This year I realized we can't wait around for the pandemic to end. Nothing prevents transmission or infection of Covid. There is no ability to form long lasting immunity, not with a shot and not naturally. The only thing we can do is adapt.

While I've given up a lot of things, I started to reclaim some as well. Some of the things I've given up are movies, air travel, indoor dining, concerts, basically anything that involves spending time indoors with big groups of people. I don't really miss any of these things. I think they are mostly a distraction.

Some things I've reclaimed are time with my family, time with my Bible, and time for friends in small groups.

This year I completed a lot of tech projects. I deployed a virtual private server, learned how to use Docker, reverse proxies, and containerized web apps like Vaultwarden, Rocketchat, and Ghost.

I installed Linux on a laptop and GrapheneOS on a google Pixel. I nuked my social media accounts and started self hosting a Mastodon server that I use a microblog. This server is managed, but I think I may try installing another activityhub based project like Pleroma on a server I manage.

One of our biggest past times this summer was working on landscaping the backyard.

This wraps our first year with Big Acres. While we personally haven't been able to spend much time up there, our family has been busy building roads, fixing up the cabin, and clearing land. For 2023 we want to get up there and put in a dog run so that traveling up with S will be a lot easier.

While we spent less time than in years past with friends, we got some socializing in with people we value and stayed busy.
I think moving forward things will only continue to get more challenging and it's essential to surround myself with people who are good at critical thinking, who have a strong moral compass and unbreakable mental fortitude. The trials of the pandemic were extremely revealing of people's characters and I realized that choosing friends wisely isn't just a good idea, it could mean the difference between making it out of a dire situation, or not. So while we had less, it was the important stuff that mattered.

I have a Leatherman Wave+ that I daily. I've had it for about 3 years and I wrote about it a few weeks ago. It's the ideal size for that purpose, especially in warmer weather when I might not have a coat or big roomy pants to keep it in.

Owning land very near to national forest, BLM and state parks, I thought I might want something a little bigger and sturdier for those times when I feel like going on a bigger adventure.

The surge is about 4oz heavier than the Wave+ (12 point something oz vs 8 point something oz) and sports bigger versions of most of the same tools. It also has a few additions, these are an awl, blade exchanger, big scissors and gives up the eye glass screw driver. Instead it has a smaller flathead, which I think is pretty unnecessary since it has a bit driver as well.

The Wave + feels down right petite in comparison. While I don't think I'll daily carry this beast, I think it will be a great addition to my camping gear.

The black scissors on the right are what comes on the Wave+, while probably better than no scissors they're fairly useless. The middle scissors are the Surge which are clearly much bigger and beefier. The Gerber Armbar is on the far left, I carry this with my Wave+ because it gives me an awl, big scissors, a longer bit driver, a second sharp blade that I won't mind beating up a bit, and finally a small prybar and pommel (not a hammer, but you can slam it into something that needs a good whack, I'd probably just find a rock instead).

With the Surge, I get 21 tools plus room for a saw blade, a ratchet, and 42 bits. 40 of which can be used in my Surge's bit driver. The large screw driver can double as a small pry tool as well, which they don't count. That gives me a total of 64 tools in my pocket. The other cool feature is that the blade exchanger accepts t-shank saw or file blades, so it will accept much larger saw blades than can be folded into the tool.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the overall quality and tool set. It feels like something the Mandorian would keep on his belt and I'll probably carry it on mine as long as I can hide it under a long flannel or coat.

If you're not sure which one to get, I think most people would be well suited with a Wave+ for every day utility, but if you don't mind the extra weight and bulk, the Surge is an upgrade for sure.

While the overall risk is low to users who had strong passwords, it's not zero. Every year I am reminded several times that using someone else's service puts my data at risk. As of today, I have set up and deployed an instance of the open source alternative "Vaultwarden" and while it was a little tricky, it was definitely not that bad. Vaultwarden is an open source password manager. I'm running a copy of it myself on a computer in the cloud. That means there is no one to fix it if I break it, if my server crashes I have to log in and reboot it. If vulnerabilities are discovered I have to log in and update it, and so forth.

How is this better? Well Lastpass is a honeypot because it has a lot of data in it. Now I have moved my honey to a smaller pot hidden in an obscure corner corner of the internet where less people are looking for it, and the reward for finding it is dramatically low. Not worth the effort basically.

While Lastpass may not know your passwords, I suppose they could scrape some metadata like my IP address and device info, maybe the website I was logging in to. I don't know if they do this in practice, but now I don't have to worry about it.

The biggest benefit was I learned something new. I used Portainer to install Vaultwarden onto a server in the cloud. Then I used nginx proxy manager to route traffic coming in to that subdomain to the appropriate internal ip address which represents the port I'm running it on. I also had to create a few DNS records.

My vault is still online, so it's not exactly fixing all of the problems Lastpass has. It's also running on a server I don't own. While my data is encrypted and running in the cloud next to a bunch of other random apps, it could still get hoovered up I guess, but the hoover user wouldn't know what they were hoovering up until after it had been hoovered. If that doesn't make sense, lastpass was known to have a ton of passwords, so if people wanted credentials then it was a good place to look. Now I've hid my vault on a random provider's infrastructure and if someone were to try to hack that entire datacenter, they would have to sort through a lot of mixed data from a bunch of random services people like myself are running.

My VPS provider while perhaps not knowing what I was running exactly, could still scrape some but probably a lot less of my metadata, so this is an improvement but it doesn't fix it.

I think the most secure situation would he to have a server running locally in my house, but that can cause other problems, like for example, creating back ups, 24/7 up time, etc etc.

So I've made some security improvements, but I've given up some conveniences, and have arguably put my data in peril because there is no one to help should I botch it, but I learned how to do something new and that's good!

In 2009 I had a run of bad health. I got stung by a bee, it got infected, and then I did a round of antibiotics. The antibiotics wiped me out and while I was sick I agreed to getting a tetanus boost which overloaded my system. A few weeks later I had raging tinnitus, digestive problems, heart palpitations and I thought I was dying. I started trying all kinds of things to fix myself not knowing what was wrong, including low carb. I went low carb for a long time and lost a bunch of weight but felt awful. One day for a lark, I googled "high sugar diet" and found Ray Peat.

Ray Peat was a retired biologist that lived in Oregon. He believed that helping the body make energy was critical. The best way to do that according to Ray was to eat lots of sugar, protein, and fat soluble vitamins like Vitamin A, K, E, and D. He was a pioneer of the idea that red light had special benefits and that seed oils are toxic, that cancer and diabetes were metabolic conditions that could be treated by treating the thyroid.

Ray was criticized by a lot of people for his fringe ideas but I think he was way ahead of his time on a lot of it. The most impressive part of Ray's behavior was that he sold only a few products. These were his books, which were in the process of being digitized and reprinted for the entire 13 years I kept up with him. They were never available to purchase. He also had a newsletter, to sign up you had to mail cash in an envelope to his PO box. Finally, a progesterone supplement which I don't think he had been involved with for many years. Every article, hundreds of hours of podcasts, he gave away for free. More than that, his email address was right on his website and he would write back if you emailed him a health question. He must have spent hours per day replying to people. Over the years people even built a repository of his responses and it was always encouraged by the community to check for an answer before emailing Ray, but he'd write back anyway.

I follow Danny Roddy who is sort of an heir of Ray's legacy and work, one of many in the community who follow in Ray's footsteps. He put together a call in show and I watched all 3 hours of it. Grown men called in crying, but what really got me was the number of people who said they would call Ray and chat with him on the phone regularly. A number of callers said Ray saved their lives. All in all even if people disagreed with Ray, he wasn't in it for the money. He literally just wanted to help people the best way he could. They don't make people like that anymore.

Recently at work they were like, "Hey so you can work from home 4 days a week. Also we're moving, so the view is great but now your cube is gone and it's called hoteling, and the space you used while you're here is only for when you're here."

I'm particular about some things in my life, for example I don't eat or drink out of plastic and don't particularly enjoy disposable cups. I know this next one sounds over the top, but I also do not like stale air. I don't like tap water, seed oils, and people who don't wash their hands.

Due to these factors I just bring my meals and water AND coffee AND supplements to work on the one day per week that I'm on the office. I left some possessions at work such as a single serve french press, two fans, and real cups. I bring 8 glasses of water, everything is packed in glass and heavy as heck, it's my life let me live it.

Anyway I'm strong and healthy, carrying 20lbs of crap up one flight of stairs was no issue for me. However now I have more things I have to bring back and forth every week and 16 stories up. These items include: real cups, my fan, laptop, and now the whole coffee maker has to go with me.

A man with less determination than myself would let the change in circumstances change his decisions. I will not alter my path because things have gotten harder, BUT there is no way I'm carting 20lbs of glass, food, and electronic equipment up 16 stories by hand. People might ask "what about the elevator?" They're incredibly slow and now all of my stuff doesn't fit in my giant trader joe's grocery bag so it's still a long walk to my desk and God by his grace gave us the wheel 10,000 years ago.

It was time for an upgrade. It was high time! Enter the Toughbuilt Massive Mouth XL toolbag. Yeah it's a tool bag and it looks tactical and has an offensive sounding name. I could probably put my whole dog in this thing if he'd get in. It's huge and I'm thinking of adding actual power tools to my edc. I mean why not? A reciprocating saw is probably one of the most useful tools on the planet. How about a wrecking bar or a power bank big enough to use as a back up whole house battery? At the very least I'm going to go with a tool roll of the same tools I carry in my Leatherman Wave+ but full size. You just never know when you may need em.

When people show you who they really are, don't make them tell you twice.

I'd like to spend as little time as possible on this thing, but it just does everything. My money is on my phone, my credit score, my work emails, my important notices, all breaking news and frequent updates from my peers across social media - so it's tough. After Elon took over twitter I found myself exploring it again and more than I'd like and even though I've unfollowed everyone on Instagram beyond people I know in real life or that are known to be real people / friends of friends etc.. I still find myself checking it more than I want. Blocking it is annoyingly restrictive but it does work and I may go back to doing it.