tail -f /dev/brain0
As life progresses, it naturally creates a lot of challenges. Regardless of their size, they always pack more than they show. Handling them the way they deserve requires more effort than blindly fighting them until they give, and trying to handle these challenges to prevent them from repeating resulted in something unexpected: Burnout. This was not the first time I had exhausted myself, but this…
Lately, I have been pondering the waste we generate as we live and the ways to reduce it. As I scale down, I fill trash bags with things I can’t use, which bothers me. The items that can be donated and have a second life are strictly excluded from this definition, though. They’re donated to people who need them. The items that are disposed of include cardboard boxes, plastic containers, and items…
The people I'm following on the internet put me inside a small but vibrant retrocomputing bubble. When this is combined with the synthwave composers I tend to listen lately, I'm being transported to my earlier years on this planet, repeatedly. The fact that I have grown with a Commodore 64, 486 systems, boomboxes and big Hi-Fi racks makes this a rather harsh, but enjoyable ride every time. While…
While this blog was silent, my life was buzzing with activity. I have been trying to tend to multiple big projects at work and in my personal life, like a juggler trying not to drop anything. Not everything went as planned. The blog got sidelined, personal projects lost momentum, and a couple of them are temporarily frozen. On the other hand, I managed to finish a big migration at work. As always,…
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. -- Steve Jobs Normally, I’m not a quote person, and don’t get inspired by them much. Sometimes they provide great insights, but even in that case, I prefer to strain them through my own experience and see what remains. However, in recent times, I’m experiencing a domino effect in my digital life and…
Hype is a loaded word, both in meaning and energy. It’s moving masses in today’s consumerism oriented world, in every category possible, including technology. Both for consumers and professionals alike. Hype is not inherently bad, but after a certain threshold, it’s nauseating and blinding, creating mindless followers and fanboys of the worst kind. When hype reaches these levels, Logical discourse…
The year is ending in a couple of days, and I wanted to leave a public note about how it went for me. 2023 was an interesting year. I spent a lot of time getting used to my new life, and to be honest, it went well. I’m happier than ever, and learning to handle my life in this new chapter. The biggest change was how I allocate my time during the day. This nudges me to learn to downscale and manage…
During my lifetime, I have met with people who had certain skills, like reading the weather, or knowing a technical subject inside out, or being able to learn pretty quickly while being thorough. I have admired these people, and wanted to learn what made them tick. The main question was "How is this possible, and what can I learn from these people", and the feeling accompanying this question was…
As a part of my minimalism journey, I'm trying to reduce my digital footprint. This means I'm using less services, less devices, less applications. In other words, trying to do more, with less. This concerted effort has created a set of dynamics and side-effects which I didn't anticipate. While it feels strange, the resulting outcome is nice. Before embarking on this journey, I used to have a…
During the pandemic, I have found a nice application called Pagico , which allowed me to dump everything in my mind, divide them into projects and actionable items. This process enabled me to plan my short term and medium term workload effortlessly, and see what I'm doing with my life. One of the things I done with Pagico was to create deadlines for almost all the tasks I added into it. Combined…
Learning and being informed about new technologies is a habit of mine. I regularly visit webpages and follow RSS feeds to see what is happening and what are the new tools being developed. While I learn and be aware about these new tools, I rarely switch what I use with shinier and newer incarnations of the ones with the same role or functionality. Moreover, I defend using the same tools for a long…
In recent years, a lot of note taking applications (or personal knowledge base tools if you prefer the term) have entered the space. Prominent examples are Roam Research , Obsidian , Notion and countless alternatives and reimplementations of those. On the other hand, there are older ones, and there's one literal elephant in the room, and it's called Evernote . Evernote is one of the oldest…
As I try to move towards minimalism, I discover what it is like in different dimensions. When one starts to explore minimalism, it starts outside one's being, with the process of downsizing and keeping that state. Literature targets reduction of physical (and sometimes digital) belongings and presents it as the starting point and the only possible path. For these methods, victory is achieved when…
I have been observing a trend both in blogs and general internet discourse, but instead of pointing fingers, I decided to sit back, observe and assume that I'm the man who was yelling at the cloud. However, an article , and comments on the orange site convinced me that I'm not the only one with this observation, hence I decided to note it here. We're arguably going through the second big shift in…
There are things which mesmerizes me, with no end. One of them is watching humble people who are good at what they're doing. Being calm, confident and efficient while doing high quality work has a particular charm to it, regardless of the discipline they're in. Honestly, I have been studying these people on and off for quite some time. It's not a scientific study, but more of an informed…
This is first of a series of posts where I talk about the tools and technologies I prefer to use. They are not intended to be in-depth technical documents, but posts answering the questions like Why & How with the history behind it. As always, all comments are welcome. Eclipse is an IDE framework. A complex scaffolding which can host a lot of functionality at the same time. This means an Eclipse…
Lately, I’m working on a new tool which will help me to automate the tasks I manually do using my desktop computer. While these tasks are mundane, they increase life quality of me and many individuals. As I mentioned before, I won’t have a Linux desktop system, and will move to a Mac laptop. Naturally, I wanted to move these workflows to macOS. Moving these workflows to macOS is indeed possible.…
Recently, I have been following a lot of events that made me uneasy about the future of both GNU/Linux and Free Software in general. Normally I have been an observer in these events, but I found that I have formed pretty coherent set of ideas, feelings and preferences for the future evolution of these things. As a result, I've found myself inside many discussions about these topics, and I came out…
I have been following the whole GitHub Copilot issue for a while, and I was not happy about Microsoft using open-source code hosted in GitHub without consent for training Copilot. Consent is only one part of a bigger issue though. As everybody knows, Microsoft has used open-source code on GitHub to train Copilot, disregarding the licenses. This means many repositories containing GPL licensed code…
Exploring minimalism is a multifaceted journey. As I travel down the path; different ideas, problems, ways and possibilities appear. These branches lead to different interpretations of minimalism, but some of them brings the ultimate vision of more time and inner peace nearer. One of such paths is workflows. Every human being performs repetitive tasks. The tasks are small in size, relatively easy…
I had to travel recently for a conference, and I decided to apply what I've learned about minimalism so far. Traveling as a tech person means carrying more electronics and peripherals than most people, and things can get complicated and heavy quickly. This time, I tried to prevent that, and I succeeded. Since it's a work-related conference, my office laptop came with me, which is small and can be…
This post builds upon " I decided to trust cloud storage ". If you didn't read it, please spare a few minutes for going through it for a better context. As I started to move my files to cloud, a lot has happened. I've decided on a single provider for my files, bought extended file revision membership on said provider, and more importantly, started to move my files over there. The backup plan is…
For more background information about this post, and to see where I'm coming from, see previous post on this subject, Meditations on minimalism . As I ponder about minimalism, its advantages and what it brings to one's life; other promises start to show themselves. One of the biggest secondary promises is saving money. Saving money is a desirable action all in itself. It enables one to have a…
For more background information and to read where I'm coming from, see my previous post, meditations on minimalism . I'm an old school person. For years, I always accomplished my things the old school way. Using a desktop system, preferring local-first file storage, organizing and curating these files by hand, sometimes painstakingly. This never meant that I denounce newer technologies, but I…
I've been pondering about minimalism, and trying to implement it into my life for quite some time. However, the idea proved itself to be elusive due to various reasons. While this elusiveness can be partly attributed to the nature of the beast, other parts can be attributed to me. The idea minimalism puts forward is an enticing one, which can be simplified as "having no excess, but what you need",…
Web ecosystem has changed a lot in the recent years, esp. in the area of e-commerce, with the rise of cloud computing and subscription economy. With the evolving technology, many parts of an e-commerce system, or commerce parts of any website became increasingly commoditized. You need a payment processor? Paddle, Stripe, or any other alternative is there for you. Need to send files? SendOwl or…