January 2023 In Review

What is this?

As part of my New Years resolution for this year, I want to document, and highlight everything that has happened to me for each month and provide an insight in what I want to accomplish in the next month. Think of this as an open diary.

The New Year

I started off the New Year by coming back from Epoch Bay Area which is the biggest in-person hackathon I have ever helped organize as well as one of the best hackathons I have been a part of. Overall it was one of the best experiences and I had a lot of fun helping out. One of the best things to come out of it was the joke project that was made at the event was HypCoin. HypChain Header.

I have to give my utmost thanks to Hack Club for sponsoring the whole event and making it one of the best times of my life! Me @ Epoch BA After that I had to prepare for my trip to Las Vegas, but not without starting some hardware projects. Hack Club (again, I love them!!) held an awesome event, the Winter Hardware Wonderland where I designed a hardware project and could submit it to them for funding up to $250! I had a lot of ideas for the project but ended up doing like 3 different things.

I needed the PiKVM because I really needed a cheap IP-KVM in case I royally screw things up on my server (usually with networking errors) and need to fix it without plugging a whole display in. (I also can't rely on my IGPU to reliably output a signal).

The macropad was something fun I wanted to do so that I can learn soldering and also have extra keys for my keyboard, although this would be more useful I would find out later this month.

Soham wanted to participate in the Winter Hardware Wonderland as well and so I decided to give my remaining funds to help build a microphone with him.

Right before leaving for Las Vegas, I had received my 4x10TB hard drives for use in my server. I won't get into much detail here, but will make another blog post soon about my new server build!!

Viva Las Vegas

On January 2nd-5th I went to Las Vegas and did all the fun Las Vegas things. Everyday had something exciting going on! The first day we wandered around for nearly 10 miles. Funnily enough for 2/5 days we were there I had Panda Express from the same location. One of the best things I did while there was go on the New York New York Big Apple rollercoaster. the rollercoaster.

On my last day in Las Vegas I went to a card game shop, the Pinball Hall of Fame (one of the best "museums" ever made), and the Atomic Museum. In the Atomic Museum I got a funny lil alien friend to take home.

Last days before school

When I came back from Las Vegas I almost immediately started work on my new server upgrade. I also set some resolutions for myself, mainly to write a blog post atleast once a month, post on Scrapbook everyday, lose some weight, go to gym atleast once a week (going to aim for twice a week now!), and actually finish more projects. The next few days, and even weeks were filled with setting server stuff up.

Back to school

I went back to class on the 12th and not much spectacular happened in class. I am very thankful that this semester I can take it easy and not stress about getting all As. I unfortunately won't be able to live 100% stress-free until I get my decisions back in March. I also started watching Mob Psycho 100 with my dad and will probably finish it by the start of February! (man, I miss Mob Psycho). Also One Piece kept hitting hard as always, 2023 is going to be absolute peak for the One Piece.

The Fun Meetup

Right as I was finishing up this post, I went to a lil audiophile meetup in my area and got introduced to what $10k+ audio setups sound like. There some big names there, but as a cheap student like I am I knew to be satisfied with my current setup (Phillips headphones, Plexamp with FLAC, and Boom3D). The same day there was a keyboard meetup in the same building which was awesome! I spent way too much time trying to decide if/what I should buy. I was very close to spending close to $100 on a whole new keyboard setup, but thankfully after my second purchase I could not hold anything more. I got myself a nice new Ajazz keyboard which fits my favorite pink color scheme. It doesn't have any function keys (F1-F12 keys), or even arrow keys, but I am learning to solve this with some awesome Karabiner-Elements + Goku magic!

Leaving off

Overall I must say that January was an awesome month and really taught me to set my expectations straight. I am planning on February to get back into programming with trying to learn back Data Structures & Algorithms and also making fun projects in C#!!

Thanks for reading!