Today was a lot of exploratory work with tech to solve a couple problems.

I want to use a tiling window manager on my work PC.

I want to stream media from my Home PC to my phone or work PC.

I knew that I could easily access a network stream, or an internet radio station, from programs that I use regularly (Podcast Addict on my phone, VLC on my work PC). So, I had to figure out how I could set up an internet radio station.

I got set up with icecast and liquidsoap. icecast hosts streams and acts as the distributor. liquidsoap configures the scheduling of the content in the streams.

With my minimal setup, I've got one network stream set up with some of my old beats on shuffle. I can tell with liquidsoap that you can already do a lot of cool things, so I'm looking forward to experimenting with that.

My idea so far is to create radio stations based on certain goals of mine and to just connect to them when I want to engage. Sometimes, not being able to choose the specific song playing at any given moment is a good thing; I am free to spend my energy making choices elsewhere.

I'm satisfied with this setup so far. But, one potential issue is the fact that it's streaming-forward. Will I incur massive data transfer costs? It's also not something that I can engage with when I'm without a network connection. What if I have a playlist that I engage with when I want to get in the flow but I'm without a network connection?

I was also learning some sketchybar and aerospace. I've tried to set these technologies up before but came to various issues that I didn't feel like resolving in the moment, for the sake of speed. So, with my free time, I decided to try again. I set up something very minimal and will have to reproduce it on my work laptop in short time.