My blog

2021 goals: February progress

At the end of January I set my goals for 2021 looking for a more productive year. This is my February progress report.

You can check those progress reports:

  1. 2021 goals: January progress

2021 goals

  1. Write down my projects and researches in this blog;
  2. Be able to have a daily conversation in Japanese;
  3. Have all my photos edited. Have some of them at Shutterstock;
  4. Have Home Assistant fully functional at home with some automations concluded;
  5. Have a NAS server running with all our data organized;
  6. Learn to write in Arduino and make some DIY projects;
  7. Do periodical physical exercises;
  8. Meditate;
  9. Read more books.

Overall Review

I’m still avoiding my studies in Japanese and I could do better on my Yoga and Meditation activities. On the other hand, I read a lot this month and also worked on some “bonus” project. I also began classes on Lightroom to work better and faster on the program.

What I could do better in March?

Avoid postponing my Yoga and meditation activities.

Write down my projects and researches in this blog

Goal for this month: 4 posts
Achieved this month: 4/4 (100%)
Total achieved: 6/49 (12.24%)

Be able to have a daily conversation in Japanese

I’m meant to being studying Japanese but I just couldn’t. This goal was over-ambitious. When I start studying languages, I need to focus on this task and only after that I’m supposed to do other activies.

On February, I’ve been organizing documents, the NAS Server, the Home Assistant Setup and other stuffs that didn’t allow me to focus. Then, I decided to begin studying on March.

Goal for this month: 6 hours
Achieved this month: 0/24 (0%)
Total achieved: 0/288 (0%)

Have all my photos edited. Have some of them at Shutterstock

Goal for this month: 0 hours
Achieved this month: 0/0 (%)
Total achieved: 0/344 (0%)

Have Home Assistant fully functional at home with some automations concluded

“Home Assistant Supervised” is running smoothly on TrueNAS thanks to Petrica on Home Assistant Community solution.

I can say now that my Home Assistant setup is almost complete. “Almost” because I think that there will always be something else to change, improve or automate.

New devices shall be implemented in the forthcoming months and further modifications will be done.

Total achieved: 90%

Have a NAS server running with all our data organized

My most important data has been backed up on Backblaze and external hard drives.

Despite some plugins that I want to try, the setup is done.

Total achieved: 100%

Learn to write in Arduino and make some DIY projects

I’m postponing my Arduino studies because I’m focused on our NAS Server.

Goal for this year: 6 project
Total achieved: 0/6 (0%)

Do periodical physical exercises

Goal for this month: 12 days
Achieved this month: 10/12 (83.3%)
Total achieved: 13/120 (10.83%)

Meditate

Goal for this month: 12 days
Achieved this month: 6/12 (50%)
Total achieved: 9/120 (7.5%)

Read more books

Goal for this month: 2 books
Achieved this month: 5/2 (250%)
Total achieved: 6/24 (25%)

Bonus activities

  1. The Simple Suspender – I created a PHP script to suspend my tabs on Google Chrome due to Google blocking The Great Suspender plugin.
  2. Web scraping – I began studying and trying to use web scraping. For now, I’m working with JS (bookmarklet) and Google Script to get data from the loaded page to a Google Sheets.

January books: Sapiens and The Telomere Effect

As part of my 2020 public goals, I read 2 books on January:

The Telomere Effect

I read many reviews from Goodreads saying that they were expecting more of the book despite some basic information like don’t eat too much sugar or try to have a less stressful life but after reading that I think the opposite.

Dr. Blackburn and Dr. Epel are, both of them, scientists. What they bring to the table is a résumé of hundreds of scientific studies in a very simple way that everyone can understand. If you’re looking for data, I would suggest to google what they are presenting and read the studies.

People still think that there is a miraculous way of becoming healthy and those scientists are hiding from us. People don’t want to read that doing exercise is one of the best way of keeping your health on track. They also don’t want to read that being black and poor are huge disadvantage and these are problems that we must deal together.

Nevertheless, it’s not a perfect book. The author keeps the entire book focusing on self-help and presenting quizzes to the reader to help determine the role of stress in one’s life. The fault of the author was to not make clear to the reader that they wouldn’t find a magic key for the eternal life in the book.

The book also didn’t tell that we need more research on the topic, specially for those that are not used to follow scientific studies. If you pay attention to the text, you can notice that, although harmless (in my point of view), the authors present suggestions of life improvement based in only some studies. Few things are presented as a conclusion although it’s been a field of study for more than 40 years.

Sapiens

Sapiens aims to explain very complex issues of some thousand of years in a way which people can understand. All in one book.
It’s a book made for those who would not have time and will for reading but still could make people think more about the world that we live within.
It was a nice reading, but with some flaws:

  1. You cannot compress thousand of pages and studies of the humanity in 1 book. It has a very, very simplified view of everything.
  2. It begins with a very interesting presentation of early human history, but the author contaminate (in a very deliberate way) the facts from that time on. The author makes you think that the agricultural revolution was humans biggest mistake ever.
  3. Specially when writing about the last century, the author uses a very simplified view of how things works and our “homo deus” tendency.

Don’t get me wrong, I still recommend this book, but I suggest taking care of not following some fallacies presented.