What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

I understand with the rise of music streaming people have been introduced to a wider variety of bands than ever before, but what's your favorite band that no one has heard of? I think everyone has that one band that they love that no one in their friend group has ever heard of.

I think I have a few, but I'll throw out Kadavar who have a Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath feel to them.

I'm a little late on this, admittedly. $dayjob is requiring us all to set up a pair of YubiKeys, and I'm using them for the first time and my mind is a little blown.

I was seeing articles about "passkeys" all summer, not really grokking what they were talking about, clinging to my usernames and passwords and 2FA codes coming out of 1Password, etc.

I just set it up on a few accounts today, initially as an additional 2FA source, but when I set them on GitHub, I saw for the first time how exactly they are used instead of the username and password and 2FA combo to log in, and it seems incredible to me!

For long-time YubiKey users: what are some cool things in the ecosystem that you would recommend looking at?

Apologies if posting before October is truly upon us is frowned upon, it's been a while and I don't recall the etiquette! This post is going to be a bit of a brain-dump about how I've gone about allocating my time towards Timasomo 2023. It might come across as a bit self-indulgent, which is not intentional. I think talking about processes is valuable, and hopefully others who are figuring out what they want to do for this year and how to find the time for it may find some inspiration as well.

In my comment on the announcement thread, I mentioned that I don't have a huge amount of time in October that I'll be able to dedicate to the project I'm planning to work on. I decided that I do actually want to get it done, and it'll be a good exercise in working to a deadline and not being too much of a perfectionist.

So I needed to figure out how to allocate my limited time towards the creative process in such a way that I should (hopefully) be done by 31st October. During my masters degree, we were gently guided towards breaking down each of the component tasks of writing the dissertation and creating a gant chart for the project, allocating the time we thought we'd need towards the project. I decided to do something similar for this project as well. It's a useful skill to be able to take a large project and break it down into individual tasks, and being able to estimate how long each chunk will take is helpful as well.

My project is to arrange, record, and film video of me playing a metal version of Reel Around the Sun, the opening tune from Riverdance. It's been an idea rattling around my brain for ages, and I think it should be doable in the time. I'm intimately familiar with the tune already, which helps massively. So that means that there are 4 overall stages of the project:

• Arranging
• Recording
• Filming
• Release

Arguably the Release stage is implied, but I felt it was good to have some time set aside for the actual process of putting the tune out into the world, and posting here for the showcase once it's done. I broke down each of those main stages into smaller portions, typically per instrument:

• Arranging
  • Guitars
  • Drums
  • Bass
  • Keys/other

And so on for each of the first 3 stages, with a few extra bits thrown in for better coverage (mixing and mastering under Recording, for example).

The next stage was to put the month of October onto a gant chart and to start putting things onto it. I split each day into two parts to better capture days where I can put time in during the afternoon but not the evening, and vice versa, and started blocking out the slots that I absolutely cannot fit anything into. Due to my work being fully remote I have left most daytime slots for workdays unblocked, since I can sometimes fit non-work related stuff into the day or my lunch break. I anticipate this being considerably easier for certain stages over others.

Here's the more or less finished chart. Grey is dead time, and the palest colours are to indicate where I will need to make time during work or other activities to get the task done. You'll note that there are some where I haven't got a more solid colour, meaning that I am going to have to steal time from work to get those bits done. Where those exist, I have tried to be more generous with myself, giving at least two opportunities for completion. Where I have the less pale colour is time that I can definitely put into the project, so I have gone to my calendar and actually blocked out the time so I don't book anything else in.

Braindump complete! I now have a rough schedule in my calendar and in my mind that I can run with for my Timasomo project. Of course none of it is rigid, it's a guide, not a requirement. Many aspects will naturally take more or less time than I have estimated, but having the structure there has helped me to realise that I can actually make this work. Bring on October!

Next week, I will be closing on my first ever home (hello Michigan tilderinos!). One of the projects I want to tackle and work on after I move in is setting up a smart home ecosystem that is sustainable long-term. I saw the open-source Home Assistant but I think I need to do more research on it and find compatible products. For now, my wishlist of projects are:

• Controllable lighting from my phone or computer
• Carbon Monoxide/Natural Gas detection
• Water leak and usage monitoring
• Thermostat

Are there any other use cases that you use home automation for? If you use Home Assistant (or used it in the past), what are some things I should consider? Any products that you bought in the past and regret now?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.