partying with nikita

Random thoughts, sitting on the patio with my coffee mug.

Slowly coming back from the travel. The integration is hard. I want to be on the road again.

"The road is not going anywhere"

The regional burning man was really intense. Partying until 6am, resting for a few hours. Offering massage from 10am to 2pm. Resting for a few more hours. Partying from 8 to 6am again.

Technology and Free Software

• Facing the Creeping Darkness

  This is not the 1st edition of this text. The original is for a blog that I never continued after the 1st post. I wrote this 4 years ago, in 2022, before everything went to shitty extremes on October 7th, 2023. I still identify with every word of the original, but I had to edit some numbers and a bunch of other words so that it fits my situation in 2026.

• A Smol Document Server

  I’ve come, far too late, to realize the error of my ways concerning the dangers of becoming too reliant on very convenient platforms, without paying sufficient attention to how difficult it may become to disentangle myself from them later. Now I find myself caught up in a number of platforms that have more control over my digital property than I currently care for, and the road to disentanglement will be long, and I may never fully complete it.

  Amazon Kindle became a serious problem in this area, when they stopped allowing users to handle actual device files, thereby rendering user backups, and protection of the content we paid for/“own” from summary removal, alteration, or withholding, an impossibility (fortunately, at least at the time I’m writing this, there are workarounds, and I did manage to back everything up). Google, at least, has made no moves to withhold my own data from me (yet), but my whole life is wrapped up with them. Documents, tax records, financial planning... if I lost access to Google Calendar my life would swiftly turn to shit. And, for a variety of reasons that I’m sure I needn’t elaborate on in a Gemini capsule, I no longer trust Google with my life in its hands, to the degree I once did.

• More PalmOS-ing

  Since I got the Expenses plugin for jpilot compiled and working, I have been using the Expenses program itself on PalmOS. I had been musing over whether it was possible to change the Expense Types in it though, since the default ones seem to be for jet-setting business people with things like "Hotel", "Laundry" and "Mileage". Well, the answer is yes, but it's not easy.