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A space for my thoughts.

I don't write anything too serious on here; these are mostly shower thoughts from an engineer. My new year's resolution for 2024 is to write one article per week on average. Browse on the navigation menu on the left or type in the search bar at the top to look for articles. Click on the links in the footer to view my homepage, send me an email, or visit my other online presence. Enjoy!

Changing the Bathroom Fan Really Blows

I can't say I'm a huge fan of this last home upgrade project, and I'm writing this article to vent. I recently replaced my bathroom fan, which I've had no prior experience with and decided to give it a whir. All the warnings seem to have been mist on me, but completing this project was really a breath of fresh air.

Composting

I've been practicing trench composting for over a year now in my small garden. It's been a good way to eliminate waste and improve soil health. By putting food scraps back in the ground, it adds nutrients to the soil, sparking life and feeding my plants. It also gets me going outside and a good discipline to hold myself to - not to mention the more time I spend at my garden, the more I'll inadvertently care for it. However there's some plant-related topics I want to get off my chest.

Fake Grass

I highly despise fake grass, which is also known as artificial turf. It not only prevents natural plant growth, but it is actively harmful to the environment.

Speed of Driving

It's a little stressful when you're driving exactly the speed limit (of course, I would never go beyond the posted speed limit) and someone zooms by you at 10, 15, or sometimes 20+ miles per hour. As a bonus, these people will usually weave through traffic too. What's so important that you'd risk your life, and several other peoples', to save some time? Maybe, man's gotta poo. Who knows? But something I do think about, is how much time are they actually saving, assuming they don't get into a crash or stopped by the police?

Custom Domains in Gmail

Go to | #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 | #7

I'm reviving an old series here. This one branches off of story #5, where I split up my Gmail account to use a custom email for each online account. But now, instead of exposing my Gmail account, I can use one of the custom domains I own to send and receive emails, directly in my Gmail mail client, for free! For example, I can now send and receive emails from an address like example@nicfv.com. It was an adventure to figure out this project and quite a lengthy headache at times.

2024: A Year for nicfv

2024 was a big year! I completed and exceeded both of my New Year's resolutions, did a lot of running, visited 2 new countries, and worked on a lot of cool projects. Let's go over the 2024 recap for this mysterious individual named Nicolas Ventura.

Owning Property, (Almost) Two Years Later

It's crazy to think, but coming up on two years now, I purchased my condo. I absolutely love it and have no regrets, but there are some things I wish I had considered. Here's a short story of what I wished I could tell myself those 2 years ago, and things (specific to me) that are really important in finding a place to live.

Working with an NPM Monorepo

It's no secret that I'm developing a series of npm packages. The primary reason I'm doing this is for code reuse. I want to build up more complex programs using as much of my own software as possible. Second, the packages I'm developing might also benefit other developers. Also, the secret third reason I'm doing this is just for fun. Although there have been times where I really questioned my secret third reason. One of those recent times was when I changed my development strategy from maintaining several independent repositories to maintaining just one monorepo containing all my packages.

Connecting to Public Wifi

I'm currently writing this from my laptop running Kubuntu 24.04 in a public space; Peet's Coffee. (The matcha latte here is good.) I had some difficulty connecting to the public wifi. Luckily, I had my smartphone with me, which gave me options.