Dear UNIX diary,

The last few months have been quite exciting when it comes to you.

We have quite a big project at my job and my knowledge of intricate topics in the Unix and Linux world has been useful. From writing helper shell scripts, to doing one liners to convert hundreds of certificates in different directories from one format to another, from discussing SE-Linux features and Linux internal auditd (auditing) system, to using Linux capabilities (CAP_*), to having fun with permissions and ACL, to helping coworkers with setting up their environment variables properly, to debugging shell startup issues (what files it's reading in which order), managing services with systemd or supervisord or whatnot custom, and much more.

But what I've been learning the most is a whole new level of patience, not only to sit down and debug for myself but also to teach others that might not be accustomed to the topics I'm referring to.

Another thing that is humbling is seeing one person on a Linux based system, another on Windows, and another on MacOs. Then seeing how to debug the exact same issue on all three systems, be it firewall rules, or management of services. This help appreciate the different approach to thinking that those systems employ.

Meanwhile I'm not doing much on the personal side of things other than the newsletter. Every week I spend around 5hours or more reading every entry I add in it, seeking joy and interesting topics on the web that I can share with the growing list of readers, around 246 so far. We are approaching the 100th issue, this week will be the 98th. This is a bit time consuming, however this has been a treat for so many and is forcing me to visit many ideas and concepts around Unix that I wouldn't have touched before.

The podcast is still lagging behind unfortunately, and the more I talk about this the more it's not moving forward. To say the truth I purposely push it in favor of the newsletter as I can't allocate time to both at the same time.

At home I've recently fixed a 2bwm bug that has been sitting there since the beginning apparently. I'm not sure why no one has been pinging me more often about those, or maybe they did and at the time I wasn't experienced or patient enough to go through the debugging session with them.

As I mentioned here somewhere it's soon my birthday and I've been looking into bluetooth earphone/earbuds. The main goal is to get two pairs so that I can sit in a café or any cacophonic place and be able to watch a movie with my significant other without being bothered by the cable length. Bluetooth seems like the growing trend, cables are disappearing in most new devices. I'm still not so accustomed to this but I've tested playing audio output through two audio devices on my personal machine, one bluetooth and the other normal jack heaphone, and it plays fine so I'm hopeful this setup is going to work properly.

I guess this summarizes what I've been doing with Unix.