It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, so I thought I’d give an update on life as of late.

Website

There have been a couple of changes I made to the website if you haven’t noticed, but I’ve also migrated its location as well. I hosted my site with HostMonster for probably close to 10 years, and I recently decided to migrate to AWS Lightsail. It’s a nice modern cheap solution for hosting a WordPress site, and for the price I was paying HostMonster, I felt I could get a much better value. Beyond the aesthetic changes I’ve made, you need to go checkout my live broadcast of my weather station data on the main page or at the bottom of this page!

Cat

After what seemed like way more effort than what should be required to get a cat, we have now adopted Tilly! She is 4 1/2 months old and is the most social loving cat I’ve ever seen. With my wife and I both working from home, between the both of us, she probably spends 3-4 hours sitting in our lap, and spends the rest of the time hanging around us. This is very different from Boots, our last cat, who was very independent. I can’t say I enjoy getting stepped on and woken up at 4:30am, but we’re very happy to have Tilly in our home.

School

My daughter has returned to school currently as a Hybrid model. The kids go to school Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. Wednesday is an at-home day where the facility can be cleaned. This has been working out well so far. Caitlyn wears her mask no problem, and seems to enjoy getting back into school where she can socialize and make new friends.

RocketBook

My wife bought me a RocketBook, which is a notebook that allows you to take eraseable notes that can be scanned into a digital library. I hated it at first for several reasons:

• I’m left handed and write over the ink
• writing on plastic feels strange
• The OCR feature doesn’t work very well

With that said, I stuck with it for a week and ended up warming up to it. I don’t rely on the OCR feature and just stick to basic PDFs, and I’ve learned to adapt to the writing style needed for this to work. It is nice having one notebook and a digital copy of everything you’ve written. I wish they could improve it to feel more like paper and pencil, and have more of an algorithmic approach to OCR where it can learn to adapt to your writing. Overall I think based on the price it’s at least worth a try. I’ll have to provide a more thorough update of my experiences maybe around Christmas time when I get more time to use it.

Technical Projects

I’ve finally gotten around to tinkering with an FPGA development board I purchased a while back, and I have the first of a series of blog posts on it which will hopefully fill in some knowledge gaps I felt weren’t very clear when working through development. I should have the first of these published in the next couple days.

Desktop PC

I had a desktop PC which the case was literally purchased when I was in undergrad college, and needed updating. Having built a mini ITX server recently, I liked how small they were, so that’s what I chose for this PC. It’s an AMD 3900X, and I’ll be making a post to go over all the details. Needless to say, it’s working very nicely.

Stay Tuned

I’ll be trying to create posts weekly or bi-weekly so stay tuned for future content. As always, thanks for reading!