After enjoying every day of my adventyr (advent + äventyr ‘adventure’) in December I was so ready for a short vårvinterventure (vårvinter + adventure)! This is a week-long event and it comes after a couple months where I’ve been writing a lot, so I’m burning to do something more technical. Problem is, I am quite exhausted and this should rather be a week of self-expectation minimization. If I manage anything, however small, beyond the ominous must-do list, I’ll take note of that in this log.

Monday1

  • created a Codeberg account. The plan is not to quit GitHub (quite yet), but to gradually move at least my personal projects somewhere better
  • sketched a flyer to promote one of my upcoming subversive events while on a call with a distant friend

Tuesday

  • finished the flyer, even made different versions for digital and print. Definitely not a masterpiece of design, but hopefully it’ll do the job. As long as we get it to print correctly…

    Flyer for an upcoming free software install fest in three versions, one dark to use digitally and two light for printing

Wednesday

  • went around my faculty’s building leaving flyers here and there

  • got the sudden urge to do something with my hands and merged a pair of wired earbuds with a broken jack and a malfunctioning aux cable into a pair of working earbuds! (exclamation mark due because it was my first time using soldering iron unsupervised and my second time ever)

    A pair of beaten up wired earbuds with a heavily taped jack plugged into an even more beaten up laptop

Thursday

stressed, tired – nada

Friday

  • finally fixed audio on my work laptop (it wasn’t even hard) and copied some of the music I usually listen to while I write (text or code) to an SD card that permanently lives in there
  • backed up my 157 (!) GitHub repositories and started spring cleaning. Just by removing obvious trash (forks that no longer serve a purpose, project that died when they still were in the world of ideas, repository whose sole purpose was showing someone else how Git works…), homework and other private stuff that no longer needs version control, I’m already down to 76 (61 of which public). What’s left are repos under active development, past projects I’d still include in a programming portfolio, websites hosted on GitHub pages and stuff that is linked to somewhere else. In other words, things that require a little bit of thinking and/or actual work before moving/archiving/deleting

Saturday

  • archived a few more GitHub repos
  • repeatedly tried to install Debian on an old laptop that is being promoted to the role of server, repeatedly failing due to mysterious network errors and/or pressing enter instead of space in a counterintuitive TUI screen (then they say Arch is the hard one…)
  • fixed a fake SNES controller, a pot and a lid (very minor, easy repairs) while waiting for the installs to fail

Sunday

  • successfully installed Debian (btw) on the server half broken laptop and sshd into it from my mainframe other half broken laptop

  • went on a nice short bike ride with a friend. We went to a nearby lake, Aspen. While there, we tried to fix my front gear, which had completely stopped working. It’s much better now, but still needs some adjusting. Luckily, the ride there and back is very flat and it wasn’t really needed

    A yellow GPS track in the FOSS app CoMaps. It goes from east Gothenburg to the lake Aspen in Jonsered and back, taking slightly different routes

  • finished reading a wonderful book that also happens to be in the public domain and available through my favorite Swedish website, Litteraturbanken. The writing, starting from the title En saga om en saga och andra sagor (‘A story about a story and other stories’, better than a recursive acronym!), is superb in my opinion.

This was a happy ending for a week at the start of which I was really struggling. The more time I dedicated to these little projects (especially the repairs), the better I felt. I should take proper holidays and to do more of all of my hobbies soon, so that I can then go back to my PhD thesis fully (or at least largely) recharged.

  1. weeks start on Monday in my world ↩