I have been thinking about why I continue to maintain this blog. What is its purpose? Is it good for me? Should I continue? Can I continue? In this post I would like to dive into this.

First of, I started this blog a six years ago, back in April of 2020. Originally my purpose with the blog was to discuss tech things. Programming, backups, network, and more. But over time it became more of just a miscellaneous blog, where I discuss whatever. Still tech has a heavy hold. But I have also discuss food and miniature painting. Yet, what very few know is that the blog started with two purposes, one I already discussed. The second was improving my writing skills. I am, still, working on a novel. But writing skill in a more literal sense rather than academic and technical sense was lacking. Therefore, I want to utilise this blog to expand this skill set and I do find that it has evolved over time. Additionally the blog gave me a way to write down my thoughts on certain topics that I thought other might need. And through this, the blog gave me a sense of purpose. So why have I been thinking about why I maintain the blog?

I have been thinking about this, because I am not happy with how rarely I post. So, I have been feeling stressed about it a little. But there is actually a deeper reason for it. At the moment I cannot share so much of my primary work without potential trouble. As a lot of my work now is proprietary and I cannot share it. Well I can if I make it very abstract, but then the fun gritty details are left out. Which intone reduce the value of the post I would make. I can share some of the work I do on the RDK platform. But it is a grey area. I can would be able to share the open source stuff. But really, that is not so interesting. The interesting stuff like hardware abstraction layers and so on, is a no go. So what would the purpose of this blog become then?

Well that leads into the is it good for me to have a blog and should I continue? Indeed is good for me, I love writing blog post and put them up online. Which answers the second question, should I continue, yes! But I want to change the rules for myself a bit. First of, I will not expect myself to have one post a month or something like that. I will write on draft posts until they are ready and then release them. I do not want to rush through a post and then half ass it. That is just not the person I am. Plus it is clearly not good for my psyche.

But what then becomes the purpose. Well! I have plans! As some have noticed, I have been writing more about mental health. In particular screen time. I would like to continue down this avenue. Not because I am professional, because I am not! But because I find that certain things work for me and I want to share it. I really do believe I can help people in this area. I do not want to become a coach. I just want to share the little nuggets I find. This is both to help my readers and myself.

I will also continue to do tech post. Probably mainly programming. But I would like more deep dives. Like how does a data structure work, write example in C or C++, maybe rust. What is generic programming, and so on. More the stuff that good engineers should know, in my opinion.

Finally, I would like to show case some other work. Which is more in regards to teaching material. But I am not sure it belongs here. We will see.

Thanks for reading

./Lars

So I have used yocto since 2024 as part of my position at Sky Labs Aalborg. Whilst, at work I mainly provide recipes that integrates into a larger yocto based project. This has made me build a few yocto based projects in my spare time, mainly focusing on creating a simple print server system and a simple storage system. So I do have some understanding about very big and very tiny yocto projects.

But, before we dive into why I love it. Let me briefly touch on what is actually is. yocto at is core is a (collection) of tools that allows you to build a custom Linux distribution. Some would argue that it is only for constructing Linux distributions for embedded devices. Yet, I have seen it used for building very heavy distros no for embedded devices. Also, it is a project under the Linux Foundation.

So why do I like and why did write this post? Let us start with the latter. Amongst my colleagues and on forums online, I have heard a lot of arguments against yocto. Must circling about when a project gets large enough, it gets too difficult to manage or the build gets heavy. Some even suggest switching too alternative tools, one popular option seems to be BoB.

Okay, let us talk about why I like it then. Firstly, getting started with yocto is super simple! The Yocto Project Quick Build guide, pretty much sets you up for success. One thing here, the guide is focused on Debian and Ubuntu based distros. However, it is fairly easy to find a guide for how to get it running on OpenSuse or Fedora. When you have followed the quick build it is easy to advance on to the next steps.

Secondly, manuals! To me it honestly feels like the yocto project took inspiration from freeBSD and its in depth handbook or ArchLinux wiki. If it is not in the documentation why are you even doing it???? That of course is a joke. The manuals are quite and an excellent resource

recipes.

https://bootlin.com/training/yocto/

I originally planned this to be a post on Mastodon, You can follow me here if you want. But, it simply got to long for that format. So here it is, in a longer form than I originally planned.

I got asked an interesting question by a junior developer a couple of weeks ago. The question was quite simple but interesting; “What do you do to wind down”.

For the longest time! I have had an annoying issue with my Mac Studio. A little over half of my disk was being used. I have a 1TB disk. Of this roughly 266GB was used on System Data.

There are so many post about this on Apples own discussion board, on Reddit, on Ask Different, and so on. YouTube has over a 100 videos about cleaning it and so. However, none of these solved the issue for me.

I went through application data, caches, and all the other fluff. Which according to the different resources could be the potential issue. Then! I noticed something. My Time Machine had been failing since July last year. YEAH YEAH I know CHECK YOU FLIPPING BACKUPS. I do check the others, I promise!

Which made me think, what does Time Machine do with the backups it prepare? Turns out it stores some form of snap short locally on your machine. But how can you know that? Because it sure as hell, is not obvious from Time Machine settings.

Well enter tmutil. Which let you interact with time machine through the command line. If you look at the man page you will see the verb listlocalsnapshots. This let you list all local snapshots for a give mount point. To get for you Macintosh hard drive run the command tmutil listlocalsnapshots /. For me this gave me a list of 21 one snap shots:

com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-034253.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-29-232838.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-29-180459.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-162801.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-29-190510.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-080956.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-101239.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-125847.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-003759.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-070449.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-29-213724.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-141114.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-152753.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-021149.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-091308.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-050221.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2025-07-07-205826.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-060144.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-30-113605.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-29-223324.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2026-03-29-200941.local

First things first! APPLE!!!! Why are these not in order? Secondly, that is quite a lot although the do not seem to be so widely disburse. This sort of worried me because I have had my time machine hard drive connected. So why had it not taken any backups? Well that is saga for another day.

But how much space did these snapshot take? Well, honestly I did not care about what was in them, as I have other backups I know is up to date and more importantly working! So I decided to delete them ALL. No dry run no nothing! Like a pro! Or something to that extend. Turns out tmutil has a command for this called deletelocalsnapshots. Please notice the s in the end. The full command goes either tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <MOUNT POINT> or tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <DATE>. It deletes ALL snapshots from either the mount point or from the date you provide. I could not find one that actually can delete a single snapshot. So powerful tool, a true nuke! Either nuke with day precision or nuke it from orbit.

But what did this give me? Well my System Data Storage usage went from 266GB to 25.23GB so roughly a 10.5x decrease. Significant! Magnificent! So maybe you can give this a try. Though, I do urge you to be careful. In case there might be something in those snapshots you have deleted but needs.

NOW my next quest in this saga will be to find out what the hell is wrong. Is it the disk? Is it my mac? Is it macOS? A dark curse? Is it something else? Who knows? I do not. I have literally never seen Time Machine fail like this. And I have been using on the first mac I got with Mac OS X Leopard, so since 2008. Almost two decades without failure. What happened?

I will find out.

People who follow this blog knows that I would like to reduce my screen time and spend time on other things. You can read about this in my post: How I am using less time on my Phone.

Now, whilst what I describe in the blog post just mention, does keep my screen time below 2 hours and often below 1.5 hours it is (to me) still a lot. I would like to average between 45 minutes and 1.5 hours max. The reason for this is, that I find my focus going up the less I use my phone with active screen time. Gaining focus is a goal for me. In particular in terms of being present when I am with other people and when I am doing a task. Be it at work or at home.

But, wait. What do I mean with active screen time. With active screen time I mean actually swiping around my phone and actively engaging with applications.

So how did I reach my new goal? Well, if you do not know iOS has a Focus Modes, some times only called focus. A focus mode allows you to set up what notifications you let through, what apps are available and more. For a long time, since the feature became a thing I have used a modified version of the sleep mode. It silence all notifications, except from my wife and my immediate family, I can only see the phone, messages, clock, health, and a few other apps. Just counted, it is apps in total. My phone goes into this mode about 30 minutes before my planned sleep time, so I do not get tempted to use some of my more time consuming applications.

I have also been a heavy user of the Do Not Disturb, in particular back when I was still in academia. Honestly, I think most students should have their phone in this during mode during the day and during evening study sessions.

However, do to the need for me being a little contactable during the work day, I had a struggle getting a mode that fully worked. So, now I have set up a custom mode (still called work) that I use daily, It is active whilst I am at my work location. I have the same notifications rules as in sleep, only my wife and immediate family. The mode allows me access to the following type of applications:

• Select Communication
• All music and audio book related
• Health releated
• Todos
• Security and Identification

While I would actually prefer to not have to use my phone for communication at work, I do need access to a few communication applications. Element for matrix communication, as I have some issues with the desktop application that is available on Ubuntu. I mainly use this application to stay in contact with the FOSS community when needed. Then there is signal, where I know if I get a message during the work day there is a pretty good reason for it. Finally Phone and Messages, as this is how I mainly communicate with my family. Also emails are allowed, though I mainly check them from my laptop.

For music apps I allow all. I am pretty heavy user of Apple Music Classical, Apple Music, Apple Books, and Bandcamp. With the three first being my main source of music and audio books. Bandcamp I will explain in another blog post. But I love having access to music whilst I work, as it help me focus. And YouTube just does not cut it during work ours as I fairly quickly get sucked into looking more interesting YouTube videos. Also YouTube has frustrating ads. But wait, why use a phone at all why not just use (for instance) Spotify? Well honestly… I have had such bad experience with Spotify that I do not see myself use it, again, ever. And I actually do not always use my phone because both Apple Music Classical and Apple Music has Web Players now :D

Health Apps! For reasons, I keep a tight look on my rough step count, pulse, and more. All of this I have consolidate into health where I can. And where I cannot I have allowed myself to use these apps.

Things and Apple Reminders are my jam. I use them for different types of todos and they honestly help me stay sane throughout the day. BY THE WAY Cultred Code where is my GTK based Things app for Linux???? I desperately need access to these to ensure I do not forgot stuff throughout the day.

Then there is Security and Identification apps. I have many, to many, two-factor authentication apps and a few password managers, which I do need access to through the day. Also in Denmark we insist on using MitID for accessing banks, governement sites, and more. Therefore, I need access to these from time to time during my work day.

Finally, I still sometimes need to be able to access the internet during meetings where I did not bring a laptop. To access different standard documents and more. Therefore, I have allowed Safari. This, however, annoys me as I sometimes have a hard time not using the app for less relevant things.

Setting up this Focus Mode has let me reduce my screen time even further! I actually cut my screen time by 30 minutes on average. Mainly, because I do not use my phone during micro breaks.

Now, I have now expanded my use of these modes to include one 1 hour before bed. I have almost the same restrictions as my work mode. But, I add a few Apps that I can use like Duolingo, Mendely, and Photos. This has actually added an additional 15-30 minutes reduction in screen. Bringing me solidly within the 45 minutes to 1.5 hours average I was aiming for. I even have a few days of 30 minutes screen time. Mainly taken up by Duolingo, and email and internet browsing where for the later I mainly go to Mastodon.

Findings

I have run with the above setup since January and I have some findings which I would like to present. These I have divide into a few sub categories.

For tasks

This section is not just in regards to work, but also tasks in my leisure time. I find that I do not have the same issues focusing deeply on a task that I have had in the past. It is also easier for me to juggle multiple tasks at the same time. Both are a huge benefit that overall have greatly increased my performance and I, honestly, make less mistakes.

Sleep

Whilst I have never had a problem falling asleep, staying asleep has been a problem. After, the introduction of my evening focus mode, I have found that my sleeping has gotten much less interrupted. And while I do not trust my smart watches sensors that much, it does appear to agree. I feel more rested and have started waking half an hour earlier than my alarm goes off. Though, I already was an early bird, it is nice to see I could get some gains there also.

Over all focus

Over all focus here, expands on the task section above to include things like, writing for this blog, personal coding projects, reading, cooking, and the list goes on. My focus has greatly expanded, during writing, reading, and coding sessions I no longer reach for my phone. I know how 45 minute reading sessions where I do not think about my phone. This has been amazing and I truly feel like I have won back my reading habits! In general, I simply do not grab for my phone so often anymore. Note: I have had a side question with listing to full music albums or self curated playlists which I will also have a blog post about later.

Where the heck is my phone

A thing I found surprising is that I forget my phone. Without wanting to, I go the bathroom with a phone, I go to meetings without my phone, I go out in the garden without my phone. It is quite weird, as this is not a habit I have had before. Whilst, I am writing this, I literally looked at my desk to verify that it was there. Sometimes, I notice that it is far away because my head phones cut out. It is quite annoying sometimes, when the phone is somewhere else and I need it. But hey, then I get some extra steps in.

Why the heck am I just watching YouTube

A thing I find weird, is that I do not enjoy watching YouTube as much as I use to. Some evenings I literally just feel like “Nah I do not want to watch”. Then I go pick up a book, clean, or something else. My wife has actually commented on this.

I will add here that I do often listen to audio books whilst doing stuff. But that is more just to enjoy the time more. Yet, I do want to cut that out too over time. Not saying here that there is anything wrong with audio books.

An extension is also, gaming has sort of lost its appeal. I have to be in a very specific mood to game.

Conclusion

Focus mode helped me a lot. I have shaved between 30 minutes to an hour of my active screen time. My focus has indeed improved and I do not feel like I constantly need to consume content anymore. Furthermore, I do not get gratification from doom scrolling YouTube and Social Networks. My Reddit abuse have been greatly reduced too. I do not even have the app on my phone anymore, only on my tablet.

I highly recommend configuring Focus Modes on your phone. They do exists on Android as well, I just believe they have a different name.