Updates 2023/Q2

The second quarter includes a mix of personal and open source project updates.

Personal things

I took some time off in the past quarter to focus on myself, physical fitness and health, and on decelerating from more or less five years of non-stop hustling and bustling.

This quarter began with issues concerning the apartment that I’m renting. An odd, acetone-like smell, that came from the gas valve box, as well from in-between the stove and the oven kept me, as well as the building administration puzzled. After taking apart half of the kitchen in search for the source they eventually gave in to my initial hypothesis, being that the smell doesn’t actually originate in my apartment, but is instead creeping through the walls from some other area in the highrise. They filled the pipe outlets behind the counters, but that didn’t really seemed to have helped. Since it only seems to be around from time to time and nobody here really seems to have an understanding of how the building was engineered, I don’t expect this to go away anytime soon. My bet is still on the source being some storage room somewhere in the building, where maintenance workers keep old paint (or paint solvent), which happens to evaporate and somehow end up in my apartment and possibly a few others.

Additionally, two of the three ACs also began emitting a very weird smell. I had the AC guys comes by and redo the maintenance for both units, which didn’t seem to help. Ultimately I requested the owner to break open the wall behind one of the units and check where the smell is coming from. It turned out the AC unit had no P-trap installed on its drain, causing the smell from it to rise back up into the unit and slowly fill the apartment. A P-trap was installed in one of the units and it seems like it fixed the issue – at least for that one unit.

In more positive news, focusing on physical fitness and health yielded some very good results so far. I’ve been completely off of refined sugar, salt and 99% of processed food for 6 months now and it’s going really great. With the changes in diet and rest, I was able to increase my endurance and strength across a multitude of (mainly body weight) exercises, allowing me to work out more often and increase repetitions for individual sets.

FYI: I’m using BetterCounter to track repetitions across multiple exercises.

Unfortunately all this came to a grinding halt in the mid of June, when I got hit with a truckload of Covid and was virtually dead for pretty much two weeks.

The first time I caught it was back in 2021, when I was not vaccinated at all, which was rather unpleasant but fairly manageable. Back at the time it took me three days to get back up on my feet. However, this time it was a different beast. I got my vaccines throughout 2022, so I didn’t expect to be hit hard if I would ever catch it again. I was wrong. The fever alone stuck for a week, I lost both, smell and taste, my head hurt for pretty much the entire time and I had everything: Nausea, a runny nose, an ugly cough, an increased heart rate, night sweats, you name it. Even walking a few steps felt like a marathon.

Long story short, Covid crashed a lot of the progress I made so far unfortunately. Right now I’m working on slowly getting back on track without putting too much pressure on especially my heart and my lungs.

Open source projects

My open source projects have mostly received fixes and dependency upgrades, however not many new things have happened during the past three months.

Neon Modem Overdrive

I’m not quite sure what has happened with Neon Modem Overdrive, but in the recent weeks an influx of active users and developers seem to have picked up the BBS-style command line client that supports Discourse, Lemmy, Lobsters and Hacker News. These fine people have ever since been opening issues and pull requests to fix things and improve on the overall experience of Neon Modem – which I appreciate. :-) Hence new versions of Neon Modem were released on GitHub every other week.