Mycroft Mark 1

I have been dabbling in smart home technology and voice assistants for several years now. I was one of the first people I know to own an Amazon Echo (the original black tube), and used it until November 2016, when the Google Home first came out. Since I am an Android user, and I use Google’s services heavily in multiple areas of my life, I made the switch to the Google Home and never looked back. That is, until mid-2017, when the Mycroft Mark 1 Kickstarter was first announced.

Reflections on a Year With Linux

A little over a year ago (Nov. 2016), I made the switch to using Linux pretty much full time. I wrote a few blog posts about it during the first month, but I have been relatively quiet since then. So, I thought it was about time that I gave a public update.

First of all, am I still using Linux as my daily driver? For the most part, yes. In fact, I’m writing this blog post on one of my Linux machines. Both my main laptop (the Asus ZenBook) and my main desktop computer (an old Dell Precision T3600) run Arch Linux as the OS, with KDE Plasma 5 for the desktop, and I have had very few issues with them overall. Arch gives me the latest version of pretty much any Linux software I want to run, and KDE gives me a nice, fluid desktop experience that doesn’t feel stuck in the 90s/early 2000s like some other desktop environments do (not to disparage them – just not my preference if I have the option).

Site Redesign and Migration

Note: This blog post is outdated, but left in place for historical reasons.

As you may have noticed if you’re reading this on justinvollmer.com (instead of an RSS reader), my website has undergone some visual changes. This was due in part to my choice to migrate away from Squarespace, where my site had been hosted for the last few years.

So, why the change? Well, for a couple of reasons, the biggest of which was cost. I was paying close to 100 USD a year to Squarespace, and I felt that I could find a cheaper solution elsewhere. Also, while Squarespace is extremely easy to use, it was also beginning to feel a bit limiting. I’ve been looking at using Amazon Lightsail to host my own server for a few months anyhow, and my impending renewal on Squarespace gave me a good incentive to make the switch. And since I had a few days off from work, it felt like a good time to make the changes.

Three Weeks Into the Linux Experiment

Note: This is part 2 of my series on switching to Linux. To see my first blog post, click here.

In “The Long Road to Linux”, published in late November, I wrote a post stating that I was attempting to switch to using Linux full time as my operating system of choice. And so, after spending slightly over three weeks running Linux on my main laptop, I figured it was time to post an update on how things are going.

The Long Road to Linux

In October of 2015, I transitioned to using Linux as my primary OS at work. At the time I was using Ubuntu 14.04, as it was the suggested distribution for compiling and testing one of the main software products my employer creates, and it was (for the most part) compatible with all of the other various toolchains that I needed to use as an Embedded Software Engineer. I got along with it for the most part, and continued to use Mac OS X and Windows 8 in my personal life.