I reserved a Slate truck on May 11, 2025. Why. I have bought into their story. New vehicles are expensive. And they've become so packed with features; it often seems so they can be on the marketing materials. I don't want ChatGPT in my car or truck. I don't need my truck to feel nicer than my living room. I just want a basic vehicle. Something I can depend on. And I want an BEV. I am done with gas vehicles. The maintenance is almost non-existent with BEVs. It is so nice to have a full "tank" in the morning.

I'm not certain I'm ok with how basic their truck is. Will I be ok with using my phone or tablet for music? Having a standard cab might be too limiting. Although, having a frunk will probably be more useful than an extended cab given it's locked and out of sight. I had a truck for about 4 years until last fall; a 1990 Ford F-150 extended cab with a six-foot bed. Having an open place to transport things is great, but I don't need it all or even most of the time. I didn't need a truck that big most of the time. I do think the right-sized truck is more useful than an SUV.

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I thought replacing my Apple Watch would be the most difficult part of switching to GrapheneOS. I wasn't wrong, and I acknowledge that I did this to myself. First by moving off of iOS. Second by choosing GrapheneOS. Third by wanting to limit third-party apps for devices. I had heard of GadgetBridge and wanted to use it. All of these factors limited my watch choices. I limited my search to devices that were at least mostly supported by GadgetBridge. I also wanted to a watch that I could pair directly with GadgetBridge. Not only that, but I wanted to avoid the need to create an account to get a key/token for pairing. This limited the choices. I really wanted to get a Garmin but given the price of the three models that were at least mostly supported I decided to not go this route. I'm also worried that support could be broken by Garmin in the future. The Venu 3 would be my choice if I do ever break down. It looks like a nice watch for the price.

I decided on the Bangle.js 2; I bought it in February and got it in early March. It's basic. It reminds me of my Pebble many years ago. There are more apps for it than I expected covering a pretty wide range. I installed one that basically does DND on a schedule since the watch doesn't have that natively. I've been pretty happy with it. Furthermore, I've gotten used to using a physical card for payments. The screen is small but usable. I then started having issues charging it and dropping connection to my phone. The charging issues are caused by the contacts on the back corroding. This is a known issue with a preventative measure but not much can be done once it's started. I scrubbed the contacts which helped a bit but the disconnects continued.

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I have a simple use case for building images. I have a Python script that I run from my Synology NAS box as a container using Task Scheduler. I have one task that pulls the image and another to run a container using that image. I create my image using a derived image of Debian from Astral that has uv pre-installed. I call uv run in the image which creates a temporary environment and executes my python script.

The last time I built this image I used docker buildx with the platform flag since I was building it on my M1 MacBook Air. I am now running Asahi Fedora Remix 42 on my MacBook Air which has Podman pre-installed but not Docker. Do I install Docker? Do I use Podman?

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About a year ago, I bought a used ThinkPad and installed KDE neon on it. That has been my daily driver for about 9 months. I've used my 2020 M1 MacBook Air for some items that weren't well supported on Linux but those went away last month. While I've been pretty happy with my Linux set up, I've grown weary of a few things. I can't update the firmware in Linux due to the partition size being too small. I'm getting a stub error on bootup. The sound isn't great for watching videos. Some of this can be fixed and some can't.

While using Linux more and more, I decided to try an Android phone. Specifically, GrapheneOS on a Pixel 9. I wanted to try this as another break-away from Apple. This was more difficult than switching to a new desktop OS. I had an iPhone 15 Pro with an Apple Watch Ultra 2. For the first two months, I kept using my iPhone with my Apple Watch Series 6 and sold my Ultra 2. I quickly realized that I was ok with the old watch. I missed some things from the Ultra but not enough to justify the cost.

After a couple of months of that, I decided to start using my Pixel as my daily phone. This meant getting a watch. After researching watches with good GadgetBridge support, I decided to buy a Bangle.js 2.It reminded me of the Pebble. It's a basic smartwatch, but it has what I wanted. Notifications, vibrating alarms, step counting, and timers. I had my watch and I had my phone. I kept my main number in my iPhone and got a pre-paid plan for my Pixel. I installed BlueBubbles to access iMessage from my Pixel.

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As part of my trial of Linux on my recently acquired Lenovo X1 Carbon, I wanted to figure out how to get my Obsidian notes on it. I looked into several solutions but ended up with two supported approaches because of iOS/iPadOS. I could use Obsidian Sync or Git. I decided not to spend the $100 per year and go the Git route. I came across this article about using GitHub for syncing Obisian notes on her MacBook, iPhone, and iPad. I also already own Working Copy.

I had heard about self-hosted git services and decided this was a good time to set one up. My first use of it would be for my notes. I decided on Gitea. I ended up with Forgejo.

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I bought a used ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 to try out Linux as a desktop replacement. I've used macOS personally for 10+ years and Windows for work longer than that. I have recently begun to wonder what it's like outside of the Apple ecosystem; I know I don't want to use Windows personally. I use Debian and Ubuntu on cloud instances but only command line. I have no experience using Linux with a windowing environment. I've been listening to Linux Unplugged recently and have become interested in NixOS. I like the idea of declaritive configuration and being able to role back changes. Those two features were enough for me to try it.

The installation process was simple and straightforward. I was concerned dual-boot might not work because there wasn't mention of it during installation but it worked! I was excited when I rebooted and logged in! My excited diminished a bit when windows and text were too small. This is not an issue with NixOS; I was unaware of the different support of fractional scaling by KDE and GNOME. I selected GNOME because it has a different style. I switched to KDE Plasma 5 after reading about it's built-in scaling support. I changed the config in configuration.nix and had a appropriately sized desktop. It was pretty amazing to switch environments by changing some lines of confguration. I was smiling.

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After the dissapointment that was Chamberlain preventing third-party api access to MyQ, I looked for alternatives. I wanted to control my garage door from Home Assistant and came across OpenGarage. It is a little more expensive than some of the other options but it ticked off all of my boxes. Plus one I didn't know was an option!

• Open source. I was done with dealing with companies deciding what I could do with something I paid for.
• Local only. I didn't want or need a cloud solution. Tailscale is my remote access solution. OpenGarage does have cloud functionality but it's optional.
• Has a built-in Home Assistant integration. While I was ok with some additional effort like using HACS, I preferred a more plug n play approach.
• Well packaged hardware. This the one area that OpenGarage falls short. It's perfectly fine but won't win any awards.

The extra feature is vehicle presence detection. I am excited about using this in the future. I think this will make some of my Tesla api calls more streamlined. I've found it difficult to determine if the car is at home. The primary method of detecting the state of the garage door is with an ultrasonic sensor. this also allows it to detect if a vehicle is present.

One thing that I underestimated is how it handles Security+ 2.0. I was good with their approach and felt it would work out fine. This turned out to be more complicated.

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