekit ecosystem, with mostly Ikea Tradfri stuff, which I also plan to do a post about. The Tradfri line of smart home products are economically priced and so far work well, I guess time will tell if they last. Ironically, I always felt my house was “too small” for home automation, especially since most home automation ecosystems and products were actually more work than any convenience or cost/time savings, but so far I seem to be enjoying the Tradfri/Homekit experience, although with the typical learning curves along the way.

With all that said, I’ll bid adieu for now, and hopefully check back in with some new posts before the holidays.