The track saw and router, imo, are existing libraries.

It feels like it cheapens the whole thing. Maybe I'm just old, because I remember people saying the same thing about code completion in Visual Studio back in the late 90s.

This is so much more than code completion, though.

I dream, often, of working somewhere where the problems are simple and the work is rewarding. I will likely end up retiring before that happens, and then spend my time volunteering and gardening.

I had it all priced out, but a bunch of birthdays in my family were coming up and I felt like I shouldn't buy something for myself if it's really their time.

My old laptop will have to cut it for a while. :-)

Plus I still have some esp8266-based widgets that I made which only operate on 2.4GHz.

The only headache has been setting up a Canon printer -- it doesn't know what fast roaming is and won't prompt for a password if it's enabled. You must disable that first, connect the printer, and then turn it back on.

The one little girl is black and has very tightly curled hair. Every few weeks she has it done up differently, with different colored beads, etc. I make sure to pay attention to when it changes so that I can tell her that it looks amazing, and she gets a huge smile on her face every time. It's often the highlight of my morning, and I truly hope that she heads off to school with more spring in her step.

Adults aren't much different -- they also like to receive compliments. Give out compliments as you see fit and soon you'll have something in common to talk about.

If you're eating alone at your desk, you are signaling that you wish to be left alone.

You might need some hobbies which are more social, like volunteering. It's very easy to fall into work -> hacking at stuff -> sleep cycle, but you can't live inside your own head for the rest of your days.

I'm older and I've lived through the analog era, before people had cell phones or internet. Facebook wasn't around when I graduated from college, so most contacts from before that withered away -- especially if you ended up living in a different state or city.

It is sometimes heart wrenching to hear about people from your past, knowing that you didn't keep in touch. A girl that I went to elementary school with, always kind of an odd girl (but in a good way), developed leukemia in her 30s and passed away in 2019. I didn't know for seven years. Seven! I went through her Facebook page and it was a roller-coaster of emotions, playing her life backward as she chronicled her condition worsening, periods of hope, all the way back to when she was saying that she had some kind of bug and felt awful.

She was a good friend to me in elementary school, but we ended up going to different high schools and different directions after that. I feel bad that we didn't keep in touch, and that I was completely unaware of her suffering.

I can't wallow in this, though, and this is where I'm attempting (maybe poorly) to make a connection to your situation. You can't change the past, but you can start making meaningful attempts to forge new relationships and to rekindle old ones. Those people that you never kept in touch with? Reach out to them, if only to say "Hi". Reach out because you want to do it, and not because you need something.

How many days will you sit there and think "why doesn't anyone reach out to me?" when you, yourself, are not also making the effort to do so?

There are plenty of people who never leave their house, and I have no idea what they do all day.

A few years ago a very small, yet very strong, thunderstorm clipped through and took out trees, mailboxes, and power. One large tree fell on a neighbor's grill, and another somehow took out mailboxes on both sides of the street.

There was so much damage, but it was amazing -- everyone was out there, together, cutting up the trees and clearing the debris from the road. I saw neighbors that I hadn't seen outside in _years_. I know that part of this was because of the chaos, but the biggest part was that nobody had power and the cell towers weren't working either. Unfortunately, it was brief.

Maybe I'm just getting old but the more I see our society the more I feel that smart phones, the internet, and social media were a mistake. I say this as I use them daily, of course, but there's some truth in the gen z phrase "touch grass".

As much as it bothers me, I do feel like I've had a healthier diet since cutting out soy. It's not the soy itself which makes these things unhealthy but rather that it's used as a filler in processed foods.

I'll be honest, though, I do miss Nutella.