Workspace table improvements

Finally bit the bullet and purchased a Caldigit dock. I have about 3 cables that I was having to constantly connect/disconnect. Even though, I now have a separate office, I like to take my laptop and work either in our balcony or in my wife’s office. This dock has been a 10x life improvement. Can’t believe I didn’t order one earlier. I took the opportunity to also buy some bracket mounts and DYI-ied a mechanism to mount my trusty USBPre2 under my table along with the dozen power adapter bricks my 2 monitor + dock setup now requires.

Taylor Mayson desk from Billions
Courtesy: Reddit

I also swapped offices with my wife and moved a whole bunch of furniture. This was more work than I expected.

Mac Mini is back online

After I moved in to my new plac,e the Mac mini was not in commission. Given improvements with Skynet1, I felt I could bring it back online. But what has taken my Mac Mini setup up several notches is the introduction of Tailscale. I can now connect securely from anywhere in the world to my Mac Mini 💥. Blog posts coming soon.

Skynet: Homebridge

Having setup the Mac Mini, I got a wind of energy and decided to install Homebridge. With the Apple Home app, I now have control over every smart device in my place. The one that I’m particularly glad with is the Ring Vidoe Doorbell working flawlessly with Homebridge.

Inbox 0

I took the long weekend and just rummaged through my inbox aggressively. I have my inbox somewhat under control and I felt it was a noteworthy achievement.

Henry updates & switched to a light theme

Inspired by an NYT magazine article I was reading, I decided to change things up and convert my blog to look reflect the cleaner black/white magazine aesthetic. This gave me the opportunity to refactor some key css variables, so if I ever wanted to quickly switch up my them again, should now be a breeze. I also introduced a lot of improvements like navigation, a spiffier favicon… blog post with all the good details coming soon.

In search of the perfect programming font

I have a chronic problem of never being content with the monospaced font I use for programming. There are 3 that I have come to love:

  1. IBM Plex Mono (specifically the iAWriter Mono variant)
  2. San Francisco Mono
  3. Input Mono

After using iAWriter Mono for a month and being happy with it, I switched to Input Mono. This is a real struggle cause it eats up way more time than I have to spare. I’m pleased and convinced Input Mono is what I should stick with it for aesthetics + legibility. Let’s see how long this lasts.

kau.sh

I was browsing my phone and through some rabbit-hole blog-browsing session realized that the domain name https://kau.sh was available 😲! So I snatched it right away. I spent a weekend diligently migrating all my domains over and now this domain has changed 😎.

Part of why I could do this over a weekend is practice. In the past I’ve switched from kaushikgopal.com → kaush.co → jkl.gg → kaushik.page → kau.sh. My family (understandably) makes fun of my obsession over quirky short domain name choices2. I’m content with this one though… hopefully this too lasts.

Blog post

I wrote two blog posts this month:

  1. Magic enter command for (fish) shell
  2. Keyboard Maestro as a Text Expander replacement

I also spent sometime sharing it through social media and the results have been pretty satisfying. Way more clicks. I think what helped particularly was sharing it in specific reddits where this type of content would do well.

July Goals

I didn’t get much of my originally planned goals done, but I’m quite content with how much I got done outside.

August Goals

👋

2022 goals

  1. My project to convert my home to a smart home dream ↩︎

  2. they endearingly refer to it as weird ↩︎