It’s this time of the year when people are trying to make a summary of achievements and make “resolutions” for the new year. Usually none of that is useful, especially the resolutions part. But it’s definitely entertaining to watch and especially to participate. The part I like the most is when it’s around March, and you look at the list of your resolutions, and you haven’t done a single thing. But I digress.

My resolution for the new year would be to waste less time and finally produce some more useful content. Specifically that would be code and documentation, which other people (including, but not limited to, you, dear reader) can use to make the world less shitty place.

There’s one problem which plays into this whole “resolutions are never done” trope. I think most of the content I can produce is trivial and isn’t worth it. Nobody will learn anything useful from it and nothing will be done with the world, it’ll remain at least as shitty as it is. This mindset really cripples my motivation and as the result - nothing in done.

But in reality this is false. To prove this I’m going to undraft an incomplete post I was sitting on for 2 years about institutional knowledge, which I haven’t finished because I wasn’t able to find a good punchline. The fact is, while I think some of the things I know are trivial, unfortunately most of the people in our industry don’t have a clue, and others (and their users) are suffering because of it. And this is why I’m going to make much more of the effort this year to share my rants with you.

The real problem with this will be not that it’s too trivial, but the opposite. For some of the topics to accept the conclusion you need to be well-versed in the prerequisites, which we also need to cover. This is going to be fun. I shall enable comments in which you’ll be able to tell me how much sense I am making and hopefully that’ll direct me to the most efficient approach. I think I saw the way to do it with bluesky? But first I need to move this page to cloudflare for more flexibility (this is done!), and to protect you against occasional IPv6 hiccups (TODO: write about IPv6 hiccups, troubleshooting, and the “root cause”; also TODO: write about why there’s no such thing as root cause and what is, in my opinion, the shitty state of our industry wrt postmortems).

So in no particular order I shall have a:

1. Story about replacing my old HP Microserver Gen8 with new Aoostar WTR Pro (not without problems! still ongoing!)
2. Rant about rootless podman
3. Story about replacing old ikea tradfri gateway with HomeAssistant + Zigbee2mqtt
4. Story about Ubiquiti and sad state of home networking.

That’s all for now! Stay safe these days!