> The past few nights I have been reading fiction again just like I was last summer. I forgot how nice it is to just sit in bed and binge read a good book, where you feel like you just can't stop. Significantly better than watching YouTube or anything of the like. I think I stopped because of school, but I have plenty of free time in the evening. Just in the past few days I have finished two books. Although, I have not studied enough for finals thus far, but it is not because of the reading.
> This month I have started being active on Neocities and talking to some people whose blogs I enjoy. An unintented result of this has been an influx of traffic to my site. This month alone I have had over 100 unique visitors. Also some people I look up to have linked back to my site. I appreciate everyone who has been reading and linking back to my site.
> Although it shouldn't be, it can be surprising how many ideas flow when one is truly experiencing boredom. Creativity spikes and we make connections and think about things that we have read and consumed as well as produce original ideas. I just forget how lovely this is and get surprised by it since I get sucked into consumption and don't let myself experience boredom.
> I am lucky enough to have been very close to the path of totality for the eclipse a few days ago. Was really neat and better than I expected.
> Messing around with classic text mode/BIOS fonts. I like the "retro" look and am using one on my PC. I am now also using that same one on here, I think it fits the theme of the website pretty well and looks somewhat decent. I will see if I keep it around or go back to Source Code Pro.
> Why can't nutrition science be simpler? I am not sure if its just because we have people who think they know what they are talking about or that are pushing a narrative to benefit themselves online or what it is. But everywhere you look you hear something different. One place will tell you seed oils are the devil and to never touch them, but then others will say they are fine. This goes for almost everything. I realize the end all answer to is eat all natural and unprocessed foods (NOVA class 1 & 2 and some 3) but even within that there is debate. Is saturated fat as bad as they say or was that propaganda by sugar companies? One study will say the former and the next will say the latter. It is so tough to figure anything out.
> ADDITION: It seems that the blog post I wrote summarizing one of Robert Lustigs talks could be partially incorrect. It seems that what he says is very heavily debated and that it could be atleast partially incorrect. It is very tough to know what to believe. I do not know how to go about nutrition research and implemenation. Maybe just a fully unprocessed diet that has a balance of everything natural?
> I started keeping track of views and unique visitors to this site on December 21st. Since then ther has been 207 unique visitors. This is way more than I would have thought. This does not count the neocities mirror, that has over 6700 views since its creation. I don't know how to feel knowing that there is a fair amount of people reading or atleast seeing that this exists.
> I wrote about Qutebrowser here at one point. But I started using it again recently and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes their vim keybindings. The bindings are amazing and flow well. Also, it seems to have been mainly written by one guy who seems pretty active and passionate about the project. The only unfortunate thing is that it is Chromium based (It uses the QTWebEngine which is Chromium based) and I dislike supporting Googles monopoly over the browser space, but Firefox plugins do not come close to the experience.
> My disdain for present-day technology and some of contemporary society is somewhat paradoxical. Anyone that has read anything on this site will know that I enjoy computers and computing. I am fond of low level computing and understanding the intricacies of it. This is where the paradox occurs. My views pertain more towards invasive technology. If everyone were to have a computer for the purpose of local computing and basic internet browsing, I would not be upset. It is not technology as a whole I dislike, it is what it has become to be and how prevalent it has become in our daily lives as well as the over consumption and over stimulation it has brought with it.
This is something that I plan to write more about in the future, especially the more I ponder and read on it. Also I have said this about many things in the past and yet there are no writings on them. Some end up in my private journal while others are just on the backburner and may or may not come here eventually.
> Semester is going well. I have joined a new organization that I am doing embedded development for. ParOS has had some work, physical and virtual (partly) memory managment is working. I have been enjoying my lighter workload and have been spending time on things that interest me outside of my school work. I was thinking about a ParOS devlog but honestly am not really sure what I would write about in it. We will see.
> Next semester I will have extra free time (most likely). I will be attempting to make some meaningful process on the ParOS rewrite.
> 2024. Time to keep doing what I am doing and making progress where I have already been making it.
> Already slacking on ParOS work. Since tomorrow is not a holiday I will probably be able to sit down and get some stuff done. We will see.
> Home on winter break. Time to get back on track and maybe plan or do some work on the ParOS rewrite. Assuming I do the rewrite I will probably have a devlog on my blog this time. I will be switching to 64-bit like I said a while ago and using the Limine bootloader.
> I want to start work on ParOS again (rewrite it hopefully). To motivate myself and be able to show it off I setup an emulator on this website here. Check it out. The filesystem works on here too, although it does not persist between browser sessions.
> Next semester I will be taking both an OS class as well as a bare metal embedded class. I want to use this knowledge to either revive my OSDev journey and rewrite ParOS better this time and document the process in blog posts or use what I learn in the embedded class to continue writing the bare metal embedded blog. Or I could do both. We will see.
> I have been reading on dietary fats and CVD risk. Nutrition research seems to be very mixed. I have been finding numerous studies that are showing there is not a significant link between saturated fats and CVD. But then there are a few that say there is a link, Outlive states there is a link as well. I discovered a professor at my university that has done research on this exact topic and I may discuss this with him and document my findings and my own personal conclusion in a blog post. It will be one of many posts where I document my findings on longevity and what I will be practicing within my life. If only we could just know more about nutrition so that we would be able to make good informed decisions more easily.
> I don't know exactly why but I sometimes just get the feeling that parts of our current society are dystopian in nature. I thought this today when I saw the Macys Thanksgiving parade on TV. Tons of money and resources are spent on these floats/balloons of "cultural icons" and brands that people want to see so badly. I mean I literally saw a float for wonder bread, who cares about and wants to go see that? It just feels very dystopian to me. Another thing I saw recently that goes along with this brand worship is childrens toys and candy that are in the shape of branded food such as Kraft mac and cheese. It just blows my mind sometimes.
> I have been reading Outlive a lot over Thanksgiving break so far. Some of the stuff in this book is very surprising. I am excited to possibly start writing on biology/longevity/healthspan. I will start and continue to integrate what I learn into my life and become the best and healthiest version of myself. I have multiple other books similar to this one that are on my reading list as well.
> I should work on simplifying my life even more. I do not have many possessions as it is but I still own many things that I do not use. I think it would be a neat idea to compile a list of the things I own that I actually use, it would make it easier to get rid of the things that I don't. It would also be neat to have that list contain everything that I own, similar to this and this list.
> I have been thinking about it for a while now and I think that I want to hike on the appalachian trail during my last summer break. The idea of a long backpacking trip has made me excited for a while now. I think going out and backpacking/hiking the appalachian trail until I decide that I have had enough would be good for me.
> As I study longevity and healthspan more and start to implement the practices into my daily life I may make a blog series about this. I am also considering doing some self experimentation with diet and other things and getting my biomarkers checked.
> Today I plan on continuing my learning embedded blog series. My goal is to make posts on bare metal setup and then on some peripherals. I just feel like I do not know enough to actually "teach" it. I know I am not really teaching, I am just documenting what I am learning but still. I just need to really read in depth on some of this stuff to get a good grasp on it. Writing about it makes me need to understand it very well which is nice. I also want to get into learning some lower level computer architecture stuff and write on that.
> I have been reading Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia recently. I have been a listener of Dr. Attia and Dr. Huberman for quite some time now. Over the summer I was really focusing on my health and studying longevity and healthspan but after coming back to school I put that on the back burner. Now I am making it one of my main priorities; finally reading Attias book is assisting in that. I have been very successful with my eating habits as of late though. For the past ~month I have been eating ~95% of my calories from whole/natural foods. This has been a goal of mine for a while.
> I forgot to update here but about a week ago I also bought the domain coleroberts.dev. This is going to be the "main" domain for this site as I am trying to rebrand it to my personal identity as I said previously.
> I got a new domain, cole.ac. I didn't expect to be able to find first.TLD since I have a fairly common first name but I just had to find some neat short TLDs. I will probably be rebranding to be more personal and have it be an actual personal website with my real name and such instead of colexdev. I can also buy firstlast.dev so I may end up grabbing that too. We will see.
> Ever since going back to school I have kind of been on autopilot and just not been present. This seems to always happen, when I am on break I spend lots of time thinking and doing things that I enjoy. But once I have the stress of school I end up losing a lot of that. Sometimes I just feel like if I am doing anything productive that isn't school work its a waste. I need to figure out the best way to get over this so that I can get back to working on the things I enjoy working on and spend time alone thinking.
> I move back into college on the 19th. I am sort of excited, I have been back at home since January and am ready to be living alone again. I am also a bit excited for the school work believe it or not.
> I think I am going to compile a list of all the things that I own that are essential to me. Also maybe a list of everything I own. This can help me get rid of things that I do not really need.
> Planning on starting a blog series of my embedded learnings. Not sure how in depth it will be but it will go over what I am learning and be educational.
> Got the ADC up and running on my board. As of now I have still just been playing around with some of the peripherals. Maybe I should start thinking of projects to do.
> Wrote and posted my first blog post. Have been wanting to for a while now but I have no idea how to write. So I just decided to sit down and just write, regardless of how poor the quality is. I may go back through and edit it eventually. I just need to realize that not everything I do has to be perfect. I end up not starting things or finishing them due to the fact that I believe they are not or will not be good enough. But yea, go read the post!
> Slacking on embedded work. Next week is the last week of my internship. It ends on the 28th. It does not feel like 7 months have gone by already. I am sort of excited to go back to school, will be nice living on my own again. I have gotten into hiking as well. Also been doing lots of thinking about life and self improvement. Most things are going well at the moment, besides my lack of technical work.
> Bought the NUCLEO-l432KC board to play around with embedded systems. Currently I have a program that blinks an LED with a system timer setup to delay it by a specific number of milliseconds. Also have UART through USB setup so that I can have the board print and I can see it on my computer.
> Time to go all in on embedded systems learning. This is the career field that I want to be in.
> I have a Raspberry Pi Zero W that I am not doing anything with and I am considering switching gears with my OSDEV and developing and OS for it intead of x86.
> I am starting to rewrite ParOS, it will now be a 64-bit OS. I had fun playing around with 32-bit and trying to setup everything on my own and keeping it very simple. But its time to get serious. I am going to have ParOS support SMP, all the systems physical memory, an actual filesystem, userspace and much more. The goal of this rewrite is to get to an actual working userspace and to take advantage of all of the systems resources.
> Been working on ParOS more. I had stopped for quite some time because I got way too distracted with meaningless things. Now that I am getting back on track I am going to continue on with it. This has by far been my favorite personal project I have done. Ontop of this I have been continuing to spend my time more meaningfully.
> I have studied and practiced Stoicism on and off for the past few years but have decided to use some of my free time now to take it very seriously. I have been journaling and meditating a lot and purchased a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius to study as well.
> I have been reading more and more recently, just yesterday I sat outside and listened to all the birds that live in my backyard and read an entire book within three hours. The book was Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz and was very good. I will also be reading lots of non-fiction. I am posting my reading list here
> The ParOS filesystem is no longer as bad as it once was, before I had a fixed allocation of sectors for each file, now I am having a set of pointers that each point to a sector on the disk. Iirc I am only supporting 12.8kb files but can extend this in the future.
> I have created a small, pretty poor custom file system for ParOS. I can't decide if I should go back and refactor poorly written parts of the codebase and add more features to previous things or move on to my future goals for the OS. Also went back to the old CSS for this site, I prefer this over what was here previously since I wrote this myself. Not much else going on, but it has been beautiful weather so I have been taking advantage of that.
> ParOS is going well so far. Nothing too complex so far, have to write the memory manager next. Also this year has been the best year I have had in a while. Internship going well, finally getting started on my OS, and I have been improving myself in other parts of my life as well.
> Internship is going well so far. Nice to have a break from school. Working with firmware is pretty neat, fits well with my interests. Haven't made much progress on operating system stuff besides some reading. I am going to be doing that soon. My OS will be called ParOS.
> Happy new year!
> Home on winter break now. Won't be back at school until Fall semester. Last summer I slacked on what I wanted to work on, I am going to use this winter break as well as time after work to focus on learning operating systems and starting work on my own.
> Been a while since I posted here. Received and accepted and offer for an internship as an embedded software engineer. Wish me luck.
> Spent like 4 hours completely revamping my neovim config. Added a lot of stuff and made it organized, will be posted on my GitHub soon.
> Been almost a month, wow. Within the past few days I have started learning Rust and its pretty neat. Going to be posting my first Rust project on my GitHub sometime soon. Just not too much to update with on here, just doing work, programming wise and spirituality/philosophical wise. Also going to be spending time with family and friends soon along with taking a trip alone. But maybe I will get around to posting on this, who knows. Only time can tell. Take care.
> Edit: Some of my past work fell through so I was slacking a bit. Also got back into lifing again recently.
> Its somehow already almost June. I have been home from school for a bit over 3 weeks and it feels like its been no time at all. Going way too fast
> Nothing new here as I have been hard at work with Vex AI stuff. This is what my last post was referencing.
> Big things coming. Possibly a paper. I will also be taking on new roles as well. Information regarding all of this will be posted here and my GitHub. Stay tuned for some amazing stuff.
> Started my journey of learning operating systems yesterday. I have started reading "Operating Systems Design and Implementation" by Tanenbaum. ColeOS coming soon ;)
> Finally trying to fully rid my use of streaming services. Used spotdl to download all of my spotify music and I am now using cmus as my music player. I highly recommend both of these if you are trying to switch from spotify to owning your music. I am going to continue to get rid of more services as time goes on.
> Gave in and switched back to Qutebrowser, I just love it too much.
> Finals start tomorrow. Not feeling prepped at all, will update after to share my how I think I did. Also after finals I am hoping to put some more work into this site and other things regarding my online presence. Stay tuned ;).
> Edit: Did how I wanted to on exams so far, break is almost here
> Calc 2 is hard.
> Calisthenics progress going great. Ripped my calluses though so going to be out for a while. Currently have increased my handstand hold and tuck planche hold time. Also learned I can kinda do a tuck front lever.
> Trying to switch to Firefox from Qutebrowser and it kinda sucks. Qutebrowser feels like home since I use vim bindings everywhere.