Busy, Busy, Busy

Daniel F. Dickinson has been keeping extremely busy with employment, other technical activities - not the mention the snow removal that is required in Midland - and his self-motivated volunteering hours.

Daniel’s work at Ambient Activity is keeping him quite busy on its own. Ambient Activity has many orders to fulfill and part of Daniel’s responsibility is preparing the computers for the kiosks…

At Ambient Activity Daniel is also responsible for IT and management of accounts related to the development of the ABBY™ and GENIE™ activity and communications platforms. These accounts have recently been required to make changes by the distribution sources used by the platforms.

But wait, there’s more! 😉

There are also always ongoing integration and related development projects for Daniel. And, of course, customer service related work.

Daniel’s other technical projects include continuing to help Gateway Centre for Learning with their data and analysis needs.

And we’re not done yet…

On the hobby side Daniel spent a weekend day reusing an old Raspbery Pi (Model B+) and a set of speakers as a Bluetooth speaker arrangement for Android and desktop systems. In the process Daniel rediscovered OpenWrt and learned about the new OpenWrt One, of which he intends to try a few. One as a home router, another experiment with, and one more to use as server for backups from his computers (which use the restic deduplicating and encrypting network backup tool).

Daniel is contemplating (if he can find the time) working on adding a GUI for the Bluetooth speaker setup and the backup server, as well as updating the NUT (Network UPS Tools) GUI for OpenWrt (and - hopefully not needed - any required backend changes). This is still up in the air depending on whether there is some slowdown in the primary tasks and activities in Daniel’s life.

Oh, and that doesn’t even mention what looks to be a winter of frequent snow removal needs (self-managed due to lack of response from local snow removal contractors and companies). Daniel would like to be proven wrong on that one.

Daniel is often tired as a result of currently activity levels, but is feeling quite good and bullish on possibilities, despite the external world’s current bizarre and disturbing state, and a rough patch.