adrium

Glad you mention that, fully agree! One of my primary goals will be quality - I am a perfectionist.

Good input and compliments for your project!

Sometimes, deadline for private projects are necessary and for some projects they could be completely irrelevant. Also, it is a matter of personal choice and character to set one.

The idea part is very interesting. Basically ideas are the raw, unstructured parts of projects. There is an exploration aspect to it and to realize them may bring a lot of joy - without calling them a project just yet.

So maybe your decision to finish all those ideas, wrap them up, put them together, create the video, is the very incarnation of the project. For that you probably set some purposes and goals and maybe even a deadline.

I meant this purpose in the sense that an activity brings joy, the purpose is pleasure.

Doing something while procrastinating may be enjoyable. But along with it often comes guilt - sooner or later. I had issues with procrastination and occasionally still do. Even though some outcomes of alternate activities may be good, projects should not have the purpose of procrastination.

Passing time is when you deliberately do not work on any project. I think projects can not have and should not have the sole purpose of passing time. If a project brings you joy, good, if not, the activity should not be called project.

Not sure what you mean with your comment, but 'keeping yourself busy' should not be confused with procrastinate or simply passing time. Procrastination, passing time, doing nothing, and feeling bored should also deserve time on its own.

However, I would not call them projects.

Anyway, there may be a feeling of burning on, or burning out, when private projects start to feel like a todo list...

Cool that you are seeing your progress!

Improvements are an important aspect. They are simply changes to goals and the scope.

In terms of finishing projects, it is crucial to define them and possibly define milestones in advance.

Nice, congrats to your successful projects :)

Good point about being happy with the results! I think this could be added to the definition of success.

Some results can not be improved, like sewed clothes, but there can be a review to learn something (why are you not happy with the result?) and a feedback loop, for the next project to turn out better.

Nice article with interesting thoughts and I appreciate the quotes - but I respectfully disagree that 'finishing a personal project you’re doing just for yourself is impossible'

I think it's really important to first reflect on the purpose when doing something: is it to solve a problem, is it to learn something, is it to achieve a target, is it to keep yourself busy to wind down and because you like doing it, or is it to promote yourself.

The next step is to define a goal and a scope - not a deadline.

When realizing it, it is important to take a pragmatic approach. All activities should lead towards achieving the goal - do not overengineer.

This way, projects can actually get finished.

From personal experience, I have been successful in software projects, sports competitions, building objects and furniture, and doing musical projects.

Success being defined as achieving the set goal and having completed the project.

Their purpose was never to selfpromote and the activity rarely involved creating art. So maybe art is a niche that is never finished...

Mid next year, I want to pick up writing a blog. The primary purpose is to 'keep myself busy' because I have never delved into this activity and I am curious about the process. The secondary purpose is to improve my literacy: I want to be able to read and write more efficiently, because my new job will require that. And the tertiary goal is to self-promote.

Elaborating on the topic of finishing projects would make a perfect first article. Thanks to the author for your inspiration!

It is irresponsible to use (let alone to hardcode) those addresses in the first place. But in any case, fortunately, software can be patched and it has been done so already in 'tricky' cases: Y2K and X.509 UTCTIME are examples.

My company operates big networks and it caught us off guard when 44/8 got used on the public Internet. Internal tooling used the space because it was assumed to be non-routable. Assumptions like this always carry a risk and sooner or later, they need to be fixed. In our case, a workaround could be produced within hours, and it was fixed within weeks.

0/8 support has been added in the Linux kernel as well.

Edit: scdown.qq.com resolves to 0.0.0.1 and is possibly related to WeChat. I am not sure, if the address is actually routable in China, though.

240/4 was reserved for future use more than 30 years ago. When is 'the future' if not now. Furthermore, reservations for 0/8, 127/8, and 224/4 seem mostly useless at this point.

Also Ford, Daimler, and Prudential owning huge network blocks and neither even doing business in networking, nor announcing prefixes can be referred to as outright IP squatting (if that term exists). The US DOD seems to be a squatter, too.

Based on professional experience, I doubt that networking equipment can not handle reserved blocks. And if it does not indeed, patches could be provided by vendors for sure within reasonable time.

The problem is not severe enough: neither for a switch to IPv6 (also conceived almost 30 years ago!) nor to make use of unused blocks.

I refuse to believe that IPv4 address exhaustion is actually a thing.

Hmm... Yes, but I am only aware to use it for unlocking the computer...

I have a similar experience: Some hosting providers / AS host shady stuff and I understand that VPS ranges end up on block lists quite easily.

I only block AS 4134 and AS 4837, some AS that host services like shodan, and aggressive crawlers like semrush.

Anything that sends packets to my server get ratelimited quickly. Still barely noticeable for occasional human interaction. I also started with /24, but I am now up to /12.

PS. By the way, has anyone ever seen [email protected] in the logs? It shows up almost on a weekly basis as RCPT TO address from literally all over the world.