What I’m doing now

(This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one, too.)

Updated October 11th, 2024, from New Zealand.

“Useful Not True” is done

You can buy “Useful Not True” now at sivers.com. The paper books should be back from the printer by October. But the ebook and audiobook are ready now.

I’ve been working on this almost full-time for two years, and I’m super-happy with it. Setting up international warehouses to ship it.

spaced repetition flashcards in PostgreSQL

For years, I’ve used and loved Anki for learning anything, both for myself and my boy. But I wanted something simpler and felt it could be done directly in PostgreSQL functions.

It was about 50 hours of hard work to adapt the work by Open Spaced Repetition and convert it into SQL functions, but yesterday I finished. See github.com/sivers/srs and give it a try. I’m going to use it to learn Chinese.

output projects

After pushing aside all other projects for two years, I’m back in the mode of getting things done. It’s a big change for me, because for two years I’ve had basically one job, (finish the book), and now I have 23. Interesting side-effect is that I don’t want to learn anything new, since I just want my TO-DO list done. Lots of programming.

posted /met notes

See my notes from the people I met while travelling.

Void Linux

I like to change my operating system every year or so. Last month, while my boy was having a slumber party with friends in the next room, I erased my hard drive on both my desktop and laptop, and installed Void Linux. I love it. Snappy fast and minimalist.

It only took about an hour to install everything and copy over my settings, then back to work. Of course I’m not doing anything different than I do in OpenBSD or FreeBSD or Arch Linux before that. Exact same apps, configs, etc. I’m really just in vim in a terminal all day. But it’s nice to know that my /home/derek directory and configs and shell scripts work in different operating systems and Linux distributions. I’m still 100% OpenBSD on the server.

While I was at it, I erased my phone, too. Cleaning computer and phone feels like cleaning the house, but much easier.

cuddly pet rats

I would never have predicted this, but my boy heard from a friend that rats are wonderful pets, so a few months ago we got two twin boy rats. They just want to cuddle and sleep all the time. They’re so sweet, never bite, and don’t even smell. (They poop in a litter box!) They lick me to show affection. They fall asleep in my lap as I work. Little pocket puppies. They’re as gentle as Golden Retrievers.

See this video for an example of what rats are like as pets. They’re so adorable that a local friend here in Wellington fell in love with mine, then adopted her own pet rats too. Now hers are friends with mine, so we can house them together when the other is out of town.