5.9 KiB
| title | published | updated |
|---|---|---|
| This Week (2024-07-06) | 2024-07-06T20:57:24.013873Z | 2024-07-06T20:57:24.013873Z |
Here's what I've been up to since the last weekly status...
Cycling
New bike!
I bought a new-to-me bike, and I've now taken it on three rides this week - it feels great! The Crosstrail's front-leaning posture really helps transfer power from my legs to the pedals, and I can feel that it's working my calves more than the upright posture of the Verve ever did.
New gear!
Of course, a new bike needs new accessories. I transferred over my headlight, radar taillight, and water bottle cage. I also added a heavy-duty phone mount since the one I had designed and 3D printed for the other bike wouldn't work.
I'm trying to find a kickstand that will fit the bike's peculiar frame; pre-2016 Crosstrails had an integrated rear kickstand mount, but that was removed for some reason. I don't know why the ability to park a bike without having to carefully balance it against a wall seems like such an afterthought.
Oh, and I ordered some weird suction cups so that I can maybe carry the new bike around on top of my BRZ and not have to borrow my wife's station wagon all the time.
New riding buddy!
I don't really need two bikes, so I'm trying to find a new owner for the Verve. To that end, I invited a friend to join me for two of my rides this week. He hadn't been on a bike in over 15 years, so he struggled a bit... and I struggled a bit with riding slowly enough for him to keep up. But he seems to be having a good time (he came back for another ride this morning, after all), and some targeted Zone 2 training is probably good for me anyway.
Golang Learning
I mentioned last week that my next "for learning" read would probably be something Go-related. I've fumbled through using Go for a few projects (including my little feed aggregator), but have never deliberately sat down to learn the language. It's always just been smashing stuff together until the angry errors go away. I think it's time to change that.
Past-John wisely picked up a Humble Bundle of Golang Programming books back in May, so present-John has started working through Go Programming: From Beginner to Professional by Samantha Coyle. It starts out pretty basic (as it should), but I already have a better understanding of pointers (and how/where/when to use them). I really appreciate all the exercises and activities to guide me through learning this stuff. I'm looking forward to developing more foundational knowledge of how to wield Go effectively.
Home networking
I've been a Google Fiber subscriber for a bit over seven years now. In that time, my rate has been a consistent $70/mo for symmetric gigabit service, and I can't remember an outage that wasn't caused by nearby construction. That's a pretty good track record for an ISP, I think.
I was a tester for 2-Gig service when that was starting to roll out a few years back, and that required swapping to a fancy multi-gig router/gateway device. At the end of the test, I opted to drop back to the 1-Gig service since I didn't really have any devices that could use more than that anyway, but I had to keep using that multi-gig RG since my account had already been "converted" (and couldn't be unconverted, I guess?). I eventually switched the RG into bridge mode (once that was offered) so that I could continue using my Google Wi-Fi pucks without having to deal with double-NAT issues.
My home network has grown a bit since then, and now includes a tidy little homelab. So I thought now might be a good time to revisit. I upgraded to the $100/mo 2-Gig (2 gigabit down, 1 gigabit up) plan, switched the RG out of bridge mode, and removed the now-quite-dated Google Wi-Fi nodes. The RG came with a mesh extender, but my testing suggests that I don't really need that; I've got plenty of coverage within the home using the single AP, and not using the extender will eliminate a lot of the potential issues that tend to come with mesh networks.
As for the wired network, I have a small 10Gbit switch in the homelab environment already, but there's still a 1Gbit switch between that and the RG. So I've ordered a larger 2.5Gbit switch to replace that and feed the rest of the home as well.
In other news...
- We spent time with my parents, my brother, his wife, and their infant for the holiday. That was nice.
- I updated my little feed aggregator project to use a unique UserAgent string, and I felt confident enough about that to declare a
v1.0.0release! Of course, I then immediately noticed that I'd left in some placeholder code and found a few more bugs opportunities for improvement. Maybe I'll push another release this week. - I also did more tinkering on the GitHub Actions-powered lunch scheduler project at work. I'll probably fork that soon and build something similar to help my wife and me decide on dinner.
- I'm still (very slowly) working on a post about how I set up a GitHub Actions workflow to build Proxmox VM templates in my homelab using Packer; it's a pretty big topic, so it's taking a long time to write things out clearly. Also, I keep getting distracted.
Top scrobble
My most-played track of the week:
🎧 Smack My Bitch Up by The Prodigy
=> https://blog.jbowdre.lol/this-week-2024-07-06/ 📡 Originally posted on jbowdre's weblog