What's up - November 2015

Distractions, the Internet is full of ‘em

So I wanted to get to know Meteor this month; it started off well enough with declaring my intensions in an earlier post; but as it always happens, I totally got distracted by other, equally interesting things.

Here’s my achievements list of this month up to today:

  • Reading articles in my Feedly list; on all things IT; new tech, software, news, etc.
  • Setting up and testing things on my own VPS for the sake of getting to learn more about how a web server needs to be configured regarding being able to send e-mail and being accessed over a sub domain name. While making sure to make it as secure as possible; My server is sending out emails using SendGrid now.
  • Started using Visual Studio Code as my main code editor at work and for private projects; writing this blog using the tool right now. Really impressed by how Microsoft is showing this much love to the software development and especially the web dev community by offering it for free - and now actually even open-sourcing the tool.
  • Subscribed to a couple of StackSkills courses; but to be honest haven’t started really any of them; at the same I am feeling a bit bad that I’ve been neglected my math studies on Khan Academy.
  • Went to see the blockbuster movies: The Martian and James Bond: Spectre; Loved The Martian, but was not impressed by the latest James Bond vehicle unfortunately.
  • Moved the Sustainica site repository from Geekli.st to BitBucket.org because one day we couldn’t log into the repo any more through the online client; after waiting in vain from a reply from Geekli.st we moved the whole repo over to BitBucket, a process which did not take longer than an hour to do. BitBucket is the better choice for free private code hosting; Atlassian is a more professional choice.
  • I’ve started the registration process for my official side job as Web Consultant; calling my self Johan Bové WWW.
  • Got a free SSL certificate and installed it on my “professional” website at sslstart.com; now my https://johanbove.info has a nice green secure lock! Planning to move everything over to the secure site soon; need to figure out what to do with the GitHub pages hosting my Jekyll site is currently still hosted at.
  • Created a “Medium” account; so I can see how the whole CMS works and see for myself how good the writing experience on it really is; haven’t published any thing yet;
  • Did the same for SquareSpace actually. Setting up a “developer” account and adapting an existing template using the JSON template system; The WYSIWYG tool is impressive, although the experience of layouting pages is not always that smooth.
  • Got really impressed by the 360° videos currently being posted everywhere; on Facebook; I’m considering getting a Theta360 camera from Ricoh.
  • Also considering getting a Pebble Time watch; since I had some issues with the BlueTooth interference from my Android Wear watch I’m still looking for a nice “smart-watch” alternative.
  • Visited the World first’S Cyborg messe at the NRW forum in Düsseldorf and got inspired again to play around with my Espruino kit; so I managed to set up a simple thermometer and played around with the 25 RGB WS2811 LEDs; Still need to get a BlueTooth module and battery set for the Espruino board so I can talk to the device remotely. Doing so I learned what hysteresis is.
  • Used the Windows Phone HTC 8x for a couple of days to see if I could survice with it; the result is: I could if only I had Web or Universal App alternatives for a couple of apps which I currently cannot really go without: Time Recording Pro being a particular big miss.

… And we’re only the 21st of the month; and there are still some other things I did which I haven’t described here yet. So why I am surprised I did not do anything with Meteor yet?

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