I feel pretty good about where things have come in the past few days. I have resolved to setting a couple attainable goals before I continue on in any more of an aggressive manner. I have to remember that I start school in the fall which I am sure will be a time hog, but at the same time, could possibly give me my fill for learning. I guess we shall see. Onto what's been going on lately!
My focus for now has to be on continued reading and understanding the book “Code” I am reading. I know I've mentioned it before but it's really a fantastic book for anyone looking to further understand the basics of computer language. I am slowly progressing into reading it. The first 100 pages were fairly basic and easy to comprehend but now we are getting into how a subtraction machine works all through logic gates and light bulbs. It takes me some time to get through a chapter having fully understood everything behind what was put out. I'm not trying to be some computer scientist overnight haha.
My other focus is to start learning and practicing bash scripting. This might seem like an odd introduction to programming (maybe, I don't know what the norm is for getting into programming lol), but after having it recommended to me I read into it a little and it makes sense for me and what I am interested in. My first real interest in computers started with learning about the boot process. Can't quite say what it is about it that fascinates me but I'm hooked on learning as much about it as possible. Anyway, a description I read about bash scripting is that it requires knowledge of the boot process. This either means I will have to learn more about it in order to bash-script, or that I may have a leg up on some of the concepts already. OOOORRRRRR maybe bash scripting is what the boot process is built on??? I'm eager to find out!
And finally, I have come to a hault with trying to get my laptop to run any sort of crazy partitioned setup with a dozen os's. I have proven capable of doing it which I think is pretty damn sweet, but now that I want to get to doing some actual work, I really need to preserve the nicest computer I have which is my laptop. I run a fairly simple partition scheme now that I figured out how to format a GPT I can all the partitions I could ask for. So I have my boot, root, home, spare, spare, swap partitions. The first spare I mount as an external drive to save my timeshift snapshots to. I have no clue if this is good practice or not but it allows me to have, at the very least, a separate partition to recover snapshots and backup images from if I need to.
The second spare partition is for my project down the road of building Linux From Scratch. That is a long-term goal that I am excited to complete someday but for now I think I need to focus on gaining a little more knowledge. I'm close, just not quite there to be able to install it yet.
And of course, my “daily-driver” operating system that I have chosen is Manjaro. I went with the architect builder for the install which allowed me to go with a minimal install. I elected the xfce desktop environment because I want to keep things lightweight and simple; and because it's all I had known up to that point anyway and the xfce de holds a special place in my heart. On top of that I installed the i3wm so I have an option of wm's when I login. I didn't want the full i3 environment all the time, at least for now.
So when I am doing things like paying bills and stuff I have the xfce wm with the floating GUI's and multiple workspaces. It's my little playground if you will, for easy, uninvolved tasks and chores and fun! And when I am getting ready to read or do anything I feel I need to be “productive and focused” for, I login to my i3 wm and utilize that wonderful product. I love the simplicity and effectiveness this type of window manager brings for me. I can't tell you how often I used to try and fit windows on my screen so I could easily bounce between them. This does it all for me saving me time and allowing me to be incredibly efficient.
I have long thought that if I had a way of keeping notes that made sense to me, and I could somehow get them on a computer and be able to search them and catalog them and whatever else, that I could be a very good student. Left to a pen and paper, sadly, I'm disorganized and scattered with my thoughts and I can never find old notes that I know I have written down but can't remember where.
Setting all this up allows me to have what I have always considered to be an optimal learning environment for me. I have music, notes, journals, web browsers, text editors, and so much more all just a command away. So now I have spent nearly ¾ of a year getting to this point. I started determined to get something out of my computer that was failing me constantly, and now I am here. I finally have nearly every single tool I have thought would help me learn and organize. It's scary and exciting to know that really the only thing left to do is keep customizing my stuff because its fun, and learn. I have nothing left to do but learn. And that's whats next!!!