Chess journey

What's new in Chess? Project for February and everything about IT and Linux

Author: Luca Matteo Spoljarevic
Contact: git@spoljarevic.info
Socials: https://linksta.cc/@spoljarevic
Projects: https://linksta.cc/@spoljarevic-projects
Date created: 2026-02-10
Last changed: 2026-02-11

Greetings everyone

Introduction

A lot of things have changed and I'm writing this at 11 pm with a monster energy on my right (not sponsored lol).

Chess

First of all, the most important topic, chess. I had my third chess tournament last Sunday. This time I played in the A Class (normally I play in B class) so my opponent was significantly stronger then I am. I think he was around 1350 ish? Anyway, the game started and I was unhappy from the start. My opponent neutrilized the movement of my knight and bishop quite quickly and I was defending myself the whole game. But after managing to trade queens I offered a draw, which he accepted. That was luck since the engine showed that it was around +4.6 for my opponent when I put the game into the computer afterwards. Now I only need to play 4 more games to get a DWZ, the official german Elo. Also I bought a chess clock, the DGT 3000 Limited edition to be exact, so it's easier for me to prep for over the board tournaments.

Coding goals

I also set myself a goal to write more Wiki pages on Codeberg. Currently there's a short explanation about the neovim plugin Neogit and my ASCII Converter (which I mainly wrote to document the link to the font I use). This is quite a large goal and I set the deadline to the end of the month. Not sure if I can manage to do it, but I'll try my best.

Some of my latest commit messages are a bit silly, and I apologize to everyone who doesn't like it. I'm still gonna to it since it makes me smile, so just ignore them if you don't like it.

Helping friends

A friend of mine asked me if I could fix their Notebook. Since I can only look up the serial number since he lost the charger, I did exactly that. It's quite an old ThinkPad, for Linux enough, but definitly nothing for Windows. I would love to install Linux on it, but he's unsure if he wants that. A new charging cable would cost 50 bucks, which he's not sure if he wants to pay that. I offered him to buy the Notebook, on which he replied that he needs to think about it.

My fight between Arch and Red Hat Enterprise - Linux life

Today I tried installing NVIDIA drivers on my RHEL System but failed. Since my graphics card is an old GTX 1060 dual, the new drivers won't work. I couldn't find a way to install old drivers on RHEL 10 and the official drivers from NVIDIAs website won't work. This is quite frustrating but I still have Arch installed on the same PC so I can easily dual boot into that. And honestly, I still prefer Arch a lot. I'm just trying to use RHEL since I want a job at Red Hat in the future and knowing their operating systems would surely benefit me.

But it's a pain. Arch is (in my oppionion) so much easier when it comes to install and configure things.

I use Arch with Hyprland and since a few weeks ly too. It's really great and I'm so glad that after some distro hopping, I always come back to Arch.

Updating Ansible Playbooks

Speaking of coming back to Arch, I really need to update my Ansible Playbook for Arch Linux. There's just so much stuff missing or outdated in the playbook. Maybe next month I'll open a ticket and focus on that. At the moment, besides the packages and the way images are handeled, i want to have a way to automate the configuration of my OS. Since I'm uploading nearly all my code to Codeberg, GitHub and GitLab, I'm gonna try to automate it that way. A few files need to be written maunally I guess, but that's something I'll figure out.

Besides the Playbook for Arch, I should also take a look into my other playbooks. Tailscale is still not working in Semaphore UI and I published some of my private company projects with a hardening playbook that I still need to review since it's written by AI for now.

Jumping on the Crypto hype

I know I'm late to the party but I recently discovered joy in some Crypo stuff. Specifically in Monero. I like the privacy aspect even tho it's a pain in the ass to get your hands on as a newby. After some time, I figured that it's the easiest way to buy Bitcoin (via Proton Wallet of course) and then use monero.com to convert it into XMR. My setup is the official Monero GUI and on my phone the monero.com app. And after a view days, I made my first purchase with monero, and that is...

Mullvad VPN

Yeah yeah, I know. Why should I use Mullvad when I already have Proton VPN. The answer is simple, the reputation. Don't get me wrong, Proton is great and I'm really happy to say that I'm back on the Visionary Plan, but my brain just tells me that Mullvad is slightly better when it comes to VPNs. So I made the switch, payed around 50 bucks for one year of Mullvad VPN and I really enjoy it so far. After a bit of troubleshooting, I figured out that on my PC I couldn't use Mullvad since Tailscale was constanly overwriting the DNS file. So I disabled Tailscale and Mullvad finally worked.

Still need to figure out a way of how to combine these two, but that's a problem for future me.

Honestly, I can totally recommend Mullvad VPN to everyone who seeks a trustworthy and truly private VPN!

Proton Visionary Plan

A few months ago I had to cancel my Visionary plan due to money issues. That really hurt, but there was no other way. Now it has gotten better, still not good, but better. And after canceling almost everything I had, I thought I could go back to Visionary. Besides the VPN (thanks to Mullvad), I use pretty much every Product Proton offers and it wasn't much more in terms of pricing. Maybe 15 bucks if even.

I love what Proton does and I'm glad that I can support them again.

Business plans

I keep it short, Who2Industries is paused at the moment. The business still exists and is planned to officially launch in 2028 but I'm not too sure of how it will look. My plan was to offer IT services like any other company, but now I'm thinking of turing it to a non profit organisation and just help people with their IT Problems to be nice and give the communitiy something back. Of course I can't make it a full time job this way, honestly I'm not sure how I can handle it if I do it this way, but yeah... that's my thought process at the moment.

ZED the IDE vs. Neovim

I know I know, I said I'd test Zed. But honestly, the way I used it was just Vim with an AI. Not worth my time to be honest. Instead, I spend more time customizing Neovim to my liking and what can I say except I succeeded. Neovim if now my text editor/IDE for everything I do. Watched a course on Coursera about it and learned a few new things. Not much but a little at least. Still, there's so much I need to learn to optimize my workflow, but after mastering that, I'm gonna be a god XD And of course, my full Neovim setup is on Codeberg and the other platforms inside my Dotfiles Repo.

With time I started disliking social media more and more... Now I'm so close on shutting ever socials platform down except Mastodon. I'm sick of it and if it wasn't for a few creators, I would've done it already.

Meeting new people

On a Discord Server I joined, I met a girl that was really nice. Even tho she was the server admin, she was open for me to DM her and we talked a lot over the next days. It's really nice to meet new people and make potential friends, but it's to early to call it that. This shows that you should take the step and even ask people you think are untouchable (in a sense of too high of a rank) and just see what happens. This way I met a lot of my friends and it almost always works. Be brave and just ask people you think are nice! The same thing happened on another server a few weeks ago too. I just asked someone who seemed nice if I could DM her and out of that developed something I would call a friendship.

End words

You see, I was honest when I said a lot happened since my last blog post. If you read throw this, I want to thank you so so much! It really means a lot to me and as always, feel free to message me on whichever platform you prefer. If you can't find me under the name spoljarevic, just look for who2lu. There's a big chance you'll find me and if not, just write a message to git@spoljarevic.info.

Alright, it's the 11.02.2026 in one minute and my Monster is nearly empty.

Goodbye everyone and remember... Stay private. Stay root.