Casey Neistat Youtube videos

Casey Neistat has really kindled an interest for me in working with more hardware related stuff. See specifically this compilation list. As part of this interest, I’ve decided to get more in tune with my mechanical roots and take up a course by Mark Rober on Studio & the one by Casey Neistat. Excited about this.

Recursive updates

In the never-ending journey of tweaking and finding the perfect font, I spent some more time fiddling with Recursive and am now on version 8 (which is internal as I test it out). Specifically I’ve switched to a dotted 0 and simplified versions of L & Z.

Android Developer Summit 2022

As part of being a GDE, one of the nice perks is the ability to attend the conferences organized by Google. I attended ADS and it was a lot of fun. The best part was getting to meet a lot of the android devs in person after so long! Google was also kind enough to give each of us a free Pixel Watch 😲. The more I messed with it, I realized it’s time for the prodigal son to return. I now am back on the Pixel train with the Pixel 7 Pro and a Pixel watch! I don’t necessarily think the hardware is better than 🍏 but the allur of just whipping up some .kt and testing it out on a phone and watch was too compelling.

🌐 Skynet updates

My gateway modem is located in the attic but the router is another room1. Whenever there was a power trip, my entire network would go down as either the gateway or router would lose power and need to restart. This is incredibly frustrating, let alone damaging. If I have a remote backup running, or just an important zoom call. I decided I should add both a UPS2 and a power conditioner to my network. This required me to move the gateway & router to the same place. The easy solution would be to move the router back to the attic but then my Wifi would suck. So I had to rejigger my network, head to Home depot and I finally landed with this:

Network for my Closet

The excessive duck taping strategy was something that I picked up from Casey Neistat.

Casey Neistat Redbox project

Speaking of Casey Neistat, one of his vlogs inspired me to clean up my own hardware box andd add some semblance of organization. That was another project I finished and am quite happy with the outcome.

Build your own vs buy!

Switched back to Things 🙈

Jotting down these logs have been the best thing I’ve done as it shows me how fickle my decisions are especially when it comes to software choice.

Anyways, I moved back from TickTick → Things3. I have to eat my hat and specify the reasons here:

  1. Things 3 the UI is gorgeous. TickTick is more functional with a plethora of features. But the UI was getting to me. When my tasks would inevitably pile up on account of my procrastination, TickTick was just a mess. Things would somehow still surface this info. It’s a delicate balance of font size, choice, spacing etc.
  2. This is one of those tools that I’d love to dissect with KG Sr. in a possible future youtube/podcast. So only made sense that I switch between the two and carefully identify my observations.
  3. I keep thinking when I move back to Android, it would be nice to have my todo list be multi-platform. But truth is I’m pretty entrenched as a user with the iPhone. Also with the advent of KMM there now exists the possibility of me working with my preferred programming language of choice (Kotlin) and preferred hardware/OS (iPhone).

Given I’ve switched to the Pixel train now, I’m tempted to build the equivalent of Things for Android. I should pull up that repo I spun up for this purpose long time ago 🤔.

Switched to Obsidian for notes

Moving to the Pixel means picking a solution where I can jot down notes quickly. Obsidian also hit 1.0 and I really like the redesign. That coupled with the fact that I get to liberate my notes into .md pushed me over the edge.

Start reading more again 📚

I’ve started to take breaks and read physical books more. The first one I’ve started on is “Smart Brevity”. I’m on a journey to improve my writing/speaking/communication skills. It was a good book but not exactly one that blew my mind or left me wanting to go back and re-read right away.

🎾 Tennis!

I picked up playing Tennis with my brother for a few days and the habit really stuck! My sister who stayed with us for a few days found a Tennis court near my place and now I’m essentially hooked. I see more exercise in my future in the form of Tennis.

Review October’s Goals

This was a terrible month in terms of getting goals done but a lot got done in hindsight. I don’t feel bad but I do want to make my goal for next month more realistic.

Goals for November

I think the switch to Android is going to be big. Setting up my phone and new watch and getting back to the nuts and bolts of #AndroidDev will be exciting.

  1. wider Wifi span ↩︎

  2. Uninterrupted Power Supply ↩︎