Online and offline thoughts from Kevin C. Tofel
I really can’t believe I haven’t blogged in roughly six months. Then again, I know what I’ve been dealing with so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s been a lot. Many, many changes. I think they’re for the better but time will tell. Separated and living alone The sub-title says it all. My wife of 16.5 years and I are separated. Folks who know us seem surprised. And why not? To outsiders, we…
A downsized iPad Pro experiment I’ve been using a 5th generation iPad Pro 12.9 tablet with keyboard for nearly four years. It’s still a great device but the battery has degraded quite a bit. That’s to be expected. I considered getting a new battery for it, but realized this was an opportunity for change. So I traded in the big iPad Pro 12.9 with M1 chip and bought the latest iPad Pro with an M4…
Low productivity challenges I missed updating my daily journal several times this past week. All of the non-journal days were those I worked 8 hour shifts. I’ve just been too tired to sit and write. Something has to change, so I’ve started some new efforts. First, I’m trying to get to sleep a little earlier. I often get up at 3:45am or 4:45am, depending on my work shift. So I’m going to be a good…
A wild week To say this was a crazy, stressful week would be an understatement. Aside from working 36 hours, which kept my tinkering time to a minimum, we’re dealing with a medical challenge. I found out back in June that I’d be a grandfather for the first time. My step-daughter Sydney is due in late February early March. Only nobody told the baby. Sydney’s been in the hospital since Monday with…
Back to a regular work schedule After two full weeks off, I went back for 32 hours this week. That really boosts my step count as I average between 4.5 and 7 miles of walking during a shift. But it also tires me out. I come home at 1pm, 2pm, or in one case, 4pm, after work and have zero energy to do the things I want to do. I’m not sure how to mitigate this. Is it afternoon coffee? A short, 90…
Back to UNRAID Last week, I mentioned I was trying TrueNAS on my homelab server. However, I find the UI a bit cumbersome and (at times) non-intuitive. So it was back to UNRAID. For some reason, it took several attempts to get the server to boot from my UNRAID USB flash drive . Eventually I got it working. Sometimes I wish UNRAID would move away from the “run this system on a flash drive” approach.…
Back to blogging For some reason, I haven’t felt like writing in a long time. In my head, I miss it. But in practice, I haven’t seem enthusiastic to actually write. I spent some time this past week thinking about why that is and came up with a few reasons. I won’t get into them right now. Suffice it to say, I’m rethinking my tools, my workflows and how I spend my time. During that process, I came…
As mentioned in my last post, I really like the Watchy DIY smartwatch . I still don’t think it’s a viable option for most consumers because it’s less of a product and more of a tinkering platform. Sure, it’s functional, but only for the basics. I also noted that I had a new case for the watch on order. The $35 aluminum case arrived and it’s great. Not perfect, but still excellent. By swapping over…
Earlier this month , I mentioned that I ordered an original Pebble watch for $22 on eBay. The watch arrived in perfect condition, save for a dead battery. No problem! I’ll just spend $18 at iFixit for a replacement, I thought. I got the new battery and attempted to solder it to the Pebble PCB but I ended up ruining the watch. It’s a shame, really. After lamenting over my personal e-waste…
I haven’t posted a minimalism update since the beginning of March , mainly because I haven’t been writing. I suppose after 12,000+ blog posts over two decades, I needed a break. So here’s what’s new and what I’ve been thinking about in terms of simplifying my digital life. What I bought In terms of purchases, I’ve been very intentional. That’s good! In fact, intentionality is a key part of how I…
Ollama + Obsidian? Last week I downloaded a few LLMs and got them to run locally on my computer with the open source Ollama app. As cool as I thought that was, today I learned there are Obsidian plugins that integrate your “second brain” with Ollama. In fact, one is even called “smart second brain” . I installed that specific plugin today and after it indexed my Obsidian notes, I asked my AI…
LocalSend Given that I use an iPhone, iPad Pro, Windows and Linux, I lean towards cross-platform services. Apple’s AirDrop is awesome for shooting files to different devices but of course, it’s limited to iOS and macOS devices. Enter LocalSend, an AirDrop-like app that works with Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux. It’s free and open source, found right here . A quick test of sending a photo…
After doing so well in the month of January by not spending much and donating some items , I’m almost ashamed to report on February. However, I committed to doing this every month and you have to take the good with the bad. I’ll rip of the bandaid and just right to it. What I bought I had to buy non-slip shoes for my new part-time job , so it doesn’t bother me that I spent $89.00 on some black New…
Bless me blogosphere, for I have sinned. It has been more than three weeks since my last blog-fession. I made a conscious effort to lay low this month. After putting my Chromebooks site on pause , I wanted to hit my personal “reset” button. So I did until now. That offline time gave me a chance to think through some personal challenges. And one of them, a reduced income, is now sorted out. At…
Well that was quick. It feels like New Year’s Eve was just last week and here we are at the end of January. Yes, there’s another day left in the month, but I’m 99% confident that nothing will change in the next 24 hours. 🤓 In order to hold myself a little more accountable, I kept track of my minimalism efforts this month. I’m sharing what I bought and/or added to the home and what was removed.…
As my wife and I get older, we continue to debate an important decision. Should we stay in our current house or should we look for a more suitable retirement home? As a minimalist, I’m leaning towards a smaller place. And I recently saw a “smart” pre-fab home that appears ideal. When I say this is a “smart” home, I don’t mean from a connected or IoT standpoint. Rather, the design and re-use of…
It’s time to log out. I’ll be putting the AboutChromebooks blog on hiatus for bit. Possibly for good. I’ve already mentioned the financial challenges that led me to this decision and frankly, the month of January only continues the worsening trend. Although it will cost me around $25 per month for hosting, I’ll leave the site up and running for a bit. There is still value there for those…
Let’s start the week with a personal question. No, you don’t need to share the answer. Just answer it in your head. Here we go: How many bath towels do you have? If you’re like most people, I’m betting there are at least five bath towels per person in your house. Maybe even six or seven. That’s just a guess; I’ve never seen any official statistics on such an important question. My wife is like…
Earlier this week, I noted that I’d be sharing more longer form thoughts on my minimalism lifestyle . Today I want to share how important my mornings are to that lifestyle. I take very intentional actions to prepare my day. These actions effectively set up the framework of how and where I spend my waking time. It’s taken many iterations to get the current iteration of this framework. Probably…
I’ve shared bits of my minimalmism experiences over the last year or so. Occasionally, I get some confirmation or a good suggestion from other minimalists. More often though, I get a comment from someone whose interest in minimalism is piqued. As I enjoyed some quiet time with coffee on New Year’s Day morning, I decided maybe I should share more on this topic, but in a longer form. So that’s the…
A quick look at my current default applications as of the end of 2023. Most are the same as I used in 2022 with a few exceptions. In particular, I’ve moved away from VS Code, the default Terminal app in Linux, heavy reliance on cloud storage from Google / Apple, and the Chrome browser. Even on my Chromebooks, I no longer use Chrome as the default browser . While inspiration for this listing comes…
As a minimalist for the past five years, I’ve previously jumped on the quiet trend of finding a minimal phone. These typically just provide the basics, such as voice calls, messages, a clock and contacts. Occasionally, you’ll also see a podcast or music player and maybe some navigation features. The idea of these devices is to rid or greatly reduce all of the “noisy” apps found on modern…
Winding down 2023, I’m looking over the past year, like many others. With my primary income as an independent blogger since 2018, this year was hellacious. Annual revenues weren’t just the lowest. They were massively lower. I’m at the point where it may be time to pull the plug on AboutChromebooks.com . There are several reasons for this huge drop in revenue, but most of them are outside of my…
After buying nearly every Amazon Kindle ever made, I switched to a large e-Ink Android tablet two years ago. It’s a 10.3-inch device running Android 8. As much as I like the reading experience combined with a few Android apps, it has a very slow refresh rate. As a result, I was using it less and less. I also gave up on using an e-Ink tablet as a minimalist device, which was disappointing. I think…
My quest to greatly reduce the use of a mouse or trackpad took a half-step forward this weekend. I don’t recall which of the folks I follow on Mastodon mentioned it, but someone pointed out Mutt . That was later followed with a vote for Neomutt . These are both terminal based email clients. In 2023! Mutt and Neomutt setup I futzed with Mutt for a bit but found Neomutt worked a bit better for my…
Recently, I shared on Mastodon that I was making an effort to reduce, if not eliminate, my mouse and trackpad usage . Every time your hands leave the keyboard, that’s time you’re not typing. And it adds up over time. To that end, I stopped using VS Code and migrated over to Neovim in my terminal . While I find the configuration of Neovim daunting, LazyVim goes a long way to mitigate that. It…
I ran out of space on my laptop’s internal SSD over the weekend. Most of the storage is used by my Home directory. Ugh. Luckily, I’m running Linux on a 2021 Dell XPS 15, which is generally fantastic. And it has two NVMe slots inside. Even better: it’s simple to crack open the laptop and add a second SSD drive. I actually had a second one installed already. In addition to the 250 GB SSD for the…
As a developer in training for a while (too long, TBH), I don’t have a robust project portfolio. So I decided to rectify that with a personal project. It’s possible, although unlikely, others would want to use this project. I decided that since I recently started tinkering with 11ty as an SSG, or static site generator, I would create a web-based CMS, or content management system, for it.…
First text of my CMS project to post a blog on my 11ty site. Not writing anything fancy here but let’s include a link to my site to mix it up a bit. Hopefully, this works so I can start making the GUI look a little better; I’ve been concentrating on the functionality more than anything so far. Cheers!
Adding a test post directly in GitHub. This is just for testing purposes as my CMS project is requesting all of the post title file names. Prior to this post, I was only getting six post titles. After publishing this post, I hope to see all of the existing post titles plus this new one. Before: UPDATE – After:
I’m writing this post in Markdown directly in Visual Studio Code. This is a sample post with an image of Norm.
I’m writing this post in Markdown directly in Visual Studio Code. This is a sample sentence with a link to my Chromebooks site . If this works, I’ll have a new post on the home page. This should also appear in the archives. And the link should work This is new text added from the GitHub API
I ’ve been tinkering with an idea lately in terms of big tech and contact management. This is mainly for two reasons. O ne: My contacts are basically “held” by big tech. I have them with Apple, Facebook (although I’m not a regular user of that service), and Google. Outside of “big tech”, I also manage them in Proton Mail , which I switched to a few years ago from Gmail . T wo: I’m tired of…
I t’s been nearly three years since I custom build my last desktop PC. And to be honest, I love that computer. Between the more than good enough AMD Ryzen processor and an AMD Radeon 6800XT GPU, it’s fantastic for gaming. Initially, I had an NVIDIA RTX 3080 installed but recently swapped my son for his GPU. He’s more into gaming than I am. Obviously, that much power works for everyday use as well.…
W hat a long, busy week. I mentioned on Monday that I’m beginning to prep for my first JavaScript assessment. And I put a good 15 hours in on that effort. I also wrote five blog posts about Chromebooks, recorded an IoT podcast, and wrote the news for an IoT-related newsletter. Oh, and my own newsletter was written and published this morning. A side from that, we’ve been taking care of Norm, our…
Since February of this year, I’ve been a JavaScript Padawan. If you’re not familiar with the term Padawan, it’s a reference to a Jedi-in-training, apprenticed to a Jedi Master in Star Wars . I’m not actually apprenticed to a Jedi, although that’s a nice bucket list item. However, I have studied JavaScript 101 , the first course at Launch School, for most of this year. And since the approach of…
Well, my first semester in the Georgia Tech OMSCS program is over. And my first semester is also my last semester. I’ve decided to not continue this online Masters program. My decision isn’t because of the program, it’s because of me. At least in a sense. I’ll say upfront that I think the program is fantastic. Georgia Tech has created an affordable, top-notch advanced degree path in Computer…
I made a big life decision this past month. At age 51, I’ve applied to an online Masters in Computer Science program at Georgia Tech . Yeah, I’m surprised too. See, I always wanted to teach college classes. Even before getting my B.A. in Economics back in the early '90’s, that was the plan. It didn’t work out back then and I eventually started a 15-year career in I.T. followed by another 15 years…
It works This post suggests that I correctly have my Hugo-rendered site up and running. Check the link for more information on the Hugo open-source software, but essentially, it takes Markdown content and renders static site pages for much faster delivery than a traditional CMS with a database, such as Wordpress. For now, I have the content being hosted for free on Netlify which does offer a…