Status Updates: A retrospective

If you've been paying much attention, you'll notice that my last update was 2 months ago. Status updates are dead. So goodbye... At least to the monthly update. Yes, I've been hinting about its end.

For almost ten months, advancing Free Software was my 'main project'. I never put any effort toward monetizing these pursuits, so its inevitable I would eventually engage in a time-for-money exchange.

Yeah, I got a day job. I'm also (usually) very active outside of work, so I just don't have the time or energy to invest into the same projects or into these writeups.

Last update

I fixed issue with my PinePhone's microphone by... stuffing a small piece of paper in there. Someone suggested it, and I tried it (and even added it to some wiki).

As the time ticked down to the beginning of my job, I tried to package and advance some of the projects that I haven't quite wrapped up

New Era

I picked up two new projects.

One, being the firmware for a hardware device my brother made which is shaped kind of like a keyboard. I've got a port of QMK.fm to it in progress. Next, I need to add control for the RGB LEDs.

The other is an irc bridge to a popular proprietary chat app.

I've got some WIP ircv3 changes, and I hope eventually I won't need to use the proprietary webapp client (but that's not likely to be soon).

Now that money's flowing in, I've migrated my Google Voice number to JMP.chat, which is just $3/month (beta pricing) if you aren't making multiple hours of phone calls. I imagine soon I'll discover that group MMS works fine.

stop

Interestingly, sourcehut published an article about their consulting business: they use monthly status updates as part of their contracts.

They also charge a lot more than I did when I was a consultant. That... gives me some good information.

I might do some updates to my website (web-heads need *content* too!). I love you, Geminauts (especially Josias)! 👋

Take care, brush your teeth, and be Holy!

-Zach