It's been nearly 2 weeks since I last wrote on here. There hasn't been much excitement until recently. I had the rare and exciting opportunity to head back to my parent's house which of course brought on questions of how to improve computer and cell phone performance. This was all well and good until I got the grand idea to set my parents up with a Linux distro. To make a long story short, I completely messed up their computer. Based on various discussions I had, a combination of a mistake on my part and their motherboard led to disastrous consequences. Failure to install Manjaro resulted in a complete lack of recognition of an operating system when I booted. Ill leave my trials to my own computers for the time being. I clearly have much to learn.

As I am too lazy to go back and read to see if I had mentioned it yet or not, I have been reading a fantastic book called “Code” by Charles Petzold. What a world-changing book this has been. I have always wanted to learn about low level computing and how it worked but that has always seemed like far more than I thought I would be able to comprehend. This book completely changes that now that I have a much better understanding. I would recommend anyone read the first 100 pages, and see if they aren't hooked.

So anyway, I figured I would try setting up a Conky as my first little attempt at getting my computer to do something I wanted. My desire is to still get even further down into the basics. I don't know why but the boot process fascinates me and that's kind of where I want to end up doing work. My two goals are to contribute to some fashion of UEFI improvement and have one accepted contribution to the Linux Kernel. We shall see where we get to but nevertheless, those are my goals.

Now that I write this to kind of track where I go and what I do, I should note that I am on twitter (where I have already found a great community to engage with), manjaro forums, and now (excitedly) in some chat servers. I have been mulling this for a while and I will admittedly tell you that I was not comfortable joining a chat server at first. After finding these rooms mentioned almost continuously, I finally asked a couple people I was comfortable enough asking, and was told by everyone they are a great resource. So I figured out how to get my login for freenode, the server I was told is most helpful, and joined in a couple rooms that offer help and guidance.

Now I literally have no excuse. I have an unlimited amount of resources which undoubtedly hold a piece to the puzzle I want to build in my quest to learn more about computers. I have no specific goal in mind, other than the two I mentioned, but those can be obtained over countless paths made available by open source. And for now, I will continue to work on my conky. Hopefully I can figure out how to get this thing to transfer from my xfce desktop over to my i3-wm. So far it's been challenging but fun to see the progress and results. I also will be focusing on some bash scripting. I think that will be a fun way to learn some more as well. Until next time!