In 2017 so far, I've written a couple of posts that have not yet made it to the publish stage. One entitled "Fixing BSDgrep," and another with general thoughts on Python. These will eventually get published. =) Here's a little bit of what I've been up to in 2017:

Ham Radio

I recently obtained my general license in the USA, and I have plans to shoot for extra in the short- to mid- term. I have a couple of Baofengs that I use, and I've also setup a Raspberry Pi (running FreeBSD, of course) with an RTL-SDR dongle plugged into it running Direwolf to capture APRS traffic.

Fixing BSDgrep

Also the subject of one of the articles I'm writing, I've spent a good chunk of time fixing BSDgrep in FreeBSD. There were many outstanding bugs open against it in Bugzilla, but I've slowly squashed each one and got a couple of improvements through in the process mostly so that I don't have to specify a working directory with -r. I've also been doing some work in other areas of the base system to help my workflow in some areas. I intend to continue trying to improve things in FreeBSD; mostly because I get a certain satisfaction out of doing so, but also because I converted al of my stuff to FreeBSD roughly two years ago now.

Server Migration

I've also managed to migrate my www droplet with DigitalOcean to another droplet, but this time with more jails. In the new setup, I've got four jails using iocage:

• db0 - Postgres jail, runs postgres 9.6, houses website databases
• vpn0 - OpenVPN server for my private network 
• www0 - Nginx jail, houses acme/letsencrypt bits
• xmpp0 - Jabber server, runs ejabberd

This is a marked increase from the one jail (xmpp0) I previously had, but SSL certs are still mounted into individual jails as required.

Future Plans

The year is still just under half-way over, and I have much to do. Here are some future plans I have for this year:

• Help get HDMI up on pine64/pinebook
• Continue FreeBSD development
• Replace old SunFire build server with more cost effective solution
• More programming

Not the most difficult lit of things to accomplish, but still worth formalizing. I reserve the right to accomplish more or less as needed.