Alright, I finally mustered the strength to leave the couch. Funny, how lazy I’ve been today. I got a 2-hr massage with cupping and hot stones. It was well needed and helpful. I am still dealing with some pain. I got injured, but the adrenaline of my work trip delayed the actual body discomfort and pain that I have been experiencing. So, the massage was a good decision. But, then instead of coming back, finishing up my homework for YTT and preparing for the final weekend – I decided to go to a cigar bar. Enjoyed a couple old fashioned. It was chill.
Okay, so now I am ready to get to work, right?
Well, I forgot the new Fantastic Four movie is out. So, I should go see it. And then I will be ready to get to work, right?
Alright, and then I got back. Well, I refilled my drink before I left the theater. Would be great to have some chips to go with it. Oh yeah, I forgot I had an extra bag of All Dressed Lays in the kitchen. Perfect. I don’t want to go upstairs and eat because it will attract bugs to my upper layer. So my rule is to eat downstairs. Well I guess I will watch TV while I snack.
Not even watching something new, rewatching Mr. Robot.
Now, I just summarized my day. But, finally, typing this post upstairs at my desk. I know I have work to do. However, I have to have faith in myself that I will get it done. But, if I keep letting these tasks dictate my decisions, I will end up not doing the things I want to do. Closing the tabs that exist in my mind, my heart and are holding me back from living a life I don’t want to regret.
So, I choose to write this post. Finding the fatigue I am facing. Taking a few deep breaths so I can enjoy this moment of doing something for me.
Although I like writing physically, and I do have the notepad next to me, I wanted to embrace the blog that I set up. And as luck would have it, I still have it set up.
I am an architect. I am working on this outdated Gateway laptop running ChromeOS. I leveraged Google Cloud Free Identity to set up a Google Workspace account, using a pre-bought domain. This means I get an @custom-domain Google Account, for free. But, I do not get to use GMail and other Google products. Is it worth it on the Chromebook? Probably not at this point, but I challenged myself.
From a developer’s standpoint, it’s not bad. ChromeOS enabled Linux Apps a couple years ago, and so I can run Codium, a light VS Code. I have some other tools installed which has allowed me to work on several software projects over the years.
Including this blog.
I even got Obsidian installed, which has become my favorite note-taking app.
The downside is now having Google Docs to work on things in a collaborative setting. And, not having Gmail.
But, I ended up solving that too. Zoho Mail offers free custom email addresses, up to 5 users. So, with a bit of setup, I have Zoho Mail. Which comes with it’s own workspace, including a note taking app, calendar, etc.
With a Google account, I was able to set up Slack, GitLab, Teamwork, and a handful of other apps, so it really is business as usual.
I thought this was about de-Googling my life. But, I suppose this challenge was about seeing how far I could get away with a cloud-first, freemium architecture.
Of course, I thought about taking it a step further, self-hosting open-source apps, essentially running my own cloud. Which opened it’s own can of worms. Self-Hosting on my own devices vs self-hosting on someone else’s cloud (AWS, Linode, Google etc).
So, I ended up purchasing a hosting reseller account through A2Hosting. Which means, I can sell web hosting services and products, leveraging their data centers.
Which means, for the many domains I own, I could set up more “free tier” solutions. I would love to update this to be automatic and more turnkey.
The next step would be setting up these tools like WHM and Blesta on my own servers on Linode or AWS to be independent to A2Hosting.
I did experiment with repurposing my gaming PC into a server, installing ProxMox. Hosted it locally on my network. That PC is now at my parents, since I had to move out.
I’d still love to explore the idea of repurposing my old devices to set up this homelab. Could be cool being mobile. Leveraging even this Chromebook, since it does allow port forwarding, I could have my other laptops/devices and now it’s a portable homelab.
I want to put in a pin into that for now. Because on the flip side, I want to roll out content, my project ideas, and continue building.
I’ve started embracing AI as well. On my work computer, I have Cursor. But, on this device, there isn’t a lot of computing power anymore, or RAM, so I want to be a bit more selective of what I’ll use.
Ideally, the next steps would be figuring out how I will host this blog. Well, I started with a new GitHub user. But decided to convert it to an Org, transferring ownership to my personal GH account. So, it would be connecting the devOps in such a way that I could push to the repo from this account, and then that would deploy either to my server space under the reseller account, or a free hosting service like GH Pages, Netlify, etc.
Makes sense why I have decision fatigue now.
I also did all this for security reasons. Now sure if I am creating armor. I am logged into my personal Google account as a secondary user. I may ask GPT how I can pen test this approach. Is my secondary account safe? Or, is this laptop’s hardware too old that it doesn’t matter.
Those are things I would like to explore.