October 2024 - Bryan's Briefing
Hey friend,
most of my time in October has been spent resting and recovering. I had my tonsils removed, a bit later than originally thought due to a scheduling mistake of the hospital but nonetheless they are finally out.
After the procedure I spent almost a week at the hospital and then had to come back again due to more bleeding. Now I'm doing good again though, just having quite a dry throat currently.
So I spent the beginning of this month playing more video games, while at the hospital I played the new Legend of Zelda and Animal Crossing NH in Korean.
Once I was feeling better I started writing some more again as well looking into things relevant for my bachelor thesis which I should be starting in November now.
I also became a freelancer and registered a business. Working on making Social Media profiles and websites now.
Also tried making my old PC into a home server. After spending 3 days of trying that with Linux Ubuntu I decided to just use Windows. After one more day of making a lot more progress but still struggling I decided my time is better spent elsewhere. Will try again in the future to setup Jellyfin as a Netflix alternative and Immich as a Google Photos alternative. At least I was positively surprised by how easy it was to setup file sharing.
🌱 Cool Content I Made
Spent a lot of time making a South Korea travel guide for anyone who's planning to go to Korea for the first time. It includes relevant information regardless of if you are doing an exchange semester there or just a holiday.
- South Korea Travel Guide (blog post) - Information for anyone going to South Korea for the first time.
- Using Obsidian To Make A (Gaming) Backlog (blog post) - How to use Obsidian to create a gaming backlog, or book or any backlog for that matter.
Continued building webdev.bryanhogan.com, a resource for web developers. Also helps me improve and find gaps in my knowledge, as well as prepare me more towards building an app for my bachelor thesis.
On Web development:
- Different ways to build a website (web dev post) - Overview and general comparison of ways to build a website, what tool fits what job. Developing is not the only way to make your personal website.
- Steps to develop a website (web dev post) - Overview of steps that go into developing a website.
- Styling Markdown (web dev post) - Showcasing CSS needed to style markdown content following best practices.
- Basics of UI & UX for a simple website (web dev post) - Basic building blocks of good UI & UX for a website.
- Selecting colors for your website (web dev post) - How to select colors for your website.
- CSS Reset (web dev post) - What is a CSS reset and what yours could look like.
❤️ Cool Stuff By Others
Some things I came across this month.
Since I was also looking into self hosting I found many great open-source apps. There are many quite bad ones but also some good ones.
🍿 Videos
- Framework 13 Review by Hardware Haven - I find the Framework Laptop to be a good cause and a very interesting concept. More support for right to repair and honest communication is very much needed nowadays. Supporting a concept such as this will signal to other manufacturers to move away from their anti-consumer behavior, at least to some degree. I also love that Framework openly says that they are not sustainable. Even Louis Rossmann talked about his 2 year old Framework and gave his praise.
📝 Blog Posts
- Mr. Beast's leaked PDF HackerNews Discussion - Found Mr. Beast's leaked PDF document titled "HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION" interesting. Hope others do not follow his example of optimizing content towards a few digital metrics.
- The Age of PageRank is Over by Vladimir Prelovac - On why current popular search engines fail, the misalignment between high-quality search for users and advertising-based revenue.
🛠️ Apps
- Spliit App - An easy way to track and calculate shared expenses. Cool about the tool is that it's kept somewhat simple while also being an effective solution to an existing problem. Found the creator great since he's making a free tool, website is ad free and does not lock basic features behind a paywall.
- Appflowy - Replaced Trello with AppFlowy this month to manage my every day tasks. The upselling in Trello got too annoying. AppFlowy has a great Kanban board that works well on PC and mobile. Can create simple cards quickly and also add attributes when needed. Can view my cards in a calendar view. Code is on GitHub and can be self-hosted.
- Affine - Also similar to Notion but stands out with its great whiteboard mode. It's more of a Miro x Notion hybrid. Definitely using this the next time I need a collaborative whiteboard. Hope Obsidian would take some inspiration and make its Canvas Mode more useful.
- SiYuan - Similar Notion, but more of an Obsidian x Notion app. I like the business model, just need to buy a one-time license and you can then self-host it forever. Made by a Chinese team.