May Update
Hello readers, I hope the year has been going well so far.
Mine has been quite fulfilling. I've been getting a lot done, especially in the way of my professional life. I've been getting more web development gigs and the ticket price is getting higher and higher, which is of course very desirable.
I'm taking on a large project soon so I will likely have less time to dedicate to the website itself. I will still try to write blog posts once in a while, since the site is getting better and better and closer to a place where I am finally happy with it.
You may or may not have noticed that the URL for this website is now awdev.co. It's much shorter than the old URL (awdev.codes), but ironically, it's cheaper. I've set up the DNS and email and whatnot, so easing into the new web domain is pretty easy.
Since I am starting to get paid substantially more for my projects, I think I'll have some money that I can dedicate to doing some cool projects that I've always wanted to do. I want to do some RC stuff and probably do some work with composites. I mean, I could justify doing some composites work as my high school capstone project, as my grade 12 year is coming up soon.
I'd also like to do some more embedded stuff. I have a bunch of designs, and I've learned a ton of lessons from previous embedded projects that didn't work out completely.
New year, new me. I'm using some new tools on my PC this year, and I'd like to share some of them.
I'm using Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client now. It's a big shift from the Gmail interface I'm used to, but I'm beginning to warm up to the workflow. It's more low-level than the Gmail client is and I like being able to tweak things. There are also a few additional tabs within the app that allow me to check my Google Workspace calendar or view my Google contacts. I would recommend Thunderbird to people who have a further-than-surface-level idea of how email clients and systems work, as it's not completely intuitive to use at first.
As my main browser, I'm now using Zen. It's a fork of the Firefox browser that has some features that I really like. The tabs are laid out on the left side of the screen, which clears a lot of the screen up. There's even a built-in split screen feature that allows me to view two websites side by side, which has proven very, very useful, especially when I'm configuring DNS servers and I need to copy 8 different IPs between tabs.
I love the facilities that the Firefox browser has, especially the fact that they're not deprecating Manifest V2 as all the Chromium browsers have. This allows me to continue to use uBlock, an extension that removes ads from news sites, YouTube, and everything that I don't want ads on. However, I cannot continue to use the main Firefox browser itself, as Mozilla recently changed their terms of service to allow themselves to sell a very intrusive set of data about users, which I find completely unacceptable.
I would wholeheartedly recommend the Zen browser as an alternative to Firefox that has a ton of quality of life features and is easy to use.
It's a pretty well-known tool, but Excalidraw is a life-changing app. I can sketch things and draw whatever I want, and it's like a sketchbook on my computer. The Notion integration is super cool, as I can draw things on Excalidraw and put them on my Notion boards right away.
I've used Excalidraw to do my math questions on "paper", and using my drawing tablet with the app is a wonderful experience.
I would definitely recommend Excalidraw to anybody who regularly visualizes or sketches things and doesn't want to use crappy apps like Microsoft Paint.
I think I'll get to do some new things and whatnot this year, but we'll have to see. If so, I'll try to remember to write a blog post about them, but no guarantees.
The year so far has been quite interesting, and I'm excited for the last 9 months. Take care and goodbye!