Interested to know what I do in my free time or fun conversation topics to bring up? You’ve come to the right place! For my research interests, see /research.
Reading blog posts
As you might be able to tell from my Mastodon profile, I’m not the most active on social media. Instead, I prefer to read blog posts. It serves a similar purposes to me. I know that I can follow Mastodon feeds using an RSS reader, but I really prefer to follow blogs where:
- The typical post is longer than a toot/tweet, my preference is a 5-8 minute read.
- There aren’t consistently multiple posts per day. I don’t want my RSS reader to be overwhelmed by a handful of people.
A great consequence of this is that there’s a finite number of posts for me to check out per day.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a natural tendency over time for people to stop creating new posts. This means I am always on the hunt for new interesting blogs to follow. As of 2025, I follow 1355 RSS feeds. It’s entirely likely that several hundred of these are dead. If you have a blog, reach out and let me know!
Every so often, I get asked for recommendations on which blogs to follow. Since the majority of the blogs I follow post less than once a week, often times those authors aren’t top of mind. To get around this, I’ve created the postroll. This is a partial list of blog posts that I’ve enjoyed recently. My hope is that if you find their posts interesting too, that you would give them a follow!
Going on walks
Spending the majority of my days sitting in front of a computer screen; I’m always happy when I take the time to go on a walk and admire nature’s natural beauty.
My favorite walking trail near Troy, NY is at Peebles Island State Park. They have a two mile perimeter loop around the island where you can look out into the Mohawk River. Depending on the water levels, there are also spots where you can walk into the river.
Near that park is the Erie Canal Lock E-2. It’s in operation during the summer, and it’s fun to see small boats move up and down in elevation.
Also near Troy, NY is Grafton Lakes State Park. During the summer, you can canoe along the large lakes, and sometimes during the winter you can walk on the ice admire the frozen lakes. The Long Pond trail is covered in trees which gives you the great forest feel that you see in the Eastern coast of the US.
Sometimes, I feel like recording my GPS track and pictures and uploading them onto my website. You can find them at /tracks
Tinkering with technology
Never is there a dull moment in technology, there’s always so much to learn. I enjoy diving into a project and sharing what I learn on my blog. While I tinker regularly at work, in my personal life, a lot of my blog posts stem from playing around with my website and self-hosting.
For example, tinkering with my website resulted in:
- Rolling out my own CDN with GeoDNS
- Listing Offline Pages with Service Workers
- Linting my blog posts with Vale
- Mapping the states I visited
While playing with my homelab led to:
- Monitoring my Hard Drives with SMART Attributes
- Accessing Homelab Services Remotely with mTLS
- Webhook notifications on systemd service failure
- Setting up unprivileged containers with LXC on Fedora 38
I like to keep my eyes peeled for new projects to self-host. I really need to write a blog post on what services I’m currently running. Though the following services are tried and tested for me and I use them regularly:
Hedgedoc: Superb-real-time-Markdown-collaboration tool! I use it multiple times a week for hashing out ideas with other people.
Syncthing: File synchronization tool that has never failed me. I have an always-on instance on my server in an attempt to limit conflicts. You can even set it up so that you don’t use any of the public pools.
Nextcloud: File sharing tool which makes it easy way for me to create a share link that’s password protected and expires. I don’t really use its other features.
Home Assistant: Smart home automation. We all have to turn lights on and off somehow in the 21st century. Combine this with MQTT and lightbulbs/switches flashed with Tasmota, and you have a fully open-source smart home that operates only within your local LAN and magically works.
Reading Manga
Having to read lots of dense technical content for work, I enjoy reading manga at night since it’s typically less dense and includes lots of pictures. Also I enjoy stories that end, and don’t feel like it has to drag on for >500 chapters.
The following is a sampling of manga I’ve enjoyed. As it’s been some time since I’ve read some of these, the plot is not top of mind, so I won’t go into the plot of these and instead give a high-level overview.
The quintessential fantasy story following an elf mage named Frieren as she travels with her companions Fern and Stark. Living for more than 1000 years, Frieren has seen companions and even civilizations come and go. Honestly, the world-building is fantastic and I highly recommand you give this a read.
Benefit of dating a girl in the drama club? She can act out many personalities and provide a whole harem in one package. This manga is a cute light-hearted romance with comedic undertones as Rin acts as cool-chan, tsundere-chan, spoiled-chan, and four other personalities. Eiji, on the other hand as a non-actor who works on props for the club, replies to Rin’s personalities in an awkward but lovable way.
A cute manga about a girl named Shiina dating a coppersmith named Shuu. Lots of great character moments and overall a warm and fuzzy read.
Alvin the knight and Karla the healer join together to adventure in a comedic fantasy universe. The story focuses on their interactions with Karla regularly making jabs at Alvin. This story has an anime adaption, but honestly, the pace when reading the manga made me laugh out loud a lot more.
Medical drama where Psychiatrist Konosuke Yowai helps his patients going through depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, PTSD, and others. The manga highlights the struggles that these patients face and points out how their country does not help given that their society doesn’t fully recognize mental illnesses.
Shun and Naoki are in the Going-Home club, and while that may seem boring, there’s always a detour along the way! It’s a slow paced wholesome romance between two high school kids and crazy enough no weird drama.
A slice of life primarily focused on one person, Takako-san. She has better hearing than most and the chapters revolve around her processing the world around her.
Want to see a romantic slice-of-life story about a young couple living together? Then this is a story for you. It’s a very wholesome story which teaches you to never steal your partner’s pudding.
A slapstick comedy where Saburou and Reiko are anchors trying their best to bring you the latest new stories. Except one of them might be a bit too lax on the delivery…
Playing Video Games
Early in my childhood I played a lot of flash-based games on the Internet including:
- Blooms Tower Defense
- Learn to fly
- You can’t help but root for the cute penguins.
- Pandemic
- Fancy Pants adventure
- Epic Battle fantasy
- McDonald’s
- Yes this a real flash-game parody where you’re trying to grow the empire. It captures the entire process: from growing soy, slaughtering cows, selling burgers, and do whatever the folks in HQ do.
In 2012, I got a steam account:
- Civilization V & VI
- Gotta love the multiplayer sessions where your friend is taking forever to decide what his nation should focus on for the next 100 years.
- Star Trek Online
- For some reason, the second hand market in this MMO was really good.
- Neverwinter
- Faster than Light
- Long Live the Queen
- Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale
- Strangely, I have a fond spot for shop management games.
A friend really enjoyed playing shooter games, so we played some together:
- Risk of Rain 1 & 2
- From a nostalgic standpoint, I like the first version a lot more. I have many memories trying to collect as many Barbed Wire as I can to fill up the entire screen. This might’ve caused a few of our runs to crash…
- Warframe
- Star Wars: Battlefront 2
In the last five years, two games that I’ve enjoyed are:
- Chrono Ark
- For the King I & II
Nowadays, I’m enjoying what Honkai Star Rail has to offer. Hoyoverse has really expanded over the years, take a look at the beautiful character trailers they’re releasing on YouTube.
Watching Hockey
During the winter season, when it gets dark at 4:30 PM. Nothing brings the hype back into the evenings like Hockey does.
It’s a great experience! Clare and I bought season hockey passes for seeing RPI’s hockey games. I write about it in more detail here.
Inactive Interests
The time I spend on my interests waxes and wanes and that’s okay! I wrote a series of blog posts on Amateur Radio, and while I do not partake in the hobby regularly currently, I still find it exciting.
Maybe I’ll be convinced to get and play around with the Flipper Zero?