For the first time in my life, I find myself writting in my head a list of goals I want to achieve next year. Some are mundane, some are harder to achieve. I thought about sharing that list here.
Please consider sharing yours as well. Consider it like sharing ideas, something to push others in to thinking about small things they can do as well just because they can.
Now, without further ado:
The List
- survive
A reminder from j4k3. Should always be a priority.
- renew my entire fleet of hand tools and, if money allows it, some power tools
I have lot of maintenance chores, renovations and improvements to do around the house and my current tool stock is essentially shot, so…
- start making furniture for my house
Have you seen the price furniture goes for these days? I have a carpentry shop nearby willing to look at my doodles and work out the details with me and make the rough cutting of the big pieces that require precision tools for it. I’ll have to take care of the rest.
- put together a cook book with my partner
This just came to me/us the other day.
Throughout this year, we shared with a good number of people food from our table. We are not foodies nor trained chefs, we just enjoy having good, tasty, healthy food. Many people told us they could never make what we cook daily and a few even told us we should open a place of our own. Because we’re not that insane yet, the book will do.
No publishing intention: it will be about putting together a collection of recipes anyone can follow and share it. All inclusive.
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paint the freaking walls
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finish that computer tech course
I’ve been playing with computers for twenty+ years. Now I want my know-how recognized. And on this I have money tied and a deadline!
- write my own first book (romance, with raunchy bits)
Or should I say just put it together? I write my fantasies basically since I was taught to put letters together to form words. My biggest flaw is that I’m my worst critic and I drop draft after draft. Well… it needs to end.
- work with my dogs
I have two, very over reactive dogs. Of the big kind, that are constantly fighting each other for no reason. I need to do something to counter this.
- get back on working on my plot of land
That place is a fire hazard and I want to start growing my own food again.
- read more books
As an added incentive to culture and reading habits: support an online ebook repository, download and keep offline copies of as many books you can manage. Culture is the worst enemy of bigotry and ignorance.
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In a brief moment of clarity I told my wife we should do dry January.
- Dry January.
- Get laid.
That’s about it.
I wanna touch more unique turtles this year than I did last year, and last year I touched seven turtles.
It’s okay if I pet the same turtles again though, new year, new goal.
🐢
(That said, I much prefer an actionable and enjoyable goal like “go touch some turtles” to something nebulous and frustrating and intangible.)
I admit: that is wholesome.
My list is short: Don’t let another Trump term sap my ability to enjoy life
Valid!
Last year I set out with the vague goal to improve my relationship to food and honestly had a lot of success.
This year I’m choosing another vague goal which is to improve my relationship with leisure time / entertainment. Hoping to take on reading more, vegging less, and trying to do more artistic endeavors etc. basically trying to move towards digital minimalism.
Getting of reddit about 2 months ago was tough but now I don’t miss it much at all and I get on Lemmy for maybe .5 hours a day. I switched to graphene and my Google stuff is in another user profile so no more mobile email checking. I’m shooting for more of that this year.
Here is an excellent article on setting goals:
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/goal-setting/
The idea is that you use a goal heirarchy:
The nice thing about this setup is that if some of your subordinate goals don’t work out the others will still help push you towards your goal.
So that being said, my goal is to get to a healthy weight (again) but to do so in a healthy manner. So I’m:
- cutting my calories for two weeks, followed by
- eating at maintenance calories for a week (practice eating “normally”, upregulate metabolism a bit, give myself a mental break)
- weight train regularly (maintain muscle)
- jump rope (additional physical activity, fun skill)
- walk 10k steps a day
Stay strong on those goals. Health is our most precious possession.
Absolutely!
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Finish at least one book per quarter. I start a lot of books but never finish them.
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Cook more so we eat healthier things at home.
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Spend more time outside
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Be more diligent about working out to get in better shape and hopefully improve knee pain.
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Work on increasing water intake. Stop going from coffee to tea to wine.
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The big one - repair/remodel my mom’s house that i inherited and decide which house to live in and which to sell before i go completely broke, while trying to maintain a positive relationship with the kid who’s living in the other house and now thinks it’s his.
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Try to be nicer and more forgiving to people who deserve it. Ignore the others and try not to let them get to me.
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The same one i make every year - listen more and talk less.
Renting is not an option for you?
Renting it out? It could be. My husband doesn’t really want to be anyone’s landlord. I worry about how quickly that renter/ landlord relationship can become an us vs. them situation. I’d probably have to get $3k/mo to cover the cost and have a tiny cushion for repairs and that seems like a lot.
Mortgage cost?
Having a rental house is being demonized nowadays. By default, the owner is a bad person, regardless if they try as best as they can to be fair. That’s sad.
If people sit down and reach an agreement, legal, on which both parts feel safe, there is no harm there.
Mortgage, taxes, insurance, and lawn mowing total just over $2, 500. I could take a hit and rent it to my son and DIL who are currently paying $2,000 for a two-bedroom apartment.
Taxes and insurance are yearly costs in my country.
Let me guess: HOA contracted lawn care service?
I’d prefer to set my kid with a good head start in life than let go of such a property but I’m me. Family is family.
Insurance monthly and taxes annually- i was just dividing it out to monthly. I pay a lawn guy to mow weekly and trim the trees one or twice per year - If it’s rented I’d rather keep paying that than risk having it look bad and pissing off the neighbors. The house is 4 bed, so really more than either of my kids need/want. Talked about selling it and helping the kids with down payments on something smaller. Right now we still don’t know what we’re doing. Some of it will depend on what we can afford to do at the other house.
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survive
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try to force myself back into a daily physical therapy routine that seems nearly impossible for me now
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do my best to partition off my circumstantial depression from the existential fear of homelessness with my physical disability against the courage to end it on my terms
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try living on solar time by building an ESP-32 clock that tracks the local solar time instead of time zones and cultural habits
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try plating copper through holes and do a ridiculous multilayer home made PCB with 6 or more layers
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finish my toolbox drawer lighting with some integrated 3d printed wire connectors
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read some Arthur C. Clark
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figure out netboot and run a server I can spin up from my phone with a small LLM as a proof of concept
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replicate Ben Eater’s 6502 project with another processor, probably the Z80 or 6809
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try to figure out a way to flash a generic Rockchip based Android tablet that has a corrupt Linux kernel and bootloader
Why would you live on solar time
The timing of noon is primarily what centers the day and the distribution of daylight hours. I’m in social isolation from physical disability. So standardized time becomes more of a psychological burden than a concept that hold value. Standard time comes with many cultural expectations that mostly come from within, but are born from life experience.
I hypothesize that by rejecting standard time in favor of solar time, I create a framework of logic that enables me to reject all the cultural expectations and associated baggage. I’m no longer “waking up early” or “going to bed late”. My psychology of what is late or early is no longer dictated by the standardization of time. I am not a train station or a stock exchange. I am a human of Earth, and my natural circadian existence is that of a diurnal animal in obeisance to the stellar powerhouse driving life on this planet. My noon is the center of my day and to say otherwise is heretical to life itself.
That’s not to say standard time has no uses or value. I am of the belief that I should own myself by taking complete ownership of my day and relegate the subjugation of standard time to nothing more than a tool I access when I choose instead of a jurisdiction I live within.
Sounds potentially freeing but what do you do about work or making plans with others?
I would coordinate with their preferred time. I don’t eat meals or go anywhere except to the doctor every 3 months. I eat when I’m hungry, not when I’m told or fed like a farm animal. I mostly struggle with the psychology that staying up late is an act of rebellious freedom. As silly as it seems, I struggle to overcome that in practice. Yet I’ve worked every imaginable shift including 7/12’s at night for months at a time in the past. I’ve raced bicycles when my start time for my category is just before sunrise. I can absolutely control my timing of my day, but I can’t defeat the psychology that I’m subjugating myself in some way when I do so. I’m not naturally a morning person. So why should I let standard time dictate when morning time is or is not.
I went from 350lbs to 190lbs because I took control over my diet and the psychology of meals and arbitrary food consumption that I struggled with growing up. I’m willing to bet that time holds a similar subtly unhealthy twist on daily psychology. That is an internal perspective that has little relevance to interactions with anyone that may or may not have a similar self awareness.
That’s some insane weight loss! How’d you do it? Very interesting philosophy on this too
Rode a bicycle everywhere. I even spent a year doing 33 miles each way to work. Back then I could ride a hundred and still function for the rest of the day. I was riding at least 400 miles per week.
I started just trying to ride as cheap transit. Then it became a quest of exploring myself and my potential. The more I rode, the more I was punished for my poor diet. By the time I started working in a bike shop I was around 250lbs maybe 275lbs. I knew that taking a job that far away would be super challenging, but potentially forge me into something anew. I started racing then too. The commute was getting to me around the time a nicer shop was opening near me and I landed the job there. The owner tweaked my last few bad habits and got me down to 190lbs. I’m not disciplined like that now but I’m under 220lbs, which is after spending 90% of every day lying in a bed after the car that disabled me. I still eat almost nothing processed and cook all of my own food.
Very inspiring! That’s an insane amount of miles
Plating through holes is going to be a fun project. There are kits for doing that kind of thing, but you will pay a premium to get everything in one box. The last time I researched it, some conductive ink/paint/glue and an simple electroplating setup was going to be the best option. (The low resistance conductive ink at the time was super expensive, and I was super broke, so I had to ditch the project ) For diy, copper rivets seem like the next best option, TBH.
Take lots of pictures of your wins and failures in your multilayer board project. I have no clue how you are going to be able to press the layers together while keeping them aligned, so I am super curious how that will go.
Those projects are super fun, but are a time suck because they tend to have quite a few iterations before they are usable. Sigh. Work and kids basically terminated those kinds of projects for me.
I have some stuff already, I just need to be willing to hurt enough to hopefully finish such a physical project. I use brass rivets a lot too.
I’m curious about trying to use some cheap enamel silver paint with a little bit of carbon black added. Most people only use soot black in a paint, but all silver paints are aluminum with chrome type paints having the smallest particle size. I may try to get some silver automotive paint out of storage if that doesn’t do the trick. The color coat of automotive paint is much thinner than other types and contains a higher density of aluminum particles that are designed to form a more unified consistency. In practice the passes are sprayed with a similar wetness so that the solvent evaporates and leaves the particles in a consistent orientation. Getting this wrong leaves stripes or streaks where light reflects off of the particle facets inconsistently. The UV protection, durability, and thickness of the finish is from the 2k clear coat only. I’ve never tested if an automotive color coat is conductive, but if it is not, I bet adding a bit of amorphous carbon will be.
The sandwich is just a fiberglass layup. It would probably be better to use a prepreg inner with an autoclave. I already have very thin double sided copper clad and thin blanks of FR4. I’ll just be roughing up the FR4 for mechanical tooth and using a common fiberglass epoxy like a glue.
I already have a small modular 3d printed tool that uses heavy bolts and nuts around the periphery to bend sheet metal prototypes like a deep drawl die press. I’ll likely just use that with a printed jig for alignment and the required pressures.
The bigger challenge is what I might want to make and the programming to justify the task.
I have to add a few of those to my own list.
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Mine:
- Don’t make lists I won’t follow
A recommendation: Dont choose something for your list because the world thinks it’s the thing you should do. Do you really want to “read more books”? Or do you want new forms of entertainment or education?
Make sure a list is of things you actually WANT to do, not that you feel like you SHOULD do.
Of course, if you enjoy reading, by all means make a resolution to make more time for it.
Edit: Should note this is not directed at OP, but the world in general.
Reading and writing are closely connected. At least for me.
I’m personally going to work on improving myself, grabbing a bunch of good habits and just trying to be the best version of myself to the best of my ability. Picked up daily walks very recently which has been fun, so I’m hoping I can stick to it through to the next year. Once I get in the groove with that, hopefully I’ll also be able to pick up some additional hobbies and have some fun/development with that.
Another goal of mine this year is going to hopefully be making real life friends and connections. Got my work cut out for me though - currently have no friends, my city doesn’t really have any clubs for hobbies to meet people at so I’m pretty much reliant on miracles (and hopefully some job hopping). Still, anything can happen in a year so just gotta hope for the best.
