For a couple months last year, I became borderline obsessed with Emacs. While initially a massive learning curve to begin grasping I found it extremely powerful and intriguing. The first few days were quite challenging but I was slowly finding my way through and thoroughly enjoying myself. Realizing the power that was in my hands with Emacs Lisp, I couldn’t help but dive headfirst into configuring and tweaking into the perfect development and editor for myself.

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As I wrote in another post a few weeks ago, Gentoo has officially made the switch. The new default Python version is Python 3.7! I was not totally sure just what to expect with this update. Surely some things would go wrong, and I would encounter some issues somewhere. As it turns out, I was wrong.

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Pardon our dust — a redesign of /dev/ncdulo is underway! Read more and catch all the details.

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If there’s one thing I only really started to pick up, and get interested in when I moved out of my parent’s house it’s cooking. Not that I relied heavily on my mom much for food — I was pretty good at covering my own expenses when living at home. But you don’t truly realize everything that is already taken care of for you until you have to take care of everything yourself. You know, the little things. Keeping a well stocked pantry. Having a wide variety of cooking utensils and devices. Making sure the rent check is out on time.

Being out on my own has really given me a good push to branch out into cooking more, expand my horizons, and gain more ambition in what I cook. You can’t just live off of Pizza Rolls and M&M’s forever — it starts to get boring after a bit. Though I have had some great results at times, I’ve also had some not so great results. Tonight’s dinner was actually pretty good, but I made a few mistakes along the way and learned a few things.

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An idea I’ve had on & off over the years is to set up a blog. Somewhere I can write about the things on my mind. Somewhere I can share, or catalog the bits and pieces of information I pick up over time. I’ve even made a few attempts at it before, with various levels of effort and completion. Yet for the most part, I have not stuck with previous attempts long term. Most of them falling into inactivity not long after the first or second post was made.

Going through this process again, I’m not going to say, “this time will be different”. I will say that I’ve been very much enjoying this, and having fun with it. Something I’m not sure I did in some previous attempts. There are also several notable differences to me that seem to factor in to play here.

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Portage is the official package manager, and software distribution system for Gentoo Linux. It allows packages to be configured, built from source, and installed onto the system with a minimal of fuss and manual configuration. When compared to the traditional ./configure && make && make install of many software packages, Portage provides a far nicer and more streamlined process.

Portage ships with a very sensible default configuration, but for most of us on Gentoo — there is near always room to further streamline the process. In this post, I detail the tweaks and enhancements I have enabled for the Gentoo install on my desktop. I would consider these to be “safe” enhancements in that most should not negatively impact the system. Exceptions to that are noted within.

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Oh, happy day! I truly do enjoy Python version bumps. With Python 2 at EOL, and Gentoo Linux making big moves over the past couple of months to bump the Python3 default target to Python 3.7, it has been a very exciting time for me to be working so much with Python. Though a bit confusing at times, the care and attention put in by the Gentoo Python Team has made this an easier transition to go through.

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I mentioned a bit about this in my last post — trouble coming to terms with a sensible way to maintain this website in a Git repository. Right under my nose it looks like there is a great solution. Not sure how I missed this way of handling it so easily. This guide was written with Nikola in mind, but it can be applied to any project repo on your GitHub account.

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Hard to believe how quickly, and how well this project is coming together. It’s infancy began some months ago, but never quite got off the ground. Then about a week ago, a rekindled interest sparked up. And just like that — here we are! Reaching a point now where I feel comfortable with this base, I’d like to get this online. For final testing, and of course to open up for visitors. These are my final thoughts as I prepare for a proper deploy.

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Over the past couple of years, I found myself more and more interested in DIY solutions. Part of that is the obvious, saving money. When you’re already stretched thin, every dollar you can save is a big help. But another part, seemingly the bigger draw for me — being able to say, “I did this”. Having the ability to take of things on your own, without reliance on other people, or factors can really take a lot of stress off the mind. As the Coronavirus pandemic continues to work through our world, there is a greater growing interest in DIY once again. Seems as good a time as any to go over some of my own ways for saving money, and getting things done on my own.

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