secluded/content/posts/day-6-updates.md

---
title: "Day 6 Updates"
description: "I don't really have much to say today so here are just a few things I've been working on"
author: Amolith
cover: /assets/pngs/calendar.png
date: 2020-05-03T01:57:03-04:00
toc: true
categories:
  - Technology
tags:
  - Zettelkasten
  - Doom Emacs
  - Emacs
  - NixNet
  - 100 Days To Offload
---

I haven't been able to come up with a specific topic for today so this
is just a kind of generic update about me.

## Zettelkasten
In my [previous post about Vim,](/vim-as-a-markdown-editor/) I briefly
mentioned being inspired to create a Zettelkasten by Daryl Sun in [his
fourth 100 Days To Offload
post.](https://write.privacytools.io/darylsun/100-days-to-offload-day-4)
A Zettelkasten is a personal knowledge management tool that allows one
to quickly retrieve useful information about a subject, relearn
forgotten concepts, and discover connections between those concepts to
form entirely new ideas. There are different processes recommended by
different people but I think it's a very personal choice and depends on
what your workflow will look like. Mine will be as follows.

1. Take *very* concise notes on something I learned in a *physical*
   notebook
2. When I'm able, go through those notes and add them to my [digital
   Zettelkasten,](https://git.nixnet.xyz/Amolith/zettelkasten) expanding
   them a little and fleshing the thought out more

The last step is *the most important* as this is the one where you sit
down and think about what you're adding and try to draw connections
between it and what you already know. The goal is not to make the
longest and most complete notes in the world but to add value to each
*concise* thought by linking it with others and build a web for you to
explore later. You might not see immediate benefits but a mature
Zettelkasten with hundreds of entries will constantly surprise you as
you tumble into your own store of knowledge and rediscover things. That
surprise is actually one of the greatest benefits to this kind of
knowledge management system; when something is surprising, we tend to
remember it better.

## Doom Emacs
A friend of mine convinced my to try [Doom
Emacs](https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs) and, so far, I am very
impressed. Emacs itself is very powerful but, from what I can tell, this
configuration adds a *lot* of value. The main one being Vim keybindings
:wink: I'm looking forward to learning [org-mode](https://orgmode.org/) and
seeing what it can do for my productivity. As a text editor and
programming tool, I plan to stick with [Neovim](https://neovim.io/) on
desktop/laptop, [Vim](https://www.vim.org/) on Debian-based systems,
[vi](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi) wherever else.

## NixNet plans
Today, I fleshed out some of my thoughts on reprovisioning all of my
over the summer. I'm going to have [Ansible](https://docs.ansible.com/)
or [Salt](https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/) build and deploy
[LXC](https://linuxcontainers.org/lxc/introduction/) containers to a
baremetal server from [Hetzner](https://www.hetzner.com/sb) running a
*very* minimal [Alpine Linux](https://alpinelinux.org/) installation.
Whatever setup I have for those will of course be available on
[Gitea.](https://git.nixnet.xyz/NixNet) From there, my local NAS will
use something like [borgmatic](https://torsion.org/borgmatic/) to back
up files and databases from all of my servers and
[LXD](https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/introduction/) to create container
snapshots[^1]. All of that will be mirrored to
[BackBlaze](https://www.backblaze.com/) likely using their B2 model as
paying per GB per month is generally the most reliable option. Under one
of the others, there's always the possibility that I might upload more
than they think is reasonable and start limiting me in some way.

Short-term, I'm going to consolidate some of my servers to a single
baremetal machine from Hetzner. Long-term, I'm going to look into
building and racking my own servers in a datacenter in Germany, likely
one of Hetzner's. This comes with a plethora of benefits but a pretty
major detriment: the up-front cost will be absolutely *massive*.
Building a rack server worth putting in a datacenter will be incredibly
expensive at the start. Following that, all I have to pay is a monthly
fee for however much space it uses in the rack and it won't be too much.
Before any of that is even considered, I'm going to be spending a lot of
time discussing things with my father; he did a lot of racking before he
got his current sysadmin job and has a ton of advice to give, from using
VoIP to powercycle the server to what networking gear to look at and how
to organise everything within the rack.

I have a lot of really big plans.

[^1]: This one isn't *really* necessary as building the containers with
    Ansible/Salt is automated and it's a simple process to rebuild them.
    Snapshots might just take less time to redeploy should something go
    wrong.