The Geekorium

This is the third in a series of posts where I just plonk stuff I’ve been thinking about that doesn’t go anywhere else. It’s got a stupid title because my first thought is…

1. I have a real bad time trying to come up with good titles. I don’t try too hard, so I guess it’s to be expected, but I note that my titles have a similar quality to other posts I’ve read that strike me as amateur. If I could tell you what that meant it would put me closer to rectifying it.

2. I have subscribed to a number of new “blogs” recently - as an aside, I think the word blog is awful so I will from now on refer to them as as net-logs, or personal chronicles, or whatever fits.

   After a week of posts on Hackernews about the death and resurrection¹ of said personal chronicles, I thought I’d fire up the ol’ RSS reader and brush off the dust.

   The first thing that struck me was how unpleasant the PHP-based software I had been using was. So instead of dicking around with it, I put my new Docker/Nginx skills to work and fired up a version of Miniflux which is just so elegant and simple to work with. I’ve been slowly accumulating a bunch of low-key personal chronicles by people who write about FOSS and speculate about the same kind of issues that interest me. I’ll put up a list of them somewhere soon.

3. I’m looking for some diversity in my growing list - a lot of these people are other men about my age, which is a fine thing to be - I myself am a man about my age - but other view-points and ideas are also nice. I’m interested in FOSS, internet decentralisation/federation, programming, technology so I’m looking for personal chronicles with a similar bent. I’m not looking to subscribe to stuff that’s completely outside my interests (eg. sport, cars, gardening etc.) but someone who occasionally shares their passions for those things amongst the stuff I’m interested in is welcome². Share your linkrolls!

4. Today I did a big Mastodon harvest - finding and following a lot of new people. This was just to widen the number of voices I’m seeing there. I have to walk the line I failed to walk on Twitter though - while it’s important to be politically engaged, Twitter doesn’t do political nuance well, and Masto probably doesn’t either. I don’t want a lot of politics in my feed anymore. I also need to remember that hiding people’s boosts is a thing I can do.

5. I was going to say something about the protests and riots and police/military action going on in the US, but almost everything I wrote seemed flippant. I hope that whatever happens it leads to real lasting change (or the start of it).

That’s another round up of stuff that’s been on my mind that doesn’t deserve it’s own post. I guess it’s also the third in the #100DaysToOffload³ series I haven’t officially committed to.

It’s time for round-two of a bunch of random stuff that’s slightly-interesting-but-not-interesting-enough-for-a-full-post.

• I’m sitting on a new office chair that’s called a Swopper that I got second-hand as a Christmas gift from my dear wife, and it’s bouncy and fun to sit on.

  I read an article somewhere that said active chairs encourage you to move more and put weight on your legs and fill that niche between [standing desks]({{< ref “a-standing-challenge” >}}) and vanilla sitting. What I was finding with my fancy-schmancy office chair was that I was cutting circulation in my legs, my butt was always sore, and I just felt bad after sitting for a day of work. While the Swopper has some problems of it’s own, I’m definitely feeling more active while using it, and (surprisingly) I have sore core muscles after using it, like I’ve done a couple of situps.

  I’ll get back to you if my opinion changes, the main downside is that it seems wildly over priced if you buy it new.

• We took a family holiday to Buninyong to visit my sister, and went with my brother’s family and my mum. It’s the first big family holiday I’ve been on with my mum and brother and sister since well before I got married, and it was a lot of fun to just hang out with them all.

• We took the opportunity to go to Sovereign Hill, which I visited once when I was a boy, and I remembered why I thought it was so dull when I was a kid. It’s fascinating, but not very hands-on for children, but we spent a good hour panning for gold, so the kids will have some good memories I hope.

• We stepped up our new car plan before we went so we’d have a bigger car to squash the kids into before we drove over the border. I’ve said goodbye to the beautifully cheap-to-run Prius that has done me well for the last five years, and purchased a second hand Holden Commodore wagon. The running costs are higher, but my daughter can now fit in the back seat again. Plus other men are no longer threatened by the care-free way I drove my smaller, lower-emission car.

• Australia is on fire. Well, parts of it are. Important parts that have people in them. It’s forced a lot of them to uproot, and has a lot of people very cross that successive governments have done so little to address climate change. I donned a cap of political apathy after the country decided that just because Tony Abbott was no longer the public face of the Liberal party it meant that they were probably the best party we had. I pulled the cap lower and raised my collar after the country decided a second time that a party who is very clearly uninterested in tackling the biggest issues we’re leaving to our kids was their best hope for a bigger tax rebate. These fires would be just as bad if anyone else was in charge, but maybe if we’d given enough of a shit 10 years ago we might have actually been in the middle of trying to do something now.

• I’m still trying to find somewhere online that can scratch that itch that Reddit used to fill. I’m still resolute that I’m not returning, but I don’t have anywhere to find new things to read, and nowhere to participate in discussion. I’ve been using Hacker News, but as much as I like to think of myself as a “hacker”, only about 20% of posts there interest me, and I’ve almost never felt the desire to contribute to the discussion. In the last two days I’ve discovered Lobste.rs, Hubski, and Tildes. Lobste.rs and Tildes are invite-only, while Hubski is open for registrations.

  Lobste.rs is even more niche than Hacker News, but I love the technical design decisions they’ve made. If I wanted to make a similar site, the Lobste.rs source would be an excellent starting point.

  Hubski is less niche, but despite the open registration seems to have far less activity. As an example: as at time of writing, the fourth article down is about the impeachment of Donald Trump, posted 23 days earlier. It’s big news, and it’s off the back of the Christmas break, but I’d expect more recent news than that on the front page of a news aggregator. The discussion on it is thoughtful though a little sparse, so the community is definitely not the sort of people who left Reddit for Voat, but with so little happening, there’s not a lot of reason to stick around and see if it’s worth it.

  I’ve settled on giving Tildes a try for a week. Their community is big enough that I keep seeing new stuff on the front page, even across the space of a single day. The diversity of discussion is also much better than HN or Lobste.rs, and I’ve found myself with actual things to say while reading some threads (although I can’t do so yet). And although I don’t like using it for webpages - it’s much better for a text editor or terminal - the fact that they offer Solarized Dark as one of the out-of-the-box color schemes means that someone there understands sophistication.

• In the process of trying out Lobste.rs I have also installed WeeChat for IRC. I love the idea of IRC, but I’ve never found myself in a room where I’ve wanted to say anything. Can anyone suggest a good room for IRC newbies to just hang out in and chat with nice people? Leave a comment below, or chat in Keybase, Discord, or directly with me on the aus.social Mastodon instance. I’d set up a Geekorium IRC channel but from what I can gather, I’d need a server that’s amenable to randos making channels.

So that’s me for another four months - still trying half-hearted-ly to push air through the blue lips of this website.

My greatest hurdle to writing here is myself. I have plenty of opinions, but nothing I feel is worth inflicting on anyone else (unless you sit within a few feet of me at work). I have lots of ideas, but very few fully formed, or that survive a withering stare. I have drafts galore, but rarely hit publish because on the path to writing things, I so very often disappoint myself with what I actually write.

Then today Kat posted and published her first blerg post and reminded me that the reason I love this can-and-bits-of-string style of old-school post is because they’re not polished thought pieces on the nature of mortality, but simply a glimpse into what other people are thinking and doing in their lives¹. Rubenerd has being doing exactly this for many many years and I still love reading what he’s doing and thinking, even though it’s not hosted on Medium or written like he’s got VC funding he needs to justify. They’re just slice-of-life observations and thoughts, and they’re the good stuff.

Even the above is more waffle than I meant to do in this post, but this time I mean to cut through the attempt to formulate a thesis and simply put down stuff that was on my mind tonight while I did the dishes. So, some things I’ve observed today in no particular order:

• I tried a new coffee place. My boss incredulously asked if we really walked to get coffee two blocks away. So I thought I’d see what the coffee was like at the new(-ish?) place at the end of our street. The coffee was good, but a large was miniscule, and I can’t imagine the thimble size I would have got if I’d asked for a regular. I had to get another coffee later in the day to make up for it.
• My partner and kids are excitedly buzzing about two new chicks we got to give to one of our broody hens. We couldn’t make her take them yesterday, but we just successfully executed a Mission: Impossible style coordinated operation to drop the chicks in in the dead of night, and it seems to have worked. Apparently you know it worked when the new mother purrs like a cat. I’m only disappointed I didn’t get to use the mask I’d made to infiltrate the coop by impersonating our rooster.
• I’m still struggling with my self-imposed Reddit ban (which is my most recent shunning of social media after Twitter and Facebook). I’ve replaced it in some small part with a combination of the ABC news app, Hacker News (top stories), an Aussie Mastodon instance with a bunch of people I met through Twitter, and Dev.to, but none of them are a drop-in replacement (minus the crap I was getting tired of). I really miss the not-thinking-ness of being able to just witlessly scroll through Reddit when I’m not doing anything better.
• Speaking of Dev.to - I can’t find a simple way to just see top posts in any field. As far as I can tell, my feed (and the week/month/year/all-time) feeds are only the tags I’ve subscribed to, and ‘latest’ is the only un-filtered list I can see. Maybe I’m missing something, but one thing I really appreciate about HN and Reddit is that I get posts on topics I’ve never even heard of before, and I really need it. 100 posts on “#javascript” is not my idea of a good time.
• I chiselled a hole in my desk this week in my never-ending crusade against cables. This hid a further 30cm of cable beneath the desk, bringing me ever closer to the glorious day when everything I own will hover fractionally above the desk and nothing will be connected to anything except by invisible forces.

I’m going to stop here. Observing-ness maybe shouldn’t be a brain dump of everything I’ve thought this week.

Maybe I’ll be back again soon with more observation… nesses?