So I’ve been getting back into creating, exploring, learning, and building with tech. It’s one of my hobbies (and most beneficial skills in relation to my career). It’s been fun and I’ve learned a ton. Like, I’m so excited about some of this stuff, if I don’t force myself to go to sleep, I could sit up all night just building. I’ve learned more in the last week than I probably have in the last few months. This AI stuff has piqued my interest, and I’ve unlocked some ideas in my head of the possibilities of what I can do with it. It’s fun to be at the beginning of a journey and not know how you are going to get to the destination, but still be excited.
Anyway, one of my ideas is to send a weekly tech news update. It may not be weekly, as sometimes life gets too busy to stick to a content calendar. I may split it out into its own newsletter thing or section on Substack. Time will tell.
Anyways, on to the updates. Links to relevant YouTube videos if you want to dive deeper.
1. Improved Notion Notes databases
Created view filters for archived content.
Marked old content as archived and hid from table and database view(s).
Created an archive tab for viewing archived content as needed, and not having to delete old data.
Creating a note maturity field on my notes, and started tagging my notes as “seedlings, growing, Mature, or Prime.” This allows me to quickly reference how useful or the quantity of info is in my notes. This is subjective and does require occasional updating.
2. Research
Created a reminder task to research: astro, netlify, pocketbase, ghost, and bolt (JavaScript-based tools for AI & blog frameworks) to potentially replace wordpress as my website platform.
Created a reminder task to research: research Twingate vs tailscale vpn on TrueNAS (add vpn overlay network into my homelab)
researching ollama vs LMStudio for running local AI
researching installing local n8n in Docker containers for AI agents development
Set up iPhone shortcuts for AI
Open Gemini mic session with one button
Add keyboard shortcuts for AI
Added an AI shortcuts menu to share menu
4. Tech Improvements
Got development tools set up on my Arch system and my WSL system on Windows. (vscode, git, node.js, python, python3, pip, pipx, docker desktop)
Got API’s set up with Anthropic and OpenAI for AI access from my own programs or command line.
Got remote desktop setup with my own relay server in the cloud, my home pc, laptop, family computer, and the wife’s pc can all connect to each other.
Got Twingate vpn node setup in Docker
Got Ollama installed and can run local AI models of GPT-oss and Llama4.
Got Fabric AI tool installed and connected to local AI models and Claude in the cloud.
Mistakes
Don’t make an alias named “alias”; it will overwrite the shell binary for the alias program and break your .bashrc file. Thanks to Claude AI for helping me diagnose in 10 minutes what I had been fighting for 3 days trying to fix my .bashrc file to have my useful aliases. Did this with two different binaries. Luckily, Claude AI helped me diagnose and fix it.
That’s it for this week’s Tech Update. -Derek
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