Maybe on a day like this it is a good idea to look to the Stoics. Gain trust in yourself and the good people around you. Do what’s right. Don’t despair.
Here’s the whole text of this excerpt from the Daily Stoic by Ryan Holliday.
DON’T BE DISTRACTED BY DARKNESS
There’s no question that depressing things happen in this world. They always have and always will. People lie, cheat, steal. Envy, avarice, selfishness-it’s all out there. And it’s hard to miss. I’s easy to despair about this. What do we do? Must it be this way? What’s the point of being good when everyone else is so bad? This is the wrong way to think about it. It’s not up to us to change this unchangeable part of the human species, but instead to think about how to adapt to it, how to integrate it into our understanding of the world and not let it make us miserable. That’s a big part of why the Stoics talk about ignoring what other people do-their lying, cheating and stealing— and focusing on what we do. On making sure that we hold ourselves to a higher standard and put our energy towards evaluating ourselves according to those standards rather than projecting it onto others. Marcus’s best advice on this is worth remembering today: instead of talking about other peoples selfishness and stupidity, our job is “to run straight for the finish line, unswerving.”
To not be distracted by the darkness of others, to head towards the light. To be good without hesitation, even when other people are not. That’s our job. Today and for our whole lives.
My FaceID didn’t work tonight. No idea why. 🎃
New to me backup solution restic
I found the link to a new backup software that looked interesting.
I used to use Arq which costs money. When I was runnning my business and was self-employed it was a sensible cost to pay. Now that I am no longer self-employed I’d like to cut costs. Once Arq will ask to renew my license I’ll switch.
Posting this here for you as much as for me so I can find it again later. 😉
Restic is a modern backup program that can back up your files:
I continued to read “Tress and the Emerald Sea” and it’s been given me thoughts like:
The thing about going by subway is that you might be underground. But you are also not above ground.
Which is important as I am very much freezing above ground right now.
Guter Artikel von @tante@tldr.nettime.org
Beim Spiegel wird geleitartikelt, für ein Verbot der AfD sei es “zu früh”, “Zunächst müssen alle anderen Mittel der wehrhaften Demokratie ausgereizt sein.”
Dann kommt ein konfuser Mix aus “ja, die haben aber so viele Mandate, und deren arme Wähler fühlen sich dann sicher betrogen” und “die Demokraten müssen sich einfach anstrengen”.
[…]
Wie kann man mit einer so geschichtsvergessenen, feigen Position in einen Leitartikel stolpern?
Später verlinkt er einen lesenswerten Artikel von Wiglaf Droste.
Alle Welt sucht das Gespräch mit Rechtsradikalen. Warum? Haben sie einem etwas zu sagen? Ist nicht hinlänglich bekannt, was sie denken, fordern und propagieren? Wo liegt der beschworene aufklärerische Wert, wenn Henryk Bröder in der tageszeitung Franz Schönhuber interviewt? Muß man an jeder Mülltonne schnuppern? Niemand wählt Nazis oder wird einer, weil er sich über deren Ziele täuscht - das Gegenteil ist der Fall: Nazis sind Nazis, weil sie welche sein wollen. Eine der unangenehmsten deutschen Eigenschaften, das triefende Mitleid mit sich selbst und den eigenen Landsleuten, aber macht aus solchen Irrläufern der Evolution arme Verführte, ihrem Wesen nach gut, nur eben ein bißchen labil etc., »Menschen« jedenfalls, so Heinz Eggert, »um die wir kämpfen müssen«.
Ich denke nicht, dass wir mit Nazis reden sollten. Nicht über Politik und nicht über andere Themen. Ich verschwende meine Zeit nicht an selbstgewählte Arschlöcher.
Und die AfD sollte verboten werden.
Ich musste mal was zu diesem EUDI-Mist, der da gerade passiert, etwas schreiben. Das stinkt alles zum Himmel.
Gute Zusammenfassung mit Beleuchtung von Machenschaften, die einfach so passieren…
Falls ihr euch Argumente zurechtlegen möchtet, um mit Menschen zu Themen wie dem Rechtsruck zu diskutieren und dabei in der Lage sein wollt dem Populismus stand zu halten, findet ihr hier einen guten Ansatz: www.aktiv-gegen-diskriminierung.info/argumente…
As I’ve written before, I’ve switched browsers to Vivaldi and am very happy about that choice:
I used to be a big fan of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Now I read about For Advertising Firefox Now Collects User Data By Default. Learning about stuff like this makes it hard to continue to trust them. What are the alternatives? Going back to Safari? Not sure about what to do.
Today I find a link in my RSS feeds where Mozilla’s strategy is now revealed publicly. They seem to want to create a new advertising infrastructure.
Across both pillars (product and infrastructure), we maintain the same goal – to build digital advertising solutions that respect individuals’ rights. Solutions that achieve a balance between commercial value and public interest. Why is that something for Mozilla to address? Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better internet. And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.
I am trying to figure out which websites I visit regularly that have to rely on advertising. I will make a small collection and create replies to this post with all the sites that come to mind. It’ll be interesting to see how much the part of the net that I use has to rely on ads.
The brightest flame burns quickest
Maybe the answer is simpler than I think. Maybe I should just keep things simple. If I like my coffee the way it tastes, that should be enough. If I enjoy playing the guitar songs I love, there’s no need to dig into the theory behind them. And when I write on my blog daily or a few times a week, that’s enough too. There’s no need to turn a hobby into something bigger. It’s fine as it is — an enjoyable way to spend time. Trying to grow it into something more only leads to destruction.
I feel you, Yordi. I’ve been there. And I am not sure I am not still there. I always wanted to do things “right”. It’s actually a mantra of mine: “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing it right.”
But that quickly leads to burnout and boredom. Unless you find a way to do things in moderation. Recently I picked up singing. And I do that maybe once or twice per week. And I enjoy it tremendously. Now I started playing piano again, and mostly re-learning it. And building on the little that I already knew. And I specifically set me the goal of not playing more than once or twice a week. Not daily or anything like that. Because then I know that I would hate it soon.
So yes, my last blog post was a few days ago. I don’t need to write daily. Let others do that. 🫶
Some small thoughts on the Middle East
This is a very personal, moving piece by @jsonbecker.
It’s surreal to see your cousin in a Washington Post video. It’s worse when the reason she’s being interviewed is because of her experience living in a community in Israel that was overrun on October 7th.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve seen her.
I am 42 years old. The “conflict in the Middle East” was present on the news for as long as I can remember. When I was around 15 years old I had the chance to take part in a student exchange program and travel to Israel. We lived in Ashkelon, a small city very close to the Gaza strip. It must have been near the end of the 90s and I guess it was a bit more relaxed (don’t want to say peaceful…) back then. I was able to visit Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and I am still impressed by what I experienced. The magic, the food, the architecture and all of the history. I would love to go back there and see everything with my adult eyes and experience it with the knowledge and appreciation I have today. But I wouldn’t go there now, or previously. As a kid I didn’t understand why people couldn’t stop fighting and my understanding did not grow as an adult. The blind hate and it’s source in the people’s religions is one reason I do not like religion. I don’t think that the fighting will ever stop in my lifetime and that thought makes me very sad. I am glad, personally, that I do not have any relatives in that region. My situation is very different from Jason’s. Still I feel for him and how torn he has to feel. How frustrated and helpless.
I recently wrote about Pinboard and how I use Obsidian to save bookmarks.
For saving website to reference later, which you could call bookmarking, I mostly use Obsidian. It’s my preferred solution for taking notes that I want to keep. Right now I have over 5.600 notes in there. A big part of those are my journal notes, which I imported from Day one. To make saving websites quicker I wrote a small Alfred.app workflow that calls a Shortcut (from Apple shortcuts). If everything works out (it does most of the times!) a note is created in Obsidian.
Since then I tweaked my Apple shortcut a bit. A reason for that was that Brett Terpstra has released Marky 2.0:
I recently revived Marky the Markdownfier. In case you missed it, Marky turns any web page into clippable Markdown for storage in notes/organization apps.
Marky is available via API/cURL. That made it quiet reasonably easy to save the website’s content as markdown and add it to the note. That essentially freezes the contents and the bookmark gains value since it acts like an archive. It’s not always pretty what comes out as Markdown, but it does the job well enough.
I didn’t stop there, though. I learned about Obsidian’s feature to embed websites as iframes.
Learn how to use the iframe HTML element to embed web pages in your notes.
And now my notes will be prettier still with the original website embedded as iframe.
Here is the link to the Apple Shortcut https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/27c9d7137bd54e4f9291c33b0020374d How you use that shortcut is up to you. My preferred way is to call it from Alfred.app
Currently reading: Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson 📚
A quote from Shelby Foote:
“I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.”
In that regard a practical link I found this morning: Gwern.net writes about sidenotes in Web Design with many examples how different authors tackle it. Of course, the examples are linked and you can get lost in those websites as well. Dangerous start into the week, everyone.
This morning I was able to reproduce a bug(?) I came across using Halide. Photos seem to disappear randomly. At first I thought I was imagining and didn’t properly take a picture. This recording demonstrates it. Wrote to support already. (The pic of my white cupboards just vanishes…)
This!
Israel is out there assassinating hundreds of civilians on a daily basis and no one fucking cares
A few years back I memorised the shortcut to create a new folder in Finder on Mac. It’s Cmd-N, Cmd-W, Cmd-Shift-N.
Works every time. 🙈
Fedi(verse) is for losers? I don't care.
From where I sit, I don’t see that we have a strategy. Fedi is fine and all, but it doesn’t scare anyone. That’s not good enough. Twitter was always flawed but it was a great tool for activism and continues to be useful in some ways. Bluesky has some of that old-Twitter vibe, and perhaps it will supplant the original, in time; inshallah.
I wouldn’t count myself as part of the fediverse but I am. I don’t do Mastodon. It’s one of the reasons I use micro.blog to host my content right now. I don’t think that joining a mastodon instance is the right way. In my opinion the best way to share your thoughts is on your own personal website using your own domain name. A name that you control. And then use federation through protocols like ActivityPub to take part in the social circles. That way I don’t have to care about Mastodon or the fediverse.
We deceive ourselves as to what constitutes effective action, and we are deceived by billion dollar algorithms that understand our subconscious better than we do and feed our illusory sense of accomplishment through facilitating and encouraging such paltry (yet addicting) protests.
When I read the original article up top about “the fediverse is for losers” in my opinion it touches on this exact topic. The fediverse isn’t good for activism. You don’t use it to make the world better. You use it to complain about what others do (which is kind of what I am doing here right now 🙈). If you really want to make the world a better place, change routines in your daily live. Interact with people outside of your computer. Bring a smile on another person’s face. Show them you care.
Since switching to Vivaldi, yesterday
For now I will switch and try out Vivaldi. The feature set makes somehow sense and what I've seen about the browser so far seems good. We'll see.
I noticed that my camera has new options during a video call. I can set a background 🎉. This background choice is just lovely. 😍
Pinboard is dead. At least for me. Let me tell you how I bookmark in 2024.
Yesterday, I read an opinion about the bookmarking service pinboard.in. I am a user since 2010. In 2019 I paid ~$210 for a 10 year contract because I wanted to do my part to keep the service running and enable the founder to do his thing. Because I believed in his mission and the purpose of the service. Gordon made me aware that Pinboard might be over. There is a Hacker News thread for the linked article where alternatives are discussed, if you are interested. The thing is, I believe Gordon and others might be right. Roughly 1,5 years ago I tried to write a small application to interface with the Pinboard API. Unfortunately, the API didn’t work as expected. When I looked into it, I learned about a version 2 of that API that was supposed to be in development. The documentation to that API was insufficient and things didn’t work in any way like they were documented. When I reached out to the Pinboard founder I heard nothing back. The state of the API hasn’t changed at all since then. There were no updates.
The founder still writes on the web about things like lunar programs and moon landers with SpaceX and other political topics. He also gave entertaining talks on conferences during the last years. But he didn’t do what he was paid for. At least in my opinion. Sure, the basic website still works. And maybe that could be considered enough?
I have since stopped using the service. Bookmarking is an activity I not do as often anymore as before. If I want to have a website handy for later reading or watching, I use Omnivore. It’s an open-source solution that is free to use. Eventually you can even do self-hosting. I chose it because it works well and I can read and understand the code and tech stack. If they ever decide to discontinue the web app I can host it myself.
For saving website to reference later, which you could call bookmarking, I mostly use Obsidian. It’s my preferred solution for taking notes that I want to keep. Right now I have over 5.600 notes in there. A big part of those are my journal notes, which I imported from Day one.
To make saving websites quicker I wrote a small Alfred.app workflow that calls a Shortcut (from Apple shortcuts). If everything works out (it does most of the times!) a note is created in Obsidian.
I attached a screenshot of the note, because I don’t have a good way to share it with you otherwise right now. Those bookmarks land in a folder called /sites. I can add tags and link them to my notes, or references the bookmark in a note somewhere else. It doesn’t save a complete copy of the bookmark. So if the website disappears from the web, my bookmark would cease to work. Maybe that is something that I will add later. I am not sure yet.
So yeah, Pinboard is dead as far as I am concerned.
