Happy 2025

Happy new year from the desk of Aaditya Joshi 🙌.

In most of my posts, I usually have an agenda around which I write. However, it's not the case with this one. I am writing freely in this. Since it's the first day of the year, I hope that by writing on this day, I would be motivated to write more this year.

I don't want to know the details, but I hope that you have at least one new year resolution. Something that you want to achieve this year.

Because I believe in things/plans getting jinxed, I will not share my resolutions here. Instead, I will share them at the end of the year, so I can evaluate my progress.
Resolutions? You might ask. Plural?
As in, more than one?

Oh, yes. There is more than one. Am I being overly ambitious? Yes, there is no question about that, but I know myself very well. At the time of writing this, its 5:08 PM and I already have broken one of them. In order to achieve any measurable growth in the year, I have to take multiple as there is a strong chance that as the year goes on, I might abandon quite a few of them. Let's see what happens🤞

There is one thing however, that I can share with you. It's not a resolution but an ongoing task which I started in the month of December (2024). 

De-google

Reducing the involvement of Google in my daily life. As a guy who runs a home lab, I was bound to go this route someday but after watching Linus Tech Tip's video on the topic, I got the motivation to start. This is a mammoth project as one cannot simply just stop using Google apps/services in just one click. But it's possible. I just have to be patient and take baby steps.

There was an idea to self-host this blog also. My home server is up 24/7 (except for power cuts which are not very long) so uptime won't be an issue. Also, there aren't many readers, so traffic is also not the problem here. I have looked at multiple self-hosted services but none of them is good enough for me (yet). I will continue to explore options and If I find one good enough, I might migrate.

But blog takes less priority. There are other things higher up in the list. Email for example. Switching from Gmail is something that I am tackling currently. Expect a post on that sometime in the future.

I try to keep myself busy with some or the other side project. Recently I was working on a DIY version of the helmet from Lord of the Rings which was worn in the third movie by the Witch King of Angmar. It turned out quite well. Normal people use yoga mat for well....yoga. I consider them a great source of EVA foam to make prop/replicas out of.

There are things like this which I would like very much to share with you folks but writing a post about something which I am making by following a YouTube video seems redundant. I am thinking about adding a gallery like page in the blog which may be useful for sharing updates like this.
Let me know if you would like some of that. Here is an example of what it might look like: https://demo.usememos.com/explore

While we are on this topic, yesterday, I also created an account on mastodon which is a decentralized social media platform. Its fairly new and the idea behind it is actually pretty cool. I really hope that in a few years, federated platforms (Fediverse), becomes the new normal. Currently, I get that it's not for everyone but if you consider yourself tech-savvy in any way, all I ask is to check it out.

I was on leave from 28th Dec to 1st of January, and it sucks that holidays are over and from tomorrow I have to school work again.

It's time to end the post and get busy with some of the new routines I have planned. I have many ideas for new posts and I have already drafted a few of them in my mind so stay tuned for those, and we'll meet again soon.

Bye!