A large portion of this week in the office was spent working through some interesting networking configuration to allow test devices at remote sites to securely access a cloud database… thankfully people much smarter than I were able to assist!
Precision Planting’s 20|20 Display was featured this week in a story on the Qt website, which included an interview with my coworker Dave. It’s a nice view into some of the products we work on, along with some of the technical decisions we’ve made over the years.
While working on a project in the office, I was reminded that, sometimes, slightly over-engineering is not a bad thing. I had forgotten that I built a safe-guard into a product’s software so that it wouldn’t install updates that didn’t explicitly include support for its hardware revision. While it was an annoyance this time, it also has saved many headaches in the past.
This weekend was spent ripping some new (to me) Jazz CDs to my Plex server. I’m really enjoying some of the new albums, and am currently listening to The Best of Miles Davis: The Capitol/Blue Note Years while writing this post.
Early this week I set up an old Lenovo ThinkCentre to run a headless install of Ubuntu, and started playing around with some projects I’ve heard of from others, but never used myself. First up: Pi-hole, a network-wide ad blocking option. It took a little while to get everything configured the way I wanted, and I’m still working through some odd behavior, but overall I like it. Most of my browsers already have some form of ad-blocking enabled, but this works even with devices I don’t have as many options on (phone, iPad, etc).
I’m still sticking with OmniFocus, and actually started using one of their slightly more advanced features, Mail Drop. I’ve used similar functionality on Todoist to auto-forward certain types of emails as tasks to my inbox, and I’m happy to now have the same workflow set up with OmniFocus.
I spent some time digging into Tailscale’s permissions management options, and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to configure. I wanted to start limiting certain connections on my tailnet, instead of leaving settings wide-open, and within minutes I was able to set up a few simple rules that put things in a much better (and arguably more secure) state.
A few weeks ago I heard about LocalSend, an app that gives you an AirDrop-like experience between virtually any two machines, on the Linux Matters podcast, but didn’t have a reason to use it at the time. Fast-forward to this weekend, and I needed to transfer some large files between two machines on the same network, but didn’t have another mechanism set up. In almost no time at all, I was able to download the app on both machines, and send the files… it was one of the most “it just works” experiences I’ve had in a while. I highly recommend checking it out.
News articles are continuing to be published regarding Precision Planting’s 2024 announcements. This post from AgriNews had a good overview, and (in my opinion) nicely combined comments from yours truly with those of Justin McMenamy, Vice President - Disruptive Products.
Friday was the release of Apple Vision Pro, so I’ve been watching and reading reviews of it all week. I’ve linked some of my favorites below in the Read and Watched sections. I’m not yet convinced to drop $3500 on it, but I’m also still considering it…
I’m still actively using OmniFocus 4, and did my first (abbreviated) weekly review with it today. While I still wish there was some more natural language processing built in, similar to Todoist, the overall experience is growing on me.
A project at work has me dusting off my Python skills (meager though they are), and also relearning how documents in MongoDB work. It also gave me an excuse to play with Python packages in Nix, which I’m still finding extremely useful for software development.
Overall, this week was relatively uneventful (outside of some stuff at work). I didn’t focus much on personal projects, except for…
Only a few weeks after claiming that I was sticking with Todoist for the foreseeable future for as my task manager, I once again got curious about OmniFocus, and ended up switching my entire task list over mid-week. Todoist has been implementing more team-based features recently, which I don’t need. And something about OmniFocus keeps drawing my attention… We’ll see how long it lasts.
On Saturday, I spent a substantial amount of time becoming familiar with the Nix package manager, which I am interested in using for reproducible builds of a project at work. The basic premise was easy to learn, though it took most of the day to get a fully functional solution.
Sunday so far has consisted of Divine Service in the morning, some cooking over lunch (which included prep for the week ahead), and some small amount of time focusing on a work project.
Even though it’s technically a holiday, I had work on Monday, preparing for our conference, and will instead use it as a floating holiday sometime later this year.
Tuesday through Friday of this week was Winter Conference 2024 for Precision Planting. The following links include coverage from various agriculture-focused outlets, a few of which quote yours truly, and I’ve thrown in a picture of one of the show stands as well:
