Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing" book notes

    These are my personal book notes from Daniel Pink's "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing." They are for me, but I hope they might be useful to you too.

  • Contingencies

    Yesterday was a thing. Had to send my uncle to the hospital in fairly rough shape, and as he finished doing his last chemotherapy treatment this previous Tuesday, I'd been very worried something was going to happen. It was enough for me to go into "boss mode" and start planning for what I can do if we suddenly lose him, since he's been keeping me and my partner afloat for several years while the job market has been bad.

    I actually started writing up lists of things that need to be done to the house, researching some DIY solutions to a number of those issues, and as dire as it may sound, I started drafting a potential GoFundMe page to possibly find some help with crowndfunding to get us back on our feet if shit hits the fan. Budgeting, figuring out what can be done to cut the bills as much as possible, drafting out plans to make things from what I've learned in the green living and tiny house communities, all going into text and files to do anything I can to help.

  • Meshtastic

    The lab has been a mess for quite some time now, with parts and equipment not in the right places where they should be. This happens to me sometimes and I don't feel like cleaning up for extended periods of time until I get to the point were it is miserable and demotivating with all of the mess and the clutter. I don't even want to be in the space since it just psychically drains any inspiration I might have at working on something. Well, it's become awful enough where I've started clearing things up and putting things back where they should be. I hate it when I get to this point, but it is just part of what I do. Hopefully, I can practice maintaining order so it's not such an uphill climb to work on fun projects.

    Lately, I have been tinkering with Meshtastic.[1] I've been researching online about it for some time now, and finally got around to ordering a couple boards.

    Meshtastic is a firmware that you flash on to ESP32 boards for decentralized off-grid mesh communications and projects. It uses LoRa (Long Range) radios on the unlicensed part of the radio spectrum, so you don't need a ham radio license or anything.

  • Terminal

  • Catching up from ...March

    I didn't paint much in March, but in the last week I found it therapeutic to draw lines with a dip pen and india ink, so that's what you get here. Grids. I had been reading the Rem Koolhaas book "Delerious New York," which reproduces some great 1930s New York atlas pages as endpapers. I won't link to all of them, but I think this is the strongest: [...]

• Politics and World Events

  • Starting to grapple with fleecehold

    Fleecehold is essentially a private estate where freehold homeowners must pay for the maintenance of land they do not own, similar to Home Owners Association's in the United States, but less democratic. In the UK, debate about the issue has been inhibited by the phenomenon's parallels with leasehold, the considerable diversity of the arrangements found in practice, and the dysfunctionality of discussion of the issue due to Facebook-based campaign groups.

    The arguments advanced by some activists are quite extreme and sound to the uninitiated observed like a straw man invented by opponents. Despite a dozen or so attempts at civil and polite engagement, it has not been possible to get HORNets' Facebook admins to engage with the issues or clarify their position of "Adopt the Lot" beyond "Maybe don't adopt everything but we refuse to discuss literally any detail of what should or should not be adopted"

    [...]

    There's also a prevalent misconception about how management companies work in the HORNets group. When I was still subscribing to the group, I initiated a discussion, facilitated by a shared Google Doc, about how people understood the term "embedded management company".

    There was a lot of difficulty disentangling the concept of a management company (limited to a particular site and comprising its residents) from a managing agent (a commercial property management firm) and further from a company which could not be sacked or whose directors could not be sacked. The concept of an "embedded management company" turns out to be incoherent - on any sensible definition, a company can stop being one, and management companies that are not "embedded" can still be exploitative.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Inbox, begone!

    Okay so 99% of GTD advice is about how to “process” your inbox, and that’s awesome, even my own basic version starts by making an inbox list and sorting it into steps and goals.

    And getting good at GTD means getting good at sorting the inbox out.

    But it’s never going to be completely “free”. It’s always going to be one decision after another and that’s going to be mentally exhausting and totally dreaded.

    I’ve de-emphasized weekly reviews in my posts because the review is usually what trips people up. But the point of the review is to make sure your lists are current and that every project has a next step (or is done… or officially abandoned). That’s something you’re gonna have to do eventually and hard enough even if you don’t have a massive inbox waiting for you every week.

    [...]

    Having to sort through a huge inbox is an inescapable part of GTD, I’m not denying that. When you first bootstrap GTD, when you’re returning to it after having fallen off, or when your life circumstances drastically change and turn everything upside down. I could try to sell you some other productivity method that didn’t do that but I honestly don’t think that would make your life any simpler or better. Reviewing the inbox is core to GTD. I’m just saying I’m trying to do it as little as possible and “bypassing” the inbox when I can; as long as I’m making conscious and deliberate decisions about what goes on my lists.

  • French computer and game magazines in the 80s and 90s

    I have been reading old computer magazines lately, lots of them have been scanned and uploaded to the internet archive.

    [...]

    In Tilt, there were ads for Amstrad CPC software until 1992, the CPC was very popular. Thomson had lots of ads but there was not a lot of software for their machines and they didn't evolve the hardware. Thomson gave up producing computers in 1989.

  • Comparing my music, and how to keep creating

    Why do I always have to compare myself to others?

    I think that, as a result of my low self-esteem and my small opinion of myself, I latch on to every small opportunity to exalt myself before and above myself.

    So I latch onto my music, not only to express myself towards the outside world — which is probably a healthy way to deal with things —, but also to portray myself as a human being that is worth something.

    Because I do not inherently recognise a value in my existence, I try to define my worth as a human through artistic craft.

    There are always people who are better at something than you. While creating, I have to ignore this, otherwise I lose all motivation.

  • Looking for great books around tech

    My flatmate is an architect. From my point of view, architecture seems to be a field where culture is crucial. You have to inspire yourself from other works. Thus he has lots and lots of books on architecture, books that he often reads, granting him a broad knowledge over his field.

    The thing is, I'm currently working in networking and most of the books seems to be technical books or how to pass a cert etc. I'm currently greatly interested about history around computers and networks. I've seen (not yet read) books like 'The Idea Factory' (about Bell Labs) or 'Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet'. Do some of you have some other great recs please ? I know it's not a Computer forum but most of us here on the gemini space have an interest in this area.

  • [Old] Computers of the 80s

    My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48, an 8 bit computer, I got it for christmas in 1982. When I was in the computer shop with my parents in Paris, I looked briefly at the Intellivision and Atari 2600 and I spent most of my time playing Mine Storm on the Vectrex, I was impressed by the vector graphics, meanwhile my parents were talking with the salesman about the microcomputers.