Musings

consistency and poetry

2024-02-22T19:31:17.000Z

I wrote recently on the benefits of consistency in keeping a regular routine and fulfilling positive habits, but there’s another reward that consistency confers: improved skill.

my poetic journey

I enjoy writing poetry. But while I was okay at it, I don’t think my poetry was actually something I was proud of until recently.

Near the end of my time in High School, I began to take poetry seriously. Specifically, I began writing it in earnest and trying to improve. I wrote a few poems I was proud of, but overall I simply wasn’t very good.

So, after starting university, I tried something new: every night, before going to bed, I’d write a poem from scratch and post it to Mastodon with the tag #GoodnightPoem. A few others joined me.

I kept this practice up regularly for about two months, and in that time my poetry went from mediocre to pretty good. Occasionally, there’s been a gem.

So, there’s my less on consistency: writing a poem every night, despite my lack of skill, helped form the skill where it lacked.

consistency as a skill-builder

The most common form of this idea that you’ll hear is “practice makes perfect”. But it’s not just practice that builds skill, it’s consistent practice. Writing a ton of poems is great and will teach me a good deal, but writing regular, consistent amounts over an extended period of time is what really solidified those skills for me.

If I want to be a skillful writer, I need to write regularly. If I want to be a skilled programmer, I need to code regularly. If I want to be a skilled musician, I need to make music regularly.

It comes down to time allocation: what’s the most valuable way that you can spend your time? You have a limited amount of time to spend—if you like, imagine time as a literal currency that you “spend” and budget out what you will purchase with that time.

A common response to the “I don’t have time to write complaint” is to remind those making the complaint that there always is time, they just aren’t prioritizing writing. While true, I think that argument is somewhat unfair. (And I must admit, I’m guilty of having made this argument before—though with reading, not writing.)

Not everyone has the kind of time it takes to become a master of writing. There are more pressing things to spend time on; it’s a busy world. Writing is a joy, but not everyone has the time to hone the skill it takes.

So the question becomes, how can you best improve your skill with the least amount of time required?

And honestly, after a long time asking that same question, I think that my “Goodnight Poem” project is an excellent contender for the title. It took me perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes per night and often even less, and I received so much joy and ability from the exercise.

While I’m here, I’d like to share a few of my favorite poems from the exercise, which I’ve published on this site:

conclusion

I plan to start up this habit again. I’ll be writing regular poetry, every day—though perhaps not always at nighttime, that’s no longer the best time for me. I hope others will join me.

And, to be clear—I think a vital part of this exercise is the publication of the results. Having others see your work is a massive ego booster when you receive compliments and feedback from others is an essential component in your growth as a poet.

The most straightforward path to publication is the one I originally took—posting your work on the Fediverse and using the #GoodnightPoem tag. I understand, though, if having your work completely public is daunting—some poems are just too private for that.

If nothing else, I recommend sending your poems to a trusted friend. If you’d like to share them with me, I’d be honored—my email address is below and I look forward to reading your masterpieces and watching you grow.

#100DaysToOffload 15/100

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the minimalism cycle

2024-02-21T19:44:18.000Z

I’ve spent sufficient time over the last year optimizing my workflow setup—both software-based and analog—to notice distinct patterns emerging in the ways that I optimize my workflow.

Most significantly, I’ve noticed a cycle of adding and removing items and tools from my setup. I call this the Minimalism Cycle.

minimalism

As I mentioned in my recent post on wireless devices, my tastes tend toward minimalism. However, “minimalism” to me is not always the primarily-aesthetic concept that’s become mainstream.

To me, minimalism is founded in ideas and processes—for example, low friction to accomplish tasks. I value having a simple workflow more than having a clear and empty visual setup.

Put simply: it’s more important that everything has a distinct function and to remove anything superfluous than to have the appearance of minimalism.

the cycle

Here’s how the cycle goes:

I add a cool new tool to my setup
I use it and gush about it for a while
The next step follows one of these two paths:
- I realize I can accomplish the same result with a tool I already use
- I realize that the new tool can replace an old tool
I remove any now-superfluous tools, whether that’s the new tool or one/multiple old tools

As an artifact of this process, I tend to go through alternating periods of installing everything I need on my system and removing everything I don’t need. One day, I’ll install an office suite, conversion tools, photo editing software, and video/audio recording/editing software; a week later I remove almost everything I’d added.

It’s a cycle. The “minimalism” cycle.

not just software

I also go through this process with my desk setup, though I don’t iterate as quickly, because changes in the physical world tend to cost money.

Usually it’s a rearranging of my setup—but it’s also a cycle of putting things I might need in easy reach (reducing friction) and realizing I have duplicated tools out and storing something away. (I don’t need both pencils and pens on my desk’s surface—put those pens in a drawer!)

It’s a less subtle manifestation of the Cycle, but it’s still there.

why?

I have no idea why I go through this constant dance.

The more rational approach would be to start with as simple a setup as possible and slowly add tools as I rigorously evaluate them.

My best guess is that my brain thrives on novelty—I love trying out new things, but I don’t want to have many things. Hence this cycle where I’m constantly trying new tools and recombining old ones.

It means I’m usually in a non-ideal state, but I’m also happier when I’m trying something new, so there’s definitely something to be said for the approach.

It works for me, and at the end of the day that’s often what matters.

Have you seen or gone through the Minimalism Cycle before? What’s your approach to optimizing your workflow?

I’d love to hear from you. My email address is below.

#100DaysToOffload 14/100

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friction

2024-02-21T19:22:44.000Z

Over the last few years, I’ve had significant trouble maintaining the motivation to finish my projects and complete work when I need to.

The best strategy I’ve developed for managing my motivation has been to increase and decrease friction.

what is friction?

The actual definition of “friction” is physics-related—it’s a force that results when to objects rub against each other. Usually, it results in slowing things down. For example, a ball rolling down the street will slow down as it moves due to friction.

In this context I’m using “friction” more metaphorically: friction is anything that slows me down or makes it more difficult to accomplish a task.

how do I use friction?

There’s two main ways I use friction to help manage my motivation.

The first, and most obvious, is to reduce the friction to complete tasks that I want to encourage. For example, to simplify my writing setup so that I can simply edit a file on my computer to draft a blog post instead of needing to go to a password-protected page on my site and paste in HTML code of the article.

I’ve also reduced friction by adding keyboard shortcuts to my setup to simplify navigating to locations or programs that I need to use frequently. Similarly, my physical setup of my computer hardware facilitates easily transitioning between classes (where I need my laptop on the go) and sitting at my desk with a comfortable keyboard.

These things make it easier and simpler to start writing or coding or doing schoolwork.

The other use of friction is to increase the friction to complete tasks I want to discourage. For example, take video games. I don’t play video games often, but when I do they have a tendency to monopolize my time and keep me from completing my tasks; it’s easier and simple (ie, less friction) to play a video game than to write a blog post, so my natural inclination is to play that game.

My solution has been to lock all of my games in a tomb that requires a flash drive and password to access, so that I (1) can’t access games when studying at the library and (2) have to type the password “I know what I’m doing” in when at home, meaning I essentially have to consciously lie to myself to open a video game when I should be working.

A more realistic example is my posting on the Fediverse—that has a much more subtle hold on me and it’s easy to decide to open up tut (my client) for a few minutes when I should be studying or even when bored in a lecture. Similarly, I’ve locked that in a tomb so that I can’t access it while in class or studying at the library.

There are easy ways to get around these blocks, but the important thing is that I’ve increased the friction: I can use Fedi, but I have to either re-download and configure my client or use a different client that I enjoy less. I can play a video game, but I won’t have access to my saves and would lose my progress.

Specifically, I’m increasing the friction to begin procrastinating; I don’t particularly want to make it harder to actually relax, that would ruin my legitimate free time.

The temptation then, though, is to simply never switch from relaxation time back to work time. So, as a response, I’ve also decreased the friction for that switch.

With a single keyboard shortcut (super+alt+s) I can instantly lock my access and forcibly close any open programs I’ve locked up. This means a single moment of “hmm I should be studying” is enough to remove my access to temptations and force me to go through the high-friction process of switching back, making it easier just to get to work.

Similarly, I’ve set up a script to close those tombs on a timer. I can even set up a timer to automatically close a tomb after a certain amount of time from unlocking it, forcing me to go through the high-friction unlocking regularly to maintain access to those temptations. I haven’t done that yet, but it’s an option I have.

conclusion

I went a little into the technical weeds there at the end, but I think my point was probably clear. I decrease the friction both to accomplish tasks I want to encourage and to switch to those tasks. I increase the friction to switch to procrastination and make it low-friction to stop procrastinating.

Have you set up anything similar for yourself? Are there any areas you can see in your workflow that you should increase or decrease friction? I’d love to hear your thoughts; my email is below.

#100DaysToOffload 13/100

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tty1 guest article proposals are open!

2024-02-21T03:56:18.000Z

Hey, authors and terminal nerds! Interested in writing a Guest Article for tty1? I’ve just published full guidelines to that process.

what is `tty1`?

tty1 is a blog I run about the Linux terminal. I’ve been writing for it for nearly a year, and in that time it’s gained a sizeable audience. That audience is nerdy and awesome, commenting on articles and suggesting changes and I love y’all so much.

If you want to jump in, here are some great articles to start with:

How to Save the World with tar
You Don’t Need a File Manager
Terminal-Based Music
Shell, Yes! (a guest article by Brandon Phillips!)

what should I write about?

As long as it’s related to the Linux terminal, the world is your oyster! I’m open to articles on a wide range of topics.

After all, you won’t lose anything by submitting a proposal: the worst that can happen is I say “no” and you get to write it for your own blog!

why should I write for `tty1`? I have my own blog!

I’m glad you have your own blog! I still think it would be a great idea for you to write for tty1.

Your guest article exposes your writing to a new audience (a great chance for self-promotion)
Writing in tty1’s style and format may give you ideas to carry into your own blog
Perhaps most important, your article will go through the editorial process with my detailed feedback along the way; receiving feedback and learning how to interact with an editor is an extremely valuable experience and a free opportunity for you to hugely improve your writing!

In short, there’s no downside. :)

how do I sign up? that sounds great!

Head over to the Guest Article guidelines at tty1, where I’ve written up a detailed guide to submitting your proposal and a summary of what the process will be like.

Good luck! I can’t wait to see what you come up with. (Also, feel free to contact me separately to ask questions. My email is below.)

#100DaysToOffload 12/100

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consistency

2024-02-20T19:37:41.000Z

Recently I put together a daily routine for myself in writing (finally!) and the process got me musing on the idea of consistency. It’s always been a double-edged sword to me, bringing both benefits and pitfalls.

the benefits

On the one hand, having a consistent routine makes it far easier to stick to that routine. Last semester, my class schedule was crazy; on Tuesday/Thursday, my classes began at 08:00 and finished at 18:45, but on Monday/Wednesday/Friday I didn’t have any classes until 14:00. My sleep schedule was extremely irregular as a result.

This semester, I have a consistent start time as well as a consistent block of free time from 11:00 through 15:00, and it’s been much easier to have consistent sleep, mealtimes, and more.

One of the elements of the routine I’m implementing is a consistent block of writing time every day from 13:00-14:00 (I’m writing this within that time slot). Since beginning that constant rhythm of writing time, I’ve gotten tons of writing done and have been able to get back into projects I’d abandoned.

It’s not like I didn’t have this time previously—I’m taking the same number of classes. But putting the time into a more consistent schedule has helped me better keep up with what I should be doing.

the downsides

The problem is that every time I skip on a habit I’ve set up, I’m more likely to skip it the next time as well. That consistency is frequently my downfall when I try to get into journalling: I skip a day, then I skip the next, then I just keep skipping days for weeks or months at a time.

Consistency in that case is fighting against me: missing even a single day among weeks of keeping on top of things that can completely undo all the work I’ve done during that time. Then I start building up consistency in missing my habits, making it harder to keep them.

As a counterexample, sometimes habits that I don’t do as consistently can be easier to keep because they don’t have this negative side to them. I read books often, for example, even though I don’t have a consistent time allotted to reading; if I did, I’d start to feel ashamed of missing days. Instead, I just read when I feel like it and have a fun time doing so.

the solution?

I don’t really have a solution. The problem boils down to this: doing a task consistently can make it easier to keep it, but has the downside of making me do it less often if I break the pattern.

I want to take advantage of the consistency a routine provides, but I haven’t really found a way to overcome this yet. My best strategy so far has been to try to increase the friction of tasks that are negative habits and decrease the friction of things that I want to do.

Ah, you want to hear more? Well, I plan to talk about the role of “friction” in managing my motivation in an upcoming post.

See you then. For now, I’d love to hear your thoughts on consistency’s role in habit formation; my email is below, as is a link to reply via the Fediverse.

#100DaysToOffload 11/100

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lost treasures (party game)

2024-02-20T19:13:26.000Z

I recently designed a game for my youngest brother’s birthday party. It successfully kept twelve thirteen-year-old boys occupied and gleeful for nearly two hours, which is a difficult enough feat that I thought it could be worth writing up here for anyone else in need of such a solution.

Enjoy!

the concept

Have you ever played Mafia? Well, I took some beginning inspiration from it, but with the goal to avoid having anyone who were just generic players without specific roles.

In the game, the main two teams are the Robbers and the Heroes; the Robbers are trying to steal five “Treasures” spread through the house, while the Heroes are trying to discover who the robbers are. There are a number of other roles as well, with a total of six separately-scored teams.

Since it was near Christmas, I selected a five-piece wooden nativity set we had in the living room as the treasures and called them “The Lost Treasures of Nativité” (which got a couple giggles). Just about any five items will work, though.

To “win” the game, your team needed to reach 25 points. To get a perfect score, the team needs 50 points.

Something worth noting: this game is pretty complex, as is the strategy, when looking at it from a high level. That said, I designed it to make it easy for each kid to focus on their own role and goals, in which case it’s pretty simple.

the roles

I had twelve boys to design the game for, and this is how I distributed the roles:

2 Robbers

get 10 points for each successfully-stolen item (I’ll explain how stealing works later)
if both are arrested, the team loses 15 points and the game ends
if the robbers get 50 points, the game ends

2 Minions

the Minions are on the Robbers’ team, but cannot steal items
instead, the Minions are trying to trick the Heroes into arresting them; the Robbers’ team gets 10 points for each arrested Minion
if both Minions are arrested, the game ends (without a point penalty)—this raises the stakes for the Heroes, forcing them to select their arrests carefully to avoid ending the game without catching the Robbers

3 Heroes

can arrest people—the process will be explained later
receive 20 points for each successfully-arrested Robber
at the end of the game, they receive 5 points for each non-stolen Treasure (note: after playing, I’m considering revising this mechanic; it made it easier than I intended for the Heroes to get the 25 required points [and made it more difficult for the saboteur—but that comes later]. If I were to do this again, I would instead make specific point counts they get at different thresholds; perhaps 5 points for 3 remaining treasures, 10 for 4, and 15 for 5)
this is the only public role; everyone knows who the Heroes are, but all of the others are secret.

1 Informant

the informant is on the Heroes’ team but cannot make arrests
their goal is to discover who the Robbers are and tell the Heroes

1 Corrupt Informant

this person is on their own team
their goal is to try to get the Heroes to arrest the Minions; they receive 25 points for each arrested Minion
if they get arrested themselves, though, they lose 15 points
the existence of this role means that the Heroes can’t trust people telling them information, helping “nerf” the “Informant” role

1 Saboteur

this person’s score is the difference between the Heroes and the Robbers’ scores; for example, if the Heroes get 40 and the Robbers get 20, the Saboteur gets 20. Similarly, if the Robbers get 50 and the Heroes get 20, the Saboteur scores 30.
this means the Saboteur essentially gets to pick which side to help, and can even change which they’re helping, trying to make a large point disparity between the Heroes and Robbers
in our run at playing the game, this was the only role not to get at least 25 points; however, if we had adopted the change in point structure I suggest above for the Heroes, the Saboteur would have received 30 points and the Heroes would receive 20 (the Robbers got a perfect 50).
this is a difficult role—I intentionally gave it to a kid I knew was bright and would enjoy it even if he didn’t win

2 Shopkeepers

While there can be up to two shopkeepers, they are scored separately
The shopkeepers each own two of the Treasures that the Robbers are trying to steal
Each shopkeeper begins with 50 points
For each of their Treasures that is stolen, the Shopkeeper loses 25 points
They need to try and guard the Treasures they own, discouraging the Robbers from trying to rob those ones
I made sure to give each Shopkeeper 1 Treasure on the bottom floor of our house and 1 on the top, making them have to travel a large distance back and forth to guard both. (Them moving around so much actually brought them under suspicion from the Heroes; one of them was falsely arrested.)

stealing and arrests

Whoof, that’s a lot of info. Let’s look at a few small details that were mentioned but not explained.

stealing

To steal an object, a Robber needs to grab it, then take it to one of the people who were organizing the game—in this case, those were me, my two parents, and my middle brother (not the Birthday Boy), four in all. Something to note—there needs to be one more organizer than there are Heroes, otherwise the Heroes could just guard all the organizers to see the Robbers hand off the treasures and discover who they are. If you only have three organizers, for example, you’d have to have one fewer Hero.

Organizers should be sure to wait ten or so seconds before declaring to everyone that something has been stolen, to give the culprit a chance to get out of range.

arrests

After each Treasure is stolen, the Heroes have an opportunity to make arrests. All Heroes must agree on someone to arrest; that person is then put in our “jail” area for the rest of the game. We only revealed the identity of the arrested person if they were a Robber or a Minion; otherwise, the Heroes did not get to learn which role they had mistakenly arrested.

If the arrest was incorrect (ie, not a Robber or a Minion), the Heroes receive the option to arrest a second person. They must arrest at least one person, to keep the game moving forward.

Since Heroes cannot arrest on the spot, but have to wait until after the Treasure has been stolen (or organizers call a meeting, see below) stealing an object is not difficult; what’s difficult is not being seen in the act and arrested right after.

A note about the “jail”—we put it in the center of the house so they could still watch the action, as well as providing a few games and books so they wouldn’t just be bored. Still, if you think one of the players might be particularly bored in jail, it could be worth assigning them as a Hero. (I assigned my brother, the birthday boy, as a Hero, so he wouldn’t have any chance to feel left out at his own party.)

If no treasure is stolen for a long period of time, the organizers may call a meeting and require the Heroes to make an arrest. I did this once, near the beginning of the game, to try and thin the crowd a bit (the Robbers were never having a chance alone with a treasure, I guess) and spur the Robbers into taking more risks to move the game forward.

I also threatened to do this at the end of the game, but a treasure was stolen right as I declared a thirty-second warning.

A note: players can still win from jail. For example, our first arrest was the corrupt informant, but since both Minions were arrested, he ended up scoring 35 points anyway. Similarly, a Shopkeeper was mistakenly arrested, and though he was no longer able to guard his treasures, one remained unstolen so he still received 25 points. Minions, particularly, actually want to be arrested, since it scores points for their team.

our results

Here were the scores for our teams:

Robbers: 1 Robbers arrested (no point penalty unless both are) + 2 Minions arrested + 3 Treasures stolen = a perfect 50 points
Heroes & Informant: 1 Robber arrested + 2 unstolen Treasures = 30 points, a win (note that they would not have won with the scoring change I suggested earlier)
Corrupt Informant: Arrested very early + 2 Minions were arrested anyway = 35 points (he got kinda lucky, there)
Saboteur: 50 Robber points - 30 Hero points = 20 points, a near miss from the goal (note that he would have won under the aforementioned scoring changes). Sadly this was the only loss.
Shopkeeper 1: 1 stolen treasure = 25 points
Shopkeeper 2: Arrested (no point penalty, but unable to guard his objects), after which 1 treasure was stolen = 25 points

To summarize, the arrests made were, in order:

Corrupt Informant (during the meeting I called, before anything was stolen)
Minion (after the first treasure was stolen)
Shopkeeper 1 & Robber (in that order, after the second treasure was stolen)
Minion (after the third treasure was stolen; this ended the game)

some notes on numbering

This game was designed with a specific number of players in mind that I knew beforehand. If you’re considering trying this, you may need to tweak the numbers. Here are some notes to help.

Two robbers and two minions are hard numbers to tweak, since the game end conditions are dependent on them
Heroes can easily be cut to two players (though it will make their task a little more difficult). Only one, though, might be difficult, balance-wise. Be sure you have one more organizer than you have heroes.
Shopkeepers can be cut as needed. I originally only planned to have one. If you need, you can cut both. Still, they do add a nice layer to the game, as by running back and forth between different rooms they draw suspicion and provide extra guarding
Informant and Corrupt Informant are a package deal; don’t cut one without cutting the other. And honestly, I wouldn’t recommend cutting either. Or adding more; that would add too many voices to listen to. If you decide to, I’d also add to the number of treasures to split the guards between more objects.
Saboteur can be cut, but I thought it was a nice touch. The reason being, it’s a little boring if everyone wins (though not entirely), and the Saboteur has a vested interest in trying to make sure someone loses.
As mentioned above, you need more organizers than Heroes. That said, one role I was considering adding is a “Seller”—a member of the Robbers’ team who can’t be arrested. They can hand off objects to that player or to one of the organizers. (This helps if you have one too few organizers.) I ended up cutting it because frankly I think it would be a rather boring role to play, but if you need the role it might be helpful to you.

If you find yourself in this situation and aren’t sure you’ve got the balance right, I’d also be happy to help you design a way around your problem. Just contact me and we can come up with something.

instructors for organizers

Okay, so you’ve read the basic idea behind the game, but there’s some vital details missing: how to actually put it on. Here are the steps you should take.

Procure all of the items you need.
- Five treasures
- Print out sheets to hand each player with a basic summary of their role—I consider this essential. See “resources” below for a copy of what I used and an explanation of why it’s so essential.
Hand out the role sheets before explaining the rules, so they know who they are when you explain their role—tell everyone who the heroes are.
Explain the rules
Have the other organizers put the treasures in position while you continue. Ideally, the treasures are in plain sight, but within separate rooms so that it’s impossible to see any two treasures at once. If you have multiple stories, even better. Try to put each shopkeeper’s treasures as far as possible from each other; for example, when I ran this each shopkeeper had one treasure on the top floor and one on the bottom, forcing them to run back and forth between them to guard both.
Have everyone close their eyes.
Have the robbers and minions open their eyes so they know who each other are.
Have robbers close their eyes and the corrupt informant open theirs, so they know who the minions are.
Everyone can now reopen their eyes.
Designate one organizer people can go to privately if they have questions.
10. Announce the start of the game. They’ll likely all take off running to find all the treasures.
11. Organizers should stay relatively apart from each other so the Heroes can’t just guard all of the hand-off people. It’s fine to move around some, but it shouldn’t be difficult for a robber to hand something to you.
12. When handed a stolen treasure, give them time to get out of range before you announce that it has been stolen, so they’re not implicated by their proximity to you. When you announce the stolen object, gather everyone in the main room for a meeting.
- If nothing gets stolen for a while, you can call a meeting anyway to try and pick up the pace and thin the crowd.
1. The meeting and arrests proceed as described above in the “arrests” section.
- We had a “jail” area prepared in a location that could see what was going on with games, puzzles, and books, so people who were arrested wouldn’t be totally bored.
1. When the game is over (due to one of the win conditions mentioned in the role summaries), tally up the points for each team. 25 points is a win, 50 points is a perfect score.

resources

role summary sheets

I’ve put together a template for role summary sheets, adjusted to match the scoring change I proposed earlier:

Download (ODT)

You’ll want to make sure the number of roles matches the number of players and fill in the names of your organizers to replace [Organizer Names].

If you feel like any more resources would be helpful, let me know (my email is below) and I’ll try to make something for you and add it here.

#100DaysToOffload 10/100

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reply via email

2024-02-17T18:44:45.000Z

I’ve added “Reply via Email” and “Reply on the Fediverse” buttons to articles on Musings, including to Atom Feed items so you can reply directly from your feed reader.

background

I used to have comments on my blog. (At the time, that blog was See With Eyes Closed.) It worked well, but I didn’t have a good way to check back for new comments, and I was having to implement measures to fight spam.

When I transitioned to a static site, though, one of the things I had to drop was the comments section.

When I launched tty1 last year, I decided to implement something I’d been seeing: comments via the Fediverse. I’d hand my site the link to the thread where I’d posted about the new article, then it would fetch any replies as the comments section. (It still does that!)

Moving to my own self-hosted instance broke this, though: GoToSocial, the platform I’m using, requires authentication to fetch statuses the way I was doing, so I had to keep posting on my Mastodon account instead of my GoToSocial one to get the comments working.

I’ve been thinking, though, do I really need to do it this way? One of the benefits of GoToSocial is that it provides its own static, JS-free version of public posts. Simply linking to it should be enough for people to read comments and post their own.

So, that’s why this blog only has a link to the relevant thread. It works out easier and better that way.

Now, to Reply by Email: I’ve seen a number of other blogs with Reply by Email links, and I’ve enjoyed the idea. When I launched tty1, I also had it list my email address and PGP public key, so people can email me if they want to.

To my surprise, some people have emailed me. My conversations over email about my articles (and about other people’s when I reply via email) have been some of the most valuable and interesting discussions I’ve had related to my blog.

So, finally, I decided to add a simple “Reply via Email” link to the bottom of posts, both on the site and in the Atom Feed.

my thoughts

I love how it turned out. It’s nice and simple, and should hopefully result in my having a number of thoughtful conversations with y’all.

I highly recommend setting up something like this on your site—I want to see more “Reply via Email” links when browsing in my feed reader!

And once you’ve set it up (or if you haven’t), why not take this opportunity to try it out? Go ahead, send me an email. The link is below. If you wanna try out PGP encryption or signature verification (I sign all my emails), my public key is there too.

Terminal nerds can import the key with a simple command:

curl https://benjaminhollon.com/assets/public-keys/me@benjaminhollon.com.gpg.asc | gpg --import

#100DaysToOffload 9/100

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wireless is a lie

2024-02-15T19:47:12.000Z

I’m a minimalist—at least, my aesthetic tastes tend that direction. Somehow, people (or at least marketers) seem to think that wireless technology effectively achieves minimalism.

It doesn’t.

first: what does “wireless” mean?

Let’s get on the right foot. When I say “wireless,” I’m referring to any electronic device that runs off of a battery while in use rather than being connected to power.

This includes:

keyboards
mice
phones
laptops
headphones and earbuds
toys
clocks and watches
surveillance cameras

I also include anything transmitting data wirelessly, whether or not it’s battery-powered, but that’s not the focus of this piece.

the lies

lie #1: wireless is more portable

The great thing about wireless technology is that you can just throw it in your bag and go to the library, the beach, your friend’s house, a trip to the other side of the world. Or so they say.

In reality, though, a wireless device is only as portable for as long as its battery lasts. Want your earbuds along for a week-long vacation? You’ll need your charger. It’s the same with phones, laptops, smartwatches, and so forth. Every device has a threshold of time past which you’re going to need to bring a cable or spare battery.

Granted, wired devices need cables too. But they do have a benefit in this regard.

Wired devices get their power from the main device they’re plugged into. A wired keyboard or mouse gets power from the computer. Wired headphones get their power from your phone or laptop. This means they don’t have to deal with the extra weight of having their own batteries, making them lighter to carry and, therefore, more portable.

If the main device is wireless, it’ll usually drain faster as a result, but at least you only have to worry about keeping one device charged. That feels more minimalistic to me.

lie #2: longer battery life

Well, wouldn’t longer battery life fix the issue? It’ll help with the portability (though weight is still an issue), but there’s another root issue: the number of devices you have.

People who embrace the wireless lifestyle often go all in. You have your wireless headphones, e-reader, keyboard, mouse, lamp, smartwatch, and more. The problem is, the more wireless devices you have, the more often you’re going to have to recharge something, even if each individual device needs charging infrequently.

Throw in the mess of things that need replaced batteries, like smoke detectors, toys, flashlights, remote controls, alarm clocks, or electric pencil sharpeners and you have a big mess on your hands. There’s always something needing to be recharged or to have its batteries changed. Charging stations devolve into a rats’ nest of cords. Drawers of batteries have a pile in the corner you avoid because you’re not sure if they’re used or not.

There are some things which it’s truly a blessing to have wireless versions of, like phones. It’s absolutely vital, though, to minimize the number of wireless things in your life to avoid the chaos I just described.

lie #3: when it works, it’s better

Okay, so maybe having wireless devices will have problem times. But when wireless works, it works better.

Well… that may be correct, but I don’t think it’s a good thing. You see, I believe in minimalism not just in aesthetic, but in function. Yes, eighty percent of the time you’re having a better experience, but you’re frequently having to switch between wireless and charging.

For example, when using my laptop in my dorm room, I’ll spend the time split between being at my desk with it charging or in a comfier seat with it on battery power. The problem is that I have to switch back and forth. It’s much simpler to just stay at my desk, ensuring I can stay focused on my task without having to worry in the back of my mind about how much charge my battery has left.

It’s the same with a “wireless” keyboard—they’ll often charge by being plugged in for a while during use. The problem is that you have to have a cable constantly available and that you’ll be occasionally swapping it in or out of the system. It’s much simpler to always have the cable, also simplifying the underlying technology, even if that means you’ll have a bit less freedom.

tips for hardware minimalism

tip #1: consolidate everything wireless

When you have to go wireless, try and combine functions so that you need fewer wireless devices. Don’t carry both headphones and earbuds; use your phone’s flashlight and camera; use wired devices when possible. The fewer batteries need charging, the better you’ll succeed.

One way I’ve consolidated that probably isn’t for everyone is that I don’t use a mouse anymore; I have keymappings on my keyboard that fill the role a mouse normally would and move the pointer around the screen. In my opinion, it’s a much better experience than a mouse and it does away with an extra device I’d have had to worry about.

Again, that’s not feasible for everyone, but that’s the kind of consolidation you should be looking for.

tip #2: match power cord type

If your cords are all the same type, it makes charging wireless devices and powering wired ones a much better experience. I personally favor USB C to C or A to C cords, which is a good bet the way current electronics are headed. The same cable can power my laptop, my keyboard, or my headphones.

tip #3: docking stations

When I work at my desk, I have a great setup. My laptop is on a stand to raise the display to the level of my eyes, and I have a custom mechanical keyboard. The best part is, all I have to do to start working is set my laptop down on the stand and plug in a single cable.

The USB C hub I use and keep out of sight underneath the stand can handle power in, keyboard, mouse, external storage drives, external monitor, and audio all with that one cable running to the laptop. That’s worth more to my minimalism-focused aesthetic tastes than having everything wireless. It’s easy to transition, too; when I need to go off to a class, I unplug the single cord, put my computer in my bag, and go.

my setup—wired vs. wireless

Here’s my hardware setup, so you can see what’s wireless and what’s wired:

Wireless:

Laptop - 5-7 hours of battery life - USB C
Headphones - 60 hours of battery life (can be used wired, as well) - USB C
My watch - rated for 10 years of battery life
Mouse (when I use it, which I usually don’t) - 2 AAA batteries, hasn’t run out in the 1.5yrs I’ve had it
Kindle - 1-5 weeks of battery life depending on usage - USB Micro-B
Phone - 10-20 hours of battery life - Lightning Cable :P
Portable microphone - only 6 hours of battery life, 2 AAA batteries, but I usually use it wired or for very short periods, so 2 batteries can last me up to 6 months or more

Wired:

Keyboard
Headphones, some of the time
Lamps at my desk and bed
Home server (an old laptop with the battery removed)
Speakers
Turntable
Electric Kettle (for my tea)
Alarm Clock

Now, a number of those wired items aren’t normally wireless, but I think my point overall stands. If you tally up the wireless items, a very simple charging schedule emerges. Laptop I generally use at my desk when in my room, so it’s fully charged by bedtime and I leave it unplugged at night. Phone gets charged at night. Kindle and Headphones only rarely need charging, so a weekly charging of both while I read a physical book or something like that suffices perfectly.

And, worth noting is that I don’t have a number of devices that many people my age do—no wireless earbuds, no tablet, no wireless speaker, and so on. I’ve arranged my workflow to remove the need for those devices, lowering the number of things that need charging.

Everything else just stays plugged in, doesn’t have batteries, and works perfectly every time I want to use it.

conclusion

I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to convince you of with this post. It’s largely a rant about misconceptions of minimalism and the problems with the wireless philosophy.

Wireless devices do have utility, but I believe that wired should be the default and wireless devices only obtained with a lot of thought put into the decision.

#100DaysToOffload 8/100

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tracking my travels

2024-02-14T19:30:10.000Z

I grew up all over the world. A matter of pride for me was always the number of countries I’ve visited.

I don’t care about that the same way anymore, but about a week ago I did something I should’ve done long ago: put together an actual list of all the places I’ve been and when.

The dates aren’t all perfectly precise and accurate, since I was very young for many of these trips, but I’ve done my best to put all the information I can recall, and my parents have helped me narrow down some dates I was unsure about. Going forward, though, I do plan to keep this up to date and precise.

#100DaysToOffload 7/100

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in defense of "free" shipping

2024-02-14T19:19:17.000Z

If you’ve shopped online, you’ve seen it. “Add $5.89 to your basket and get free shipping!” It feels… misleading? Dishonest? Manipulative?

After all, it’s not like the shipping is really free. The cost of shipping was factored into the price the company you’re buying from set. They’re just doing this “free shipping” trick to get you to buy more.

I actually like the strategy, though.

You see, though it is undoubtedly manipulative on the part of companies employing the strategy, from my perspective as a customer who is unlikely to purchase something additional just in the hopes of getting free shipping, it makes me think instead about how to better group purchases I make to take up fewer shipments.

Fewer, better-grouped shipments is better for the environment, which is something I care about. More than that, it also makes me take extra time to think through purchases before pulling the trigger. If I don’t have enough in my cart to receive free shipping, I’m likely to wait until I have more things I need to buy to fill out the order.

But if I wait that time, I also use that time to subconsciously consider whether I actually need the item I was planning to purchase. As often as not, I’ll decide that I didn’t need it after all during that interval and cancel the order. (And even better for the environment than fewer shipments is not purchasing something in the first place. Better for my wallet too.)

So, in the end, once you’ve taken a firm stance that you’re not going to purchase something you wouldn’t have solely to receive free shipping, the concept of shipping being free past a certain threshold actually serves to reduce shipments and to give you a buffer time to reconsider purchases.

There are probably measures of cart capacity other than cost of purchases that would better serve these goals, but this is a metric which appeals to both me and the companies that I’m purchasing from, so I’m willing to settle for it.

#100DaysToOffload 6/10

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announcing clew: my search engine

2024-01-31T23:34:42.000Z

I’ve been posting my exploits in beginning to code a search engine here on this blog, and I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally picked a name and set up a placeholder site.

clew!

The name I chose is “Clew”, and I put a good deal of thought into that choice. A clew is a ball of thread or yarn; specifically, I envisioned the clew from the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur which leads Theseus safely through the labyrinth. This is an excellent metaphor for the task of a search engine; its job is to guide you safely through the labyrinthian World Wide Web safely to your destination.

I also incorporated other names from the Theseus myth into our naming; the web crawler, for example, is named after Ariadne, who gave Theseus the clew.

You can view the site at clew.se.

faq

As I anticipated, I’ve received a number of questions about the crawler.

what programming language will you use?

I’m using Python for the crawler, though I initially wrote it using bash scripts.

I haven’t decided the language for the search backend yet, I’ll burn that bridge when I get there.

why the `.se` tld for the domain?

.se is intended, in an ideal world, for Swedish websites. I’m not Swedish and I’ve never been to Sweden.

That said, when I settled on “Clew” as the name, I was faced with an issue: domain name availability is always tricky. In the case of “clew”, a number of the more conventional TLDs have been taken already, usually by squatters hoping to sell them to people like me at a very high price (which I can’t afford).

Faced with a number of imperfect options, I chose .se, rationalising the “se” as standing for “search engine”.

I hope that’s not a dealbreaker. I expect it won’t be.

why doesn’t the search bar do anything yet?

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not anywhere near ready to publish any results yet. The current site is a placeholder and showcases my current mockup of the design as the landing page.

will this be a privacy-focused search engine?

Privacy isn’t the primary focus of Clew, but all of my projects try to respect people’s privacy as much as possible.

I do have some privacy features in mind that I’ll likely implement. If you have ideas about features you’d like to see in a search engine (privacy-focused or otherwise), feel free to contact me!

do I need any help with designing a logo or anything like that?

I’ve had multiple people offer already; I’m not quite at that stage yet, though. Once I am, I’ll probably contact them directly.

will this be self-hostable?

I am planning to open source the code once it’s more mature, and I would like very much for it to be easily self-hostable. I’d like to be able to provide database dumps of our index to help people easily seed their own instances with a bunch of data without having to run crawlers for weeks to get good data, but I’m also carefully thinking through the implications of that: I don’t want to just provide an easy dataset for the training of ML models like ChatGPT. That would be very disrespectful to the sites I’m crawling.

I guess the answer for now is, “I don’t know what form this will be in; I have to balance making things easier for people wanting to take control of their data with respecting the sites I’m crawling.” I don’t like that, but it’s the world we live in.

when will this launch?

I have zero idea. :D

do you need financial contributions?

(yes, I have actually been asked this, it’s not just self-promo)

Not much at this stage, but once I start renting server space, costs may pile up. But hey, I’m also using a bunch of time in the development stage, and you may just desire to shoot me some money as appreciation of that.

In any case, I have made a Liberapay team for Clew. You’re welcome to donate there, should you feel so led.

thank you!

Overall, I just want to thank everyone who’s been following along with this journey for their support! When I started with a random statement of “I want to build a search engine” on Polymaths Alpha to grow into a passion project with dozens following along and cheering me on from the sidelines.

It’s been a wild journey, and I hope something wonderful comes out of it. And, of course, worst comes to worst, I’ve learned a lot and had fun, and that’s what’s most important to me with this project.

#100DaysToOffload 5/100

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using grep to increase index quality

2024-01-17T15:12:53.000Z

I wrote in a recent article about how something so simple as reversing the sort order of a list of URLs could drastically improve my search index’s quality, due to my practice of limiting the crawler to 100 pages per domain.

Today I decided to prune those starting URLs further, with the help of grep.

the problem

The biggest thing I saw that was impacting my search index negatively was the presence of tag listings, pages that list all the articles that match a certain tag.

Due to my sort order solution, these pages (starting with t) were getting crawled before most blog posts and articles (starting with b or a, usually), which is non-ideal. I don’t have any desire to serve these tag listings as search results, and they were keeping me from crawling more articles, which I do want, so something had to be done.

the solution

I have a function in my crawler that’s regularly run to remove duplicates in the queue of pages to be crawled. This felt like the ideal place to prune unwanted URLs.

So I passed the result of it to this grep command:

grep -vP 'http(s)?://.*/(tag(s)?|categor(ies|y))/*'

Looks a little complex, let’s break it down.

The -v flag reverses the results; things that match my string won’t be in the result, rather than my result being only URLs that match the string.
The -P flag tells it to interpret my string as a Perl-compatible regular expression, which gets me a couple features I needed.
https(s)?://.* will match any URL starting with “https://” or “http://”—which is every URL in my index. This isn’t where the magic happens.
It’s (tag(s)?|categor(ies|y)) where the magic happens; this’ll match any paths that have a directory named tag, tags, categories, or category. There’s a slight possibility this’ll have some false positives, but it increases my index quality so much that I don’t mind.

This problem was a bit more complex, but still pretty simple in concept.

#100DaysToOffload 4/100

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this should've been a database

2024-01-04T08:38:58.000Z

I’ve mostly passed the web crawler stage in my search engine project’s prototyping, so my next step is to figure out how to index the vast amount of information I’ve scraped from random places on the internet.

The obvious answer is to use a database.

I… uh… am not using a database.

my solution

In my working directory, I’ve created a subdirectory titled _index. Inside it are subdirectories for each language (since I wanna separate keywords by language). When I run my ./index script, it goes through every page I’ve scraped in the specified language and creates a line something like this:

0.970873786407767	https://alpha.polymaths.social/

The first column is the weight, or the relative frequency of the keyword within a page. It’s roughly equal to percentage of the page’s text, but with text in headings counting as extra. The second column is the link to the page in question.

Then this line gets put in a file named after the keyword. Rinse and repeat for every page and keyword in my corpus.

Takes a good amount of time and computing power, but once it’s done it means I can just read the files for the keywords people search for and get a shortlist of URLs worth further indexing.

so… why not a database?

Because I’m silly.

No, seriously.

For some reason, I really, really don’t like using databases. So I’m seeing how far I can get before I give in and just set up postgresql like a smart code monkey. I’ve been told numerous times I should be using a database, and I agree.

conclusion

Not entirely sure where I’m going with this. I know I’ll end up rewriting this all to be in a database, assuming I get far enough into this project and don’t drop it in a few days.

But hey, I’m having fun for now, and that’s what counts, right? As Eric, from Polymaths.social, replied to me on the subject:

It’s more of a choice between wanting to build one versus wanting to use an established one. It’s much like the choice of building a search engine versus wanting to use an established one.

Indeed, this whole search engine project is about wanting to see if I can build things myself. It makes sense, then, that I’d rather see how far I can get with my own indexing mechanism, however inefficient, rather than simply use a database.

#100DaysToOffload 4/100

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announcing my blogroll

2024-01-04T04:41:04.000Z

As a long-overdue update to this site, I’ve added a blogroll with all the best feeds I follow!

selection criteria

This blogroll by no means contains everything that I follow—I have over a hundred feeds in my aggregator—but instead I picked a select few.

The selection criteria I went through for most of the feeds:

The writing needs a level of quality control. For the most part, I haven’t included feeds that are full of random thoughts without much explanation or elaboration of them. Similarly, while this isn’t a hard rule, I’ve favored blogs that have a great and unique writing style.
I need to have been following the feed for a long time. There are some blogs I follow that I might add eventually, but I want to take a good bit of time and review them over a longer period to ensure that they’re up to my standards.
I prioritize new thoughts and ideas, not book or movie reviews or people jumping on the bandwagon of article topic and format trends. That doesn’t mean the blogs I link don’t have the occasional book or movie review, but if that’s most of what a blog posts, I probably won’t link to it.
Something I haven’t actually checked for all of them, but should go through to be sure, I don’t want to link to sites with ads or invasive tracking. I don’t think any of these sites have that, but I haven’t checked to be sure (using an adblocker means I often don’t see it when it’s there).
While there are some good blogs that haven’t been active in a while, I tried to link only to sites that still receive updates.

Now, to be clear—it’s possible to break these criteria and still have a great blog. I follow plenty of blogs that don’t quite meet these standards. But these are the standards I’m willing to endorse sites with.

why start a blogroll?

Me adding a blogroll to my site has been a long time coming; I knew about them, but didn’t have any desire to add one. To summarize my reasons against:

What I follow feels private, I didn’t really want to share it
I didn’t want to make anyone I interact with frequently sad that they didn’t make the list
I didn’t want to have to handle the upkeep of the list as yet another thing to be sure is up to date

My change of mind really came when building my web crawler, a few days go. That started me thinking about how discovering sites works on the web; generally, you’re gonna discover a website through one of these ways:

It comes up in a search result
Someone sends you a link to it or to an article on it
Someone you follow links to it

I don’t want people to have to rely on the first method—search engines should not be the primary discovery method for websites, historically they haven’t done a great job at steering you to websites that respect you and have great quality-control. Instead, they steer you to sites that make them the most money—which, in essence, comes down to ad-ridden or LLM-generated pages that game the ranking algorithms. (I know, I know, this is a slightly odd statement from someone coding a search engine, but I’m trying to do a better job on these counts.)

Getting sent a link is great, but not really under your control. When you’re wanting more sites to follow, the best you can do in that regard is ask your friends to send you cool sites and articles.

Which leaves people linking to each other from their personal sites. As I coded a crawler, I loved whenever it ran across one of these pages, since it would instantly learn about a couple dozen high-quality new sites to peruse.

Anyway, perhaps this was long-winded, but my reasoning for adding a blogroll ends up coming down to this: “I love these sites, I want other people to find them too. And the best way to do that is to put together a list of sites people will love.”

If you follow sites you love, please consider doing the same. And feel free to send me the link, I’m always looking for more great feeds to peruse!

And now, without further ado, go read my blogroll.

#100DaysToOffload Day 3/100

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picking the sort order for a web crawler

2024-01-03T18:30:09.000Z

As I was coding the web crawler for my search engine project, I encountered an unexpected issue. The way I was sorting URLs that needed to be crawled was resulting in my script only crawling the oldest pages on many websites.

the problem

The problem arose with sites with URL patterns like this:

https://example.com/docs/v1.0.0
https://example.com/docs/v1.0.1
https://example.com/docs/v1.0.2
https://example.com/docs/v1.1.0
https://example.com/docs/v2.0.0

Or this:

https://example.blog/posts/2004/10/15/changed-my-blog-platform-to-wordpress
https://example.blog/posts/2006/07/24/changed-my-blog-platform-to-hugo
https://example.blog/posts/2008/01/01/sorry-i-should-post-more
https://example.blog/posts/2021/07/13/changed-my-blog-platform-to-hand-coded-html
https://example.blog/posts/2023/02/18/this-time-i-really-mean-it-im-gonna-post-more

When sorted normally, my crawler would start with the oldest pages and crawl toward the newest. That’s perfectly fine—except that by default I limit each domain to having 100 crawled subpages. I would only crawl the oldest 100 blog posts on a site, or only documentation for outdated versions of a piece of software.

the solution

Pretty simple. Instead of piping the URLs to sort -, I piped to sort -rn -, sorting by numerical ascending order (making 10 sort as more than 2, even though the first character is lower) then reversing it.

Now the problem is solved and if I hit my page count limit for a site, I receive the freshest articles and documentation instead of the oldest.

Sometimes problems are simple.

#100DaysToOffload Day 2/100

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i'm starting work on a search engine

2024-01-03T05:06:21.000Z

I’ve decided to try and code a web search engine.

No, there’s not much reason behind it, but I figure I’ll learn a ton along the way and might actually end up with something cool. I don’t have any obligation to actually finish the project or any timeframe I’m trying to complete it within, so it’s just something I can pick up and work on whenever I feel like I need something to do.

progress so far

So far, I’ve been working on the crawler, the piece of code that goes around the web, finds cool pages, and saves information on them.

I’m writing it entirely as bash scripts, which has been a challenging but rewarding technology to use for the task.

Some data I collect about pages at this point in time:

title
description
author
language
links to web feeds
keywords
whether they use javascript
whether they have ads
whether they have invasive tracking/analytics

So far I’ve crawled over 25,000 pages as a starting index to develop the rest of the search engine using.

The crawler definitely needs some refining, but it’s pretty good for a first effort. I’ll likely post some more about different challenges I faced in the process along the way.

plans

I do plan to open source the search engine and crawler if I get far enough, but I don’t want to yet, so people don’t take my non-perfected crawler and start scraping the web with it and all its potential issues at this point.

Also, I haven’t decided on a name for the search engine or crawler. I’m brainstorming, but if you have ideas, shoot me a message!

Neither do I know what programming language I’ll use as a backend for the search engine. If you have suggestions, I’m open to hearing them.

conclusion

I’ve had fun so far, which is most of what matters to me for this project. I’ll keep trucking and keep you posted; I know a number of people have expressed interest in the final result to me.

#100DaysToOffload Day 1/100

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personal essay: behind the name

2023-11-28T18:15:08.000Z

When I was a senior in High School, my literature teacher assigned an essay: write about my name.

It felt silly. I’d only ever really considered the meaning of my name—Benjamin, “son of the right hand”—in the context of jokes. Like saying that the real position of honor in my family would be “son of the left ear”, since my dad can’t hear out of his right.

I never took it seriously; it seemed a fairly antiquated meaning based on a cultural value not really cared about anymore. No meaning to me.

I procrastinated on the essay, as I often would. The night before it was due, I finally sat down to write it.

In this moment of rushed work, I was forced to give the matter of my name some serious thought for the first time ever. In that time of reflection, I made some realizations.

My name is not just Benjamin. I have two names.

When I was born, my parents lived in a small town in northern Afghanistan.

Let’s look at that side of me for a little while.

My parents wanted a name for me that would hold a meaning in Farsi as well. “Benjamin” is remarkable in that regard—the Farsi transliteration, “Bin-e Amin”, means “Faithful Son” or “Righteous Son”, very similar to “Son of the Right Hand”. To the neighbors I was “Amin-jon”. (The “jon” suffix is an affectionate title, meaning “beloved”.)

Afghanistan holds many memories, for both me and my parents. It’s part of who I am. I played with a hatchet with a neighbor’s kids, then fell and hit my head on the blade. I drank tea in every neighbor’s home. I had two tortoises—“Rocky” and “Toughie”—who ate all the vegetables I tried to grow in our garden. Rocky once fell into the pit beneath our outhouse. Poor Rocky.

The mud brick walls of our house were home.

We left when I was six. Upon visiting again, a year later, the government had decided to widen and pave the road our house was on.

Half of my childhood home was a pile of rubble. Many of our neighbors were living in half of their original living space, with a tarp to replace the missing wall.

I’ve never been back.

But that’s a story for another day.

Next, we moved to Bangalore, India. By this time I had two younger brothers. Do you know, I didn’t know their names’ meanings until I looked them up? Timothy, according to Behind the Name, means “honoring God”. Peter—“rock”. We loved India, but for me it was never “home”. I don’t think I’ve ever really had “home” again—the only one I had was destroyed by “progress” and redeveloped into a block of concrete shops.

In India, I made my first lifelong friends. Some of them I still message with regularly.

When I was eleven, my parents’ reapplication for Indian visas were denied.

We moved again, to Malaysia.

Malaysia is where I really became who I am today. It’s the closest thing I’ve had to a home since Afghanistan. But it never gave me a name—that makes all the difference.

I shed the name “Amin” when I left Afghanistan. Forgot all about it, with occasional exceptions.

The essay I was assigned in my last year in Malaysia brought it all back to mind.

My first realization was this: “Amin” is every bit as much my name as “Benjamin”. Since then, I’ve been transitioning more and more toward using it. I’ve asked my parents to start calling me it again.

And do you know something? “Amin” sounds like home. It gives me a home, wherever it’s used.

Because this is my fundamental realization: names have power.

“What’s in a name?” the great bard asks. He maintains that no matter the name, objects have the same essence.

But they don’t, do they? Names have power. I have two names. Yet, both are the same name. It’s a duality of existence that sums up my whole personality as someone caught between cultures. Using a different one of my names is enough to return me to a place of comfort—to create new places of comfort.

And so, I’ve started asking people what their names are. What names they like to be called. And, most importantly, what their names mean.

Sometimes people might be wrong about what their names mean, at least in an objective sense. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is what names mean to the people who wear them. Why they wear them. Whether they wear them proudly as badges of honor or carelessly like simple identifiers.

A name is what you make it. Names are powerful, but only if you let them be.

What name do you have that makes you feel at home? What name creates the home you have? Perhaps it is a “nickname”.

Do you want to know something else? I also have two family names. My “middle” name is my mother’s maiden name. I bear the names of both of my families, the Barnards and the Hollons.

My names carry two cultures and two families. My names encapsulate who I am, the beautiful mix of ideas and people that blend to make the person I am and can be.

I am Benjamin Amin Barnard Hollon.

Who are you?

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photo essay: in memoriam

2023-11-28T06:17:58.000Z

Our society places a heavy emphasis on memorializing and honoring those before us. One day in November, I began to notice the sheer number of memorials around me—including numerous flags at half-mast—and biked around to see the breadth of how Texas A&M honors the fallen. As one memorial I saw eloquently quoted: “Greater love hath no man than this. That a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) As I biked past, I couldn’t help but notice the beautiful, everyday things going on around these memorials, perhaps demonstrating the result of the sacrifices.

Hover over or tap images to display color.

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goodbye, see with eyes closed

2023-11-24T09:06:12.000Z

It’s time to announce the official closing of See With Eyes Closed, my first blog and longtime main website. A sad moment, but I feel it’s the right move to make.

why?

The simplest reason for See With Eyes Closed to leave is that it’s outlived its purpose. I don’t need it as a general-purpose blog; I have this one, now. I tried redefining it as a blog about media literacy, but quickly discovered the simplicity I had to put into it to make the topic appeal to a general audience was proving a difficult balance.

So, I didn’t need it. It didn’t ever really receive much attention from me either: while I originally planned to post weekly, it ended up receiving 33 posts over the three years it was active, just under one post per month on average. A good number of those posts were actually apologies for not posting more.

It was time for it to go.

what next?

I’ve put up a memorial site that I do intend to keep up for the foreseeable future. In practical terms, this is because many places I’ve left behind only link to See With Eyes Closed, since I didn’t have my current websites then. With the memorial site still up, people finding me through those links will still be able to find the things I currently do.

I’ve migrated all of the See With Eyes Closed posts here. To view them, go to the articles listing and scroll to the bottom. If you click on “View Archived Posts”, you’ll be able to open and read any article from See With Eyes Closed. I will also list them all at the bottom of this article. (Bear in mind that some of the links in the articles may no longer work. I’ve tried to correct them where I can.)

I may remove a couple of the lower-quality ones, but most will stay up.

I’ve also started branching out into more niche blogs; my first, tty1, has begun and focuses on the Linux terminal. I fully expect I will continue to create niche blogs, perhaps ones that don’t have the expectation that they’ll run indefinitely. tty1, at least, was created by me with the expectation that I won’t be writing for it forever, though it has broadened in scope since the original conception.

I also intend for Musings (this blog) to play a bigger role than it did in the past; previously, it was an intermittent blog, only being posted on if I had something I wanted to publish that didn’t fit in See With Eyes Closed’s Media Literacy theme. Now it’s my central and main blog, general-purpose and not entirely formal. I’ll likely announce projects here and post an occasional rant or well-wrought argument. We’ll see where it goes; I’m not going to tie it down to a particular style or topic at this point.

We’ll see where the future takes me.

in memoriam

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Goodbye, See With Eyes Closed.

posts migrated from see with eyes closed (in no particular order)

I’m Not a Robot
How to Draw a Really Bad Partybone
Quote Analysis: Laziness
Life Behind the Mask
Just Write!
Forensics Tournament and Assumptions
The Mayflower Compact: A Lesson in Fragility
The Power of Procrastination
The Bookwyrm Method
Quote Analysis: See With Eyes Closed
Necessary Murder?
When the Sun Sets
It’s Not Selfish to Ask for Help
Umify Available on the Chrome Web Store
The Tyranny of Grades
Stop and Listen to the Alarm Clock
Guns on this Morgue Ship
Why Read?
Butterfly Prophecies
Astrotheology: Religion Meets Space
Where Is Everybody?: Implications of the Fermi Paradox
New: Emoji Reactions
Stop Using Chrome. Seriously.
What is Trust?
Here’s Why Web Privacy Matters
Let’s Start This Over
My Technology Manifesto
How to Choose a Web Browser
reCAPTCHA is Dead
An Introduction to Passwords
Passwords and Biometric Authentication
The Learning Machine
Grade Comparing: The New Pillory?

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a note on cloning

2023-11-23T04:05:44.000Z

This article on cloning is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. /j

What interests me about the popular portrayal of cloning in science fiction is how removed it is from the actual details of cloning.

The process of cloning, as scientifically performed, is with the goal of having an animal with identical genetic material to another. In Science Fiction, however, clones are general expected to be far more identical.

The closest actually-existing things I can think of to Science Fiction–esque clones are identical twins. They’re nearly genetically identical, but they also are the same age, something scientific twins are not. Assuming I’m understanding the science correctly, and it’s quite possible I’m not.

But that’s a lot less exciting to think about, isn’t it? 😉

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error 404

2023-11-21T22:18:31.000Z

I was talking with Sotolf and Paul Wilde over on the Fediverse, and we got to discussing error codes. A certain xkcd comic came up, one where an esoteric error code is interpreted as “go sit by a lake”, a simple action that removes the frustration from receiving the error.

We started talking about making alternative meanings for other error codes, and my mind turned to the famous 404 Error.

what 404 represents

404 is “Not Found”. 404 represents loss. A page that once existed now exists no longer.

Tech savvy users might immediately check the Wayback Machine where many sites are saved, long after their death. Still, not all sites are captured. Some of the most beautiful, unique pieces of the web are long gone, lost to the whims of their creators (or, more likely, the caprices of the creators’ wallets).

Digital media is flouted as having an indefinite lifetime, but in reality it has one of the shortest useful lifetimes of any technology. Just think: something digital is considered long-lived when it’s been around for a decade.

A single decade. I have books that have been around up to eight times that long.

What’s this mean?

We have to be far more proactive about conserving digital information.

a proposal for an alternate 404 meaning

Instead of getting frustrated when you see a 404 error and trying to find another way to get at the information, take a moment and pause.

Now go, find something you care about. Anything.

Make a copy of it, a personal archive. A copy you know is under your control and not subject to the internet’s whims.

If you do this every time you encounter a 404 page, I can guarantee you’ll be happy one day that you did.

an addendum: Paul Wilde’s “Error Code Index”

Paul has created a lovely index of alternate error code meanings, I implore you to give it a glance. Perhaps submit an alternate meaning of your own?

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sticky notes are the future (at least for now)

2023-11-21T06:08:40.000Z

I’ve been trying numerous ways to keep track of tasks I need to complete and… none has really worked for me long term.

So I’m going old-school: one task per sticky note, sticky notes go on desk, sticky notes are visually annoying until I get the tasks done.

conclusion

Yeah, this is a short post.

I’m hoping this’ll help with some time management issues I’ve been having, I suppose time will tell. Ideally I’d like to have a more structured solution, but… now is not the time to experiment with anything fancy, and sometimes the simpler a solution, the better.

Any tips people have are welcomed, of course.

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is this the end of NaNoWriMo?

2023-11-16T19:34:31.000Z

NaNoWriMo has been a big part of my life for a long time, now. It’s my favorite time of year. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve outgrown it, though.

the history

This year is my fifth NaNoWriMo; the first three were wins, but last year I didn’t complete it, and I’m very far behind this year.

What’s the difference? Well, I’m attending university now where, if I’m being honest, November isn’t a great month for me to have a bunch of free time. On the contrary, I have numerous papers and projects due right around this time that I have to spend my writing time on.

the value of NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo first got me deep in the world of writing. It showed me how to get words down on the page without endlessly deliberating over which to use, then to go back and edit later.

NaNoWriMo is invaluable for that, for helping motivate people without the motivation to embark on such a large project and for building such a wide support network for writers. It has other values, too, but those were the main ones to me.

Now, though, I’m motivated to write. I want writing to be a career, or at least part of one. What’s important to me now isn’t large once-per-year projects, it’s building a consistent, year-long routine of daily writing.

That’s… not what NaNoWriMo is for, or at least not to me. When I have a writing schedule working, I tend to drop it to focus on my NaNoWriMo novel, and when I don’t, I feel like taking a “break” from writing after November is over, a break that lasts far too long.

I’ve also proved to myself that I can write effectively outside of NaNoWriMo; this January and February, I wrote over 18,000 words of daily updates to a serial novel before giving up (which I was rewriting as this NaNoWriMo’s project). I gave it up, but due to issues with the publishing structure, not the time commitment. This was the largest project I’d written outside of November, and I’ve done more projects since then; this October I wrote an 8,000-word play for a student org I’m involved in.

The point is, I don’t need NaNoWriMo to write anymore, and NaNoWriMo disrupts what writing habits I have built.

While NaNoWriMo was and still is valuable, it’s not what I need anymore.

what now?

I won’t be continuing this year’s NaNoWriMo. I’ll still work on my project, but within the context of a wider writing routine.

Instead of NaNoWriMo, I’ll be looking at strategies to help me build that routine. I have a few ideas, but haven’t had time to implement them until now.

For future NaNoWriMos… I may participate. I’m not sure. One way I can see myself participating would be to set a different goal for the month, one that fosters the writing habits I’m trying to build instead of disrupting them. For example, to keep a daily journal for the full month. Journalling is a valuable habit to me, but never one I’ve been able to keep up consistently; the structure of NaNoWriMo could help me make it a regular habit.

upcoming projects (hopefully)

And now, for a quick status on my writing projects. I’d like to find a better way to publish these, but for now appending it to this post and others like it works well.

Coriolis (formerly known as The Prodigal’s Brother) - temporarily stalled, but making progress
Musings - picking back up!
Poems - going stronger than ever!
tty1.blog - stalled, but new posts are in the planning stage
Journaling - Stalled for a long time
An Antique Land (mixed poetry/prose based on “Ozymandias”) - Stalled
A Rainless Sky - Making progress, but very slowly
Tick - I haven’t even announced what this is yet, but it’s in the planning stage and I’m very excited about it. I’m not gonna let myself begin actual work on it until I finish A Rainless Sky since it’s very similar in medium.
Fake Movie Blurbs - I haven’t touched this in forever but it’s really fun and I want to start making these again!

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best pictures of the week (W45/2023)

2023-11-14T04:24:44.000Z

I’ve been getting interested in photography lately, at least the casual sort of taking pics that catch my eye, using my phone camera. So, for your viewing pleasure, I now present some of my better pictures in the last week.

Keep your eyes peeled, I may make this a regular occurrence (perhaps monthly instead of weekly, though).

Hover over or tap images to display color.

Tuesday 11-07-2023

Tuesday morning I saw that a bunch of flags were half-mast so I biked around campus for a solid hour taking pictures of half-mast flags and memorials, as part of an idea for an upcoming project in one of my classes.

Not all of these pictures are part of that, some are just things I saw on the way.

I’ve found myself intrigued by soda delivery trucks lately; I have a matching one to this of a Mountain Dew truck. Alas, though, that was not in the last week, so it does not appear in this post.

This is the official main entrance to Texas A&M’s campus—at least, I think it is. It’s a big campus, there are a lot of entrances.

This is the same flagpole, just with the half-mast US flag eclipsing the sun.

If you look closely, you may notice John 15:13 on that monument. An appropriate verse for the theme of this photoshoot.

There is hardly a more apt word to describe this turtle than “majestic”. Turtles are neat.

This has a certain “Taj Mahal” feel to it, does it not?

So many flags! This lines the street between the Memorial Student Center and the football field.

Wednesday 11-08-2023

I revisited the park to do some work the next evening when my dorm’s fire alarm began freaking out. It was restful! This is perhaps the one place on campus where you can hear nature sounds. Except maybe on the golf course; I haven’t visited it. Why on earth does a university campus need a golf course anyway?

I also recorded some passive audio of the waterfall sounds, the traffic sounds from the nearby road, and the ducks I got to see as a potential sequel to my recent audio postcard (go listen to it if you haven’t!).

There were some people fishing in the pond; I don’t know if it’s allowed or not, but they were doing it.

It looks more serene than it was. There were some people across the pond celebrating getting their Aggie Rings (I presume), popping champagne corks and taking pictures while it fizzed out with big lights flashing to light the scene. A little distracting, until I moved.

That stadium seats 110,000 people. Aggieland is insane… Oh look, ducks!

The man with the blue cap on the left is fishing, though you can’t tell from this angle.

I have to visit this building once a year to write a thank you letter to my deceased scholarship donor. They provide candy, though, so I stuff my pockets on my way out.

the rest of the week

I apparently didn’t take many pictures the rest of the week. Ah, well. Maybe next time.

I hope you enjoyed this format, let me know if you did!

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audio postcard: the MSC

2023-10-19T19:50:09.000Z

This week, I’m sharing a project of mine from one of my classes, “New Media and the Independent Voice”. The result is field audio recordings from Texas A&M’s Memorial Student Center, accompanied by narration by me.

I’m really proud of how this turned out, I hope you enjoy it!

Audio

See below for a full transcript.

Transcript

This weekend, I spent an evening at the Memorial Student Center.

My stay began in the basement, eating a meal from Panda Express. Orange Chicken with Fried Rice. The smell was strong, the chicken tasty, and my skills with chopsticks served me well.

I always carry chopsticks with me, in my backpack. They’re easy and quick to clean off, making them the ideal utensil, in my books. Besides, carrying my own means I don’t have to use the awful disposable wooden ones Panda Express provides. You can feel the splinters biting into your lips and tongue.

One of the best uses for chopsticks, in my book, is with chips or popcorn; that allows me to enjoy at my leisure without getting the grease or dust all over my fingers and, by extension, my book or device.

After finishing my meal, I moved upstairs to the Flag Room to do some work.

The flag room is one of campus’s favorite study and relaxation spots. During the day, you often see people napping or on their phones while waiting for their next classes.

And of course, the focal point is the beautiful grand piano that’s open for students to use.

These impromptu performances are truly grand and one of my favorite things about A&M.

Often I’ll see people dancing in their seats to the music while looking at their phones or chatting with friends.

When I first heard about the flag room, I envisioned nation flags. I imagined it as a room representing unity between different nationalities and cultures. To my disappointment, but not exactly my surprise, it turned out to be a room honoring Texas A&M’s traditions, with flags of the ROTC.

Still, in my dreams that’s what the flag room is; a place for people to put aside their differences and come together over beautiful music.

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all hail OSIRIS-REx

2023-09-22T02:49:10.000Z

This Sunday is a big day. OSIRIS-REx, deep space probe, will be returning a sample from an asteroid to Earth. I’ll be watching, along with many others.

The OSIRIS-REx mission, though, has a deeper story that’s largely untold. I’d like to tell it to you now.

the setup

OSIRIS-REx: a space probe, tasked with travelling to the asteroid Bennu, taking a sample, and returning it to Earth. It all sounded straightforward… until the probe reached Bennu.

Bennu, it turns out, is a “rubble pile” asteroid, made of a bunch of rocks held together only by gravity. The problem for OSIRIS-REx was that there was no clear place for the probe to collect its sample. They hadn’t counted on all the rocks.

So NASA called in us. The “citizens”. I, along with numerous other volunteers, mapped out the surface from images taken by the probe, marking every rock, boulder, and crater. Myself, I mapped just over 49,000 square meters of the surface, including Nightingale, the sample site that was eventually chosen.

citizen science

Citizen science: it’s the idea that some scientific challenges can best be overcome when many people come together, even people who don’t have any scientific training. To me, it’s a wonderful picture of everyone, from different nations and cultures and professions and backgrounds, working together to advance a common goal.

The best part of the project was the community. More than 3,500 of us participated. We griped together about the frustratingly repetitive job of marking every tiny rock large, seemingly-endless images, but once we had finished, many of us expressed nostalgia. We wanted another Bennu to map!

I miss those days.

I marked my images while my dad read to me from Les Misérables. It gave me something to do and something to think about, all while I spent time with someone I loved.

All good things must come to an end. We celebrated those (including myself) who’d mapped sample sites, the organizers sent swag to people. They even sent gifts to me, living all the way over in Malaysia. I still have the OSIRIS-REx mission patch as a sticker on my water bottle, front and center.

conclusion; or so we thought

We finished in October 2019. The very end of a world that would soon change forever. (You know, of course, what 2020 brought.)

We forgot—nay, I should only speak for myself. I forgot. I forgot those days, only reminded occasionally when someone asked about the sticker on my water bottle.

Then, one of my brother’s classmates who also loves following space exploration mentioned OSIRIS-REx, that it would be returning with its sample this Sunday, the 24rd.

I remembered.

the untold story

First I looked at the OSIRIS-REx Wikipedia page. I read it all the way through.

It never mentioned us. The thirty-five hundred. Not once. It just says that “NASA selected the final four candidate sites.”

I looked at the Bennu page—perhaps we were mentioned there instead, as the mappers of the asteroid. Nothing.

Maybe they’ve forgotten about us. Maybe we weren’t as important as we thought we were.

I still remember us. So, as a storyteller, I did my job: I told the untold story.

the real conclusion

We’ll be watching on Sunday, when OSIRIS-REx returns. We’ll be watching, us 3,500.

We collectively marked fourteen million surface features, combing over the entire asteroid’s surface fifteen times.

We’ll be watching. And we’ll remember, whether they do or not.

We’ll celebrate, we’ll laugh, and we’ll tell people our story. The story the world seems to have forgotten, or perhaps never known.

We’ll be watching.

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things i use (september 2023)

2023-09-15T17:06:08.000Z

Some people I’ve seen have lists of software and other things they use on their websites, but I change the things I use rapidly and would have to be constantly updating that page if I had one. At the same time, I know that many people have found programs they enjoy by seeing the software I casually mention I’m using, so it might help people to see a list of a bunch of things I use.

So here’s my solution: do a blog post about what I’m currently using, then potentially write new blog posts with updates. That way, I don’t have to be constantly updating a page with the things I use, since this page is not a living document.

Let’s jump in.

software

A quick preface: I’ve recently been making a push to be able to use my whole operating system with only my keyboard, and I think I’ve finally done it. I’m going to mark things here that have vi-like keybindings (or that you can set to have them).

For those who are interested, here are my dotfiles (ie settings) for many of the apps I use: Imagine I have witty link text here.

web browsing

qutebrowser (vi-like). This browser is absolutely fantastic for keyboard-based navigation of the web.
lynx (vi-like when enabled). A terminal-only browser. Also the oldest web browser still in development.

productivity

neovim (vi-like, duh). Need I say more? I started with vim and ended up switching to neovim. (Both are good, though.)
timewarrior (CLI-based). Time tracking software I integrate into my scripts.
vimwiki (vi-like). I use vimwiki, a plugin for vim/neovim, to help me take notes in plain-text Markdown. I used to use Joplin’s terminal interface.
khal (vi-like) and vdirsyncer (CLI-based). I use these to sync my calendar to a radicale server (self-hosted) through CalDAV.
todoman (CLI-based). A todo list manager that can read and write from the same CalDAV calendar as above.
khard (CLI-based) and vdirsyncer (CLI-based). Similar to khal, khard takes my contact list from my radicale server and lets me manipulate it from the terminal.

operating system (and related)

NixOS is my current distribution of choice. I’m considering switching to something else, but also want to see how long I can keep at it, since my full year on NixOS may be a new record for me.
SwayWM (vi-like) is my preferred window manager.
foot is my terminal emulator of choice.

password management

KeePassXC is what I used to use.
I moved to pass (CLI-based).
I use qute-pass to use those passwords in the terminal.

games

Kerbal Space Program
Endless Sky (It just got a new release but I haven’t tried it yet)

file management

git (CLI-based). I mean, who doesn’t?
mr (CLI-based) to manage my numerous git repos.
syncthing. Really great for syncing files between devices. Even better if you have a VPS or always-on machine connected, since you no longer have to have the other devices on at the same time to sync between them.
borgmatic (CLI-based) to make backups. Really cool!
Calibre is pretty much the final word when it comes to ebook management. Seriously, there’s nothing even in the same ballpark.

services

Codeberg as my sourceforge to manage and host my git repositories.
I used to use Joplin Cloud Basic (with a student discount) to sync my notes from Joplin. I could self-host something to sync to, but I paid a little for this instead to support the developer. The note publishing feature has also been handy when I want to share my notes from a class with someone. I haven’t yet come up a solution to pair with vimwiki, which I now use for notes.
Porkbun is where I buy my domain names.
Uberspace for hosting my websites. I recently switched to them from a conventional VPS and am loving the experience. It’s more aimed toward personal websites and self-hosting than business use, but that fits me well.
Weightless Books is where I buy DRM-free ebooks. Specifically, I currently subscribe to Clarkesworld and Forever Magazine through Weightless Books.
Borgbase, for remote backups. I use Borgmatic as my Borg client, as I mentioned earlier.
Zoho as my email host.
Lowkey.zone is where my Mastodon account is currently hosted. That said, I’m planning to move to my own forthcoming Polymaths.social when it launches.
Tailscale, which is fantastic for connecting devices. Another great feature I discovered recently for it is the Tailscale Funnel.

self-hosted

Immich, for hosting my photos. (I use syncthing to then sync that to my main laptop, from which I back them up to Borgbase.)
gonic, for streaming my music collection to my phone
radicale, for hosting CalDAV and CardDAV
hastebin, for sharing quick snippets of code or text. My is public and you’re welcome to use it! I’m considering moving to bin, though. EDIT: I made the switch and love it! The new instance is https://bin.benjaminhollon.com
Firefly III to track my finances.
Maloja as a self-hosted scrobbling database to track my music listening—still working out some tricky things with it, but it’s very cool.
Miniflux as a feed aggregator. I just started using it and am already in love.

mobile

I won’t give links here, but you should be able to find them.

Firefox
When I have a Mastodon client (I usually delete it to help keep me from distraction), I use IceCubesApp, which is delightful
VLC
iSub (as a subsonic client to stream from gonic)
Pass for iOS (though it hasn’t been syncing over ssh lately—I need to figure out a workaround)
Immich
Tailscale
Signal
WhatsApp, GroupMe, and Slack (unfortunately, I have people I need to communicate with who through these)

Overall I try not to use my phone much. I prefer doing things on my laptop when possible.

coding

Lume as a static site generator (SSG) for this site and most of my others.
readable.css as the base stylesheet for my sites. Full disclosure, I created readable.css myself, so I may be biased in favor of it, but I really do think it’s a great option.

other

cmus (vi-like) as a terminal music client.
tut-tui (vi-like) as a terminal Mastodon client.
aerc (vi-like) as a terminal email client. Quite honestly, this is the first time I’ve actually enjoyed going through my mail.
mouseless for software-side keyboard remapping. I use it to match what I do with QMK on my mechanical keyboard so that I can use the same keybindings on my laptop. I’m considering switching to keyd, but it doesn’t have built-in mouse keys support, and I wasn’t a fan of warpd, which it recommends pairing with to get mouse keys, but which didn’t work great on SwayWM.
abcde (CLI-based) to rip CDs for my music collection and beets to manage the collection (both are CLI-based).
newsboat (vi-like) as a terminal feed reader. I currently have it set up to use my Miniflux instance as a backend.

hardware

devices

Framework Laptop 13 with 12th-generation Intel. I posted a full review here on Musings after my first semester using it. (This thing is great!)
A handed-down iPhone SE (2020).
An old Dell Inspiron n411z as a home server.

peripherals

Soundcore Life Q10 headphones. These are fantastic, with 60-hour battery life and really great sound quality for a great price. For $10 more, there’s a model with active noise cancelling, but it doesn’t use USB C and I don’t care about ANC, so I went with these.
Keyboard
- Keychron V4 as the base board. It has QMK and hotswap for a great price. I got it instead of the Q4, since (1) it’s cheaper with a plastic chassis instead of aluminum and (2) it’s lighter and I do a good bit of travelling.
- I waffle between preferring Gateron Silent Black Ink switches or Durock T1 switches, both of which are fantastic.
- For keycaps, I have the “Smoke Cloud” set from YMDK

other

I switch between my Casio 1200-WH (a great watch) and my PineTime (also a great watch) depending on how I’m feeling. I’d probably be more often using the PineTime if it had better iOS support.
PinePower and PinePower Desktop. The portable PinePower is especially neat as an international traveller since it comes with international adapters.
I use a USB-C dock to connect all my stuff to my laptop. I bought it at Walmart, I think, and it’s from their brand of computer peripherals, “onn”. I don’t have it with me as I write this, or I’d find the exact details.

Conclusion

Well, that may or may not be everything. It’s kinda hard to put together an exhaustive list. But maybe it’ll give you some ideas.

Enjoy!

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the prodigal's brother needs to stop

2023-06-06T14:27:11.000Z

Some of you may have been reading The Prodigal’s Brother, the serial novel I was publishing daily updates to. I liked where it was going and some of you did too, but it needs to stop, at least for now.

the situation

If you have been following along, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t published an update since early February. What you may not have known is that for a good couple weeks before that I was writing updates right before the deadline, often finishing only fifteen minutes before they were due to go live.

It wasn’t working for me. Being so rushed meant I was taking shortcuts in the writing and not planning things out fully, pushing me into corners I didn’t want to have to storytell my way out of.

Finally, there came a weekend where I had enough work that I knew I had to choose between schoolwork and getting my updates out on time.

I chose right: I prioritized schoolwork.

I promised myself I’d get back on top of things, but I never did. I think I already knew at that point that this day would come.

The Prodigal’s Brother is temporarily dead. I don’t have plans to continue my publishing schedule and I’m taking down what I’d published.

why?

Here’s the thing: The Prodigal’s Brother is an important story to me. Due to this form, the issues I was having, and some other pressures I won’t mention, I was botching it.

This story is too important to me to mess up, and I realize that now. I need to take a step back, look at it from another angle, and try again.

And I will try again, I promise. I’m not going to let this story die. But I don’t know yet when I’ll be able to publish it or even if it’ll be in the same form. After trying, I really don’t think this plot is cut out for the update model I was using. It fits better as a conventional novel. (And I already have new ideas now that I’m admitting that.)

There are also some fundamental worldbuilding problems I didn’t notice until I was too far into the project to change them. I need to take another look at those. More importantly, I need the freedom to be able to change things I’ve already written, which this form didn’t provide me.

Finally, feeling guilty for not writing toward The Prodigal’s Brother was holding me back from my other writing. Since admitting defeat on this attempt, I’ve written about ten times as much as I wrote in the previous month, toward various projects. Besides launching a new blog, tty1, I’ve drafted some posts for this blog (coming soon), started work on some new fiction projects, and gotten into poetry again.

going forward

I don’t plan to stop writing this story, and I especially don’t plan to stop publishing my writing regularly. I grew unbelievably as a writer over the course of the month and a half I was writing for The Prodigal’s Brother. I need to keep publishing to keep growing, because I know I certainly haven’t arrived at my peak yet.

So, here’s the plan for how I publish what I write, going forward:

I want to publish blog posts regularly. This blog, Musings, was originally intended to receive intermittent posts, but it’s now my primary personal blog (an official announcement of the closing of See With Eyes Closed is forthcoming). I want more posts here, in addition to the weekly posting schedule I’ve been trying to keep for tty1.
I’ll keep publishing poetry here, as well. (Did you know I have an Atom feed for those poems, now? Get subscribed!)
Since The Prodigal’s Brother doesn’t fit this web serial form, but I do like the medium, I started thinking about a story that would fit it better. I have an idea, and I’m excited about it. I’m not ready to announce it, but I think it could work far better as a web serial than The Prodigal’s Brother did.
I’m going to try journalling again. I’ve tried to pick up journalling repeatedly, but have always stopped. For a reason I’m gonna keep secret for now, I think I have the motivation to at least try it. We’ll see how it goes. (Note: since I first drafted this article, I’ve stopped journalling daily, but am occasionally picking it up.)
I used to have a weekly newsletter where I gave updates on all of my projects. I think that could be a valuable way to keep me accountable on actually doing all of these things I’ve promised. I don’t really want to try doing that through email again, so perhaps I’ll start publishing something like that here on a weekly or monthly basis. Or perhaps set up something completely separate? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go get to work!

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reconsidering my reading choices

2023-06-05T11:57:41.000Z

One of the very first articles I planned to post on Musings was a list of my favorite books. It’s now a complete draft, but has sat on my computer for over a year, collecting dust.

I dug it up, planning to brush it up, address any changes, and post it, but noticed something: the only female author to feature on the list is Agatha Christie.

I find this very sadly lacking, and I intend to do what I can to rectify the situation. If you have recommendations of books written by women, I would be very grateful for them (though I don’t promise to read every recommendation I receive).

That is all. Perhaps at some point in the future I can present a more balanced list, but until then the original post that would have appeared here will be kept under wraps.

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imagining an email-free contact form

2023-01-27T00:00:00.000Z

I don’t like email for many different reasons, including that it’s a decentralized platform that’s been forcibly centralized by big companies.

To line up with that, I’ve been slowly eliminating email from the code of my websites over the last few years. Finally, I stopped putting out emails when I post new things, instead providing RSS feeds for people to keep up with my posts.

There’s one spot I still use email though: for people to contact me. Let’s think for a moment about how I could do away with that, too.

eliminating email on the user’s end

The standard solution is to provide a contact form where people can leave a message. However, these forms are usually written with the goal of eliminating spam and keeping the site’s owner’s email private, not the goal of eliminating email. They usually ask for the user’s email and then the site’s owner replies with email.

Clearly not the solution I’m looking for, but it can get close: a form like this could let me ask users if they’d prefer I get back to them in a different way, for example XMPP, Matrix, Mastodon, etc. (Ideally it would be a platform other than email; using email would defeat the whole purpose.

Using the standard model of these forms, though, that would still require sending an email from the site to me.

eliminating the contact form

I found coding a contact form challenging; my implementation kept breaking and handling email in code is frustratingly difficult.

The easy solution? Just give my email and let people send me messages themselves. I currently do this, albeit using an email relay through Firefox Relay so that I’m not giving away my private email address to spammers.

This is very much not the solution I want. It uses email in every part of the process, even though it is easier to code.

So, this got me thinking: what would be easy to code and yet eliminate email completely?

For sending blog post updates, RSS was the solution. Could RSS be an answer to this problem?

rss for a contact form

I love RSS. If you don’t know what RSS is (or you don’t use it), you’re missing out. It’s a private, easy-to-code way for websites to provide updates in a machine-readable format. Users can plug the link to the feed into a “feed reader” and then get updates from the site through it.

The problem: RSS is usually used to update users about site content. Can I use it to notify the site owner about users trying to contact them? I think I know a way.

Imagine a form as described above which asks people using it to input a way for me to reply to them. Now, if instead of emailing the result to me, I stored it on the server, I could then generate an RSS feed using those stored messages.

RSS links can use authentication, if your reader supports it. My reader, newsboat, does. This would let me restrict access to the feed only to me, making sure people’s messages to me are private.

I think it would be the perfect system. Now, I haven’t implemented it yet, so there very well may be issues. But I plan to try it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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a semester with the framework laptop

2023-01-04T00:00:00.000Z

Back at the beginning of my first semester at Texas A&M (a few days in), I received a Framework Laptop, a long-awaited purchase for me.

Spoiler alert: I absolutely love this thing.

For whatever reason, though, I never got around to writing up the full review of it I planned to. Now that the semester is over, here’s a review of how it performed over time. That should be an even better indicator than a “first impressions” post to anyone considering buying their own.

where i came from

To give you some context on why I bought the Framework Laptop, let me tell you the horror story of my previous laptop.

I had a (gasp) Microsoft Surface Laptop, first generation. It was easily the worst laptop I have ever used, even to the point that for a couple months I preferentially used a Macbook that didn’t have a functional battery or storage drive.

Why was it so terrible? Well, for one, it broke easily, but even worse, there was no way to fix the laptop. The first thing I remember going wrong was the trackpad popping out of place; when we went to the Microsoft website to look at repair options, the only one was “Out-of-Warranty Replacement,” clearly not ideal. So I suffered with it.

The Surface power cords were also terrible. Even though they’re magnetic, you can still accidentally yank your computer off a table if the cord is pulled at the right angle. Worse, they failed frustratingly quickly and were uncomfortably expensive to replace.

By the end, I was suffering through a popped-out trackpad, failed screen hinge (I propped up the lid with a bookend), a battery which occasionally disconnected, and terrible battery life. I finally gave up on the laptop when my fifth replacement power cord failed.

How about repairability? I said it was bad, but how bad? Well, here’s what iFixit said when they tried to take it apart and fix things:

The Surface Laptop is finally ~~vanquished~~ disassembled!

Verdict: The Surface Laptop is not a laptop. It’s a glue-filled monstrosity. There is nothing about it that is upgradable or long-lasting, and it literally can’t be opened without destroying it. (Show us the procedure, Microsoft, we’d love to be wrong.)

– Microsoft Surface Laptop Teardown - iFixit

You can see why a fully repairable and modular laptop that iFixit gave a repairability score of 10/10 (as opposed to the Surface Laptop’s 0/10) appealed to me.

what i got

One nice thing about the Framework Laptop, there’s a ton of options to customize exactly what you get, especially if you get the DIY edition (which I did). You can even source some of the parts like storage, RAM, and power cord yourself instead of buying from them (which I didn’t).

So here’s what I got:

Intel i5-1240P 12th-generation CPU (4 P cores, 8 E cores; it was the cheapest option but still crazy impressive)
32 GB RAM (I know, it’s overkill, especially since I now use a tiling WM and rarely go over 2 GB usage, but I didn’t know I’d make that switch then and it’s nice to have)
2 TB SN750 SSD

And my expansion cards?

4 USB C
2 USB A
1 HDMI
1 microSD
1 250GB storage expansion

opening it

The DIY edition doesn’t come fully assembled, but no worries! The online guide was easy to follow as someone who’d never done anything like this before and I was up and running in 10-15 minutes. Here’s a time lapse:

The setup of my Framework Laptop as a time lapse

I started by trying out the i3 spin of Fedora and had trouble configuring it for the HiDPI display, so I switched to the regular GNOME Workstation edition of Fedora (I hadn’t used i3 much, so I didn’t really have a solid config yet and I just wanted to enjoy the laptop on something I was used to). I then installed sway alongside GNOME and would use it when coding.

Eventually I moved to NixOS with a sway-only setup, then went to Fedora (Server Edition) with Sway installed, then eventually went back to NixOS, where I remain happily at this time.

faq

I’ve been asked a lot about the laptop, so here’s some answers to the most-asked questions.

battery life?

By far the most common question I got was about the Framework laptop’s battery life.

It’s mediocre. Not spectacular, but still easily sufficient for what I need.

I set a charge limit of 75% on the battery in the BIOS when I first set up the laptop; this helps increase the long-term life of the battery and lengthens the amount of time before I’ll need to replace it. On this 75% of power, I usually have 3-4 hours of active time before I plug it in, at which point the battery is generally at about 25%. If I know I’ll be needing the extra capacity, for example when taking a flight or a road trip, I’ll increase the charge limit to 100% temporarily and that’ll give me another couple hours of life.

As for the capacity after a semester’s use, according to upower, I have 89.5% capacity of what it originally was (I haven’t noticed any degradation myself). If I remember correctly, I lost the first few percent in the first few days and the loss has been slower since then.

I’ll let those of you who know more about batteries interpret all this; all I know is that for my purposes, this battery life has been easily sufficient.

Keep in mind, though, that I now use a tiling window manager (Sway WM, to be specific), which in my experience uses a fair bit less battery than something heavier like GNOME. So your mileage may vary.

linux support?

How well does the Framework Laptop support Linux?

If you have an up-to-date kernel, it’s almost flawless. (There’s a minimum kernel version for the graphics and another for proper P and E core usage.) That covers all the distros I like to use, since I prefer ones that have up-to-date kernels. This includes Fedora, NixOS (though it needed to specify the latest kernel), Arch (btw), and the like.

They also provide guides to setting up some Linux distributions, which is fantastic and sadly rare from other companies.

Some might wish that they would offer pre-installed Linux distributions, but personally I prefer it without anything installed. Even if it had come with my exact setup of choice installed, I probably would have reinstalled it myself just for the experience and the peace of mind.

The one issue with the Linux support: you can’t have both the Ambient Light Sensor automatically adjusting the brightness and use the brightness keys on the keyboard. I prefer to set my brightness manually, so I blacklisted the sensor module in the kernel flags as explained on the Framework Linux setup guide for Fedora (and for NixOS independently found a guide on how to do that). I don’t like things being automatically done for me anyway, so this worked out fine.

I don’t think I have any other issues to report! All the firmware has upstream support in the kernel, so as long as your kernel is up-to-date enough, you’ll be fine.

As for the fingerprint sensor, it works, but I didn’t find it very useful. Something to do with the implementation in PAM I read about (I don’t remember the details) requires you to hit enter before it starts checking for your fingerprint. Their reasoning makes sense, but I didn’t find the fingerprint sensor useful with that limitation.

But maybe you’ll think differently; it works in Linux, which is a win, whether it’s useful to you or not.

expansion cards?

You may notice I got a wide range of expansion cards. One question I’ve received is how useful they really are.

And it’s true, I don’t change around the configuration much. But I want to raise two points:

It’s extremely valuable to have your ports placed where you want them, whatever they are
If I ever do want to change the configuration, I can!

My usual configuration:

(left back) USB C
(left front) 250 GB Storage Expansion
(right back) USB C
(right front) USB A

I usually use the left back for charging, which I usually do through a USB C dock I have, which also takes care of my keyboard and mouse.

I run hourly backups to the storage expansion card because why not? I can! It consists of a LUKS-encrypted btrfs partition where I run hourly backups via Borg (my current client is Vorta, though I’m looking around for a different one).

I don’t use the right side’s ports much; when I need to plug something in, I usually just use the USB C dock I mentioned, since it’s convenient to have everything in one place. I’ll use the USB A one occasionally if I need a Linux live USB or to plug in something to charge if I run out of USB A ports on my dock (which has three, one for mouse, one for keyboard, and one free). The second USB C port comes in handy if I need to charge my laptop while away from my dorm and the socket is on my right rather than the left. It’s great to be able to use either side to charge my laptop; gone are the days of wrapping my charger around my body!

I haven’t used the HDMI card yet, but it’s good to have in case I need it. I haven’t tested the microSD reader yet either, but I do have some devices (like my microphone and my Raspberry Pi) that use microSD, so I’m glad to have it for one I use those while at university; I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

One final question on this note: I’ve been asked how robust the cards are. They’re pretty sturdy and don’t slide out unless you’re very intentional about it. They have a small latch and are supported by a ridge along the length of the card. I don’t have the Ethernet card, which seems to be slightly different, so I can’t speak on that one.

some quick impressions

I’m honestly almost disappointed that nothing’s broken, meaning I haven’t gotten a chance to test the repairability! But that’s actually very good news for the laptop; I’ve found when it comes to either software or hardware, it’s best when it’s boring. That way, you never have to worry about it not working.

A few minor nitpicks (keep in mind I love the laptop):

The screen hinge isn’t quite strong enough for my liking. When I move to a different spot, the lid will sometimes fall down. BUT: Framework sells a stronger screen hinge for those who want it; this doesn’t bother me enough to go to the trouble and expense of ordering it, which shows it’s not a huge issue.
The speakers are angled down, which makes them quiet on my lap. I’m sure if flat on a surface it would work fine since it’s a 45-degree tilt (look up product pictures to see what I mean) and the sound would bounce right, but I use a stand for my laptop when at my desk, so I don’t get that effect. That said, AGAIN Framework does sell replacement speakers that are louder. However, they’re not (currently) available in the US and again, I don’t think I’m bothered enough to get new ones.
I don’t remember seeing any way to turn off the light on the power button; I don’t care to have it on. There is a way to lower the brightness in the BIOS, which I’ve done, but it’s still easily noticeable. I’ve gotten used to it, though.
The boot menu isn’t very easy to manage (though once you’re set up, it’s fine)
The open source firmware is great, but I would love to have an Open Source BIOS too!

Some great things I wasn’t expecting:

The screwdriver it comes with is awesome; it has an interchangeable bit even though you only need one bit for the laptop’s screws. The bit even has a regular Phillips head on the other side for convenience! This really drove in to me how much they’re focused on sustainability and reusability.
On that note, the box was really nice and I’m keeping it around. All the packaging materials were (as far as I could tell) recycled, including the included stickers.
The privacy switches for the camera and microphone are great; I wasn’t expecting to actually enjoy them. They’re almost always off in my case. (I just have to remember to turn them back on when I need them!)
The keyboard is pretty great for a laptop keyboard. My High School literature teacher (who got one shortly before I did) described it as “typing on a cloud.” It isn’t spectacular to me now that I use a mechanical keyboard, but it’s still definitely comfortable to use and I type just as fast on it as my mechanical keyboard (which is in the 120 wpm range for short times and over 100 for 5 minute times). I’d been told it was great, but it really is great. One of the top two laptop keyboards I’ve used (the other being on the Dell Inspiron n411z).
The build quality is fantastic; I love the aluminum chassis and it feels very professional, even more so than the modern Macbooks, in my opinion. Absolutely fantastic. I never imagined just holding a laptop could be such a great experience. This isn’t just a tool, it’s a work of art.

things i’d do differently

I don’t need 32 GB of RAM. Now that I’m on a tiling window manager, it’s very rare for me to even pass 2 GB used. But it doesn’t hurt to have it. I might get 16 GB just to have dual channel, but 32 GB is definitely too much.
I might get a different charging cord. Then again, I might not; the one they sell is just fine. But if there was a high quality braided cord available for a similar price, I’d probably go with it, especially if the end is at a right angle like on the Framework one—that’s really nice. But the current one is great.

I think that’s it. It would be great if with the DIY edition you could get the firmer hinge and the louder speakers, because I’d probably do that, but it’s fine that they don’t offer that option; it makes things harder for them, I get it.

verdict

The Framework Laptop is easily the best laptop I’ve ever had. It’s expensive, but that pays for itself with the repairability and quality of the laptop. Framework also provides unparalleled documentation and guides for everything related to maintenance of your laptop, which I deeply respect. Doing repair to your computer following their guides doesn’t void your warranty either, which is also fantastic.

Hats off to you, Framework, you’ve made something amazing. I wish you great success and will be watching your new product releases with anticipation; I can’t wait to see what you make in the future.

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2022 in review

2023-01-02T00:00:00.000Z

A lot happened this year. Not really any easier way to describe the year.

Let’s jump in.

university

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: I’m a university student now. Yes, that’s right, I am the loudest and proudest member of the fightin’ Texas Aggies class of 2026, studying toward a BA in Communications.

Some of you may have noticed a detail about this: Texas is not Malaysia, my home for the last six years. So this summer was largely spent with the move from that continent to this one.

The good news: I love the A&M Communications department, far more than I was even expecting. I’m definitely in the right place.

The not-so-great news: it’s winter right now and I miss the tropics so much.

A&M is a great school too; I’m part of both the University Honors program and Communications Departmental Honors, and I’m enjoying both programs. This semester I finished the last of my science requirements (by taking a Racquetball class, no less), thrived in my COMM 101 class and a Journalism class on American Mass Media, and got a bit frustrated in my US History and US Literature classes. They covered the same time period (foundations through the Civil War), but I don’t feel a ton of stake in US history and kept running across examples of fairly narrow mindsets compared to the international scope I tend to think on.

But overall, my first semester went great and I’m looking forward to next semester, where I’ll be taking Public Speaking, Group Communication and Discussion, Beginning French I, Concert Band (and lest I forget, I’m in the A&M pep band too), and Foundations of Money Education, among a few other things.

writing

I did some blogging, but honestly not as much as I would like. You can check out my blogs and see what’s there yourself.

Other than that:

I launched A Rainless Sky, an interactive murder mystery set in a fantasy world of my own design. It messes a good deal with free will and causality and is somewhat mind-bending to write, which is why updates have been… slow. I hope to get to it, but since I wasn’t originally planning to write it, it’s lower on my list of priorities.
I have a redesigned page for my writing you should check out. There’s not much new there yet, but it does have a bunch of poetry that I’m publishing! I’ve written more and plan to put it up soon.
There’s a project I’ve been planning for two years that is finally ready to go: The Prodigal’s Brother! This is a hard science fiction story set in the year 2078 and I am so excited. I put out the prologue on Christmas Eve and one update will be published every day of 2023. Please, check it out and let me know what you think; I’m really very excited to finally be publishing it after so long.

Not much other than that (I failed NaNoWriMo after four consecutive wins, but… University!), but I’m very excited about this year; having to publish a new chunk of story for The Prodigal’s Brother every day should help me build a habit of writing and I have a ton of ideas I’m working on.

coding

This was a big year! Let’s start with the biggest thing:

I launched Freedom to Write, a formal grouping of projects focused on developing and supporting Free and Open Source Software for the writing industry. The first project, readable.css is out and has received a good bit of positive feedback!

I redesigned all of my sites as well (except for See With Eyes Closed which still needs a little work); they now all use readable.css and are based in Deno instead of NodeJS. (NPM, NodeJS’s package manager, is owned by Microsoft and I’m trying to move away from depending on Microsoft.)

Speaking of moving away from Microsoft, I moved from the Microsoft-owned GitHub to Codeberg for all of my projects. I’m also moving toward more permissive licenses instead of the GPL for my code; I have a post about that coming out soon (hopefully).

computer stuff

I’ve had big strides this year in both hardware and software. Let’s discuss!

hardware

I was daily driving a Surface Laptop (1st-generation) that has now been retired. May it rest in peace.

Just kidding, that thing was the worst laptop I’ve ever used! By the end, it’s screen hinge didn’t keep the lid up (I used a bookend to prop it up), the trackpad had popped out, the battery disconnected occasionally shutting down the computer, and my fifth replacement power cord had failed.

And because it was 0/10 repairable ([according to iFixit], “The Surface Laptop is not a laptop. It’s a glue-filled monstrosity. There is nothing about it that is upgradable or long-lasting, and it literally can’t be opened without destroying it.”), the only option was to get a replacement. I stuck it out to the end of High School.

And now… (drumroll please) I have a Framework Laptop (12th Generation Intel)!

The setup of my Framework Laptop as a time lapse

This thing is absolutely fantastic. Absolutely. Fantastic. I’ve got a full review coming out soon (hopefully).

I also got a Mechanical Keyboard, a Ducky One 3 TKL Daybreak, which you can look up to see how it looks. I have it with Cherry MX Clear switches, which are fantastic. My typing speed went up from ~100 wpm, where it had stagnated, to ~120 wpm since getting it, though for some reason I can also type that same speed on my laptop now. It’s odd, but I’ll take it!

Other hardware includes a Pine64 PineTime which is also really neat and should also hopefully have a full review out soon.

software

This is where things get interesting. For a long time, I was staying on Fedora Workstation with GNOME. Occasionally, I’d try something else, but nothing stuck.

Then I discovered… Vim. It’s a text editor that’s a complete paradigm shift. I can now edit text and code faster than ever before and without my hands ever leaving my keyboard.

I started looking around for other software to match; I found qutebrowser, a browser that also lets you use it keyboard-only, faster and more efficiently than I ever did things before. I’m much more comfortable now when browsing the web, focusing more on the actual sites instead of the process of navigating the sites.

The rabbit hole goes deeper. I switched to i3wm, then SwayWM, which works better on my Framework Laptop, window managers for my Linux install that let me control the entire operating system with my keyboard and have an enormous degree of control over it.

I also use a ton of different programs; most use keyboard shortcuts similar to vim’s, helping me have a consistent experience across all my programs. They also run from the terminal, which probably only matters to you if you already know what that means. ;)

The final piece of the puzzle was mouseless which, true to its name, has completely done away with my need for a mouse. More than that, it allows arbitrary keyboard remapping, which is awesome.

I’ll probably be posting more about that here on this blog and on tty1, my upcoming blog about the Linux terminal.

consumption

I’ve taken in a lot of writing, music, etc. this year, so I’ll briefly go through that.

books

Liu Cixin is my new favorite Science Fiction author, I’ve decided. Not only do I love the Three-Body Problem trilogy, I’ve now read Ball Lightning and two short story collections and am in the middle of Supernova Era. His writing is fantastic, especially in the way it connects the large and small scale of plots. For example, one short story I read was about a hitman trying to take out targets in the middle of an alien invasion. You’d expect a story like that to be more focused on the alien invasion, a huge society-shifting event, but no, he’s trying to take out his targets. Now, it turns out there’s a connection, but that only shows how well Liu Cixin connects the large and small.

I haven’t read as much as I’d have liked to this year. I read some Heinlein (and decided that while he’s a good write, I disagree with much of what he writes). I reread some Asimov and Bradbury. I read a ton of early US literature for a class.

Not much else to report on this front, as far as I can recall right now. I wish I’d been tracking my reading progress on Bookwyrm so I could better report it, but I’ll have to try that again this year.

Currently reading:

Supernova Era by Liu Cixin
What if 2 by Randall Munroe
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (it’s a reread, and yes I know that sounds like bragging but it is so good on the reread)

podcasts

Everyone’s listing this on their “Year in Review” posts, so here goes. I listen to:

Writing Excuses
Command Line Heroes

Not much else at the moment; occasionally I also listen to Writer’s Routine, but not regularly.

movies

I don’t watch much. But:

I loved the new Dune movie
Did I watch anything else new? I’m not sure I did.

blogs

I’ve got some RSS feeds for you I’m gonna spit out without much explanation:

https://bt.ht/atom.xml
https://joelchrono12.xyz/feed.xml
https://jmhieber.wordpress.com/feed/
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod.rss

For more, view the list I subscribe to. This also includes some feeds of my own stuff, since why not?

more from me

Okay, I’m done for now, I think. Maybe I’ll add something if I think of it.

If you want updates as I’m doing things, you should follow me on Mastodon. I post there a ton.

I’m looking forward to a great 2023!

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a nanowrimo pep talk

2022-11-06T00:00:00.000Z

If you’ve used the NaNoWriMo website, you’ve probably seen that they’ll occasionally get famous writers to write “pep talks” to encourage current writers to keep going. Personally, I haven’t found them very helpful.

I’m not a famous writer. There are a few people who like my writing a good deal, but I haven’t yet pursued publishing in a professional capacity. I’m not the kind of person who would write an official NaNoWriMo pep talk.

But then, maybe that’s what you need. So here we go.

introduction

“I can’t write,” you said. Yes, you’ve all said it. I have too; I used to hate writing, no joke!

I’ll let you in on a little secret: you were lying. (And no, the irony of me cluing you into a lie you’re telling does not escape me.) You can write—in all probability, you can do so pretty well. You’ve had teachers, mentors, and role models who dragged you down the corridor of learning kicking and screaming, and you have now begrudgingly reached the point of competency.

Congratulations. As the Vogon guard said, “Resistance is useless!” Writing is a fundamental part of who you are, a tiny pillar holding up a deep, dark corner of your heart you never knew existed but which would send you into cardiopulmonary arrest were it to collapse. You are, at base, a scrivener.

Whether or not you believe me or are still running through the circuitous and frankly rather dubious track of my logic, let us accept as a given that you, in fact, can write. Therefore, the question is not whether you can write but whether you will write.

Will you?

I sincerely hope so, from the most writerly depths of my heart, but you’re not ready. You have questions, hesitations, walls you have to break down before you’re willing to dip your pinky toe into a puddle as preparation for the vast ocean that is writing.

Let’s work through those questions.

i won’t finish

That’s a terrifying thought, isn’t it? Fifty thousand words is no small sum, especially in so few as thirty days. Sometimes it’s easy to wonder whether it’ll actually be possible to cross the finish line.

I think it is possible, but putting that aside for the briefest moment, I would like to ask you: What’s the worst thing that happens if you don’t finish?

You have part of a novel written.

And if you hadn’t started?

You would have none of a novel written.

Is having part of a novel really so terrible? I think it’s far better than no novel.

And then, of course, there’s the very slightest possibility that you may in fact do better than your wildest dreams in which case you, my reader turned writer, will be the author of your very own novel.

the site

I need to take a moment to acknowledge something: the official NaNoWriMo site is not great. It really isn’t. It’s buggy, flashy, distracting, and very money-centered.

Well, here’s a thought: you don’t actually have to use the site if you don’t want to. I almost recommend you don’t. Or if you do, only check in once a day to plug in your word count.

NaNoWriMo isn’t about the site, it’s about the people. You don’t need the site to find people. I’ve found the people to do NaNoWriMo with first in school, then on Habitica, then on Discord, and now on Mastodon. I’ve worn my “2020 winner” shirt (bought after a particularly challenging NaNoWriMo for me) to a dining hall on my campus and had someone recognize it and say she has multiple friends who do NaNoWriMo.

Find some people to do NaNoWriMo with; that’s the important thing. Get together with them to write, whether in person or online.

People are 80% more likely to win NaNoWriMo when they’re part of a community participating together. Also, 60% of statistics are made up on the spot.

But still, find a community.

i don’t know what to write

Neither did I the first time I tried. I only went for half the goal that time, 25 thousand words. (That’s a valid approach too, by the way!) I went in without a plan for more than the first few paragraphs.

It was absolutely terrible. The central plot twist that gave the story it’s main ideas revolved around a tap-dancing chicken, and at one point the villain materialized in the same room as the heroes, threw cupcakes at them, and then disappeared.

It was absolutely terrible. I stored the file in a place I would never run across it by accident and haven’t looked at it since.

But it was something. And a couple years later, I remembered that and said to myself, “Maybe I should try this again.” I did the full 50,000 words this time and absolutely aced it, ending up with a complete mystery novel that I later realized was almost identical to Agatha Christie’s Curtain which (a) is an incredible book and (b) I had just read. So that year’s novel was a wash too.

The next year I wrote a realistic fiction novel that I realized afterward was (a) very, very similar to my own life and (b) wasn’t actually very interesting at all.

The next year I wrote a science fiction novel. I put in huge amounts of planning and it was actually going very well until Windows locked me out, didn’t upload the recovery key to where it was supposed to, and so I lost the first 43,000 words. But I still rewrote the first seven thousand to finish the month. I haven’t revisited the story, but I can someday if I decide to.

Then I tried to write three novellas that would add up to 50k words, but I had a big school project and ended up counting my 14k word count from that project during November toward my goal of 50k words.

This year I’m doing well so far, even a bit ahead. But it’s a busy month, so who knows?

Did you see the point to all of this? I didn’t know what to write when I first started, and sure enough the result was horrible. But it’s led to wonderful things and achievements, and I honestly think that if I hadn’t done NaNoWriMo that year, I wouldn’t be on my current path of wanting to be a professional writer. It was lifechanging for me. And all I did was take the plunge of writing something without planning, then to realize that I actually enjoyed writing, even though I was horrible at it then.

I heard once, though I don’t remember who said it, that every writer has a million trash-level quality words inside of them when they start out. They need to write all of those million words before they start getting to the good ones.

I like that picture. Thanks to NaNoWriMo, I’m now a quarter of the way there. And I know my writing is already much, much better.

So it really doesn’t matter what you write as long as you write. Your NaNoWriMo novel won’t be winning the Nobel prize for literature, I can assure you of that. It probably won’t even get published, if you’re first starting out.

But it’s an amazing place to start. Even if you don’t think you’ll end up writing long-term, go ahead! I know it’s already part of the way into the month, but go ahead even so! Remember, I only wrote 25 thousand words the first time. You don’t have to do the full NaNoWriMo, but you might as well write something while there’s a large community of others out there to support and encourage you.

There’s no better time to start.

to current writers

I’m aware that many of you reading this may have already started. You were already convinced.

Can I just offer you my hearty applause? Good job.

You might not be doing too well right now, and you were coming here for advice or some tip or trick to help you keep moving. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any sage advice for you.

Except.

Don’t forget about community. There are people here for you to move you forward through every step, even as we’re struggling ourselves.

I’m in it with you, myself. If you ever need someone to encourage you, brainstorm with you, do a word sprint with you, or just tell you a joke to get your mind off your novel for a few minutes, I’m here.

And you know, that goes for life in general. I’m here for you to the extent I can be as a flawed human being who doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time.

But you matter to me, you can be sure of that.

Otherwise, would I have written exactly 1,500 words on this when I could have been writing my novel? Now excuse me, I need to go write.

And you should too. You’ll do great, believe me. Go get 'em.

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a social experiment on copyright

2022-10-23T02:16:09.000Z

I had an idea, so I tried it out. Sometimes I have trouble keeping myself from doing that. But this one seemed pretty fun, it intrigued me, and I thought there might be fascinating results behind it.

It was definitely fun, and the results are intriguing, though I don’t have an explanation behind them.

I just thought I’d put the facts out there.

what happened

Back when I first joined Fosstodon, I ran a poll on how long people thought copyright terms should be. It got 35 responses. Here are the results:

Looking back at that poll, I got curious: what would happen if I ran the exact same poll again, word for word, character for character? Well, I’ll let the results speak for themselves:

Fascinating. At least I think so.

what changed

For one, I should address the biggest change: my audience. When I first ran this poll, I did not have any significant following. Practically everyone who responded did so because they ran into the poll naturally, not because they’ve been following me and have already been hearing my own views on copyright and other issues. With the new poll, a significant number of respondents are my followers and may potentially have biased by what I’ve posted in the past and by the sort of followers I tend to attract.

But then, that was kind of the point of the experiment. If it were the exact same respondents, (1) someone would probably notice the experiment and (2) the only changes would be if people have changed their mind since the first poll. In scientific terms, my audience was the independent variable I changed, while I tried to make everything else constant between the two experiments.

As for the actual results, people overall tended to be less extreme in their views. Fewer people thought the current US law is ideal, and fewer people thought that the extreme “15 years or less” was correct.

What’s interesting to me is that the percentages for each half didn’t change at all. 35% of respondents thought copyright should last at least as long as the author’s life in both polls. Again, in both polls, 65% thought copyright should last 50 years or less.

I’d like to think this means that we’ve grown more willing to compromise. Realistically, since in this poll the respondents reflect my audience which reflects on me, it likely means I’ve personally become more likely to compromise.

I hadn’t thought I had, but looking back I do understand the issue a little better and sympathize better with people who have different views than me. I think that’s good.

I’m glad I did this.

again?

Maybe I’ll do this again. The date, of course, would need to be proper so that the three polls would be evenly spread out over time for the best results.

See you all on July 11, 2023, maybe.

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a seven-dimensional universe

2022-04-28T05:00:00.000Z

My current mental framework of the universe works in seven dimensions. It’s weird, and I haven’t seen this theory before, but neither have I seen anything yet that contradicts it. It’s perfectly possible something does, but I haven’t seen it, and this makes a lot of sense to me.

To understand my theory, you’ll have to understand two more mainstream interpretations of physics: Eternalism and Many Worlds.

eternalism

This theory has always fascinated me. I’ll give you a quick summary, then explain what it means. Eternalism is the idea that the universe is really a static, four-dimensional object, and that we only see a moving three-dimensional cross section of it.

This is easier to visualize if we remove a dimension; let’s look at film. In a video, the universe is reduced to two dimensions of space—width and height—as opposed to the standard three dimensions of space—width, height, and length. In addition to these dimensions of space, we have a single dimension of time, so a video reduces our four dimensions down to three dimensions, two of space and one of time.

Good so far?

Here’s the step Eternalism takes: if time is a dimension, just like width and height, why not represent it in the length dimension, which we currently aren’t using. By replacing length with time, we create a visible three-dimensional object that represents the entire video.

To imagine this, think of taking each frame from the video, printing it out on a piece of translucent plastic, and stacking them. The end result is a three dimensional object of each object in the scene, with every position represented.

We’ve represented two dimensions of space and one of time as a single, three-dimensional, static object.

To apply this to our universe, we do the same thing, but with all four dimensions. In the view of Eternalism, the universe is really a four-dimensional static object. We are limited to seeing three dimensions of it, the three dimensions of space. Because the three-dimensional slice we see is constantly progressing, objects appear to move, when we’re really only seeing sections of them from different locations in time.

many worlds

You’ve heard of this one before. It’s the standard explanation behind all the “multiverse” idea that’s popular in modern science fiction. Whenever a choice is made, the universe splits into two branches, both of which play out, though we only observe one.

In reality, this splitting happens at the quantum level, but we don’t need to get that technical for this article. Here’s the basic idea you need to know to understand my theory: every time two things could happen, both actually do, but we only observe one of them.

combining the two

Some may have seen where I’m heading. In Eternalism, we only see some of the existing dimensions. In Many Worlds, we only see some of the existing possibilities. In both, there are things we don’t see at any given time that nevertheless exist.

For review, let’s list our standard four dimensions: x, y, z, Time (x, y, and z are standard variables to assign location in space).

I said this is a seven-dimensional view of the world, so here are my three new dimensions: possible location across x, possible location across y, possible location across z. This adds in Many Worlds, not only representing every location a particle can be located, but every location it could be located at any given time.

Add in Eternalism; we now have a seven-dimensional object representing every possible location of everything in the universe at any given time.

visualizing it

Try paring the model down if you need to visualize it: one dimension of space, one of time, one of possibility across space. That should help.

the eighth dimension

While there’s no actual evidence to support this being true, I have thought through a way physics could allow non-paradoxical time travel if we added an eighth dimension: possibility across the time axis.

I’m not going to explain all the nuances of it, but here are the basics:

To be able to travel somewhere, that location needs to be marked in some way. This is why no time travelers have reached our past, since no one has discovered this method. Other branches of the eight-dimensional matrix, though, could have had time travelers at the same date if the method of marking a location was discovered then.
Once a location is marked, a time traveler will appear instantly. After all, the marking only affects the specific location at the specific instance of time, so anyone travelling to a position in time would appear at that instant. In the branches of possibility, though, different time travelers might arrive, though there are also branches where you have decided not to mark the location.
To avoid paradox, time travelers also travel across the “possibility across time” dimension. This way, if you kill your grandfather, it’s not actually the grandfather of your branch, so you can still exist.
I haven’t worked out any math on this, but I think all the conservation of matter and energy stuff is most likely to work out if the way you “mark” a location for time travelers is by time-traveling away from that location yourself. This would also mean it would be impossible to mark a location and not have a time traveler arrive. I’m not sure how the chain would get started, so perhaps this is the requirement that makes the whole thing only theoretical.

Previously, it’s been possible to visualize what I’ve been saying by reducing the number of dimensions to the minimum, but that’s not possible here. The minimum number of dimensions to model this would be four (one of space, one of time, one of possibility along space, one of possibility along time), so I absolutely understand if you can’t visualize it. It’s the more “out there” part of this theory anyway, so feel free to ignore or dismiss it.

conclusion

Well, that’s the theory. Let me know how bonkers I am by contacting me on one of my social accounts (ideally Mastodon) or via email.

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"non-comprehensive" ≠ "wrong"

2022-02-09T06:00:00.000Z

When it comes to learning, I hate analogy. Being given a simplified solution, only to later be told, “Oh, it really works like this, but that was an easier way to think about it,” frustrates me to no end.

That being said, explanations don’t have to be complete. Admitting that you don’t know everything is laudable, not a problem.

And lists of examples, of all things, certainly don’t need to be complete. In fact, they should not be complete. Ideally, any lesson should only have one, two, or perhaps three examples. Any more and the audience begins to become bored.

Some perceptive readers may have realized I’m speaking out of frustration. In particular, I’m referring to a comment on my article on why web privacy matters:

You skipped over OS and Application telemetry and analytics, location tracking, web dev SaaS like Google APIs and Fonts, supercookies and profiling technologies, Chromium and all its forks phone home (does anyone open wireshark/tcpdump anymore?), droid and all its forks phone home… This is outdated because it’s incomplete

I can only assume the person who wrote this was under the misunderstanding that the intent of the article was to list every possible breach of privacy on the web. If so, they didn’t read carefully; while I did list some cases, I did not say it would be comprehensive:

Here are some ways you probably didn’t realize sites you’re visiting are making money through the data they collect about you.

“Some” ways, not “all” ways. In fact, it’s specifically “some” ways that most people don’t realize are privacy concerns; the comment’s author listed some things, such as telemetry and location tracking, that many people know are privacy issues.

But that’s not the point.

Here it is: please don’t say that something is incorrect or “outdated” because it doesn’t list every example of something (unless that’s the intention). This comment in particular was written within days of the original publishing date; there’s no way the article was “outdated.” Perhaps, if you see that a newly-published article is not comprehensive, you should take a look at the original intent.

conclusion

I’m not angry at the author of that comment. I’ve probably had similar misunderstandings, and I know it happens. There are no hard feelings. There are things I could have done to make it more clear that this was not supposed to be comprehensive. For example, I have now added a note at the bottom of all the articles on digital citizenship that makes it clear that they are part of a series. If the comment’s author had read that, they would likely have realized that I had plans to address more points.

Instead, this is a note for the future. I’m hoping that a look at a common mistake, thinking through the faulty rationale, might help some people look more closely at the things they criticize in the future.

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how to code a blog

2022-01-25T00:00:00.000Z

To kick off my third blog, Musings, I thought it might be fun to list out the general process I follow now when coding a new blog (or, the process I wished I followed).

But first, let’s look a little at the idea behind Musings.

What is “Musings”?

Musings is a place where I can be me, without worrying too much about formality, staying on topic, or pleasing the people. It’s where I’ll be posting announcements about new things I publish, reactions to feedback people give me, behind-the-scenes on my various projects, and more.

For those of you subscribed to my See With Eyes Closed Digest, you know what I’m talking about. In those emails, I’m generally pretty easygoing, posting about various things I’m interested in. Now, I’ll be doing some of that here, too.

As I said, this is a pretty informal place. I’m not planning to do intensive grammar checking on my articles (usually I read through an article 3-5 times and run it through Grammarly), and I’m not going to worry about sticking to a theme. I think giving See With Eyes Closed a theme was an excellent move, but I also need a place where I can write about anything that comes to mind.

Some of it will be more technical, since I’m not worrying about keeping it catered to a specific audience. I’m not going to be afraid to use jargon. As I said, this is a place where I can be me. If you were to talk to me in person, this is largely how I would talk.

I hope it’ll still be interesting to people.

Without further ado, let’s look at my thought process when coding a blog.

Planning the blog

This is potentially the most important step; when I first coded See With Eyes Closed, it was a pretty random thought, without much effort put into the concept. Here was my thought process from beginning to end:

Oh, some of my friends have blogs.
That’s pretty cool.
I want to make one too.

Not much planning. It took me two years of intermittent posting and random topics before I decided I should actually think things through.

Here are some questions I recommend asking yourself:

What will your blog be called? Just “blog” is a bit boring. In my case, the exception is the Verbose Guacamole blog, which is already attached to the name of a product I make. I picked “Musings” for this blog to reflect it’s random nature, showing that it’s a more raw look at what’s going on in my head. I’m still thinking through what See With Eyes Closed means to me, but it was named after a couple of quotes I liked.
What will it be about? I do think writing a blog with a defined topic is a good idea. I’ve moved See With Eyes Closed to a series on Digital Citizenship which I plan to keep it on for this entire year, but I also think I’ll be switching the theme occasionally after that. On the other hand, you might just be making a personal blog, about your own adventures. That’s fine too.
Who is the audience? If you’re a coder, are you writing for other coders? Are you writing to potential readers of your yet-unpublished novels? Are you attracting customers? Is this just for friends and family? Your intended audience will govern the tone you pick for your blog.
What’s the tone? As I said, Musings is fairly casual. The current form of See With Eyes Closed, though, is rigorously researched and a relatively formal structure, but with an informal tone, addressing the reader directly. I recommend trying to find a structure that works for you and trying to design your blog posts to match.
How often will I publish things? This is more important than I realized at first. I tried once a week, but I didn’t actually commit to that publicly, so it quickly fell apart. In 2021, I only published nine posts, three of which were from school projects. In contrast, this year, with my goal of 100 total posts in 2022, I’ve already published four (this article makes five) and am finishing another. Having a goal and telling people what that goal is makes it far easier to write regularly.

The Technical Side

Some of you have been waiting for this, bored by all the planning stuff. Well, here it is. (To those who aren’t technically minded, setting up a WordPress site should be relatively straightforward and will suffice.)

The first step is to pick your programming language. All three of my blogs are currently written in NodeJS, but See With Eyes Closed was originally written in PHP, and I’m sure you could do this in other languages such as Python if you prefer. (I’m not a huge Python fan, sadly.)

I’m not planning to give you technical information about how I coded my blogs, since that is highly subjective and ruins the fun of you figuring it out. If you do want to take a peek, though, all three blogs have their code available on my GitHub account.

Once that’s done, you need to pick the method you’re going to code it with. I’ve actually done this two ways:

See With Eyes Closed and Musings — Articles are stored in a database. I currently use MongoDB, though I’ve used MySQL in the past. This approach gives you a huge amount of flexibility.
Verbose Guacamole — For the VerbGuac blog, all of the articles are stored as files in the code itself. This is far quicker and easier, and sometimes better, but it does make it very hard to implement comments or any sort of feedback system on individual articles without resorting to a third-party service like Disqus.

Both are good approaches; it all goes back to your planning. What do you want this website to be? If you want your blog to be something of a community, you’ll probably want to go the way of Musings, where people can easily respond to what you post. If it’s just a way for you to share information, use VerbGuac’s method.

I’ve also seen people simply link to their contact form or social media to allow people to reply; that’s a perfectly valid approach and one that could give you the best of both worlds.

Steps

Here is the actual order I code things in:

The Frame. — Your blog probably isn’t the only thing on your site. Code everything else first, then begin on the blog. Even See With Eyes Closed has some content other than the blog, and I made that first.
The Admin Dashboard — If you want to store your articles in a database, you’ll want to publish them through some sort of dashboard. Make sure it’s password protected, probably through Basic Auth. At this point, all you need is the mechanism to post articles.
RSS — Most would have this as the last thing, but I recommend doing it very near the beginning. RSS is a far easier format to generate than pretty much any other way you could display your articles to your readers, but it also makes you think about what needs to be displayed, so it’s a good starting point. (What is RSS?)
List Articles — Make a page that lists all articles. You can pick how this is displayed; on an old version of See With Eyes Closed, I had a list of articles in published order and another in order of popularity. Currently, I have published order and a way to view all the articles of a series in order.
View an Individual Article — You’ll need to let people read the article! I recommend trying to make a page that’s simple and not distracting. Something you could read on for hours if need be.
Edit an Article — You’re going to need some way to edit articles once you post them! Add that to your admin dashboard! (people going the VerbGuac route can skip this step)
Bells and Whistles — Add comments, reactions, and anything else to make the experience fun. Don’t forget to add a way to moderate your comments! If you’re considering using Google reCAPTCHA, don’t. Here’s my recommendation instead.

I think that’s it. You’ll probably find things along the way that I missed, but that’s part of the fun! And there are always new directions to take your blog; I recommend revisiting the code at least once a year for a major redesign.

Actually Posting

This is the hard part for many people. I’m not sure what to tell you.

But here’s what I’d recommend: set aside a time regularly where you can sit and write without interruption. Remove any devices you’re not actively using, pick a non-distracting program to edit in (I recommend Apostrophe on Linux), and let loose. It doesn’t have to be good.

Once you have a draft, here’s the process I usually run it through:

Read it through. Fix any obvious errors.
Plug it into Grammarly. I have a premium account through my school, which makes it especially useful, but even a free account should help. Feel free to use a similar tool.
Read it through again. Fix any more errors.
Read it through a final time, out loud!!! Reading out loud will help you catch so many mistakes or awkward ways of wording things; it’s probably the best proofreading technique I’ve developed.
Show it to someone for feedback. (This step is very much optional and one I rarely do.)

🎉

Congratulations! You’ve successfully coded a blog and published your first article.

Please send me a link on social media, my contact form, or in the comments below; I’d love to take a look and give you feedback.

I, also, have just successfully coded a blog and published my first article. Thus ends the first Musing.

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Musings

consistency and poetry

my poetic journey

consistency as a skill-builder

conclusion

the minimalism cycle

minimalism

the cycle

not just software

why?

friction

what is friction?

how do I use friction?

conclusion

tty1 guest article proposals are open!

what is tty1?

what should I write about?

why should I write for tty1? I have my own blog!

how do I sign up? that sounds great!

consistency

the benefits

the downsides

the solution?

lost treasures (party game)

the concept

the roles

2 Robbers

2 Minions

3 Heroes

1 Informant

1 Corrupt Informant

1 Saboteur

2 Shopkeepers

stealing and arrests

stealing

arrests

our results

some notes on numbering

instructors for organizers

resources

role summary sheets

more

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background

my thoughts

wireless is a lie

first: what does “wireless” mean?

the lies

lie #1: wireless is more portable

lie #2: longer battery life

lie #3: when it works, it’s better

tips for hardware minimalism

tip #1: consolidate everything wireless

tip #2: match power cord type

tip #3: docking stations

my setup—wired vs. wireless

conclusion

tracking my travels

in defense of "free" shipping

announcing clew: my search engine

clew!

faq

what programming language will you use?

why the .se tld for the domain?

why doesn’t the search bar do anything yet?

will this be a privacy-focused search engine?

do I need any help with designing a logo or anything like that?

will this be self-hostable?

when will this launch?

do you need financial contributions?

other questions

thank you!

using grep to increase index quality

the problem

the solution

this should've been a database

my solution

so… why not a database?

conclusion

announcing my blogroll

what is `tty1`?

why should I write for `tty1`? I have my own blog!

why the `.se` tld for the domain?