Projects
Project development this week has been slow with the final week of the college semester.
MediaCow Touch 2
See blog post MediaCow Touch 2 Part 11
Website, InfoSite, StaticSite
I have been getting myself confused over on how I should structure the website; should it be static, dynamic? How much should be hardcoded and how much should be configurable?
At this point, I may make something similar to suckless's swerc that generates a static webpage from markdown files where I just upload the resulting HTML and CSS files to the server to be served by nginx. There has not been any point of writing a backend in Python or Rust to serve content that is static.
SP7021 Development
Recently, I decided to pull out the Banana Pi BPI-F2P single-board computer to test its ability to run the i3 window manager after my successful experience with i3 on the ThinkPad X200 Tablet ("R121"). It appeared that the image present on the microSD card was the experiment I done with attempting to build a Debian image for the BPI-F2P in May 2021. In the process of updating packages, I ran into issues with outdated apt configuration relating to GPG keys. After installing the current GPG keys, I ran into more issues with package dependencies that eventually broke the installation.
I decided to rebuild the image as many changes have been done to the Sunplus/Tibbo-provided Linux resources since May 2021 and the last time I attempted to work on the system being in July 2023.
I successfully built the image though I chose the "BusyBox" rootfs option that left me with minimal tools to work with. I attempted a hacky solution to use debootstrap to convert the installation to Debian by copying over various root directories and files. As I expected, a kernel panic occurred on boot. I have considered figuring out how to add Debian as a rootfs option then making a pull request to the SP7021 rootfs repository.
SP7350
Recently, I found out about the Banana Pi BPI-F4 that has has been released recently using the recently announced Sunplus SP7350 SoC. I have heard about the SP7350 since January 2024 with commit messages in the Sunplus-provided SP7021 repository. The SP7350 has been listed on Sunplus's website within the last several weeks.
I contacted Banana Pi to see if they can sell me a BPI-F4 kit as it seems to not be available on any online stores they list. On December 16, 2024 I have gotten a response that the BPI-F4 is still in development and it would not be available yet.
WBPC1
On December 14, 2024, I have started the process of switching the dual-booted Linux Mint and Windows 10 installation to Fedora.
Unfortunately, during the backup process, I did not push the website configuration repository to GitHub. I lost all of the writing for this blog post, a major part of MediaCow Touch 2 Part 11 blog post and possibly many other edits of other pages. I had to write this post all on December 15, 2024. The reason for this is that I did not look over what I have written so I did not feel comfortable pushing what I have written to GitHub. With the amount of other things I needed to do to complete the backup process, I forgot about the website configuration repository. There may be other pages I have made edits to that I have not pushed to GitHub.
First, I tried the XFCE Spin but for some reason I decided to try to install i3 as the window manager. This failed and I installed the Sway Spin which I used briefly before I switched to the i3 Spin due to the lack of support of Wayland by some software. There is a lot for me to get used to with i3 though I envision I would be more productive with it.
Other
On December 16, 2024, I made a Pull Request for a small change for hyfetch. Specifically, I added the ability to use "n" and "p" for next and previous in the flag selection along with page roll over; next on the last page goes to the first page and previous on the first page goes to the last page. This was not my idea and was brought up by someone on Discord.
In recent times, I have been having myself consider contributing fixes to open source software instead of waiting for someone else to fix something.
AI Usage
On December 14, 2024, I have started to use the Cody extension for VSCodium to explore its capabilities. AI usage has been very limited in my projects, with the first time was used for assistance was with Serine while this is the first blog post that I used with AI assistance.
For writing, it has been useful for sentence completion and grammar checking.
The chat feature can be used to summarize and review a file or a certain part of a file. It has been shown to be accurate from my testing.
Personal
Antidepressant Discontinuation Syndrome
I have been slowly recovering from ADS since I have started to take fluoxetine (Prozac) again on December 9, 2024. Some of the more severe symptoms have faded with each day.
On December 14, 2024, I temporarily "Deactivated" my Instagram account though this was reverted on December 16, 2024. However, I will only use the service through a web browser for the time being as I stopped using it on the dedicated social media phone (iPhone XR).
On December 15, 2024, starting to use Discord again so soon was shown to be a bad idea. Discord will still remain to be on the social media phone but I would try to keep the device out of sight.
College
This was the last week of the semester which was mostly final exams. As of December 16, 2024, I have passed two out of three classes.
The classes of the Spring 2025 semester seems to cover mostly computer-related topics.