I like neat, minimal and clean with no stuff or junk or clutter; but I also like this person’s setup. š¤·
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice: I don’t much care where. The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Been thinking about moving my spreadsheets on Google Sheets to Proton Drive. I only have two I actually use, a money one and a SOTA mountain climbing timetable one. I’d like to self host them but so far haven’t found a comparable self hosted, open source spreadsheet software. They all seem to be more like low code databases. IronCalc looks to be the best thing but not sure it’s ready yet. First time I found it there were no instructions on how to install it, but now there are some.
My daughter has been making a calendar for her friend for a secret Santa she’s doing at school. She made it on the computer then printed it out and stuck to backing card. It’s scrapbook style with photos and little pictures related to her friends. It’s so lovely and a true gift.
I need to migrate away from logseq at work. It’s slow and annoying when it just stops working for 5 seconds. I was thinking VS Code and a few markdown plugins but now I’m wondering about emacs and org-mode š
Probably a bad idea.
I’ve sent off my postcard for freeshell.de. Planning to move my personal apps to it from the free Oracle VPS I have. Probably not a sensible idea to put my stuff on a free service run by one person. I need to get my accoutn verified first anyway, so I’ll check it out before I make mass migrations.
I kinda miss my old static blog for this site. Generated with jekyll which I used for several years straight without flitting between software. I got into a regular habit of writing something, either on my phone or the computer. I really enjoyed using 1Writer on my phone for it. Just it was more hassle to add images to, I did very occasionally do it, but it was mostly just an outpouring of rambling words. I admit, I do think a header image at the top of a blog post makes it more interesting or nicer to look at, which is sort of the style I’ve adopted here.
Image uploads on micro.blog aren’t as easy as I’d like them to be. Sure they’re a lot easier than a static site generator setup but uploading more than one at a time would be nice. Anyway, I’m sure I can find things to complain about for every blogging tool.
We were reading bedtime stories and then heard a screech from downstairs. Turns out the cat had caught a mouse, brought it into the house and then killed it in the hallway.
The pebble ring is interesting. Although the black one looks like a zip tie around his finger. It’s a neat concept that let’s you record a note quickly. When writing this an image of Dale Cooper telling Diane he should pre-order this ring popped into my head. Eric Migicovsky says he has 5-10 amazing thoughts everyday…
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about getting another gold ring…not sure why but I’ve been leaning into gold jewellery. A watch is on my to buy list for a long time, although still yet to decide upon one. Mostly as I keep falling back into obsessively tracking steps and cycles and sleep etc. on my Garmin. I could wear two watches but I struggle with a watch on my wrong hand. So I’m tempted by the gold one. It’s not actually gold but looks nice, I’m watching the video and wondering where the button gets placed. I like the idea of it being on my pointer and then using my thumb to press the button.
Of course I have thought about setting up some system to make a blog from the ring! Not sure about the unrechargable-ness of it, seems like a waste and “don’t worry you can buy a new one when the battery runs out”. I guess there’s always trade offs.
Sometimes I want to document everything ever. I’m pretty good at work at making notes now, and it seems to be a very simple task that everyone is blown away with. The thanks I get for sending out notes from a meeting afterwards is disproportionate to the effort I put into writing those notes. Plus I can go back to meetings from literally years ago and pull up what was said.
But do I need to do that at home or for me? So what if I thought about some random thing 3 years ago. It doesn’t matter. Saving useful stuff, like what size thingy does the wotsit use, that’s helpful. Sometimes it’s “interesting” to go back and look at stuff but mostly as a passing curiosity. Maybe I regret all the notes I didn’t take? It is time consuming though, and I do like not having a burden or a commitment I feel like I have to do for myself.
Work is very formal, and structured and there’s a contract, so words are good. The rest of life is just whatever you want, and maybe what I want is not to spend the time writing about how I spend the time. Plus I’m still 5,000 words (in my head) away from where I write it down.
So let’s have another photo from this week’s hike:
Plus I already wrote a whole story for that elsewhere.
After waiting ages, I forgot Stranger Things 5 came out yesterday. It’s now 11pm, so I’m not going to start watching it!
I’ve been enjoying the new 3D printer, making huge models I could never dream of with my old one. Although now I have a list of people who need Lego “minifigs”.
Did some christmas shopping the other day. Even went into a women’s clothes shop and bought some things for my wife. Today I get home and look in the wardrobe. What do I see? The exact dress I’d bought. The positive is, I can pick well; the negative is, I now need to take it back and find something else.
More hikes this week.
Reading “Touching the Void”, a true story of some mountain climbing incident. I’ve not got to the incident yet but they’ve been very close to dying several times already and I’m only a quarter in. Think there’s a TV documentary too.
Deleted my Strava account. It’s pointless for me. I’m not running or cycling or looking to beat other peoples times. What else can I delete?
This site? Did think about migrating my radio site here and being done with this one. Not really interested in posting on it. It’s work to do stuff though.
Also thought about selling the Leica M2…
The neighbours had a Halloween party today. I went with the kids for a bit but their kids go to a different school and everyone was from the other school - kids and parents. It was awkward for a while then we had to leave anyway for swimming.
Installed Debian on server and set most things back up. Some docker services didn’t work - like silver bullet - for reasons I’m not quite clear on. I might just scrap it as I don’t use it anyway. Need to setup tiddlywiki again. Although haven’t really missed it…but be good having it available to edit should I need.
Reinstalled Windows 11 on the family machine too. Cleared out all the junk, which is nice. Quick to get things back again though. Except Office. I bought Office 2016 and it’s impossible to download it again. I thought I’d saved it but it didn’t like the installer. There was one on archive.org but seemingly not quite right. It sort of works as I log in with my work account and I think that makes it okay…as we have 365 at work. For a minute I thought about subscribing- get office plus 1TB cloud storage. But I don’t want that.
Tidied garage too - hours of doing but hard to see improvements. Need to sort out storage better, still using some temporary shelves when we moved in 5 years ago which are terrible.
Want to sell my old 3D printer but it’s such a hassle. It’s so big and who really wants to buy it? I offered it to the hacker space but no one seemed interested. Haven’t quite ordered a new one. Wife asked if I’d really use it anyway. I think I would but she’s also partially right.
Had another fun SOTA outing this week with MM0EFI.
Think I’m going to get a Bambulabs 3D printer. Been putting it off for ages but it’ll be much better than my current one. The P1S is on sale but I might get the P2S instead…
The server has been offline for a while now, since the hard drive failed. I did buy a new hard drive but zfs couldn’t recover - at least not that I could do - and I’m supposedly working out what to do. It is interesting how I’ve not really missed the server though. Probably plex is the biggest miss but not really that much. The kids sometimes want to watch something from it but given we have so many other streaming services, or games etc. that they don’t really care. So I don’t know what to do with it. Probably would still like the linux server to tinker with but so far I’ve not had much time to deal with it.
Visited this lovely little cafe in Bettyhill on my trip to see my sister in Thurso (most north town of UK mainland), and had a cracking breakfast.
Her iPhone is stuck in a restore loop and using the computer doesn’t fix it. Get some generic 4013 error which can have lots of causes. All the simple stuff doesn’t fix it, so time to take it into the Apple Store (when I get time). No doubt they’ll tell me it’s broken and I have to buy a new one.
Had a spectacular day up near Ullapool in the north west of Scotland.
The kids are obsessed with the Pikmin Bloom app. We’ve cycled 16 km each day and walked around the local lake four times today! Got us up to 18.5k steps. Not sure how long it’ll last once we’re back home but certainly can’t complain about them not being active.
The weather is lovely here, but it’s also lovely back home and I can’t help think about all the summits I want to do. However, I tell myself that there are always more sunny days and the hills will still be there. Hoping to do a couple next week when we’re back and I go visit my sister. Just hope it’s not pouring with rain.
The more I think about the server the more I think I can delete stuff. Got a lot of tv and movies from over the years but all I need to keep are kids things, as they actually watch them again, whereas we never do. If it’s that good - like Lord of the Rings - then I should get the bluray. I also bet I could slim down the photos folder. So many raws I’ll never go back and edit, so many pictures taken of events that I really only need 10 of to remember it. We’ve made photo books every year, so I don’t need to worry about deleting the “wrong” photos. Although how I’ll actually go about doing this will be challenging and extremely time consuming.
I do have some home videos. The ones I’ve made into proper clips, I’ll just keep the final product but there are some I never did. Am I going to make those now? (no) but I don’t need 10GB of clips when a 2-minute video will suffice.
I came across 85GB of DnD related pdfs and helpers on my computer. Completely forgot about them and, surprise surprise, I’ve never used them or even opened a fraction of them. I keep them as “maybe the kids will play dnd” but if they do, they don’t want 85GB of pdfs. They want to learn and find out themselves. That needs deleting when I get home.
Would be great if everything would comfortably fit on a single 4 TB drive, and key items: photos, videos and documents are well under 1TB so I can use the Hetzner Nextcloud backup for everything.
I’d also like to have all the keeper photos on iCloud via Photos.app without having to pay the 2TB tier. Mostly so nice stuff pops up on the AppleTV or I can find nice photos on my phone.
Not sure what I’m going to do about Home Assistant. I don’t do any automation, and at most I look at the dashboard I made every so often. The most I do is upgrade the components and restart the service. It’s basically a glorified logger…of data which I never look at. It’s always “I could do so many cool things”, but I don’t. I like using Apple HomeKit as stuff just works and I can do it from my phone with no bother. It seems a shame not to keep using HASS but meh. I don’t want to install proxmox just for it. Perhaps I can setup a VM…I’m sure someone has a script for it. I can run it in docker but it doesn’t get all the features and that makes it annoying. Really, I should just not bother with it as it’s another thing that needs looking after.
I’m either going to install Debian or Arch Linux on the server and just use docker for services. I want it to be arch linux as I like the OS but installing Debian takes 10 minutes and zero thought.
I discovered Pikmin Bloom, which is like Pokemon Go, but based on step count. First day of the holidays and the boys and I walked around the lake twice planting flowers and are going cycling this afternoon to find some mushrooms to attack! š
It’s been around about four years but I only just found it via reddit suggested subreddits the other day. Same waypoint system as PG and Niantic games of the past. No waypoints near where we’re staying, which is slightly unfortunate, but means we have to go cycling. I think you can request new locations in other games but not sure exactly how you do that. Perhaps some research for another time.
Yesterday was world mental health day. š”
Getting out in the great outdoors, fresh air, physical exertion, always makes me feel better. It can even be pouring with rain, but with some waterproofs on it’s still enjoyable. Mostly when you get back home and have a nice cup of tea. āļø
I’m still half heartedly trying to fix the server but I think it’s gone. Maybe someone who’s a zfs wizzard could bring it back but I suspect me exporting the pool ruined any chances of that. It does present an opportunity to start again. But what should that be? Nothing? A wee Linux box? I do need to just DNS at home again as I’m going to hit the limit of NextDNS free tier. Too many stupid devices calling home endlessly.
We’re off for a week for the school hols so I’ll have plenty of time to think about it and still not decide.
I know AI generated images are old hat now, but this package looks nice for making super specific images - something I’ve found tricky before (although I’ve not really played with anything recently). A while back I wanted to have some very specific images for a web app but struggled to get it just right and then gave up.
Wrote up my last SOTA trip report on the forum. I always enjoy the conversations that follow - typically they’re completely non secateur, and this time is no exception.
The replacement hard drive arrived for the server. Plugged it in, still can’t import zfs pool. Now various things to try and figure it out. smartctl says one drive has had a communications error, which could be a cable but I think it’s only had one error. Then we get into wild commands like sudo zdb -lu /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x50014ee2b8f30293 | nawk '/txg =/{txg=$NF}/timestamp =/{printf "txg %d\t%s\n",txg,$0}' | sort -n -k 2n,2n | uniq | tail -10 to find historical transaction ids of … transactions… to revert back to but nothing happens. I don’t know how long to keep trying.
I have my photos, as they were backed up elsewhere, and maybe there were other things I wanted. Think I had some audiobooks from the library I’d saved, but suppose I can just borrow them again. Maybe other stuff too but I can’t even remember it so do I really need it? I now have Nextcloud on Hetzner backing up photos and docs. Do I even need a server?
I like having an always on linux box for tinkering with… I do have a VPS, so maybe that’s enough? But occasions when I want a minecraft server or some fun new thing on github to play with for a day or two, then a local - and considerably more powerful - server is probably best. However, what should I use?
Somehow I ended up watching a video of someone opening a Magic the Gathering deck from 1995, from the Ice Age expansion. That expansion was out when I first started playing the game. Makes me miss my old MtG cards, the art work was amazing - so much more character than the recent digital art.
I also think it’s time to rewatch Blackadder.
I very much underestimated how long it would take to sort out files on the computer. So many folders of similar but different things, so many subject/docs and docs/subject folders. Plus ebooks and calibre libraries all over the place.
Tried to consolidate as much as possible and delete even more. My Dropbox is nearly sorted out now. I’m now tempted just to use that - although it’s not quite as flexible as Nextcloud. Biggest decision is if I want to backup photos to it as well.
It has been good that I backed up my photos to my friend’s server as my internal backups had missed some files.
Probably I’ll get bored and just delete large swathes of files anyway.
I signed up to the Hetzner 1TB Nextcloud offering. It’s nice, I can pick and chose what folders get sync’d, and these can be all over my computer. Also want to tidy up all my documents across various cloud providers, ideally I’d have one system and sync it everywhere, but for now, it’s my hard drive and Nextcloud. I did look at Johnny Decimal, but that’s too much work for me. I just need a bunch of folders, and I have an existing structure that I’ve used for 15 years which I already know the strengths and weaknesses of it.
Just found a folder on my Dropbox from June 2015 where I was clearly researching ham radio licence exams. Trying to tidy up my Dropbox, which is not even starting on sorting out my key documents, it’s just a bunch of stuff I’ve collected. Mostly things can be deleted and then rearranged somewhat. Probably I don’t need Nextcloud, other than photo backups, as I’m sure all my docs would fit in the ~20GB or so Dropbox gives me. However, I do like the Nextcloud client more…