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Hey Jarvis, What is Writer's Block?
It’s amazing how quickly a computer can sum up our existence. When I ask Chat GPT to explain writer’s block it doesn’t even blink before telling me exactly what’s wrong. On a scale of 1 to 5, I have been all of these things lately. This post is an attempt to break through this drought. I’m really not sure what I’m here to write about, but I’ll be posting whatever happens to come out.
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NaNoWriMo-vember 2021
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Experiment: Graph View
I’ve been stewing on a better way to present a website and for organizing my personal thoughts. This post includes a brief demo of me experimenting in this realm.
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Random Thoughts After 29 Laps Around the Sun
It’s my birthday. Sometimes it feels good to just ramble and that’s what you’ll find here. Some personal history and projects I’ve been working on with some random chaos sprinkled here and there.
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What Computer Architecture Can Teach Us About Anxiety
I’m consistently impressed by how well certain computer concepts translate to how our brains work. This post dives into the CPU idle operation and what we can learn from our electrical counterparts.
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Modeling a German Shepherd in Blender
After thinking about it forever, I’m finally attempting to learn 3D modeling. Today I completed my first project a low poly German Shepherd.
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In Memory of Peter Kratchmer
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Adam's World - a 3D Representation of my Blog
You’re currently on MySpace 2.0 (or 2D if you prefer). Now I am introducing Adam’s World - a 3D explorable (eventually) world constructed by yours truly.
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Уча Българси
Здрасти! Здравей! Здравейте!
Добро утро! Добър ден! Добър вечер! Лека Нощ!
казвам се Адам и уча Българси.
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Mental Health Awareness Month 2021
Today marks the end of Mental Health Awareness Month. I shared some of my own mental health struggles earlier this year. In the spirit of this years theme #Tools2Thrive, I would like to share engram, a tool I’ve been building to promote better mental health.
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How to Setup an Admin Page With MongoDB
The year is 2013 and you’re looking to start a new SaaS application. You’ve been following the latest trends and decide to go with The MEAN Stack: MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS and Node.js. It won’t be until a few years later that you regret most of these decisions, before finally settling into the acceptance phase. Jokes aside, MongoDB has carved itself a spot as one of the top NoSQL databases and will be around for the forseeable future.
If you are using MongoDB, you are likely also using Robo 3T or MongoDB Compass to manage your data. This post describes how to quickly setup an admin page using the Django framework and djongo connector that makes it a breeze to view and modify data in your database.
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2021 Bell Let's Talk Day
Today is Bell Let’s Talk Day. I’ve seen it more in the last few years, but it’s taken a while for me to really understand what its purpose is and what “mental health” means. After weathering at least three depressive episodes, I finally feel like I am on solid ground again. I find we are afraid to share what we have learned and be vulnerable. Our collective fear of sharing perpetuates a stigma that sharing negative personal experiences is not acceptable. Today I am talking and I encourage you to do the same.
Bell will donate 5 cents to mental health for every view of this video -
engram - Open Source Knowledge Management App - Early Access
In my last post, Introducing Engram, I shared some of my personal motivation behind engram. Today, I am happy to announce that I am formally opening up the application for early access.
In this post, I will cover what you can currently do in the app, and where it will go from here.
Introducing engram -
When is the Last Time You Had a Real Conversation With Yourself: Introducing Engram
As I write this, British Columbia and many parts of the world are entering another lockdown to curb the second wave of COVID 19. We’ve found ourselves with an abnormal amount of free time, but how many of us have actually used that time to make the changes we said we were going to at the start of January 2020? I have spent the last couple of years trying to find the app I want to use to manage my thoughts and reflection. I (un)fortunately came to the conclusion to build my own and am happy to introduce Engram – an open source knowledge management tool.
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Keyboard Shortcut to Enter Current Date on Ubuntu
Tired of typing and remembering the date all the time? Find out how to use Autokey to insert today’s date with a keyboard shortcut.
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Breadth-First Search a Walk in the Park
Today I went for a walk, and I’d like to take you along for a ride. All the headings are random thoughts that came to mind while on this walk. Now, about an hour after this walk, I’m going to attempt to interweave the actual thoughts that linked these all together. If it feels disorganized at times, that is intentional as this is a demonstration of how my brain operates.
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Two Weeks Of Covid
Today is my two week-aversary of waking up to one of the worst illnesses I can remember. I still haven’t fully recovered, but would like to share what the experience was like. Despite being bombarded with COVID numbers every single day, I really didn’t know what to actually expect.
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Hello World
I started writing on xyzdigital.com a few months ago. I didn’t and still don’t have a clear goal in mind, but it’s getting there slowly. I’ve decided I would like that page to focus on high quality and high effort posts. So far, I think only Exploring-Mozilla-Text-to-Speech lives up to that desire.
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Compound Interest Calculator
Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it. – Albert Einstein
A simple tool to help visualize compound interest, followed by some general personal finance thoughts.
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Spring Cleaning
It’s peak of Summer, but as someone said today it’s only March 148. Which means it’s a perfect time for some digital Spring Cleaning. I like to consider myself fairly technically literate. However, over the years I have still managed to get myself all kinds of disorganized in this new world of cloud storage.
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Opinions About Opinions
Out of curiosity I googled this title and the third result was a Quora page. I’ve broken down just 6 of them and shared some of my own along the way.
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Introducing Categories
In an attempt to bring order to the lack of organization currently, I am introducing four main categories: “Announcements”, “Arts”, “Opinion”, and “Tech”
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NeuroTribes Part One: Autism as a Spectrum
NeuroTribes, by Steve Silberman, takes the reader on a historical journey of autism since the 18th century. I stumbled on this book after watching both of Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix Comedy specials (Douglas and Nanette). In both of them, she discusses her Autism diagnosis and how it affects her life. This wasn’t the first thing I watched about autism that I related to. Last year I stumbled upon Temple Grandin and her presentations on autism. Autism is widely known to be prevelant in the software industry, so whether I have it or not, I am likely to be exposed to it. I believe it is important to learn about so that I can better understand others and myself.
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The Happiness Equation
Preamble
I have been on a real self-help reading tear lately. I’ve been on a quest to learn more about what makes us happy and as a math nerd finding “The Happiness Equation” is ultimately the goal.
According to his blog, Neil Pasricha wrote the book as a love letter to his unborn son on how to live a happy life. I remember taking a moment of reflection after finishing the book and wondering why “self-help” is not a genre of books we help kids find.
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X 'Why' Z Digital
First recorded homepage from 2003 using the Wayback Machine
The domain xyzdigital.com was acquired on August 25, 1999. I still don’t know the full story behind it, here is what I do know.