A bit of general updates on what’s up with me in this new year!

Posts and updates on this websites are still far and few in between, apologies to my avid readers(ha ha).

Work life⌗

Still pretty much enjoying my job situation at Wazo Communication Inc..
Working with competent people in a mostly comfortable, interesting technological ecosystem.
This opportunity to discover another industry where computing pays also got me started on a learning adventure in the history of telephony and computing, and the relationship between the two.
Confident I’ll be able to look back with appreciation at this step in my life.

Hobbies: electronics⌗

Somewhere at some point in the past year I woke up to a renewed interest in electronics. Since I discovered programming and computer science, I mostly dismissed electronics as “too low level”, “too hard” and “not worth the effort” given how easy and cheap programming and working with software is.
Well, easy in way, and not always. But certainly easier to get started and get somewhere fast these days.

Realized how crazy and interesting it actually is that we can do all this computing and software stuff by moving electrons around, sometimes photons, sometimes actual air molecules(see acoustic couplers), in different patterns and encoding 1s and 0s through all of that in order to make pieces of silicons talk, or interact with us.

Also realized how useful and cool it would be if I could pick up some “useless” piece of electronic waste and actually make it do something useful, or at least entertaining.

Understanding, reusing, repurposing, revaluing. All good things I want to strive for.

So I got myself an arduino Uno, a book, a cheap logic analyzer and some magic protocol decoder thing, and started picking up broken or unused electronics I had around, and “investigating”. Okay, mostly watching videos and trying a few stuff with little results, for now. Not yet that deep into the rabbit hole, and also have other projects in concurrence(of course), but enthousiastic about this, liking what I learn and all the potential for cool and actually useful projects.

Tying in telephony and electronics, one of my more long term project would be to build a circuit that can reproduce the analog protocols of an analog phone exchange, so that I can plug in a RJ-11-compatible phone and make it ring, use the phone to transmit audio, decode DTMF signals from it, etc.
My naive self feels like this shouldn’t be that hard if it pretty much worked more than a hundred years ago and worked pretty much the same for a hundred years!

When I give up or get distracted by something else, I can always just buy a SIP interface adapter, and make old analog phones usable with SIP-enabled systems like asterisk, which is also a fun prospect.

Hobbies: homelab/computer stuff⌗

Speaking of other projects, I’m again working on setting up a real “homelab”. That is, a network of computing resources serving different purposes. Mostly as a mean for me to learn and experiment with stuff, but also for concrete useful goals, such as local media hosting & streaming, personal data archival, independence from third-party services.

Also want to experiment with exotic systems, be it newfangled linux distributions(nixos, fedora silverblue/fedora coreos), virtualization layers(k8s, proxmox, containers), or even more exotic non-linux unixes like plan 9, or inferno os. Old laptops and desktops are cheap and are raining around me, better find some cool uses for them!

Coming back to telephony, I’m playing around with my own deployment of an Asterisk PBX!
Still just in a prototype phase, closed-off in my home network, but a next step would be buying a VOIP number and configuring it to point to my asterisk instance so that anyone can spam me with remote execution exploits!
Okay, I have to think this through a bit, but I’m sure it’s not that hard to secure, compared to a website?

Adulting⌗

On another kind of personal front, currenty looking to buy a house with my partner! Perhaps not the ideal time considering the interest rates, but it’s been worse I’ve heard, and it should get better I hear. Not easy for me to be confident in choosing a first home. When is a deal a good one, when you can’t get an expert opinion up-front?

Hopefully, it should give me more space and flexibility for my projects at the very least! Or perhaps this is a good way to have no time left for useless computer stuff and sink all our budget into maintaining a roof over our heads.

Anyway, another big leap into adulthood I guess!

Think that’s all for now! Wish me luck, 2024 is looking like a big year ahead.