There is never enough time to learn all the new things you want to and sometimes other things need to be prioritised. At the moment I am trying to prioritise experiencing some non computer related experiences. Mostly I am (slowly) learning Hebrew and trying to get out on my bike more. Also, the sea isn’t very far from my house and I really want to be in it all year round. As the weather gets colder I would rather acclimatise than get a shock for the Boxing Day dip. In an attempt to limit distractions here are some things which I want to do when I have the time. (also I can refer back to this post in the future and say I wanted to do them but never got around to it, in case any of them become really cool)

NixOS

I think that NixOS would solve the following issues, which I know I want to solve on my current system but not enough to justify the work (I also have solutions to some of these things) :

  • Rollbacks
  • Keeping track of whats installed
  • Minimal installs
  • Experimentation

Plasma Bigscreen

This one is mostly for my extended family, but having something which can be a Roku/Fire stick replacement would be neat. I am thinking about a device which can be controlled using a simple hardware UI (like a remote or a games controller) that can handle :

  • the big tech streaming platforms (Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon Prime et al.
  • Some less big tech stuff (ITV, Channel 4)
  • Your own things (Streaming from the NAS, Jellyfin, that sort of thing)

My thoughts are a raspberry pi with Plasma Bigscreen on it with a stripped down app selection as well as anbox running (it isn’t the right tool for this job). I have never tried any of this so I have no idea if any of it is any good. I am thinking about anbox as a way of simplifying the UI for the mainstream apps as well as boosting (Linux) support. Instead of always opening a browser (and so needed a keyboard and mouse) to type in each streaming service, the android app should act as a nice shortcut to these bits of content. Everyone makes an Android app these days but not always a Linux desktop app. Old people and kids are much more familiar clicking on a logo than they are dealing with URLs (I reckon).

Alternative to Anbox would be to use the wrapper for a webapp which makes website more … app like. This would definitely work whereas I think Anbox struggles to do stuff like streaming video. I loaded Anbox up on my laptop and it worked very well except that Disney+ didn’t play any video.

Rebuild this website

It has been working fine for years and does a good job. It just isn’t all that fun. Looking at peoples websites and how often they change them makes me want to change mine up more. If I had the time I think I would change it up lots more than I do now. In a way, getting the content served in an API from markdown to be consumed by many other things would be a good shout. It would make switching out the website part easier I would think.

I sort of want to make a svelteKit implementation as well as see what 11ty has to offer. Or even Nuxt?! Probably not Nuxt.

Other things

There is always more to do and never enough time to do it in. We just need to live with this tension.

Peace.