I have not been spending much time on the computer, lately. This is mostly due to the rest required that is part of dealing with my burn-out. I’ve been working on getting the basics under control. I’ve also been reading a bunch: it’s one of the few activities I can spend more time on without mental exhaustion kicking in quickly.1
For reading fantasy books I settled on reading those with EB Garamond, but I wasn’t entirely happy with that font. Nonetheless, it was good enough. After scouring the net, I stumbled upon EB Garamond Absinthe. Notably, it contains larger glyphs and better line spacing, which are both welcome changes.
I started using this version, but I noticed some ligatures weren’t rendering nicely on my Kobo. So, what’s a man to do? Tweak the font myself, of course.2
Read blog postI suppose it was to be expected. The signs were there.
You may recall last year’s post about taking a sabbatical on this very blog. In it, I laid out my motivations as to why I needed to take a longer break to recover.
I also briefly wrote about prior experiences with mental exhaustion and burn-out, which I dismissed. Perhaps I was simply bored?
You may also recall that in a blogpost reflecting on the break I wrote:
I must admit that while I have gotten a lot of rest over the last three months, I don’t feel in a remarkably better mood than I did when my break started. I had hoped that things would shift dramatically, but sadly the dreadful weather has worked against me and as a result my overall mood has been middling at best.
After feeling off during my vacation time in August, I became extremely tired, both physically and mentally, and my sleep quality fell off a cliff: I started waking up once every hour. That makes everything much worse, very quickly.
Read blog postI actually enjoy writing. I always have, and writing blog posts on this website is not exception. In fact, besides blogging and writing code, I also maintain a daily journal.
When things are written well, reading is a ton of fun. It is a shame then, that so many folks online are only interested in selling merchandise, shilling sponsors or selling their latest course. I get it, you need to bring in the dough.
But the majority of my blog posts here, I simply write because I enjoy writing and I write them because it’s plain fun. My Linux experiments, my video game retrospective posts every year, my programming posts, all of them are written because they’re fun.
Read blog postWhen I was much younger I used to run Linux on the desktop, and tinkered around with the popular distributions of the day. I used to daily drive various distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint… it was a good time. My preferred desktop environment at the time was GNOME 2.
I eventually became a Mac OS X user in 2011 after getting my first MacBook. I’ve been a happy Mac guy for a long time now, but I’m a bit concerned about the direction Apple’s going with their software at this point.1
In reaction to these macOS changes, I’ve been thinking about running Linux on the desktop. However, I didn’t want to sacrifice my bootloader on my desktop, so I decided not to do it.
Read blog post