2023 Outlook

I’m not one to make New Year’s resolutions, but there are a number of things I’m looking forward to in 2023. Most of them are pretty nerdy…

Home Assistant

I’ve been running a Vera Plus home automation controller to manage some Z-Wave devices, mostly lights and locks, at a condo I share with another family. The Vera setup has been pretty rock solid, but I want to do more with the devices and I want an excuse to play with Home Assistant. I’ve heard my friends at Jupiter Broadcasting talk about Home Assistant for years on the Self-Hosted podcast and based on their reports, it sounds like it’s stable enough to give it a try.

To get started on my Home Assistant journey, I’ve purchased an ODROID H3 with the minimal Type 2 case, 8GB of RAM, and a 500 GB M.2 SSD. I’m also using this opportunity to explore NixOS for creating a declarative OS configuration. I’ll have more about my ODROID Home Assistant set up with NixOS in future posts.

Machine Learning

I’ve been keeping an eye on advances in Machine Learning (ML) but I haven’t dug very deep because of my frustration with Python, lack of a beefy GPU, and a lack of free time. Last year I tried Python again and discovered Poetry for dependency management and packaging. Poetry isn’t perfect but it was good enough to get me writing and deploying meaningful Python code. Thanks to the Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab, I have access to enough free compute power to learn some ML without making the investment in a GPU.

I’ll be using the book Deep Learning with PyTorch from Manning as my learning guide. The authors seem to have an approach to teaching ML that makes sense to me, and I’ve had very good success with other Manning publications.

Blogging with Hugo

The closest thing I have to a New Year’s resolution is to post more content here. I have a backlog of things to write about, but too often I’ve let perfect be the enemy of good. My goal is to write smaller posts more frequently. I enjoy writing and would like to post something once a week, but I’m not going to commit to that.

I useHugo to build this site and would like to expand the features I use to include RSS feeds, Taxonomies, and ActivityPub. The Fediverse seems like an interesting concept, and this seems like a good baby step in that direction.

Travel and Music

I haven’t been to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival since 2019 and boy do I miss it. I’m looking forward to taking N96988 to KNEW once again this year to soak up the music, food, and great times. I’m not sure where else I’ll make it this year I’m looking for warm places with scuba diving and of course live music.

I hope our paths meet in 2023! As always, feel free to reach out.