Phil Wayne

Happy New Year 2022

31 Dec 2021

My Dearest Mad-Readers,

First and foremost, I would like to wish you a very happy new year 2022. I decided to write this post to explain what I have been up to since the last time you read me. I would like it to represent a new beginning, as a phoenix being reborn from his ashes.

What I Have Been Doing Lately

Linguistics

Let us begin with linguistics. It is no secret that it is one of my favorite things on earth, so it makes sense for it to be at the top of my priorities. I have been working a lot on my Italian, but this will not come as a surprise. I still need to learn many things and perfect my knowledge of others: I can recognize the passato remoto when I read books, and understand, its meaning but I am still having difficulty using it myself. I already have a good vocabulary base thanks to my skills in French and in English but I would like to broaden it even more in the months and years to come.

Since I have reached a decent enough level in Italian (I can speak fluently and keep growing toward proficiency a little bit more everyday), I have decided to begin learning a new language. It took me several months to actually make up my mind but, in the first days of November, I finally picked up German again. After years of focusing on other languages and having other priorities, I am finally giving it the attention it deserves.

My current goal in German is more or less the same as it was with English and as it still is with Italian. I am not yet targeting the same level of proficiency but I hope to be able to speak it and understand it well enough by the end of the year 2022.

Since this is also related to my passion for languages, I would also like to tell you that I terminated my company. I may retry to be financially independent later but I wish to concentrate on other priorities first. I also want a more stable situation. For those of you who would be interested, I still give online lessons: in English, in French, and even in Italian (I am especially active on Italki!).

In my previous blog post My Sins As A Linux User, I said that I installed Telegram and Instagram and that I had to make sacrifices for the success of my company. Well, I no longer have to do that. I deleted many accounts in the past few months: Instagram, Monster, Telegram… and more recently, I deleted my Google account, which means that I no longer have a YouTube channel. I may re-publish some of my videos on Odyssee but not all of them. I do not intend to publish videos in which one could see my face, for instance. I may delete other accounts in the future but, for the time being, I consider I have already a decent enough online cleanup.

Technology

In terms of technology, I have not remained inactive at all.

Another great success was my switch from Thunderbird to Neomutt. It took me a lot of time to configure it and then get used to it, but I do not regret my choice. I learned SO MUCH! I now enjoy a freedom that Thunderbird could never have offered me. I am certain I could optimize Neomutt even more but it is fully functional, at the very least. I wrote a perl script, which you can find in my wiki, (in the scripts section, surprisingly), and which warns me when I get new mail. It is not perfect but, for now, it does the job well. Coupled with a CRON job, it synchronizes my various mailboxes every 15 minutes. I could have it run every minute but I find it unnecessary. Feel free to send me an email if you have suggestions regarding how I could better my system!

I also fully configured Calcurse and wrote a script that I also coupled with CRON. This way it emails me important events and to-dos on a daily basis. I did a lot of research to directly get a message on my phone (send an email from my server which I would get as an SMS) but I haven’t yet been able to find something that works for me. Unfortunately, it seems that the French network will not make this easy for me. I have thought of another solution, such as KDEConnect, but it fails to satisfy me. Ideally, I would like to stop being dependent on my smartphone entirely. I would like that potential solution to work both on smartphone and older phones. Yes, I am part of these people who think a phone should not be a smaller version of your laptop but should mostly be used to make calls and send a few texts here and there… I am not old yet!

Something that will certainly interest you: I re-published a much cleaner version of my wiki!

It was originally structured in such a chaotic way that it took me days to clean it up and organize it properly. You see, that wiki used to be a very selfish project. It mostly was for me and I believed that a file would be more than enough. Every once in a while, I would add content to it and it kept growing and growing for so many months that, eventually, I had no choice. If I wanted it to be actually readable by everyone, I had to redesign it entirely. Which I did, and I love the result. Again, feel free to send me an email if you have suggestions or fork the entire project if you feel you could do better!

There are several other projects which I am quite proud of, but I will try and condense them:

I installed Nextcloud and WordPress on my Raspberry Pi. I may not have written about my Raspberry Pi yet, so here is what you should know: it is a model 4B with 8 GB of Ram. The operating system I run on it is Raspbian, a lighter version of Debian which was actually designed for the Pi. Both installations offer me more freedom for various reasons. Nextcloud is a cloud instance that I self-host. I mostly use it to experiment, but it did turn out convenient to have my own cloud a few times. As you know, I recently deleted my Google account, so I expect to use Nextcloud more in the months and years to come. As for WordPress, I intend to stop using it entirely very soon, but I still want to keep it around. It is a useful skill to maintain and I enjoyed working with WordPress anyway. To put it clearly, this means I do not intend to delete my current account. This way I get to keep a private instance of my old blog. This is primarily for backup purposes, but I am not yet certain how long this will last, since I have also downloaded my entire blog with wget already.

The free time I had this summer also allowed me to study Perl more in depths, as well as PHP and MySQL. I would not pretend that I have reached a professional level in PHP or MySQL but at least I now have a decent understanding of them. This makes me a more complete developer and I am certain these skills will prove useful one day. As for Perl, I developed a project which I added to my portfolio: a password manager. It is very similar to pass but I very much encourage you to try it out. I could definitely use some constructive criticism. When you do, you should notice that I implemented dmenu by default! (It was necessary, I think!) It is a far-from-perfect version of pass, so if you are a perl developer and want to better it, just make a pull request already!

I re-discovered a lot of Microsoft software, playing around with it in Virtualbox. This was necessary, because I am still looking for a job as an IT professional. More specifically, I am not particularly looking to become a developer, but a network and computer systems administrator. I would like to begin with entry-level jobs (be a technician and then become sysadmin) and, with this purpose in mind, I saw it as a necessity to refresh my Microsoft skills. So I has a look at Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange, revised network protocols, learned what ERPs and CRMs are, and so on and so forth…

Finally, I have been very active on discord: I created my own discord server for friends, fellow developers and linguists; and I also joined several other servers. One of them is La Congrega degli informatici. It is an Italian group of developers and technicians that I help administrating. We used to answer many technical questions but we now focus on discussions and debates. If you can speak Italian and are interested in technologies, I highly encourage you to join us. I may not remain among their staff for a lot longer but I still intend to keep around, so we could definitely have a chat!

Other

The pandemic and all the propaganda contributed to convincing me to do one thing: educate myself better. You see, my scientific knowledge is rather limited when it comes to biology, chemistry, and physics. I decided to put an end to that ignorance and make the first step: I purchased a book about biology in order to understand the world better and make my own opinion. I believe this knowledge is now essential to my survival. Otherwise, I might always be subject to manipulations. That, I cannot accept. Knowledge is power, people. Keep that in mind!

Future Projects

  • Start a podcast && publish blog posts more regularly. I am not yet sure about the podcast. I know that I want to make one but I do not yet have the necessary ideas and motivation to get started.

  • Learn Spanish: I am getting closer and closer to becoming a polyglot. I find it very exciting since I should soon be able to communicate with most people in Europe (at least countries close to France). I am currently working on a priority list of languages I will learn when I reach a decent enough level in German. Spanish interests me for several reasons: it is widely spoken, and there are many variants (dialects). Obviously, it is not the only language which I find appealing. Portuguese has also caught my attention and, after many years of watching anime, I keep fancying Japanese. Recently, I also began considering Latin and Greek. I would like to understand the depths of etymology with more precision. I am already rather capable with etymology but I would like to know so much more…

  • Travel: This pandemic has been hell for me, as for a lot of you. It has had its upsides but its main downside is that it has completely stopped me from traveling. There is so much political turmoil in the world at the moment that I would rather find a stable job in France to let it all pass. I had several opportunities abroad but I had to renounce them to remain loyal to my convictions and principles. I even had to say “no” to my dream job. Would you see yourself do this?

  • Restart writing: in French but also in English and perhaps even in Italian.

  • Work on more programming projects. Most likely in perl!

Warning?

As you have noticed, my blog’s appearance has drastically changed again. My blog will no longer be available on WordPress. I decided to have a much simpler one with github pages and jekyll. This way I can control everything and it will be even easier when I wish to move my blog to a personal server. That server might be a VPS (Virtual Private Server), I’m quite interested in Linode and OVH (it is French, after all!); or a dedicated one. I have not yet decided.

This is everything for today, folks! I hope you enjoyed reading me again after all this time. Hopefully, you should read some more very soon! Do not forget to share. If you like my blog posts, you now have only 2 ways of showing it:

  • Share my content!
  • Send me an email and say hi!

Take care of yourselves, Phil.

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