Last week I planned too many tasks and finished none of them. This week there was a lot of extra unplanned work, so I skipped daily tasks and just pushed a few important ones.
The first half of the week was mostly setting up environments for the lab and my mini PC. The lab machine is a Dell PowerEdge R730. It has its own boot thing called Lifecycle Controller, so I spent about half a day trying, still being naive, thinking I could just install the OS from a USB stick. I put Ubuntu Server and CasaOS on the lab server, so any computer on the LAN can get in with a browser, and the terminal over ssh. Feels like the best setup I can do right now. The mini PC also got Ubuntu Server; I want it as an edge-computing node. Buying a WiFi card cost me a day, then wireless wouldn't connect (over the weekend the after-sales group said it was the WiFi antenna), then buying an Ethernet cable cost me another day, and only then was the system actually set up. The edge-computing config I'll do later.
The second half of the week I spent a lot of time on the blog. I didn't want to create a new markdown file every time I write, copy-paste the post format, and only then start writing. At first I moved the blog to xLog. I thought that would fix it — importing old posts, the look, the publishing flow, all of it made me happy. Then I hit a fatal issue that really annoyed me: adding a tag crashes the page (not sure if anyone else has this) (later: after switching from Zorin to Windows it went away... so I did move to xLog. VSCode is still too much hassle... mostly I'm lazy... the moment I think about opening VSCode to fix formatting and add images, the will to write disappears...). Old posts were all imported so they didn't need tags, and I never noticed. That would have been fine — just import like before — except you can't add a new tag to a post that's already out. Seems like you have to delete the original, fix the tags, and import again. That's too tedious, and it defeats the point of moving the blog, so I looked for other options. I'd seen a senior using something like an xLog-style blog backend; felt convenient. Found one online, deployed it on Vercel, didn't like the result, dropped it. Looked at other writing platforms; almost none of them let you add tags, so I dropped those too. Also saw people using Notion as a blog, but it's a bit annoying, and mostly I can't stand the look. btw I asked that senior what backend he uses now; he said he just uses VSCode. Then I looked at Hexo plugins for VSCode, found one I really liked, and that made me check Notion and Obsidian plugins too — none of them were good enough. In the end I decided to build the site with Hexo and write in VSCode.
Writing the blog in VSCode looks roughly like this
I also spent 200 yuan at Wanwang (Alibaba Cloud) on a 10-year domain. Feels pretty worth it.
Saturday I watched WBG make the finals, and I'd just about finished the domain and the blog setup. Seeing them in the finals made me really happy. I was alone in the lab and I just laughed out loud. Finals against SKT T1 — go for it!
I'm not going to write the blog in a bunch of places at once, carefully growing it for reach or whatever. That's not me. If I post here I won't post on xLog anymore. The point of the blog is to keep notes and some thoughts, write a weekly recap of what I did. I think I need writing as a way to think. The blog is also a way to say something as myself.
This week I got back to the dorm around midnight every day, played games a bit more, slept late, woke up late. Can't do that next week. Even if I go back to the dorm earlier and play there.
Next week's focus is the MIT 6.824 lab. I have to get over being scared of hard things. If I go slowly I can actually finish it. Today I read the source and added comments; I can understand it. So I should trust myself and not slack off. If I finish MIT 6.824 this year, that counts as success.
I felt like I had a lot to say, and then when I sat down to write the weekly I didn't know what to say.
That's it for now. See you next week ^^