Life Update - November

It feels surreal that we are at the last year of the year 2021. I was super busy during November and I'm trying to recover from that now. November was also my most productive month in a long time, but I need to find a balance between productivity and stress.

Learning

I dove deeper into continuous non-invasive blood-pressure monitoring and embedded device programming. I have been building a dashboard in Python to monitor an ECG and PPG signal in real time and calculate the heart rate and pulse arrival time from those.

I also tested with different sampling rates with the Arduino board we are using. The PPG sensor we use has some delays that were too big for our purpose so I took some time to investigate those during this time. It has been a learning experience to work with the Arduino and C-code, but it was nice to get a chance to learn about this.

I also migrated this website to TypeScript to learn a bit of that too. It was just a quick migration and I need to change all of those Any-types to correct ones and make the code more correct otherwise too. Using and writing Typescript was much easier than I assumed. I can't wait to build a project from the ground up with Typescript.

I was so busy with everything else that I only managed to read a few chapters of the Rust book, but not actually write any Rust code. I want to fix this by participating in the AoC 2021 using Rust during my Christmas holiday in the end of the year.

Reading

I did not finish any books this month, but I read tons of research papers about continuous blood pressure monitoring.

I also started my personal research paper reading club. I try to read one research paper every week. This month the topic was mostly that blood pressure one, but I have many programming, security, cryptography, cryptocurrency, etc related papers on my reading list. I want to get more familiar with the research in the field to get some ideas for my Master's thesis.

Update MacOS experiment

I used the Macbook as my main computer for the whole month. I fixed all the issues I had earlier and the experience has been really smooth ever since.

The developer experience on the Macbook is not on par with Linux, but everything else just works so well on macOS. Fantastical is a good example of things that just are not there yet in the Linux environment. It works perfectly together with iCloud, Microsoft Exchange (for school) and Gmail accounts. I also show my todos from the Reminders app on the week view to quickly see what I need to do every day. And everything syncs automatically with the iPhone so I never miss any meetings or todos. I have my daily/weekly agenda with me wherever I go.

I'm now using a wired connection to fix the WiFi cutouts and I found MonitorControl to fix the Bluetooth audio problem. I have the Macbook connected to the monitor with an USB-C cable which handles the video, audio and charging. With MonitorControl you can control the external monitor like you would control the Macbooks own monitor. This allows me to ditch the Bluetooth audio and just use wired audio with the external monitor.

I still have the Arch desktop machine, but I have not used it at all during the past month.

I have been thinking about maybe buying an iMac in the future (when they roll out the replacement for the 27 inch one). I'm in the need of a more powerful desktop machine and I'm pondering between a custom built PC or an iMac. I'm still really skeptic towards Apple because of the CSAM scandal earlier this fall. I really like their products and the whole ecosystem, but I'm not yet ready to put money into new products from Apple until I see which way they are going regarding privacy.

Other stuff

I continued that "Sober October" challenge in November. I loosened the rules a bit, but I'm keeping stricter than normal rules for eating and alcohol usage. I'm still losing weight slowly, at the lowest point I was down 5kg from the start of October.

I did not play any games during the fall, but I started playing a bit more now. I get easily into this productive 24/7 mode and I have usually relaxed by opening a beer and listening to some music, but now that I'm cutting down on alcohol, my brain is in this problem solving state 24/7. That's why I started gaming during the evenings and weekend, because gaming introduces this same relaxed feeling. I'm playing the new Chapter of Fortnite and the Christmas challenges in the World of Tanks.

All of this made me go from super stressed at the start of the month to more reasonable work/life balance at the end of the month. As a result I had the clearest mental state in years at the end of November. Resting from January to August (after 4 years without vacations) allowed me to do a full recovery, but resting for so long made me feel really shocked when the school started. I felt like my brain just could not keep up with all the new information, but now I feel like I'm back to my normal self. I'm learning quickly and I'm enjoying what I do. I have also learned to balance productive time and rest quite well in a healthy way.