From e04153baa64880763dcc75d0a13440cdcd3f175b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: luxagraf Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2020 14:46:36 -0400 Subject: brought up to date with what I've done lately --- abundance.txt | 21 ++++ command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt | 29 ------ end.txt | 31 ------ published/2020-04-18_reflections.txt | 83 +++++++++++++++ published/2020-06-25_hands-on-the-wheel.txt | 73 +++++++++++++ scratch.txt | 74 ++++++++++++- .../command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt | 116 +++++++++++++++++++++ 7 files changed, 365 insertions(+), 62 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt delete mode 100644 end.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-04-18_reflections.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-06-25_hands-on-the-wheel.txt create mode 100644 src/published/command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt diff --git a/abundance.txt b/abundance.txt index f088a53..de3a310 100644 --- a/abundance.txt +++ b/abundance.txt @@ -1,3 +1,24 @@ +The idea behind comments, behind Facebook, and twitter as well ends up being, you post your personal experiences and someone comes along and injects their belief system into your experience and judges your experience against their framework. I have no idea why you would want to experience that, but I certainly don't so I don't use this things and I heavily moderate comments here. Most comments here are from friends, family, and other thoughtful people, but every now and then someone feels the need to tell me I am not living inside their moral framework. Here's the thing: I already know that. + + + + + + + +True materialism is respect for nature—it is an appreciation for what nature has given us: Throw things away just because we tire of them or buying things because we are bored shows lack of respect. I’d argue that traveling (burning jet fuel) for simplistic reasons such as reaching goals we can brag about e.g. “I’ve visited more exotic places or a greater number of destinations than you” is also disrespectful [of nature]. In a similar vein showing off by buying bigger houses or bigger cars or more stuff than one needs is disrespectful and contemptible as well. In general consumer culture is somewhat of an immature delinquent civilization; it is inconsiderate and has no class—it is only concerned with itself. + +I repeat: A respectful philosophy is crucial. + +Without a philosophy, one’s understanding and behavior is simply a collection of techniques. It is possible to just follow “rules”, but I think this is merely the first step on the path towards living well. Perhaps by repeating the actions of a good life, they will eventually be internalized and grow into something greater, that is, personal growth. + + + + + + + + Abundance is the natural state of the world. If you leave something alone, there is enough, plenty in fact for all. Anyone who thinks that life is a competitive battlefield filled with individuals struggling, clawing at each other to survive needs to get outside more. That's not what life is and the first time you sit still and listen to the forest, pause in a grassy meadow in the moonlight, or tk you'll realize our conception of the world as struggle is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we imagine. diff --git a/command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt b/command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 4d3667e..0000000 --- a/command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,29 +0,0 @@ -One of the best things about computers is that they can automate repetitive tasks. One of my favorite ways to automate my least favorite repetitive tasks -- typing the same thing over the over -- is with saved text snippets. - -For example, when I cold email a company for work I have some boilerplate text that says something like hey, my name is Scott, I work for WIRED, I'm contacting you because... and so on. Similarly, when I write a bit of Python to build something for this site, I'm probably going to write something to the effect of this several times: - -~~~python -class MyClass(): - """ - Docstring describing class - """ - - def myfunc(self): - """ - Docstring describing function - """ -~~~ - -To save some time I have built up a lot of little text snippets over time. When I was X11 I used [Autokey](https://github.com/autokey/autokey). It's pretty simple, you define a shortcut for your longer chunk of text, and then whenever you type that shortcut Autokey "expands" it to your longer text. - -It's a nice little app and I wish it worked under Wayland, or even XWayland, but currently it doesn't, and it's unclear to me whether it's possible to do this at all with Wayland's security model. Even if it is possible, no one seems to have written anything like Autokey for Wayland yet. - -That kinda sucks. But really what I need is a fast way to get these saved chunks of text into documents I'm creating. If I'm in vim, then it's no problem, I just dropped all my old Autokey snippets into my vimrc and added some keybindings. But alas I am not always writing in Vim. My current job requires me to use Gmail, which is the bane of my existence - -*** - -Tangential rant: it blows my mind that people don't just put up with Gmail, they love it. I don't get it. Forget the privacy-invasion of reading your email, forget the tracking, forget the data harvesting, the UI is awful. The fonts are illegible. HTML email constantly renders strangely and Gmail will never fall back to plain text. The search is no better than notmuch, and the keybinding support is a joke. I can navigate, search, and act on email using mutt 10x faster than Gmail. I waste hours a week using Gmail. But, no choice. - -*** - -To get those dozen or so snippets I use regularly for work I discovered diff --git a/end.txt b/end.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 50afa57..0000000 --- a/end.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,31 +0,0 @@ -Sustainable vs regenerative: sustainability is about keeping things as the are, regeneration is about making things better than they are. - -Living in the bus was always about far more than traveling. It would not be inaccurate to say that traveling was really a byproduct of living in the bus rather than the reason for it. A nice fringe benefit if you will. - -For me living in the bus was more about stepping outside, literally and figuratively. Stepping back as well, taking stock and critically evaluating the assumptions that had been handed to me about how to live. This very quickly became about living with less. When you have less than 160 square feet of livable space, everything becomes about doing more with less. - -And that's what we wanted anyway, which is why the bus was always perfect. I wanted to step back and eliminate a lot of things and see if they actually mattered to me. It is one thing to sit around and wish you could get rid of things because they cost money or you think you might be able to get along without them. - -It's another story entirely to actually do it. - -Living in the bus provided a way to experiment in doing without, but offset any loss with the adventure and excitement of travel and living on the road. You might miss your friends and family for instance, but you know, it's also nice to be sitting here on this perfect white sand beach in the Gulf of Mexico. Or you can think, gosh I'd really love the have some ice in this drink, but at least I'm sitting here in the amazing smelling pine forest 8000 feet up in the mountains of Colorado. - -It's harder to notice loss when you're surrounded by beauty and when you can't wait to get to the next place. And you know you can't get to the next place, you can't have that feeling of freedom and peace without having given up that stuff. So your mindset shifts over time, the things that you were "giving up" become the very things that enable you to live, to get to that beauty and find that peace. In end there's no giving up, you're enabling. - -I could see the beginnings of this before we left. I could read it in between the lines of some of the travelers I have long followed. Like Rolf Potts, Bumfuzzle, tk, but you can't really know it until you go a live it. And it grows. The further you go, the more any sense of loss fades and the sense of gain grows. The less becomes the more quite quickly actually. By the time we went made it to Fort Pickens the first time, about a month into a our trip, I don't think we were missing a thing. And we didn't even have a water tank or working shower yet. - -To even get on the road in the first place we had to get rid of a ton of stuff, yes, but I think it was much more important to step back, to, as I said above, think critically about the assumptions your culture has handed you. To question those assumptions. There's a saying I like that I think embodies this quite well, and is apt since we had our share of rodent troubles over the years: you don't have a mouse problem, you have a cat shortage. - -We questioned everything, trying to look at it sideways and see if there was another way to solve the problems. In doing so we learned all kids of things. Do we need a large living space? No. Provided we have a large outdoor space we don't really need anymore than place to sleep and get out of the weather from time to time. Did we really need tk? Nope. Do we really need air conditioning? No, but it can be really nice at times. How about Refridgeration? Nope, but again, nice for some things. The list here is very long, but you get the idea. - -It took a bit longer to extract some of the lessons from the micro-case studies, but I think there are two very important things I've taken away from this experience so far. The first that is that you should learned to adapt to the environment rather than changing the environment to suit you. You can take this as a macro level thing, for example, don't turn on the air conditioning the first time you get hot. Let your body adapt to the heat. You body is a phenomenal thing, it is capable of miraculous things if you give it the chance. But I also mean this at the micro level, don't change the environment around you by adding an extra fork, wash the one you have. And so on. - -The second lesson I learned is that things don't have to be perfect. My natural tendency seems to be seeking some level of perfection, letting go of that is hard, still, but I have seen over and over again the virtue in doing it. From the desire to have the bus looking perfect to even this site, writing the perfect thing that's going to perfectly convey what I want to say. There's nothing wrong with striving for those things, until they get in the way of noticing where you are right now. There were so many days out there in the wilds of America where I was finally able to force myself to stop. To go get in the river with the kids, to go watch the birds at dawn, to sit around the fire half the night. To spend time where I was, rather than spending time worrying about how I could improve the future. - -The strange thing about the future is it never quite arrives, which is part of what makes it so enticing. We can store all our dreams and aspirations there and we don't have to let go of them. We can just put them out there and look at them from afar and never actually do anything today that moves you any closer to them. For whatever reason, somewhere in the last three years I got better at moving myself toward those things in the future by recognizing where I was, spending some time where I was and then looking at that future and seeing if actually wanted to go there. Nine times out of ten I realized I didn't. I relized the point wasn't to have the perfect cool bus to put on the internet, the point was to get in the river with the kids, to sit in the hammock, to dance on the couch, to cry under the engine. The future never arrives, today never leaves. If you try too hard to capture this in words you end up sounding like a fortune cookie. There are some things you can't write, you have to live them. - -I saw, and still see, that as the first step in a transition away from a life consuming. Okay, so we consume much less, that's good. That's a first step, but we can (and should) go much farther than that. - -Another ancillary benefit (goal?) of traveling in the bus was getting to see all the various regions of the country. Well, we did not get to all of them, but we got to quite a few. We missed the PAcific Northwest, but wet and cloudy is no place for me. I already know that (I am saving the Pacific Northwest for a different adventure many many years down the road). There were unexpected things in exploring the United States. I would never have predicted that we'd enjoy the great lakes, parciularly the regio around lakes Superior and Michigan so much. You could probably argue we didn't experience winter and therefore have a very distorted view of the great lakes, but to me that's just not a factor. I spent three long winters in New England, I know what winter is like and I am fine with it. - -That said, diff --git a/published/2020-04-18_reflections.txt b/published/2020-04-18_reflections.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a4d11a4 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-04-18_reflections.txt @@ -0,0 +1,83 @@ +April 1, 2020 marked three years on the road for us. + +For all practical purposes our time on the road really ended in October 2018 when we [flew to Mexico](/jrnl/2018/09/big-exit). After that we've continued to live in the bus, but we haven't traveled like we did those first 18 months. Still, three years of traveling and living in the bus is far longer than we intended [when we set out](https://live.luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/april-fools). + + + +Living in the bus was always about far more than traveling. It would not be inaccurate to say that traveling was really a byproduct of living in the bus. A nice fringe benefit if you will. + +More importantly living in the bus was more about stepping outside, literally and figuratively. Stepping back from life, taking stock, and critically evaluating the assumptions that had been handed to me about how to live a good life. + +Do you need a house to live a good life? What about a car? What about a refrigerator? What about a fixed address? What about a phone? Oven? Books? Speedometer? + +Living in the bus very quickly became about living with less. When you have less than 160 square feet of space -- with only about a third of that truly "livable" -- everything becomes about doing more with less. That's what we wanted to learn how to do, which is why the bus was perfect. + + + +It eliminated a lot of things by necessity. We did without and got to see if any of that stuff mattered. It is one thing to sit around and wish you could get rid of things because they cost money or you think you might be able to get along without them. + +It's another story entirely to actually do it. + +Living in the bus provided a way to experiment in doing without, but offset any sense of loss with the adventure and excitement of travel and living on the road. If you want to eliminate something and learn to do without it, fill that open niche in the ecosystem of your life with something you *do* want. Otherwise the weeds will take over. + +You might miss having a hot bath for instance, but you know, it's also nice to be sitting here on this perfect white sand beach in the Gulf of Mexico. Or you can think, gosh I'd really love to have some ice in this drink, but... since I was willing to forgo it I get to sit here in the amazing smelling pine forest 8000 feet up in the mountains of Colorado watching thunderstorms roll in all afternoon. And I could get ice actually, but I no longer need it. + + + +It's harder to notice what's missing when you're surrounded by the beauty of the world. You spend less time thinking of what you miss when you can't wait to see what's over the next hill. It also helps to know you couldn't get over the next hill -- you can't have that feeling of freedom and peace -- without having given up those old requirements. + +So your mindset shifts over time. The things that you were "giving up" turn out to be things you don't need. There's no giving up in the end, you free yourself of those unnecessary burdens -- those burdens you didn't even realize were burdens. + +I could see the beginnings of this before we left. I could read it in between the lines of some of the long term travelers I follow, like Rolf Potts, Wade Sheppard, the Bumfuzzle crew, and others. But you don't really know something until you live it yourself. Happily, I was right. And it grows. The further you go, the more any sense of loss fades and the sense of gain grows. + +Having less became really wonderful quite quickly. By the time we made it to [Fort Pickens the first time](/jrnl/2017/04/gulf-islands-national-seashore), about a month into our trip, I don't think we were missing anything. And we didn't have solar power, a water tank, or even a working shower yet. + +To even get on the road in the first place we had to get rid of a ton of stuff. And that is helpful, but I think it was more important to take that step back, to, as I said above, think critically about the assumptions your culture has handed you, and to question those assumptions. Once you do that deliberately for a while it becomes second nature. You start to look at everything a little sideways. + +So we questioned everything, trying to look at it sideways and see if there was another way to solve the problem. In doing so we learned all kinds of things about how we live. Do we need a large living space? No. Provided we have a large outdoor space we don't really need any more than a place to sleep and get out of the rain. Did we really need an extra car? No. Do we really need air conditioning? No, but it can be really nice at times. How about refrigeration? No, but again, nice for some things. The list here is very long, but you get the idea. + + + +It took a bit longer to extract overarching principles from these small lessons, but I think there are two very important things I've taken away from this experience so far. + +The first principle is: accept the environment for what it is and learn to live in it. + +One of our unspoken cultural values is that we can shape the environment the way we want it and that this is good. This is barely-consciously a part of our daily lives in very subtle, seldom-noticed ways. Take air conditioning for example. For the entirety of human history no one had air conditioning. Somehow, those people did not all expire of heat exhaustion[^1]. + +If you don't turn on the air conditioning, eventually you won't need it. The first time you get hot make it a point to sweat. Deal with a little discomfort and let your body adapt to the heat. In the end you'll be cooler and have no dependency on air conditioning. This frees you up to explore and exist in places others cannot. You body is phenomenally well-designed, it is capable of miraculous things if you give it a chance to adapt. + +This principle -- adapting to, rather than changing, the environment -- also applies at the micro level. Don't change the environment around you by adding an extra fork, wash the one you have. Don't bother fixing your oven, [buy a waffle iron](/essay/waffle-world). And so on. This is something that, once I saw it, I was never able to unsee it. I see it everywhere I look in the world, ways to make do without abound when you're looking for them. + + + +The second principle is really just an extension of the first: stop worrying about what you can't control. + +How do you do that? You learn to adapt to things. You let go of the need to make the "right" choice and you make the best choice you can based on the best information you have at the time. You make a choice and you move on. You can always adjust and chose differently when conditions change. + +Are you going to make it to that campsite you wanted to get to? Maybe? Maybe not? Okay, then where are we going? Well, on the map there's something over there... let's try that. If I had a dollar for every time this played out I could buy you a couple dozen tacos. + +Are you going to have enough water to stay another night? Maybe? Are the tanks full? Maybe? There are dozens of unknowns like this every day in traveling, you either make peace with the uncertainty of it or you become stressed out and miserable. It's not for everyone. + +It's not a matter of solving all the unknowns. That's not an option. There are always more of them. You have to learn to be at peace with them because you know you can adapt. That is peace, knowing that whatever happens, you're going to adapt to it. + +That's not to say I don't have moments of stress and misery because my world falls apart. I would actually say there's been far more world falling apart situations on the road than there ever were before. If your house has a engine, expect your world to fall apart frequently. + + + +Part of adapting is learning when you *should* do something. Traveling has made me very suspicious of myself whenever I say "no". Whenever I don't do something I force myself to stop and think, why not? Why not go swim in the river with the kids? Why not take a walk to watch the birds at dusk? Why not sit around the campfire half the night? Too many times there is no good reason for not doing it. It's painful to admit, but sometimes I'm essentially refusing to go swimming because I don't have a towel. That's crazy. + + + +That said, sometimes the answer to the question *why not?* is *because your axle is falling off genius*. The picture above is of our rear axle mount, which supports about 5000 pounds, with three of the four pins sheared off. I don't care how comfortable you get with uncertainty, how much you can push aside worry, how much you say yes to, there's no way to stop yourself from freaking out when your axle hangs by a single, obviously weak pin. Ditto when your head gasket blows and takes out a cylinder, or when you run out of money in Mexico, or any of the other things that will come up in life whether you travel or not. There are times you will not be able to stop yourself from worrying to some degree. + +What I've learned is that the things worth worrying about are fewer and farther between with every passing year. After the axle almost broke and the head gasket blew, I wasn't all that concerned when the exhaust manifold cracked in half. I've built a tolerance perhaps. + +I've also learned that worry is often a way of avoiding the work that needs to be done. Worry and stress don't fix anything. + +If you want to have any control over which future you get, you have to figure out how to turn your worry into action. You have to stop freaking out and get to work. When your axle mount is about to shear off you have to turn that worry (actually more terror in that case) into action. Call a tow truck. Call a friend. Call everyone you know. In our case, [my uncle came to our rescue](/jrnl/2017/10/trains-hot-springs-and-broken-buses)). When there's a pandemic and you have nowhere to park your rig, figure out your options, pick the best one, and make it happen. Call a friend. Call everyone you know. Spend all day pouring over Zillow and Craigslist. Do whatever you need to do to find the solution. + +Someone said to me the other day that things always seem to work out for us. I won't argue, but I take except to the implication that this is solely the result of luck. We are very lucky, and yes that does help, but to be completely honest the main reason we've had so much good "luck" is because Corrinne works very hard to make things happen for us. + +I might write more about coaxing the engine along, but she's the one who spends long hours solving all the other, much more frequent problems we encounter, like where to live in Mexico, what to do when the budget has to stretch farther than you thought, or where to go and what to do when the world shuts down. To figure those things out you have to set aside the worry and do the hard work. + +[^1]: It is true that in many case their homes were more intelligently constructed than ours, and they understood their land and its microclimates at lot better than we did, which gave them more ways to escape the heat. These are things worth exploring should you decide you want to free yourself of tyranny of air conditioning. diff --git a/published/2020-06-25_hands-on-the-wheel.txt b/published/2020-06-25_hands-on-the-wheel.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..910d7d5 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-06-25_hands-on-the-wheel.txt @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +I once had the opportunity to float for a while in the confluence of two great rivers. It was hot, the middle of summer in the Utah desert. I waded out into the cold water and floated along for a while, half my body in the Yampa River, half in the Green River. + +The Green River was true to its name. The Yampa was muddy brown. The brown and green waters met at a surprisingly sharp line you could see and feel. + + + +I floated along for maybe five minutes. Ten at the most. It was a pit stop on a long day's paddle, but I think about that confluence all the time. I think about how sharp the division was there, and how utterly it vanished two hundred meters further down the channel. Two very large, incomprehensibly powerful things join together and become one in a matter of feet. + +What's perhaps more startling, having started out on only one river, is to suddenly see that second one join in. A world you didn't even know existed suddenly arrives and blends into what you thought was the world. Everything changes in an instant and then carries on toward the sea as if nothing happened. Rivers of thought, rivers of possibilities, rivers of history, rivers of choice all coming together, opening and closing worlds in ways that are sometimes difficult to predict. Everything always heading toward the sea. + +--- + +We spent some time at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown in an old farmhouse that had been converted into a schoolhouse. It seemed in keeping with our general strategy that, when the world zigs, you should zag. In a world where no one was going to school anymore, our kids, who have never been to school in their lives, suddenly lived in one. Zig, zag. + +While everyone else struggled to entertain their kids at home, ours suddenly had access to swing sets, climbing structures, stages for plays and magic shows, and every STEM-related learning toy and tool you can imagine. There was even a zip line. From my kids point of view, for a few weeks, the pandemic was the best thing that had ever happened to them. + + + + + + +We tried to make the best of things and not let the pandemic intrude on the kids' life too much. We were isolated of course, no campground playmates to run and bike around with, no campground even, but otherwise we tried to stick with our normal routines -- school and work in the mornings, playing outside, climbing trees, zip lines, swings in the afternoon. Then after the kids were in bed I finished up work. Naturally there was plenty of time for waffling. + +
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+ +When it became apparent that the lockdown would last more than a few weeks, we started looking around for a place to hole up a while. The school house lacked beds, and its future was uncertain. It also had a ghost that liked to walk around smoking a cigarette. + +As so often has happened to us in our travels, someone we barely knew offered us a place to stay. We took them up on it for a few weeks while we tossed around ideas for the future beyond that. + +It turned out to be a perfect place for us, plenty of room for the bus, and a huge yard for the kids to play in. There was even fancy stuff like an oven, which we used to make brownies, because brownies don't work in a waffle iron, we've tried. + +
+ + + + + + + + + +
+ +We toyed with a variety of plans, but we're more strategy people. Broad sweeping life aims are pretty well defined around here. We know what we want, but there are a lot of ways to get what you want. + +Consider for instance this trip. We had a few goals, but one of the biggest things that's emerged over time is that we like to spend time in the wilderness, undisturbed by the trappings of modern culture. A plan to achieve this would be to look at BLM land and maps. A strategy to achieve this would be to modify your life in such a way that you can get to the BLM land, or get it to you. + +One day Corrinne ran across a Zillow listing for an 19th century farmhouse for rent in the middle of a 300-acre forest. I dismissed it out of hand because real estate descriptions are usually nothing but lies. Still, it did get me thinking. Thinking strategically. Instead of wondering when we'd get back on the road again, I began to wonder if getting back on the road again was the best strategy. + +What if you could rent the wilderness for a while? Bring the wilderness to you so to speak. + +Those two rivers swirled around me for a while. On one hand there was the comfort of the familiar, life in the bus. But [you can't go home again](/jrnl/2008/06/you-cant-go-home-again), things are always changing. With international travel largely shutdown we knew people would turn to camping. RV sales went up 600% in April 2020. This year is shaping up to be an [Eternal September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September) for RVing in the U.S. and I was not at all sure I wanted to be part of that. + +There was also a parallel current that's been pulling at me for some time, one that seems to want me away from the road for a while. We flirted with this in Mexico, but that didn't work out quite the way we wanted. We were not able to get the things done that we intended to get done. At the end of the day, we were still on the road in Mexico. + +One of the strange things about writing about travel is that it's very tough to do when you're actually traveling. To write you need long uninterrupted periods of nothingness, which travel generally fails to provide. Most writers I know travel in bursts, then retreat to write about it. And to be clear, I mean writing longer projects. Creating a site like this on the road is a lot of work, but it happens in short bursts so it's not too tough to do. + +Eventually, these two streams for ideas began to mingle. Both Corrinne and I have projects we want to get off the ground that we just can't swing from the road. And that property? It turns out the description wasn't all lies. It really was an old farmhouse in the middle of 300 acres of pine forest. + + + diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index 0d82fdf..c7e33e5 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -1,6 +1,76 @@ -a.girl.and.her.commander When I first decided I was going to live on the road, I got a lot of questions from people that were trying to understand why the heck anyone would do such a thing. Sometimes I kept it simple and just answered with, "I want to travel more!" but it was so much bigger than that. I would go as far as to say that traveling full time wasn't even the number 1 instigator of this big life change.⁣ + +You learn to live your life on the margin, that strange zone between what is known and what is not. There are some answers here, but not many, and you have to make that place your home. + +The margins are where you want to be though, this is where everything happens, it's where life is, where growth is. Go deep in the forest and everything gets soft and quiet, but come out to the edge and you'll find the berries and the birds and the deer and all the rest of life -- inhabiting the margins. In ecology this is sometimes called a liminal zone. It's where life is in transition and biodiversity is greatest. It's where the action is and it's where you want to be. + +I've learned that the future will get here at the same steady pace as it always does whether you worry about it or not. + +There's a third principle I'm still meditating on, but my suspicion is that the first principle of not changing the environment around you, extends well beyond you and your immediate environment to encompass, well, everything. The ripple effects of any action are significant and we spend very little time considering them, and this is troubling. + +The less you alter the environment of you, the less you need to alter the environment of your home. The less you need alter the environment of your home, the less you need to alter your neighborhood, and so on. I suspect that this cascades in positive ways far beyond just turning off the air conditioning. At the same times, I suspect it cascades in negative ways as well, which is why I am still thinking on it. + +I saw, and still see, living in the bus as a first step in a transition away from life as a "consumer". In the bus we consumed much less, that's good, but I've come to think that it's not good enough. I think I can (and should) go much farther than that. What that looks like is still taking shape, but one thing we all have right now is plenty of time to sit and think. + + +--- + + + +Sustainable vs regenerative: sustainability is about keeping things as the are, regeneration is about making things better than they are. + + + + + + + +Another ancillary benefit (goal?) of traveling in the bus was getting to see all the various regions of the country. Well, we did not get to all of them, but we got to quite a few. We missed the PAcific Northwest, but wet and cloudy is no place for me. I already know that (I am saving the Pacific Northwest for a different adventure many many years down the road). There were unexpected things in exploring the United States. I would never have predicted that we'd enjoy the great lakes, parciularly the regio around lakes Superior and Michigan so much. You could probably argue we didn't experience winter and therefore have a very distorted view of the great lakes, but to me that's just not a factor. I spent three long winters in New England, I know what winter is like and I am fine with it. + +--- + +We tossed around possibilities. We considered buying a house. We considered buying a boat. But then we stepped back and considered what it was we liked about traveling in the bus. There are many answers to this question, but some of the big ones are: nature, the lack of modern human noises, cars, planes -- I love it when my kids say the birds woke them -- and the self-reliance. + + +Just when we were considering packing it in, a pandemic shuts down the country. Just when were thinking of not packing it in, but carrying on for another year everyone and their mother decides to go camping. When everyone zigs, the only smart thing to do is zag. + +The joy of living in the bus has less to do with the actual travel and more to do with escaping the trappings of the 9-to-5, suburban, consumer-capitalist world. We're still part of the world in plenty of ways, and propped up by it in many ways -- we wouldn't be able to travel this way without that world -- but out there in the woods we just felt better. + +If you put these things in a spreadsheet, as I do, the things that jump out at you are that you don't actually need to travel to get all this stuff. So a confluence perhaps. At the time it's difficult to travel by land in the US, perhaps we don't need to? + +One day a house came up for rent not too far from where we were. It was an old farmhouse sitting on a few acres, but more importantly it was surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest. I called and talked to the landlord. We met. We talked. A few days later after he had told us we could rent it, he said he was sorry but his wife had rented it to someone else. + +We shrugged. These things happen so much when you travel you cease to worry about them for more than a couple hours. That confluence maybe wasn't meant to happen just now. Other confluences had me thinking. + +It is very hard to do anything other than travel when you are traveling. To create things on the road is a challenge. The updates I post here is the most I have ever managed beyond notes scribbled in one of the many notebooks I lug around. + +If you want to write a book about traveling, you have to stop traveling. If you want to do anything that requires sustained effort over weeks, months, traveling just gets in the way. This is one of the reasons I think long term travelers leave behind very little in the way of written legacy. The flip side of this is that the writers we think of as writing about traveling often haven't traveled all that much. + +I always think of *On The Road*, of which the actual time on the road is vanishingly small. The *Air Conditioned Nightmare* is based on a single cross country trip lasting a couple of months. *Blue Highways* takes place over nine weeks. In *Travels with Charley* Steinbeck spends about 75 days on the road. *Wild America* spans barely a season. The only real exception I've found is *Kingbird Highway*, which does record a tremendous amount of travel sustained over many years. + +Do I want to write a book about our trip? Honestly, I am not sure. Possibly. But I have an unrelated book I very much want to write (and am). I have some other projects I'd like to tackle that would be tough to do while traveling. + + + + +--- + + +Y'all are going to be very close. + +That's what an inspector said to me once when we were selling our house and I told him what we were doing after it sold. That comment stuck in my head the whole time we traveled because he was right. Spend twenty-four hours a day every day with someone and you will be close. And we are. + + + + + + + ⁣ -It was a couple months before I found Mander and I remember trying to explain my motivation behind what I was doing to my Mom and Sister. I told them, "It's a spiritual endeavor. I want to be tested in ways I can't imagine and try to be ok no matter what." I was excited for things to be hard. I was excited to be forced to grow. I was pulling the rug out from under my own feet and putting faith in myself like I had never done before.⁣ +I want to be tested in ways I can't imagine and try to be ok no matter what happens. + +I looked forward to disasters, I looked forward to having to get out of tough situations. + + ⁣ Now, mind you, "ok" doesn't mean happy as a clam, totally unaffected, no bad feelings ever. On the contrary, it means letting go of the reigns, opening myself up to the unknown and trusting that I had the ability to see myself through it. That's basically welcoming a whole heap of tough stuff to happen to ya. And it has. And I'm ok. Heck, I'm more than ok. I'm better than before. This whole endeavor, from the word go, has done nothing but affirmed my suspicions that we are stronger and more malleable than we ever give ourselves credit for. And no matter what, we will adjust and find a way to be ok. ⁣ diff --git a/src/published/command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt b/src/published/command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7bb149b --- /dev/null +++ b/src/published/command-line-searchable-text-snippets.txt @@ -0,0 +1,116 @@ +Snippets are bits of text you use frequently. Boilerplate email responses, code blocks, and whatever else you regularly need to type. My general rule is, if I type it more than twice, I save it as a snippet. + +I have a lot of little snippets of text and code from years of doing this. When I used the i3 desktop (and X11) I used [Autokey](https://github.com/autokey/autokey) to invoke shortcuts and paste these snippets where I need them. In Autokey you define a shortcut for your longer chunk of text, and then whenever you type that shortcut Autokey "expands" it to your longer text. + +It's a great app, but I [switched to a Wayland-based desktop](/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway) ([Sway](https://swaywm.org/)) and Autokey doesn't work in Wayland yet. It's unclear to me whether it's even possible to have an Autokey-like app work within Wayland's security model ([Hawck](https://github.com/snyball/Hawck) claims to, but I have not tested it). + +Instead, after giving it some thought, I came up with a way to do everything I need in a way like even better, using tools that I already have installed. + +###Rolling Your Own Text Snippet Manager + +Autokey is modeled on the idea of typing shortcuts and having them replaced with a larger chuck of text. It works to a point, but has the mental overhead of needing to remember all those keystroke combos. + +Dedicating memory to digital stuff feels like we're doing it wrong. Why not *search* for a snippet instead of trying to remember some key combo? If the searching is fast and seamless there's no loss of "flow," or switching contexts, and no need to remember some obtuse shortcut. + +To work though the search must be *fast*. Fortunately there's a great little command line app that offers lighting-fast search: [`fzf`](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf), a command line "fuzzy" finder. `fzf` is a find-as-you-type search interface that's incredibly fast, especially when you pair it with [`ripgrep`](https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep) instead of `find`. + +I already use `fzf` as a DIY application launcher, so I thought why not use it to search for snippets? This way I can keep my snippets in a simple text file, parse them into an array, pass that to `fzf`, search, and then pass the selected result on to the clipboard. + +I combined Alacritty, a Python script, `fzf`, `sed`, and some Sway shortcuts to make a snippet manager I can call up and search through with a single keystroke. + +###Python + +It may be possible to do this entirely in a bash script, but I'm not that great at bash scripting so I did the text parsing in Python, which I know well enough. + +I wanted to keep all my snippets in a single text file, with the option to do multiline snippets for readability (in other words I didn't want to be writing `\n` characters just because that's easier to parse). I picked `---` as a delimiter because... no reason really. + +The other thing I wanted was the ability to use tags to simplify searching. Tags become a way of filtering searches. For example, all the snippets I use writing for Wired can be tagged wired and I can see them all in one view by typing "wired" in `fzf`. + +So my snippet files looks something like this: + +```` +
+ + +
+tags:html cluster code + +--- +```python + +``` +tags: python code + +--- +```` + +Another goal, which you may notice above, is that I didn't want any format constraints. The snippets can take just about any ascii character. The tags line can have a space, not a have space, have commas, semicolons, doesn't matter because either way `fzf` can search it, and the tags will be stripped out before it hits the clipboard. + +Here's the script I cobbled together to parse this text file into an array I can pass to `fzf`: + +~~~python +import re +with open('~/.textsnippets.txt', 'r') as f: + data = f.read() +snips = re.split("---", data) +for snip in snips: + # strip the blank line at the end + s = '\n'.join(snip.split('\n')[1:-1]) + #make sure we output the newlines, but no string wrapping single quotes + print(repr(s.strip()).strip('\'')) +~~~ + +All this script does is open a file, read the contents into a variable, split those contents on `---`, strip any extra space and then return the results to stdout. + +The only tricky part is the last line. We need to preserve the linebreaks and to do that I used [`repr`](https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/functions.html#repr), but that means Python literally prints the string, with the single quotes wrapping it. So the last `.strip('\'')` gets rid of those. + +I saved that file to `~/bin` which is already on my `$PATH`. + +###Shell Scripting + +The next thing we need to do is call this script, and pass the results to `fzf` so we can search them. + +To do that I just wrote a bash script. + +~~~.bash +#!/usr/bin/env bash +selected="$(python ~/bin/snippet.py | fzf -i -e )" +#strip tags and any trailing space before sending to wl-copy +echo -e "$selected"| sed -e 's/tags\:\.\*\$//;$d' | wl-copy +~~~ + +What happens here is the Python script gets called, parses the snippets file into chunks of text, and then that is passed to `fzf`. After experimenting with some `fzf` options I settled on case-insensitive, exact match (`-i -e`) searching as the most efficient means of finding what I want. + +Once I search for and find the snippet I want, that selected bit of text is stored in a variable called, creatively, `selected`. The next line prints that variable, passes it to `sed` to strip out the tags, along with any space after that, and then sends that snippet of text the clipboard via wl-copy. + +I saved this file in a folder on my `PATH` (`~/bin`) and called it `fzsnip`. At this point in can run `fzsnip` in a terminal and everything works as I'd expect. As a bonus I have my snippets in a plain text file I can access to copy and paste snippets on my phone, tablet, and any other device where I can run [NextCloud](https://nextcloud.com/). + +That's cool, but on my laptop I don't want to have to switch to the terminal every time I need to access a snippet. Instead I invoke a small terminal window wherever I am. To do that, I set up a keybinding in my Sway config file like this: + +~~~.bash +bindsym $mod+s exec alacritty --class 'smsearch' --command bash -c 'fzsnip | xargs -r swaymsg -t command exec' +~~~ + +This is very similar to how I launch apps and search passwords, which I detailed in my post on [switching from i3 to Sway](/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway). The basic idea is whatever virtual desktop I happen to be on, launch a new instance of [Alacritty](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty), with the class `smsearch`. Assigning that class gives the new instance some styling I'll show below. The rest of the line fires off that shell script `fzsnip`. This allows me to hit `Alt+s` and get a small terminal window with a list of my snippets displayed. I search for the name of the snippet, hit return, the Alacritty window closes and the snippet is on my clipboard, ready to paste wherever I need it. + +This line in my Sway config file styles the window class `launcher`: + +~~~.bash +for_window [app_id="^smsearch$"] floating enable, border none, resize set width 80 ppt height 60 ppt, move position 0 px 0 px +~~~ + +That puts the window in the upper left corner of the screen and makes it about 1/3 the width of my screen. You can adjust the width and height to suite your tastes. + +If you don't use Alacritty, adjust the command to use the terminal app you prefer. If you don't use Sway, you'll need to use whatever system-wide shortcut tool your window manager or desktop environment offers. Another possibility it is using [Guake](https://github.com/Guake/guake) which might be able to this for GNOME users, but I've never used it. + +###Conclusion + +I hope this gives anyone searching for a way to replace Autokey on Wayland some ideas. If you have any questions for run into problems, don't hesitate to drop a comment below. + +Is it as nice as Autokey? I actually like this far better now. I often had trouble remembering my Autokey shortcuts, now I can search instead. + +As I said above, if I were a better bash scripter I get rid of the Python file and just use a bash loop. That would make it easy to wrap it in a neat package and distribute it, but as it is it has too many moving parts to make it more than some cut and paste code. + +####Shoulders Stood Upon + +- [Using `fzf` instead of `dmenu`](https://medium.com/njiuko/using-fzf-instead-of-dmenu-2780d184753f) -- This is the post that got me thinking about ways I could use tools I already use (`fzf`, Alacritty) to accomplish more tasks. -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2