What I done did in November

It snowed this weekend — Winter is coming

Took a bit of a blogging break

At the start of the month my girlfriend took her first trip away to visit family in almost two years which left me to my own devices and when I’m left alone I really struggle to get motivated (I think I get overwhelmed by all the options available to me).

I decided instead of worrying and fighting to meet deadlines I’d embrace the meh-ness and just rest up while I was in that headspace, however with the days getting shorter that feeling took a bit longer to shift after she returned.

I’ve got time off work after the 10th of December so I’ll be looking to get back on the blogging when I’m not juggling my day job and a side business.

Explored other ways of realising Reciprocal.dev’s goals

Another reason for the lack of blogging was that instead of celebrating the launch of the Reciprocal.dev alpha with a well-deserved break I jumped straight into exploring other ways of realising what we wanted to achieve with the project.

One of these approaches has been to build a Miro plugin that offers a similar experience (there are quite a few limitations to the Miro API) to our web app but within Miro.

We’ll be conducting some user testing around which approach works for users in the coming weeks so I’m really excited to see if the integration into an existing tool makes the difference in the way people engage with it.

Finally got Pokemon D&P remakes

Although I ordered the remakes on the day they were announced my order was unfortunately given to Hermes to deliver which meant even though they received it on the Friday the game came out I didn’t actually have it in my hands until Wednesday.

This delay essentially knocked all my plans out of sync as I had dedicated that weekend to playing it and instead I found myself having to play it bit my bit over weekdays so by the time it was the weekend I wasn’t in the mood to play as I had to make up for all the stuff I didn’t do in the week.

The remakes are OK, the story is still great but there’s something about the like-for-like remake that makes me wish they’d done a bit more to modernise it as the game feels very grindy compared to newer entries.

I’m sure there will be those who appreciate the old grindy Pokemon ways but as I don’t have time to immerse myself in games anymore I just found it a bit too much.

Setup NextCloud

Over the last few months I’ve been slowly figuring out how to move away from Apple’s infrastructure onto something self-hosted. Ideally this move would involve swapping out my iPhone for something running a Linux mobile OS but there are things I need that mean that’s not entirely possible.

The weekend just gone saw me put nextcloudpi on an old Raspberry Pi 3 I had kicking about and giving that a go. I have to say I’m very impressed with how easy it was to get everything set up and while there’s been a few issues getting external access set up (due to port forwarding not nextcloud) I’m very happy with the set up.

This single box has allowed me to replace a fair amount of my cloud based services:

• I can ditch iCloud for NextCloud’s files app
• I can ditch Photos storage for NextCloud’s photos upload
• I can ditch Lastpass for Keypass (Keypassium for iOS) for password storage
• I can ditch Lastpass’ secure notes for Cryptomater/Joplin on NextCloud’s files app
• I can ditch Notion for Joplin syncing up to webdav on NextCloud for notes

All the data is backed up onto a USB stick that I have plugged into the Raspberry Pi so should I want to move to another self-hosted cloud I’ve got portability which as someone who’s moved from Google to iCloud and now NextCloud I appreciate.