🗓️ Weeknote 2026-W26

2026-06-29 11:22

Half a year down. Wow.

We finally got a dumping of snow, but it's disappearing quickly with the sun beaming.

White caps from around the block

🏢 Work

I finished up at my previous job. Instant weight off my shoulders. I have a lot of things running through my head right now about all this. It is probably one of the biggest cross-roads of my life. Not just leaving a job, but my feelings towards how I as a person want to live and actually own my life. Time to be my own puppet-master.

🩸 Health

Started counsellor/therapy/psychologist sessions.

I am working on some healthy routines, before bad ones creep in. Regular morning stretches. Moving. Reading. I'm diving back into my GTD weekly reviews which is helping immensely.

For the first time in a very long while I am able to sleep in, or at least stay in bed longer, without being forced out because of back pain. I can't ignore the fact I've just finished a highly stressful and physical job. Coincidence? Doubt it.

My sciatica is out of the way so at physio we have switched back to knee strengthening. My running is slowly picking up.

I'm taping the knee again for the patellafemoral pain syndrome using the McConnell Taping method. Instant relief.

📝 I want to start writing more here again. I keep drafting things then deleting them. I'll probably stick with impersonal topics for the moment to get the ball rolling. These weeknotes are one of the most enjoyable for me as a means of reflection and forward thinking, and relatively easy given a lot is already captured in my private daily notes and done.md (a result of my todo.md).

💻🤓 Geekery

To my surprise I'm still using the qtile tiling window manager. I contribute that to out of the box, it worked relatively well - I could do most of everything I was already doing in GNOME and Xfce. Not everything though. I've had to configure lots of little things I've previously taken for granted by default desktop environment configurations. Things like a calendar popping up when I click the date, application launching, screen timeouts, mouse scrolling. Luckily for me I have thoroughly enjoyed the process of configuring these myself using tools like xset, xinput, and configuring the very understandable ~/.config/qtile/config.py file. I've now more control than ever over my working environment. Classic Linux user non-problem - balancing configuring and actual beneficial activities.

Tried to install Passbolt on the RPi4 but it didn't seem to like that PHP was installed already. Can't be faffed with figuring out workarounds or setting up docker or something so I'll leave it there. TrueNAS has it as an app, but I haven't set up any remote applications on that server yet, and I don't want to start because of this. I could use Tailscale, but totally not practical for on the fly password manager stuff. Sticking with Bitwarden for now.

Updated FreshRSS from 1.28.1 to 1.29.1. Changed my theme to light-mode "Swage" which is kinda sexy.

💻 Tools discovered

  • pomotroid - Very basic Pomodoro timer that looks nice. Installed to keep that moving habit going. Keeping this running all the time.

  • rofi - I needed an application launcher for qtile. This one popped up after a quick search around the webs. Clean, pretty, fast, simple, and customisable (uhoh). Mapped it to ALT+r. Brill.

  • dict - Dictionary on the command line. Also installed dictd for dictionary database management, and subsequently dictionaries that might be useful for me - dict-wn (includes synonyms and additional English definitions), dict-vera (acronyms) and dict-foldoc (computer related). It is ridiculously fast. On spelling - when I wasn't sure how to spell a word I would usually type it into a web browser search bar and scan results or autocorrections. dict is much faster and less bloaty to show what you're after:

zkbro@laptop:~$ dict rediculous
No definitions found for "rediculous", perhaps you mean:
gcide:  Pediculous  Ridiculous
wn:  ridiculous

🏃 Activities

📚 Reading

  • Finished reading The Trader's Journey by Peter Robbins. **** A good re-introduction to trading. Nothing new for me here. An easy read that reminded me of some core principles to apply in my own journey. Pretty good breakdown of designing a trading plan, something I've drafted many times, but never got to an actual solid plan.

  • DNFd The Model Thinker by Scott E. Page. It's good, and I can understand the gist, but it takes a bit of brain power to stay focused. Think I need something lighter for now. Will return to later.

  • Started reading Escape Everything by Robert Wringham. If you're reading between the lines lately, this is the most on-point with my real life shifts right now.

📺 Watched

Got my sci-fi on.

  • Upgrade (2018) *** A bit of cyborg fun. Quite enjoyed the twist at the end.

  • Hands of Steel (1986)(re-watch) *** Didn't remember it at all. A few laugh out loud moments. 80s cyborg shoot em up. Had a western feel, just replace duals with arm wrestling. The female villain in the Blade Runner kit had a hilarious golem voice. I love these gems.

  • Mercy (2026) *** It was Ok.

🛠️ Projects

Helped fam attach a folding table to a wall. Yay for drill skills.

I've ordered the timber battens for my pergola build. Will cut to length and screw them down this week when they arrive. After that it is just some staining which I will coincide with house staining. We copped some heavy winds earlier in the week and the anchoring to the house held up well.

A lot of things happening with tidying the house for rental.

Current projects keeping me busy via tree -L 1 ~/01-Projects/current/:

/home/zkbro/01-Projects/current/
├── 20251112-build-pergola
├── 20260418-stain-house
├── 20260513-prepare-for-nz-exit
├── 20260531-just-a-thought-course
└── 20260601-remote-network

I could probably go on forever with these posts, but I probably should go do something.