If — by some minor miracle — you’re still following this site in your favorite RSS reader, you might’ve noticed that I’ve been a busy little beaver over the last several days. What’ve I been up to? Well…
I migrated some archival content over from a couple of side projects that stalled out.
gomi no sensei, my early COVID-19 pandemic, Doctorow style, dailyish newsletter that I ran for a few weeks in early 2020.
blog.boogah.org, a more personal site where I didn’t have to worry about all the technical debt that I’d accumulated here.
I migrated all of my site’s content over to using blocks via the WP-CLI bulk converter added to 10up’s great Convert to Blocks plugin.
I updated about ninety posts in the Linked category to use the Bookmark Card block instead of Daring Fireball style links. This decision was made mainly because the plugin I was using hadn’t been updated in at least 11 years. 😅
Getting rid of that ancient plugin freed me from the technical debt that was holding me back from changing themes and embracing Full Site Editing in WordPress. I’m using Davis Blocks as my current theme, but will likely cycle through a few until I find one that feels like “home”.
Does this mean that I’m going to start posting here again? Honestly, at this point, I’ve learned to not make promises that I don’t know if I can keep. So let’s just say maybe.
By late next year, Bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.
After reading a story on Bitcoin’s energy consumption late last year, I decided to stop being a part of the problem by getting rid of all of my (very meager) cryptocurrency holdings.
Unstable as shit? That, I can handle. But unstable and bad for the environment? Fuck that noise. I’m out.
In case anyone needs me, I’ll be over here marinating in my own self righteousness…
Today, through that web browser, there are movies and TV shows and every song ever recorded; it’s where I do my writing and chatting and messaging; it’s where my notes and calendars and social networks live. It’s everything except fun.
I’ve been using the internet for almost 22 years now. Gross, right? Every year, things get less fun around here. Especially the last couple years.
Maybe I’m just getting older. Maybe the internet’s sense of whimsy really has been taken out behind the barn and left for dead. I don’t really know anymore.
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
Getting wild with digital design in 2018 means getting wild in 2018 with responsive design that’s agnostic to the kind of device you’re rocking. That’s doable, probably, but it’s really, really hard.
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
The ethics of engineering are an ethics of: Does it work? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out the social mission for your object. It’s like the famous line from the Tom Lehrer song: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
Hey, 2017.
You were, hands down, the worst year of my life. The more distance that I’m able to put between you and I, the better.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Some really great things happened this year. But the worst thing I’ve ever been through in my life — which I’d much rather be vague about than recount here — also happened on your watch. And while it’s hard to hold a year personally responsible for the circumstances that occurred in the middle of it, I still kind of do.
Irrational? Sure. But it’s easier than self-reflection, I guess.
Maybe, eventually, I’ll be able to look back and thank you for making me stronger. For helping forge me into a more resilient person. But the wounds are still too fresh, and my emotions are still too raw.
Here’s to hoping that 2018 treats me — and all of us — a little bit better.
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
I’ve decided that 2018 is going to be a year of paring back.
Less junk.
Less apps.
Less podcasts.
Less distractions.
Less commitments.
Less eating out.
Less bullshit.
Less stress.
I’m not really interested in obsessively measuring how successful I am at doing any of these things. Mainly because of the “less stress” item on the list above. But I’ll still do my best to check in every once in a while.
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
Because all of the other social networks have become a huge fucking bummer, I’ve been lurking on a new peer-to-peer social network, Rotonde.
Right now, the chatter over there is (mainly) a bunch of navel gazing around building Rotonde. But I kind of prefer people yapping about hacking on JavaScript to a shitload of emotionally exhausting politics talk anyway.
Nodes (or “portals”) on the Rotonde network are, as of now, only viewable from Beaker — a stripped down, desktop only, Chromium based web browser that supports the BitTorrent inspired Dat protocol. Thanks to the peer-to-peer nature of Dat, Beaker is able to act as:
A web browser.
A place to host JavaScript and/or basic HTML sites of your own.
A distributed cache of the other Dat sites you’ve recently visited.
An simpleish demonstration of everything listed above can be demonstrated by spinning up your own Rotonde instance. Want to try?
Select "Fork this site" from the menu at the end of the address bar and give your new site a name.
Select "Library" from the hamburger menu near the upper right corner.
Select the name of the site you just created from the list on the left.
In the right hand pane, you'll see a list of files. Clicking on the name of your site will open up your Rotonde portal.
Select the input field (near the top of the page) and press CTRL + SHIFT + DELETE. This will reset your Rotonde instance.
Refresh the page.
Enter edit:name example (replacing example with your own preferred username) in the input field and press RETURN.
Change your avatar by opening your Beaker Library, selecting "Open folder", and replacing media/content/icon.svg with an SVG file of your choosing. If you don't want to bother finding one, someone's already generated a bunch that you can use. Just make sure you publish your changes after you've found something you like, or nobody will ever see it.
Go follow some people by pasting their dat:// URL into the input field. I wouldn't be mad if you added me, but I also won't be offended if you don't. There's a list of known Rotonde portals here if you want to browse around and see what's going on.
Write a post or two.
Once you have everything dialed in, sign up for a Hashbase account to mirror your portal. That way, your Rotonde content stays browsable even if your copy of Beaker crashes (as it is currently wont to do) or you need to take your computer offline.
One of my favorite things about Rotonde is that updates to the underlying client and portal software get rolled out to the entire network as features are added. This means that you never have to worry about keeping your client up to date — it just always is.
While Rotonde has clearly got a way to go — those aforementioned browser crashes, the community is still figuring out mentions, discoverability and following aren’t very user friendly — I’m excited to kick back on the sidelines and watch it all take shape.
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
