Category Archives: Life

Top 5 investments of January 2025

I woke up today thinking “I can’t believe it’s still January”, and it will still be January for one more day. I actually like it when the year moves slowly. I mean, I know every year is (almost) the same, but I like it when it feels like it’s moving slowly.

So, it got me thinking, what did I do in January? Well, a lot of things, I finally upgraded some servers, I finally started a hackerspace, and I finally figured out what I want to do this year.

That being said, I also invested a lot in January, which got me thinking, what are some of the best investments? Here’s a short list.

Sleep

Sleep is underrated. I know everyone talks about how sleeping can make your live longer, be healthier and such, but none of that actually interested me. However, last year when I learned that sleeping at least 7 hours a day makes my brain work like fire in the morning, I realized that it just got interesting! For me, everything is about productivity. How much value can I produce per minute? It’s similar to Apple’s obsession with Performance Per Watt. The more I produce, the more I can die in peace (one day), and looks like sleep is an amazing solution to that.

While I’ve been sleeping properly (as in 7 hours, at least) for (almost) more than a year now, what I didn’t know was about the schedule of sleeping. For example, I would sleep around 5AM, and wake up mid day. These days? not so much. My usual sleep schedule is around 10:30PM now, and 11PM if we have any Call For Testing, Production Users Call, and I wake up at 5AM.

Yesterday, for example, we had an outage at a data-center, and I was helping a customer recover, so I slept a bit later, but still woke up before 5:30AM.

I do think that I’m a night owl (which implies the existence of morning owls), I can easily stay up to 5AM hacking on code, or configuring servers, without any performance hit… while I’m awake! but oh boy am I gonna have a shitty next morning. It will take me around 5 hours the next day to get back my performance, my production per minute.

In today’s case, however, I was very productive until sleeping at night, and I’m productive now as well.

More importantly, when I wake up at 5AM, and get in front of the computer at 5:30AM, no one is awake (in Armenia, at least), which means I can easily get some work done without anyone bothering me via calls and text messages.

Sleep; a very good investment for 30 year old who want to produce as much as possible for the world and their family.

Internet Radio

Couple of years ago, my mentor norayr introduced me to Deep House Radio, a one-man operation from Cork, Ireland. It basically plays one DJ mix after the other, and I cannot work without it anymore. You can’t work without AI? well, sorry to hear that, but at least my online radio is not just made by people, for people, it’s also very accurate 😛

I got a Deep House Radio subscription around new year, for a year. According to their Buy Me A Coffee page, I am in the top 3 supporters from the last 90 days, which makes me very happy. The operator, Alan, provided me with two links to two streams, meaning I was able to share my subscription with my friend as well.

I want to blog? I put in Deep House Radio (like right now). I want to code? I put on DHR? I want to read? I put on DHR.

Overall, I love DHR, totally recommended.

Triode and BMBX

As soon as I got the personalized links for DHR, I pasted them into Music.app (or as I still call it, iTunes), and it worked fine, as expected. But if got me thinking, do I need this massive app just to listen to radio? I mean sure, I use iTunes to listen my music, in my library, on my computer, and to sync music with my iPod (Touch and Classic), but it seems like an overkill for a simple internet radio stream, aye?

Two days in, I needed to leave the house for a customer site, and I usually listen to music when I’m working in a Data Center (I’m sure our security officers even see me on camera dancing when running around the data center), and all I had was my iPhone, running the shittiest operating system on the planet: iOS… Okay that’s a bit extreme, that title goes to Windows, but that’s for another day.

Anyways, so iOS, the toy operating system (that fits much better), which, in 2025, gives you the ability to listen to internet radio streams in one way only: YOU HAVE TO PASTE THE LINK IN SAFARI!

Oh god, you thought using iTunes was too much for an internet radio stream? How about A WHOLE BROWSER!

So I got deep, I started searching, in the only place I could (because Apple reasons), I started digging into the App Store!

After multiple tried, I finally landed on two apps that I like: Triode and BMBX

Triode is made by a company that I like already, iconfactory. I use many of their apps, and I liked this one as too! It has a monthly and yearly subscription, and you can buy it one time as well. I opted for the latter. 

What I didn’t know is that the app was also available on macOS! which made me very, very happy. You know what made me happier? Knowing that Triode’s subscription can be shared with family members.

Another honorable mentions should be BMBX (which should be read as BoomBox, I guess?), an app that I loved so much, I kept it even after installing Triode. It has a very simple interface, it just works, I don’t know what else to say about it.

In an ideal world, I’d like to see any of these apps being open-source. Maybe I should email them about it, and see if that’s possible?

Good January

So, in conclusion, (almost) every night I go to sleep at a reasonable hour, listening to Deep House Radio, using Triode, and this made me very happy.

Invest in people, invest in yourself, be useful for society. Isn’t that what’s all life is about?

Wait, the title says top 5 investments, I only mentioned 3? Oh well, here’s two more:

  • Spend more time with friends and family, you mean a lot to them
  • It’s 2025, why haven’t you learned Unix tools yet? time to read that AWK book!

That’s all folks…

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Antranig Vartanian

November 12, 2023

I spent some time and moved my What I Use page to WordPress. I finally have a good reason to use the details HTML tag.

I also updated the content! My new music player(s) is the iPod! More about that, soon!

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Quitting Smoking, Again

I think it was Mark Twain who said once,

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times

In reality, I’ve never felt addicted to smoking, sometime around 2018 I’ve even stopped smoking for like 9-10 months, but after a couple of stressful days I’ve started smoking again.

I made a deal with myself that next year I will run a marathon. I know it wont be easy, but at least I can try.

Obviously I started with walking and turns out my cardio is worse than ever, and hence, I will quit smoking.

So, a new event has been added to my calendar, well, multiple actually, where every 3 months I check, “hey, you didn’t start smoking again, did you?”

And hopefully, I will finally run a marathon.

That’s all folks… Wish me luck!

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Antranig Vartanian

July 20, 2022

The apartment building in front of our house feels like the United Nations. There’s so many flags.

The obvious one is, of course, the flag of Armenia. Then there’s the flag of Nagorno-Karabakh. The new wave of migrants means that there’s also an Ukrainian flag. I’ve seen some other flags too, but not sure which country was it.

Our balcony is small, if it was bigger I’d join them too. Also, we’re on the last floor where everyone would be able to see the flag.

Wave your flags, folks!

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Citing Saturday: John le Carré

If you haven’t watched it, I totally recommend you check out The Night Manager, either the novel or the TV series.

As I said before, I’ll be doing Citing Saturday, which I’m doing on Sunday, but technically Monday, because I messed up my sleeping schedule.

And here’s a quote:

Promise to build a chap a house, he won’t believe you. Threaten to burn his place down, he’ll do what you tell him. Fact of life.

– John le Carré, The Night Manager

That’s all folks.

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Techlife Crisis

This is another migration story, like the one that I wrote back in 2020. Unlike the other story, the motivation of this migration is totally different. It’s emotional instead of technical.

Last year a friend of mine got a new job that I referred her to. She passed the interviews and I helped her to get on-boarded as the employer was a friend of mine and I was pretty familiar with their product. The job was remote and she didn’t have a good laptop. Since I have many laptops I ended up giving her my ThinkPad T480s where she ran Ubuntu. As you can tell the employer was a VERY close friend of mine 🙂

All of this meant that I moved back to my MacBook Pro running macOS. I used to like macOS, for me it was always a rock-solid UNIX system with a proper graphical interface.

Unfortunatly these years the UNIX part is not solid anymore and the graphical interface is more iOS-y eye candy than a proper desktop interface.

But I was okay with that, since I spent most of my time in a terminal running vim, ssh, etc. I’d run typical work apps like Mail.app with GPGSuite and a Slack browser client.

But then something snapped in me. I think it was after the car accident. I spent two weeks at home, not able to work. So I started coding on my open-source projects again, doing some patches in FreeBSD, improving code on software that I like and so on.

I realized that I’ve been an Open Source advocate for years, and yet I was in the Apple ecosystem. Not that I don’t like the Apple ecosystem, don’t get me wrong, but as someone who’s been telling the government to use open source, helping them migrate, giving lectures to students about the open source movement and its history, I felt… bad.

I had this MacBook Pro laptop and this iPhone that both control me more than I can control it.

I contacted my friend again, asking if we can swap the laptops and she told me yes. She actually ended up working at our company and now she has a fancy new MacBook Pro while I came back to my lovely ThinkPad T480s running FreeBSD like I wanted in the first place.

As I mentioned, this time it hit me hard, so I decided to escape non-OSS things completely and now I’m running a Pixel 2 with Lineage OS.

There’s a whole story on how I got that Pixel 2 at this day and age and that story is coming soon. And the funniest thing is, as soon as I completed my transaction/migration to Open Source, I got the news that Apple Pay will finally work in Armenia.

Open Source changed my life when I was a kid in Syria, I learned more about computers because of Open Source and while I got distracted with the cute and nice macOS for a while, it’s time to come back home.

Here’s a screenshot

That’s all folks!

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Wrong Indicators

Bryan Cantrill has this amazing talk about debugging where he tells the story of Three Mile Island.

After watching that talk all I thought was “well, let’s hope this doesn’t happen in my life”, and by “my life”, I meant my personal or work server, not my AFK life!

55 days ago my girlfriend and I moved to a new apartment downtown the capital. I like everything about this house, specially that many things are electric, including the stove.

Like a sane person, when I see a stove with multiple levels (1, 2, 3) I assume that the lowest number is the lowest and highest number is the highest.

Now you’d think and say “Antranig, didn’t you notice that your cooking was talking 2 hours, so there must be something wrong?”

Oh no, my friend, very much no. As you can see we have two stove tops, a small one and a big one. Now, the small one is working very fine. At the highest level it heats more than at lowest level.

But the big one, the big stove top, not so much.

We thought that there’s a problem with that top and used it only during slow emergencies.

One day I come home from work and Lilith is laughing. I asked “what happened?” and she replied “you’re not gonna believe this!”

Well she was right, it’s been couple of days now and I still can’t believe this. I mean if both of the stove tops were in reverse order, I would understand that someone was very Unix-y and they wanted to design it similar to nice.

But when each of those knobs are the exact opposite of each other, it makes you think, “why me?”

Why me indeed.

That’s all folks!

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2021 Retrospective

Lately Rubenerd blogged about Reading people’s blog archives and I remembered that I used to do that when I had nothing better to do. One of my favorites was Norayr’s yearly retrospective. Let’s try doing the same here.

I’m happy that I’m not doing this last year, as 2020 was the year of pain, loss and war.

2021, on the other hand, was the year of happiness, gain and love.

Let’s start 🙂

Personal life

  • I finally had a proper vacation
  • I moved with my girlfriend, Coffee, to a new apartment!
    • It has an amazing view of our lovely city, Yerevan 🙂
  • Had a car accident around October
    • No major incident, fully recovered
  • My ideological crisis made me rethink my technological choices

Technology

  • I moved to open-source Android, LineageOS, running on my Google Pixel 2 phone.
    • You’d think that now I’ve completely ditched Apple, but that’s not true.
    • A friend of mine needed a laptop, so I moved back to my MacBook Pro and gave her my ThinkPad T480s
  • I learned JavaScript and started writing VueJS at work
  • Wrote a new FreeBSD Jail orchestration software named Jailer. I planned on open-sourcing it in the Summer, but with the lack of hands I hope it will be released Spring of 2022
    • I moved all my servers to Jailer
  • I ditched music streaming services and I’m more than happy with this choice
  • I moved all my networks to WireGuard and I’m happy with that choice too!

Blogging

  • I wrote 65 entries, which makes me sad. I hope I will blog a lot more in 2022
    • I wrote a blog post about blogging regularly where I mentioned Jamie Zawinski. Then I emailed that blog post to him. When I was drunk. I also mentioned that I was drunk. Good thing he replied 🙂
  • 3 of my entries were posted on the orange site with many people commenting about them
  • I added a comment section to my website using isso
  • Reading more about blogging led me to learn about Dave Winer
    • Which led me to learn about OPML and oldSchoolBlog, which I still don’t know how to use or even if I should
  • I redid the theme of my website based on Archie theme which was written by Athul
  • I automated my writing process using Shell Scripts

Community

  • I organized the first Systems We Love — Armenia meetup
    • The plan was to make it a monthly thing, but life happened
  • For years I dreamed about an Armenian Open-Source Ecosystem, as of 2021 we have
  • We went to the city of Stepanavan and organized a GradaranCamp (LibraryCamp) at the Stepanavan public library. Unlike me, my friends continue organizing it
  • I started using Twitter Spaces which led me to talk with my idols, including Bryan Cantrill. His talks have shaped my methodology and ideology for years. I don’t have the word to describe how happy I am about this. I kinda still don’t believe it 🙂

Talks

  • I have given 8 talks this years, including and not limited to
    • Portland Linux/Unix Group Online Meeting: 360Cloud based on FreeBSD
    • BarCamp 2021: FreeBSD Cloud
    • BarCamp 2021: Open-Source ecosystems and Armenian tech communities
    • BarCamp 2021: Information Security Panel
    • PYerevan #15 Meetup: Tracing Production
    • ArmSec 2021: Tracing hackers for fun and profit
    • ArmSec 2021: DNSSEC in Armenia

Work

I hope 2022 brings the best to all of us.

That’s all folks

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Car accident and pain

So I had a car accident two weeks ago and like any sane person my first action was to tweet about it. It’s good to let people know that you will be offline for couple of weeks.

There were no serious injuries to the bone, but my muscles hurt till now. The main reason why I wanted to go offline so I don’t become asshole do mistakes while under pain.

The downtime was good. I was able to spend some time contributing to some personal and open-source projects that I care about.

At this point I’m back on track, hopefully will blog about some upcoming personal and $WORK news.

That’s all folks…

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