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diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index 3cd1af1..bc9fd32 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -8,8 +8,11 @@ Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried. "The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution." Igor Stravinsky -“Be cheerful, do good, and let the sparrows chirp.” - john bosco +Almost every article you'll ever find on attention will at some point repeat Simone Weil's statement that "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. +"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis + +The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf # Scratch @@ -995,7 +998,10 @@ https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/grill-and-smoker-setup-and-fi https://www.vagabondjourney.com/you-cant-get-lost-anymore/ -# Birds + + +## Programming for Intrinsic Value Vs Extrinsic +Or the difference between Linux culture and startup culture -- giving vs getting and how it shapes the final product. ## Carolina Wren I have so many Carolina wren stories it's hard to know where to start. @@ -1029,14 +1035,6 @@ It wasn't until they started flying in the bus that I really started pay attenti -## Quotes - -Almost every article you'll ever find on attention will at some point repeat Simone Weil's statement that "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. - -"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis - -The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf - # Notes @@ -1612,495 +1610,3 @@ I wouldn't want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days -# Pages -## Technology - -The less technology your life requires the better your life will be. - -That's not to say technology is bad, but I encourage you to spend some time considering your technology use and making sure you *choose* the things you use rather than accepting everything marketed at you. - -This is not my idea. I stole it from the Amish. The Amish have a reputation for being anti-technology, but they're not. Try searching for "Amish compressed air tool conversion" if you don't believe me. The Amish don't rush out and get the latest and greatest, that much is true. They take their time adopting any new technology. They step back, detach, and evaluate new technology in a way the rest of us seldom do—they're arguably more engaged with technology than you and I—and this allows them to make better informed decisions. - -That's what I try to do. I take my time. There's very little latest and greatest on this page. And I am always trying to get by with less, if for no other reason than this stuff costs money. There's no affiliate links here, no links at all actually. I'd really prefer it if you didn't buy any of this stuff, you probably don't need it. Again, I could get by with less. I should get by with less. I am in fact always striving to need less and be less particular about what I do need. - -Still, for better or worse. Here are the main tools I use in building this site and living on the road. - -## Writing - -### Notebook and Pen, Pencil and Paper - -My primary "device" is my notebook. I don't have a fancy notebook. I do have several notebooks though. One is in my pocket at all times and is filled with illegible scribbles that I attempt to decipher later. This one I mainly write in pencil, and I stick post-it notes into the actual notebook so that I can then move the post-it notes to the larger notebook where I write them in pen. This larger notebook is a mix of notes, as well as a sort of captain's log, though I don't write in with the kind regularity real captains do. Or that I imagine captains do. Then I have other notebooks for specific purposes, meditation journal, fiction notebook, and so on. - -I'm not all that picky about notebooks, if they have paper in them I'm happy enough. I used to be very picky about pens, but then I sat down and forced myself to use basic cheap, black ink, Bic-style ballpoint pens until they no longer irritated me. And you know what? Now I love them, and that's all I use—any ballpoint pen. Ballpoint because it runs less when it gets wet, which, given how I live, tends to happen. Pencils are a more recent development for me. I adopted the Pentel P209 with .9mm lead because someone on the internet said the led didn't break. This has proved true, so I've stick with it. - -### Laptop - -I recently retired my trusty Lenovo x270. I still love it, but it just wasn't up to editing video. I ended up getting an HP Dev One, which I generally like, though the screen is a little glare-prone. This computer is probably overkill for me, and it costs $1,000, but I use it for work so it ends up paying for itself that way. - -The laptop runs Linux because everything else sucks a lot more than Linux. Which isn't too say that I love Linux, it could use some work too. But it sucks a whole lot less than the rest. I run Arch Linux, which I have [written about elsewhere](/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux). I was also interviewed on the site [Linux Rig](https://linuxrig.com/2018/11/28/the-linux-setup-scott-gilbertson-writer/), which has some more details on how and why I use Linux. - -## Photos - -### Camera - -I use a Sony A7Rii. It's a full frame mirrorless camera which makes it easy to use the legacy lenses I love. I bought the A7Rii specifically because it was well suited to using with the old lenses that I love. Without the old lenses I find the Sony's output to be a little digital for my tastes, - -The A7 series are not cheap cameras. If you want to travel you'd be better off getting something cheaper and using your money to travel. The Sony a6000 is very nearly as good and costs much less. In fact, having tested dozens of cameras for Wired over the years I can say with some authority that the a6000 is the best value for money on the market period, but doubly so if you want at cheap way to test out some older lenses. - -### Lenses - -All of my lenses are old and manual focus, which I prefer to autofocus lenses. I am not a sports or wildlife photographer so I have no real need for autofocus. Neither autofocus nor perfect edge to edge sharpness are things I want in a lens. I want, for lack of a better word, *character*. I want a lens that reliable produces what I see in my mind. - -One fringe benefit of honing your manual focus skills[^1] is that you open a door to world filled with amazing cheap lenses. I have shot Canon, Minolta, Olympus, Nikon, Zeiss, Hexanon, Tokina, and several weird Russian Zeiss clones. - -These days I have whittled my collection down to these lenses: - -* Minolta 50mm f/2 -* Minolta 55mm f/1.7 -* Minolta 100mm f/1.7 -* Olympus 50mm f/1.8 -* Olympus 100mm f/2.8 -* Pentax 35 f/3.5 -* Pentax 20 f/4 - -Yes, that's a lot of lenses. I used to keep the Minolta 50 f/2 on there about 90 percent of the time, but these days I actually shoot with all of these pretty regularly. None of these lenses are over $200. - -I also have a Tokina 100-300mm f/4 which happens to be Minolta mount so I use a Minolta 2X teleconverter with it to make it a 200-600mm lens. It's pretty soft at the edges. That's a nice way of saying it's utter garbage at the corners, but since I mostly use if for wildlife, which I tend to crop anyway, I get by. I also have a crazy Russian fisheye thing that's hilarious bad at anything less than f/11, but it's useful for shooting in small spaces, like the inside of the bus. - -## Video - -In addition to the photo gear above, which I also use for video, I have GoPro Hero 10. I mostly use it while driving the bus and have yet to actually make a movie out of any of the footage I shoot. But it piles up on my hard drive and I keep telling myself, one of these days. - -## Audio - -I like to record ambient sound. I use an Olympus LS-10 recorder, which has the lowest noise floor I can afford (it was $100 on eBay). I use a couple of microphones I made myself and occasionally a wireless Rode mic. - ---- - -And there you have it. I am always looking for ways to get by with less, but after years of getting rid of stuff, I think I have reached something close to ideal. - -[^1]: If you've never shot without autofocus don't try it on a modern lens. Most modern focusing rings are garbage because they're not meant to be used. Some Fujifilm lenses are an exception to that rule, but by and large don't do it. Get an old lens, something under $50, and teach yourself [zone focusing](https://www.ilfordphoto.com/zone-focusing/), use the [Ultimate Exposure Computer](http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm) to learn exposure, and just practice, practice, practice. Practice relentlessly and eventually you'll get there. - -## Code - -Driving gives you plenty of time to think. Somewhere in that thinking I decided I needed to clarify my basic approach to life. To know what I was doing and why. I hesitate to call these rules because it's not like I know what I'm doing and I modify these all the time as I learn and adapt. Anyway, this is mostly for me, but I mentioned them in a post once and someone asked me to write them down. So here they are. - -###1. Everything is a Practice - -There is no finish line. There's no winning, no losing. Not in human terms anyway. Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. Most things worth doing do not have a stopping point. There is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough. Everything is a practice. Embrace it. The practice is never done, which means you get to keep improving. - -###2. Do It Yourself - -It's probably cheaper and easier to buy most things, but when I can I'd rather make things myself. What else are you going to do with your life if you aren't making stuff? Watch TV? Stop buying stuff and hiring people for everything. Give yourself a chance to solve the problem first. Contrary to what it says on the label, professionals and experts aren't necessary. They'll do it faster and better than you will, but you'll learn and improve every time you do it yourself. - -###3. Adapt to Your Surroundings - -No matter where you go you will not fit in when you get there. The climate will be different, the people will be different, the food will be different. Don't expect the place to adapt to you and don't get bent out of shape when it doesn't. - -One great way to do this is to simplify your life. Depending on a lot of stuff makes it hard to adapt. My favorite practical example is air conditioning. If you depend on air conditioning you aren't able to adapt to climate changes as well as someone who doesn't. As Jakob Lund Fisker [succinctly puts it](https://earlyretirementextreme.com/manifesto.html) "Comfort is having the sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold. It is not central heating or air conditioning which may fail or be unavailable." - -###4. Make Something You Like Everyday - -In the world as it once was I think this need to create was fulfilled by hunting and to some extent farming. With those gone we're left with kind of a void[^1]. I have found that filling that void with creative endeavors is very satisfying. Other people find that studying something in detail fills that void. For me it's making stuff. - -Digital stuff (like this site) is okay, but I prefer to make tangible stuff most of the time. Could be a delicious meal, could be some little thing around the bus, could be a paper airplane for the kids. *What* doesn't matter so much as the practice of making things. See also, rule 1. - -###5. Retain Agency - -Retaining agency means rejecting the passive. In some ways this is what you get when you practice rules 2, 3, and 4. You are the driving force behind your thoughts and actions, do not outsource them to others without carefully considering what you're giving up. - -Agency is not control though, it is not bending the world to your will (see rule 3), it is merely ensuring that one's ideas and tools are one's own[^2]. - -###6. Avoid Waste - -The only thing in short supply on this planet is time, do not waste it. Fuck entertainment, it is a waste of time. You are not on earth to be entertained. - -Similarly, fuck stuff. Make good financial decisions and get by with as little stuff as you can because money takes time to earn, and that is time you will never get back. - -Waste is not natural (read up on ecology if this idea is new to you), avoid it in all things. - - -###7. Prefer the Analog - -I find that the digital world isn't very satisfying. I have a rather outlandish theory about why. I think it lacks the rhythm of the natural world. I believe your body and spirit know the difference between the rhythms of the world they evolved in and the more recent additions. Don't get me wrong, I love the rhythm of a piston-driven engine, but I also think that the truly great engines are the ones that manage to mimic natural rhythms. - -###8. Don't Report Stories, Live Them - -I have no training as a journalist. I studied philosophy, religion, and literature, but somehow I ended up writing for journalism outlets. I have no real problem with journalists—the few left who actually do journalism, almost none of whom are published by major publishers -- but I also have no desire to be one. - -The stories I tell are ultimately about me because that is what I know. The idea that you can tell other people's stories seems fundamentally wrong to me. They are not your stories, let other people tell their own stories. - -###9. Novelty Wears Off, Routines Carry You Through - -The novelty of new places, new people, new food, new whatever doesn't last long and ultimately isn't that exciting. It has an addictive nature too. If you always need the new something has gone astray I think. I think the novelty of travel lasts about two years, and then you look around and start thinking, well, now what? - -My experience has been that the answer to *now what* means reaching back to your old life and finding the things that made you happiest there and bringing them on the road with you. Doing your thing becomes your routine that you bring to a new place, and now you have something to offer that place: you. You're no longer just traveling to see the sights, you become, in a small way, for a short time, a part of that place. - -###10. Live Small, Venture Wide - -I stole this line from Pat Schulte of [Bumfuzzle](https://www.bumfuzzle.com/). The basic idea is that I am happiest owning very little and living in small spaces, which makes it easier to move through the world. - - -###11. Try Everything Twice.### {: #twice } - -As the Aussies would say, "have a crack at it." There are two parts here though. The first is a call to experience. Try it. But recognize that some things suck the first time you try them, so you might want to have a second crack at it. - -[^1]: To borrow some ideas from Jacques Ellul et al, humans need goals, they need to put forth some effort in pursuit of those goals and they need to at least occasionally attain them. Ellul, and later Ted Kaczynski, have fun splitting hairs about what should fulfill these needs. I don't see much point in that, but I am going off personal experience here and, again, you might find otherwise. - - -[^2]: Matthew Crawford's *[Shop Class as Soul Craft](https://bookshop.org/books/shop-class-as-soulcraft-an-inquiry-into-the-value-of-work/9780143117469)* very much influenced my thinking on this subject. Crawford digs into why people like to repair things and concludes that this need to be capable of repair is part of a desire to escape the feeling of dependence, to reassert their agency over their stuff. He calls the individual who prizes his own agency the Spirited Man. This becomes a kind of archetype of the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance." Exactly. -# SRC - -## Finding Django - -I was still running a restaurant kitchen the first time someone told me I should learn Python. It was 2004 when my best dishwasher, Aaron, a young man who enjoyed solving unsolved math theorems in his spare time (yes it was a lot like working with Good Will Hunting) said, Learn Python. That was all he said. Learn Python. I'd been complaining about PHP, which was at the time the language I understood well enough to build things with, but I hated it. It's highly functional, but messy, inelegant language. His solution was Python. He was smarter than me, so I wrote it down. Learn Python. - -The problem with learning in any programming language is that there's a sharp learning curve that involves a lot of drudgery and bashing your forehead into the keyboard when things don't work. There was no Stack Overflow in 2004. We bought books from the likes of O'Reilly and tk. I bought Learning Python and a skimmed the first few chapters. I had no project though. Without a project that obsesses you, you'll never learn to program. - -I also didn't learn Python just then because running restaurant is an all-consuming, life-sucking thing to to do. There is no spare time in which you are not thinking about food. After another year I was burned out. I scraped together what money I had, bought a couple of plane tickets and headed off to lose myself in Asia. Hey, it worked for the Beatles. Sort of. - -At some point in my travels I fell in with a couple of English travelers who were not familiar with the great Jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. For shame. Back then we all traveled with iPods, there was a limited amount of music anyone would carry at any one time. I did not have any Django Reinhardt myself. For shame. - -This was also the heyday of sites like Limewire though, so I went down to the internet cafe below our guesthouse in Bangkok to search for some Django Reinhardt. The problem was that the keyboard, naturally enough, was Thai. I could change the layout in Windows settings, but the symbols on the keys were still Thai, which made it hard to type. I figured Django was a distinctive enough name that that was all I needed (this was back when Google's index held useful information rather than content farm spam). I typed in Django and sure enough, Reinhardt was right there in the first couple of results. - -Oddly enough, that's not what caught my eye. What caught my eye was a website for something called Django, "the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines." (here's the [early 2006 version of the site](https://web.archive.org/web/20060410074810/https://www.djangoproject.com/) as I discovered it) I didn't have any deadlines just then, but perfectionist? I can't tell you how many times I messed with tabs and spaces to make sure my hand written HTML was properly indented when you viewed source, something no one was ever going to see except my fellow perfectionists. God bless you if you ever viewed source and were appalled by the sloppy unindented source code that confronted you. Was there, possibly, a web framework for people like us? For people like me? Tell me more. - -It was the subhead that got me: Django is a high-level Python Web framework. Learn Python. If this were a movie there would have been a bad flashback here where Aaron's face cuts through a cloud of Southeast Asian traveler haze saying, *Learn Python*, *Learn Python*. - -But I didn't learn Python just then because I was busy building Flash websites (I know, I know) so I could afford to keep traveling. Sometimes you have to stick with what you know to get on down the road. Not very perfectionist of me. - -Six months later, back in Los Angeles, trying to figure out what in the world I was going to do with myself, a friend asked me to build a website for a bike charity, Wheels4Life. I agreed to do it, on the condition that I build it using Django. I had a project. - -That website turned out well. I built another. And another. I ended up at the first Django conference ostensibly covering it for WIRED, but I was mainly there to meet the founders and learn from the community. - -## Origins and Power of Markdown - -I would call markdown one of the most widespread and influential "apps" of the last couple of decades and it's pretty much just a Perl script that's not in version control, was mostly written by one person, and hasn't seen a meaningful update in 20 years. It just works despite ignoring every supposed rule of what makes good programming. Which drives programmers crazy. So much so that they've tried to take over Markdown (which, full disclosure, I've written about before) But I thought it might be interesting to talk to John Gruber about his little script and its impact. - -## Text Editors - -You want controversy in programming, just say "text editors" to a couple programmers. For this though I was thinking of a slightly different angle -- that text editors remain more or less unchanged over 4 decades. - -## Programming for Intrinsic Value Vs Extrinsic -Or the difference between Linux culture and startup culture -- giving vs getting and how it shapes the final product. - - -## Scratch - -I know several people who take tech holidays. I understand this urge, probably it's the only solution to what I think is the central problem of modern times—distraction and the inability to do deep work. That said, I am going to try other things to tame the beast. - -I don't think this is an entirely new problem, I'm not even sure it's any worse than it ever was, it's just that anyone in any age facing this problem is daunted and it somehow makes one feel better I think to fall back on the belief that it's worse than ever, even if perhaps it is not. - -Whatever the case, whatever the diagnosis may be doesn't really interest me. I am most interested in a cure that works for me. That's not to be overly selfish, but to recognize that what works for me isn't going to work for everyone. I am writing it down mainly in case it does prove helpful to you. - -The first step is to eliminate your ability to multitask. - -I used to be a fan of browser tabs, but lately I have come to think that the tab model, the conception of their being other stuff right there on the screen next to what you're trying to focus on is actually a huge distraction. I stumbled on this idea quite by accident. I was on Ocracoke Island for a while and the cell reception was awful[^1]. I struggled to load page. Like type in a URL, go boil water for tea, make tea, come back and the page still hasn't loaded. - -At some point I thought I wonder if I could at least get the text gist of what I'm after by loading the page in w3m, the text-only cli-based web browser Linux users like us install out of habit but rarely use. At least I rarely used it. But I opened it up and low and behold, it worked. It rendered the text I needed, and it didn't take long using the exact same connection that wouldn't load in a graphical browser. - -That's not surprising I know, but yet it *was* surprising. - -The downside to w3m was that I didn't have a clue how to use it. In particular I didn't know how to open links in the background, something I've relied on in the browser for who know how many years? I typed man w3m and started reading. I quickly discovered that like Vim, w3m uses the concept of the buffer. While it does support tabs, I've never felt the need for tabs in Vim so I thought maybe I don't need them in w3m either. I like the buffer concept. It's like a stack of things, where only the top thing is visible. To find the other things you have to call up a list and read through it. As far as I know while typing this, this document is the only one open in this application. That's a powerful way to focus. There is nothing else on the screen to distract me. - -Here's a screenshot of what my desktop looks like when working this way with Vim: - -This way of working helps my focus on the task as hand. There is nothing else anywhere on the screen and that's how I find I do my best work. I can quickly and easily call up a list of all the other files I've edited recently and see something like this: - - -But all that information is not visible to me the rest of the time. - - -[^1]: With the 3G spectrum shutdown this is increasingly the case in remote locations like Ocracoke. - -I still use them. I keep open some tabs for the stock market because those are really applications running the browser. - -## Intentional computing. - - -"We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it. - -"Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our author and our end. Now what does the world think about? Never about that, but about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring, etc., and fighting, becoming king, without thinking what it means to be a king or to be a man. - -"I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." - Blaise Pascal - -############# - -I believe that screens are a distraction from life. - -There is no life in a screen. Life is what happens when we look away from this screen at the actual world around us. Perhaps it is strange to say this on a screen. Still, it feels like a truth we all know. We all used to know. At least, anyone over 35 knows. It is our task to carry this memory through. I am writing this for other people who want to spend less time staring at screens and more time not. - -## Rules for Screens, Level Two - -### Rule One: Prefer the Analog. - -Here's the basic idea: only use a computer when you absolutely have to. Every time I reach for my laptop or phone I force myself pause and think—do I need to do this right now? Yes? Okay, but could I do whatever it is I am about to do *without* a screen? Quite often the answer is yes. So that's what I do. I use some analog tool instead. - -I write for a living, so when I am going to open my laptop chances are, I am about to write. For work, I do write on the laptop. There's too much to reference and link to not use a laptop. When I'm writing for myself though, I prefer to write things like this in a notebook with a pen. - -### Rule Two: Batch Your Queries - -Writing is as least as much research as it is actual typing, and this tends to be where I really get sucked in to the endlessness of the network. In an effort to cut down on the amount of time I spend "researching" stuff that I probably don't really need to research, I now write down questions on paper instead of immediately typing them in duckduckgo. Only later do I set aside some time to go back to this list and actually look things up. - -From this I have learned something important: I am not a very good judge of what is important to me. - -A lot of the things, *a lot*—like almost all—of the things I go to look up on the internet are utterly trivial things I don't really care about once the two seconds where I did care have passed. I am forced to confront this every time I go over my day's list of stuff to look up later. Of all the things I write down in my notebook to look up later, I actually end up looking up maybe one in twenty. Probably less. I have no real way to catalog how much screen time this has saved me, but it feels like it must be ages. - -Once I've exhausted all avenues of analog deferment I still give myself one more ultimatium that I call the Outkast ultimatum: forever ever? Is it really really that important? Right now? Really, really? It might pass. It will probably pass. No? Okay then. - -## Rule Three: Single-Task Computing - -At the end of the day.What greets me when I open my laptop is an entirely blank screen. Well, actually it's a gloomy, slightly blurry picture I took a long time ago somewhere deep in the lagoons of the Florida panhandle. The point though is that I don't leave any applications open, ever. This encourages what I call single task computing: open an application, complete a task, close the application and then the laptop. The task is done, the last page has been reached so you shut the book, so to speak. - -This is the opposite of how we approach computers much of the time, but I find that trying to multitask on a computer ends up with me distracted by all things shiny and next thing I know an hour has gone by. Single task computing prevents this, but you have to be vigilante. Applications encourage the opposite—especially web browsers, where the tab essentially functions as an ever expanding task list. - -Here's where I will suggest something heretical: hide your tab bar. Go into the browser's View menu and disable the tab bar. One tab, one task. - -To understand how this can be powerful I have to take a technical detour. The application I do my writing in is called Vim. It is very old. Old enough that it predates the idea of a tab. Instead it has something it calls buffers. They're similar to the tabs in modern applications, but with one important difference: a buffer is a stack of pages with *only the top one visible*. - -Tabs are always visible. Tabs are a todo list you don't need. Tabs will will steal your attention. Buffers will not. To change buffers requires a conscious decision and effort on your part. You have to call up a list of buffers and then switch to one. You will never accidentally switch to another buffer. I have used this to my advantage as a way to focus when writing for years. - -You know that expression out of sight out of mind? That's buffers. For example I am typing this right now on a screen that looks like this: - -That is about as uni-tasky as I've been able to make a screen. - -What I've really done here is recreate the typewriter, and no one has ever accuse a typewriter of stealing their attention. - -**Rule four: Use The Machine Lest It Use You** - -The reason for single task computing is to make sure you always have a task when you sit down to your laptop. Do not use the machine if you don't need to. When you do that the machine is using you. There is no such thing as entertainment. Entertainment is a word designed to hide the truth: you are poring precisions hours of your life into the machine. Why does the machine want your life? I have no idea, but observation suggests it does. Don't give your life away. - -**Rule 5: Balance the digital with the Analog** - -This started as a throwaway ending, but in the months since I started experimenting with this I've come to believe that this is the most important rule: every time you interact with the digital, make a point to spend the same amount of time not interacting with the digital. If I edit photos for this site for 30 minutes, then I go and either make something tangible, write in a notebook, draw a postcard, whatever it may be for 30 minutes. If you don't feel like making something than go for a walk or play with your kid, or lie down in your yard if you have one. Read a book in a hammock. Just do something that does not involve a screen. And do it for the same amount of time you spent on the screen. - -When I started doing this I found myself at a loss for what to do with myself, which was kind of terrifying. Was I really that used to mindlessly staring at a screen that I had nothing else to do? What did we use to do before we had screens? This is the advantage of being part of an analog generation—the last of those for a while—you can think back to the pre-digital era, retrace your steps as it were. This ended up unlocking a whole flood of memories that I walked through in great detail in meditation, most of that is not relevant here, but one thing that came back to me was that we used to publish zines. Now that's one of the things I've been doing with what I think of as "my analog time". Another things I did was type, on a typewriter. I'm on the hunt for a good super compact model. Yeah, I know it's like the worst hipster cliche. I don't care. I'm craving that analog pounding of the keys. The sound of something happening in the world. - - - -In order to tell you how I have managed to reduce my screen time it helps to look at the bigger picture. Let's start with the book. - -If the screen is a distraction from life than so is a book. A good book is every bit as hard to put down and distracting from the shared human existence we call life as a screen. And yet the book feels less problematic. I think this is because a book has borders. I has hard limits. - -A book is a single world. The boundary of its world is well-defined. A book ends on the final page. Its depth is limited. We known our way in, we find our way out just as easily. - -The story on the screen offers unlimited depth. A world without beginning or end. There is no final webpage. This is why we fret over the distractions of screens and never worry about books. - -Two things started me on a path to less screen time. One was the birth of my children, which were a kind of sledge hammer reminder that nothing on a screen matters. None of it actually exists and none of it matters. The people in front of you, they matter. Not just the people though, the tangible world, the world of artifacts you can hold in your hand. This is what matters. I have not watched a television show or movie since they were born. That screen was easy to stop. - -The other thing that really changed my relationship to the screen world was moving into the bus. This was another sledge hammer reminder that the physical world is what matters. Given a choice between staring at a computer screen at night and sitting around a fire, staring up at the night sky, is, well, not even a choice. - -These two things greatly reduced how much time I spent using a screen. But then we left the road and rented a house for a year and something happened. I went back to staring at the screen way too much. All that distance I thought I had created? Gone with single change of behavior. I slid right back into those old habits of tucking the kids in and sitting down at my desk to stare at a screen. - -I could defend myself and say that I wrote a novel in that time, but that only really accounts for maybe half the time I spent staring at that screen. And now that we're back in the road, I've once again had to wean myself off. I still pick campfires over screens, but like most of us I imagine, I still spend way to much time on a screen. - -So how do you stop yourself from getting sucked into a world without end? -I want to spend less though, and so I've been working at this for some time, finding ways to not just get off the screen, but handle the things that I used to do on a screen, without needing a screen. This time I don't want to relapse should I be away from life on the road for some reason. - -To lessen the time I spend using a screen I realized I needed to turn it into a book. I needed to put boarders on it and make sure it has a last page. In order to defeat that time sucking endless form of the network we're going to have to put some endings in place. - -What I've done is to create many endings. Endings for every beginning. The best ending in this case is the beginning that never begins. Here are my five rules for avoiding the digital. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -I have no way to measure how much time browsing in a single window with buffers bidden away until I need them has saved me, but again I believe it is significant. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Now I do leave some background tabs open, mostly investing related tabs because I am a fairly active trader and I like to run through my charts every morning. But the rest of the day, I don't see those tabs. - -I got to thinking about this recently because I was out on Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks for a while where the cell reception was awful[^1]. It was a struggle to load a webpage. I would type in a URL, go boil water for tea, make the tea, come back and the page still hasn't loaded. It was bad enough that I pulled out w3m, the text based browser that started life in 1995 and hasn't changed much since. I opened it up and low and behold, it worked. It rendered the text I needed, I got the info I wanted, and it didn't take long using the exact same connection that wouldn't load in a graphical browser. - -Enthused I set out to figure out how to use w3m. How, for example, did I open a link in a tab? Well, you can do that, but before I figured out how I learned that w3m uses the concept of buffers, much like Vim. Because I am lazy and familiar with buffers from Vim, I just configured a shortcut to show the w3m buffer list and I was on my way. I never open links in a new tab anymore, I know that all the previous tabs I've visited are there in the buffer list. - -Now buffers might seem like tabs in some since, and perhaps like browsing history in another sense. They're actually neither for a variety of reasons, but the most important difference is that a buffer is a stack of pages with *only the top one visible*. Tabs are always visible. Tabs will steal your attention, buffers will not unless you choose to view the list of them. You know that expression out of sight out of mind? That's buffers. I have no way to measure how much time browsing in a single window with buffers bidden away until I need them has saved me, but again I believe it is significant. - - -prefer analog over digital -batch your queries before going digital -single task computing - buffers are better than tabs - get in and get out. - - - -single task computing. open an application, do a task and then close it. I think this is ostly a web browser problem for most people, bug for me it's a terminal problem as well, there is always something I could be doing in a terminal, there is always one open. Just like there is always a browser windows open. But what if I worked differently, what if I close out that windows when the task was done? What if I put an edge on it? Gave it a shape that also meant an end to it? Would that just be more beginnings and endings, or would that maybe mean a greater space between myself and the machine? - - - -Fail gracefully when possible (an elevator is still stairs even when broken mitch hedburg joke) - -Complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes the system "easy" to use, also generally eliminates the redundancies and graceful degadation that makes a system resilient. - - -Much ink was spilled, many hands wrung, many complaints lodged about our addiction to screens. All this worry though, about what? I think the answer is distraction. This is what western philosophers—and ordinary people like you and I—have worried about for centuries. The only difference to day is the degree for distraction. Why distraction? I think distraction bothers us because it keeps us from attending to the adventure of human existence. - -At least I for one, want to spend more time attending to the adventure of shared human existence than I do screens. Screens are ultimately both addictive and boring. - -Interestingly though, what's true of a screen is also true of a book. After all a good book is every bit as hard to put down and as distracting from shared human existence as a screen. And yet the book feels less problematic. I think this is because a book has borders, has hard limits, has edges. - -A book's distraction from life is much less consuming than a computer screen. It is a single story. Its depth is limited. A book ends on the final page. The boundary of its world is well-defined. We known our way in, we find our way out just as easily. - -## Back to X11 - -Earlier this year I upgraded my Lenovo laptop with a new, larger SSD. Video takes a staggering amount of disk space. In the process I decided to completely re-install everything. It had probably been at least five years since I've done that. - -Normally I would never say anything about this because really, the software you run is just a tool. If it works for you then that's all that matters. However, since I once disregarded this otherwise excellent advice and wrote about how [I use Arch Linux](https://luxagraf.net/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux) and [Sway](https://luxagraf.net/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway), I feel somewhat obligated to follow up and report that I still love Arch, but I no longer run Sway or Wayland. - -I went back to X.org. Sorry Wayland, but much as I love Sway, I did not love wrestling with MIDI controller drivers, JACK, video codecs and hardware acceleration and all the other elements of an audio/video workflow in Wayland. It can be done, but it's more work. I don't want to work at getting software to work. I'm too old for that shit. - -I want to open a video and edit. I want to plug in a microphone and record. If it's any more complicated than that—and it was for me in Wayland with the mics I own -- I will find something else. Again, I really don't care what my software stack is, so long as I can create what I want to create with it. - -So I went back to running Openbox with a Tint2 status bar. And you know what... I really like it. - -Wayland was smoother, less graphically glitchy, but meh, whatever. Ninety-five percent of the time I'm writing in Vim in a Urxvt window. I even started [browsing the web in the terminal](https://luxagraf.net/src/console-based-web-browsing-w3m) half the time. I need smooth scrolling and transitions like I need a hole in my head. - -That said, I did take all of Sway's good ideas and try as best I could to replicate them in Openbox. So I still have the same keyboard shortcuts and honestly, aside from the fact that Tint2 has more icons than Waybar, and creating "desktops" isn't dynamic, I can't tell much difference. Even my battery life seems to have improved in X11, and that's why I switched to Wayland in the first place, was the better battery life I was getting. Apparently that's not true with this laptop (a Lenovo Flex 5, as opposed to the X270, which does get better battery life under Wayland). - -pnyway, there you have it. X11 for the win. At least for me. For now. - -## How to Get Work Done on a $75 Tablet - -Turning a Fire 10 Tablet Into Something Useful - -Fresh out of the box Amazon's Fire tablets are useless. They're just firehoses designed to shove Amazon content down your throat. That's why Amazon sells them for as little as $55 for the 10-inch model. Technically it's $150, but it frequently goes on sale for around, and sometimes under, $75. The time to buy is major shopping holidays, Prime Day and Black Friday/Cyber Monday are your best bet. - -To do any work you'll also want the Finite keyboard. The tablet-keyboard bundle typically runs about $75-$120 depending on the sale. It's $200 not on sale. Don't do that, it's not worth $200. - -For $75 though, I think it's worth it. Once I strip the Amazon crap out and install a few useful apps, I have a workable device. The price is key for me. This is what I take when I head out to the beach or into the woods or up some dusty canyon for the day. It don't want to take my $600 laptop to those places. $75 tablet? Sure. Why not get it a little sandy here and there? So far (going on a year now), it's actually survived. Mostly. I did crack the screen, but it's not too bad yet. - -It lets me work in places like this, which happens to be where I am typing right now (picnic tables in the middle of nowhere are rare, but I'll take it). - -<img src="images/2023/2023-04-11_152857_st-george.jpg" id="image-3587" class="picwide" /> - -A Fire HD 10 is not the most pleasant thing to type on. The keyboard is cramped and there's no way to map caps lock to control, which trips me up multiple times a day. Still. After a year. But hey, it enables me to get outside and play and still get a little work done when I need to. - -For anyone else who might be interested, here's what I do. - -First you need to disable all of Amazon's crap apps. Before you so that though, you need to make sure you have a new launcher and a new web browser installed, because if you turn off Amazon's defaults before you have new ones you will have nothing and you'll be stuck. There are millions of browsers and launchers for Android. I happen to like Vivaldi as a web browser, which you can download from UptoDown.com (which is officially supported by Vivaldi). For a launcher I like [Nova Launcher](https://nova-launcher.en.uptodown.com/android). - -Once you have those it's time to start shutting off all the Amazon apps and services. To do that I use [these instructions](https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-no-root-remove-amazon-apps-on-fire-10-hd-2019.4009547/) from the XDA forums. You need to install the adb developer tool, connect that to your fire, and then run a series of commands. The commands themselves are a touch of of date in the XDA article, so to disable some apps on newer tablets you may have to search for the new app names. - -Once you've eliminated Amazon from the Fire HD 10, you have a base on which to build. Over the years I've purposefully built a workflow based around very simple tools that are available everywhere. If it can run a terminal emulator, I can probably work on it. On Android devices, the app I need is Termux. That and a web browser and I can get by. All of those work fine without the Google Play Store installed. If you do need apps from the Play Store I wrote a tutorial on [how to install the Google Play Store](https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-install-google-play-store-on-amazon-fire-tablet/) for Wired that you can use. - -For writing and accessing my documents and other files I use Termux, which is available via F-Droid. I write prose and code the same way, using Vim and Git. I track changes using Git and push them to a remote repo I host on a server. When I get back to my laptop, I can pull the work from the tablet and pickup where I left off. To make everything work you also need the Termux:API, which for some reason is a separate app. - -To set things up the way I like them I install Termux and then configure ssh access to my server. Once that's setup I can clone my dotfiles and setup Termux to mirror the way my laptop is setup. I can also [install git annex]() and clone my documents and notes folders. I don't often access these from the tablet, but I like to have them just in case. The last thing I do is clone my writing repository. That gets me a basic setup, but there are some things I do to make life on Android smoother. - -First install the termux-api package with: - -~~~ -pkg install termux-api -~~~ - -This gives you access to a shell command `termux-clipboard-set` and `-get` so you can copy and past from vim. I added this to my Termux .vimrc and use control copy in visual mode to send that text to the system clipboard: - -~~~ -vnoremap <C-x> :!termux-clipboard-set<CR> -vnoremap <C-c> :w !termux-clipboard-set<CR><CR> -inoremap <C-v> <ESC>:read !termux-clipboard-get<CR>i -~~~ - -That works for updating this site, but some sites I write for want rich text, which I generate using [Pandoc](https://pandoc.org) and then open in the browser using this script: - -~~~ -#!/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/sh -cat $1 \ - | pandoc -t html --ascii > /storage/emulated/0/Download/output.html \ - && darkhttpd /storage/emulated/0/Download --daemon --addr 127.0.0.1 \ - && termux-open http://localhost:8080/output.html -~~~ - -I saved that as rtf.sh, made it executable with `chmod +x`, and put it on my path (which in my setup, includes `~/bin`). Then I run it with whatever file I am working on. - -~~~ -~/./bin/rtf.sh mymarkdown.txt -~~~ - -That'll open a new window in my browser with the formatted text and then I can copy and paste to where it needs to go. Note that you'll need to install [darkhttpd](https://github.com/emikulic/darkhttpd) (a very simple web server) with `pkg install darkhttpd`. - -####Issues and Some Solutions - -There's no `esc` key on the Finite keyboard, which is a problem for Vim users. I get around it by mapping `jj` to escape in my .vimrc. - -The one thing I have not solved is the capslock key. I am so used to having that set as both Control and Esc that I hit it several times a day and end up not only not running whatever keycombo shortcut I thought I was about to run, but also activating caps lock and thus messing up the next commands as well because they're now capital letter commands not lowercase. I've considered just prying off the key so it'd be harder to hit, but so far I haven't resorted to that. - -I've tried quite a few key remapping apps but none of them have worked consistently enough to rely on them. Such is life. It's $75, what do want really? I get by. I write and edit in vim, copy/paste things to the browser. That's all I need. Again, part of the reason I can work on a tiny $75 computer is that I have chosen to learn and rely on simple tools that work just about anywhere. - -That said, this thing is not perfect. The keyboard is prone to double typing letters and also not registering a space bar press. I end up spending more time editing when I write with it. I also constantly reach for the trackpad that isn't there. Also, sometimes I get to the middle of the woods and realize I don't have the latest version of the document I want to edit. Git comes to the rescue then though, I just create a new branch, work, push the branch to the remote repo, and then merge it to master by hand when I get back to my laptop. - -If you don't do everything in a terminal you might be able to still get something similar set up using other offline-friendly tools. I'm sure it's possible I just have no need so I haven't explored it. Anyway, if there's something you want to know, or you want me to try to see if it might work for you, feel free to email me, or leave a comment. - - -## Running Arch on Server - -The big tricky part for me is Postgresql, the database that powers this site behind the scenes. Major updates, e.g. postgres-15 -> postgres-16 require manual intervention. For this reason it's essential to make sure pacman doesn't automatically update postgres. I open `/etc/pacman.conf` and set it to ignore postgres: - -~~~ -IgnorePkg=postgresql -~~~ - -Then I periodically check to see if there's a major update available for postgres by looking at the Arch package: - -Then I use the [instructions from the arch wiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PostgreSQL#Upgrading_PostgreSQL) to upgrade postgres: - -> 1) While the old database cluster is still online, collect the initdb arguments used to create it. Refer to #Initial configuration for more information. -> -> 2) Stop postgresql.service. (Check the unit status to be sure that PostgresSQL was stopped correctly. If it failed, pg_upgrade will fail too.) -> -> 3) Upgrade postgresql, postgresql-libs, and postgresql-old-upgrade. -> Rename the old cluster directory, then create a new cluster and temporary working directory: -> -> **Note: If you had not emptied /var/lib/postgres/olddata from a previous upgrade, do it before moving the content of the latest /var/lib/postgres/data there.** -> -> # mv /var/lib/postgres/data /var/lib/postgres/olddata -> # mkdir /var/lib/postgres/data /var/lib/postgres/tmp -> # chown postgres:postgres /var/lib/postgres/data /var/lib/postgres/tmp -> [postgres]$ cd /var/lib/postgres/tmp - -> Initialize the new cluster using the same initdb arguments as were used for the old cluster: -> [postgres]$ initdb -D /var/lib/postgres/data --locale=C.UTF-8 --encoding=UTF8 --data-checksums - -> Upgrade the cluster, replacing PG_VERSION below, with the old PostgreSQL version number (e.g. 15): -> [postgres]$ pg_upgrade -b /opt/pgsql-PG_VERSION/bin -B /usr/bin -d /var/lib/postgres/olddata -D /var/lib/postgres/data - - -Note that, if you use the postgis extention like I do, in addition to postgresql-old-upgrade, you also need postgis-old-upgrade installed. That package is rarely updated so I end up editing the package file by hand most of the time and re-installing it. -> -https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/postgis-old-upgrade - - - |