Over the holidays I read a blog post where someone was answering how they are so productive and the response is they don’t want to waste a week. So every week they work on something that moves them towards their goal. I thought this was an excellent idea so I’ve been started playing with different projects every weekend to play with different ideas, technologies and the like. Keeping it small, try a tutorial or play with an idea.

So what have I been up to this month?

• Elastic search. I started with this tutorial for using Elasitic Search to index my gmail. On the way I started a new server and go a grip on how to use Elastic Search. Pretty powerful tool that I’m still figuring out ways to employ. Full-text search was a no brainer but seeing some of the aggregation capabilities was pretty interesting. Looking to see if I can use that on projects that summarize data.

• iBeacon/Raspberry Pi.
  I’ve had a Raspberry Pi sitting around and I’ve been meaning to do something interesting with it for awhile. I sat down one weekend and loaded the latest Raspbian image and went to town. I created a new machine called PiBot.Had some fun getting back down in the Linux weeds. I had picked up a Bluetooth LE USB adapter that I was able to get running. Took me a few tries to realize that the bluez, the bluetooth library that comes with debian/raspbian doesn’t support LTE. I got that rolling and am pretty happy with the results.

• Responsive Web I’ve also started carving out web stuff again, with some small changes to personal websites using skeleton for Responsive design. This I think will be a launch point to help me write new applications. I’ve started looking at mixing and matching items together. I’m working on a new project to try and build a home dashboard on the PiBot.

The goal is to keep learning and find new ways to play.