I’ve got a few plans that involved substantial learning. I try to get a head start on New Years, this time specifically because I moved cities and that’s a great opportunity to build new habits.

1. I’m forcing myself to push through with Linux on the desktop and managing a more robust network. This will help with 2. It’s going pretty well so far. The big insight has been to work around some of the harder parts rather than punish myself; e.g. I just don’t use the intel graphics and the nvidia graphics simultaneously. I bought a DisplayPort cable so I can use two monitors with my one nvidia card. Next up, I want to get a setup where I can run my self-hosted services reliably across several devices. I may do a kubernetes type setup across several raspberry pi servers and possibly a new dedicated x86 box. I’ve never used kubernetes so figuring out if that’s crazy will be part of the learning process.

2. I’ve always a wanted to take on a real-life 3D mapping project. I’ve got a 360 camera on the way, which I’ll be using at first with mapillary, then self-hosting with openstreetcam. The pieces are all there to build 3D models from that content, so that will be my opportunity to really learn how that stuff works and make it happen. I love the city at night so I’d like to build a full nighttime map if possible; it looks totally different than during the day, but there’s enough artificial light I think it should be possible, if not practical.

3. I’ve outfitted my kitchen and am committing myself to cooking all but one or two meals a week, and to try to do that well. I suck really bad, but I’m starting to build an intuition for how basic bread works, I’ve had some mild success with quick breads and am also starting to have intuition for corn bread specifically. I made butter chicken on Monday for the first time, from a recipe that suspiciously used no butter. It came out great but not quite like I’m used to at restaurants; I look forward to trying again. I’d love to get into sweets and pastries like croissants. Biggest lesson learned so far: hand-rolled butter is worth every last penny, despite being twice as expensive than the usual butter. It has a depth and complexity of flavor more like cheddar than the mass-produced stuff.

4. I’m learning piano and music theory through that. It is a lot of fun, but certainly not easy. This is the first time in a while I’ve get viscerally what it’s like to be a child learning to walk - getting my hands to do the right thing at the right time is very difficult, especially with two-handed playing. I’ve also been amazed at how quickly ability builds with regular practice. I still suck really bad, but I’m getting what I wanted out of it, including a deeper appreciation of the music I listen to, the ability to read very simple sheet music, and honestly just a humbling challenge. I highly recommend it if you haven’t learned music already; it so so different from my usual skills that it really is like building from scratch. The process is physically exhausting because of the amount of effort it takes to operate my hands and not press the wrong keys. I feel like I can feel how much my brain is changing to build those new pathways.