Matt Marshall's Personal Site (en)

2025 Winter Solstice Update

2025-12-23

We entered the winter period after the Autumn Equinox by getting stuck down with an awful illness. Based on the reports across the region, I think we were among the first wave to fall to an aggressive flu. It took us a long time to recover and it was very scary for a while. We made it through though, and we’ve mostly managed to recover.

This winter has been characterised thus far with feeling overwhelmed. Firstly the sickness, but then D’s developmental milestones have left us quite disrupted. Our social calendar has been very busy to the point of squeezed, which is an odd feeling for us.

The Solstice, however, has been amazing. It was a little touch-and-go for a moment with the build-up week being quite packed and stressful, but both “Solstice Eve” and the Solstice Day itself were incredible. D is old enough to understand that something is happening and is special, and she really enjoyed seeing her family and opening her presents. My favourite moments were when she said “Thank you daddy” without prompting.

This was a great way to ride out the midwinter, and I look forward to the return of the light.

Key Events

2025-06-28, my now-wife A, and I, are married in front of our family and our gods in a handfasting ceremony administered by my “heartsister” K, on land owned by The Patchwork Project.
2025-07-10, our rabbit Pika dies en route to the vets after showing signs of distress
2025-10-26, my daughter tells me that she loves me for the first time

Hobbies

Quite sparse entries in the hobby list this update. I wish there was some more exciting things happening but the key takeaway is: “I’m plodding along”. No big pushes to try new things, no real slippages. A few cases where there are opportunities to do more, but overall I’m pretty happy.

Archery

No archery to speak of really, although we are planning on attending the “Boxing Day Fun Shoot” as a family. I think I’ve managed to shoot about 6 arrows this year! I think my goal for next year is simply just to shoot more than once, since my equipment is all set up now.

Creative Writing

No creative writing to speak of either. I’ve had a few ideas for poems but haven’t prioritised writing any down. I think Creative Writing will be taking a backseat for a little while, and I’m OK with that.

Exercise

My mainstay of strength training is holding nicely. I’ve been making decent progress with my pull-up form, although I’m disappointed in my numbers. I hope to be making strides in this across the next few months. My current thinking is that I need to do more pulling generally, so I hope to be doing the odd pull-up here and there across the day to build a solid base for then getting higher reps during training sessions.

I haven’t tried to start running again. This is mostly due to lack of being in the habit, now. I’m not sure where I want to be with running, so my main job is to do some thinking about this before I make any half-hearted attempts to reinstill a running habit.

My feet are stronger than ever, though. Winter has not deterred me from the barefoot lifestyle, and I look forward to building up my barefoot running soon.

Hiking

No hiking across this half of the year either, sadly. Again, this is largely due to incompatibilities between hiking and my toddler. She would love going on a long walk, but she also hates being in the car long enough to get there.

I think the main goal for the next few months is to try and find a location nearby which sort of ticks the “outside walk” boxes, without being a “proper hike”; we can build from there.

Languages

My Esperanto is coming along strong. My informal Esperanto club with my friend M has moved from monthly to bi-weekly, which is nice. I’ve also restarted my daily journalling habit, which means I write more Esperanto again.

I need to put some more Esperanto books into my reading list to prompt myself to pick them up, as I’ve not managed to read any despite getting good recommendations from people on the internet.

My company is also allowing me to expense a year’s subscription to one of those online learning platform things, so I’ll be doing some Mandarin just to try it.

Logs

Albums

I’ve had a nice half-year enjoying lots of music. Looking at the logs, most of these are old favourite so there’s not too much to write about or reflect on. I continue to dip my toes into both Hip-Hop and Pop music as I’m trying to take each of these genres much more seriously and open myself up to new musical experiences.

For times that I’m struggling to determine my mood; I’ve also got a bare-bones “choose me a random album” script which picks a folder in my library and I then queue it in my music player. This has helped me explore some more of my backlog.

As always, this is a de-duplicated list¹ so doesn’t include the many re-listens throughout the half-year.

Pain Remains by Lorna Shore
Spiderweb Princess by Kukielle
Are You Listening? by Dolores O’Riodan
No Baggage by Dolores O’Riodan
Room by Eivør Pálsdóttir
Duke Ellington & John Coltrane by Duke Ellington & John Coltrane
Blink-182 by Blink-182
Dingleberry Haze by Bloodhound Gang
$O$ by Die Antwoord
The Blackening by Machine Head
Drif by Heilung
Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde by Alcest
Ecailles De Lune by Alcest
Les Voyages De L’Âme by Alcest
Keep The Faith by Bon Jovi
Ofnir by Heilung
Kvitravn by Wardruna
Homesick by A Day To Remember
Elegy by Shadow of Intent
The All-American Rejects by All-American Rejects
God Hand by Brand Of Sacrifice
Femme Fatale by Britney Spears
Thornography by Cradle Of Filth
CMF2 by Corey Taylor
Heaven Tonight by Cheap Trick
Eternity by A Wake in Providence
The Blvck Sun || The Blood Moon by A Wake in Providence
Sunbather by Deafheaven
Communiqué by Dire Straits
Storm Of The Light’s Bane by Dissection
The End, So Far by Slipknot
The Last Kind Words by DevilDriver
The Fall by Gorillaz
Thug Misses by Khia
Living Things by Linkin Park
The Hunting Party by Linkin Park
One More Light by Linkin Park
Timewave Zero by Grendel
Harsh Generation by Grendel
One For Sorrow by Insomnium
Maximum Overload by DragonForce
Goatlord by Darkthrone
Clayman by In Flames
Dance of Death by Iron Maiden
Koloss by Meshuggah
Sunburn by Fuel
In The Halls Of Awaiting by Insomnium
Ritual Hymns by Worm Shepherd
Ya Nass by Yasmine Hamdan
Spitfire by Jefferson Starship
The Black Halo by Kamelot
Exercises In Futility by Mgła
No One Here Gets Out Alive by Alien Vampires
Demigod by Behemoth
London Town by Wings
Return of the Astro-Goth by Yugen Blackrok
Possessed by Venom
Billy Talent by Billy Talent
Desensitized by Drowning Pool
ACD by Half Man Half Biscuit
Contradictions Collapse by Meshuggah
lately I feel EVERYTHING by Willow
The Slop by Nine Inch Nails
Killer by Alice Cooper
Lifa by Heilung
Gemini by Macklemore
When The World Comes Down by All-American Rejects
The Glorious Burden by Iced Earth
The Adversary by Ihsahn
Don’t You Fake It by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
The Dethalbum by Dethklok
Milk And Honey by John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Zager & Evans by Zager & Evans
Mugzy’s Move by Royal Crown Revue
Jumping All Over The World by Scooter
The Poison by Bullet For My Valentine
Satellite by P.O.D.
Tall Poppy Syndrome by Leprous
Bilateral by Leprous
Coal by Leprous
Take To The Skies by Enter Shikari
So Long, Astoria by The Ataris
Savage (Songs From A Broken World) by Gary Numan
Existential Reckoning by Puscifer
Megalomania by Aqua
Hell by Venom
Hesher by Nickelback
… And I Return To Nothingness by Lorna Shore
Freaky Styley by Red Hot Chili Peppers
Sempiternal by Bring Me The Horizon
A Beautiful Lie by 30 Seconds To Mars
AOL Sessions Undercover by 30 Seconds To Mars
The Chronicles Of Life And Death by Good Charlotte
angL by Ihsahn
The Congregation by Leprous
Das Seelenbrechen by Ihsahn
Malina by Leprous
I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me by Lorna Shore
Rammstein by Rammstein
Paranoid by Black Sabbath
Cheese by Stromae
Exile On Main St. by The Rolling Stones
Temples Of Ice by Venom
Billy Talent II by Billy Talent
GUTS by Olivia Rodrigo
Old Soul by Deaf Havana
100% No Modern Talking by Knife Party
Something Real by Meg & Dia
Exodus by Cyferdyne
Invaders Must Die by The Prodigy
Night Train by The Oscar Peterson Trio
Mezmerize by System Of A Down
Toxicity by System Of A Down
No Need To Argue by The Cranberries
Boys Don’t Cry by The Cure
Lateralus by Tool
The Life Of A Showgirl by Taylor Swift
Postindustrial Hometown Blues by Big Special
Ascendancy by Trivium
Prime Evil by Venom
Automatic by VNV Nation
Have A Nice Day by Bon Jovi
Collision Course by Linkin Park and Jay-Z
The Black Album by Jay-Z
Experience by The Prodigy
All I Want by Tremonti
Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace by The Offspring
A Hangover You Don’t Deserve by Bowling For Soup
Anthology by Suicide Commando
The Death Of Peace Of Mind by Bad Omens
Tsunami Sea by Spiritbox
Phenomenon by UFO
Clockworked by Stray From The Path
Vended by Vended
Kingdom Come by Jay-Z
Necrolatry by Darker By Design
The Sidewinder by Lee Morgan
All Killer No Filler by Sum 41
Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Nightwish
Wake Up And Smell The Coffee by The Cranberries
Keep Your Silence by Cyferdyne
Ten$ion by Die Antwoord
His ’n’ Hers by Pulp
Red Hot Chili Peppers by One Hot Minute
Follow The Leader by Korn
Return Of The Astro-Goth by Yugen Blakrok
Breakfast In America by Supertramp
Rock ’n’ Roll by John Lennon
Slipknot by Slipknot
Devil Came To Me by Dover
Blame The BBC by Hungover Stuntmen
Awake by Godsmack
Only By The Night by Kings Of Leon
The Blvck Sun || The Blood Moon by A Wake In Providence
.5: The Gray Chapter by Slipknot
The Other Side by Godsmack
Splinter (Songs From A Broken Mind) by Gary Numan
The Colour And The Shape by Foo Fighters
Meet Me Halfway At Lease by Deaf Havana
Prometheus: The Discipline Of Fire And Demise by Emperor
Lux by Rosalía
City by Strapping Young Lad
The Woods by Lydia The Bard
The Blueprint by Jay-Z
SYL by Strapping Young Lad
Asia by Asia
Alien by Strapping Young Lad
Psalms by Lorna Shore
The New Black by Strapping Young Lad
Melody by Sharleen Spiteri
Nightfall In Middle Earth by Blind Guardian
King Of The Tenors by Ben Webster
Furiosity by Monster Truck
Black Metal by Venom
Disraeli Gears by Cream

Books

A bit of a slow one for reading I feel and this is reflected in my current mood which is that I’m in a bit of a slump.

However, there have been some great books in here which have perked me up. I picked up a copy of “Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky on the recommendation of a friend and I was not disappointed. The follow-ups were great as well, although I don’t think I was prepared for the tone shifts, with the third one being the most eyebrow-raising. Ultimately, I enjoyed them all and will definitely read them again but I definitely wasn’t prepared for the discussions on the nature of consciousness towards the end of the third book.

I picked up “Paladin’s Strength” by T. Kingfisher because my wife loved it so much. I was initially hesitant because I had a mixed experience of the previous book in the series, because I didn’t know it was fantasy-romance going in and had a rough time because of that. However, this was very entertaining and nourishing and it humbled me nicely. I still don’t totally gel with the plot-beats of romance, but this was so well executed and set against a compelling story that I didn’t roll my eyes or get irritated once.

I also enjoyed “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir, although there were things that bothered me about it. A different friend recommended this one to me, and I enjoyed “The Martian” so I thought I’d give it a go. It was very thrilling, and overall I’d recommend it to anyone who likes sci-fi with the caveat that Andy Weir apparently can’t write women or non-Americans. The only other critique is that the main character of this novel behaves and sounds exactly like the main character from “The Martian”. This is fine if you want more of the same in a new-and-exciting setting/dilemma, but I think if you didn’t know that going in you’d be disappointed.

Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” books continue to be my mainstay palette-cleansers. “Tiffany Aching” has started appearing, and is not disappointing. There have been a few duds; I didn’t enjoy “Making Money” very much, but overall I continue to enjoy reading Discworld in publication order between other books. I also re-read “The Player of Games” by Iain M. Banks, which is an old favourite and always reminds me of my father. A good comfort read.

I read Brandon Sanderson’s “Steelheart” series, which is a YA series. Overall, I think it was OK although it was more YA-oriented than I was expecting. The first book felt like a carbon-clone of the first “Mistborn” novel in terms of plot beats and climax. I actually quite enjoyed the second book, but “Calamity” had a very disappointing ending. I liked where we ended up, but it really felt rushed and I wanted there to be much more room to breathe and hint at or discover the mysteries. However, I think Sanderson was likely working within the constraints of the format. I won’t be reading them again, but I’m glad I did.

The dishonourable mention this time round goes to “The House in the Cerulean Sea”. I was recommended this by a few internet strangers and also an AI when I asked around looking for something “cosy” to read. I hate-read this book past the 40% mark and I have so many negative things to say about it. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book I’ve disliked more. I will try not to rant here, but I have no idea why it is so recommended on BookTube and GoodReads etc other than the fact that I suppose it is also technically a Queer novel. However — and I say this as an openly queer/bisexual man — we should stop recommending this book. It’s awful. Queer people deserve better than this. It’s very poorly written, it’s got poor character-work, all the “good” characters sound the same and it’s full of transparent navel-gazing and moralising. To be clear, I agree with the moral messages that Klune is conveying; but the book is so poorly executed that it’s very jarring to read. There is also complexity around Klune supposedly drawing inspiration from experiences of indigenous children in Canadian “Residential Schools”, which does raise further questions. I haven’t researched this thoroughly though.

On the upside, I cured myself of the bad taste left by “The House in the Cerulean Sea” with “Bookshops & and Bonedust”, the worthy-prequel to “Legends and Lattes”, followed by “The Mercy of Gods” by the authors of “The Expanse”. Both were great and just what I needed.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson
Mitosis by Brandon Sanderson
Firefight by Brandon Sanderson
Calamity by Brandon Sanderson
Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
Thud! by Terry Pratchett
Paladin’s Strength by T. Kingfisher
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
Making Money by Terry Pratchett
The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune
Bookshops — Bonedust by Travis Baldree
The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey

Movies

Not a bad haul of movies. I actually went to the cinema to watch “28 Years Later”, because I had a day to myself to prep for my handfasting and I did it after picking up my outfit. I loved it, and I was a bit surprised. People who know me well understand that I am terrified of zombies, so might be surprised that I opted to see it. I was too, but the trailer was so good and the movie did not disappoint. Very well executed, and very intellectually and emotionally fulfilling. Going in, I didn’t realise that it was set in the North East of England so it was lovely hearing local accents and seeing my native Northumbria being portrayed in the film. My one gripe was that the characters seemed to teleport across vast swathes of the Northumberland and Tyneside so that the director could capture scenes at famous locations in the area, but if you’re not familiar with the North East then this shouldn’t bother you.

Other highlights for me were seeing “Into The Wild”, watching “Big Hero 6” with my wife, and re-watching “The Endless”. The Dungeons & Dragons movie was also way better than it had any right to be and I loved it. I also watched some trash, being the first “Resident Evil” movie and the “Alien Vs Predator” movie. “Resident Evil” wasn’t too bad and was delightfully cheesy. I mostly watched it because I used to love it, and watching “28 Years” motivated me to try and overcome my zombie-phobia. “AVP” was pretty awful, and I mostly watched it as I would a B-movie.

I also watched a bunch of the Mission Impossible Movies when I was in the early stages of being sick, before I got bad. I’d never watched beyond the third movie before, but was reliably informed that they were solid action movies. I enjoyed them. They were far from nourishing, but were very well executed and tight cinematic experiences that I thoroughly enjoyed.

“The Revenant” was a bit of a miss for me. The cinematography was great and I adored it, however the movie was asking me to empathise with a settler-colonial guy while it also partially portrayed the treatment of the natives at the hands of settler-colonials. I feel that there was a better story hiding in there about the mixed-race son, or changing DiCaprio’s character for a native man.

28 Years Later
Into The Wild
Resident Evil
Alien Vs Predator
The Covenant
Hunter Prey
Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves
Rushmore
Big Hero 6
Mission Impossible
Mission Impossible III
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
Mission Impossible: Fallout
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
The Endless
The Revenant

awk '!seen[$0]++' /tmp/extract-of-my-logs-with-dates-removed.txt ↩︎

Updates to site structure

2025-08-10

I know that at least two human beings read my blog via RSS, so I’m writing this post to issue an apology if I’ve just pumped your feed reader full of my old blog posts.

The reason for this is that I’ve done some updates to the site structure and as part of that I’ve changed the way that the permalinks for posts are created. There are full details in the site changelog, but essentially I’ve changed it so that posts exist under a new /posts/ section and not directly underneath the site root at /{YYYY}/{MM}/{DD}/. My understanding is that this will register as new posts to most feed readers and I offer my sincere apologies for polluting what is probably an otherwise ergonomic and curated space for you.

changelog.txt (.txt, 4KiB)

This was the result of me mulling things over for a long time. I want to keep the site as flat as possible and don’t have a lot of different content types; and the date-based permalinks kept things consistent from how the site used to be powered. However I read something recently — although I’ve lost the link, sorry — which stated this to be harmful because every section of the url should be resolvable to a page. This meant I should have been having pages return for each component of the date: /{YYYY} creating an index of all posts for that year, /{YYYY}/{MM} creating a list of all posts for that month etc.

Back when this site was dynamic, this was how it worked. You could visit a url for a year, month, or day and get the content for that period of time. I could probably configure Hugo to generate these pages but I think that would be trying to make the content fit the old structure instead of making the structure fit the content.

Further to this, I was also brushing up against the limitations of having a single /projects page which contained links and descriptions for my technical projects. I wanted to migrate this to make use of Hugo’s list pages to have an index of projects each with their own pages. This lends itself to also delineating posts into their own list page as well to keep things consistent.

I’ll also be setting up some redirects in the web server to try and minimise the amount of linkrot I’ve created as well as the amount of annoyance in the RSS feeds!

2025 Summer Solstice Update

2025-07-31

Well, another half-year! This update is very late at this point, as the Solstice is well in the past and we are well into the late summer.

I feel that the last six months have passed in five minutes and two years simultaneously. There have been weeks that felt like days, and weeks that felt like months.

Our Winter Solstice celebrations were beyond perfect, and we rode out the winter in a very cosy fashion. As winter gave way to the Spring/Early Summer, our daughter had her first birthday and I returned to work. She’s grown so much and I well up in tears at the beauty of watching her develop every day.

We’ve mostly been illness free, although there have been a few low days with some poorlies. We’ve been able to care for each other as a family and managed to avoid burnout for the most part.

Key Events

As with last update this section comes with the caveats that there are lots of things I didn’t log properly. D has already spoken her first words and been starting to work towards sentences, but this happened so gradually that it’s really tough to determine an actual date for them. Combined with the nature of raising your first child, all of the “firsts” come thick and fast, and it’s really tough to keep up with noting them down. Especially as I don’t use my smartphone much anymore.

These are the things I have dates for.

2025-02-11 – D takes her first steps
2025-03 – D turns one year old
2025-04-02 – I return to work at 0.8 FTE after my extended parental leave
2025-06-14 – rehearsal for our handfasting

Hobbies

I’ve managed to touch on most of my hobbies over the last year, but not been able to go too deeply in any particular one. This suits me for now, but it’d be nice to wrangle either hiking or archery into something that I weave into my weekly or monthly rhythms.

Archery

Archery has once again fallen by the wayside as something that I only get to when I can, rather than manage to integrate into my daily life.

I have actually done some shooting this year. My coach P has been instrumental in helping me get to a point where I am done with the bow setup, as he showed me how to do a nocking point. So my bow is all set up, and the main blocker now is the time and effort it takes to cycle to the field and get set up to do some shooting. It’s a good position to be in.

Creative Writing

No creative writing to speak of this year so far. I started planning a few poems in my head but never got around to comitting them to paper.

I also did some worldbuilding for a setting I have in mind, but again nothing has been committed anywhere.

Exercise

This is holding steady and I have progressed in my pull-ups nicely.

Sickness has reared its head a few times, but we’ve mostly been OK since the Spring Equinox which has meant that I’ve had the time and space to exercise consistently and get stronger as a result.

I recovered slowly from my foot injury but I did recover. I still haven’t begun running yet – primarily because I’ve not felt the urge or a need for weight management. Ever since I recovered from my injury I’ve begun wearing my barefoot shoes as my everyday shoes and this has made a massive difference. My feet are thriving and are stronger than ever. They even look stronger than before. I think I’ll be set up for barefoot running when I want to return to running at some point before too long.

Hiking

I’ve done a bit of hiking, but nowhere near the amount I was doing across 2022 and 2023.

I’ve done a few hikes with A and D and a few friends. We revisited a few old favourite routes and did one or two new ones as well. Unfortunately, soon after we got back into the swing of it D started walking by herself which means she’s less enamored about being carried everywhere and now we are back to not being able to hike very far. This will change, but it’s something we have to accept for now.

I did do some hiking without my immediate family. The week before my I returned to work, D had her first full day at nursery which meant I had an entire day “to myself”. We made sure all my chores were done at home, so that I could leave for a day hike as soon as I dropped D off at nursery. I went to climb to Wether Cairn in The Cheviots and the weather was glorious. It was the first time I drove just myself to a hiking route, so was an emotional moment where I’d fulfilled a fantasy I’ve had since 2017.

I also dragged my “heart-sister”, K, on a hike for my “stag-don’t” in May. This was a shorter hike scaled to ensure we prioritised comfort and cosiness rather than an epic hike, but it was in one of my favourite parts of the North East.

I’m pretty happy about the presence of hiking so far in 2025, especially compared to last year.

Languages

I’m letting my language brain have a bit of a rest at the moment, as I’m at a very comfortable level in Esperanto and I’ve not got an immediate urge to learn another language.

My friend M and I have started our informal Esperanto club. It currently consists of a monthly call on a weekday lunchtime, where we just chat about our lives, GNU/Linux, and about our Esperanto learning.

I also received an email from a Canadian Esperantist who found my site! This was a very pleasant and humbling experience as I never actually imagine anyone reading my site. We exchanged a few emails back and forth in Esperanto and they recommended me some books to read. Which is very timely, because I’ve finally finished my read-through of The Wheel of Time and that means I can read some Esperanto literature soon.

Logs

Albums

Lots of old faves here, with some novelty albums and some nostalgia trips. However I hope it comes through that there’s a whole bunch of new listens here as I’ve made a concerted effort to expand my horizons.

The main standout for me was being late to the party with discovering Lorna Shore and their album Pain Remains. I actually discovered them through connecting some dots watching YouTube reaction videos[^lorna-shore] which resulted in my wife walking in on me crying to the music videos of Pain Remains. A few days later, I got her to watch them and she ended up crying as well. I now own digital and vinyl copies of Pain Remains, and the whole thing kicked off a binge into Deathcore for me. I’ve really enjoyed that binge, and I’ve listend to Pain Remains several times a week since I discovered it. It’s definitely shot up to be one of my favourite albums of all time.

My discovery of “deathcore” also lead me to explore the roots of the genre in metalcore and hardcore punk. I am familiar with metalcore, having developed my music taste in the 2000s when metalcore was kicking off; but I’ve never explored punk at all. I started with Black Flag because my old driving instructor had their albums and lent me them. I enjoy it, but I’m still forming my opinion on hardcore punk as a genre. I need to do more diving.

I’ve also started tip-toeing around listening to more hip-hop. There’s some incredible lyricism and musicianship in the hip-hop world that I’m just totally unaware of, and I want to amend that. This might turn into a binge at a later date, but for now I’m just feeling my way around the shape of the genre as it’s as nuanced and rich — if not more so — as rock and metal.

Finally, there’s a few pop albums thrown in there for good measure. I have a USB optical drive now, and access to charity shops which means that I’ll be adding the odd pop album to my datahoard semi-regularly from now on.

Slippery When Wet by Bon Jovi
Sounds of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel
Polka’s Not Dead by The Dreadnoughts
Victory Square by The Dreadnoughts
Uncle Touchy Goes To College by The Dreadnoughts
Green Willow by The Dreadnoughts
2525 (Exordium & Terminus) by Zager & Evans
Vended by Vended
We Are Not Your Kind by Slipknot
CMF2 by Corey Taylor
Meet Me Halfway At Least by Deaf Havana
Black Album by Metallica
The Monster Show by Lordi
Reckless by Special D
Everytime We Touch by Cascada
Beyond the Valley of the Murderdolls by Murderdolls
Exodus by Cyferdyne
Breakfast In America by Supertramp
Alien by Strapping Young Lad
Blame the BBC by Hungover Stuntmen
Reroute to Remain by In Flames
Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield
Dire Straits by Dire Straits
From Under The Cork Tree by Fall Out Boy
Take This To Your Grave by Fall Out Boy
Minutes To Midnight by Linkin Park
A Thousand Suns by Linkin Park
Three Imaginary Boys by The Cure
Conspiracy of One by The Offspring
Scream Aim Fire by Bullet For My Valentine
Move Along by All-American Rejects
Inquisition Symphony by Apocalyptica
Goes To The Movies by Bowling For Soup
Does This Look Infected? by Sum 41
Pain Remains by Lorna Shore
…And I Return to Nothingness by Lorna Shore
Psalms by Lorna Shore
Soundtrack To Your Escape by In Flames
Let Go by Avril Lavigne
Flesh Coffin by Lorna Shore
Immortal by Lorna Shore
The Cleansing by Suicide Silence
Pastel Blues by Nina Simone
Homesick by A Day To Remember
King Of The Tenors by Ben Webster
Nervous Breakdown by Black Flag
Jealous Again by Black Flag
Damaged by Black Flag
My War by Black Flag
No Time To Bleed by Suicide Silence
Let It All Out by Nina Simone
The Black Crown by Suicide Silence
Family Man by Black Flag
Slip It In by Black Flag
Suicide Notes And Butterfly Kisses by Atreyu
The Curse by Atreyu
In My Head by Black Flag
A Death-Grip On Yesterday by Atreyu
Lead Sails Paper Anchor by Atreyu
You Can’t Stop Me by Suicide Silence
Suicide Silence by Suicide Silence
Become The Hunter by Suicide Silence
Remember… You Must Die by Suicide Silence
Temper Temper by Bullet For My Valentine
Loose Nut by Black Flag
Venom by Bullet For My Valentine
I Can See You by Black Flag
Wasted…Again by Black Flag
Panzerfaust by Darkthrone
200 по встречной by t.A.T.u
Boy’s Don’t Cry by The Cure
Permission To Land by The Darkness
All I Was by Tremonti
Daredevil: The Album by Various Artists
Britney by Britney Spears
Insomnium by Across The Dark
DROGAS WAVE by Lupe Fiasco
Clayman by In Flames
Come Clarity by In Flames
One Way Ticket TO Hell… And Back by The Darkness
For All Tid by Dimmu Borgir
Evanescence by Fallen
Aqualung by Jethro Tull
Reload by Metallica
Faith by The Cure
The Open Door by Evanescence
Evanescence by Evanescence
Plagues of Babylon by Iced Earth
Ascendancy by Trivium
Gravity by Bullet For My Valentine
Take To The Skies by Enter Shikari
Babylon by Skindred
Roots Rock Riot by Skindred
Sounding the Seventh Trumpet by Avenged Sevenfold
Bullet For My Valentine by Bullet For My Valentine
Midian by Cradle Of Filth
Relapse by Eminem
Kill ‘Em All by Metallica
Recovery by Eminem
Elegy by Shadow of Intent
Primordial by Shadow of Intent
Reclaimer by Shadow of Intent
Melancholy by Shadow of Intent
Chuck by Sum 41
Nutbush City Limits by Ike & Tina Turner
Ya Nass by Yasmine Hamdan
Ritual Hymns by Worm Shepherd
In the Wake Ov Sòl by Worm Shepherd
The Sleeping Sun by Worm Shepherd
Hunger by Worm Shepherd
Zwielicht by Mental Cruelty
Purgatorium by Mental Cruelty
Inferis by Mental Cruelty
A Hill to Die Upon by Mental Cruelty
Lifeblood by Brand Of Sacrifice
God Hand by Brand Of Sacrifice
The Interstice by Brand Of Sacrifice
Between Death and Dreams by Brand Of Sacrifice
Necrolatry by Darker by Design
Genesys by Cyferdyne
Amongst the Low & Empty by Signs Of The Swarm
Senseless Order by Signs Of The Swarm
The Disfigurement by Signs Of The Swarm
Mezmerize by System Of A Down
Sanctum by AngelMaker
Decay by AngelMaker
Dissentient by AngelMaker
AngelMaker by AngelMaker
At The Heart Of The Winter by Immortal
Damned In Black by Immortal
Anthology by Carcosa
Under My Skin by Avril Lavigne
Satanica by Behemoth
A Night At The Opera by Blind Guardian
Thornography by Cradle Of Filth
Ten$ion by Die Antwoord

Books

This half year was dominated by my readthrough of the Wheel of Time books, and it reflects in the number of books I read. These are large books, and despite the prose being very drinkable they can be a lot to get through. This was my third time reading books 1–10, but my first time from book 11 onwards.

I first read Wheel of Time as a young teen, between the ages of 13 and 14 I think. At this point, book 11 hadn’t been published and I believed that there were only 10 books in the series. I was a bit confused at the end of Book 10 because there wasn’t a resolution, and by the time book 11 came out I struggled to get started because I’d forgotten a lot of the plot points and non-primary characters.

My second attempt was about ten years ago now, and I once again made it to the tenth book before I gave up or got distracted.

This time, I had originally planned to read through three or four of these books at at a time before throwing in a palette cleanser but I didn’t end up doing that for several reasons. I didn’t feel the need for one at all during the early books; it was compelling enough to keep me going. I definitely noticed “The Slog” this time, though. However the trouble with this portion is that I’d trudge through the meat of each book and then be compelled enough by the conclusion to pick up the next one! At the end, I just accepted that I was binging the books in order, with a slight detour to read some non-fiction Marxist literature that I’d been meaning to get to for a while.

So, what did I reckon on The Wheel of Time? It definitely shows its age now. It’s still an admirable work in terms of scope and ambition, it’s got interesting lands with believable history and cultures; but compared to fresher takes on Fantasy such as those by Brandon Sanderson or Robin Hobb, it felt a bit cringey in places for me this time through. The gender essentialism was palpable, and it became very clear that Robert Jordan had some form of spanking fetish partway through the series. The descriptions of women characters basically amounted to how pretty they were, and Jordan was pretty transparent about what traits and body types he found particularly attractive.

Lots of others have written much more elegant and thorough critiques of Jordan’s writing in The Wheel of Time, which I encourage you to read as I don’t want to bloat my Solstice update with them. Suffice it to say, I was pretty glad when Brandon Sanderson took over writing the later books and downplayed a lot of that stuff. There are other critiques that can be levied at the later books, and some of the plot points felt rushed and hadn’t been built up appropriately – however I think that was more a result of the circumstances surrounding Jordan’s death and the pressures Sanderson was under to finish the series in time while hitting all the notes that Jordan had planned for the end of the series.

My conclusion is that I’m glad I did this, it’s scratched a 15+ year itch to finish the series and I got a lot from it. I don’t think I’ll be reading through the series again any time soon. Maybe once more before I’m too old to finish it again, for old times’ sake; but there’s too many other books to read first. I also probably won’t recommend the series to anyone who’s not already a fantasty fan and who can grit their teeth through the problems I note above.

After I was done, I refreshed myself with reading The Martian, which was absolutely delightful. I loved every page, and stayed up past my bedtime to read it on both nights I was reading it. Whoops.

The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan
The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan
The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan
The Fires of Heaven by Robert Jordan
Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan
A Crown of Swords by Robert Jordan
The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan
Principles of Communism by Frederick Engels
Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti
Winter’s Heart by Robert Jordan
Crossroads of Twilight by Robert Jordan
Knife of Dreams by Robert Jordan
The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
The Martian by Andy Weir

Movies

Wow, I actually managed to watch movies!! This has been due to a variety of factors: D is sleeping for longer stretches now which gives A and I a change to watch the occasional movie together; A sometimes takes D for a sleepover at my mother-in-law’s house, which gives me an evening to watch a movie in; and I started watching movies on Friday nights which aligned with training days since I had already exercised and thus didn’t need to be up so early in the morning.

Some absolute gems here, both in terms of really cool clever films as well as just fun. Some standouts for me were (in no order, and for different reasons) The Northman, Wet Hot American Summer, The Beach Bum, and Companion.

Heretic
Inside Out 2
Gentlemen Broncos
Companion
The Northman
The Wild Robot
Clerks
Clerks 2
Clerks 3
The Cabin In The Woods
Mallrats
Wet Hot American Summer
Jennifer’s Body
The Beach Bum
Only Lovers Left Alive
Green Room
Totall Recall
Tucker and Dale vs Evil
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Anastasia
This Is Spinal Tap
Horns
Get Out
The Mummy
Jurassic World
What We Do In The Shadows
Serenity

Daily Driving a Dumb(ish) Phone in 2025

2025-04-19

In November last year I popped my SIM card out of my smartphone, into a nano-to-micro SIM adaptor, and then slotted that into a Nokia 8110 4G. This has been my daily driver since then and I’ve found it to be a very comfortable experience and I have found myself to be happier day-to-day since making the switch.

Nokia 8110 4G on Wikipedia

My new setup is tailored very much to my needs and fits me perfectly but is not totally without friction and I have not entirely ditched my smartphone – I never intended to. My goal with this was to be able to turn my smartphone off while being contactable by friends and family for emergencies or conversations. I have comfortably achieved this goal.

The rest of this post goes into the details of my motivations, the setup, and my experiences of this change.

Table of Contents

Motivation

As stated, my main motivation was to be able to turn my smartphone off while remaining contactable by friends and family in the case of emergencies or just for chatting on the phone. A lot of digital ink has been spilled — by people much cleverer than I am — over the effect that smartphones have on people so I won’t go into this too much. Suffice it to say that I wasn’t happy with my relationship to my smartphone.

I have made a lot of changes to my digital life over the last decade such as removing myself from all social media and using an Un-Googled smartphone which doesn’t have many distracting apps on it. However I still found myself twitching and reaching for the device more often than I liked. This was largely because I like reading things on the web and my smartphone has a web browser in it, which is a recipe for distraction.

Over recent years, I’ve tried a few different tactics to address this twitch. At first I started putting my smartphone in a drawer when at home or in my bag when I’m on the move. This worked for a time but I would always just be able to reach in and grab it and get caught in the Web. The main triggers for this would be wanting information of some kind or when I used it to queue something to listen to on the move.

The next tactic I had in my arsenal was simply turning the smartphone off which provided a bit of friction between my twitch to reach for the device and the act of getting what I wanted. This approach also worked for a time but began to show its limitations when I’d miss actually-important messages or calls which lead to some negative consequences.

While I was struggling with this, others were writing articles or making videos about attempting to make the switch to a dumbphone or minimal phone and I started to think this might be the way to go for me. A dumbphone makes me contactable in an emergency while removing the stimulus of a smartphone. My main blocker was losing access to all of the genuinely useful things that a smartphone does while on the move; chiefly navigation, audio, and mobile banking.

This also seemed to be the blocker for people writing articles and making YouTube videos. They didn’t like not having access to various maps services or music streaming/podcast applications on the move, or having a decent camera which they could carry about in their pocket. I think they also missed out on having access to various messaging services such as WhatsApp or iMessage but that didn’t bother me at all.

I tossed and turned this over for a while because it felt like I was so close to where I wanted to be. My brain tried to fill in the gaps by looking at modern MP3 players, GPS devices etc. but these were non-starters. Most modern MP3 players are small Android devices which come bundled with Google services and that felt like a big step backwards to me. I’d almost given up on the idea when a thought occurred to me; did I actually need to ditch the smartphone to switch to a dumbphone?

I sat down and thought about it seriously and came to the conclusion that most of my problem stemmed from the fact that my smartphone had an always-available internet connection via my SIM card. Even turning the connection off via settings didn’t remove it and I could always just turn it back on again with a few swipes/taps. However; if I were to pop my SIM card out of my smartphone and into a dumbphone then I would be left with a useful device capable of playing local music/podcast files and being a decent calendar; but without the ability to endlessly distract me.

That left only one issue; mobile banking when on the move. For historic reasons, I only carry around small floats of “spending money” — usually enough to get something to eat/drink on the move — and whenever I want to make a larger purchase I transfer money from a savings account to pay for it. This serves as a moment of reflection for whether I really want something and when I was younger stopped me from spending my rent money on crisps, but it does require an internet connection and sometimes when we’re all out as a family there’s not enough in the float to pay for everyone’s lunch which means I need some way of transferring the money in situ.

However, there was hope. A little bit of research into contemporary dumbphones lead me to realise that there was a class of semi-dumb phone which suited my needs but could generate a Wi-Fi hotspot from the data connection of my SIM. I reckoned to myself that setting up a Wi-Fi hotspot on one device and then joining it on another was enough friction to stop me doing it every time I had a twitch to read something on Wikipedia, but not too onerous that I couldn’t do my mobile banking across the few times that I need it.

Choice of phone

I did a bit of research and landed on the Nokia 8110 4G because it had the features I want, they were going for a reasonable price second-hand on eBay, and I could easily swap out the stock ROM for a custom one without bloatware and spyware on it.

Nokia 8110 4G on Wikipedia

I was really apprehensive at first because a lot of this class of phone run an operating system called KaiOS, which is based on FirefoxOS. To the best of my knowledge despite being based on FirefoxOS it is proprietary and is mostly designed to provide internet services such as messaging and maps to low-end devices.

KaiOS

This means that KaiOS devices often contain Google services and Whatsapp! These are selling points for a lot of people but for me are things I would class an anti-features. In theory I could just ignore them and not use them, but I was worried about the phone leaking data to Google and Meta when I used the hotspot functionality.

A bit of quick research revealed the existence of the GerdaOS project and the BananaHackers community. It took me a while to wrap my head around the steps but I gathered from these resources that I could replace the stock KaiOS firmware with a bloatless and spywareless GerdaOS install and it wouldn’t be too different from flashing LineageOS on to a smartphone.

I have written a separate blog post about installing GerdaOS onto the Nokia 8110 4G:

Installing GerdaOS on a Nokia 8110 4G in 2024

Experiences

I’ve daily-driven this phone since November and I overall I have really enjoyed the experience. This section contains some grouped reflections on my ~5 months carrying a dumb-ish phone.

I was already half-prepared for this switch

In a lot of ways I was already mostly prepared for this switch. I’ve spent most of the last decade chipping away at things which had snared me and my attention. This started by ditching first Facebook and then all social media which lead to my experience of the web being based around link aggregators, RSS feeds, and personal websites. As noted I still had a twitch to go and check these things for new links and things to read, but I’ve had a life without social media notifications for nearly a decade now.

Not using some proprietary messaging services also helped me make this switch. I never used WhatsApp as it never solved a problem for me and by the time I ditched Facebook Messenger I had already moved all my regular conversations over to Signal, Telegram, and SMS. Generally people are still happy to SMS me if they don’t want to get Signal.

Using LineageOS on my device without the Google services or Micro-G since 2018 also meant that I’ve not relied on any proprietary apps or services other than for mobile banking. All of my apps are from F-Droid and are mostly practical and non-distracting. LineageOS also helped me prepare for this by not being perfect. It sometimes dropped my data connection so I was at least practiced at not having a connected device while on the move.

Playing music and audiobooks from local files meant I was never craving access to a streaming service. I’ve always loaded music files onto my smartphone’s local storage so if I’m on the move the device is far from useless. On the rare occasions I know I’ll be travelling a long way, I sometimes load entire movies onto the device for playback.

All of this together meant that my switch to a dumb-ish phone represented another step down a road I’ve been on for some time rather than a revolutionary change that’s flipped my life upside down. It is still a very positive change and one I’m very pleased that I’ve made but it’s a sort of calm joy that I’ve taken another step into a lifestyle that suits me rather than the sort of revelatory ecstatic joy one gets from a total paradigm shift.

Friction points

This change has not been without its friction points but they are ones I can live with. Having a young daughter means that the most obvious one is the lack of a camera to hand to capture random moments. This is doubly true on occasions I’ve left the house without the smartphone but it can be palpable inside the house as well. If my smartphone is turned off — and probably in a desk drawer — then it’s tough not to be able to capture a cute moment with my daughter in order to preserve or communicate it to my wife. The 8110 4G does have a camera but it’s not very good and I’ve only used it once to take a photo of my daughter to use as some wallpaper for the device rather than faff about with sideloading some images from my computer.

The other major friction point is typing on the keyboard. The 8110 4G has an alphanumeric 3x4 keypad which is not fun to type on if you’re coming from a world of QWERTY keyboards on smartphones. This has severely hampered my ability to sustain SMS conversations over time and means no digital notetaking on the device. I’m not too fussed about the latter as I have other means of taking notes but I still use SMS to converse with people.

I’ve managed to partially address this by trying to have more phone calls and only using SMS for sending very quick one-liners to transmit or respond to information. I do have, however, a few ongoing SMS conversations which require more thorough replies. For these I either have to carve out 5-10 minutes to respond or compose the message across an entire day. This is just the trade-off of my choice and overall I am happy to make it; but it does feel frustrating in the moment when my thumbs hurt.

Finally, I feel that I read far fewer interesting things. The twitches that distracted me would also often lead me to interesting articles or longreads which I do miss somewhat. I like learning about the world I live in and it was nice to have the ability to discover these things when I was on the train or the bus. However, this is another trade-off I’m happy with. I’m much more “in the moment” for most of the day, whatever that is supposed to mean. I’m more focused on what I’m doing and the muscles which make me pick up the smartphone for stimulation are atrophying nicely.

Surprising bonuses

There have also been some surprising bonuses for me making this switch. The first is that the charge in my smartphone lasts way longer these days due to the change in usage patterns.

On an average work day the smartphone lives in a desk drawer and then comes out later in the evening to act as a source of music while we cook in the kitchen or play/relax in the sitting room. I listen to an audiobook via the smartphone to help me sleep and when I work out I listen to podcasts. Most other uses are intermittent or not reliant on the smartphone itself; I have access to my email and messaging services via my computer while the dumbphone handles SMS and phone calls.

I’ve only needed to charge the smarthphone once every two or three days for the last few months. This usually occurs in the evening before I head to bed so that it’s got enough charge to see me through 90 mins of an audiobook and then can play podcasts and act as a stopwatch during my morning workout. The phone idles overnight once my audiobook sleep timer turns off the audio.

Another bonus is that I pay more attention to routes when I’m driving to try and remember them. I still use the smartphone for navigation to new places but if I know that I’m expected to drive somewhere multiple times in the future, I’ll pay attention to the specific turns as we go to try and ingrain them in memory with the goal of not needing the navigation aid for that specific route. I’ve enjoyed this and found I get a lot more out of driving than I used to.

Finally, a small positive side-effect of ditching the smartphone during the day is that I carry a pocket notebook and a pencil now. This emerged as a way to compensate for not having a notes app on a smartphone with which to take notes comfortably but is something I’ve really enjoyed.

Conclusion

I’ve swapped my daily driver phone to a the Nokia 8110 4G, a dumb-ish phone which has gained me the ability to turn my smartphone off during most of the day. I’ve kept the smartphone around for practical things which means that the trade-offs are fairly minimal and overall I am happier and am much less distracted.

I’d heartily recommend this model to anyone who doesn’t mind carrying around a dumbphone and relegating their smartphone to the status of little pocket computer.

The mrshll.uk templates are now Free/Open Source

2025-03-02

I’ve made the source code — such that it is — for this website licensed under a Free Software license, the GPL v3. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while but was put off by the fact that if I exposed the git repo to the public, then everyone would be able to read my shonky drafts. I’ve solved that issue by moving my drafts to another folder on my computer.

The content of the site (pages and blog posts) are still licensed underneath the Peer Production License.

This means that I can safely release the source for this website. This is more a matter of principle than anything that will have any practical benefit for anyone, but it makes me feel much better to know that basically all the code I’ve written outside of university is now totally publically accessible and licensed properly.

The “code” just consists of a few Hugo templates and some assets like CSS files and my profile picture so is very minimal but as noted; this is more about bringing my actions in line with my values to solve some internal dissonance.

2024 Winter Solstice Update

2024-12-21

What a long half-year!

I honestly feel that it’s been about four years since I was writing my Summer Solstice update. I think it’s because having a small child means that the days can become a bit long and tiring, but they also each hold new challenges and firsts which means my perception of time stretches with all the novel things that occur.

The tail end of the summer was great. We did get COVID just after the Summer Solstice which represents my second infection. It was definitely much milder than my October 2023 infection but still pretty brutal, and with the added stress of having to parent a small child — who also had COVID — at the same time. Aside from that, we really enjoyed our summer and made good use of the light and the heat when we had it.

Since October I’ve been on parental leave with my daughter D. My wife works three days a week which means that I am D’s primary caregiver for “only” three days but it has been a shift in the household rhythm. My confidence with her has grown monumentally since taking her on solo adventure days. I definitely did my “share” of parenting before but was hamstrung because D was exclusively-breastfed, refused a bottle even if it contained breast milk, and only started on solid food in September.

I was really worried about what that would mean for my ability to look after her solo given that I do not own a set of mammaries. However, since she’s been weaning herself with solid food she’s also been very willing to drink breast milk from a sippy-cup which has meant that I can take her out and about and have adventures. This has been fun and we’ve been enjoying a relatively cosy winter knocking about the local parks and trails, and meeting our friends in the city centre weekly.

My wife started back at work at the same time as starting her treatments for multiple sclerosis which has had an impact on her health since she is now immune compromised and adjusting to having to parent and work in the same brain.

On a sad note, my friend R died tragically in December. I won’t write much about it here as I’m still processing it, but it threw up the regular cocktail of grief as well as a lot of guilt for not being a better friend and anger at capitalism for its part in creating conditions which lead to this tragedy.

Finally, we’ve all been poorly in the house for what seems like forever. Over the last few years I’ve either been in good health or had COVID, so I’m unaccustomed to being “somewhat ill” for an extended period of time. My ability to recover from illness has definitely decreased with age, repeated COVID infections, and the demands of parenting. So it’s not been a fun December until now.

But the Solstice Tree and the decorations are up. Our lungs and heads are a bit clearer now, there’s twinkling lights and warm radiators and as of writing the Solstice is just around the corner. This is our second Solstice with D after the Summer Solstice earlier this year, but Winter Solstice is very special to us and we are really excited to celebrate it with the newest member of our family for the first time.

Key Events

There are a few things missing from these as I haven’t been as stringent about logging them as I might’ve been, especially with things pertaining to D. There are so many firsts with a baby — and especially as a new parent — and they come so quickly. I have tried to live in the moment a lot more and I can tell you the rough age and season that D balanced herself for the first time, or took her first steps while holding my hand etc. I can’t, however, tell you the exact date as I didn’t manage to log them.

2024-06-22 – My sister gives birth to a healthy baby boy, my first blood nephew.
2024-06-26 – D giggles for the first time.
2024-07-05 – I pass my driving test with zero minors. It is also the first General Election as an adult that did not yield a victory for the Conservative party.
2024-10-04 – A has her first treatment for Multiple Sclerosis, which means that she is now immune compromised.
2024-12-14 – my first day of parental leave with D, lasting until March 2025.
2024-12-09 – my friend R dies tragically.

Hobbies

As with last time, this is relatively brief compared to previous years because my primary focus is caring for my young daughter. This said, I have had the time to do a few things here and there but I have to be very conscious with how I use this time.

Lately, I have been interrupted more by illness than with parenting which has thrown a wrench in a few things but thankfully the house seems to be crawling out of that now.

Archery

Archery remains a tertiary hobby for the time being, sadly. I definitely want to aim to do more in 2025 though.

I haven’t shot anything since the last update. My bow’s nocking point needs re-tuning and I don’t have the know-how to do it solo. My coach, P, is amazing and has offered to meet me on a Saturday morning to help me fix up the bow so this is an offer I am planning to take him up on early in the New Year.

We are planning to attend the fun shoot on Boxing day. We really enjoyed it last year and are hoping that we’ll make it a bit of a family tradition in the future.

Creative Writing

Once again I’ve not done lots of creative writing this half a year, but I have put pen to paper several times.

I managed to do some serious plot work for one of my planned stories which goes by the name of Broken Scar in my head. I think if I’m ever going to show anyone my fiction, this will be the one. There’s still a long way to go with it but it’s the one I think has the best legs.

I also started composing some poetry when I was out walking with my daughter asleep on me. I got home and went to commit it to paper but I was interrupted and the “muse” fled. Oh well, that’s the beauty of poetry I guess.

Exercise

This is mostly holding steady which is both good and frustrating because I want to be progressing.

The entire house has been sick since around mid-November and I’ve been no exception. This has affected my strength training by making me miss the odd training session. I have a philosophy that I train unless I feel it would actually be dangerous or unhealthy to do so, including when mildly sick, so this shows how sick I’ve been!

In October I picked up running again, this time with some “barefoot” running shoes to help work around my knee injury. The first two runs were amazing and I love how the shoes force me into a really interesting and safer new running form. My third run, though, resulted in a foot injury I’m yet to fully recover from. I get severe pain in the foot when walking I was limping around the house barely mobile for days.

I’ve been able to address the worst of it by switching my regular boots for my hiking boots during the day when I’m out. This seems to directly help the injury likely due to the extra padding in the boot. The injury does seem to return after I switch back to my regular boots and walk about town, so I’m really hoping that I’m not confined to hiking boots and no running forever.

I will go and see a medic if it hasn’t gone by the end of January as at the moment the official NHS advice for such an injury is basically “just see if it goes away with rest”. This is fine to a degree, but if it hasn’t went after a quarter of a year I’m going to press for getting it looked at properly.

Hiking

No real hiking to speak of either. I hiked with D down the coast from South Shields to Sunderland, to meet with my sister-in-law and my nephew at a local play café. We really enjoyed it aside from a very cold nappy change on the cliffside.

I have soft plans to spend a day hiking in either the Lake District or the Cheviot Hills with a friend early in the New Year; if I feel healthy enough and A is happy to take D for a day to give me the time.

Languages

I dropped learning Norwegian as Duolingo became untenable due to its rampant enshittification. I’m yet to pick it back up but I have soft plans to grab a book of Norwegian grammar from eBay if I see one come up but I may actually ditch it in favour of Mandarin because the local university run Mandarin evening classes that are accessible to the public. Mandarin was my second choice for a third language so that would fit nicely.

My Esperanto is still strong although I am really missing writing my diary in Esperanto. I actually think I know how/when I’m going to work this back in now, but we’ll see!

I’ve struggled with finding good Esperanto reading material. I haven’t been able to find a good Esperanto fiction book to sink my teeth into since I read La ŝtona urbo last year. I tried searching for an Esperanto copy of Solaris but apparently they were a limited run, and I can’t find an ebook anywhere. I mostly find myself reading things from facila.org since this is one of the only places that produces material in Esperanto that isn’t just about Esperanto itself.

uea.facila.org, a website which contains interesting articles written in straightforward Esperanto.

I’m a bit annoyed at the “Esperantujo” at the minute, more generally. It could be that I’m too insular so I’m not ready to give up on it, but I find it very self-obsessed and I really don’t enjoy the western centrist/liberal political skew that it has. By far the most regular publication is Libera Folio and most of the articles are about various congresses or faction of the Esperantujo social infrastructure, and when there are some world-politics or interest pieces they often contain pro-imperialist lines such as a recent article about BRICS basically parroting Russophobic and Sinophobic lines¹. I yearn for some Esperanto-speaking leftists but at this point I’d take a good novel!

I am also having to walk back slightly on speaking to D solely in Esperanto due to some advice from an Esperanto newsletter; although I read and write Esperanto pretty fluently, my speaking does need work and I’m worried that this will affect my relationship with D as well as her ability to acquire the language and relate to it. I still speak to her partially in Esperanto so that she’s not confused — she loves it when I look at her and exclaim “Mia filino!” — and I’ll continue to read her Esperanto children’s books; but I’m going to re-frame the language as a sort of “spice” that I add to our relationship rather than doing the pure “one parent one child” approach.

I’m hoping that she still gets a broad feel of the language and wants to participate, but it seems that the general wisdom is that unless you are very fluent in speaking and listening Esperanto it’s better to wait until they’re old enough to start learning the language rather than hoping they acquire it from a parent who is slightly hesitant and doesn’t express themselves as elegantly as they could.

It’s not all grumpy news though. My friend M and I are planning to start an informal Esperanto club, which is really just an excuse for us to get together every so often and chat in Esperanto and about GNU/Linux at the same time. I’m still unsure what this will look like in practice, but if it’s feasible I’ll also bring D along so that she is exposed to more conversational Esperanto. I have also joined the EAB mostly out of a sense of obligation but also to take a first step into the Esperanto community in Britain in case D takes to the language and I need a community to expose her to.

Logs

The logs continue their trend into sparseness. While my reading has reached a nice equilibrium as I have been able to read consistently in the evenings; being off work and thus not at a computer has meant that I haven’t been able to listen to many albums all the way through. I’ve been able to watch exactly two movies since the Summer Solstice, and only because I had a quiet day at work with all my jobs done and also when my wife overnighted with D at her mother’s and I ended up with a bit of “me” time.

I’m really keen to see what shape these logs will have at the next Solstice update. By then both A and I will be back at work and parents, so the household rhythm will have changed once again.

Albums

Lots of old favourites here, including some very old faves of mine harvested from my old archive drives. A main trend here is me reliving my teenage metalhead years, starting with Kamelot’s Black Halo was amazing and I adored it. I also enjoyed nerding out to the incredibly cheesy — and incredibly fun — DragonForce. There’s plenty other metal strewn about these logs as well.

A standout moment for me was listening to The Death of Slim Shady by Eminem. This was the first Eminem album I listened to since The Marshall Mathers EP and it really stuck with me. I think what made me appreciate it more was the fact that I knew it was a concept album going in and had done some reading about Eminem’s Slim Shady persona.

I also indulged in a bit of nostalgic pop music. I was too dark-and-edgy™ to admit to liking Lady Gaga growing up but really she’s an amazing lyricist and musician. I really enjoyed going through the albums that were released when I was coming of age but never appreciated enough. Really enjoyed them. Later on I also got “Despacito” stuck in my head, so managed to pick up a cheap copy of Luis Fonsi’s Vida and made my way through the album. It was fine but obviously Despacito is the standout track.

November actually contained quite a march of the earworms all in sequence. The main cause of this was my daughter having a bit of a fussy phase and me wanting to entertain her by dancing to upbeat music. This resulted in a few cheesy earworms and me grabbing the containing albums so that I had local copies of the media. As a result I got into They Might Be Giants and Macklemore, who it turns out are each really cool. I ended up listening to Macklemore’s Gemini and really enjoyed it; this might be the first time I’ve seriously bopped to hip-hop! Other than that, the 90s band Pulp made an appearance after I got “Common People” stuck in my head for a few days.

My friend sent me some Meshuggah albums for the pure djent glory and I enjoyed the one I listened to. Being all nostalgic, I also picked up some music which I listened when clubbing during my twenties and am thoroughly enjoying both Die Antwoord and VNV Nation.

This time I didn’t use DeDupelist² for removing duplicates as I wanted to force myself to rely less on web tools. A handy resource taught me that a simple awk command will do the trick³.

The Present Is A Foreign Land by Deaf Havana
Without A Sound by Dinosaur Jr
Meet Me Halfway At Least by Deaf Havana
The Fury Of Our Maker’s Hand by DevilDriver
The Blues And The Abstract Truth by Oliver Nelson
Eagles by Eagles
A Matter Of Life And Death by Iron Maiden
Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance
Polka’s Not Dead by The Dreadnoughts
Legends Never Die by The Dreadnoughts
Victory Square by The Dreadnoughts
Uncle Touchy Goes To College by The Dreadnoughts
The Last Kind Words by DevilDriver
The Black Halo by Kamelot
Framing Armageddon (Something Wicked Part 1) by Iced Earth
Inhuman Rampage by DragonForce
The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce) by Eminem
Into The North by The Dreadnoughts
Bleed American by Jimmy Eat World
Paranoid by Black Sabbath
Collision Course by Linkin Park and Jay Z
Hand It Over by Dinosaur Jr
Sonic Firestorm by DragonForce
The Crucible Of Man (Something Wicked Part 2) by Iced Earth
A Night At The Opera by Blind Guardian
Save Rock And Roll by Fall Out Boy
The Dark Saga by Iced Earth
Epica by Kamelot
Carolus Rex (sv) by Sabaton
Carolus Rex (en) by Sabaton
The Trumpton Riots by Half Man Half Biscuit
Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails
Dark Passion Play by Nightwish
Ascendancy by Trivium
Shogun by Trivium
Exodus by Cyferdyne
A Twist In The Myth by Blind Guardian
Melody by Sharleen Spiteri
Abbey Road by The Beatles
Diskovibrator by Turmion Kätilöt
Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) by Slipknot
Blizzard Beasts by Immortal
A Sense Of Purpose by In Flames
Valley Of The Damned by DragonForce
The Eminem Show by Eminem
Imaginaerum by Nightwish
Les Voyages De L’Âme by Alcest
Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace by The Offspring
Wild Life by Wings
Venus And Mars by Wings
Wings At The Speed Of Sound by Wings
Phenomenon by UFO
Poetry For The Poisoned by Kamelot
The Fame by Lady Gaga
Soilbleed Redux EP by Grendel
Ellington at Newport by Duke Ellington
Infinity On High by Fall Out Boy
21st Century Breakdown by Green day
Splinter (Songs From A Broken Mind) by Gary Numan
The Fame Monster by Lady Gaga
First Take by Roberta Flack
Pray For Villains by DevilDriver
Ofnir by Heilung
Born This Way by Lady Gaga
War Of The Worlds by Jeff Wayne
Homesick by A Day To Remember
Seven And The Ragged Tiger by Duran Duran
Ulta Beatdown by DragonForce
Portrait In Jazz by Bill Evans Trio
Disraeli Gears by Cream
Under The Table And Dreaming by Dave Matthews Band
Sunbather by Deafheaven
The Way Of The Fist by Five Finger Death Punch
Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane
The Power Within by DragonForce
Primo Victoria by Sabaton
So Long, Astoria by The Ataris
What Separates Me From You by A Day To Remember
Hot Fuss by The Killers
Dead Silence by Billy Talent
Mutter by Rammstein
Beyond by Dinosaur Jr
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace by Foo Fighters
There Is Nothing Left To Lose by Foo Fighters
Pastel Blues by Nina Simone
Sour by Olivia Rodrigo
Common Courtesy by A Day To Remember
Nymphetamine by Cradle Of Filth
Godsmack by Godsmack
Grom by Behemoth
Genesys by Cyferdyne
And Their Name Was Treason by A Day To Remember
For Those Who Have Heart by A Day To Remember
Farm by Dinosaur Jr
Vida by Luis Fonsi
They Might Be Giants by They Might Be Giants
Spiderweb Princess by Kukielle
The Heist by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
Nothing by Meshuggah
Gemini by Macklemore
Iowa by Slipknot
Ten$ion by Die Antwoord
Different Class by Pulp
The Blues and the Abstract Truth by Oliver Nelson
Rammstein by Rammstein
Hellbilly Deluxe by Rob Zombie
The Sinister Urge by Rob Zombie
$O$ by Die Antwoord
Advance And Follow by VNV Nation
Praise The Fallen by VNV Nation
The End So Far by Slipknot
Automatic by VNV Nation
Transnational by VNV Nation
Sinner by Drowning Pool

Books

Not tonnes here but more than I thought there would be since I’ve been able to adjust to our new household rhythm and pick up my reading pace a bit.

The absolute highlight of this half-year has been reading through The Expanse by the James S. A. Corey duo. I utterly adored this series from beginning to end and finishing it was really bittersweet. They nailed the ending, everything was well-written and compelling the entire way through the series and the characters were all consistent and amazing. It has set the bar very high.

I also had a good few moments with my continued read through Pratchett’s Discworld novels. I usually use them as palette-cleansers between larger works as I can normally chew through a Discworld novel pretty quickly and it is a nice change of tone. Of the ones I read; Maskerade, Carpe Jugulum, and The Fifth Elephant have been my faves. I am fairly certain that The Witches and The Watch are my favourite groups to follow, with Rincewind being the opposite. I really don’t enjoy the Rincewind books at all. The Last Continent wasn’t very fun, fairly hard to follow and disconnected for me, and just felt like a bunch of pastiches of Australian stereotypes.

I picked up Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher on the recommendation of a friend, without realising that it was a fantasy-romance book. Whoops! The world is great, as were the characters but I definitely didn’t enjoy it as much as T. Kingfisher’s other work. I think I’m just learning that romance novels — including fantasy-romance — are just not for me. I don’t seem to get on with the “beats” of a romance book despite the fact I somewhat enjoy romance plots as part of larger or other works.

I read All Systems Red to get acquainted with Murderbot. It wasn’t what I expected but still quite good and I look forward to reading the next few books, perhaps as palette-cleansers between other larger works. I also really enjoyed Planetfall by Emma Newman. This was really novel, really interesting sci-fi. A picked it up and recommended it to me and I really enjoyed it as well. I might read more by Emma Newman soon.

The lowest moments for me were reading through a few Suneater books by Christopher Ruocchio. They are… problematic. I picked up the set a while ago because the premise is quite cool, I have a soft spot for space opera, and a few YouTubers had recommended them as comparable to both Red Rising and The Expanse; two series which I really enjoyed.

I’m really not sure why people compare Suneater to these series, because other than sitting comfortably in the realm of space opera they couldn’t really be more different in tone and premise. I had problems with Suneater straight away from the first book, Empire of Silence. I ignored the problems because it was the author’s first published book and I was assured they got better. They mostly did, and both Howling Dark and Demon In White were just compelling enough to keep me going although I had growing concerns. This came to a head partway through the fourth book, Kingdoms of Death, which I ended up DNF’ing because I couldn’t take it much more.

I won’t rant too much here because I don’t want to clog up these posts with rants and also because I don’t want to have to translate these rants into Esperanto. However, in summary my main problems with Suneater are that the books are very politically conservative and only grow more conservative as the series goes on. The reason I DNF’d Kingdoms of Death is that the author makes a horrible, racist, caricature of Russian people and demonstrates their own utter political incompetence when describing what they believe is the end-state of a Communist society in the far-future. I can normally grit my teeth and get through stuff like this if the rest of work is good; but it also read like something written by Ben Shapiro. The protagonist and narrator is also a bit of a “Gary Stu” and while the author attempts to give them flaws and an unreliable-narrator vibe, the conservative politics of the author and the series’ setting means that the main character is not very compelling at all.

Ultimately the books read as a cross between some pulpy sword-and-planet fiction (which I am all for at times and with the right context), and Dan Simmons’ Ilium/Olympos duology which was the turning point of Dan Simmons descending into conservative lunacy. Oh well, I’ve heard that James S. A Corey are doing a space opera series soon which I hope will be a balm to this.

After I DNF’d Kingdoms of Death about 400 pages in, I read a bit of Pratchett to take the taste out of my mouth and then read through the Liveship Traders trilogy by Robin Hobb. This was my first Robin Hobb and it was incredible. I really liked it. It definitely shows its age, and deserves content warnings for stuff like sexual assault (both attempted and successful) and a few gory scenes; but overall these books were a very compelling fantasy series and I thoroughly enjoyed them. I think I enjoyed the first two books more than the final one but Ship of Destiny is still great. These are definitely very character-driven, which is something that I’ve learned I really appreciate in a story. Everything that happens with the characters feels really well grounded in how they’re established and the things they go through during the novels. I really got a feel for the setting of Bingtown and the Pirate Isles, and the events were page-turning. I ended up making up excuses to stay up past my bedtime to read another chapter or two, and had a few very tired workouts as a result.

As of writing I have also started a re-read of the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (and later Brandon Sanderson). This is something I have been intending to do for a while. I first read WoT in 2003-ish, when there were only 10 books out (plus New Spring), and then never managed to pick them back up as the final books were coming out. I then binge-read them again around 2014 or 2015 before I started logging my reads, but only managed to get through to book 10 again before I burned out.

I plan to read these in blocks of 3 or 4 books initially before throwing in a palette cleanser. I find Jordan’s prose very drinkable so I tend to read and digest these books very quickly so don’t need too much recovery between books. I’ve since read about “the slog” which might explain why I burned out around book 10 last time. As a result, I’ll take it easy and just keep plugging away and just take a break if I’m not enjoying it. I’m not sure what I’ll use as palette-cleansers between WoT books, as I think Discworld might not be appropriate. I’ll have a think about this.

Cibola Burn by James S. A. Corey
Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett
Nemesis Games by James S. A. Corey
Babylon’s Ashes by James S. A. Corey
Maskerade by Terry Pratchett
Persepolis Rising by James S. A. Corey
Feet Of Clay by Terry Pratchett
Tiamat’s Wrath by James S. A. Corey
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
Leviathan Falls by James S. A. Corey
Jingo by Terry Pratchett
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher
Planetfall by Emma Newman
The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett
Empire Of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio
Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett
Howling Dark by Christopher Ruocchio
The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
Demon In White by Christopher Ruocchio
The Truth by Terry Pratchett
Thief Of Time by Terry Pratchett
Ship Of Magic by Robin Hobb
The Mad Ship by Robin Hobb
Ship of Destiny by Robin Hobb
The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett
Star Wars: Darth Plagueis by James Luceno
The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

Movies

This is easy, there are only two films. I watched Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny on a quiet day at the office just before my parental leave started (don’t worry all my work was done and handed over to clients!). It hasn’t aged well with a bit of homophobia which disappointed me, but was otherwise very nostalgic and a nice way to kill half an afternoon while writing a handover doc.

I also managed to watch Civil War (not the Marvel Movie). This came at the recommendation of my mother but I was also intrigued after seeing the trailer when A and I were in the cinema for Dune Part Two. I really enjoyed it on several levels. It was a great film to choose for a movie night and I definitely feel I didn’t waste my “me time”.

Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny
Civil War

more like Liberista Folio, am I right? ↩︎
https://dedupelist.com/ ↩︎
I first grab all the relevant lines from the log file in nvim, and dump them into a file inside of /tmp then do some macro-fu to remove the dates and replace the CSV formatting with the “X by Y” format used in these posts. I can then run this against awk '!seen[$0] /tmp/albums.txt to get a deduplicated list of albums. Eventually I’ll work this into a script where I can get this list of albums automatically, but this represents a big step forward now! ↩︎

Installing GerdaOS on a Nokia 8110 4G in 2024

2024-12-02

Update 2025-11-09: It appears that the gerda.tech domain has lapsed and is now owned by some spammers/scammers. Thankfully, someone has archived the old web page and uploaded the latest (last?) builds of GerdaOS and the Nokia 8110 recovery to an archive site. In this article, I’ve updated all the links pointing to Gerda.tech to the archived version of the site. Reading between the lines, it appears that GerdaOS might have slowed or halted development.

This post contains some instructions to install GerdaOS onto a Nokia 8110 4G in 2024. I’m writing this down partially for myself and partially for others who may find it useful. Despite the fact that the official gerda.tech instructions are fairly clear and I’m accustomed to flashing Android ROMS¹, I got a little overwhelmed at first and it took a few attempts to get it right.

GerdaOS

The Nokia 8110 4G is a re-imagining of the classic Nokia 8110 “banana phone” and I picked one up a while ago to help wean me off of my smartphone usage. I’ll write more about my goals and process for that separately. The key reason that I chose the 8110 4G is that I could use it to generate a Wi-Fi hotspot for any emergency situations where my smartphone needed a connection. The tradeoff is that I needed to install an alternative to KaiOS to remove all the proprietary bloatware and spyware that came pre-loaded on the phone.

I found Martin Kaptein’s series of related blog posts very useful in filling out some gaps, which some readers may prefer to my style of writing. Martin claims that some things no longer work but I found that I managed a very similar process relatively smoothly once I understood what I was supposed to do.

Flashing GerdaOS onto the Nokia 8110, installation tutorial on Martin Kaptein’s blog
Remove default pre-installed bloatware apps from KaiOS on a Nokia 8110 4G on Martin Kaptein’s blog (this one contains instructions for temporary root access)
Sideloading and deploying custom apps to KaiOS on Martin Kaptein’s blog

I did encounter a few wrinkles, so I’ll outline how I solved them as I go either by heading them off before they cause you an issue or by letting you know what might occur and how I got it to work for me.

Table of Contents

Overview of the steps

With something like this I always find it useful to have a high-level overview of what we’re doing and the motivation behind some of the steps. I find that this “primes” me, as my brain always wants to know what’s actually going on and thus I understand the actual steps a lot better than if I didn’t have an overview.

The process of installing GerdaOS onto the 8110 4G is very similar to flashing a custom Android ROM onto a contemporary smartphone, only a little bit more involved. If you’ve ever flashed e.g. LineageOS onto a device, this represents a small step up in complexity but after some initial faff it will feel very comfortable and familiar.

Ultimately our goal will be to replace the operating system with GerdaOS, but this requires replacing the stock recovery software with some custom recovery software which is friendly to GerdaOS. Once we’ve got the recovery loaded onto the phone, we can then use it to install GerdaOS.

The main wrinkle in this otherwise smooth plan is that in order to install the custom recovery software we need to achieve root shell access because we can’t overwrite it otherwise. This is the main additional step and represents about half of the work. The best way to achieve root on the device is to sideload an app and that involves installing an older version of the Pale Moon web browser to use its Web IDE features.

So when we put that all together, we get the following:

Setting up Pale Moon on our computer
Configuring the phone for USB debugging
Sideloading “Wallace” to achieve temporary root access
Overwriting the recovery image via an adb root shell
Flashing GerdaOS via the recovery image

Things you’ll need

An old version of Pale Moon. I used 28.6.1 for GNU/Linux
adb. I already had mine installed from the Devuan GNU/Linux repos
The phone to flash and a suitable USB cable
A copy of each Gerda Recovery and the System Installer from Gerda.tech (in the Get GerdaOS section). These are zip files.
Wallace, a KaiOS app used to achieve a temporary root shell. Download it from the Gerda.tech page.

You will need access to a terminal for this in order to use adb to speak to the phone, and ultimately get root shell access. Going forward I will assume a GNU/Linux setup for a few things but if you know your platform you should be able to make it work.

Installing Pale Moon

The first step is to install Pale Moon on our computer. Sadly, not just any version of Pale Moon will do as we need to use the Web IDE to do our sideloading for us and newer version of Pale Moon no longer contain Web IDE.

My understanding is that a good bet is to go for Pale Moon version 28.6.1, which you can find on the Pale Moon archives below:

Pale Moon 28.x series archives

Download the correct one for your platform, which for me was the x86_64.tar.bz2 file. I downloaded and extracted it to $HOME/opt/palemoon.

Try to run it by executing the palemoon binary. This is where I encountered my first error, copied below:

XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /home/matt/opt/palemoon/libxul.so:
libdbus-glib-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Couldn't load XPCOM.

The solution is to install libdbus-glib. At first I was a bit concerned because the libd in the name made me think it had a dependency on systemd — which I don’t have installed — but luckily it’s not the case.

Your mileage may vary by distro, but I overcame this error on Devuan GNU/Linux daedalus by installing the libdbus-glib-1-2 package. Pale Moon opened without complaint after that and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Configuring the phone for USB debugging

Moving onto the actual phone now. We need to enable debugging mode to get it to speak to adb and Pale Moon so we can sideload our app and get temporary root access.

Assuming you still have a stock KaiOS system installed, you can enter debug mode by using the keypad and entering special sequences of characters. Enter the following:

*#*#33284#*#*

If you’re paying attention, you’ll see that 33284 correlates to DEBUG on the phone’s keypad. Once you’ve entered this sequence and hit dial you should see a little “bug” icon appear in the status bar meaning you’ve been successful.

Next, it’s a good idea to also enable USB storage. This heads off a few potential errors down the road. You can enable this in the settings menu.

Connecting the phone via adb

It’s at this point you should connect the phone to your computer via USB cable. Once you’ve done that, check you can see the device by running adb devices.

Presuming success, you can now interact with the device much the same as you would if it were an Android device i.e. using adb push to push files on to the sdcard, adb pull to get them off etc. You can get a shell by running adb shell, but it’s not (yet) a root shell so it isn’t particularly exciting or useful. If you open a shell, exit it.

An aside: making backups of stuff off the phone

It might be possible that you’ve already got some apps or data on the phone which you want to keep. If so, you should back these up by using adb pull to back up relevant folders.

I didn’t do this because I was flashing a new/factory reset phone and my goal with the phone is to keep it as “dumb” as possible. Martin’s blog post has a good section on why and how you might do this, such as sideloading apps from the KaiOS store which you’ll lose access to otherwise.

Making backups of apps from the GerdaOS flashing tutorial on Martin Kaptein’s blog

Sideloading Wallace to achieve a root shell

Apparently there’s a few ways to get temporary root access on KaiOS depending on the version of the firmware you’ve got installed. However, the only way I was able to do this consistently is through the Wallace app. This is a delightfully cheesy app whose entire purpose is to get you root access on your KaiOS device.

Because it’s not on the KaiOS store for obvious reasons we’re going to sideload it via Pale Moon’s Web IDE.

With your phone still connected, in a terminal run the following command:

adb forward tcp:6000 localfilesystem:/data/local/debugger-socket

This heads off an error when connecting the Web IDE to your phone apparently.

Fire up Pale Moon and use the menus to navigate to Tools -> Web Developer -> WebIDE. Click the Remote Runtime button and check that the dialog box says localhost:6000 and then connect.

Next, download the Wallace application as linked in a previous section. It’s a zip file so extract it wherever.

Inside of Pale Moon again, click Open Packaged Web App and head to the directory of the unzipped application. You’re looking for the folder where the manifest.webapp file is located.

The interface of the Web IDE will change to give you some details of the application. There may be a green circle next to the name of the application but this isn’t necessary; mine worked fine with an orange circle. If you hit the play button (the triangle one), Web IDE will deploy the app to the device and start running it.

When Wallace loads it presents a screen saying root me and you will need to confirm by pressing the centre DPAD button. The screen will go black for a moment and then an edgy hacker face (apparently taken from Bladerunner) will fade into view. Once that’s finished fading in, you’re rooted!

We’re about halfway through the process now.

Using a root shell to install Gerda Recovery

Now that we have rooted the phone we can install the Gerda Recovery system by using a root shell from adb. This requires that the phone is still connected via USB.

From your terminal, run the following:

$ adb shell

You should enter a root shell, which you can confirm if the prompt looks like this:

root@Nokia 8110 4G:/ #

The job here is to use our root privileges to overwrite the recovery software with Gerda Recovery. To do this we trust our old friend dd. Inside of the root shell run the following command:

dd if=/sdcard/recovery-8110.img of=/dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/recovery bs=2048

Now just wait for dd to finish its magic.

Rebooting to Gerda Recovery to install GerdaOS

Once dd has done its thing, reboot the phone into recovery by turning it off and then holding DPAD UP when turning it back on. Inside the recovery menu, you can navigate using the DPAD and you select options by using the power key.

The gerda.tech website lists a number of options to install the main system, including building it from source. I have found that is a lot of faff you probably don’t need, so I advise you use the pre-built image linked from the gerda.tech site which is what I did.

This leaves two options really. The first is installing via the SD card, and the second is sideloading via adb. Martin Kaptein went with the SD card route but this didn’t work for me. No matter how or when I loaded the gerda-os system installer zip file on to the SD card via adb, Gerda Recovery failed to mount the SD card and aborted the install.

That left me with sideloading. Initially I thought I was scuppered because this also failed for me. The way sideloading works is that you choose this option on Gerda Recovery and — while the phone is still connected via USB! — run adb sideload $name-of-file on your computer.

As noted, this failed for me until I rebooted the phone to KaiOS then rebooted back to Gerda Recovery. I’m not sure why, but afterwards running adb sideload worked like a charm². No matter how I tried I couldn’t get the internal SD Card to mount in recovery mode. Martin Kaptein mentioned that you need a blank SD card, so perhaps that was my missing piece. I’d think it odd if that’s the case because I could adb push $file /sdcard/ fine, and my understanding is that these systems abstract the internal storage under /sdcard/ as well. Whatever the issue with the SD cards, I did install GerdaOS successfully via sideloading it. It made me feel like a hacker.

Don’t reboot the phone yet, though! There’s one final step.

Factory reset

The final step is to perform a factory reset. This is listed as mandatory on both gerda.tech as well as Martin Kaptein’s blog. I’m not sure what would go wrong if you didn’t do this, but I suspect that it would do something like wiping GerdaOS and reinstalling KaiOS.

Select the Wipe Data/Factory Resest option from the recovery and perform it. Once it’s done, you can reboot into GerdaOS and enjoy your private and lean feature phone.

Summary

In this post we replaced the data-leaking, bloated, install of KaiOS on a Nokia 8110 4G with GerdaOS. We achieved this by getting a temporary root shell on the device which allowed us to install a custom recovery system and then used that to install GerdaOS.

Well, just LineageOS really. ↩︎
It should be noted that my phone was running on KaiOS version 12, in case that’s important at all. ↩︎

My obligatory 'moving to SourceHut' post

2024-11-29

I’ve moved all of my software and related projects from my Gitlab.com account to SourceHut, the hacker’s forge.

It seems to be the given thing to announce this move on one’s blog, so here it is. Outside of my day job — which requires that I use whatever software forge a project or client needs us to, usually Github — most of my forge usage is incredibly lightweight and personal with a few notable exceptions.

I mostly use git forges for private repos: my dotfiles, encrypted passwords, personal writing, and my plaintext planner. I do have some public repos which mostly consist of some software that I write for myself and release as Free Software as a matter of principle. I really doubt that anyone has even stumbled across them let alone finds them useful!

As such, moving software forges really isn’t a big deal for me. I’m not dragging a community of contributors with me and I’m not moving anything that people really rely on for personal or professional use.

Despite this, I felt compelled to write this post and reflect on this move as it is the result of a sort of personal internal pressure that’s built over a few years. Moving to SourceHut has brought my daily actions closer in alignment to my values and the way I like to do my computing.

First and foremost, I wish to promote SourceHut to anyone and everyone I meet. As far as I can tell the team behind SourceHut are true keepers of the flame and SourceHut is testament to that. I’ve quietly admired Drew DeVault, arguably the most public face behind SourceHut, for some time as his views on computing and a lot of his values seem to align with mine quite nicely. I know nothing about the rest of the team but the vision and execution of SourceHut does them all proud.

Drew DeVault’s blog

When people gush about SourceHut they usually cite the following things:

It’s independent, which matters a lot in a world dominated by Github
It’s modular, thus lightweight and every piece is good at what it does without overextending itself
The software powering it is truly FLOSS, unlike some other popular forges
The interface is the epitome of usability; being both brutalist/minimal and friendly
It does away with the Pull Request, which software developers are divided about

This post will be no different. These are exactly the reasons — to varying extents — that I have signed up as a customer of SourceHut.

When Microsoft bought Github in 2018 I moved all of my personal repos to Gitlab.com. It was admittedly a knee-jerk reaction as I came of age with FLOSS and became allergic to Microsoft stuff. In retrospect, I feel that this reaction has been more than justified since the advent of Copilot and the controversies that have followed.

I still maintain my old account on Github as I use it for work at ODSC but I dislike using Github for a number of reasons beyond the standard “it’s operated by Microsoft”. Although to be clear – this is a perfectly valid reason in-and-of-itself to avoid Github.

I’ve also since grown a bit annoyed by Gitlab. I used to be a fan because I believed it was FLOSS and I knew that you could install and run your own instance if needed. In fact the first instance of Gitlab I used was the (now defunct) instance hosted at Open Lab where I did my PhD. Open Lab researchers and staff used it to write and store software developed for research and a few of the LaTeX or Markdown inclined academics used it to do our academic writing as well. I later learned that Gitlab is “open core” and “source available” a model which makes me both roll my eyes and wince a bit inside. Github’s platform is proprietary, although everyone seems to give it a free pass usually with the argument of “well they give you free repo hosting!”.

SourceHut itself is totally FLOSS and available for download and self-hosting:

SourceHut on SourceHut

In addition to licensing both Gitlab and Github’s interfaces have been increasingly bothering me. These are incredibly Javascript-laden and I find them loud and confusing as well as slow. I use a keyboard to navigate the web as much as possible via a Firefox extension which does link highlighting. Activating this on each Gitlab and Github creates a visual minefield of interactions and I’ve never been able to consistently get around without reaching for the mouse — thus breaking my concentration and workflow — after about three minutes.

Gitlab.com is especially grievous. I find it even more confusing to use than Github, not just in terms of the visual minefield of interactions but even where various settings and forms are located at any given time. When I eventually do find what I’m looking for, if I try to use my keyboard to perform an action I make a disproportionate amount of missteps and each one produces weird and confusing behaviour. In addition to this, Cloudfare makes me validate my browser every time I need to sign in or sometimes just to view a repo on the platform. I can’t use my keyboard to pass the Cloudfare check and it breaks me straight out of my concentration.

I ended up moving to the Github CLI to make my Github usage a bit more tolerable at work. I know there’s an equivalent CLI for Gitlab but hopefully I won’t need it now.

By way of contrast, SourceHut’s interface is an absolute delight to use for a number of reasons. In the list above I described it as the “epitome of usability” and I am not understating this. It is, for many reasons, one of the most usable interfaces to some web-based software I have ever used. I don’t usually like to flex the “I have a PhD in HCI and Design” muscle a lot; but trust me when I say that professional and academic analysis would rate SourceHut’s “user experience” very highly indeed.

SourceHut does not clutter its interface at all. Everything is clear and designed to be read. Everything is relevant for a software engineer or related professional interacting with the repository. The layout is good and any signposting to other parts of the repo is clear and concise. Each page loads extremely quickly and lightly and works without Javascript. I haven’t tried yet, but I also reckon I could very comfortably use it via a Terminal browser.

There are no weird gamified or social media features. No stars or badges, thank heavens¹. There’s just a focus on the project. Besides repos, other important software forge features are implemented as other modular tools. I don’t use any of these at the moment so I have much less to say about them although I foresee a time when I may find the issue tracking useful.

I’ve also found SourceHut to be blazing fast outside of the web interface. When I migrated my repos, the initial push to SourceHut happened in the blink of an eye. Each subsequent pull and push has been just as quick. I understand that my repos are piddly little things compared to some codebases but I am very impressed and it’s set a new standard for what I expect out of a software forge.

Another major quality of life feature for me has been the way that repos are spun up. All I needed to do was set the remote to a desired repo name and push; SourceHut then created the repo for me and all I needed to do afterwards was decide whether it was a public repo or not. I’ve since learned that Gitlab.com does allow this but it did not let me know it was possible at all. Again, SourceHut told me how to do this front-and-centre.

I’m also looking forward to the email-based patch workflow that SourceHut uses. I’ve not got a particularly strong opinion re Pull Requests because they’re all I’ve ever known. I went to university to study Computer Science in late 2011 and graduated in 2014 before going straight into a doctoral program. I didn’t enter industry until 2018 by which time Github had been established as dominant for a number of years.

I am, however, looking forward to learning about doing email-based patches. I haven’t sat and analysed it thoroughly, but I’m wary of Github simply for being a centralised proprietary service which sits atop Git; a decentralised system. My initial take is that the Pull Request mechanism only cements this position further. In any case, I’m always up for learning how to better use the tools I rely on daily and this seems like a perfect opportunity for that.

I’ve written a lot already and you probably already know whether SourceHut is for you but I really wanted to convey how I experienced joy when signing up for and starting to use SourceHut. This is special to me because I feel at times there is precious little about modern tech to feel joy about. I think that’s enough reason to start using SourceHut if it aligns with you in any way; even disregarding the fact that it’s not infested with AI like other platforms!

I look forward to many years with SourceHut.

I’ve never understood any legitimate need for Github stars. If you need to remember a repository, isn’t that what your browser’s bookmarks are for? And the less said about badges the better… ↩︎

I've had to block Keychron via a spam filter

2024-11-02

I’ve had to block Keychron, the mechanical keyboard company, from sending me emails via my hosting provider’s SPAM filter.

Luckily, I use separate email addresses for purchases, web accounts, and correspondences; but even with these measures in place it’s just gotten too much. Keychron have been sending me multiple emails a week from the “support@keychron.uk” email address, with no available option to unsubscribe.

Parsing the HTML of the email I could find an unsubscribe link, but the actual link never worked; it just took me to a blank webpage. Parsing the source of this page I just found a bunch of incomprehensible JavaScript and some <p> tags which, if displayed, would’ve stated that I was unsubscribed. But the emails have just kept coming.

I can’t say I’m shocked at the behaviour; they are a for-profit company under late stage capitalism. However I’d love to know what has caused this to happen now as opposed to earlier? Are they struggling financially? Are they just ramping up for the winter spending flurry? Is it that mechanical keyboard enthusiasts are borderline addicts who can’t help but buy a new keyboard every X number of months or years?

I kid about that last point; mechanical keyboards are fun but they’re not my thing other than for practicality. My brief foray into the murky depths of getting a mechanical keyboard kit was tough and left me with the impression that the hobby must be the domain of masochists – hardly any switches or keycaps were in stock, nothing is simple, and the notion of “group buys” makes me shudder. I digress.

Keychron doesn’t score very highly on Trustpilot, and I have to admit I always resented the fact that their GNU/Linux support amounted to “Check out our Facebook support group for peer support”, and the keyboard likes to pretend it’s an Apple keyboard even when set to “Windows”, leading to the need for workarounds and hacking at scripts.

Keychron on Trustpilot UK
Getting the Function keys of a Keychron working on Linux on Do Hoang’s blog
A list of workarounds for keychron keyboards on GNU/Linux on Github

In any case, this annoyed me enough to write a blog post. I suppose it’s because I’m used to dealing with actual SPAM, but corporate SPAM seems to be something I’ve managed to avoid thusfar so it’s particularly irked me. I doubt I’ll be in the market for another keyboard anytime soon – but if I am I certainly won’t risk getting anything from Keychron again!

2024 Summer Solstice Update

2024-06-26

So I’m a father now. This has been a wonderful albeit monumental shift in my life and my daughter, D, is a constant source of joy to me.

I was originally really worried that having a baby would be inherently at odds with my needs as someone with ADHD and ASD, but I’ve thankfully been proven wrong in this case. I still do require the odd bit of “me time” to recharge my batteries but this stage of parenting has not been the constant drain that I was worried it would be since D is a true font of energy for me. I can be physically and mentally exhausted and all I need is a smile from her and I’m recharged for the next hour.

Of course, I am not currently bearing the full brunt of parenting. My beloved partner, A, has truly blossomed into motherhood and my heart swells with joy and pride every time I look at her and D together. A has been the most understanding and flexible partner one could possibly ask for as a new father. She’s allowed me to carve out time for my most foundational of hobbies to ensure I have enough mental fuel in the tank to help out where I am best needed. She manages breastfeeding as well as looking after D while I work; and still manages to find time to manage the entire household laundry cycle – one of my infamous “blind spots” when it comes to chores.

In return I now am acting as Head Chef in the house as I do the vast majority of the cooking. I also do all of the standard house cleaning i.e. surfaces and hoovering (which we used to share) and since D has decided that the car is the worst thing ever, I’ve been handling doing all of the food shopping on my pedals as well. I love it.

There have been a few low moments. D was admitted to the ICU on a ventilator when she was only 10 days old, and I found a new depth to the amount of despair it was possible to feel as a human. I’ve got a bit of residual trauma from this event, and I’ll never forget the image of my baby daughter looking at me, hurt and confused as to what was happening to her as she breathed through a tube.

Luckily, she recovered incredibly well and has grown quite large and strong. I’m hoping this trend continues well into the future, as the sun begins to lower and we head closer and closer to the next winter.

Key Events

2024-01-24 – our cat, Fröyja, has a seizure in the evening followed by another the next morning. The next few days are filled with lots of crying and monitoring her as she continues to seize.
2024-02-01 – Fröyja is diagnosed with Idiopathic Epilepsy.
2024-03 – My daughter, D, is born in the early hours of the morning after A is induced at 42 weeks of pregnancy.
2024-04 – We take D to A&E as a precautionary measure around some symptoms, and she is intubated and admitted to the ICU. She returns home with us about 4 days later.
2024-04-19 – Our rabbit, Ashley, is put to sleep after fighting a losing battle with old age and illness.
2024-05-06 – I return to work at Open Data Services Co-operative after my first bout of parental leave.

Hobbies

This is going to be a relatively short section this time around! Having a child throws a big ol’ pile of disruption and there’s a bit less time to myself to faff on with unimportant things. I still have time to myself but I have to be more acute with how I use it now.

Archery

Archery has taken a bit of a hit. I’ve assembled my bow and my coach at Cleadon Archers, P, has been phenomenal in helping me set it up and tune it as well.

Since D has been born and I’ve got my bow and arrows, I’ve only managed to make it to the archery field once but it was a lovely morning and I thoroughly enjoyed hanging out with my wife, my daughter, and P throwing arrows down the field. I’ve lost a lot of accuracy compared to when I was using the rental bow and doing archery once or twice a week but it’s still fun.

I’m looking forward to when D is a bit more interactive so we can hang out at the field together for a bit, but I’m not sure when that will be and I am in no rush.

Creative Writing

I’ve done very little creative writing since the last solstice update. I’ve done a bit of world-building for one of my planned settings but I’ve done no creative work on either the characters, plot, or putting fingers to keyboard and getting some words out.

This is likely because it takes a bit of brainpower that I’ve not got at the moment.

Exercise

I’m still exercising, thankfully.

My partner has been wonderful in that she’s always ensured that I’ve got space to do at least a baseline of strength training to maintain my physical and mental health, despite the fact she could have reasonably asked that I give it up for the time being.

When D was born my plan was to take an initial two weeks off of all exercise and then to do “micro workouts” of various strength moves, to keep some maintenance. That plan changed a bit, as I hadn’t reckoned with the hormone shift that occurs in new fathers. I discovered that my testosterone crashed and my body-fat shot up massively, and I lost a reasonable bit of muscle mass. This was distressing until I realised what was happening, and my body felt very alien to me indeed. Of course, this was very minor compared to what my partner was going through at the time but it was still quite a shock and physically very uncomfortable.

This changed my plan a bit and I started doing very small workouts after about a week of D’s birth. We still hadn’t figured out the sleeping schedule, so I was physically quite tired and these were some of the toughest workouts I’ve ever done. I worked out in my back yard at random times of the day, and did two or three movements per session, relying on instinct to figure out which exercises I hadn’t worked in a few days.

This worked for me until D went into the ICU which was another massive disruption. After a few days in the ICU and sleeping in the hospital, I went home to help relieve our friend J of Fröyja duty and ended up doing a workout the next morning to feel better about life.

This somehow evolved into my current routine which is to do a strength workout every third day. This has worked wonderfully for me, and I’ve even gained strength on my pull-ups. I’ve recently started adding in a short jog/run on the second day as well but this has been intermittent and experimental as I still have knee pain, and it has a noticeable impact on my recovery.

I will eventually take up running again, but I think I’ll aim for running 5 km consistently rather than trying to adopt my old routine of aiming to run a 5K and a 10K each week. I had a lot of fun when building up my running across 2020 to 2022 but it fell into a holding pattern which wasn’t working for me. I’m enjoying my return to prioritising strength, but I definitely need to do some steady-state cardio for my cardiovascular health as I’m otherwise rather sedentary. A few 5Ks here and there seems a good balance for now.

Hiking

We’ve done very little hiking since the last update sadly. We did manage to make it up Roseberry Topping just before D was due to be born which was seriously impressive on the part of my partner. Otherwise very little movement here.

A few weeks ago, we did a test hike with D going from Sunderland up the coast to South Shields which is a very flat and very easy 15 Km. This went reasonably well, with a pit-stop in a local pub about two thirds of the way up. We were going to take D hiking across some of the Cheviot Hills in the week leading to the Summer Solstice but she recently decided that she hated the car to the point where she screamed constantly for 45 minutes during trips. We therefore knocked the idea on the head and we’ll work out how best to get out walking at a later date.

Languages

Esperanto continues to be a big part of my life, and is arguably an even bigger part of my life now since I am speaking to my daughter almost exclusively in the language. I still journal in Esperanto, but less often now that D is born as it’s no longer a daily habit. I’m trying to do more reading in order to compensate for this though.

I’ve also picked up Norwegian Bokmål on Duolingo, very casually. I’ve had the itch to learn a third language for a while now and while I can’t throw myself into it the same way I did with Esperanto back in 2020, I’m enjoying it for now despite Duolingo’s descent into enshittification. I doubt I’ll be in a position to write any Norwegian for some time, but my goal is to translate one or two pages of this site into Norwegian eventually.

After I’ve hit up Duolingo for a month or so, I’ll explore some other resources to get a better grasp on the grammar. One challenge I’ve found is trying to find a decent EN-NO dictionary, but this is me looking ahead to problems I don’t technically have yet.

Logs

As with everything else, the logs are a bit sparser. I don’t think we’ve managed to watch a movie since D was born as we’ve mostly subsisted on a diet of TV shows. I’m still figuring out how I want to log these, but likely will start off with just logging the dates of episodes I’m watching.

I’ve not been able to read much thanks to having less time to read, but also from having a bit of baby-brain and not being able to read as fast as I used to be able to. I know that will come back, but it’s pretty sad for me at the moment. On the upside, since I now have daily “dance” session with my daughter I have been listening to a lot of music – although we often don’t make it through an entire album before it’s time for her bath.

Albums

Some old favourites as always. In terms of new music, I got back into Black Metal a bit which was a nice nostalgia trip. It was really fun digging through my old backups and finding files from albums I’d bought as a teenager. I also splurged on acquiring the back catalogues of former Beatles members. So far, I like Ringo the least but I’ve only listened to a bit of him compared with John Lennon and George Harrison.

I also got a few Dinosaur Jr. albums from my driving instructor, which have been delightful. A friend also lent me some of Casiopea’s catalogue. I can’t tell whether I really liked them, or whether they sounded a bit too video-gamey for my taste. Perhaps Jazz-Funk fusion simply isn’t my thing. We’ve also got a few Eagles albums inherited from my late Father-In-Law, which are nice enough and easy to listen to. I also received my first ever vinyl EP just for me, for my father’s day gift; which was Folk Songs From Northumbria by Owen Brannigan.

For me the musical highlights of this half a year have been the long anticipated release of Exodus by Cyferdyne and the discovery of “Blackgaze” as a genre.

Cyferdyne are one of my favourite bands. Exodus will sadly be their last album but it was a hell of a sendoff. I bought the CD+Digipak from the bandcamp page, and posted the CD to my friend while I made use of the .ogg files. I wouldn’t normally link off or advertise an album from my blog but I knew a few members of the band from way back and I love their music and they’re a small band so if you like electronic music you should check them out:

Exodus by Cyferdyne at bandcamp

I discovered Blackgaze when wikipedia’ing about Black Metal while I listened to some albums and thought it was a curious hybrid, but didn’t think much of it. However a few weeks ago a colleague who has a big interest in Black Metal recommended some Alcest to me as I asked for some new music in the genre and mentioned I was coming off of a jazz dive. I instantly fell in love and scooped up a few albums to tide me over.

Here’s the full list of albums in chronological order I listened to them, with the help of DeDupeList for removing duplicates:

DeDupeList
Soilbleed Redux by Grendel
Evermore Darkly by Crade Of Filth
The Manticore And Other Horrors by Cradle Of Filth
Trøllabundin by Eivør Pálsdóttir
Enthrone Darkness Triumphant by Dimmu Borgir
Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism by Immortal
Transilvanian Hunger by Darkthrone
The Apostasy by Behemoth
The Great Burrito Extortion Case by Bowling For Soup
Exercises In Futility by Mgła
Thornography by Cradle Of Filth
Under A Funeral Moon by Darkthrone
Eonian by Dimmu Borgir
Wednesday Morning, 3AM by Simon & Garfunkel
Parsely, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme by Simon & Garfunkel
Rubber Soul by The Beatles
Revolver by The Beatles
Reinkaos by Dissection
Damnation And A Day by Cradle Of Filth
In the Nightside Eclipse by Emperor
Into The North by The Dreadnoughts
Pure Holocaust by Immortal
Dookie by Green Day
Harsh Generation by Grendel
The Adversary by Ihsahn
Duke Ellington & John Coltrane by Duke Ellington & John Coltrane
Mint Jams by Casiopea
And The Forests Dream Eternally by Behemoth
Portrait In Jazz by Bill Evans Trio
King Of The Tenors by Ben Webster
Fuck Off And Die by Alien Vampires
Casiopea by Casiopea
Lifa by Heilung
Slow Train Coming by Bob Dylan
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band by John Lennon
All Hope Is Gone by Slipknot
Sounds Of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel
Beaucoups Of Blues by Ringo Starr
The End, So Far by Slipknot
Walls And Bridges by John Lennon
All Things Must Pass by George Harrison
Living In The Material World by George Harrison
Dark Horse by George Harrison
Extra Texture (Read All About It) by George Harrison
Thirty Three and 1/3 by George Harrison
George Harrison by George Harrison
Somewhere In England by George Harrison
Groza by Mgła
With Hearts Toward None by Mgła
Homesick by A Day To Remember
Scatman’s World by Scatman John
Americana by The Offspring
Slipknot by Slipknot
Iowa by Slipknot
Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) by Slipknot
.5 The Gray Chapter by Slipknot
We Are Not Your Kind by Slipknot
Fallen by Evanescence
100% No Modern Talk by Knife Party
Abandon Ship by Knife Party
Timewave Zero by Grendel
Bind, Torture, Kill by Suicide Commando
Jazz At Massey Hall by The Quintet
Hoitovirhe by Turmion Kätilöt
Diskovibrator by Turmion Kätilöt
Room by Eivør Pálsdóttir
Gone Troppo by George Harrison
Paranoid by Black Sabbath
Disraeli Gears by Cream
Storm Of The Light’s Bane by Dissection
Blackout by Dropkick Murphys
The Warrior’s Code by Dropkick Murphys
The Meanest Of Times by Dropkick Murphys
Unlicensed Cemetary by Six Ft Ditch
You’re Living All Over Me by Dinosaur Jr
American Capitalist by Five Finger Death Punch
Mind Games by John Lennon
Sempiternal by Bring Me The Horizon
The Gang’s All Here by Dropkick Murphys
Bug by Dinosaur Jr
Asia by Asia
Green Mind by Dinosaur Jr
Cloud Nine by George Harrison
Band On The Run by Paul McCartney & Wings
Eagles by Eagles
Desperado by Eagles
On The Border by Eagles
One Of These Nights by Eagles
Hotel California by Eagles
Hush by Texas
Dinosaur by Dinosaur Jr
The Long Run by Eagles
Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis
Heart Full Of Wine by Angus & Julia Stone
Clubbers Die Younger by Alien Vampires
Mutilate by Angerfist
Giant Steps by John Coltrane
Where You Been by Dinosaur Jr
Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk by Emperor
Black Album by Metallica
Rammstein by Rammstein
Emerson, Lake, & Palmer by Emerson, Lake, & Palmer
Red Rose Speedway by Paul McCartney & Wings
Come What(ever) May by Stone Sour
No One Here Gets Out Alive by Alien Vampires
Soilbleed by Grendel
Battles In The North by Immortal
The Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem
Brainwashed by George Harrison
Futha by Heilung
Lets Do It For Johnny! by Bowling For Soup
Nymphetamine by Cradle Of Filth
Through The Ashes Of Empires by Machine Head
The Blackening by Machine Head
Exodus by Cyferdyne
Singing the Blues by B. B. King
Zoz Kia Cultus by Behemoth
Midian by Cradle Of Filth
Immortal by At The Heart Of The Winter
Duran Duran by Duran Duran
The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails
Rio by Duran Duran
American Idiot by Green Day
Genesys by Cyferdyne
This Machine Still Kills Fascists by Dropkick Murphys
Reroute To Remain by In Flames
Enema Of The State by Blink 182
The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance
Billy Talent II by Billy Talent
Ascendancy by Trivium
Skald by Wardruna
The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails
Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde by Alcest
All Killer No Filler by Sum 41
Ecailles De Lune by Alcest
Les Voyages De L’Âme by Alcest
Furiosity by Monster Truck
Folk Songs From Northumbria by Owen Brannigan
Lateralus by Tool
Sunbather by Deafheaven
DevilDriver by DevilDriver
Old Souls by Deaf Havana

Books

Not loads of books this half a year. This has been a good thing, really, as it means I focus more on what I enjoy rather than trying to devour as many books as possible.

I finished and mostly-enjoyed The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson. It definitely reads as a sort of treat for those who’ve read all the Cosmere books up to this point. I liked it enough as a relatively stand-alone book, but it wasn’t particularly memorable compared to the high standard that the Cosmere books have set out so far.

I also read Defiant — also by Brandon Sanderson — immediately afterwards… and didn’t really enjoy it! Maybe it had been too long since I read Cytonic or maybe it was just too much Sanderson. I felt that the pacing was really off and I think the book didn’t do anything particularly memorable, to the point that I can’t actually remember what happened in it. I might revisit this at some point to give it another, fairer, go but I also remember enjoying the first book in the series, Skyward a lot more than either of the two following books. Maybe this was inevitable?

I read Scythe at the recommendation of a friend, and found it fine. It was a bit transparent what was happening in the plot and while it was a very interesting premise, the setting or the characters didn’t really grip me in the end. It was fine but not exciting enough for me to want to pick up the rest. I think I’m not the target audience.

I delved into some Terry Pratchett which is always a treat. I really liked Small Gods as well as Lords and Ladies. I then finally started reading The Expanse series, and was instantly hooked a few pages into Leviathan Wakes. I read two, and then to prevent SciFi burnout I threw another Pratchett in there. Men At Arms was delightful, and the break from Sci-Fi meant I could thoroughly enjoy Abaddon’s Gate just in time for my daughter to be born and disrupt my reading time entirely.

I didn’t read much at all until I was trying to stay awake one night by reading on my phone, and found a link to Despoilers of The Golden Empire on Project Gutenburg. “Despoilers” is a novella by Randell Garrett under the pseudonym of David Gordon, written as a pulpy SciFi serial of humans invading an alien empire on a new world but with a lovely twist at the end. I knew the twist going in since I’d read about it on a forum post but enjoyed it nonetheless. I finished the novella in one sitting on my phone and then downloaded an EPub copy later for my library.

After this, I decided to try and commit to reading a little bit on my e-reader before bed, to rebuild my reading muscles. I started off light with some Animorphs and then picked up another Pratchett book, Soul Music. I enjoyed Soul Music less than previous Discworld entries as I felt it lacked drive for the plot and was more a series of vignettes about rock and roll making its way into Discworld. However it was still good.

I’m currently struggling for something to read next as I want something light and non-committal, but I’ve learned that I burn out of Discworld quite quickly so don’t want to risk another one so soon.

The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson
Defiant by Brandon Sanderson
Scythe by Neal Shusterman
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett
Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey
Caliban’s War by James S. A. Corey
Men At Arms by Terry Pratchett
Abaddon’s Gate by James S. A. Corey
Despoilers Of The Golden Empire by David Gordon
In The Time Of Dinosaurs by K. A. Applegate
The Departure by K. A. Applegate
Soul Music by Terry Pratchett

Movies

I’ve only watched one movie since my daughter was born, during a 0400 cuddle-session where I was using Spirited Away to try and stay awake. Notably the wrong movie for that as it’s so relaxing and cosy!

But before D was born, we had a good few movie nights. Some highlights for me were The Holdovers, The Wrestler, The Florida Project, and Knives Out.

Unbreakable
Cloverfield
Sin City
Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
10 Cloverfield Lane
Ghost World
Sideways
The Wrestler
Inglourious Basterds
Split
30 Days Of Night
Glass
The Holdovers
The Illusionist
BlacKkklansman
CSA: Confederate States of America
American Hustle
Drag Me To Hell
The Princess Bride
Zack And Miri Make A Porno
Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Dune: Part Two
Leave No Trace
The Florida Project
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Her
Joker
Booksmart
I, Tonya
Spirited Away

Software I Wish Existed

2024-06-06

This post came about because I’ve spotted some places in my life where I want to be able to use alternative software that better meets my values and how I like to work, and I wanted to get these thoughts out in the wild to force myself to organise them.

I’m at a place in my life where I don’t possess the skills to implement a lot of the things I want to see in this list, and I don’t currently have the time to invest in developing these skills. I’d love to learn Rust and then use it to develop some neat ebook-management tools, or use it to build a game engine which lets me rebuild Pokémon Emerald but with the maps and Pokémon from Pokémon Silver available for me to play too. But that’s just where I am now. Maybe in a few years.

Please enjoy this ranting-and-fantasising post.

Table of Contents

An mpd-style calendar daemon with CalDAV support, and some CLI or TUI clients

This is one of my holy grails of software-I-wished-existed.

I self-host my personal calendar via Baïkal, which provides me with a Google-free calendar to use for my personal life. I pretty much access it solely on my phone via DAVx5 for Android.

Baïkal
DAVx5 (on F-Droid)

I also have to use Google Calendar for work things. For this I mostly have to open up the browser, which I hate doing, because I have not yet found a single solution which works for me in the terminal.

I would truly adore an mpd-style daemon called something like cald whose entire job it was, was to manage local and remote calendars and keep them in sync, and provide an API for me to do some basic things like viewing the calendar and managing the events.

I’ve tried using a stack of UNIX-style tools before but it didn’t work well for me in this case. Taking inspiration from my email stack which uses neomutt, imapfilter, isync, and msmtp as separate components – I used vdirsyncer to grab remote files representing my remote calendars and displayed them using khal. This was OK, but it often failed to synchronise and I found that khal wasn’t displaying things how I wanted them. I also couldn’t create events very easily.

I’ve also tried using calcurse and I may end up giving it another go as I’ve read that it has some experimental CalDAV features but I’m not sure it will stick since these are limited to syncing a single calendar. What I want is a simple native daemon which provides a local calendar backend and can sync multiple remote CalDAV calendars. This would give me the ability to use different clients and interfaces to the application as I see fit.

calcurse

A suite of independent tools to replace Calibre

Like many people, I use Calibre to manage my ebook library. On the whole, the software really is great and everything most people would need to manage ebooks and more on their computer. This is going to be a long section, and I’m going to come off as very anti-Calibre but I promise my complaints are pretty much just pointing out how the way that Calibre’s architecture no longer matches the way I like to interact with my computer. All I’m saying is that I wish that there were some decent alternatives out there for people like me. Calibre continues to be a shining example of FLOSS which I will continue to promote to anyone who isn’t actively trying to achieve a lightweight, UNIX-style, and keyboard-driven experience of computing.

Calibre

My main issues with Calibre can be summed up as the following:

It’s a GUI and I can’t use the keyboard to navigate effectively, so it breaks my workflow
It is monolithic in design and integrates lots of features that I believe would be better suited as independent libraries or tools

The first of these is pretty self-explanatory. Calibre is a GUI which is fine and for the most part I find it a very good GUI. However, I find it really jarring to interact with Calibre because when I open it, it rips me out of my regular computing environment and into a new paradigm and this context switch is often quite uncomfortable for me. The majority of my work can be done without the mouse and most of the applications I use can be configured to use the same keys for navigation and various tasks; so I’m very often in a cosy environment where I can interact with my machine in the way that is most suited for me. Opening Calibre tears me out of that and into Calibre’s paradigm.

Calibre does provide some keyboard shortcuts which I do use, and it does provide a graphical configuration menu to allow me to change these shortcuts but I have to reach for the mouse more often than not to get somewhere I want to be. Calibre’s metadata editing interface doesn’t have the ability for me to use link or form highlighting, or navigate between fields using a key combo. This makes it tough to get things done in the way that I want.

Oh, and as a final gripe about the GUI – it doesn’t use the GTK framework so has a different theme to the rest of my interface.

A lot of the other issues I have with Calibre stem from the fact that it has a very monolithic design. What I mean by this is that Calibre packs a lot of features in there that I think would be better suited as independent programs. It also has some undesirable behaviour and side-effects. Calibre does provide some tools which I think are quite neat and effective, however they’re very tightly integrated into the program and I can’t just install the components that I want.

The most egregious of these by far, for me, is the Self Updater. Kovid Goyal maintains Calibre pretty actively, and there is often an update to the software. Instead of this coming through my package manager, Calibre has its own built in updater, sort of. On GNU/Linux systems it actually directs you to a web page with a “wget to bash” pipe which fetches and installs the latest version of the software. I imagine this is great on Windows and probably macOS systems but systems like GNU/Linux and the BSDs generally use package managers or systems like Ports. I tend to lean the same way as Drew DeVault and believe that developers should not distribute their own software on systems with package managers beyond providing a source tarball and perhaps a Makefile to let a single user install it. Let the package maintainers, and package managers, do their jobs!

Developers shouldn’t distribute their own software on Drew DeVault’s blog

On systems like Arch which are more “bleeding edge”, and have access to the AUR, this would be incredibly easy to set up. On systems like Debian Stable and its derivatives which freeze packages for a release… the users of these systems actually expect — sometimes even actively value — that the software won’t change until the next distro release.

After the self-updater, the Calibre’s monolithic design irks me most by installing a bunch of cruft on my system that I don’t want and acting inflexibly when I want to use alternative software for some tasks. Calibre rolls several of its own solutions for various tasks. By installing Calibre, one ends up with a plethora of additional tools on their system:

ebook-viewer is Calibre’s built-in ebook reader which can also operate independently
ebook-edit is its built-in ebook editor which again, can be ran independently
ebook-convert is a CLI tool to convert ebooks between various formats
ebook-device is a CLI tool to manage a plugged in e-reader device, I have no idea how to use it though
ebook-meta is a CLI tool to read and write ebook metadata to a file
ebook-polish is a CLI tool that looks like it provides a suite of commands to finish off an ebook production process such as adding a jacket, embedding fonts, etc.

Taken independently, each of these tools appears utterly fantastic and I do not take any issue with any one individually. It would also be understandable if they were installed on my system from a meta package.

Although I’ve never used any of them, the CLI tools look very very useful. If I managed to replace Calibre’s interface with an alternative tool – I’d honestly probably want to use these tools to help me manage my ebook library! The issue I have is that they’re not installable separate to Calibre. I’d love just to install ebook-convert, ebook-meta, and maybe ebook-device and be on my way. But alas no.

This also works the other way, affecting my experience within Calibre itself. Calibre will open ebooks in ebook-viewer and will also open ebook-edit if you want to edit the book from within your library. There’s no way to swap these out for other tools. I use Zathura as a document reader on my machine since it’s light and keyboard-driven, and I used to edit ebooks in Sigil. I prefer both of these to Calibre’s built in tools, and only stopped using Sigil when I decided to put up with ebook-edit as I didn’t want redundancy on my system.

This isn’t to say that I think Calibre’s built in tools shouldn’t exist. ebook-edit can handle multiple different kinds of ebook files whereas Sigil can only handle EPub. This is inherently useful, so I do understand. It’s just that I only use EPub as my canonical library, and only convert to other formats for reading on my e-reader. I only need the ability to edit EPub files.

Similarly, ebook-viewer isn’t bad. It’s just that I don’t need it when I have zathura installed and it’s my preferred application, and I should be able to use zathura from within Calibre. Basically, I think Calibre should just be calling xdg-open to complete various tasks.

There is also a bunch of miscellaneous functionality that Calibre bundles which I don’t really need integrating. Calibre includes functions for things such as reading news and converting/sending that news to e-reader devices. Again, this is really neat but I really don’t need it bundled with my ebook management software.

My final outright complaint about Calibre is that it actively manages my library for me. I add books from within Calibre and it manipulates my file system to match. To some — likely most — this will be a useful and positive feature and I understand that. I’d still prefer to manage my ebook files using other tools which I feel are better suited to the job… such as my file manager.

Calibre’s enforced file organisation scheme is fine and I can just-about ignore it; but it results in files that are named differently to every other convention in my system, making it difficult to navigate in the command line since there are spaces in the file names and folders. It also means that whenever I use Calibre’s interface to send an ebook to my e-reader (an Amazon Kindle 4), it results in an additional Mobi file being placed in the book’s folder. Again this makes sense but can result in large portions of my library being duplicated and this has implications for managing my backups. I’d much prefer it if Calibre would dump the Mobi file directly on the device without storing it on my filesystem first, although I do understand the current behaviour as a somewhat sensible default.

So what is it that I actually want?

I want a few small tools that I can use to string together a lightweight, keyboard-driven, ebook management experience. I think I could get the experience I want with the following:

an mpd-style library application to create a database of books and provide a CLI tool atop of this for viewing metadata
a lightweight TUI to let me browse the database, filter books, etc. and call actions/scripts which lets me do things such as view the ebook or send it to a device
a standalone CLI for converting between ebook formats, or even just EPub to Mobi

I like mpd’s approach to managing files. It doesn’t. mpd lets you use other tools at your disposal to manage and organise your music collection i.e. your file manager and terminal. For my music library, I tell mpd which folder to look in to find my music and then, on command, it builds its own database independent of the file and folder structure in my library. This means that I can do things such give my own naming conventions for artists (all lowercase, no spaces), and for albums (prefixed with their year). For artists with large catalogues, I can further sort albums into “studio”, “live”, and “ep” folders if I so choose. mpd doesn’t care about any of that; it just scans the entire music directory and builds its database. To add new files I use file management tools to add the music to an appropriate folder underneath where mpd is looking, edit the tags using a dedicated tag editor, and then tell mpd to update the database either directly or via ncmpcpp’s interface.

I’d very much like to interact with my ebooks in a similar manner to how mpd allows me to interact with my music library. I doubt it’d need to run as a daemon, but I’d like there to be a CLI program which can be configured to watch a folder for ebooks and then update a local database based on what it finds there. Other programs can act as clients and interact with the database to provide other functionality. I’d really like an ncmpcpp-style TUI to replace Calibre’s browsing function, with keyboard shortcuts to open up readers which respected my system-defined default programs. I could use another key to invoke a command or a script to send the book to my e-reader, or convert the book to a new format in-place.

ncmpcpp – the mpd TUI client I use

If I had these two components set up, the only missing piece is a way to convert between formats. A simple CLI tool should do it, and I would be able to call it from the TUI client as part of a command which sent a book to a device, or manually from the terminal.

I understand that there are complexities to navigate around. What about a single book stored in multiple formats? Calibre can navigate this by ensuring that a book is represented by a single folder, and that all files in this folder are the same book in different formats. This new tool would need to accommodate libraries organised this way, libraries organised in format first, or language first etc. I’d also need to investigate some of the abstraction that Calibre’s ebook-device provides, in case that would become a missing component. I currently see that my Kindle 4 gets mounted on my system as a USB mass storage device so I’m under the impression I can sideload books using simple file operations but perhaps this isn’t the case.

I’m sure this all can be done with some careful design and planning. Once again, I haven’t the time to develop the skills necessary to produce such a suite of tools.

A TUI equivalent of EasyTAG

I use an application called EasyTag to manage ID3 tags on my music and podcasts. My mpd client technically has a tag editor built into it, but I don’t find it intuitive at all and prefer to rely on a dedicated tag editor.

EasyTAG

I also make use of a CLI application called id3v2 to manage some tags from the terminal but I’ve seen mixed results when from using it. I’m not sure how or why, but sometimes id3v2 doesn’t overwrite the existing tag and simply adds a new one, and my mpd client displays both of these. In these cases the only fix is to use EasyTAG.

id3v2 on the Debian repos

I think that the underlying problem is that I’ve never really explored how ID3 tags actually work in practice and perhaps this behaviour is expected. In any case, I often find myself using EasyTAG. The application itself is fine; it’s really a great tag editor; interface is intuitive, it runs quickly, and it’s effective at its job. My only real issue is that it breaks my workflow because it requires a lot of mouse input and this slows me down and is quite jarring to me when about 80% of my regular workflow is keyboard-driven.

So I’d really like a TUI equivalent. To be honest I’d settle for id3v2 behaving how I’d expect and overwriting tags properly, because at least that way I’d be able to script some behaviour or use globbing properly.

A Minetest-style Pokémon clone

I don’t play a lot of video games any more but I sometimes carve out some time to play Minetest. Minetest is a FLOSS game engine which can be used to create Voxel games (i.e. Minecraft-like games). I really love it because I absolutely adored playing Minecraft but I lost my sign in details from 2011 and my PlayStation has been broken for some years now.

Minetest.net

Playing Minetest is different experience than just firing up and playing Minecraft because it’s not just a straight-up clone. It’s an entire engine and you can use it to build or play any number of games. Minecraft is a commercial game and you get the experience and features that the game developers want you to have. Minetest is a lot more flexible, and you can either roll your own experience by downloading or writing “mods” — which I’ve taken to mean module rather than modification in this case — or download one of the pre-built “games” to have a more curated experience. Under the hood, Minetest game are simply collections of mods and other resources such as sounds and textures which have been curated or purpose-built to provide a more internally coherent experience.

The end result is much more impressive than I’ve made it sound. There are straight-up Minecraft clones such as “VoxeLibre” and “Mineclonia” which attempt very explicitly to provide a FLOSS equivalent of Minecraft with the goal of feature-parity. There are also games such as “NodeCore” which provide similar experiences to Minecraft but go off in their own direction.

There are also games which use Minetest’s engine to build totally new games with their own loops, design, and features. I’ve not played any of these but the most prominent ones I see discussed are “The Velvet Crystal”, “Exile”, and “Hades Revisited”

I tend to play “Minetest Game”, which is provided as a sort of lightweight game which is very sparse on features. If you ever played Alpha or early Beta builds of Minecraft, it sort of has that feel to it. There are no included mobs, only a few crops, etc. because “Minetest Game” is mostly intended as a platform from which to start modding; either developing your own or throwing together pre-built mods. I’ve done both on my game to create for myself something approaching a Tekkit-like experience in Minetest.

Minetest Game

I’d really like to see something similar to Minetest but for Pokémon.

I grew up with 90’s Pokémania and I loved playing Pokémon Silver and Pokémon Sapphire when I was growing up. I never really played any of the games after that which means I have cosy rose-tinted nostalgia glasses for the franchise and don’t have any experience of the more contemporary games. I’m also very ignorant of what may be seen as regressions going from the Generation II games (Gold, Silver, Crystal) to those of Generation III (Ruby, Sapphire, Fire Red, Leaf Green, Emerald). I really love the look and feel of all of these titles, and I find that I can comfortably hold the mechanics and number of Pokémon in these games in my head.

Every few years I will indulge in firing up a GBA Emulator and play through one of the games (usually Pokémon Emerald) until I get bored. I always wish that there was a FLOSS equivalent to Pokémon though, in the same way that Minetest is a FLOSS equivalent to Minecraft.

I should mention that I have seen a few “Pokémon-but-open-source” efforts around the internet in the past. The most memorable of these for me has been “OpMon”, and I check in on its development every so often but it doesn’t yet appear to be in a place where it’s playable and I don’t have any nostalgia for it since I didn’t grow up with it!

OpMon

I fantasise about something that would let me roll my own Pokémon-like experience — or play a coherent FLOSS Pokémon-like game written by others — in the same way that Minetest allows me to roll my own Minecraft-like experience. I understand that you can’t just build an equivalent because Minetest/Minecraft are fundamentally different styles of game to Pokémon and that affords a flexibility for building a FLOSS engine for the former. Minetest/Minecraft benefit from having open and procedurally generated sandbox worlds where the player is expected to run about making their own fun whereas Pokémon is a narrative RPG adventure with some really cool mechanics that are designed to interact with each other and the setting.

Even Minetest can suffer from a lack of internal coherence. If you’re just throwing mods into a base-game like I do you can end up with “mod soup”. In vanilla and commercial Minecraft all of the systems are designed to interact: crafting leads to exploring, you need to craft things to explore further, and you hunt down specific mobs or beat a boss to gain access to these resources which will help you with the thing you’re building. In my Minetest game which is a collection mods from different authors — other than the aesthetic consequences of having different mod authors with different art styles looking a bit jarring — I end up with a game with lots of different little loops which aren’t tightly integrated. I have mobs installed, but none of them give me drops that I need to gather to achieve another goal. I spend time building things and exploring or engaging in the Technic mod loop of building new and better machines, but there’s very little in the game driving me to those loops since it’s a loose collection of features that I’ve assembled into a cosy time-killer.

This would be even more pronounced in an engine trying to provide a set of Pokémon-like features since it can’t naturally fall back on an open sandbox style world.

Minetest addresses this issue by letting people publish Games, which I’ve noted are simply collections of mods and resources such as textures and sounds under the hood. This feature, however, allows for people to engage in Game Design by curating and bringing components together — or writing their own — to craft a more integrated experience. Playing “Mineclonia” would be a very tightly integrated experience which is provided by assembling reusable and purpose-built components under a common direction. The same is true of “The Velvet Crystal” or “Exile”.

So I think something which provides a platform on which to share and remix common components of Pokémon-like games would be really interesting. Maybe it’d be tough to provide a totally modular experience, but we could at least see the development of modules which can be assembled into cohesive games. Minetest players can download texture packs, mods, sound packs, and entire games. Imagine firing up a platform and downloading a FLOSS Pokémon-like game which has been assembled and built using re-usable maps, packs of creatures and items, character sprites etc. One could even imagine “texture packs” working in this scenario where two people could be playing the exact same game but one person makes theirs looks like an old-school Pokémon Emerald game whereas another uses a totally different art style.

Of all of the things in this article that I know I do not have the skill to create, it’s this. Games programming is very foreign to me and I wouldn’t even know where to start. My few dozen hours of writing Mods for Minetest in Lua will definitely not translate to the engine-level building required to pull this off. Even if this magically appeared, I’d lack the game design skills to create an effective new experience without just defaulting back onto cloning and splicing the Pokémon games I grew up with.

Summary

This post contained a list of software that I wished existed, and that I’d love to write myself if I had the time and skill to do so. If you know of something similar to anything I’ve discussed please feel free to reach out and let me know of it, I’d love to hear about it!

My approach to backups

2024-03-14

Jack Baty and Derek Sivers each posted about how they handle backups and it prompted me to write down where I’m at with backups. I’ve been reflecting on my backup regime for a while now, with a view to making my system more robust and manageable.

Backups are important to me because I like to keep the majority of my files as close to the machine I’m using as possible. I don’t subscribe to, nor do I trust, various cloud service providers like Google Drive and Dropbox to keep my data intact or to keep it safe. This means that my live copies of documents, photos, home video, media, and literature all live on my local machines, devices, and external drives that I keep around me.

My approach to backup is that it should be based off of some sound basic principles and these should be applied to your individual situation and needs. There isn’t a one-size fits all product or solution, but there are some boxes to tick and some wisdom to apply to ensure you’re covering your bases.

The tl;dr of this post is that I currently lean on UNIX coreutils and programs such as rsync to the majority of my backups to external drives onsite, and I have plans to improve the system based on the principles outlined in the rest of the post and using some CLI tools one might not often think of for backups to achieve some more robustness.

Table of Contents

Some basic principles

While I work in technology and have Computing Science degrees, I have never worked as a sysadmin or managed a data centre. I’ve never been trained in industry standard backup practices. I mention this because there’s a real risk that the things I’m about to reference may be naive or outdated from a best practice point of view. If that’s the case, please get in touch! I’m very happy to learn (but also be aware that my backup needs are relatively humble).

The two most influential resources on my backup regime have been The Tao Of Backup and the 3-2-1 Backup Rule.

The Tao of Backup
3-2-1 Backup rule (there are lots of references to this across the web but this one is clear and came up first)

I first read the Tao of Backup when I was a teenager. I’m not sure how long the site has been in its current form but it’s not changed since then and the copyright notice is dated 1997. Ultimately, the site is selling some software known as Veracity, but the lessons in it are great. It’s a little cheesy, as the main content of the site is presented like a daoist parable about a novice sysadmin learning at the feet of an enlightened master. There are seven lessons in the Tao of Backup:

Coverage – backup all of your data (incl system and application files)
Frequency – backup at an appropriate frequency (usually daily as you work for most files)
Separation – take some backups offsite
History – keep some of your old backups
Testing – test your backups to ensure they’re fit for purpose
Security – keep your backups secure
Integrity – perform integrity checking on files and backups

That’s quite a lot to handle (and I definitely don’t do all of it) but the Tao of Backup is a resource I find myself returning to each time that I want to tweak or make my backup regime stronger. It’s definitely geared towards enterprise environments with lots of data — and is definitely shilling the author’s software solution — so likely overkill for my humble needs but I believe that the underlying principles are sound.

The 3-2-1 backup rule overlaps with the Tao a bit, and doesn’t go as far. It’s much more suited to home users or even those who are taking personal responsibility for backing up their work files. The rule goes as follows:

Maintain three copies of your data (original and two copies)
Use two different types of storage medium to enhance redundancy
Keep at least one copy offsite to enhance safety

I feel that the 3-2-1 rule is a great basis to begin a backup regime, and then start tweaking it and building on it to suit your needs.

Another resource I have found useful in thinking about my backup needs is Tony Florida’s blog post about creating automated daily, weekly, and monthly backups of data using some common tools available on *NIX platforms. Again, there is definitely overlap with the other philosophies — a good thing since it reinforces their messages — but doesn’t go much beyond creating the three copies of the data. It’s heavy on practice and lighter on theory, but it forms a great starting point to get a bare minimal backup system running.

Tony’s blog post on creating Daily, Weekly, and Monthly backups

Finally, while in an unrelated keyboard-related rabbit hole, I stumbled across Ben Vallack’s video on how he backs up his home data. It’s a bit Mac-centric and relies heavily on Time Machine to handle the History aspect, but introduces the concept of having an Archive Drive separate to the primary working drive which holds data that you’re keeping but not actively working on, and having bootable clones of your drives which you swap around between onsite and offsite locations on a weekly basis. Ben also gives a fairly accessible overview of the various risks which lead to the need for a robust backup regime.

Ben’s video on backups (Youtube) (alternative Invidious link)

So, this is where I’m coming from in terms seeking a good backup regime. I’m not looking to synthesise the above into a single unified approach but rather these resources are what I consider good places to start thinking about backups or analysing existing practices to spot holes or vulnerabilities.

What I’m backing up

I use two computers — a primary desktop machine and a laptop — and a smartphone which has some things like contacts and photos which need backing up.

My laptop doesn’t ever contain the the main or only copy of any important data, and in fact is fairly empty and is mostly used for writing things which exist in git repos across multiple machines, and watching media. At any given time, my smartphone contains my contacts and some photos I’ve taken but am yet to sync to my main machine but that’s about it. I also have a separate USB drive dedicated to media storage but I’m not considering backups to that just yet.

This leaves my main desktop computer as the chief concern for backups with some additional light considerations for my smartphone necessary to cover it. I am the sole user of my computer and I store everything in my user’s Home Folder. This means I’m backing up the contents of a single folder which is nice and convenient.

As of drafting this blog post my home folder clocks in at 239GiB. Around 35GiB of that can be blamed on my downloads folder, the bulk of which is split between large sets of open data I download and work with for my job and also youtube-dl which I use to watch YouTube videos locally on my machine and later archive on a USB drive. I’m content that I don’t particularly want or need to back up my downloads, so that leaves just over 200GiB of files left over in my home drive.

For the curious, my home drive is so big largely to the combination of local collections of audio (music, but podcast and audiobook archives take up the most space) and literature (mostly comic books by file size but I keep ebooks and academic papers here too). Photos and home video occupy a few GiB, but the bulk of the weight is made up by audio and comic book files. I could relegate these to storage on the media drive and in fact they’re backed up there too, but I like having them close to hand in my home folder so I can access them quickly and percolate them through my backups.

Not covered in the above is the fact that I take special care to back up my PGP keys, since I use them every day for accessing various files and passwords. PGP keys will also feature in one of my backup strategies, so warrant their own dedicated backup system.

In the future I will also be in charge of backing up the household’s data (we are expecting a deluge of baby photos to be the household’s main product soon), but for now I am mostly working on getting a good handle on my personal machines so that I can expand out sustainably.

What I’ve got in place

This section goes into details about what I’ve got in place to back up the things covered in the previous section.

Phone (Contacts and Photos)

For my phone contacts I have a DAV server set up via a Baïkal install at my web hosting provider which handles sync and backup for my partner and I. This was originally set up so that I could live with an Un-Googled phone and has worked a treat as a low-effort offsite backup for some niche data. I use the DAVx5 app on Android to handle the syncing, which it does pretty much by itself. For key contacts we also have a paper address book in our home.

Baïkal
DAVx5 (F-Droid link)

I don’t take a lot of photos on my phone that I want to keep, although with a baby due any moment now I imagine that will change soon. About once or twice a quarter I connect my phone to my machine via USB cable and use adb to pull everything off into a working directory. I then use a jhead command¹ to read the EXIF data on the image and move it to the appropriate folder under ~/images/photos based on the date. The same goes for any videos on the phone, although they are much rarer.

Once these are on my main machine, they’re integrated into the main backup routine, such as it stands. I definitely need to be better about grabbing the media from my phone as I have been bitten by that multiple times in the past during my PhD. At the time that caused research data loss which was bad enough, but I’d hate to lost a quarter’s worth of family photos because I was too silly to grab them on a Friday afternoon.

Computer Home Folder

At the moment I have a very simple but a relatively fragile backup regime in place for my local machine. After all the elaborating on principles I did earlier in the post, I am basically doing the bare minimum. I am looking to make this much more robust over the coming year, however.

My backup regime currently consists of having a 2.5 inch, 2TB capacity, USB hard drive permanently plugged into my computer to store daily, weekly, and monthly backups. It is LUKS-encrypted and I am prompted for the passphrase by udiskie whenever I log in and start my graphical environment. Once it is successfully unlocked, I can run my backup scripts.

I invoke the scripts via a dmenu script which allows me to run the backups manually. I would like to automate them via cron a la Tony Florida’s approach, however I have some limitations:

While I am on my computer almost daily it can be at inconsistent times, and sometimes I am not on it for days
I like to use notify-send to tell me when a backup has started or finished and whether it was successful, and cron can’t do that
I might type my LUKS key wrong, and the drive will fail to unlock. Therefore the script would fail, without notifications. I am likely to forget to check logs, so these don’t help.

I settled on dmenu as a tool which was very light, easy to integrate into scripts, and a pleasure to use. As Anna Havron often says; use tools you love. It’s a pleasure to open my graphical environment, hit a keybinding, and then select which type of backup I want to run. It makes it much more likely that I’ll keep on top of it, although it is a little bit fragile.

My daily backup script basically runs an rsync command² to sync my home folder to the “daily” folder on the backup drive. I exclude the downloads folder as well as .cache, since these are not really critical at all, take time to sync, and take up space on the drive. The first time I ran the daily backup it took a little while with over 200GiB of files to sync across but subsequent runs are quite fast. They take around 2 or 3 minutes unless I’ve added some home video files.

The weekly backup script then uses rsync again, this time to sync the daily folder with the “weekly” one on the backup drive. I don’t need to add the exclusions this time since they’ve already been handled by the daily script. I run this script on a Friday morning usually. This means that I have a week’s leeway of having deleted an important file to catch it and restore it before it gets removed from the weekly copy.

The monthly backup script uses tar and gzip to create a compressed tarball of the daily folder, names it for the date, and dumps it into the “monthly” folder. Prior to having this invoked via dmenu, I was doing this manually on another drive on an intermittent basis. I actually need to consolidate these at some point, because my 2TB drive won’t store a very large archive of 200GiB tarballs. Side note: my compressed tarballs aren’t much smaller than my home folder, I assume that is because a lot of the content is audio and images (comic books) so they don’t compress well with gzip but if I could be doing something else or better to compress them, please reach out!

That’s it, really. I really need to make the system more robust since at the moment I am depending on 2TB of co-located spinning rust to take care of each daily, weekly, and monthly backups. I’m happy with it as a quick-and-dirty home backup solution to provide onsite copies of my Home folder if my internal drive fails but it won’t stand up to disk failure or physical theft. Thankfully, LUKS offers a modicum of security protection against data theft but I would still have lost the backup copies.

PGP and SSH keys

These are both mission-critical and sensitive, so I take extra care to store these securely.

I keep copies of these on USB sticks (keys, pens, thumb drives etc.). The first copy is stored offsite at a non-technical family member’s house and the entire USB drive is encrypted with LUKS. The second copy is stored on a LUKS-encrypted partition on a USB stick I carry with me attached to my physical keys. There is also a third copy on another LUKS-encrypted drive, stored in a document safe next to instructions for how my family members can deal with my computers if I die (the passphrase to this specific drive is stored separately with another family member).

Misc offsite backups via git

I am a heavy user of git for projects and for personal use. I have an account at Gitlab.com where I have all of my public repos as well as some private ones. Currently, that means that Gitlab.com serves as an additional offsite backups of some personal materials. This includes, but is not limited to:

My configuration file (“dotfiles”)
My passwords (encrypted via PGP)
My writing (creative, household, and academic)
My Plaintext Planner

I am growing a bit more skeptical of Gitlab, and Gitlab.com, but this serves for now. All of my repos are also stored on my personal machine so they are integrated into the backup routine and it’s nice to have an offsite backup for them which I’m not personally maintaining.

Roadmap

My current practices are not perfect. I do not have total coverage, I only back up my personal files and in the event of my main machine melting I would need to spend time setting up my OS and environment again. Luckily, my dotfiles (backed up offsite) ameliorate this a little but not conveniently.

I currently don’t do enough to back up my phone which is odd since I have been bitten multiple times by phones failing. I also over-rely on USB spinning rust drives not failing, as they contain each the daily and weekly copies of my home directory on a single drive. I don’t have any offsite backups for these.

This section continues by proposing some interventions and things I can start doing to improve my backup system.

More Offsite backups

I want to establish some better offsite backups. I plan to address this in two phases: first establish an emergency quick-and-dirty remote backup for ease; secondly establish more long-term offsite archival. Once both are established, I will be closer to having achieved the Separation aspect of the Tao of Backup.

Revisiting the 3-2-1 methodology, it recommends storing the backups across two different storage mediums. Drives fail, that’s just a fact. I’m not sure whether nVme is classed as different medium to spinning rust USB drives but I’m not going to take the chance relying on them for everything; and especially not for long-term archival of data.

For that reason my quick-and-dirty approach will be to take advantage of my web hosting provider as they provide unlimited file storage for sites. I used to run a Nextcloud instance to take advantage of this but I fell out with Nextcloud and I don’t enjoy maintaining it. Instead, I will be uploading encrypted copies of my monthly archives to a non-public area of my hosted space. I expect that over time, Dreamhost may warn me or get me on fair use for this but I think it will be a valid short-term solution to achieve a remote backup of important files.

I am envisioning chaining together some coreutils to create some PGP-encrypted archives which are then split into 100MiB chunks, which can then be uploaded via SFTP to my hosting provider. I will work out the exact details soon, but off the top of my head I was thinking something like the following would get me towards where I want to be:

tar -czvf - $HOME | gpg -r $MY_EMAIL --encrypt | split --bytes 100M --numeric-suffixes - $(date +%Y-%m-%d).tar.gz.gpg.³

The idea is that the PGP encryption offers me some protection against snooping on private files by my web host. There’s nothing untoward in my files, but I don’t trust corps at all and they own the servers I am putting my files on. When it’s personal data, I want it to be encrypted to be protected against theft. I had the idea of using split to split the archive up into pieces so that it was more straightforward to upload via SFTP – if I am interrupted then I can resume later from where I left off rather than have a 200GiB archive partially uploaded.

If this approach doesn’t work, or if it becomes ridiculously cumbersome, I will look to pay for some dedicated remote storage to store copies of my monthly tarballs. Jack Baty noted that he spun up a 5TB storage box on a cloud storage provider which costs around £10 per month. £120/year is more than we spend on a lot of things and with a baby due any moment, this will be something we have to decide upon together, but it’s not bank-breaking for us (a lucky position to be in we know).

For a more long-term archival solution, I have been looking into Blu-Ray. Optical is decent enough to get me what I need from archival, without the need to look into archival quality media. I fantasise about having a tape drive but they’re noisy and very slow so I don’t think that they’re appropriate for my needs. Unfortunately, with a 200GiB Home folder and each Blu-Ray disc storing only around 25GiB (25GB? I forget how optical is labelled) I’m going to need between 8 and 10 discs per monthly backup. That’ll mount up over time, so maybe I need to manage my expectations there. In any case, I’ve got a provisional “Yepp that’s ok” from a relative about storing these discs at their house for an offsite solution.

In the case of the optical backups, I imagine my tarball to split pipeline might be useful for spreading a single encrypted archive over multiple discs. If it works out, that is. I imagine restoring from these backups might not be fun if I have to cat 200GiB of tarball together and then decrypt it all.

Backing up contacts from my phone

I want to start percolating my contacts from my phone through my backup system, even in the short-term. This will involve taking explicit backups of the Baïkal server as well as having plaintext backups of the data to store elsewhere in the system. The AOSP Contacts app which I use on LineageOS can export contacts in a VCard format, however I have read that it is very idiosyncratic and thus is only really useful for restoring to another instance of the same app.

I’ll see if there’s any other solutions, but that may have to be the approach in the short term.

Easier photo/video backups from phone

I need to take photos and videos from my phone more often than I do. I’m still working out the details of this but I figured that I could collect the adb and jhead commands into a script that I can call quickly from dmenu. There may be some thing on the side of my phone I can do, via Termux and rsync, however the fewer moving parts the better for me as then there’s less to maintain. USB cables haven’t failed me thus far!

Better onsite archival storage

There’s only so far that my little 2.5 inch USB drives can get me in terms of storing my monthly backups. In an ideal world I’d have some form of expandable storage, and the obvious solution is to buy and set up a NAS with some enterprise drives.

This would be an incredibly fun project and I’d love putting it together however I have two concerns: it’s another piece of infrastructure to maintain; and it’s more kWh demand for my bills.

The first concern is that I have never maintained such infrastructure before, even on small home scale. There’s RAID to consider, ZFS is a thing people seemingly love but I have no idea how it works, and drives need mirroring and replacing. The other concern is that with Britain in the thrall of a pro-capitalist and anti-worker government, every kWh costs an extortionate amount money (in context with the profits of these companies) and I don’t want to drastically increase my fuel bills and line the pockets of capitalists (although I will concede my provider is not too voracious).

I think my initial attempt at a middle ground is that I might try out a 3.5 inch USB dock. It looks like these usually hold around two drives, so I reckon I could reasonably expect to get two 16TB enterprise drives and have these set up to be mirrored to protect against failure of a single drive. This 16TB would then act as my daily, weekly, and monthly archival storage taking the place of the little 2TB drive I use now. There are also 5 bay devices which look more robust, but that means more drives, more complexity, and more kWh used.

Backup system drive

I also need to back up my system data so that I can recover from disaster more easily. My dotfiles and install scripts get me some of the way, but it’d be much better to just be able to boot from secondary drive which was up to date.

This is a tough one for me, as I’m not sure where my line is drawn. Part of me just wants to get a second nVme drive for my machine and dd my main drive to it every day, but I think that would chew up resources and issue way too many writes to the drive to keep it healthy for long.

Once I have my larger-capacity archival drives set up for data backup, I could dd to the 2TB USB drive I’m using for my daily backups at the moment. Again, that chews up resources. I could theoretically do it overnight but I don’t like leaving my machine on between uses since it eats kWh and it feels wasteful. I’ll ponder this. It might be worth doing a a monthly system image backup and then using rsync in the other direction to restore my files from the daily backup, if it becomes necessary.

Integrity checking

The above gets me nicely over the threshold of the 3-2-1 rule and covers the first parts of the Tao of Backup. If I do the above, I will have backed up all of my data including system files and spread it across several media with several offsite copies.

The thing that is missing is integrity checking. This is a blank spot for me to be honest as I am unsure as to what tools I’d be using and how to go about starting this and maintaining it. It’s something for the far-off horizon once I’ve actually managed to achieve what I’ve set out to here.

Summary

Inspired by other tech bloggy folk online, I have reflected on what I believe makes a good backup system, analysed my current practices and elaborated on tools I use to achieve the backups, as well as outlined some thoughts for improving on areas where I’m lacking.

It looks like my pocket money is going towards storage for some time…

jhead -n$HOME/images/photos/%Y/%m/%d/%f *.jpg ↩︎
rsync -av --delete --exclude='downloads' --exclude='.cache' "$HOME/" "$BACKUP_DRIVE/daily/ ↩︎
Update 2024-10: I’ve modified this command to remove a plaintext instance of my email address, as a SPAM-preventative ↩︎

Making Firefox Work Better with my Tiling Window Manager

2024-01-01

I am very keyboard-driven as a computer user, and 2023 was the year where I properly started using a Tiling Window Manager for my computing. It really fits with the way I like to do things and has made using my machine a lot more pleasurable. This post is about some tweaks to Firefox that I’ve made via extensions and userChrome.css to make it fit better into my workflow.

Most of the software I use on a daily basis integrates beautifully into my workflow and window management: I have various TUI or CLI programs which can all be configured to use the same keybindings, and I can use the window manager to create layouts which allow me to complete work smoothly. My browser, on the other hand, is a bit of an exception to this.

I’ve used Firefox as a browser since around 2006 — excepting a brief flirtation with Chrome during uni between 2011 and 2014 — and while it’s certainly a decent browser; when integrated into my computing workflow it can be very jarring to use.

For me, the main culprit behind this friction is Firefox’s built-in management of tabs and windows. It’s very different from my window manager’s, and doesn’t fit in because it’s sort of doing its own thing. Closing tabs is done via Ctrl+w whereas my i3 keybinding for closing a window is <Super>+Shift+q. Switching between tabs involves the use of the Alt key and numbers. Ctrl+Tab cycles through recently used tabs, but to go left or right I’d need to use Ctrl+PgUp/PgDown. Very different than my window manager’s <Super>+h/j/k/l to navigate windows without needing to leave the home row!

One of the most frustrating things I came up against quite often was trying to split out a tab into a new window so I could look at two things at once. This is a fairly common task I feel, but Firefox’s built-in window/tab management doesn’t seem to support it out of the box; at least going by their list of Windows and Tabs shortcuts. In order to achieve this I needed to: Focus the URL bar and copy the URL, close the tab, open a new window, and paste the address.

This wasn’t too awful but it was quite frustrating especially when some tabs contained active GDocs for a client project and I’d lose my place. Or I’d lose my place on a dense documentation page. Going the other way was also difficult and I’d need to close the window and open up a new tab in my other window; again losing my place and breaking my workflow.

I was briefly tempted by Surf but the lack of ad-blocking was a deal-breaker and getting Surf to build properly on Debian was a bit much. I decided to put a little bit of effort in to make Firefox play nicer with i3. Thankfully, this didn’t take much effort at all, for a drastic improvement in quality of life.

My first port of call was actually to disable Firefox’s native tabs. i3 has built-in tabbed and stacking layouts which would effectively take care of tabbing for me and get me the seamless integration into my window management that I wanted originally. I couldn’t find a way to do this natively in Firefox’s settings/preferences, so I ended up installing the One Tab Per Window extension. This basically just redirects any new tabs into a new window; and if I’ve got Firefox’s i3 container set to “tabbed”, the new window pops up as a new tab and I can use my i3 keybindings to manipulate the window. Bliss!

I honestly could have stopped there as my mission was accomplished in a single swoop. However, now I had some wasted screen space taken up by the now-useless tab bar in Firefox’s UI, and I wanted to reclaim it. This was, again, very straightforward and enabled by the userChrome.css feature. There’s a decent tutorial on HowToGeek about getting started with this if you’re interested; it’s what I used.

I enabled userChrome.css via preferences and then did a quick search on how to hide the tab bar since it was no longer needed. I found it pretty quickly online:

#TabsToolbar, #back-button, #forward-button, #star-button{
  display: none;
}

I also took the opportunity to disable a few buttons I didn’t need, since I use keyboard shortcuts to manage going backwards and forwards. Et voilá! A sleek and fairly minimal UI meaning that the web page has a lot of screen space for display, and now I can manipulate the tabs and windows via my Window Manager smoothly.

I’ve had this Firefox setup for around 6 weeks now; so how’s it been? Honestly it’s been pretty great. It’s not totally without some minor quirks but compared to the ball of frustration I was experiencing before this is wonderful.

I can now navigate tabs easily using my i3 keybindings for moving between windows. This sounds superficial but actually I’ve found this much more ergonomic both mentally and physically. There’s no mental context switch where I need to remember different keybindings; i3 just takes care of it. And because my i3 bindings are Vim keys they’re fairly physically ergonomic as well.

It’s also pretty easy now to quickly split a “tab” off into a new window using those same keybindings; I just move it along outside of the bounds of the i3 tabbed container and off to the side and i3 creates a split with the group of Firefox tabs on one side and my new window on the other. Reintegrating is as easy as moving it back into the tabbed container using the same keybindings.

An additional win is that I can now send individual “tabs” to workspaces very quickly. I make heavy use of i3 workspaces, so if I’m doing some work in Firefox and then want to dedicate an entire i3 workspace to a particular task/workflow which requires a new tiling setup I can now do that very quickly and much more efficiently than before. I didn’t even realise that I wanted this, but I’d really struggle to do things differently now.

It’s difficult to overstate just how much nicer browsing the web is via the bonus screen real-estate. If you ever want to experience a moment where you realise how much screen space is wasted by most browsers, just download Surf and use it for a few minutes. There’s likely a pre-compiled binary in your repos which is suitable for a taster. Other browsers just feel… cramped. Eventually I may investigate trying to hide or toggle the Firefox URL/preferences button interface elements to reclaim more space. For now I’m satisfied.

The only noticeable drawback I’ve encountered to my tweaks is that if I’m sharing my screen with a client, I need to share the entire screen now. Previously I could just share a window and then share a pre-curated Firefox window containing all the tabs I need. It hasn’t impacted me much, as I can just do the same with a workspace, but if I need to swap back to the call window to check the chat then I risk an infinity mirror.

So that’s it. I made a few very minor tweaks to Firefox using an extension and userChrome.css and made it integrate into my workflow much better. I also use Tridactyl to add some better Vim-style keyboard controls. Together, these all make for a much nicer experience.

2023 Winter Solstice Update

2023-12-28

This has been a weird half of the year. It’s been dominated by the fact that we’re very likely going to be parents in 2024, which is amazing and terrifying at the same time. Mixed into that are the regular challenges of ADHD medication and the British medical system, increasingly complex social demands on my time, and disruptions such as COVID infections.

There’s been some low moments this half a year, but there have been significant high points too. The next time I write a Solstice update, I may very well be doing it from a vantage point of Fatherhood…

Key Events

2023-07-02 – My partner, A, and I see another positive pregnancy test
2023-09-01 – I begin driving lessons
2023-10-06 – I test positive for COVID
2023-10-21 – A and I legally marry
2023-10-25 – We see a healthy 20-week fetus at a scan, indicating that it’s likely we will have a child in March
2023-10-26 – We fully pay off our mortgage on our house

Hobbies

Exercise, Hiking, and Archery

I’ve collapsed these into one heading because there’s really not too much to report here.

I’ve been focusing more on my strength training than my running and it really shows. I haven’t run a 10K in a while, which has only compounded since my COVID infection. In terms of strength work, most of my effort has been focused on making gains on pull-ups. I’m progressing there but it’s went from linear to jagged, and I’m once-again plateauing around 3x8 reps on a purple assistance band.

My plans going forward are to try and emphasise weight loss a little. I have a mostly healthy relationship with my weight but I feel that’s one of the factors holding me back on making gains in pull-ups. Parallel to that, I hope to begin integrating Crow Stands into my weekly routine to practice balance and begin building up my shoulders for assistance muscles.

In terms of running, my immediate goals are to consistently run a 7.5K run once per week, with a goal of doing at least one more 10K before the baby gets here and my routine totally goes out of the window entirely.

We’ve barely done any hikes, unfortunately. We did a few in the summer and early autumn but we’ve had major disruptions with family emergencies, the pregnancy, and my COVID infection getting in the way. One of my personal highlights was dragging Rhiaro across Weardale on a 23.6Km straight-line route which comprised of some of my favourite bits of other hikes I’ve done in the area. Rhiaro is an experienced hiker but I was pleased that I managed to plan/research my own route which kept someone safe and dry across an enjoyable day.

For archery, I spent a good few weekends down the range with my hired bow in the summer but after my COVID infection I haven’t been able to get down. It’s winter and thus the indoor season is in full swing, but sadly the indoor sessions don’t quite gel with my schedule. I have assembled my beginner’s kit and am awaiting on my schedule lining up with a Coach’s so I can get assistance doing the final assembly and getting my draw length measured. Once I have that I can grab some cheap beginners’ arrows and start heading down to the shooting range on clear days.

Esperanto

I’m sure how much longer “Esperanto” will be a heading here, as it continues to settle into my life as a mainstay rather than being a hobby. I may replace this section title with “Languages”, maybe.

I continue to journal in Esperanto and have written a few odd lines of poetry here and there, but nothing to report or post. I continue to talk to my Esperanto pal M, and I plan for my child to be bilingual with Esperanto. We’ll be taking the “one parent one language” approach to teaching them language but Esperanto will likely be playing second fiddle to English in their life. That’s fine, as my goal is to simply give them a leg up on learning languages. If they choose to cease learning Esperanto when they’re old enough to tell me that in their own words (in any language!) then that’s fine and I’ll have done my job.

Creative Writing

I’ve worked on a few creative writing projects but haven’t had a lot of time for them around my work and other things. so there’s nothing really to report here, sadly.

Logs

Albums

Lots of old faves in here with a few notable new entries. Via some internet commentors I discovered Casiopea and gave the album Mint Jams a listen. I enjoyed it enough to grab a few albums from them but not enough to dive headfirst into their discography.

The only other notable theme is rediscovering my love of Black Metal. I got a hankering for listening to some and dredged up some old back-ups to listen to my old Dimmu Borgir and Venom albums. I really enjoyed myself and see this continuing into 2024 intermingled with some Pop-Punk and Electronic.

With Clifford Brown by Sarah Vaughan
Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane
Aqualung by Jethro Tull
Pastel Blues by Nina Simone
Exile On Main St. by The Rolling Stones
Mutter by Rammstein
Reise, Reise by Rammstein
Vicious Delicious by Infected Mushroom
Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull
Minstrel In The Gallery by Jethro Tull
Songs From The Wood by Jethro Tull
Heavy Horses by Jethro Tull
Somethin’ Else by Cannonball Adderley
Midian by Cradle Of Filth
Nymphetamine by Cradle Of Filth
Trøllabundin by Eivør Pálsdóttir
Americana by The Offspring
Mugzy’s Move by Royal Crown Revue
All I Was by Tremonti
So Long Astoria by The Ataris
House Of Gold And Bones Pt 1 by Stone Sour
Keep Your Silence by Cyferdyne
Coal Chamber by Coal Chamber
ANThology by Alient Ant Farm
Heart Full Of Wine by Angus & Julia Stone
I Put A Spell On You by Nina Simone
Pastel Blues by Nina Simone
Furiosity by Monster Truck
Asia by Asia
Thornography by Cradle Of Filth
S & M by Metallica
XIII by Mushroomhead
Splinter (Songs From A Broken Mind) by Gary Numan
Savage (Songs From A Broken World) by Gary Numan
Sings The Blues by Nina Simone
Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim by Jeremy Soule
Mint Jams by Casiopea
Make Up City by Casiopea
Casiopea by Casiopea
Cross Point by Casiopea
Photographs by Casiopea
Singing the Blues by B. B. King
Boston by Boston
Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace by The Offspring
Americana by The Offspring
Midian by Cradle Of Filth
Living In The Past by Jethro Tull
Duke Ellington & John Coltrane by Duke Ellington & John Coltrane
Mutter by Rammstein
Giant Steps by Johnn Coltrane
Pastel Blues by Nina Simone
Mezmerize by System Of A Down
Infest by Papa Roach
All I Was by Tremonti
Push The Beat For This Jam by Scooter
Jumping All Over The World – Whatever You Want by Scooter
Into The North by The Dreadnoughts
In Sorte Diaboli by Dimmu Borgir
Welcome To Hell by Venom
Black Metal by Venom
Disraeli Gears by Cream
Abrahadabra by Dimmu Borgir
Night Train by The Oscar Peterson Trio
Foreign Skies by The Dreadnoughts
Death Cult Armageddon by Dimmu Borgir
Lifa by Heilung
Drif by Heilung
Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia by Dimmu Borgir
At War With Satan by Venom
Blackout by Dropkick Murphys
The Warrior’s Code by Dropkick Murphys
The Meanest Of Times by Dropkick Murphys
Riot! by Paramore
Spiritual Black Dimensions by Dimmu Borgir
GUTS by Olivia Rodrigo
The End, So Far by Slipknot
The Gang’s All Here by Dropkick Murphys
Devil Came To Me by Dover
Stormblåst MMV by Dimmu Borgir
We Are Not Your Kind by Slipknot
Sing Loud, Sing Proud! by Dropkick Murphys
Into The North by The Dreadnoughts
Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky
Darkly, Darkly, Venus Aversa by Cradle Of Filth
XIII by Mushroomhead
The Path Of Totality by KoRn
Meteora by Linkin Park
American Idiot by Green Day
Enema Of The State by Blink 182
A Hangover You Don’t Deserve by Bowling For Soup
The Meanest Of Times by Dropkick Murphys
Soilbleed Redux by Grendel

Total Albums (unique): 93

Books

I didn’t read as much as I normally would, for a variety of reasons. Firstly my ADHD meds play merry havoc with my ability to read before bed so this affects how much I can physically read. This is a tough new reality for me, but one I’ve grown to just accept and soldier on the best I can. Secondly, my COVID infection disrupted my reading for a number of weeks and really ate into my reading time. I couldn’t focus on a book for ages during the active infection and immediately following it. Thankfully, I seem to be able to focus on them again. Next, my partner and I don’t read together much at the moment because we have separate bed times due to the pregnancy. Lastly, I finally started reading The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson; which are notably long!

After watching the movie with my partner, I decided to chew through A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. I missed these growing up as they were marketed to people a bit younger than I was, and surged in popularity just as I was knee-deep in The Wheel of Time. I really enjoyed them, with the exception that I thought the end was anticlimactic and not satisfying. Then I remembered that the author had literally warned me multiple times that the ending was not going to be satisfying, so I can’t really complain. The world it created was great and it left lots to the imagination. I will be reading them with our child when they’re ready.

Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive books were the other main feature of this half year of reading, primarily from around the end of September. I’d put off reading Stormlight for two reasons: the length of each individual book; and the file size of each ebook file. Brandon has clearly made a concerted effort to work with artists and the end result of each book is beautiful; however the file sizes are, frankly, ridiculous and take up a disproportionate amount of my Kindle’s memory. Luckily the copies I got are DRM-free, so I’m planning on creating “Lite” editions for personal use by removing the images and replacing the chapter decorations with plain text headers. Hopefully that will reduce the file size enough to keep on my Kindle safely!

I really enjoyed Stormlight, although Rhythm of War was a little bit of a slog. I’m not sure if that was a bit of “fantasy burnout” from chain-reading them, or whether it’s something to do with the book itself. Opinion on the internet seems to be that — while great — it isn’t the best of Brandon’s work, and that might be partially due to it being the first Cosmere book without his long-standing editor working on it. I listen to a lot of Brandon on Writing Excuses and I trust that whatever was wrong or off this time around should be addressed by the release of Stormlight 5. Whether that is learning to work best with his new editor, or something else. I’m looking forward to the next book and am currently going through his “Secret Project” entries so I’m all caught up on the Cosmere.

Notable mentions are Nod by Adrian Barnes and The Men Who Would Be King by Nicole LaPorte. The former is a literary fiction book marketed as a sci-fi book wherein all of a sudden, most people in the world can no longer sleep. I enjoyed the premise and mostly enjoyed the book, but it has since soured upon reflection as a bit misogynist in places. The Men Who Would Be King is a nonfiction book chronicling the rise and fall of the Dreamworks Hollywood studio through the lens of the three major players: Katzenberg, Geffen and Spielberg. It was genuinely riveting and I struggled putting it down at times.

The most disappointing book for me was Foundation by Isaac Asimov. To be clear, I think the book is brilliant but I didn’t click with its pacing or prose style very much and so it was a bit of a slog to read. This is sad since I try my best to enjoy as much as possible. Alas I am not going to be reading Asimov for a little going forward.

Never Deal With A Dragon by Robert N. Charrette
Endurance by Alfred Lansing
Star Wars: Darth Bane - Path of Destruction by Drew Karpyshyn
This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett
Star Wars: Darth Bane - Rule of Two by Drew Karpyshyn
New Suns: original Speculative Fiction by People of Colour by Nisi Shawl
Star Wars: Darth Bane - Dynasty of Evil by Drew Karpyshyn
The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket
The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket
The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket
Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal
Nod by Adrian Barnes
The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket
The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket
The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket
The Men Who Would Be King by Nicole LaPorte
The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket
The Slippery Slope by Lemony Snicket
The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket
A Darker Shade Of Magic by V. E. Schwab
The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket
The End by Lemony Snicket
Word Puppets by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Way Of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
Words Of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Edgedancer by Brandon Sanderson
Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson
Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson
Rhythm Of War by Brandon Sanderson
Yumi and The Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson

Total Books: 33

Currently Reading: The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson

Movies

This was a great half-year for movies for me. There was a decent mix of cosy nostalgia, junk food, and decent movies.

Highlights for me: Indiana Jones (I hadn’t seen them in a while and love a good classic adventure movie), Spirit (I had never seen it and it was surprisingly well written and engaging), Horns (a rewatch and a worthy one. Great movie.), Children of Men, Birdman, and finally a re-watch of my old B-movie staple Black Dynamite.

For low-lights: American Pie was not as funny as I remembered it being. I somehow felt compelled to watch the second and third ones though. The Hangover was similarly poor. Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World had a lot of promise but I feel it fell short. I loved the performances from the actors but I feel the script was a bit off, and (spoiler warning) I actually really resented Steve Carell’s character getting the girl in the end and thought that it cheapened the end of the movie a lot.

Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade
The Guernsey Literary and Potatoe Peel Pie Society
Almost Famous
The Great Outdoors
Mulan (2020)
A Series Of Unfortunate Events
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
Good Will Hunting
Hook
Evolution
American Pie
Horns
Men In Black
The Matrix
Men In Black II
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
The Animatrix
Four Lions
The Crow
A Bug’s Life
American Beauty
Blade
Logan
Blade II
Hellboy
American History X
X-Men
Billy Elliot
X-Men 2
Shrek 2
Moon
Children of Men
The Disaster Artist
Birdman
The Hangover
Little Miss Sunshine
Limitless
Project X
Toy Story
Toy Story 2
Monsters Inc.
Toy Story 3
Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World
Mrs. Doubtfire
American Pie 2
Fanboys
World’s Greatest Dad
One Hour Photo
American Pie 3: The Wedding
Antitrust
Inside Out
Corpse Bride
Gremlins
Black Dynamite
Mad Max: Fury Road
Gladiator
A Quiet Place
The Truman Show

Total Movies: 58

2023 Summer Solstice Update

2023-06-27

It’s a pleasure to report that I am writing this update from a much better place than I did the last one. 2023 has not only been mostly quiet, but it’s also been mostly positive with a few notable exceptions.

I did start titration for ADHD medication with mixed results; I am miles better during the day but I crash pretty hard during the evening which stops me doing some things I want to do.

At the time same, my partner has been told by medical professionals that she may have an autoimmune condition and we’ve been learning about that. She has lost some of the vision in her right eye, which is a scary telltale sign of Multiple Sclerosis.

Despite these challenges we are mostly feeling positive. We’ve been outside in nature a lot, really strengthened our relationship, and done a lot of healing from 2022. We’ve finally finished decorating a room in the house after dealing with some dependancy hell and some stressful decision-making, which has made us feel a lot more at home.

I hope that my next update continues this trend.

Key Events

2023-01 – I begin ADHD medication
2023-02 – my fiancée, A, starts to lose vision in her right eye
2023-03 – A starts to receive consultations around a potential autoimmune diagnosis pathway, the words “optic neuritis” and Multiple Sclerosis are mentioned

… and that’s really about it! Despite those being big scary things, it’s odd that we’ve only had two or three of them this year. Usually it’s around every three weeks. It’s meant that we’ve had time to catch our breath, but the trade-off is that 2023 has flown by so far, compared with the hellstorm that was 2022.

Hobbies

Fairly stable here with nothing too much to report except the new addition of Archery to the list of active hobbies.

Archery

Following the loss of our early pregnancy in December, my plans for 2023 were thrown up in the air. In order to give myself something to look forward to, I got in touch with both local Sailing and Archery clubs.

I’ve been sailing before (and even failed at owning a boat), but I’ve always wanted to try archery. The organiser of the beginner courses got straight back in touch with me and put me on the waiting list. While I did visit the local Sailing Club for an initial visit, I realised that I was sort of holding out hope for archery and decided to wait for that to come through since it would represent a schedule clash.

I eventually began the beginner’s course in May under some great tutelage, fell in love with the sport, and am pleased to say that I passed and have joined the Cleadon Archers as a member. I’ve not done any shooting in the month of June as it’s a little ambiguous as to whether my membership has been processed. This is because the membership year ticks over in July, but I had a verbal agreement to pay in June and it would be OK for me to go down once I had written confirmation that the membership was approved. I paid, but haven’t received written confirmation yet so I’ve avoided treading on toes.

I plan to shoot by myself or with one of the club coaches whenever they’re available and willing, until I get asked or prodded to join in with others. Cleadon Archers benefits from 24/7 access to their shooting range, and I plan to make good use of the facilities.

Creative Writing

Not too much movement on the Creative Writing front. I’ve worked on my outlines a lot but finding the energy and headspace to actually get some prose down is a little tough.

I’ve had some writing group sessions with my friend J, though, and we’re planning on sitting down and actually using the next one to write some prose when we get a moment.

Esperanto

What more is there to say at this point? Esperanto continues to be a daily part of my life. I have built a fairly decent IRL friendship with my Esperanto pen-pal, M, and have enjoyed speaking with her semi-regularly.

I journal in Esperanto daily, or near to daily, and I’ve read another Esperanto novel; La ŝtona urbo by Anna Löwenstein. It was really good! My reading was definitely rusty until I committed to reading it solidly for a day and was rewarded instantly with my brain picking up sentences faster, and with a great story. At over 300 pages, La ŝtona urbo represents my longest Esperanto reading to date. The trouble is… I’m not sure where to go next!

Exercise

Overall, a really good half year for exercise. My focus has shifted from running back towards strength training and I’m approaching each of my strength exercises with renewed vigour.

I won’t post my numbers this time, because I’m working out where I’m going with a few things. There are, however, a few things to note.

I’ve had to start keeping my push-ups at around 15 reps, rather than progressing these to about 20. If I go much past these, my left shoulder begins flaring up again. Further to this, I’ve also developed a knee injury in my right knee. I went for a run one morning and then followed it up with a short 7km hike, but then my leg gave way when I was scrambling up my stairs at home and it’s not been the same since. I’m monitoring it, before going to the GP if it refuses to improve.

My pull-ups are progressing very nicely. I opted for a wide-grip when I began retraining them, largely due to experiencing acute shoulder pain when attempting a regular grip. I’ve never done wide-grip before, but found it OK from August to December last year. Throughout the first half of 2023, I’ve really loved the wide-grip because I can actually feel my back working and my arms only take over for the second half of the movement. This has been a major achievement for me and I feel stronger and healthier. My physique has evened out somewhat but I’m still a little pec-heavy. I hope that by the time I can shed the assistance bands, my shoulders are in balance and are stronger/healthier than ever.

My runs have been mostly on maintenance mode while I devote energy — both mental and caloric — to progressing my strength work. This has suited me, however. It’s difficult to run a perfect 5K route where I’m located at the moment, but a 10K is pretty achievable as a single loop.

As a result of these factors my running routine has shifted from running a 5K and a 10K each week to a somewhat bi-weekly rhythm. In a given two week period I want to have ran at least one 10K but I don’t push myself to do it weekly. I usually do a shortish ~3.6K run on a Sunday and then do either a ~6.5K or a full 10K on a Wednesday.

I did discover that I love “trail running”, when I went for a run with my colleague D at a work meeting near Sheffield. We didn’t know the area so just ran along a known trail and then back when we ran out of time. I followed this up a while later with the longest run yet, down the cliffs from South Shields to Sunderland; a total of 14 kilometres. I was very pleased with this.

I’ve also started logging my runs using the wonderful Open Tracks on my phone. I’ll use that to keep track of how many kilometres I’m running on average, but won’t be posting any of my regular routes because they’re too close to home for me to comfortably share my location.

Hiking

We’ve had a really solid half a year hiking. We took a little time after losing the pregnancy, but eventually got back out to walking. Since then we’ve basically been out nearly every fortnight at the least, with some bonus walks thrown in.

We did our traditional set of “a week of walks” for each the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice and loved them both. During this summer week we achieved two firsts: opening with our longest ever 22km walk on Monday and then closing on the Saturday with the first time climbing a mountain together (The Cheviot) with our friend J. A great holiday.

Very recently, I’ve taken to logging the walks as GPX files, again via Open Tracks. In future updates I may reference them, and I’ve toyed with the idea of setting up a subdomain for logging the walks somehow.

Logs

Albums

A bit spotty in places but I managed to listen to 75 unique albums this half of the year. Anyone reading these logs will notice some staples reoccurring. As always, I made use of DeDupeList to generate the logs below, removing re-listens.

In terms of new listening, I ended my main foray into psychedelic rock with the amazing Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane, and somehow discovered Gary Numan really late. He’s a bit of a Tory, so I won’t pretend I’m a fan of the man himself but Savage was incredible and got me properly back into some industrial/electronic for a bit.

A definite trend of exploring Pop Punk emerged in the first half of the year. Other than owning American Idiot since my childhood, I’ve never really given Pop Punk a decent listen despite the fact that some of my university-era club anthems were obviously Pop Punk. I started with A Day To Remember, moved on to some Sum 41 and then The Offspring, Bowling For Soup, and finally Blink-182. Of these, I probably most seriously explored The Offspring as they’re just incredible. Blink’s earlier stuff didn’t always hit the mark for me but I enjoyed it. Bowling For Soup’s albums are all great but I feel had fewer “oh my gods” moments in than those by The Offspring. I need to go back and explore Sum 41’s catalogue more, as I really just stuck with the amazing All Killer, No Filler which was utterly delightful.

Spurred on by the Pop Punk stuff, I reminisced about my childhood when the British Pop Rock scene was dominated by Busted and McFly. I was a Busted fan, so dusted off an old hard drive with some Busted albums still on there and gave them a good listen. It was fun, but as an adult now I felt the lyrics were a little creepy at times.

Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane
The Blues and the Abstract Truth by Oliver Nelson
XIII by Mushroomhead
Keep Your Silence by Cyferdyne
Mezmerize by System Of A Down
Heart Full of Wine by Angus and Julia Stone
Take To The Skies by Enter Shikari
Fallen by Evanescence
The Poison by Bullet For My Valentine
Fever by Bullet For My Valentine
Save Rock And Roll by Fall Out Boy
Savage (Songs From A Broken World) by Gary Numan
What the F*ck is Wrong With You People by Combichrist
Furiosity by Monster Truck
Hoitovirhe by Turmion Kätilöt
Splinter (Songs From A Broken Mind) by Gary Numan
Duke Ellington and John Coltrane by Duke Ellington and John Coltrane
Soilbleed Redux by Grendel
Blue Train by John Coltrane
Intruder by Gary Numan
Bind, Torture, Kill by Suicide Commando
Pastel Blues by Nina Simone
Collision Course by Linkin Park and Jay Z
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles
Giant Steps by John Coltrane
Night Train by The Oscar Peterson Trio
Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis
Sketches Of Spain by Miles Davis
First Take by Roberta Flack
Riot! by Paramore
The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd
This Was by Jethro Tull
Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield
Bleed American by Jimmy Eat World
Drif by Heilung
Appeal To Reason by Rise Against
Reroute To Remain by In Flames
After Bathing At Baxter’s by Jefferson Airplane
Dookie by Green Day
Homesick by A Day To Remember
Attack Of The Killer B-Sides by A Day To Remember
What Separates Me From You by A Day To Remember
Something Real by Meg & Dia
Disraeli Gears by Cream
All Killer No Filler by Sum 41
Americana by The Offspring
Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull
A Hangover You Don’t Deserve by Bowling For Soup
Drunk Enough To Dance by Bowling For Soup
Conspiracy Of One by The Offspring
Portrait In Jazz by Bill Evans Trio
Busted by Busted
A Present For Everyone by Busted
Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace by The Offspring
The End So Far by Slipknot
Ellington At Newport by Duke Ellington
Infest by Papa Roach
Mugzy’s Move by Royal Crown Revue
All I Was by Tremonti
Smash by The Offspring
Cauterize by Tremonti
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of The Sith OST by John Williams
Enema Of The State by Blink-182
Ixnay On The Hombre by The Offspring
Splinter by The Offspring
Rise And Fall Rage And Grace by The Offspring
Days Go By by The Offspring
What The Fuck Is Wrong With You People by Combichrist
Reise Reise by Rammstein
Cheshire Cat by Blink-182
Dude Ranch by Blink-182
Take Off Your Pants And Jacket by Blink-182
Blink-182 by Blink-182
Bowling For Soup by Bowling For Soup
Rock On Honorable Ones!!! by Bowling For Soup

Total Albums (unique): 75

Books

My reading in this half of the year has been affected dramatically by the fact that my ADHD medication burns out when I finish work, and my brain is left a bit scooped-out. This means I struggle to read in the evenings. My partner and I have also slowed down our reading together, partly to put less pressure on our evenings and partly because she’s started doing more of her own reading.

This said, I’ve enjoyed this half of a year of books. I thoroughly enjoyed The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell, and absolutely drank up the Red Rising trilogy by Pierce Brown afterwards. I interspersed the two trilogies with The Kite Runner, as I never finished it when I was in school. It was OK, but a little anti-communist in places.

Legends and Lattes has left a lasting impression on me and I will forever be chasing that high of reading it. It was the perfect little novel to properly start the healing process from the miscarriage.

Reading what I term “corp books”, ie tie-in fiction, is somewhat of a guilty pleasure as you might be able to tell from the number of Star Wars novels I consume. When I discovered that Firefly novels existed I got very excited. The first one was a little meh, but apparently they get better so I might slot another one into rotation soon.

I dipped back into the world of The Witcher and mostly enjoyed Blood of Elves although not as much as the short story collections that came before it. It’s likely I’ll hold off on another Witcher book for a little while. I followed this with Skyward by Brandon Sanderson which was actually incredible. I really loved it. The follow-up books didn’t quite hit the spot for me in terms of the world or the plots, but Brandon’s prose and character work are really solid and I’m happy to commit to purchasing the final book when it is released.

A big shock for me was just how utterly bad The Dresden Files are. A lot of people wax lyrical about how amazing it is, and I’ve had a few of them on the backlog for a while. The first one got my hackles up due to Jim Butcher’s apparent misogyny and just the “look at how edgy and cool Harry Dresden is”. I needed to recover with some Becky Chambers as an antidote. I returned to Fool Moon, the second Dresden book, and was immediately disappointed again. More of the same misogyny, chauvinism, and teenage edginess. I don’t have nostalgia for the series as they passed me by, so I don’t feel I can continue. Reading some Goodreads reviews and some old Reddit threads about Butcher’s other works, it appears that it’s a problem with him. I’ve heard the Dresden books get better in terms of story-telling, but I can’t get into a series so laced with chauvinism.

I managed to get my hands on Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon and I thoroughly enjoyed it, however I feel there’s been a turning point in the Cosmere novels lately that has started to feel a little Marvel-Cinematic-Universey. I liked Tress and believe it stands on its own, but there’s clearly a lot going on Cosmere-wise in the novel and I feel I would’ve enjoyed it more had it been a little bit less dependant on that. This said, Brandon has done consistently amazing work re Cosmere things and given that this is a “bonus novel”, I can definitely forgive/defend it by saying it’s a piece designed to slot in on the periphery and start tying together some Cosmere threads.

After years of thinking about it, I delved back into Ilium/Olympos by Dan Simmons. I remember thoroughly loving this when I read it about ten years ago; sci-fi, Olympic Gods on Mars, Odysseus fighting Caliban! I enjoyed Ilium although something felt a little off this time. Halfway through Olympos I spotted it. Dan Simmons just totally lost the plot, quite literally. He did a u-turn on some clearly important plot elements just to have a moan about Muslims. Oh no. I pushed through and finally finished it (it took a while and put me off reading for a bit), and then did some research. Turns out that Dan Simmons devolved into a right-wing nutjob. All of a sudden the entire of Ilium/Olympos was re-contextualised; Simmons moaning about feminism, women, the lack of classical masculinity in the West, the rise of Islam etc. The second novel didn’t stand up as a novel, ruined the series, and then exposed a lot of the undercurrent. I’ll never read these again, and I think I’ll struggle to read Hyperion again to be honest. A shame. Go check out this video and its follow-up for a good discussion about the duology, and dip into the entire series if you want to follow Simmons’ downfall into right-wing weirdo.

I cured my Simmons-induced woes with some T. Kingfisher (always a good go-to, and I actually save her stuff for when I emotionally need it). A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking was utterly magical and I loved every second of it. World-building was great, characters were solid, plot was amazing, and the narrative voice was the same T. Kingfisher that I’ve come to love from their short fiction.

Recovering from the Simmons-slog, I wanted a few “cheat” books to clock up and dipped into my nostalgia archives. Some trashy Goosebumps built my momentum, but I surprised myself by falling deeply into Animorphs by K. A. Applegate. I’ve always enjoyed them, but never finished them as a kid. I read through a few kilos of them in quick succession and now have reached a point where I want to save them as palette-cleansers for between longer novels / series.

I took the plunge into reading my longest Esperanto-language novel to date, La ŝtona urbo by Anna Löwenstein. This was tough initially as my reading speed is much slower in my second language, but after a week or two I just fully committed myself and couldn’t put the thing down. It was definitely more literary than I had expected but it was a wonderful travelogue through Celtic Britain and Ancient Rome. As a pagan, I appreciated the exploration of different pagan theologies, and the character of Bivana was incredibly compelling. I really liked this book, and I may actually purchase another copy in English to see if I get anything else out of it.

I re-read American Gods by Neil Gaiman and actually appreciated it much more the second time around. I originally read it about five or six years ago, and I’m not sure if it’s that my attention span has gotten better or whether I knew what to expect but I could follow things and enjoy them much more this time.

Recently, I picked up New Spring by Robert Jordan as a quick “go-to” read. I’ve read the first ten books of The Wheel of Time and have always meant to read the prequel, and thought this was a safe toe-dip back into that incredible world. I didn’t realise I’d forgotten just how clear and consumable Jordan’s prose is, though. I inhaled the book, and it’s got me seriously considering revisiting the main series. I’ve been turned off giant series and doorstop novels by Simmons and my attempts at cracking Malazan, but I may commit to reading The Eye Of The World at a later date and see how it goes.

Finally, I’ve just finished Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks. It was always one of my favourite Culture novels but I’ve only ever read it through once. I started this just before my Solstice holiday, so it was interrupted a bit, but again I’d forgotten how clearly Banks writes and once I got a chance I devoured the rest of it in two evenings.

Going into the next half of the year, I started Never Deal With A Dragon, which is some corp-fantasy but oddly appropriate as it’s based in the world of Shadowrun. I got these books from a friend and I’ve actually read this one before, but I wanted to try it out as an alternative palette-cleanser.

With my partner, we’ve chewed through a few Terry Pratchett novels but not at our usual pace. We’ll continue to read through them when we can.

The Enemy of God by Bernard Cornwell
Excalibur by Bernard Cornwell
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Golden Son by Pierce Brown
Morning Star by Pierce Brown
Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree
Firefly: Big Damn Hero by James Lovegrove and Nancy Holder
Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett
Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski
Skyward by Brandon Sanderson
Starsight by Brandon Sanderson
Cytonic by Brandon Sanderson
Storm Front by Jim Butcher
A Psalm For The Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
Fool Moon by Jim Butcher
A Prayer For The Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers
To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
Tress Of The Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson
Ilium by Dan Simmons
The Maid by Nita Prose
Olympos by Dan Simmons
A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
The Ghost Next Door by R. L. Stine
Haunted Mask by R. L. Stine
Blade Of Secrets by Tricia Levenseller
The Encounter by K. A. Applegate
The Message by K. A. Applegate
Master Of Iron by Tricia Levenseller
Star Wars: Cloak Of Deception by James Luceno
The Shadow Of The Gods by John Gwynne
The Predator by K. A. Applegate
Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett
The Capture by K. A. Applegate
The Stranger by K. A. Applegate
The Alien by K. A. Applegate
The Secret by K. A. Applegate
The Android by K. A. Applegate
The Andalite’s Gift by K. A. Applegate
The Forgotten by K. A. Applegate
The Reaction by K. A. Applegate
The Change by K. A. Applegate
The Unknown by K. A. Applegate
The Escape by K. A. Applegate
The Warning by K. A. Applegate
La ŝtona urbo by Anna Löwenstein
The Underground by K. A. Applegate
The Decision by K. A. Applegate
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
New Spring by Robert Jordan
Use Of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

Total Books: 51

Currently Reading: Never Deal With A Dragon by Robert N. Charette (solo), Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett (with my partner)

Movies

I surprised myself here and it turns out that I’ve watched about double the number of movies than the last Solstice update! The main driver for this has been the fact that I mostly get Friday nights to myself now while my partner alternates between a Yoga night and then seeing her mother. I often use the time to make some fancy food and watch a movie.

Looking at this, there’s a good selection of trash. I needed a bit of mindlessness after the miscarriage and to calm down my brain during ADHD-medication crashes.

This said, there’s also some gems. The Menu was an absolute delight and a wonderful take on Class Consciousness. I could analyse that film forever. I also really enjoyed The Art of Self Defence as an illustrative take on how toxic masculinity perpetuates, and my partner and I were very pleasantly surprised by how good Palm Springs turned out to be. I also enjoyed showing my partner and our friend J The Handmaiden, which I think they liked.

Another high point for me was Slash Back. It felt like some classic 80s-era sci-fi (which I’m not really familiar with) but with some astonishing visuals of the far north. The young actors were all incredible, and the exploration of some First Nation identity was interesting to me as someone who has only read about some atrocities in books and blogs, but never viewed any art about it.

Some final high points were Fried Green Tomatoes and Mystic Pizza which were lovely little slices of life and character-driven stories which was a nice change of pace. Triangle of Sadness was great but I didn’t enjoy it as much as The Menu, although it definitely sits up there in the same echelon. I also finally watched Back To The Future and its sequels all the way through – previously these movies existed in a state of me permanently catching the first or final half hours.

In terms of sheer disappointment, Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel probably clinches it. It promised a lot in its trailer, and while the movie itself wasn’t awful, it just wasn’t exactly what I went in for and I came out feeling unfulfilled.

KickAss
KickAss 2
The Menu
Parasite
Riddick
Werewolves Within
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
The Art Of Self Defense
Behind The Curve
Napoleon Dynamite
Palm Springs
Chronicle
The Handmaiden
Fried Green Tomatoes
Filth
Star Wars: Rogue One
Slash Back
Alien
Underworld
Pandorum
Dawn of the Planet of The Apes
Aliens
Sweetheart
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Underworld: Evolution
Get Him To The Greek
Mystic Pizza
One Day
Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel
Dead Poets Society
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
Office Space
Triangle Of Sadness
Back To The Future
Back To The Future Part II
Back To The Future Part III
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
Zombieland
City Slickers

Total Movies: 40

I accidentally upgraded my phone

2023-03-11

I’ve just upgraded my smartphone. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. It’s — luckily — not massively impactful on my life or finances but a series of decisions and mistakes have lead to me upgrading a few years early.

I only ever swap out or upgrade technology when it becomes basically unusable for the majority of what I want to do with it. My tolerance for workarounds and putting up with things is quite high these days, and I value trying to eke out as much life from a device as possible before consigning it to the scrapheap and replacing it. When I do need to replace a device I generally have a few operating principles or values:

I always buy secondhand gear. It’s new to me, but it doesn’t need to be cutting edge. Generally I get smartphones and laptops off of eBay
I don’t pay more than around £80 to £100 for a new-to-me smartphone. I just don’t need the latest models. Generally I’m about 3–4 years behind the latest releases which is where I’m comfortable
I try to get my devices to last around 5 years a-piece (but this often doesn’t happen unfortunately)
I try to repair devices, or have them repaired, before I commit to buying a new one
For smartphones, I’ve run a de-googled phone since early 2018, so I’m generally only looking at phones which are on the list of LineageOS supported devices

Although the model isn’t important to me it does bear some relevance to the story. Since October 2018 I’ve had a OnePlus 5 which cost me about £80 on eBay. I Lineage’d it as soon as I got it and kept it relatively up to date for about 6 months before the auto-updater stopped working and it was on LineageOS 15 (Android 8) since then. I understood there were a few security risks, but the device barely contained any apps at all and there was no personal data on the device other than a few scrappy notes and some music files and podcasts. Maybe my contact list could’ve been valuable? I’d had in the back of my mind I should be thinking about upgrading to a later version of Android but life kept happening to me and it wasn’t a priority; the phone worked fine other than the battery being a little shonky and starting to show its age (but it still got me through an average day about town unless I went needed to use the GPS for long bouts).

That’s the context. Let’s run through the timeline of events.

My phone dies

During December 2022, my phone’s battery had ran down to a pretty low level and the screen starting glitching. It looked like a 90s hacker movie – the screen repeated itself vertically halfway down the screen, there were multicolour lines dancing around, and the screen distorted randomly. After connecting the phone to power I rebooted it and it all seemed fine and I forgot about it for a few weeks. Then it happened again during the worst day of my life as my partner and I were leaving the hospital after losing our early pregnancy to miscarriage. My phone was on 2% battery as it was late and, understandably, charging the device hadn’t been my top priority when I was hastily grabbing my gear to head to the hospital. As we were leaving, I looked down and the phone was so glitchy as to be unusable. I turned it off focused on just getting home and being with my partner.

When at home I stuck the device on charge and promptly forgot about it. Unfortunately the next morning, the screen was still glitching heavily. I managed to use it, barely, to message a few friends about our current situation and how I was simultaneously phoneless. I’m fine (even actively enjoy) going sans phone for a few days and I was glad of the lack of distraction and messaging while I began to process this latest round of grief. I picked the device up again later that day to see how it was faring, pressed a little too hard during a reboot and then the screen turned black. I could feel the phone operating and vibrating beneath as I entered my pattern on the lock screen, but nothing was happening on-screen.

As noted, I’m fine going without a phone for a little while, but I was confronted with some 2FA problems when I was trying to sort out a few things, so I was indeed prompted to reflect a little on the situation. My philosophy on possessions, tech, and most things can be summed up as “Minimalism. But with back-ups.” Two is one and one is none, after all. I did a little soul-searching and I decided on a strategy:

I’d try to get this phone repaired, because repair is better than replacement
I’d try to get a cheap secondhand device off of eBay, which could run LineageOS, and would serve as a back-up device for if/when my main device actually breaks down beyond repair

I had myself a strategy but unfortunately it was now Christmas Eve and the world turns off for a few days across this period. Good for grieving, not so good for seeking out a repair shop and ordering a new phone. It also didn’t remain my top priority for a few days.

Repair attempt and a backup device

I took my phone to a local repair shop and was told that the LCD screen likely needed replacing. By then, the phone had decided to “behave” again and was back to glitching visibly. Hey, at least it meant I could export my 2FA keys and import them onto a tablet for backup. The proprietor of the shop got on the phone to his supplier and managed to track down a replacement part. Parts and labour would cost £95 which is usually more than I’d spend on a new phone but it seemed agreeable to me given the chance it could increase the lifespan of my device for another few years at least and would contribute a little less e-waste to the environment.

I left him my contact number and a promise to keep the phone powered on so he could let me know when the LCD screen arrived. He said the repair would be a “same day job” so I was broadly optimistic that I could go a week or so with using my tablet for 2FA and keeping my phone in my desk drawer during work hours.

When I got home, I decided to act on the “backup” portion of the plan. I hunted on eBay for another OnePlus 5. I had decided that I liked the model enough and knew it took LineageOS so figured it’d be available for even cheaper than what I paid for in 2018. Sadly, I couldn’t find any in a reasonable state and price ratio but I did manage to nab its successor, the OnePlus 5T, for around £90. Delivery was estimated around New Year’s Eve, so was perfect. In fact it came a little early (2022-12-29). I installed LineageOS in the evening and everything looked pretty shiny.

Unfortunately things didn’t stay shiny for long.

Brick

My original plan was to swap my sim card into the 5T to see me through until my 5 could get repaired and then swap back to using this device. The 5T would then go into a box/drawer as a back-up device for then the 5 finally gave up its ghost, and would technically be a soft upgrade as a treat. It was a good plan and it was going smoothly until I got over-excited.

While I was downloading the LineageOS builds for the 5T, I noticed that there were now builds for LineageOS 19.1 on the OnePlus 5. I had a fully functional phone now and the screen on the OnePlus 5 was mostly behaving. So really it would be reasonable to slyly wipe/upgrade the OnePlus 5 while it awaited repair, and I’d have injected some new life into the device with its new OS and its repair?

Wrong. I followed the instructions on the LineageOS site, but when it came to upgrading the custom recovery from an old TWRP build to the latest Lineage Recovery image… it booted into a black screen with a pale LED light. I panicked and started messing around with the device via adb and fastboot. My phone still could boot into LineageOS 15 and was still ostensibly my phone, but I felt so confident and sure of myself that I wanted to upgrade. I read somewhere that running adb sideload would work, as occasionally recovery images indeed flashed to black screens.

The command didn’t work. It rebooted my phone into “sideload mode” and it was no longer recognised by adb. In addition to this, rebooting the device just brought it back into sideload mode with the black screen and the pale LED. At this point I could connect to the device via fastboot but if I ever booted into either the recovery or system partitions I was met with the same black screen and pale LED. Flashing newer versions of TWRP didn’t work.

I’d successfully bricked my first device. Go me.

USB port? What USB port?

I began the next day by returning to the phone repair shop. The proprietor recognised me straightaway and greeted me. I promptly informed him that I’d managed to brick the phone and thus wouldn’t be requiring a repair so he could cancel the order for the replacement screen. He thanked me for informing him and I went about my day.

I figured that I could order a new phone for a backup in about a month or so as it wasn’t urgent anymore. I had my new 5T and although my trusty phone was bricked, it had had a good run.

When I got home to sideload some albums onto the new device the 5T wasn’t being picked up by adb. Odd. I ensured that it had the USB permissions enabled and tried again with a new cable. Nothing. I also noticed that it wasn’t vibrating and informing me of charging when I plugged it in. Oh dear.

I ran upstairs to check that it could still charge via USB. Nope. Nothing. No cable or charging configuration coaxed any more power into the device. Luckily the device had a relatively full charge, but otherwise it was only a matter of time before I had another brick on my hands.

For some reason unbeknownst to me, I took to the internet rather than hitting up the phone repair shop again. Maybe I didn’t want to confuse the poor owner of the shop, or maybe I felt some weird sort of embarrassment about breaking two phones within a day of one another.

In any case, I managed to source and order a replacement USB board for the 5T and a repair kit (Torx screwdrivers, spudgers, etc.). I figured I may as well learn a new skill. I’m not a hardware or electronics person but luckily iFixit exists.

Until the kits arrived though, I needed to sort myself out a device.

Unbricked

At this point I was effectively left with two half-working phones. One had a naff screen and couldn’t boot into the system while the other couldn’t charge itself. Although I’m fine without phones, people were trying to get in touch with me about the miscarriage and I was starting to feel the pressure to be able to respond to them.

I took to the forums again for discovering how to unbrick my old phone. I figured that “where there is fastboot there is hope”. Luckily I came across a random post suggesting that flashing stock ROMs would help with the situation. I didn’t quite believe that it’d work, but I hunted down and downloaded the OnePlus 5 stock ROMs anyway. For anyone interested – there’s a system image and a recovery image for a total of two you need to rescue a bricked phone.

Flashing the recovery worked like a charm, and at about 2145 (way past my usual turn-off-the-computer time) I began flashing the stock ROM for the system. After a gut-wrenching 15 minutes the OnePlus logo finally booted into the pale blue of Google’s android EULA. On top of that, the screen was behaving itself. Score.

I turned off the phone and went to bed, too tired to do anything else right now.

LineageOS again, and screen failure… again

The next morning I re-flashed Lineage onto the 5 and got to doing my setup again. Thankfully the most tedious item is setting up my banking application and hooking up the CardDAV; oh except Signal decided that it didn’t like me and I’d tried too many sign-ons.

I also earmarked some pages of the web for a replacement LCD screen in case it went again and my repair of the 5T went OK. The repair kit still hadn’t arrived. The guy in the shop wasn’t actually taking much profit; the screen kit was listed as about £80 and the repair was leaps and bounds more complex than what I suspected I was capable of. Hopefully it’d go OK.

I got a whole two days or so out of my old phone before the screen gave out again. Damn. I slotted my SIM cards into the ailing 5T and aimed to only turn on the phone for a few minutes at a time to catch up on messages.

By the end of the day I was anxious about my ability to repair either phone and what would happen if there was an emergency and I was left without the ability to actually reach out and contact people. I trawled eBay again and found another OnePlus 5T and ordered it. It was cheaper but appeared to be in better condition than previous one.

Conclusion: Accidental upgrade (and a minor repair)

The new phone arrived within a few days and I went through the now familiar motions of flashing LineageOS and setting it up so as to be able to contact people. This phone, the second 5T, is currently my daily driver and has shown no signs of breaking so far.

The repair kit arrived on the same day as the replacement USB board. I waited a few weeks until I had the headspace and the will, and then opened up the broken 5T with a view to repair it. I opened this handy repair guide and watched the video through a few times to make sure I knew roughly where I was going.

It turns out that I needn’t have bought a replacement USB board. When opening the phone I discovered that the bottom case screws were missing, indicating that someone had been inside before. This was expected as it was a refurbished phone. When I opened the phone, though, I found that the ribbon cable connecting the USB port to the main board was already disconnected (for reference: disconnecting it is a key step in replacing the board).

I reconnected the cable and, lo and behold, the port worked again. The main problem as far as I can see is that whoever repaired the device previously, had either lost or harvested the shield which keeps the USB board ribbon cable in place. I imagine it’d shaken loose as a result of activity and I’d lost the ability to charge or exchange data.

Going forward, I may or may not seek a replacement shield. I’m not even sure what the correct term is for the part I’m looking for. I don’t know how generic they are or whether one needs a particular size/shape for the phone or main board. It is nice to know, though, that I can safely assemble and disassemble some electronics and diagnose a problem there.

Other than being out of pocket — and generally exhausted at mobile devices — I’ve pretty much landed where I originally wanted. The main difference is that my OnePlus 5 was sent to the recycling centre and I have accidentally upgraded to a OnePlus 5T for my daily driver. Its twin with the missing shielding is sitting in a drawer, ready and waiting to jump in if there’s a problem with my main device.

Hopefully I manage to get the full five years out of these next devices. Given my frustration with these and my move to limit the amount of computing I do on mobile devices, they may very well be the last smartphones I ever buy.

Experiences migrating to Hugo

2023-02-12

I started generating this site via a static site generator in 2021. Initially it was meant to be a short-term solution because my dynamic Indieweb software powering my site had fallen over and wasn’t generating forms properly, meaning I couldn’t post. I instantly fell in love, however, with the workflow of generating a static site and I will need some serious convincing to go back to a dynamic site.

The site generator I chose was Jekyll because it was what I knew from using it literally once or twice during my PhD for some project websites. After some wrestling with trying to get a site working without a theme (so I could use my own CSS and templates!) I fell into a comfy rhythm of updating it and adding features such as my long-desired ability to write posts and pages in multiple languages, courtesy of Anthony Granger’s blog on the subject.

Then some of the blogs I follow recommended Hugo. They touted speed as well as a few design features that I wrote off as not needing; my site is quite simple with only a few layers and very simple templating requirements. At the same time, however, I began wanting to drastically minimise the software on my system and automate my setup on new machines via dotfiles.Jekyll requires that I install Ruby — basically an entire programming suite complete with its own package manager — and then install Jekyll via the Ruby gems system. Not very minimal, considering that I only use Ruby for Jekyll.

In addition to this, during my exploration I discovered Hugo’s multilingual mode which looked promising. This meant that Hugo covered basically both of my requirements:

A cleaner install process / fewer dependencies. Getting my blog up and running on a new machine required setting up Ruby, then Jekyll. Sometimes there were dependency issues. Hugo is a single compiled binary available in most package managers and thus installable via apt.
Easier multi-lingual support. Despite the fact I was happy with my multilingual solution for Jekyll, it still required a fair bit of manual wiring and adding a new language would mean a lot of manual insertion of logic into templates.

The end result is that I’ve migrated this site to use Hugo rather than Jekyll. This post continues by reflecting on my experiences. There are plenty of blogs and tutorials which discuss migrating a site from Jekyll to Hugo. That’s not what I’m going to consider here. This is a reflective piece on how I found the experience and what I took away from it. I cover some technical details of Hugo and Jekyll as a by-product of the reflection, but this is not a tutorial or in-depth discussion of migrating particular features.

The migration experience

I began considering migrating this site sometime in 2022, but had a few false starts with Hugo. Despite Hugo’s documentation being fairly comprehensive, I found it very difficult to wrap my head around how to build the site that would work for my needs. This was basically due to how themes are presented in the Hugo documentation and quick-start guide.

Essentially, Hugo’s documentation is adamant that you need to install or build your own theme. It’s very easy to follow the instructions to set up a Hugo site when all you want to do is install a pre-built theme and write some content, or extend/build a complex theme of your own which is great for most people.

I found, however, that this made it very difficult to approach building a site in Hugo from a position of “I just want to apply my HTML templates to some content and hang some CSS off of it”. The resources seemed to be pushing me to build my own theme from scratch which can be a little daunting for me learning a new tool-chain and I got a little bit overwhelmed when Hugo was discussing index templates vs list templates vs single templates and then discussing look-up hierarchies all at once.

Like all confusing things, however, once I had approached it and digested pieces of the learning curve piecemeal – it all clicked into place gradually and my momentum built nicely. The key moment for me was figuring out that I didn’t actually need to develop my own theme to build a site and could just create the static and layouts folders to achieve what I needed.

I’m pretty happy now that — unless something major comes along in the next few years or Hugo disappears from the Debian/Devuan repos — I’ll be sticking with Hugo for some time for my personal site and will likely be using it to build other sites in the future when a static site is appropriate.

Things I adore from Hugo

The first thing I liked when starting up a Hugo site was the folder structure; it’s so nice and tidy. One of my grumbles with Jekyll was that, while it is “blog aware”, page content lives at the same level as configuration files. Post live in the _posts folder but it felt a little messy to have markdown files representing pages at the same level as my site configuration files and other types of static content such as CSS. Layouts lived in _layouts which was nice, but the _includes directory was a sibling which meant that the root folder had two different locations to deal with template files!

In Hugo, all of my content lives in the content folder, static files live in static, and all of my layouts and templates live under layouts in an appropriate directory structure. I also love that the i18n folder exists for use with multi-lingual content. This leaves a single configuration file at root. Perfect!

Related to this is the typologies or sections feature. I really like that I can just create different folders under content and this is reflected not only in the URL structure of the generated site, but the different types of content/sections can use different templates when required. I can foresee see this being very useful in the future if I ever want to develop a static site with a more complex structure than my personal site.

As a direct result of the sections/typologies feature, I’ve found that there’s less ongoing manual wiring with Hugo as compared to Jekyll. The initial setup is indeed tougher and I actually struggled with the concept of ’list’ and ‘single’ pages initially because of Hugo’s assumptions that you probably want to generate these type of pages for each type of content. This isn’t to say that the assumption is wrong, but I had to manually disable this to get the effects I wanted. Once this initial setup was done, though, there is far less redundancy in my Hugo content files. In Jekyll I had to specify which layout each page or post was using. In Hugo, this is assumed automatically from the section name and looking up the corresponding single template. Bliss. I’m given to understand that the option to manually specify a layout on a piece of content is there, though, for edge cases.

This lack of manual wiring for everything carried through when I enabled multilingual mode. After some initial setup to ensure that I could organise my folder structure to my preferences, I found Hugo’s multilingual mode to be intuitive and fun. There are multiple ways to organise content in multilingual mode and my preferred way was a quick configuration line away. This means that I have a folder per language under my content directory, with translated content having a shared filename and language-specific content only requiring that I name it something unique.

The convenience didn’t stop there, though. Whereas in Jekyll I had to run queries in my templates to pull out language-specific content based on the current page language – with Hugo it automatically applied the language as a sort of context and it only pulled out the menu items or list of posts for the current language without any additional logic in templates. Translating strings was a breeze using the i18n folder, intuitive template directives, and a simple YAML file per language. When it came to generating RSS/Atom/JSON feeds for each language it turned out that there was a simple command to retrieve the relative link for these files based on the current language context. Sheer brilliance.

There is only one grumble I have with Hugo’s multilingual mode. I want much more fine-grained control over how the URL paths for various content types are rendered under multi-lingual mode. Hugo automatically produces a mirror of my URL paths underneath a language code for every site language that isn’t the default. For me this means that everything in Esperanto lives under /eo/. This is fine and actually the behaviour I want for pages and feeds. For posts, though, I sort of want them all to live under the same /YYYY/MM/DD/{slug} path regardless of language. This is related to how I view post content as its own thing, and how I have two separate streams of posts for each language which may or not be translated back and forth.

This said, I think it’s a fair trade-off. Hugo’s multilingual mode covers literally all of my other needs and setting up translations for content requires much less work than achieving the similar effect in Jekyll. I was previously needing to embed logic in templates to check for specific languages, whereas now I just include a single template directive to reference a piece of content and then Hugo’s folder structure takes care of the rest. Much nicer.

Menus was another major convenience. In Jekyll, Menus are not implemented as a specific feature and it’s left up to the template designer. This is, in some ways, fine. It requires less wiring at the content level. In Hugo, I was able to add specific pieces of content to various menus (and I had a choice as to how to do it!) and with specific weights. I could then directly reference my menus in my templates in order to generate them on pages quickly without needing to do any querying or sorting at the template level. This was a very nice touch.

Another quality of life feature was the Partials and Shortcodes features. For me, these weren’t as mind-blowing as I’d heard some bloggers/vloggers make out, but perhaps that’s because I already have a history of building reusable snippets of templates from my days using Twig in PHP/Symfony and from Liquid when I built the site in Jekyll. For me, the quality of life feature came from the fact that Partials and Shortcodes have distinct and separate use-cases.

Partials are more like the classic include directives from other templating systems. You write some reusable HTML/XML/etc and then can use these within your templates; this keeps your template logic relatively clean and modular as well as making your Partials reusable. Shortcodes operate in basically the same way, but are explicitly designed to be included in your content files. This is a nice separation of concerns and avoids mixing up templates related to the page-templates as opposed to structures which are used to render content. Making this even more useful is the fact that — when I’m including a shortcode — I can specify whether the resulting content is pre-rendered HTML or is markdown content that requires processing. The result is that I can include my blogroll as some simple markdown and include it on every translation of the Links page without repetition, and also create a shortcode to generate a HTML table of contents for posts which I can include whenever I need it rather than having complex logic at the template level.

Things I miss from Jekyll

Despite the fact that I’ve found Hugo caters to all my needs and works in a way that my brain prefers, I do still miss some of the elements of Jekyll.

The main thing I miss is the way that drafts work. To my knowledge, the draft status of a piece of Hugo content is assigned in the content file. That is, I can include draft: true in the header to prevent a piece of content being rendered accidentally. In Jekyll, there was a dedicated _drafts folder which wouldn’t render unless a specific directive was given to the built-in server. I prefer this for the simple reason that I often have multiple drafts going on at once and it’s much easier to have them live in a single folder rather than having to manage the draft status in content files. There may be a way to change this behaviour or duplicate the old Jekyll-style, but I haven’t looked into it. As it is, I find it a little more difficult to keep track of drafts at the moment but I imagine I’ll get used to it.

The other thing I miss is the templating language, or specifically the control logic built into it. As noted earlier, Jekyll uses the Liquid templating language which was somewhat familiar to me coming from a PHP/Symfony/Twig templating background. I am all for migrating and learning templating languages but, to me, I found the Go Templating language to be a little unintuitive at times when I needed to e.g. loop over the results of something. I also found it a bit odd that I couldn’t access the page variables from inside a loop; everything was set at the loop scope with no way to reference the previous or surrounding content context. This meant that I needed to assign a variable outside the loop to enable my language menu. Maybe that’s a technically better way of doing things, or requires less memory, but I found it a bit different and jarring at first. I imagine I’ll get used to this though.

Summary

I migrated the back-end of this site from Jekyll to Hugo, learned a lot from the process and found I broadly prefer the Hugo way of doing things. My site is so simple, and Hugo is so fast, that it generates before I can blink but the main benefit is in quality of life in organising content and maintaining the site templates. I never have to repeat myself, everything is clean, and all of my needs are catered for by a single binary I can install from a single apt command without adding an entire tool-chain of bloat to my system.

This has ultimately made this site more portable, easier to maintain, and more pleasurable to write while allowing me to tinker and learn some new paradigms and skills. I look forward to many years with Hugo.

I'm done with tablets

2023-01-13

I’ve had an on-and-off relationship with tablets for a little while now. I got my first tablet in 2012 which was an Asus Transformer Pad TF300T. I used it during the summer for watching Netflix, with the rationale that it had less power consumption that my laptop, and then used it for about half a semester at university to take notes on. After that my laptop supplanted it again for most tasks, although it saw some use for watching movies during bus rides and it was perfect for reading comics via an app.

Eventually, the battery life got pretty shocking even with the keyboard dock (which I wasn’t using) and the final nail in its coffin was that it was set upon by a plague of ghost touches on the screen, which wrecked even the comic-reading use-case I was keeping it around for. I can’t remember when I actually threw it out, but it was somewhere around the 2016 or 2017 mark.

In 2019 I eventually bought a new tablet, the Google Pixel C. Unlike my first tablet it was second-hand off of eBay although it came in great condition. I also opted not to get the keyboard for it, and I installed LineageOS because I had a very clear use-case in mind for it – comics and the newspaper. At the time I’d just taken out a subscription to the digital edition of The Morning Star — which is just about the only paper I find it worth reading in the UK atm — and didn’t want to load up a laptop to read it in the morning before work. The tablet did the beautifully and the ability to read comics again was a nice treat as well.

That tablet saw good use for about 6 months before I reverted back to my laptop for reading the paper in the morning (fetching the paper on a tablet was pretty rough due to editing bits of URLs via the onscreen keyboard), although I still brought it out for comics fairly regularly. Although since about halfway through 2020, it’s basically just sat on my desk or in a drawer.

In December 2022, my trusty smartphone which I’d had since 2018 died a death and began a saga of replacements which has resulted in me being fairly disenchanted with mobile devices in general. The tablet has since decided to play its part in cementing that. In January 2023 I was fiddling with installing LineageOS on my replacement devices and had to boot up the tablet for acting as a backup OTP device so that if my phone ever decided not to work again, I could just fire up the tablet. Everything worked fine, but as I was using it I realised something. I hadn’t bothered to use the tablet for at least a year. There was no remaining use-case I had that isn’t better served by either my phone or my laptop. Since migrating to a tiling window manager and minimalist, keyboard-driven, utilities I now tend to read the paper or comics on my laptop (via zathura).

I decided that since it was laying forgotten in a drawer it would be better served being someone else’s tablet. The battery life was still great and it was functional so I could pass it on via eBay; I would even give people the option of a reset LineageOS install or flashing the stock Google ROM for an extra few quid to account for the labour. I first asked friends and family, and my brother-in-law offered to take it off my hands if I flashed the stock ROM. We agreed a price (actually a charity donation to The Patchwork Project, go donate to them) and I navigated the hellscape that was Google’s stock ROM collection page and downloaded the appropriate images to flash.

It was at that point that the Pixel C decided it had had enough of life, and promptly refused to register any touches on the touchscreen at all. That’s not a good look for a device which is reliant on touch interactions to function. I tried rebooting the device umpteen times, but to no avail. There is also no real reason why the screen would decide it isn’t working now of all times. I’ve never dropped it and it’s literally been laid flat in a drawer for months.

I’ve given it the ol’ college try in attempting to source replacement parts for the device so that my brother-in-law can still get a tablet I promised him. But unfortunately I’ve been incredibly unsuccessful. Everywhere I look there are no replacement screens available, or even listed, for the device. It’s all the Pixel phones. This means I cannot attempt a repair (something I’m not totally confident about anyway despite the presence of a good quality iFixit tutorial).

So I’ve decided I’m done with tablets. Ideally I’d be done with mobile devices in their entirety but I have a feeling my smartphone isn’t going anywhere. I’m definitely not going to be getting a replacement since I don’t enjoy flashing ROMs very much and mobile devices are broadly hostile to repairs and upgrades (with notable exceptions). Further to this, pretty much every use-case I have for the tablet is better served by my laptop and window manager with some input from my smartphone:

Browsing the web; I can drive Firefox via the keyboard and I’m a lot less clumsy with the mouse when I do need it than I am poking the tablet
Reading; my e-reader is designed for that in the case of books. In the case of blogs, I subscribe to them using my RSS reader and it’s in the terminal so I can control the typography and navigate via the keyboard
Watching movies and TV; my laptop is much better at this. I can connect a nice set of headphones and browse my library from the external hard drive via nnn and have things play in mpv which I can control via the keyboard
Watching other video on the web; I have mpv wired into my RSS reader so I can watch video from YouTube as well as a variety of other sources such as Reddit or TikTok without any daft apps
Comics and documents; As noted, zathura handles most of what I throw at it. Whether it’s PDFs for scientific things or comics for enjoyment. It sometimes struggles with a few comics files, but I have a spare CBR reader installed for those cases
Messaging; I can do most of my messaging via my laptop, although I despise the Signal desktop client. This is something the phone excels in, but not the tablet
2FA; again this is one area where the smartphone reigns at the moment although I am investigating getting 2FA wired into pass via pass-otp to reduce reliance on swapping between devices. Occasionally someone still sends me a stupid SMS to authenticate, however

Further to this there is the simple fact that mobile devices and mobile operating systems are very simply not geared towards production. I actually occasionally enjoy doing some creative writing via my phone with Markor as an editor, but that’s awkward on the tablet. The affordances of the device and the way the operating system works is inherently designed for consumption, with the occasional affordance for administration tasks (e.g. moving money around bank accounts). I’m fine with this (I don’t want to write code on my Kindle, for example) but it falls down on a tablet which has a layout designed for smaller devices and makes even trivial text input relatively difficult.

So I’m done. No more tablets for me and also a promise to try and wean myself off of mobile devices in general. The fact that I can’t repair the device easily and that both devices I’ve owned have broken in similar ways despite largely living in drawers is enough to put me off another tablet device. That my tablets have spent most of their lives in drawers at all is an indicator that they don’t really serve a purpose in my life. Goodbye tablets.

Keeping it local

2023-01-04

I’m writing this on a machine with no wifi, because my broadband connection fell down about an hour ago and my service providers are not picking up the phone. I can tether using my phone’s data connection, but that’s only got about 2GB of allowance so I try to preserve it so that it doesn’t get eaten up automatically by data-hungry daemons such as Nextcloud. Besides, the majority of my computing takes place offline these days anyway.

This post explores the ways I’ve reduced my reliance on an active internet connection to get my daily computing done (both work and play) as well as the areas I’ve still got some work to do.

Table of Contents

Projects and Work

Despite the growing integration of The Cloud™ in professional and personal work, I have managed to build a fairly robust system of getting things done using local tools and local files.

I don’t do much work at all on my smartphone; it’s largely for web browsing and listening to audio while moving about. The one exception is that it sometimes functions as a better calendar viewer than anything I’ve been able to achieve on the desktop!

Personal organisation and management

I’m really happy that I’ve got pretty much all of my personal organisation and management tools set up to run locally. The one glaring exception to all this my work calendar, which sadly I do need to check via Google Calendar in a browser or via an iCal feed in a phone app.

For personal information management, I have an entire folder of plaintext that I treat as a plaintext planner. It’s mostly markdown files with a few .txt and .csv files thrown in for good measure. I wrote an entire post on it, which is a much better overview of how I use it than what I could produce in summary here.

The other main area of my life I manage locally is passwords. I’ve never used an externally hosted password management service such as LastPass and it appears that I am lucky. I manage my passwords using some CLI software called pass. It effectively allows me to create/remove/modify passwords stored locally and encrypt them using my PGP key. The CLI can read the password directly into my clipboard so I can enter it quickly and allows me to store some other information in the same file providing I don’t store it on the first line. It even has built-in git support, so I keep an offline backup on a Gitlab repo (the passwords are encrypted but the repo is still private) and there is actually an Android application. I don’t need to use passwords for logging into much on mobile devices, but I keep the app around because it pays to have another local copy of the repo somewhere just in case.

As noted, the main glaringly obvious hole in my locally-hosted paradise is that of my work calendar. My work calendar is hosted by Google Calendar and is pretty hefty, with some recurring events from 2018 still being used well into 2022 and showing no signs of stopping in 2023. Unfortunately it’s common practice for people to invite me to calls / meetings later in the same day. This means that if I want an offline solution, I need regular syncing. I tried several solutions including using the weighty graphical tool gnome-calendar, and even writing my own python script to download and parse the private .ical feed from Google and present relevant details back to me in the terminal. Unfortunately the iCal file is too large for a script to parse quickly and, as noted, there are events in there that actually begin in 2018 and recur regularly. This means it’s difficult to automatically trim-down the file for use locally. I am still holding out hope for a CLI to iCal feeds or even just Google Calendar, but I do not have the skill to write it. The best solution I have come up with thusfar is to either occasionally view my calendar in the browser and also add it to my phone’s calendar so that I can get notified of new events if I’m away from the machine (ie making lunch early, or taking a break from the screen to read a book on the sofa). Please get in touch with your solutions if you’ve made more progress than I!

One other piece of personal organisation that I struggle to keep fully offline is my contacts. I generally manage these on my phone with the help of my Nextcloud instance and Dav×5. It does mean that at any given time there are at least three copies of contacts on local devices, but they’re not immediately local to my main desktop/laptop machines. This isn’t a priority for me at the moment but is something that flitters across my mind occasionally.

Writing

I write a lot. Thankfully, I enjoy writing. Historically, I’ve done a lot of different types of writing, but my toolkit generally remains the same. Most projects get a git repository which remains local to my machine and is backed up on a git instance such as Gitlab.

I have separate project folders for academic writing and my creative writing (when I say this I mean fiction, although I will concede that one can produce creative nonfiction!). It’s very rare that I need a dedicated project folder outside of these for writing projects although it does happen. One such case was my PhD thesis and it was separated out due to the amount of non-text assets it contained, which inflated the size of the repo considerably. In most cases, the writing project gets its own subfolder under the academic or creative writing folders. I generally write using Markdown these days although there are a few times I dip back into LaTeX for academia. In these folders I use .gitignore to ignore an /out folder, which allows me to use Pandoc to produce HTML or PDF output in that directory without committing the outputted files. This means I can produce finished publication-ready files in the same repository but avoids mixing non-source and source files in the commit history. Occasionally I’ll need to output to DOCX for sharing with the MS-Word-obsessed folks in the world of academia.

My blog is a form of writing so I’ll write about it here. That’s also managed using its own git repository. The blog is a static site which means pages and posts are Markdown files, and then I have some HTML and CSS templates (no Javascript!). The site is then compiled into the final HTML pages locally and then uploaded to the server when ready via SFTP. At the time of writing, the tool used to compile the site is Jekyll, although this may change in the future.

When I need to write documents for my day job I am generally writing proposals, research, summaries or reports. Unfortunately these often need to be done via some proprietary cloud software (Google Docs). These are more difficult to keep and produce locally, but if I am writing the first version of a report or document that generally means I can produce it in markdown on my machine. These reports generally live inside the appropriate “workbook” markdown file inside of my planner. I’ve then got an extension for Google Docs which converts the markdown to formatted text.

Programming and Data Work

I also do a bit of programming and some data work in both my day job and in my personal life. The programming isn’t particularly intense and usually consists of me writing bash scripts or python CLI tools to make some jobs in my life a little easier. For these, the standard “local git repo with online backup” model applies. My scripts are all in a single repo, whereas some tools which others may find interesting are separated out into their own project folder e.g. my Python implementation of todo.sh which has additional git features built in. For other work such as authoring schemas, or interacting with JSON data, I use commandline tools and text editors to get the job done inside the appropriate project repo, which is a local version of a git repo generally stored on a collaborator’s or my company’s github page.

For some tasks I need to run some analysis notebooks which were created using Google’s non-free fork of Jupyter notebooks known as Colab (I won’t link to this as it’s not FLOSS). If the dataset I’m working with is more than my little laptop can handle, I have to use the hosted Colab version out of Google Drive. If the dataset is more reasonable, I have Jupyter notebooks installed locally and, thankfully, most of our notebooks are available in git repos as .ipynb files. It’s still using a web browser but if my internet goes kaput it means that I can still get the work done.

For some personal organisation such as household finances and such, I use some plaintext data files in CSV or YAML format and interact with these using scripts or text editors depending on what is most appropriate for the context.

Email

I keep personal emails on my laptop machines. This is a welcome side-effect of the fact that I started transitioning to a more keyboard-and-terminal oriented workflow during 2021 and 2022. Part of this transition was swapping out Thunderbird for neomutt where possible and I made the setup a lot easier by using Luke Smith’s mutt-wizard. mutt-wizard not only sets up neomutt and points it to your IMAP or POP accounts, but also sets up your email to use isync (note, the binary is called mbsync while the project is called isync). isync does the job of fetching my mail from the server while I use neomutt to read/write mail. I believe the sending of mail is also handled by a dedicated program, msmtp.

mutt-wizard was a revelation and made setting up this a lot easier, especially as I need to have multiple accounts configured. The only thing it’s lacking is a way to filter mail into various subfolders, but I’m working on that.

For my work email, it’s hosted via GMail which is no problem for neomutt and mutt-wizard but I receive a metric tonne of email every day from various sources and I simply couldn’t process it without a strong and flexible filtering system. Unfortunately this is one area I’ve had to concede to GUI apps (Thunderbird) and keeping the email on the server for now.

Entertainment and Media

Music

So, primarily, I don’t subscribe to any streaming services for music. No spotify for me. I don’t like the weird neo-feudal attitude to streaming as it stops you owning anything and locks it behind paywalls. Right, rant out of the way; how do I listen to music?

Basically, the exact same way I’ve listened to it for about 16 years. I have a library of music files on my laptop(s) which are organsied via Artist/Album and then played through a music player either on my laptops or on my portable device. On my laptops this was iTunes when I was 14, then when I discovered GNU/Linux this was historically Rhythmbox but now I use mpd with ncmpcpp as a client. To listen to music on the move, such as walking through town or going for a run, I sideload the files onto my phone via USB. I’ve used a lot of music apps over the years but have recently landed on using VLC.

Most of my music library (around 80-90%) comes from CDs that I purchased between the ages of 14 and 20 or borrowed from friends. I originally ripped them via iTunes or later via ripperX on GNU/Linux. The files have very simply followed me around ever since. I had a brief flirtation with Google Play Music back during my fall to the dark side and when it allowed you to upload tracks and sync/pin them across devices, but that relationship ended when I got anxious about not owning my music collection and I retrieved my music collection back to my local devices (I later found that I’d also backed it up). I also did some pruning of my music collection at the height of my minimalism but, by-and-large, my music collection has remained intact since I began building it as a teenager with an iPod Classic.

I add to my library these days by exploring/discovering an artist and listening to a few of their tracks. This usually does involve an internet connection, admittedly. I’ve read a few places that the “album-era” is over and replaced by playlists and singles, but I grew up towards the end of the album era and I still think of albums as the basic unit of sitting and listening to music. This basically means that when I’m huntuing for new music, I will be generally looking for fan-curated lists of “top” albums by an artist. I’ll see if my peers have an album to listen to and rip or if that avenue isn’t open to me I’ll find a non-amazon vendor selling digital copies of the album DRM-free for me to download. If I’m familiar with the artist already I’ll skip the majority of the research although I will occasionally do a sense check to weed out any albums that are well-known to be “duds” by artists I otherwise enjoy. For albums I buy physical copies of, once I’m happy that the audio files are backed up appropriately I’ll give the CD to a friend as a gift or donate it to the local library.

I’m quite strict with my choice of digital format; it’s got to be ogg vorbis. I know FLAC is meant to be king but I’ve simply not got that amount of space on my hard drives, and it makes copying the files to a device an utter pain. If I can’t download or rip the files into ogg after I purchase them, I use dir2ogg as my converter.

Once I’ve got my ogg files lines up, I move them into an appropriate folder (Artist/Album) inside of my Music folder. These days I manage their ID3 tags via id3v2, or if they’re being really awkward and not responding I use easytag. It’s a GUI app, but it’s pretty fast. I’m not that fussed about album art these days since I use a terminal player with mpd, but I used to be pretty on the ball with this as the iTunes interface lent itself to showing album art.

Sometimes, I don’t want to listen to an album. I want to listen to some ambience or some Lo-Fi beats. I used to just fire up a browser and head to YouTube to open that famous Lo-Fi Girl/Chilled Cow stream (note: the link opens a link to the Lo-Fi girl stream on an Invidious instance to avoid opening the YouTube site). When I wanted to cut down on my browser usage, I simply pointed mpv at the URL because it can stream video content. When I wanted to ensure that I still had relaxing music to listen to offline, I learned that lofigirl.com actually release a bunch of albums by various creators for free. So every few weeks or months, I download a bunch of albums from there and add them to my local music library. To group them together, I just tag them all with the artist Lo-Fi Beats and ensure that the album and song titles reflect the creators. At present I have 11 hours of Lo-Fi to play on repeat or randomised if my network ever goes down.

My music collection is integrated into a regular backup regime for my local data, but I have a dedicated sync for it on my Nextcloud instance for off-site redundancy.

Podcasts

OK, so grabbing podcasts does require an internet connection. That’s kinda what the internet is for and it’s very good at it. But I love the interaction that podcasts inherently afford; being that you download them and keep them for later.

Maybe in 2023 most people are streaming their podcasts but I’ve never understood this at all. I originally listened to podcasts via my old iPod Classic, where I downloaded them via iTunes and synced them to the device. These days, I rarely listen to podcasts via anything other than my phone. For me they’ve always lent themselves to portable devices which have historically either not had an internet connection or had a hard download limit – and I’ve always erred on the side of requiring less data. I only recently upgraded from a 250MB data limit to a 2GB one!

So, my podcatcher of choice is AntennaPod. I subscribe to a bunch of feeds and then create a backlog of shows to watch. Usually I download about 3 hours of shows at a time when I have wi-fi access and then delete them as I go. I might top up this occasionally before I reach the end of the queue. For me, the interaction of “download now and listen at leisure” is just utterly perfect and to be honest has influenced the way I see how digital media should be.

I have been stung a few times by podcast feeds either disappearing entirely or expiring links to shows I’ve enjoyed and want to re-download. For shows I particularly enjoy, I use a desktop podcatcher known as gPodder (Side note; if there’s a comparable TUI podcatcher I don’t know about please let me know!) to download the feed en masse and back it up to an archive on a USB hard drive. When I want to listen to a show again, I generally tidy up the ID3 tags a bit to create an “album” and load it back onto my phone via USB where I play it using an audiobook application known as Voice. I’ve found audiobook apps lend themselves to podcasts a bit better than music players because they keep the playback position between listens as an inherent affordance of what they are.

Movies and TV

Similar to my music library, I store my video media locally. Well, actually it gets transferred to a USB hard drive pretty much straight away due to the space it takes up. But it’s still local, and I don’t subscribe to any streaming services.

This practice started because watching movies together was a family bonding activity for us when I was growing up. When DVDs had their hey-day and dropped dramatically in price, my mother managed to amass a truly astounding DVD library. When I got into computing and wanted to watch movies on my own I learned how to rip the DVDs to create some back-ups and to integrate them fully into my computing workflow. These files have stayed with me for over 15 years. The resolution isn’t great (especially on the early rips which were for the iPod Classic screens!) but they’re serviceable. The files have been joined by their more contemporary peers and have migrated across somewhere between 8 and 10 drives over the years.

We don’t have a TV at the moment, and likely won’t get one again. We mostly watch movies on my monitor (we have a cosy setup with a sofa facing the desk) and my partner is now pretty fluent in the keyboard commands for operating the nnn file browser and the mpv video player. I don’t watch TV or movies on the move, but if I ever go on a long-haul flight or train journey and need entertainment I’ll likely have my laptop and my drives. In an odd situation where I don’t want to rely on my laptop, I can sideload the files onto a phone or tablet via USB and play them locally via an app.

Internet Video

It’s 2023 now and there is some cracking video produced on the internet. I don’t subscribe to any streaming services, so I do miss some content there, but I do have a set of YouTube and PeerTube channels that I enjoy. Miraculously, I do manage to watch these offline most of the time, too. It’s almost the same process as grabbing podcasts.

If you read Esperanto then you can check out my post here on how to use an RSS reader, mpv, and feh to basically view most social media including YouTube and TikTok without ever leaving the terminal. However, in short I use youtube-dl to nab most YouTube videos from channels I “subscribe” to. It does download pretty slowly, but that means I can start downloading them straight away in the morning and have some viewable videos by the time I want to watch something (either at lunch or after I finish work). youtube-dl also works on non-YouTube websites so I have my download script wired to several RSS feeds such as some PeerTube channels.

For videos from sources I don’t subscribe to, such as when I need to find something on YouTube or PeerTube but don’t know who/what I’ll find; I do have to concede that this is an online task and I can’t really keep a local copy of the entire internet.

Photographs and home video

I don’t take a lot of photographs myself but over the years I’ve amassed a fair collection of memories in photograph form. When I have photographs taken either via a digital camera or my phone I just plug them into my laptop to transfer the files there. I use Shotwell which is a GUI application but is also incredibly useful at auto-sorting files based on EXIF metadata so that I’ve got everything organised by date (which is more useful to me than abstract collections). It’s also got a very handy import function for when a USB mass storage device like a digital camera or phone is plugged in. The same applies for home videos taken via the cameras/phones as well.

If others send me photos of myself (ie if we’ve all been on the same trip), I save them to my device’s memory and import them from there as normal. Or sometimes if we’re back at our place for dinner after a hike, I’ll nab the files directly off of my friend’s devices.

As my photos are stored in my home folder under Pictures, they’re integrated into my regular back-up regime as well as having a dedicated sync connection to my off-site backup via Nextcloud (see the Backups section).

Books

If you’ve made it this far into the post, this model won’t be surprising to you. My books library is a mixture of paper and ebooks, and all of my ebook files are stored locally.

I read books on my e-reader which is an old 2011-era Kindle which has had the wi-fi access turned off since the day I got it. I sideload books onto it via a USB connection, and my library is managed by Calibre. I acquire the books themselves from a variety of sources, although these can be mostly summed up as “Project Gutenberg and a variety of non-Amazon book stores such as eBook store, Retbutiko, or Smashwords”. I also use my academic credentials to occasionally get books from e.g. Springer. I use more than these and really the only criteria I have are that they aren’t amazon and don’t enforce DRM on my books. I am fine with them watermarking a page with my name or an id number (I can always edit them out…) but I don’t want any physical restrictions on how I read a file I’ve paid for.

I have a strong preference for the EPub format, but Calibre’s conversion tools mean I don’t mind the odd stray format. I mostly view PDFs via my laptop, but occasionally sideload them manually onto my tablet when the mood strikes (it rarely does).

My entire calibre library is integrated into my back-ups routine, but I also take special pains to produce extra back-ups because of the amount of money and effort I put into acquiring and reading books. For the additional backups, I use calibre’s export function to produce some archive files which I put into a folder and back up to a dedicated USB pen as well as an SD card or two.

Backups

With so much of my computing taking place locally, backups become much more important. One of the reasons I try to reduce my reliance on an active internet connection is to reduce the fragility of my setup. The logic there is that by reducing the impact of a lack of internet on my work, the more able I am to continue regardless of connection. By the same token, I need to account for fragility in the machine itself – technology has an awful habit of failing at the least convenient moments.

Backups are therefore an important part of managing this fragility. If my machine fails that’s one thing but if it takes my work and data with it then that’s quite another.

Backups are one area I know I need to be better at, but I have a just-good-enough setup at the moment which keeps me going. In an ideal world, I’d follow The Tao of Backup to the letter (minus, of course, the commercial software that it advertises). For now, I’ve drawn lessons from it where possible.

My first line of backup is really some external hard drives. My TV and Movies and podcasts are all stored on an external drive by default, and I admit that this is an area I don’t diligently backup very much. My reckoning is that this is less “mission-critical” than my Documents, Books, Photos, and Music. But in the future I do want to ensure that this drive is mirrored somewhere else. For the rest, I semi-regularly (about once a month) backup my entire home folder (including configuration files) to a USB hard drive that is dedicated to the task. The back-up is dated, and there are multiple copies of it with older copies being compressed. The drive I use for backup explicitly has a robust case, although it doesn’t get transported much either. In addition to the collection of versioned backups on the USB hard drive, I have a USB flash storage (pen or thumb drive, pick your vernacular) which I use to create another copy although this just stores the current version and is overwritten each time.

The tools I use for this are pretty much standard GNU/Linux fare; rsync does the copying because it’s fast and scriptable and tar and gzip do the compression.

My second line of backup is Nextcloud, which does require an internet connection and acts as an offsite backup. I don’t sync an entire “Nextcloud” folder, but I set up dedicated sync connections for each my Documents, Music, and Photos folders. I used to sync my Calibre library folder as well, but learned the unfortunate way that Calibre doesn’t like this and I had a few books corrupted (which I then had to reacquire). To back up Calibre to Nextcloud, I manually create a Calibre backup/export, date and compress it, and upload this to a folder on Nextcloud.

A parallel second line of backup, specifically for project files, is Gitlab. I have a Gitlab account which I use to store online remotes of my git projects such as my planner, blog, etc. in private repos.

People who work with backups professionally will probably be screaming at my lack of diligence and robustness, and this is an area I want to work on in 2023. To start with, I want to begin automating as much of the backup process as possible. At the moment I’m thinking of a dedicated desktop USB drive which is always plugged in and therefore can be used to automate a daily, weekly, and monthly backup of my home drive (managed via rsync), and the existing drives can be used to provide additional backups to this. I also want to set up a Raspberry Pi home server which acts as another backup via syncthing, and also acts as another remote for my git repos. I also want to reduce my reliance on an internet connection for my offsite backups. Some reading around the areas suggests that Blu-ray discs stored at a friend or relative’s home might be a good call.

Summary

This post discussed some of the ways I’ve managed to reduce my reliance on an active internet connection in order to do my daily computing for both work and play. I try to keep most of my work and Documents off of cloud services and on my devices, and I don’t rely on any streaming services for my media access. I have a backup system which mostly involves manually backing up to USB drives via rsync and I treat Nextcloud and Gitlab as offsite backups, although these do require an internet connection.

In the future my efforts will be concentrated on setting up a robust, automated, backup system for my work and media files. I doubt I’ll ever achieve perfection, but I can always strive for more robustness. Hopefully when the day comes that I need my back-ups, my efforts will have paid off.

2022 Winter Solstice Update

2022-12-25

This was a bad Solstice, sadly. It’s unfortunate because up until the last week or so, we’d had a really good half a year; if a stressful one. We moved house, sold my old flat, and did a bunch of walking. We’d already agreed that we were getting married, but we still wanted to do a semi-surprise proposal so I had A’s engagement ring custom made by a local jeweler and had an epic quest to fetch it. I proposed just before I took my first international, indeed long-distance, trip since the pandemic began. It also marked my first holiday with a romantic partner, and we celebrated A’s 30th birthday hunting for the Northern Lights in Iceland.

When we came back we stumbled upon some big news which made us anxious and excited all at once. Unfortunately, we experienced a miscarriage a few days ago which was the sad conclusion of a very stressful Solstice week. There’s not much more to say, other than we’re devastated and trying to look after each other as best as we can.

But the darkest day has passed now. The light is returning. I only hope it brings health and happiness with it; we’re definitely in need of some.

Key Events

2022-08-02, we move into our new home while also trying to move my mother-in-law into her new home
2022-09-30, we finally sell my old flat by the skin of our teeth
2022-10, I have my first really nice birthday in a number of years thanks to my partner A making a lot of effort for me
2022-11-09, I propose to A and she agrees to be my wife
2022-11-10, I take my first trip abroad in a number of years to Iceland to celebrate A turning 30 that week
2022-11-14, after a stressful return trip involving cancelled flights and a comfy-but-sweaty train ride, we discover that A is pregnant
2022-12-23, after a very stressful week involving multiple hospital trips, we lose our early pregnancy to miscarriage

Hobbies

There are not too many changes in the last six months. I am pretty happy and stable with the hobbies I’ve got and they each get a look in most weeks.

Esperanto

My Esperanto is progressing nicely. I still journal daily, or near enough to daily, in Esperanto and I feel that’s something I’m going to do forever. The journalling really helps me summon the language that I need to describe my life, and has cemented in a few words that I was struggling to recall before. So I am pleased with this.

I have successfully read another novel in Esperanto. This time it was the illicit translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I really liked it. The language was clear and I could slip into reading Esperanto very easily. I’ve tried reading some older, free, Esperanto novels from Project Gutenberg but these still seem a little more abrasive. I imagine it’s because the original language was more formal and a more complex style of prose, so the Esperanto follows. I will attempt to read La ŝtona urbo by Anna Löwenstein in 2023 as I am confident that this book will be rewarding.

Finally, I had my first ever spoken convesation in Esperanto! My pen pal, M, visited me to speak Esperanto for a few hours. I was really nervous going in but she is very easy to talk to and I believe we’re of similar abilities in Esperanto. We had to use a dictionary for a few awkward words, but we talked about life and work very smoothly while wandering around a museum. Reading exhibits in English and talking in Esperanto while some Anglo-Saxon audio was playing was very confusing for my brain but we made it through and I believe we enjoyed the day. Thanks, M!

Exercise

My exercise has actually improved a lot since the last update. I was really worried that, after our move, I wouldn’t be able to find a park to exercise in properly. Thankfully, I now live closer than ever to a suitable outdoor workout space. I’ve already made friends with some dogs there. The park still isn’t suitable for pull-ups, but my partner A took the initiative and got my pull-up bar installed promptly in our back yard. The proximity of the park means that now, I can do most of my workout there and then return to do my pull-ups and grip work in the back yard with only a short 5 min walk in between.

Since I’ve returned to pull-ups, my body has thanked me dramatically. My shoulder pain is almost entirely gone. I’ve also improved my push-up form a lot. A side-effect has been that my physique has been more rounded as my shoulders have widened a little. All-in all, I feel healthy and strong now after nearly four years of neglecting my pull-ups.

My running has taken a slight hit, because I don’t know the local area as well. I’ve found some nice enough loops to run around, but they are not as fulfilling as running around the Dene in Heaton and sadly don’t quite get me to the 10km mark. But I enjoy them and enjoy my runs. I’ve had a few lovely snowy runs this year and I’m thankful I can run at all in my new home.

Walking and Exploring

We did a cracking series of really tough walks in the Autumn, but we’ve only really had the energy for a few hikes following our house move. Despite this, walking and hiking remains one of our most beloved pastimes. We’ve really only got a few walks left in our Northumberland book, and the Durham book is getting used more and more.

I’m looking forward to some wintry walks across the early New Year, and some springtime walks in the hills as well.

Creative Writing

Not much movement on this front, really. I am writing bits and pieces here and there but nothing solid has manifested from it. I am mostly writing in English, although Esperanto is getting for some projects occasionally. I am not pressurising myself to perform at a particular level, but I would really like to finish something next year.

Logs

I went through another phase of listening to some new music, so there are a few new faces here as well as some old favourites. I’ve not included any Lo-Fi albums. Looking back, it’s been a good six months for listening to music but some standout moments were: listening to my first Beatles album and being blown away; getting into some old school rock such as Cream and getting deeper into Led Zeppelin; and going through a Nu-metal phase where Coal Chamber by Coal Chamber and XIII by Mushroomhead steal the show; the new Slipknot album blowing me away; doing an entire run through of Iron Maiden’s studio albums after hearing the amazing Senjutsu; and rediscovering my love of In Flames, particularly Clayman, Reroute to Remain and Come Clarity.

King of the Tenors by Ben Webster
Maiden Heaven: Volume II by Various Artists
Heart Full of Wine by Angus & Julia Stone
Sounds of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel
Bookends by Simon & Garfunkel
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme by Simon & Garfunkel
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM by Simon & Garfunkel
Ænima by Tool
Ten Thousand Fists by Disturbed
Appeal to Reason by Rise Against
We Are Not Your Kind by Slipknot
Collision Course by Linkin Park and Jay Z
Take To The Skies by Enter Shikari
Sour by Olivia Rodrigo
Come What(ever) May by Stone Sour
Furiosity by Monster Truck
Duke Ellington and John Coltrane by Duke Ellington and John Coltrane
I Put A Spell On You by Nina Simone
Sings The Blues by Nina Simone
lately I feel EVERYTHING by Willow
Stone Sour by Stone Sour
Reinkaos by Dissection
Abbey Road by The Beatles
Revolver by The Beatles
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles
Senjutsu by Iron Maiden
So Long, Astoria by The Ataris
The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd
Iron Maiden by Iron Maiden
Led Zeppelin I by Led Zeppelin
Rubber Soul by The Beatles
Killers by Iron Maiden
The Number of The Beast by Iron Maiden
Piece of Mind by Iron Maiden
Powerslave by Iron Maiden
Somewhere In Time by Iron Maiden
Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son by Iron Maiden
Led Zeppelin II by Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin III by Led Zeppelin
No Prayer For The Dying by Iron Maiden
Fear Of The Dark by Iron Maiden
The X Factor by Iron Maiden
Virtual XI by Iron Maiden
Brave New World by Iron Maiden
Dance Of Death by Iron Maiden
A Matter Of Life And Death by Iron Maiden
The Final Frontier by Iron Maiden
The Book of Souls by Iron Maiden
En Vivo! by Iron Maiden
Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin
Heavy Horses by Jethro Tull
Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull
Balls To Picasso by Bruce Dickinson
Accident Of Birth by Bruce Dickinson
Disraeli Gears by Cream
Tattooed Millionaire by Bruce Dickinson
Shogun by Trivium
Ascendancy by Trivium
Singing The Blues by B. B. King
Benefit by Jethro Tull
Harsh Generation by Grendel
Rock In Rio 2011 (Bootleg) by Slipknot
Pastel Blues by Nina Simone
Aqualung by Jethro Tull
Stormwatch by Jethro Tull
The Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd
Existential Reckoning by Puscifer
Mezmerize by System Of A Down
Follow The Leader by KoRn
Phenomenon by UFO
Coal Chamber by Coal Chamber
Chamber Music by Coal Chamber
Dark Days by Coal Chamber
Rivals by Coal Chamber
Clayman by In Flames
Come Clarity by In Flames
Reroute To Remain by In Flames
The Crusade by Trivium
King Of The Tenors by Ben Webster
Skunkworks by Bruce Dickinson
The Chemical Wedding by Bruce Dickinson
Tyranny Of Souls by Bruce Dickinson
The Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem
Wish You Were Hwere by Pink Floyd
Infest by Papa Roach
Sketches Of Spain by Miles Davis
XIII by Mushroomhead
Drif by Heilung
Toxicity by System Of A Down
Audio Secrecy by Stone Sour
Through The Ashes Of Empires by Machine Head
Slipknot by Slipknot
The End So Far by Slipknot
CMFT by Corey Taylor
Satellite by P.O.D
The Righteous & The Butterfly by Mushroomhead
Nymphetamine by Cradle Of Filth
Master Of Puppets by Metallica
American Capitalist by Five Finger Death Punch
House Of Gold And Bones Pt. 1 by Stone Sour
House Of Gold And Bones Pt. 2 by Stone Sour
The Adversary by Ihsahn
The Blackening by Machine Head
Alle Lust Will Ewigkeit by Nachtmahr
angL by Ihsahn
After by Ihsahn
Eremita by Ihsahn
Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin
Genesys by Cyferdyne
Fallen by Evanescence
Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
Meteora by Linkin Park
Unto The Locust by Machine Head
Mugzy’s Move by Royal Crown Revue
King of The Tenors by Ben Webster
Plays Metallica by Four Cellos by Apocalyptica
Inquisition Symphony by Apocalyptica
Whoracle by In Flames

Books

I’ll try not to say too much here, but I have really enjoyed this six months of reading. I took a little break around the time we moved because my brain couldn’t focus much on reading, and I am taking a sort-of break now after our recent bad news.

The novels that stood out to me were, surprisingly, the Star Wars books by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry. Death Star as well as the MedStar books were phenomenal character studies and I just drank the writing. Really impressed and I loved them a lot. Reading through His Dark Materials with my partner was another highlight. There were several moments in The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass where we were both reduced to tears. It was A’s first go through the series and my fourth or fifth, but it’s so beautiful it got me good. I also read my first western novel Shane by Jack Schaefer and my first horror by Steven King, Carrie. I enjoyed both of them a lot, although I might need some more convincing from the western genre before I slot it into regular rotation. Toad Words by T. Kingfisher deserves a very special mention, and Ursula Vernon is pure magic. I also read through Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks to get back into the Culture series, and enjoyed it although it was longer than I remembered. I also thoroughly enjoyed the conclusion of Era 2 of Mistborn with Brandon Sanderson’s The Lost Metal. I felt that this book really rewarded me for reading around the Cosmere and I got a lot from it. It was a longer book but Brandon’s prose always makes reading these fantasy door-stops very easy. Junk by Melvin Burgess was a mind-blowing book and it’s, quite frankly, important that more people read it. For me it was probably my favourite book this year. Finally, The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell was by and far one of the most memorable and unique books to finish the year on. Some books you race through, some you drink, but The Winter King simply washed over me. I’m currently striving to finish the next book before the close of the year.

There were a few slogs and duds as well. Gardens of the Moon was tough but incredibly rewarding. My intention was to read through the entire Malazan series as a challenge, but I actually had a DNF this year with regards to Deadhouse Gates. I was enjoying it, for the most part, but Malazan books almost have to be read with a guide to figure out what’s going on and I was reading it as we moved. I ended up abandoning the book about halfway through. I may return to Malazan next year but I am in no hurry to do so. World War Z by Max Brooks was incredibly disappointing. I have a love-hate-fear relationship with zombies and I had never gotten around to reading World War Z in my youth so I have it a try. Most of the books was great, but there was just this thread (more like a rope) of pure anti-communism running through the entire book. I don’t know Max Brooks or his politics very well, but I was very disappointed and it really took my out of the book when Max threw yet another dig at China, the DPRK, or Cuba to make a “communism bad” point. He all but flat-out blamed the zombie outbreak on the Chinese, although I think at that point he had already indulged his Usonian fantasy of breaking up the PRC into a capitalist-friendly federated states of China. Eurgh. I also picked up How to be Good by Nick Hornby and it was the first time I almost hate-read a book because of the protagonist. Like Bunny earlier this year, I don’t know if How to be Good is a masterpiece or dross. I’m not sure what message Nick was trying to send, and the book ends on a really jarring poetic / literary line which didn’t fit the tone of the book at all. It felt like Nick had come up with a great line and wanted to use it regardless of the surrounding book. For some light, trashy, fantasy I also grabbed the first three Legend of Drizzt books by R.A. Salvatore as a starting point into the sprawling corporate fantasy world that is the Forgotten Realms. They were… pretty bad. In a trashy-inoffensive way. I chewed through them because they’re incredibly simple to follow but Drizzt is such a one dimension character and the final book in particular was… yeah. It felt like Salvatore was just telling me things rather than showing me. I wish I’d read these as a child as I’m sure I would’ve loved them, but going from Sanderson’s wonderful storytelling to a ham-fisted ferris wheel of “look at how cool/skilled Drizzt is” was not fun. I also tried out the Partials sequence by Dan Wells. I was really looking forward to this but sadly they fell a little flat. They’re not bad books at all, and in fact are very good books, but for some reason they didn’t gel with me as much as I was hoping that they would. I will be trying out Dan’s other work soon, though.

White Sand (Prose Version) by Brandon Sanderson
Star Wars: The Cestus Deception by Steven Barnes
Star Wars: Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber
Star Wars: Death Star by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry
Star Wars: MedStar - Battle Surgeons by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry
Star Wars: MedStar - Jedi Healer by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry
Star Wars: Darth Maul - Shadow Hunter by Michael Reaves
Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace by Terry Brooks
Star Wars: Episode 2 - Attack of the Clones by R. A. Salvatore
Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
Say Cheese and Die! by R. L. Stine
The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb by R. L. Stine
Let’s Get Invisible! by R. L. Stine
The Night of The Living Dummy by R. L. Stine
The Girl Who Cried Monster by R. L. Stine
World War Z by Max Brooks
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
The Invasion by K. A. Applegate
The Visitor by K. A. Applegate
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
How To Be Good by Nick Hornby
Forgotten Realms: Homeland by R. A. Salvatore
Forgotten Realms: Exile by R. A. Salvatore
Forgotten Realms: Sojourn by R. A. Salvatore
Hari Poter kaj la Ŝtono de la Saĝuloj by J. K. Rowling
Partials by Dan Wells
Pyramids by Terry Pratchett
Fragments by Dan Wells
Ruins by Dan Wells
Shane by Jack Schaefer
Star Wars: Labyrinth of Evil by James Luceno
Star Wars: Episode 3 - Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover
Star Wars: Dark Lord - The Rise of Darth Vader by James Luceno
Carrie by Stephen King
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson
Junk by Melvin Burgess
Eric by Terry Pratchett
Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks
Holes by Louis Sachar
Toad Words by T. Kingfisher
The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell
Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Total books read since last Solstice: 44

Currently reading: The Enemy of God by Bernard Cornwell (solo) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (with my partner)

Films

There isn’t so many films here because we’ve actually mostly been watching TV shows, which are sort of hard to log; do I log seasons or episodes? Other than Prey which was delightful and beautiful, Richard Linklater is the only real standout for the films; I watched Boyhood by myself on the advice of A before I realised it was Linklater, and I immediately began showing her the Before trilogy which she adored. We watched them a week apart. It’s interesting to see how my empathies shift from 20 year old Jesse and Celine towards the 30 year old pair in the second film as I’ve left my twenties and entered my thirties.

Treasure Planet
Onward
Serenity
The Mummy
Flatland
The Incredibles
Jumanji
Spider-man: No Way Home
Boyhood
Prey
Before Sunrise
Before Sunset
Before Midnight
Robocop
Hot Rod
George of the Jungle
Safety Not Guaranteed
Planes Trains and Automobiles
Howl’s Moving Castle
Shallow Hal

Total movies: 20

Memory Lane: How I used to do my computing

2022-07-15

Recently, I felt a compulsion to write a section on my About Page regarding how I go about doing my computing. Part of this is because I’m currently going through a wave of being nerdy about computing again: switching my OS, and migrating some things like text editors¹. As I was writing this section, I felt it turning into a bit of a history of my computing rather than what I wanted it to be. So I thought I’d extract it into a post where I indulge my nostalgia and take a trip back down memory lane.

In that spirit, this post contains a timeline of how I’ve done my computing throughout the years. I’ve divided it into yearly sections in order to try and keep it from meandering backwards and forwards. In each grouping I’ll try to provide a quick summary of key events, systems, apps etc.

Table of Contents

Pre 2005

My machine was a shared family desktop computer, which I could access intermittently on weekends. It had very little RAM, something like 128MB, and a 20GB IDE HDD. The CRT monitor was a beast.
The Operating System was Windows ME.
I mostly used the computers at the local library.

Before I went to High School², our family shared a single computer. Not too unusual, for the time. I think my parents bought it for two reasons: to try and get ’the internet’ at home; and to have something with a DVD player.

At the beginning, I didn’t do much with this machine. I was only around 9 or 10 years old when we got it. I do remember that XP seemed to get released soon afterwards, and that all of my friends ended up having Windows XP machines which were much better! It didn’t run many games; but the Windows ME machine was good enough for web browsing ProBoards forums and writing documents using Microsoft Works. During this period we were often without internet access for some time, if my parents decided we couldn’t afford it or the machine broke. In these cases I used the machines at the local library. I’d often be there every Saturday to use the computing cluster, and some evenings after school. I ran a (free) ProBoards instance for some friends at school so I wanted to keep up with that.

As I grew throughout Middle School, and as I went into High School aged 13 at the tail end of 2005, I used the machine a bit more as I wanted to browse the web a lot more, and High School began to require / expect some work to be completed using a word processor. I hand-coded a site in raw (bad) HTML and within Notepad. On the homework front, our Windows ME machine with MS Works produced files that were incompatible with MS Word used at the school. I ended up staying back after school in the library to use the machines there a lot of the time.

Around this time, I think for Christmas 2005; my sister and I got iPod Minis as our present that year. Sadly, iTunes wasn’t compatible with Windows ME so we had to use my dad’s laptop which had Windows XP on it, to manage our libraries. I think this annoyed him a little, and when my sister came to High School the year following me; we didn’t last long competing for the machine in the evening (despite doing homework at the School Library I continued to hang out on the web at home) we were thankfully lucky enough as a family to afford a Windows XP machine each for completing our homework on.

2006 to 2008

I was given my own desktop machine which ran Windows XP. It had 512MB of Ram, and an 80GB IDE HDD.
I discovered Free, Libre, and Open Source software via OpenOffice and later Firefox.
In 2008 I installed Ubuntu 7.10, later Ubuntu 8.04 via Wubi. This was later replaced by a ‘proper’ dual boot and eventually became the sole OS on the device.
I fell to the dark side and bought a third-hand iBook G4 from a friend, leading me to use Mac OS X 10.6 (Leopard) for a while.

Now with my own machine, I was browsing the web, torrenting, and reading things to my heart’s content every night. The system was still pretty humble, even for the time, with less than a 1GB of RAM and no dedicated GPU. This meant I couldn’t do what my friends were doing and start playing video games. I thus contented myself with learning more about HTML and about random aspects of computing, or torrenting lots of movies and TV. Most of the time I was still using Internet Explorer as a browser, but I kept seeing the word ‘Firefox’ on the sites I was sometimes visiting. I was still using iTunes to manage my now ever-growing collection of music and I learned to rip DVDs to movie files to complement my torrent collection (I never did learn how to upload these as torrents, though). The machine came preinstalled, once again, with Microsoft Works, but I believe I saved all the files as .rtf to then open up via Microsoft Word at school. If only I’d known about Plain text back then!!

I’m now a big believer in Free Software, and I’m a bit of a Stallman-ite when it comes to my definition of Free Software and my strong preference for the GPL family of licences. This journey actually began when I was 15 and one of the IT staff at the school knew I was into computing, and gave me a USB stick containing OpenOffice 2 so that I could use my home’s computer for homework without needing to pay for a copy of MS Word. Using OpenOffice was a game-changer, and doing some reading about it lead me to discovering the term Open Source for the first time. This lead very naturally into me researching the term ‘Open Source’. This then lead me to read about ‘Firefox’, which I’d seen referenced about the web.

From there, it was a simple task to actually downloading Firefox and thus begin my journey into the world of Free Software. The four freedoms of Free Software just made sense to me but I didn’t really know how to take it further. I’d heard of this “Linux” thing before, but couldn’t quite figure out what it entailed. Then I saw this video and was amazed at how amazing and advanced Ubuntu seemed to be when compared to Windows Vista. Despite now having my very own XP box, I was always a step behind and while I’d finally upgraded to XP, now (seemingly) everyone else was moving on to Vista. At the time, I was still sold on “shiny” things, and I wasn’t really critical of Windows at the time either. I therefore envied the delightful mid-2000s eye-candy that people were able to access on their Vista systems, and being able to rival that via this Ubuntu thing was very appealing. After a bit of nascent YouTube-ing, I discovered a program which would safely install Ubuntu on top of my Windows XP installation. Post-install, I booted up Ubuntu for the first time and was slightly disappointed that my cheap computer without a graphics card couldn’t perform all the shiny effects that I saw in the earlier YouTube video. Not to matter. I got to work understanding my system anyway. Linux was finally de-mystified and (more importantly) I had some nerdy streetcred. I read more about my new OS and began learning about how Ubuntu was a ‘distro’ of GNU/Linux. Eventually, I replaced my Wubi install with a full Ubuntu install when 8.04 came out (this remains my favourite Ubuntu release), and dual-booted it with Windows XP. At this point I was doing the majority of my daily tasks within Ubuntu, but I still had an iPod which required to be loaded from iTunes; so sadly I still needed access to XP.

The XP install didn’t last long, however. After a few months XP became really nastily corrupted. As of writing, this is a long time ago and I can’t quite remember what happened. What most likely occurred is that I torrented something a little dodgy, or otherwise stumbled onto a website which managed to load some malware. After realising Windows was becoming unusable I made my decision to jump whole-heartedly into Ubuntu. I ensured all my files on both partitions were on my back-up hard drive, updated my iPod one last time, gave XP a quick salute for its service, and installed Ubuntu 8.04 as the sole OS; wiping both previous partitions. I now had my first ever purely GNU-Linux box.

This was my main machine throughout the remainder of my final school year in 2008 and into the summer. Like a lot of new GNU/Linux users I did a tiny bit of distro-hopping, but only over the course of around a month. I tried Fedora, OpenSUSE, even Debian. I failed to get Gentoo running. At the time, most of these distros used GNOME 2 as their default Desktop Environment and to my untrained eyes they just looked like re-skins of Ubuntu, with different package managers. I reinstalled Hardy Heron after a few weeks and simply went on my way. Since my OS was now stable, I began revelling in the flexibility of GNU/Linux and customised the interface a LOT to a level what I now believe is termed RICEing. I spent ages getting the best Conky setup. I installed GTK themes, adjusted my GNOME 2 panels to figure out exactly what I wanted, downloaded custom icons. I was incredibly happy and a bit of a stereotypical nerd with this. I finished my school year with this machine and Ubuntu 8.04’s install of OpenOffice. I used Pidgin to chat on MSN messenger with my friends, and used Transmission to get the media I wanted. I could play music on the machine using Rhythmbox, but sadly was still unable to put anything new on my iPod.

Outside of the desktop, I discovered Rockbox. By now, I’d also very luckily been gifted an ‘iPod Classic’ for a Christmas present, which had replaced the iPod Mini. I installed it without hesitation on the iPod Mini and subsequently the iPod Classic. I remember the interface being a little confusing, but I was sold on the shiny functionality as well as the fact it was Open Source. Unfortunately, I think the Rockbox firmware couldn’t be used to update the music on either iPod since it effectively dual-booted the device. I’d need to update the library using iTunes somehow, and then hit a button in Rockbox to update its database.

All in all, it looked like I was set for a world of FLOSS-based wholesomeness forever more. But then I fell, temporarily, to the dark side…

As I was learning about GNU/Linux at this time I was also learning about *NIX and UNIX-like architectures in general, and at the same time Mac OS X Leopard had arrived on the scene. Apple’s propaganda/advertising campaign was in full swing and although I was never quite bitten by the Apple-bug; I was turned against Windows by this point since I’d experienced doing this different. And oh man did Leopard look shiny! I read up on the system and learned that it was based on a UNIX-like system known as BSD (this is also when I discovered that BSD existed), and figured it looked really nice and I’d like to try it.

In the summer of 2008 I got my first job slinging pizzas and was able to save up a bit of money. A friend was upgrading their laptop and getting rid of their old Apple iBook G4, which I then read was compatible with Leopard. I was itching to update my iTunes music library and Leopard was only £80 to buy, so I gave him £100 and got myself an iBook. It was… fine. I really liked being able to use software like iTunes again but my Ubuntu machine was still taking pride of place. In my head, I really liked the idea that these two systems were “cousins” of a sort. I even used some really nice wallpaper on the machines to make them look like they belonged with each other: Hardy Heron / OS X Leopard Purple for use on my iBook and Hardy Heron / OS X Orange for use on my Ubuntu box.

I used the iBook from the summer of 2008, alongside my Ubuntu box until late 2009, so around 14-16 months. It was my “school” laptop when I attended 6th Form college during the first year of my A-levels. I installed Dropbox (new on the scene at the time!) and used my free 2GB storage to sync my array of .odt files which I needed for A-levels. Most of my computing at the time was still web browsing, media downloading or manipulating, word processing, or producing slideshows. It became cumbersome to carry around and I was tired of syncing everything with Dropbox. The loud chime when I turned the machine on really annoyed me, and the G4 processor was beginning to show its age. I replaced it toward the end of 2009 when an interesting opportunity arose.

2009 to 2011

I ditched my iBook G4 for a new laptop, which I’ve forgotten the model of. This became my primary machine and was a triple boot between Ubuntu, Mac OS X Leopard (later Snow Leopard), and Windows 7. It had approx a 200GB hard disk, and around 2GB of RAM.
My desktop machine from 2006 fell into disuse and eventually I dismantled it and got rid of it.
In Spring 2011, I built a PC for the very first time which was run solely on Ubuntu, and I used it with two monitors. It had a 1TB internal HDD for the system, and 2 x 2TB internal HDDs for media storage, and about 4GB of RAM.
Both my laptop and my newly-built machine failed upon my move to Newcastle for University in late 2011, so were replaced with a single laptop machine which I used to run Ubuntu as the only OS. It had 4GB of RAM and an i5 processor, and I think around a 500GB HDD. I replaced the HDD of the machine with a 40GB SSD midway through my University course to eke some more life out of it.

Throughout 2009 I enjoyed my *NIX life, but eventually grew tired of my G4 machine and my ageing desktop. In September 2009 I also bean my resit of my AS Levels, this involved repeating a year and I switched from a classic Science-focus (Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and English Lit) to an IT and computing one. This exposed me to a new set of friends and I met someone who claimed he could run Mac OS X on non-Apple (and therefore much more affordable) hardware. I instantly became intrigued. By this time, I’d come around again and was very sceptical of Apple as a company as well as the false economy of their products; but I really liked OS X as a system and thought it’d be pretty cool to try and get it working on a new machine. I was in. I bought a machine off of my friend, a laptop whose model I cannot remember for the life of me. It had a halfway decent processor and about 2GB of RAM, so plenty for the systems I wanted to run. I then issued a challenge. My friend was accustomed to getting the Hackintosh up and running, sometimes even dual-booting it with the then-fresh (and halfway decent) Windows 7 system. I wanted to use GNU/Linux on it as well. Primarily Ubuntu, with OS X being the second option. The more I thought about it, though, the more appealing a triple-boot system became to me. It would allow me to run, effectively, anything that I wanted. For example, my A-level courses required me to use some proprietary software such as Adobe Flash which was easier to pirate on Windows 7 than on Mac OS X (as far as I was concerned anyway). It was also, to my young mind, cool as heck.

We succeeded. From my limited days of distro-hopping, I was familiar with the act of partitioning disks (a lot more than I am now, actually) and set up the hard drive when installing Ubuntu. Ubuntu received half of the drive’s storage space, and the two proprietary systems each got a quarter. In my excitement, I had originally considered trying to get a FreeBSD install running, or else creating a shared ‘data’ partition that could be mounted and shared by each system; but I could never get FreeBSD installed with a working graphical environment (like Gentoo) and I remember reading that there would be an issue with machines only recognising 3 primary or bootable partitions; which prevented that anyway. In retrospect, it might have actually all been fine. My friend, thankfully, took care of all of the Hackintosh side of things. That involved scary things like .kext files and the like. Once that was running we installed Windows 7 and I booted back into Ubuntu to makes sure that GRUB was being used as the bootloader. This allowed me to set up a custom GRUB menu to choose the system at boot, passing the bootstrap down to Hackintosh’s ‘Darwin’ bootloader.

I used this machine pretty solidly as my daily driver for most tasks until the Spring in 2011. It supplanted both the iBook G4 and my old Ubuntu desktop machine. I really enjoyed it. Most of my school files were backed up on Dropbox (with a client application on each installed system!), and I stored the working or ‘master’ copies of my school files on a USB pen, which was the style at the time. This allowed me to use the school machines as well, when I’d forgotten or couldn’t be bothered to bring through my laptop. I really loved this machine, even going so far as to give it a custom spray paint job. I still think back on it rather fondly, although I would never really need to establish a similar setup again.

By the spring of 2011, the novelty of the triple-boot had worn off and I also missed having a dedicated Ubuntu box. I also had a few other itches to scratch: I’d always fantasised about both building my own computer, and having a computer with two monitors. I also wanted a desk again, for my bedroom at home. These notions burned away at the young, undisciplined, Matt until they combined with the idea of building a dedicated Ubuntu box which acted as a media centre and workstation, attached to a decent sound system, with two monitors, sitting at a desk in my bedroom. I set about researching and building the machine slowly. When it was finally finished I christened it “Big Bertha”, because it had three hard drives attached: one for the system and two 2TB drives for storing media. I also gave it around 4GB of RAM, which allowed me to run a virtual Windows XP machine comfortably on the second monitor, which for some reason I had in my head that I needed. Between my Triple boot laptop (known as “Norn”), and “Big Bertha”; I was very happy and planned just to keep Big Bertha upgraded and swap out hardware occasionally. I was happy using the laptop as my portable device for getting work done on at school; as I still wholeheartedly loved the machine. Big Bertha didn’t have a dedicated GPU, but the motherboard could drive two monitors with the onboard VGA and DVI ports.

Big Bertha and Norn were my daily drivers together for the remainder of the year until I moved to university. In September of 2011, I moved from my hometown to Newcastle, and took my machines with me. I had planned on using basically the same setup at university that I’d been using at college: Big Bertha at home for Minecraft, media, and most computing tasks, while my laptop would come with me to campus for note taking. Unfortunately, both of these machines failed in pretty rapid succession upon my move to Newcastle. Big Bertha lasted about a month, into October, before it suddenly refused to boot. I was a poor student and couldn’t afford to really get to grips with what was wrong so took to using the laptop again. Sadly, at this point, the charging port was a bit shonky and the battery life was abysmal. In addition to this, the screen connector was battered and occasionally the screen would go blank unless I adjusted it to exactly the correct angle. I struggled with it for some time until I got a £500 bursary in November, which I immediately sank into a new machine just to replace both of my dead and dying ones.

I promptly installed Ubuntu as the only OS onto the new machine. It had an i5 processor, and 4GB of RAM so was perfect for my computing needs. My fascination with running multiple systems had run its course and I was ready to return to the warm embrace of GNU/Linux monogamy. The university had Windows 7 installed at the main computing cluster, and we were mostly programming in Java and writing essays; so LibreOffice and Ubuntu did me fine. During this period Google Chrome came out and then came to GNU/Linux. Back then I wasn’t as sceptical of Google as I am now, and I was tired of having to clone my Firefox profile between installs (the Triple Boot laptop had presented a particular challenge for this); so I, shamefully, jumped ship to using Chrome as a browser. This, unfortunately, started me down a dark road.

I never did find out what was wrong with Big Bertha. The machine did get a brief new lease of life during the summer of 2012. I was working several jobs across the summer — slinging pizzas and also picking up some work at the university — and I was beginning to miss having access to my vast media library which were locked away on the machine. So I bought a new power supply and installed it, and Big Bertha lived again very briefly until the same problem occurred. I’m not sure what happened; whether I had set something up wrong during the build or something else was amiss. In either case, I didn’t have enough cash or motivation to keep pressing it when my new laptop was working fine. Big Bertha was eventually cannibalised. I took the hard disks and put them into external caddies, and I gave the rest of the components away to friends.

2012 to 2014

In the summer of 2012 I get my first Android Smartphone as well as an ASUS Transformer TF300T tablet. I used the tablet for taking to campus and taking notes until I gradually stopped.
In 2013 I replaced my laptop with an ultrabook from PC Specialist. It had similar specs, but was much lighter. It ran Ubuntu, and later Xubuntu.
In 2013 I replaced my smartphone with a Galaxy Nexus, and then replaced that in 2014 with a Motorola Moto E.

Also during the summer of 2012, I got my first ever phone contract and it came with a basic smartphone. This drove me into the world of Android, as well as the Google App-ecosystem. That smartphone was fine, and I barely remember using it. It lasted about a year before I replaced it during my second year of University. At the same time I also treated myself, due to the aforemention extra summer income, to an ASUS Transformer tablet. A colleague on my course at university during first year had one of these and I obsessed over getting one for a long time. When summer came around I got it soon after my first smartphone. I loved it, and used it to watch Netflix around the house as it had lower power consumption than my laptop. When the second year of my degree began in September 2012, I used it all throughout the winter as a note taking device because it had Google Docs access; cementing my temporary fall to the even-darker side of computing.

Partway through the second year of University I upgraded my laptop with an SSD, which sped things up considerably. It was by far the most cost-effective upgrade I’d ever made. The SSD wasn’t large, so I needed to get used to not having much space for media on the machine itself. The machine lasted two years before the charging port gave out. I always think I’m taking care of machines, but I must be more heavy-handed than I realise… either that or they’d get damaged in my backpack. My computing was basically the same at this point, except I’d been using Google Docs for writing documents. As noted earlier, this was motivated by having access to the Google Docs on my tablet device for note taking; but was finalised the move was that I was having to jump between my laptop, my tablet, and the Windows 7-based computing cluster. I had a few essays corrupted on me by failing to unmount the USB properly the previous year, so it seemed like a good move even if I was just trying to preserve my work.

During 2012/13 I got suckered by the “need a new smartphone” propaganda, and noticed that my smartphone was severely lagging behind in terms of system updates; still being on Android 2. I upgraded to a secondhand Galaxy Nexus device, which I have a few fond memories of. I didn’t use the device to its full potential, but it embedded me further into the Google App ecosystem by snaring me with the functionality of Google Play Music. Specifically, I could upload my own music, delete it off my machines to free up space, and then pin music to devices when I wanted to download and listen to it offline. Honestly, the interaction was pretty much perfect. I was hooked on Google Play Music for a while before I began to mistrust it.

The ASUS tablet fell out of favour as it got slower and slower, and I tried to do as much computing as possible with a single machine. It was relegated to my bedside drawer for a long time when I was tired of lugging it around campus. It saw a revived life during the summers, when I would download comic books and use it as a digital comic book reader and spend my days reading comics in the park or on the sofa.

Throughout 2013, my laptop’s power supply was again on the blink. I think being trussed around in my bag all day had really beaten it up. I probably replaced it a little too soon, and too keenly. It was heavy, and large, and I wanted something a little more portable for lugging around campus. By this point I’d discovered PC Specialist; a ‘configure your build’ type of OEM who specifically would allow me to save £80 on a laptop by not installing an operating system. In the winter break, in early January 2014, I took the plunge and replaced my laptop with a shiny Ultrabook from PC Specialist to see me through the final semester of my degree. That had similar specs but was much lighter, and I swapped out the HDD with an SSD as soon as I could afford it. Later in 2014, I spotted that the Moto E could run Android 4.4 KitKat and was inexpensive, so I gave the Galaxy Nexus to a friend and got myself one of those.

Throughout 2014, I started to come back to the fold a little with regards to doing computing in a way that gave me more freedom and less reliance on proprietary cloud services. I was adamant that I didn’t want to write my undergraduate dissertation document using MS Word or Libre/OpenOffice, mostly because of the citations and figure numbers. I was friendly with an exchange student, and she showed me how to use LaTeX; which I instantly fell in love with. It handled bibliography management itself, and automatically numbered tables and figures for me! Amazing. Being TeX files, it also meant that I could sync it and keep backups using Git, which I’d picked up during my degree. I used BitBucket for my Git repos at the time because they allowed me to have private repos.

My devices and my computing stayed relatively stable during the rest of 2014. My main devices were my PC Specialist ultrabook running Ubuntu (which I upgraded every LTS) and my Moto E phone with Android 4.4, later Android 5.0 Lollipop. My tablet got a look in every so often, but began to collect dust. I mostly wrote documents in LaTeX, wrote code in whatever IDE I was required to, used Chrome as a browser, and listened to music via Google Play Music as well as allowing Google to act as my photo storage and management system. Throughout this time, and especially across the summer; I was rediscovering my roots and my values around Open Source, and I wanted to do things in a more ethical way. My rose-tinted glasses over Googlified Android were beginning to wear off, and I started ruminating about doing things differently; but I didn’t want to return to the days of swapping USB pens in and out daily.

Since I needed to do some PHP web development for one of my modules, I opted for a text editor to write in as the PHP IDEs looked ridiculous. I initially chose to use Sublime Text based largely on liking the dark theme, however I ditched Sublime Text during the summer, after I discovered Atom. The proprietary nature and nagware tendencies of Sublime Text didn’t make up for what was, in my opinion, a pretty bog-standard text editor. Atom looked just as nice, had loads of cool extensions, and was Open Source. At the time, I didn’t realise how it was written in what would become Electron… and Atom became my default text editor for a number of years

In late 2014 I completed my BSc in Computing Science and moved onto my MRES/PhD course at Culture Lab, now Open Lab, at Newcastle university. They provided a laptop for their PhD students, and we were given a choice of a Dell XPS 13 and a Macbook Pro. At the time, I associated HCI and Culture Lab’s work with developing apps. I therefore had the logic of “I might need to build apps -> I might need to build iOS apps -> I can’t compile iOS apps on GNU/Linux -> I had better take the Macbook Pro in case”. It was one of the worst mistakes I’ve ever made, quite frankly.

It turns out that the University only approved Macbooks from 2011, which were a little slow and incredibly heavy. In fact I think the Macbook Pro that they gave us was probably heavier than my old iBook G4! They certainly weren’t useful as portable machines for carrying around campus. The start-up bell interrupted lectures, and the disk drive decided to make whirring sounds randomly. I ended up rigging mine up to a monitor on my desk, folding it up vertically and hiding it behind some books in shame of the device. I then nabbed an Apple keyboard from a cupboard in Open Lab and tried and claim some decent use of it as a pseudo-desktop. In addition to the pains from the hardware, using OS X was also incredibly painful this time around. My previous use of OS X had mostly been based around torrenting, playing media, web browsing, using OpenOffice, as well as using Handbrake to encode DVDs. Turns out I’d never done any programming, web development, or LaTeX writing on an OS X system. I’d taken for granted how user-friendly GNU/Linux systems are for these use-cases; they trust you enough to allow you to install your development environment onto your system. Most of the time you just need to ask your package manager for a few packages and you’re off with Python, PHP, a LAMP stack, or LaTeX. I found this incredibly difficult in OS X to get a decent web development environment set up, and for some reason Python was being daft as well.

I was also competing with the fact that the university managed the machine. I logged in using my university login and OS X would take about 10 minutes to load. In the end, we figured out that this was because the machine was frantically trying to keep in touch with the university’s servers and sync my user account, email, and integrating the calendar into the OS X systems as well as the Windows-based “H: Drive” — my allocated share of the university storage, which I’d never once used. I managed to claw back a little functionality when I realised that I could trigger a wipe-and-reinstall of the base system which would remove the university’s additions and settings. This helped in getting the system running at a reasonable speed, but the problems inherent in OS X remained. Across the winter it became obvious that I wouldn’t need to develop any iOS apps if I didn’t want to, and I took the plunge and wiped OS X from the machine in preference of Ubuntu once more. The machine stayed on my desk at work; if I needed to travel I used my own laptop.

My computing tasks at the time were pretty much the same as I’d had since my undergraduate, except now spread across two machines. My home machine remained for personal projects, completing coursework at the weekends, and watching media on it. My university machine stayed on my desk, and had a more robust setup for programming and LaTeX. My work mostly consisted of writing documents, notes, and maintaining a library of papers to use as references for essays. For this I used Zotero, after quickly discarding Mendeley. I used the Zotero plugin for Firefox, and the Zotero standalone application. I’d export these to a BibTeX file when writing documents.

This setup in terms of devices basically stayed the same over the next few years, with the biggest changes being to how I used them.

2015 to 2018

I swapped out Ubuntu for Xubuntu on all my machines, and it became my system of choice for several years.
I started ditching Google services.
I started pulling away from web services and going FLOSS on my smartphone.

As 2015 arrived and wore on, my computing largely remained steady during my MRES. I used both my home laptop and my university machine the same way: I wrote most of my documents in LaTeX although I had LibreOffice installed to view student coursework and documents that my colleagues shared; and in terms of programming I wrote a few Android applications and some web applications using PHP and Symfony, which required a text editor. As noted, I’d been using Atom for a while there. When writing LaTeX I stuck with TeXMaker, although I had a few dalliances trying to use Atom to produce LaTex. None of those stuck, though.

I was still using Dropbox to sync most of my document files, but began switching a lot of the smaller folders for private Git repos. Open Lab ran an internal Gitlab instance, which I used to store all of my MRES and PhD work. In 2014, I had begun my swing back to the world of FLOSS and regaining my hardliner GPL views. I swapped out Chrome for Firefox in very early 2015 when I realised that the latter had developed an account sync feature.

In late 2015 I saw an Open Lab colleague using Xubuntu on their machine. I had known that XFCE was light on resources, but hadn’t thought to switch from the Unity-based default flavour of Ubuntu. I had started using the terminal a lot more to run things more quickly than the Ubuntu menus could, so wiped the machine and installed Xubuntu over the Autumn period. The Macbook almost actively thanked me for this as it could run a lot better now. Once I’d gotten used to it, Xubuntu became my system of choice and I installed it onto my home laptop as well.

During 2015 I purchased some domain and hosting, carving out the mrshll.uk space but not doing anything with it. By the end of 2015, going into 2016, I had growing privacy concerns and a desire to move to a more FLOSS-based ecosystem. I began with my email. I moved my personal email address to ones under my own domain, and ceased all personal use of Google Drive. This initially came on in fits and starts, but I started turning off Social Media as well as pulling away from Google across 2016 and 2017. I discovered F-Droid, and began replacing apps on my phone. Google Maps became OSMand, a podcast client became AntennaPod etc. There were a few system apps I tried to turn off, but couldn’t and the best I could do was try to disconnect my Google Account from the device. I decided that I was now uncomfortable with Google Play Music having such control over my music files. I used their exporter software to download all the music I’d uploaded previously, and stored it on an external drive. I actually rarely listened to full albums during this period; most of my audio was podcasts and I’d put random playlists on YouTube to suit the mood I was in, but put music on my phone using USB cables. I’d come full-circle back to an iPod like experience.

Tied in with the withdrawal from Social Media described above, I went through my Indieweb phase and discovered Markdown. I migrated my notes to markdown, and used a Markdown interpreter for PHP to produce the basic CMS that ran my site.

My devices remained static across this time period.

2018 to 2022

I continue to pull away from Google.
My devices all sequentially melt and require replacing.
Markdown and Plain text become my priority for document production.
My professional work forces me to use Google Docs and services.
I start trying to get a longer lifespan out of my machines.

2018 saw me continuing the trend as before, with pulling away from Google in as many arenas as possible. I’d now fully ditched my Gmail address and was using my webmail ones. I was dissatisfied with my web host because they severely hamstrung my ability to do much with my web space. I desperately wanted to install something that would remove my reliance on Google Calendar, and nothing seemed to work.

A big trend for me during 2018 was the move to a mostly Markdown and Plain text workflow. I began using Todo.sh, and converted my thesis into Markdown. Pandoc became an important part of my daily workflow.

In mid-2018 the HDD within the Macbook Pro I used at Open Lab spun its last and the machine was rendered useless. I lost a good bit of research material and thesis work in that crash, because I had failed to back things up properly. The machine was sent for repair with the university IT, who had offered to reinstall the system for me. I requested Xubuntu, which they complied with, but had rigged it to be managed by the university network. Thankfully it didn’t try to connect to the H Drive, but I didn’t have root access. I was on the sudoers list, and I rarely needed to do anything as root but it still irked me somewhat. Sadly, they’d locked down the bootloader so I couldn’t wipe it and reinstall Xubuntu myself. I sucked it up and got back to work after syncing git and my reinstalling my applications from the repos.

By the spring of 2018, I noted that it had been a few years since I had gotten a new phone and I decided that I wanted to treat myself to something compatible with LineageOS; the next stage in my battle to liberate my phone. I had in my head that the best phone for this would probably be a Google flagship device as I imagined stock android would be patched to run quite well. I got a Motorola Nexus 6 and managed to load LineageOS sans the Google Services. This became my daily driver and I even put my de-googled device through its paces by taking it on a trip to Canada. I adored using my FLOSS-powered phone, but sadly it melted itself during the summer of 2018. I have no idea how or why it happened. I woke up one day to it having reset during the night and refusing to boot. That was the second great data loss tragedy of my PhD, as I lost a lot of interview data which I’d neglected to back up from the device. I always keep my previous phone as a backup device, I so reverted to the Moto E for a few months before I decided to get a secondhand One Plus 5 in the late September or early October of 2018. This was wiped and installed with LineageOS as well, and remains my phone to this day.

Around mid 2018, my personal laptop was on the blink as well; mostly from the charging port. I seem to have bad luck, or bad practice when it comes to device charging ports. It was refusing to charge unless I kept the charger pressed down at a certain angle and it was growing dangerously hot when I did that. I ended up getting a new machine from the same vendor (PC Specialist), which was ultra-thin and fashioned from aluminium like a Macbook Pro. I figured it’d be my GNU/Linux equivalent of a Macbook so I bought it. I really liked that laptop despite the fact that at 16 inches it was a little bigger than I’d normally want to use. It had an i5 and maybe 8GB of RAM; although I don’t really remember. I installed Xubuntu on it and got on with my day. I took it with me when I started my job at Open Data Services Co-operative and got on with it fine. I donated the Macbook Pro machine back to Open Lab who surrendered it to the university IT service without ceremony.

In 2019 I was en route to Mexico for work. I stopped at Schipol to change flight and met with a colleague during the wait. We did a little bit of work, and then realised the time and rushed to the gate. I closed my laptop, put it into the bag, and thought nothing more of it. On the flight I didn’t like the look of any of the in-flight movies so wanted to watch something I had locally on my machine. I realised that the machine was still running as it was very hot to the touch, and when I opened it I couldn’t wake the machine up. I rebooted and discovered that I couldn’t log in, no matter how carefully I typed my password… after some debugging using the onscreen keyboard to log in, and trying out keys on the device I determined that the keyboard had broken during the initial portion of the flight. By my reckoning, the overheating and jostling during takeoff had probably dislodged some solder or something keeping the keyboard connected. Upon my return to the UK, I tried to get in touch with PC Specialist about a replacement part but to no avail. I was using a co-working space at the time, and couldn’t reasonably leave any peripherals there to use the machine as a pseudo-desktop. Further to that, I wasn’t set up at home for using the machine with an external keyboard or mouse.

I donated the machine to another member of the co-working space, even buying her an external keyboard and mouse set to use with the machine. I set up Ubuntu for her using the OEM install, which would let her set up her own user, and left her an instructional PDF for how to use Ubuntu to accomplish most daily tasks. As I did that, I reflected on my computer use and device use over the last few years. During my undergraduate I had basically burned through devices at an alarming rate, and I’d just had three devices basically melt on me in the last 12 months. I resolved to only get second-hand devices from then on. I knew I preferred laptops, and wanted a smaller laptop. From observing those with Dell XPS 13 devices at Open Lab I was familiar with those machines and their specifications, and knew they took GNU/Linux well. I bought myself a second hand machine from eBay, and at the same time realised that “backups” were important. I found a cheap, £120, ThinkPad Yoga machine with comparable specs and asked for it to be expensed at ODSC with the justification that I’d brought two of my own laptops now and I wanted a company machine just for travelling.

I set the machines up using the latest Xubuntu LTS at the time. I spent some time with the ThinkPad on a trip or two within the UK, as well as the Philippines and quickly fell in love with its keyboard as well as the trackpad buttons. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and I was relegated to a sofa in the sitting room, it was the ThinkPad that came with me as my main device. The Dell machine sat unused in my cupboard, until I installed Xubuntu 20.04 on it and used it for a week while I found time to install 20.04 on the ThinkPad as well; allowing me to seamlessly work without interruptions.

When I moved home in 2021, I experienced sitting at a desk for the first time in a while. I decided that, as a treat, I’d get a used monitor from a local exchange. Throughout 2021 until recently, my setup was using the ThinkPad on the desk hooked up to a second screen. This was useful for keeping notes on the laptop screen, and really was my preferred setup generally. This year, in 2022, the ThinkPad ‘E’ key broke. I think I must type pretty aggressively. I tried to glue the key back on, but the scissor-switch keyboard on the laptop was pretty poor and I eventually gave up. At that point, I had a lot of disorganised files on the machine and the thought of changing to the Dell was a little much. I borrowed a keyboard from a friend, and dusted off an old bluetooth mouse from a drawer. I put the machine on a riser and used it like this for a while, until I decided that I liked the setup.

Once I’d decided that, I wanted a keyboard more suited to my needs. I’ve never been fussed about mechanical keyboards but when I was looking at keyboards which didn’t have the 10-key numpad on the side (to reduce travel between the keyboard and mouse). I don’t claim a lot of expenses at work, so asked for a mechanical keyboard as I perceived them to be more user-serviceable (ability to replace keys etc). The bluetooth mouse has been swapped for a wireless one which takes a little USB dongle to connect. This necessitated that I also get a USB Hub to make sure I could connect: a mouse, a keyboard, headphones, and webcam to do my work.

After a while with that setup, I decided that the desk was too cluttered and I wanted to reduce my reliance on having two monitors, in case it breaks or I need to travel again. The ThinkPad now sits folded up by my monitor, reminiscent of my Macbook Pro setup at Open Lab. I use the mechanical keyboard on my lap where possible, as that allows me to recline more comfortably (and I think more ergonomically?).

When I was setting all this up, I decided that it’d be a good opportunity to refresh my systems and realised that Xubuntu 22.04 LTS was due out. As noted elsewhere on this blog, I ended up swapping Xubuntu for Debian 11 Stable. Pretty contented with this, I then got back into Linux Geek mode and began reading about SystemD. Oh dear. I shouldn’t have done that. As of now I’ve decided that I don’t like SystemD and I’ve wiped the Dell machine to install Devuan. The ThinkPad will follow in due time.

In terms of computing, I currently straddle two worlds. In my personal computing as well as for some of my professional work I can use small minimalist programs, and I take a lot of notes in markdown folders. I finished my PhD in markdown, although the final typesetting was performed in LibreOffice because I had failed to plan ahead and build a good LaTeX template. At Open Data Services Co-operative, we unfortunately are tied quite heavily to Google Services and use Google Docs and Google Drive a lot. This has been a daily reality for my computing ever since. We also use Colab Notebooks a lot, and my computing has expanded to include logging into databases as well as analysing data files locally. I make attempts to minimise the impact of this on my computing, but unfortunately I need to use these bloated web apps in the name of co-operation.

Present Day and going forwards

My current setup is:

A ThinkPad Yoga 12, running Debian 11 stable. This machine is folded up next to a monitor and I use it with a mechanical keyboard.
A Dell XPS 13, running Devuan 4. This machine is the one that comes with me travelling or to the sofa.
My One Plus 5 smartphone, running LineageOS without Google services.

My current priorities are reducing the amount of resources that my computing uses on a daily basis. This has involved switching to a more terminal-oriented existence, which I’m actually very comfortable with. This means that I’ve been able to be a bit more productive as I have less travel time to the mouse. I’ve been swapping out bloated apps for minimalist ones to reduce memory consumption. The most eco-friendly machine is the one you already own and don’t need to replace; so I’m going to try and use these machines until they physically cannot support a decent version of Debian / Devuan GNU/Linux. The same goes for my smartphone; if I choose a smartphone going forward it’ll be for device longevity using LineageOS.

For my daily drivers, I like the setup of having a workstation-type machine attached to a desk, paired with a laptop for portable work. When the ThinkPad does eventually die, I’ll hit up eBay to look for a secondhand (or thirdhand) Lenovo ThinkStation mini; ideally with an i9 and upgradeable RAM. If I got a machine with an i9 and 64GB of RAM paired with my current trend of trying to do everything minimally; I reckon that’d likely be the last machine I’d ever need for around two decades unless x86 disappears from GNU/Linux support. The laptop machine can be a lot more humble; I’m clearly OK editing text and manipulating data using mid 2010s hardware. It’s just the increasingly bloated web apps that will reduce devices to e-waste…

This has been an indulgent trip down memory lane, reminiscing about the devices I’ve used across the years as well as how I’ve grown and change in terms of how I’ve done my computing. You can find an up to date summary of how I do my computing now by reading the relevant section on my About page.

I currently use Vim, but I’m not opposed to GNU Emacs in the future as I try to migrate more and more into the terminal. Contrary to a lot of memes, GNU Emacs doesn’t violate the UNIX philosophy; it is a fantastic LISP interpreter and a place to start pulling in multiple commandline utilities into a single space. If I get sick of trying to keep track of multiple windows / instances of Vim; I’ll be hitting up GNU Emacs. However, I’m pretty content with my current setup with Vim. ↩︎
Yepp, High School. In the UK! In Northumberland we had the 3-tier school system until around 2008. You went to ‘First School’ ages 4 to 9, ‘Middle School’ ages 9 to 13, and ‘High School’ ages 13 to 16. That marked the end of compulsory education in the UK for us. Most people stayed on at their local ‘6th Form’ or went to a local ‘College’ ages 16 to 18, before attending University (or leaving to go and work). ↩︎

2022 Summer Solstice Update

2022-06-30

Wow. This last six months have been seriously intense. Overall they’ve not been quite as rough as the previous six leading to Winter Solstice in 2021, however a lot has happened.

My partner and I began the journey of prepping our flat for sale and house hunting for our future home. One factor has been that we’ve made the decision to plan for our future and seek a home which has the room for children. This is exciting as well as a little scary. Related to that, we’ve had a lot of medical stuff going on which is a bit of a new one for me. It seems that I became 30 in October 2021, and all of a sudden my body has decided that it’s going to make me feel all the abuse I’ve given it over the years! I’ve also been given some brain-type diagnoses which are changing the way that I view myself and try to work with myself. These things combined provided quite a few stressful moments, but we’ve made it through stronger than ever before. I’ve also been growing slowly ever-more closer to my family, after being historically distant from them for around a decade.

I also submitted my PhD corrections in January, and they were accepted. I collected my certificate some time in April which was earlier than expected. My corrected thesis is still online. I resisted the urge to set a redirect for dr.mrshll.uk, although I am now officially Dr. Mrshll. It still feels odd.

Our cat (alas no longer a kitten!) continues to bring us delight and frustration in equal measure. Given that the sun currently rises around 0400, she’s decided that this is a good time to start pouncing on our heads of a morning.

Overall, I feel very good coming out of this half-year period. I still feel that I’m in the middle of a few things and that we barely get a chance to rest before we open up new “loops” in my brain. However: we’ve sold our flat and found a new home; we’ve strengthened our relationship; I’ve understood more about myself and my brain and I’m taking better care of my body; I’m closer to my family; and I’ve finally got my PhD which means I’m not constantly thinking about it.

Here’s to making the most of the remainder of summer before the winter comes.

Key Events

2022-03-04, our offer on a new home is accepted
2022-03-09, my partner A is given the all clear from a scary brush with a major illness
2022-03-14, we accept an offer and sell our flat
2022-04-12, I collect my PhD certificate
2022-04-19, one of my best friends gives birth to a healthy baby
2022-05, I receive my ADHD diagnosis alongside a strong indication of ASD

Hobbies

I’ve done a little bit of diversifying my hobbies this half-year. I’m still practicing Esperanto and exercising regularly, and our walking has become more pronounced and regular as well as more technical.

In addition to these, I’ve begun to do some creative writing and have gotten back into computing as a hobby. Each of these comes in waves, but I’m enjoying them a lot.

Esperanto

My Esperanto continues to develop, although at a slower pace than previously. I still have a lot of motivation to learn the language but I don’t feel a sense of urgency anymore. It’s just part of who I am and what I do, which is nice.

Most of the applications on my phone are in Esperanto now, and I now journal in Esperanto. This means that I’ve got daily exposure to reading and writing Esperanto. I still use the popular language learning app on a daily basis, and I’m only a few topics away from completing the course at Level 5. After I’ve done that, I will replace that with some daily Esperanto reading and writing exercises and only return to the app to practice. I’ve also started jotting down new vocabulary in Anki, which actually does help me to recognise more words. It’s not a complete solution, but nice to use.

You can see in my logs, that I read an Esperanto novella — Fajron sentas mi interne. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I adore that it is only available in Esperanto. I downloaded a bunch of other Esperanto books onto my Kindle, including an infamous illicit translation of Harry Potter. I haven’t been able to summon the energy to commit to one to read though. My goal will be to read maybe one Esperanto novella or short story every six months.

Exercise

While exercise continues to be one of my keystone habits, I’ve been on a bit of a downward trend lately. This is because of some cumulative injuries and exhaustion affecting me.

For my strength training, I’ve had to stop doing Close Pushups because of my left shoulder. I haven’t been able to see a physiotherapist yet, but it’s really bothering me. I’ve been able to do regular pushups fine, and I’m using the opportunity to get better at those.

For running, a bit of disruption has meant that I haven’t run a 10k in a few weeks now. This has been because of hiking exhausting my legs and some illness. I’m currently running some 5ks just to recover, and will build back up to a 10k soon. My eventual goal is to increase that amount, but I need to work with a coach to figure out how to do that sustainably.

Overall, I need to change up my approach to training as I’m stagnating. I need to spend some time in physiotherapy to deal with my shoulder, but I’ve also been interested in the idea of hybrid training. This would involve splitting up my strength routine, and doing a strength workout as well as a run every training day. I’ve held off such ideas in the past as a good way to overtrain; but I think I’m underperforming now and it might be useful as a cycle. I will work with a coach to do this, though, if I feel that I can’t do it myself.

I won’t be posting my current numbers this update; as they’re basically static from last time.

Walking and Exploring

My partner and I have gotten throughly into walking this half-year. Since the last update, we’ve completed over half of the walks in our book, done some of our own walks, and learned a lot about map reading and navigation. We’ve even “lead” groups of our friends on walks.

We’ve mostly been concentrating in Northumberland, although we’ve ventured to the Yorkshire Dales and Teesdale as well. While it’s true we’re confident enough now to go without a guidebook, we’ve had such a good time with our Northumberland book that we’ve actually bought another one for County Durham.

I’m still thinking about how to digitise these walks, or if it’s even worth doing so. One benefit of the physical books is that we write in them. On the top of each walk’s entry we write the date we completed the walk, and some details about who came. Also if there’s any particularly good bits of the walk.

Overall, this has become a solid habit and one that I have thoroughly enjoyed building with my partner.

Creative Writing

I’m getting back into creative writing. It’s slow going for now, as I struggle to make time in my schedule between work and getting enough sleep.

I’ve managed to start outlining some short stories as well as jotting ideas for longer stories that I want to tell. My friend, J, and I are also attempting to create an informal writing group for just us; but scheduling conflicts have meant that we’ve not had more than a single session.

I’m not putting pressure on myself to do much in this space, but it’s nice to be writing fiction again.

Logs

Albums

I haven’t listened to a lot of music lately. The main reason is that I often have a lot of calls and meetings at work, and I therefore am not able to comfortably listen to an entire album. Usually I listen to Lo-fi instead.

As always, I used DeDupe List to remove duplicate listens.

Sour by Olivia Rodrigo
Maiden Heaven Volume II by Various Artists
Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel
SlipKnot by SlipKnot
.5 The Gray Chapter by SlipKnot
What the F*ck is wrong with you people by Combichrist
Clayman by In Flames
Come Clarity by In Flames
Reroute to Remain by In Flames
Aqualung by Jethro Tull
Timewave Zero by Grendel
Portrait In Jazz by The Bill Evans Trio
A Sense Of Purpose by In Flames
Imperfect by Kinissue
Furiosity by Monster Truck
Harsh Generation by Grendel
Nature’s Beauty by Mondo Loops x L’Aiguille
Rammstein by Rammstein
Zeit by Rammstein
All I Was by Tremonti
American Idiot by Green Day
Benefit by Jethro Tull
Mutter by Rammstein
Led Zeppelin I by Led Zeppelin
Save Rock and Roll by Fall Out Boy
Somethin’ Else by Cannonball Adderley
Sehnsucht by Rammstein
Songs From The Wood by Jethro Tull
Pastel Blues by Nina Simone
Ellington at Newport by Duke Ellington
Thick as a Brick by Jethro Tull
Minstrel in the Gallery by Jethro Tull
Heavy Horses by Jethro Tull
The Sidewinder by Lee Morgan
Futha by Heilung

Books

Wow. I know that I was reading more books than usual, but totalling these up was incredibly pleasing. Some of these are “cheats” in that the books were very short, and nostalgia-driven. But I’m still pleased at my efforts.

I didn’t do the second half of the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, as planned. After I finished The Fall of Hyperion I wanted to do some fantasy, so I read through some of The Witcher books. These were pretty good, and I enjoyed the short story collections but didn’t feel up for an entire novel. I then got thinking about an old book that my dad lent me, Test of Fire by Ben Bova. I read the entire thing in a day and… erm… was that rape scene really necessary? I couldn’t relate at all to the protagonist after that and mostly finished it due to the sunk cost fallacy and nostalgia.

I’ve had a mini project on to produce some good-quality ePub versions of some old fantasy novels, The Banned and The Banished by James Clemens. These are books like Wit’ch War, etc. I had all the physical books and acquired digital copies when I migrated my reading to my e-reader. Unfortunately, the digital copies were produced via some really low quality scans. I converted them to Markdown via Pandoc and began fixing a lot of the issues to the best of my ability, and produced some pretty good ePub files! I’d fix up a book and then read through it noting errors. I got through the first three pretty quickly, but stopped halfway through Wit’ch Gate (actually my favourite of the series) because I didn’t enjoy constantly going to my phone to note down the errors. I will complete the series later this year, probably.

Between Wit’ch Storm and Wit’ch War I spent some time reading my first ever Esperanto fiction book in its entirety. Fajron sentas mi interne (EN: I feel fire inside) was a beautiful story. I didn’t do a word count but it felt around novella length, although it took me a while to read it as it was in my second language! This was another test of my ePub formatting skills as the only version I could find was hosted on the author’s website (here). I downloaded it to my machine and promptly discovered that the author had produced the page using some very non-standard HTML. I also swapped out author’s use of the ^ characters for proper esperanto letters. I am pleased with the result, and thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Feeling a little frazzled, I wanted something easy to whet my appetite. I recalled another book that my dad had lent me as a child: The City of Gold and Lead and wondered if I could get hold of a copy. Luckily, my favourite ebook vendor had the entire Tripods trilogy in stock so I promptly got them all and burned through them very quickly. It gave me a lot of closure to read the entire series because my dad only had the middle book. For some reason, I think it was because I was fixing up my bad ePub copy of Bloodtide, I recalled a few Melvin Burgess books that I had never gotten around to reading. I read through Doing It which was a solid read, and a really good take on a sensitive topic. Then I went with some classic H. G. Wells intersparsed with some childhood classics such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and a short fiction collection.

As noted below, my partner and I watched John Carter of Mars which I recalled was loosely based on a book or series of books. Through that I discovered the Barsoom series and read the first one pretty quickly. Partway through the second, I discovered that the author held some unsavoury views about race and eugenics which sort of ruined the entire series for me. It was just a little too obvious that the various different “races” of Martians were embodying particular eugenecist beliefs about how race works.

Some more short fiction, before I devoured The Hunger Games trilogy again. They’re honestly some of my favourite books of all time; they’re clearly anti-capitalist, they’re written superbly, and use a wonderful three-act structure. They also attempt to portray PTSD realistically, which is very admirable. After this trilogy refreshed me, I was in the mood for some trashy Star Wars novels and read through Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover. I had high hopes for this as it was very highly rated, but I found it hard to follow. This could’ve simply been my brain playing silly-buggers. After this I hit up some of the Elder Scrolls fiction, before giving Altered Carbon a try. Altered Carbon had been sitting on my device for some time upon the recommendation of a friend and I’d put off reading it because I didn’t want to learn a new ‘world’. The book itself was actually great, and a wonderful concept. I won’t be following through with the remainder of the series, as they apparently take a different route into Military Sci-Fi. Nothing against Military Sci-Fi, but it’s just not what I’ve got the appetite for at the moment.

I wound down by finally reading Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book which was spectacular, before my friend J told me about Bunny by Mona Awad whilst we were walking near Kielder. I got myself a copy and read it expecting a lot… and wasn’t disappointed. It’s a lot more literary fiction than I’m generally in the mood for, and she’s very clearly trying to do something with the book. But I can’t quite decide if the book is the best, most insightful, thing I’ve ever read or whether it’s utter trash and too pretentious to take seriously. Both might be true, and I suspect the author is very pleased with how divisive it is.

I was gripped by some nostalgia again and rattled through some old Goosebumps books to recapture my childhood, as well as Five on a Treasure Island. They served their purpose as quick pallette cleansers between other books. I then got the urge to revisit Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere and finished off what’s available of Mistborn era 2 (I was originally waiting for Book 4), as well as diving into Arcanum Unbounded; the collection of Cosmere short fiction. I read all of this except for Mistborn: Secret History and Edgedancer, because I haven’t yet read through The Stormlight Archive and these are apparently best read after this. It turns out that White Sand, the graphic novels set in The Cosmere, are based off of an unpublished work which Brandon distributes for free, so I grabbed myself a copy of the ePub and I’m currently reading through it. It’s honestly great, other than a few spelling errors. You can tell it’s early, Elantris-era Brandon Sanderson, but still a solid offering for a draft.

With my partner, we finished The Long Earth series which was a nice journey. We then turned to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld as she hasn’t read any of these. We read a few of these in publication order starting with Equal Rites before we took a break for a palette cleanser. I think our pattern will be to read several of these before delving temporarily into something else. We chose His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman because my partner hasn’t read those, either. We finished Northern Lights recently and have begun The Subtle Knife. My partner, A, adored Northern Lights.

Going forward, I’m going to finish off White Sand (Prose Version) and then probably delve back into Star Wars for a bit. I’m in the mood for some trashy-but-decent books, and the Pathfinder series of novels look to fit the bill once I get bored of reading about blasters and bounty hunters. I otherwise have no aim with my reading other than to do as much as possible within the next six months!

The Long Utopia by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski
Sword of Destiny by Andrzej Sapkowski
Test of Fire by Ben Bova
Wit’ch Fire by James Clemens
Wit’ch Storm by James Clemens
Fajron sentas mi interne by Ulrich Matthias
The Long Cosmos by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
Wit’ch War by James Clemens
Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett
Mort by Terry Pratchett
The White Mountains by John Christopher
The City of Gold and Lead by John Christopher
The Pool of Fire by John Christopher
Doing It by Melvin Burgess
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon
The War of The Worlds by H. G. Wells
Sourcery by Terry Pratchett
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Angels and Vistitations by Neil Gaiman
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
Star Wars: Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover
Elder Scrolls: The Infernal City by Greg Keyes
Elder Scrolls: Lord of Souls by Greg Keyes
Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Bunny by Mona Awad
Welcome to Dead House by R. L. Stine
Five on a Treasure Island by Enid Blyton
Stay Out of the Basement by R. L. Stine
Monster Blood by R. L. Stine
The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson
Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson
The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson
Arcanum Unbounded (minus Mistborn: Secret History and Edgedancer) by Brandon Sanderson
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

Total books read since last Solstice: 43

Currently reading: White Sand (Prose Version) by Brandon Sanderson (solo) and The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (with my partner)

Movies

Reading these logs back, I was honestly a little surprised at how many movies I’ve seen as it feels I’ve mostly been outside!

There’s not been a rhyme or reason for any of these. You can spot where I was reading The Hunger Games, because I’d watch the movies pretty immediately following the completion of each book. There have been a few good entries: We Need To Talk About Kevin was spectacular. John Carter of Mars was the instigator of me going off to read the Barsoom books. But mostly these have been junk-food movies. My vote for the worst movie was probably The City of Ember as it felt like it really should have been much longer than it was. But it was at least visibly pleasing.

Easy A
Yes Man
Captain Phillips
Pretty Woman
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Point Break
How To Train Your Dragon
Jerry Maguire
Maleficent
Raya and the Last Dragon
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
John Carter of Mars
The Adam Project
Constantine
The Other Guys
The Switch
The Island
The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part Two
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Bridesmaids
We Need to Talk About Kevin
The City of Ember
That Thing You Do
We’re the Millers
X-Men: Days of Future Past
X-Men: Apocalypse
Source Code
The Phantom
Hunt for the Wildepeople
Everything Everywhere All At Once

Total movies watched: 33

My dream e-reader

2022-05-15

I read the vast majority of my books, especially fiction, on my e-reader. I bought it in 2012 as a treat to myself for doing well in my semester exams at university. I replaced it about three months later, when the few books I’d carried to uni with me fell on it and damaged the screen. I replaced it with another of the same model, though, and all is well. That means I’ve had the device for around ten years now.

It’s worked fine for me. It’s an Amazon Kindle 4, black. It has about 2GB of storage, and the worst thing about it is that it doesn’t take EPub files so I need to constantly convert via Calibre which increases the footprint of my library somewhat. I made the decision very early on the turn off the WiFi connectivity on the device because I had no need for it; books are loaded via USB.

I occasionally get twinges to check out other e-reader devices; specifically any one that will handle EPub files and has better storage. Maybe a better screen, or a light so I can read in dark places without a torch. But I never do. My philosophy around devices is only to replace what’s broken to the point where it’s causing a problem.

My father sadly passed away in 2021 as a victim of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as we were going through his things I spotted an e-reader: a Nook GlowLight. I asked if I could have it, as it was ultimately my father who gave me a love of reading science fiction and fantasy and I felt that I might be able to connect with him in some way through reading whatever he had on the device. The problem was that the device is awful. The interface uses a touch screen, there are books displayed on the device that are not on the device but are on the Nook store available to sample or purchase, the buttons are awful, the file management is awful compared to my much older device. Looking at modern e-reading devices is, to me, scary. What if my device breaks, and I need to get a new one? Will I be condemned to getting advertisements on a device I own? Will I need to navigate slow, buggy, touch interfaces?

It got me to thinking; what makes a good e-reader for me? My partner is the one who uses my late father’s Nook, I continue to use my old Kindle. I want to try and get it to 20 years old. But what if the battery goes? In the future my partner and I will be thinking about having and/or adopting children. I want them to be readers, and while I will make sure they grow up surrounded by physical books; I want them to have some e-reader devices as well.

This post is me ranting about what e-readers should be and also a little bit about what they shouldn’t be. Enjoy.

Basic Features

Here are the features that I consider absolutely basic, and foundational, to what goes into a decent e-reader:

Supports a variety of open formats such as .epub, as well as basic HTML5 files
Supports UTF-8, and attempts to cover as much Unicode as possible
User can load their own dictionaries via USB
Solid basic typography built-in, for use where books don’t embed a font (or the user chooses to disregard book-specific fonts)
Allows the reader to adjust typography via system settings (e.g. size, preferences for serif vs sans serif)
Ability to adjust the system clock
Basic sorting and viewing by e.g. Author, Genre, Alphabetical, Collection, etc
Supports collections management, with a basic on-screen keyboard for naming collections
Progress through a book is made visible to the reader, through a choice of metaphor: pages or percentage read. Also distance to the next chapter is shown in some way
Front-light (seems to be the given thing)
USB charging
Load books via USB (via tools such as Calibre, or just the user’s file manager)
Has physical buttons
Firmware upgrades can be made via USB, and any firmware upgrades via WiFi are not forced onto the user
Removable battery
Additional storage via SD card slot

My current e-reading device is an Amazon Kindle 4 that I bought in mid-2012 as a treat to myself for doing well in my Semester 1 exams at Uni. It’s honestly a solid device except for the Amazon anti-features. The first thing I did was disable WiFi and by all accounts, that seems to have been a decent move, but one of the main anti-features that remains is that this model does not support EPub files. It’s really a dick move from Amazon not to at least support the open file format. Even if they’re misguided enough to think their format is better; at least let me decide for myself and try to prove it! Yes. A fundamental feature for any reader should be to support several standardised open formats. My preference is for EPub; but this is the world of tech and of Free Software. Choices abound. HTML5 should also be supported since it is a fundamentally a way of semantically tagging documents. This gels well with a digital form of reading. Proprietary formats could be supported, but the message here is one of standardisation and openness.

Supporting UTF-8 and Unicode is also essential to me; I’m bilingual (EN and EO) and I am trying to brute force the ability to read Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. Therefore, I need to ensure that I can read books with all sorts of non-English characters. Beyond that, though; this is good for generic internationalisation. I want my e-reader to support Mandarin if I ever load it to a friend in China, or learn Mandarin myself. Cyrillic, Korean, Japanese etc. All of these need good non-English character support.

Related to this, I think it’d be a good feature to allow users to load their own dictionaries via USB. These can be dictionaries that they’ve made themselves or simply dictionaries that are made available to them by the community (incl any device vendor). I don’t use dictionaries on my device, and I’m not aware of any particular standards for dictionaries, but I’m sure they exist. Supporting the user uploading these via USB will allow several for several things: they get greater control over their device; the device manufacturer doesn’t need to worry about shipping with pre-built dictionaries; it allows the user to only have on their device the files that they need or want. If I wanted to upload an Esperanto dictionary to my device I should be able to do that.

Next up is typography. A basic e-reader device should have solid typography built in. This is separate (but I imagine related to) the screen itself; which is a limitation of the hardware. I’m not an expert, but the typography should be in some way suitable or optimised for the e-ink display and aim to be as legible as possible. Some books embed fonts and typefaces into the file; the device should obviously be able to handle that but the default option should be a good-looking font. Another use-case which should be supported (and yes, as a basic feature) is that there should be a setting to actively disregard or ignore any fonts embedded in the book files in favour of the device settings. If the user has any reading support needs or even just preferences; these are primary. Sorry to you all who spent hours making your EPub file stand out from the rest, but your readers come first. These settings should also, obviously, be adjustable by the user. Basic things as choosing the size, typeface (serif or sans), and weight of things such as headers and body go a long way into making books more enjoyable for certain people.

This next one sounds silly but I’ve written it down because of an offending device in my home. Let the user adjust the system clock! I get engrossed in my books and I often check the clock via my devices menu button. My partner uses my late father’s old device (a Nook Glow or something) and cannot adjust the system clock manually. We haven’t connected the device to the internet since it passed on to me, but would bet money that we can’t adjust the system clock because some daft coder or executive decided that the device needed to be connected to some server to be updated. Seriously.

Next up is the actual handling of the user’s books and files. I really only have a few barebones requirements here. Firstly; collections management should be a thing. Whether you call them “shelves” (looking at you, Nook), or just “collections”; having a user-curated set of categories and collections is just a neat feature. A bonus feature would be the ability to have nested collections e.g. “Philosophy / Moral Philosophy”, but that’s not really as necessary as just having the ability to manage my own collections. Several ‘views’ should be presented to the user to view the books on the device sorted or grouped by any field on the EPub file. This could be Authors, Genre, Language, Publication Year, etc. Just listing them alphabetically should be a default option as well. Collections should obviously be a view, and easily accessible quickly.

When viewing a book, I should also be able to see my progress through the book. My Kindle 4 presents this to me as a progress bar along the bottom of the book, with a number representing the percentage complete. I really like this. The Nook device that my partner uses shows that the reader is on “Page X of Y”. This is also good. I have a slight preference for the way the Kindle 4 handles this; because chapters / sections are marked along the bottom bar so I can judge how long it’ll take to read the next one. This is an important decision making process for situations where I’ve limited time to read, or I’ve been reading a while and it’s late and I get the “one more chapter” urge. If this was a physical book, I’d be able to flick ahead and see the number of pages until the next chapter. These aren’t physical books so I need some sort of heuristic on the screen to mimic this. I won’t pretend that the Kindle 4 perfected this; but some sort of way to tell this on the interface would be a delightful feature and one that I think is really basic to the reading experience. Allowing a choice between sticking with a “page” metaphor or opting for a fairly brutalist percentage marker is a good thing to allow the reader to choose in their settings.

Right, now we’ve covered basic features in the firmware it’s time to take a look at the hardware of our theoretical device. Easy ones first: front-lights and USB connectivity. My device doesn’t have a front-light, I don’t much mind but it does restrict where in my house I can read it (by a window or reading lamp). While this is actually a bit closer to the interactions of reading a physical book, it’s a limitation I would like to have the option of side-stepping. The Nook we inherited from my father has a front-light and I often look enviously at my partner as she reads on the “dark” side of the sofa (where the reading lamp was destroyed by a rabbit chewing through the cable!), whereas I have to ask her to move if I’m sat there by the window and the sun sets. Front-lights should ideally be adjustable in terms of colour temperature via the device settings, to support reducing eye strain. USB connectivity is also fundamental. No wireless charging please; just let me plug my device in. This also means that the books should be loadable in by USB and not tampered with. I recently had a warning from Calibre when I plugged in my Kindle 4, that Amazon had issued a firmware update to some (all?) Kindles which meant that books loaded via USB now wouldn’t display the covers. This didn’t matter to me specifically but the principle is awful. Let me load my Project Gutenberg books please. Calibre is obviously a great way to load books via USB, but support should also be made for just dropping in books via the user’s file manager of choice. Create a folder on the device called books or something. This obviously means that the device contains the ability to be recognised as a USB Mass Storage device. No drivers required.

The USB connectivity also extends to firmware and upgrades. I make an argument in a later section of this post that WiFi is arguably an unrequired feature of these devices. Regardless of this, one cannot guarantee that the user will have the WiFi turned on or otherwise have a network available. Therefore they’ll need the ability to load firmware via USB. I’ve said this is a basic feature, even if most users are not capable of doing this themselves. Easy firmware installers or how-tos can be provided by a manufacturer: but allowing people to choose their upgrades is essential. This extends to if the user has got WiFi enabled; don’t force firmware upgrades on them.

Physical buttons are also an essential feature of the device. Touch screen interfaces and experiences in e-readers I’ve used have been universally awful. I’d need to do some proper research, but I’m also pretty sure that touch interfaces for e-readers are also less universally accessible than some button layouts. I have a preference for the style of buttons on the Kindle 4; where the forward and backward buttons are placed either side of the screen and form part of the device’s edge. The Nook Glow has a variant of these but they’re shockingly bad, and feel like an afterthought. Additionally, some small physical buttons on the front / bottom of the device to navigate menus is not the end of the world. Some of the newer styles of e-readers have went with a sort of handle thing, where one side of the e-reader is more pronounced with some buttons on it. From what I can tell, the device has a gyrometer that allows the screen to flip over and thus allowing one to hold the device in either their left or right hand. This might be good, but I haven’t used it. It does seem that having a gyrometer on the device is a bit excessive; surely this could be handled via a menu option? Having a wide variety of chassis types with different physical button layouts for different preferences would seem like a good move generally; as long as all the same features of the device are present.

Finally, two features that I think any basic e-reader should have are removable storage (via an SD slot), and a removable battery. The battery one might be difficult, due to the form factor of a device. I don’t think that “thinness” is a feature in devices, especially when contrasted with the loss of user-replaceable batteries. However, an e-reader is designed to be held comfortably for a length of time so there may be some trade-off or wiggle room there with regards to device size, weight, and ergonomics. The SD card slot, however, is another story. SD cards are a pretty standard technology and while the device should definitely come with a good helping of integrated storage; removable and upgradeable storage is definitely desirable and should be seen as a basic feature. The ability to go from a device with 2GB storage to a device with e.g. 400GB storage would be a game-changer for a lot of people. Considering how tiny EPub files can be if they’re just text, that’s a LOT of books. I’d need to confirm this, but I also imagine that speed isn’t necessarily that much of an issue if all you’re doing is reading text from the device either. If you combine good ergonomics, upgradeable storage, and a serviceable battery; you’re basically looking at a device for life. Obviously that’s not desirable from a consumer-capitalist point of view, where they want to make you upgrade on a regular basis; but it’d be better for you and for the planet.

Good Features

In addition to the basic features outlined above, here are features that I think a good e-reader should have:

Ability for user to load their own fonts for use in the system via USB
Ability for user to load their own ‘screensavers’ via USB for use when the device is powered off
Generate a TOC for books from headers, to support navigation where books haven’t done this within the file
Allow the user to disregard the CSS embedded in the e-book file in favour of some stock or custom CSS on their device (to normalise display or deal with badly formatted books)
Allow the user to load their own i18n or translations of system menus and settings via USB
Modular firmware, allowing advanced users to swap out individual components
Allow loading of entirely custom firmware which completely replaces the existing firmware
Firmware is Free Software. Device is Free and Open Source Hardware. This would ultimately enable a lot of the above

I noted in the previous section that a basic e-reader should have some good typography embedded in the system to allow the reader to read comfortably. A good e-reader would take this feature to the next level and allow the reader to load font and typeface files onto the device via USB. No restriction, support open file formats. Let the user load these fonts onto the device memory under a folder called e.g. fonts, and have the device detect them at boot (or per a user’s request). This would support people with specific legibility needs, if they have a preferred typeface for their dyslexia or other form of reading challenge. Similar, but arguably less important, is the ability to have users load a ‘screensaver’ onto the device via USB as well. I like the screensavers on my Kindle 4, but hate the ones on the Nook Glow. I’ve read about being able to hack them onto the device by booting up into particular modes etc. If there’s a technical reason to restrict the file format and the image format (colour profile, dimensions etc) then this is fine; but document it and ensure that the user doesn’t need to hack them onto the device. Just let them drop them onto the device memory.

Next is a reading feature. Some e-books that I buy or get from Gutenberg are beautifully formatted. By that I mean that they have headers where the chapters are, which are displayed on my device. Using these markers I can judge where the next chapter is, and there’s also a Table of Contents in the e-book file itself if I want to jump around. Some books don’t have this sadly. At the moment, I run them through pandoc, edit them in Markdown to add proper chapter headings or a table of contents, and then convert back to EPub. It’d be nice if the device’s firmware could pick up on headings in the device and auto-generate a table of contents for me on the fly (or cached) in case the book (or HTML document) doesn’t contain one. This would help users navigate short story collections, poetry collections, academic books, etc.

Taking that concept a little further; sometimes e-book publishers make bad choices for their books. If you’re going to indent the first line of every paragraph, then please don’t also create a gap between paragraphs. Sometimes chapters start midway through a page (this bothers me less but I do like a page break). Other time there’s distracting formatting on the page header for each chapter (looking at you Brandon Sanderson). Maybe the publisher has embedded a particularly egregious font. In these cases, it’d be useful to allow the device to ignore any book-specific formatting and apply its own rules to display the book. This is good for readability if someone has made their book illegible. The rules can, and should, be set via some CSS stored on the device. Some good options can be curated and pre-loaded onto the device by the manufacturer, but the user should be able to load their own via USB. Just let them put it in a folder called styles.

Letting users have access to the system also benefits them in other ways. If they speak a language not currently supported by device menus, they should be able to load a file which can load the language onto the device. This requires that the menus and strings are available online for community efforts to provide translations for them. The user should just be able to load a file onto the device to make the menus and interface available in that language.

Finally, with the users able to customise their device to their liking at this level; it makes sense to allow them to swap out components of firmware or even totally replace the firmware on the device. I’m not sure on how firmware is built exactly, but my understanding from doing some research into the Kobo readers (in case my Kindle ever breaks) is that some users load a different ‘reader’ onto the device. If firmware was modular then users can swap in and out components. Some community member has built a better / faster reader application? Load it in. Maybe someone has built a nicer file browser. Load it in. You see where I’m going. A modular system, with an open API will allow the device to be truly customisable. If a user messes something up; provide easily accessible restore tools to wipe the firmware and replace it with a ‘stock’ version. If the community builds its own firmware that the user wishes to user, then allowing them to easily flash or replace the firmware with this is a good thing.

Ultimately, a lot of the features just mentioned basically requires that any pre-loaded firmware exists as Free Software (not just Open Source), and that the device itself is Free and Open Source Hardware to the extent that is possible. I’m not in the FOSH world, but it’s an important step to make. I don’t believe in the fairness of market forces; but truly free markets would allow a user to own their device, understand it, and customise it to their liking. If a manufacturer thought their firmware was best it’d have to compete and provide reasons for that.

Anti-features

To my knowledge there are two definitions of the word anti-feature: a feature that the manufacturer will charge people not to include; and a feature that may have originally intended to be a feature but is perceived as a bug or annoyance.

Here are what I perceive as anti-features in e-readers:

DRM of any sort, proprietary formats or vendor lock-in
Integrating an e-Book Store
Integrating an online account of basically any kind
‘Recommending’ (i.e. advertising) something to me on my device, in any way
Any form of web browsing
For that matter, does it really need WiFi?
Touch screens

We’ll start with the easy one, as it gets it out of the way and also segues nicely into my rant on e-book stores being integrated into devices. DRM absolutely sucks, is unethical, and while not the worst sort of capitalism; it’s pretty damn bad. The idea that you hand over money for something and then can’t own it or do what you want with it is shocking and a deliberate hamstringing of digital technologies to serve the ruling class’ interests. A cousin of DRM manifests in e-readers and e-books though proprietary file formats and a tight coupling between a device and vendor services such as an e-book store. The proprietary file formats serve two purposes: making it more difficult to load legitimately bought books from other services onto the device; and making it more difficult to load legitimately bought books from this vendor’s store onto a different vendor’s device (or just any other of your devices). Usually the ‘compensation’ for this hamstringing is the ‘smooth’ integration of an e-book store onto the device itself.

I can honestly say that I do not want a e-book store integrated on my device. When I buy an e-reader I want it to do basically one thing: read books. That’s it, job done. Focus on doing that well. Let the e-book vendors sell the books. Recently, I wanted to read La Ŝtona Urbo by Anna Löwenstein but didn’t want to burden myself with a physical copy. My criteria were simple: let me download the EPub file; let me load it onto my device to read it. Luckily, the folks at Retbutiko are kind enough to run a store which allowed me to do that. I paid my money, was emailed a copy of the book (DRM-free, but watermarked with my name), and I loaded it onto my device via calibre. Fantastic.

Contrast that with when I load up my late father’s Nook Glow device and there’s literally books listed on the device from the integrated store. I’ve never connected it to my home WiFi, and there’s seemingly no way of turning off this functionality. My partner, who is now the primary user of the device, has to wade through screens of rubbish files which aren’t even on the device to find the books we’ve loaded onto the device.

Tightly coupling the devices with the stores only causes harm and frustration, and is only ultimately useful for vendors trying to keep people on their platform / ecosystem; the ‘Applefication/Platform Capitalism’ of the web has come to your e-reader. One may claim that, from a “User Experience” or Interaction Design perspective, it’s somehow easier to have people buy the books on the devices themselves, and then magically appear. I’d contend this. Other than the arguments that User Experience can be used by hostile capitalist organisations to alienate you from your device, and shepherd you along the “experience” that they’ve preordained for you; has anyone actually tried to use one of these stores? E-paper is not designed for that level of interaction. By choosing to integrate a store you need to do the following:

add WiFi chips and functionality into the device
add an interface for connecting to the local WiFi
ensure that the device can’t be used to launch attacks on the rest of the network
integrate the interface for the store into the device’s firmware
Provide an interface that makes sense in the store; either with touch or via menu buttons for navigation
Handle updates to the store or the device to fix bugs

That is a lot of additional work, and I can’t actually recall using any e-reader that seems to have gotten it right. Touch screens on e-readers I’ve used are painfully slow and janky. The screens, which are broadly perfect for reading books, are jarring and horrid for displaying store interfaces (or anything beyond basic menus). Contrast that to the experience I outlined above: I used a web browser on my computer to purchase a book quickly using an online vendor; I loaded it into some library management software which has been purpose-built for the task; and then plugged in my device and uploaded the book for reading. You can even skip the middle step and load it directly via USB on a file browser.

I don’t think that’s a particularly technical thing to do; most people are familiar with how USB pens work, even if they’ve largely been superseded by hostile cloud storage providers. People still email documents and spreadsheets to each other every day for work, politics, and pleasure. People do know what files are, and giving them control over that file is more friendly to them than making them jump through hoops. If you set up a folder on the device called books into which people can just drop files to be picked up automatically; that’s plenty friendly.

The big name e-readers also sell books via their own services, and maintain control over the books they sell to you. We all remember that time Amazon infamously deleted George Orwell books from people’s devices. The key take-away is: when you buy from places like that you don’t own your copy of the books. This wouldn’t be possible if the device didn’t have a store connected, or didn’t have WiFi. But more than this, I don’t want the store to recommend anything to me. I discussed before how the Nook GlowLight device shows books that aren’t even on the device as if they were. This isn’t even the worst practice; Amazon sell devices which have advertisements baked in. No. I don’t want my device to advertise other books. I’d ideally not even like my books to advertise other books; but at least that’s a small page at the back of the book (physical or digital) and hasn’t been built around snooping on my preferences.

Building on the above; I also do not want an account integrated into my device for any reason. My old Kindle asks me if I want to Tweet or use Facebook to share I’ve read a book. If I wanted that I’d just… do that via Twitter or Facebook. I don’t need my device manufacturer, or any other party, present on my device at all. Just let me read my books in peace.

Web browsers are another thing that need to go from these devices, although I do understand the appeal here. There’s a lot of great content out there to read on the web, and e-readers are very good at, well, letting you read digital content ergonomically and comfortably. This said: my previous point still stands, re e-ink displays and their suitability for browsing. The refresh times are shocking, and the web is built for scrolling which is to my understanding not a metaphor that has carried over to the majority of e-readers. A website is not a book; therefore paginated articles on the web are awful and used to artificially elevate hits. By the same token; a book is not a website. It uses different metaphors. There could be an argument that if an e-reader managed to develop a really nice scrolling mechanism, then this would be more appropriate; but see also my point on the refresh rate of e-paper and e-ink. It’s not built for this. It’s built for simulated page turns. Add to this the fact that modern web is a bloated, JavaScript-laden, hell-hole where the e-reader browser is going to be asked to download a tonne of resources to render on an odd-sized screen, which doesn’t refresh how the website or web designer is familiar with. I’m sorry, it was a nice idea but I still think the e-reader browsers need to go.

Once we’ve stripped away the perceived need for any online accounts, an integrated store, or web browsing: there’s really very little need at all for WiFi connectivity. The only thing I can think of is firmware upgrades in a manner similar to smartphones. However, by removing the anti-features one makes the device infinitely simpler; all it does it manage files and display them to the user’s preferences. I’m not a firmware engineer, but I think this would mean there was less chance of bugs and errors being introduced into the code. The lack of WiFi connectivity, or personal data on the device, would also mean there was very little, if any risk of the device being an attack vector. If the device made it simple to update the firmware via USB then even this use case is alleviated. No need for WiFi.

The final point I’m going to make isn’t the strongest, and I’ll freely admit that; but I don’t see many legitimate needs for touchscreen functionality on e-reader devices beyond usability for those with some mobility or dexterity needs. I’m not a user with mobility needs, and I’ve not done any design work with someone with these needs so I’m not going to make any claims whether there’s better solutions than touch screens out there: I simply don’t know that. But once we’ve stripped away the clunky stores and the web browsers, and placed a set of well placed, responsive buttons on the device… there’s not much left for touch screens to do other than get in my way. Page turns via touch screen just feel awkward, and when I’ve attempted to read via my dad’s old Nook I’ve often turned the page by accident when brushing the screen to remove some crumbs (books and biscuits go well together), or if the cat steps on the device when I’ve put it down. Swiping to unlock is just silly, as well. I can’t imagine that to be much easier for people with mobility or dexterity needs than hitting a button. I can see some use for limited touch functionality to select items off of menus if the user finds it difficult, or is unable to, select items using the buttons on the device.

Summary

In conclusion, I think e-readers are some of the most frustrating devices in the world because they could be so good, but currently come both hamstrung and loaded with anti-features designed to make the next model seem a little bit more attractive and tie their user into an ecosystem which prevents them from owning the books they buy.

By making the devices themselves, and the software powering them, Free and Open Source (emphasis on Free); the potential of these devices could be unlocked. They could focus on being really good reading devices that users can enjoy for decades. Giving people the ability to upgrade their storage and swap out their battery makes the devices eco-friendly and user-friendly; saving money and the planet at the same time. It’s almost as if capitalists shouldn’t be allowed to manufacture technology.

Goodbye Ubuntu (mostly)

2022-04-18

Note: This post marked the first time I wrote something in Esperanto first, and then translated directly back to English. As a result, the sentence structure and language in this might be a bit jarring compared to my other writing!

I’ve used Ubuntu since 2008, when I first discovered the world of GNU/Linux. I never really ‘distro-hopped’ much, because I was quite content with Ubuntu and what it continued to offer me. When I was a teenager, I installed a laptop with a triple-boot: Ubuntu 10.04; OS X ‘Hackintosh’; and Windows 7. When I went to university and was forced to get a new computer (mine broke), I only used Ubuntu throughout the entire time. Since then it’s been my sole system. When I began my master’s degree, Open Lab bought me a new machine to use for my work. It was a Macbook Pro… and I installed Ubuntu.

But today I uninstalled Ubuntu from my main computer and replaced it with Debian.

Four days ago, I remembred that it was the time when Ubuntu usually publishes a new version with Long Term Support; and it’d be almost ready. I wanted to read a little about the new system and searched the web. I found this article on OMG! Ubuntu!. At the bottom of the post, is the item: “Oh, and Firefox is now a Snap”. For a multitude of reasons, I am not a fan of Snap. Mainly because it causes the software to be so slow. Firefox is one of my most used applications and in the post, the author wrote the if I started the browser from a “cold start” then it would need around ten seconds to start! In my, suitably humble, opinion, that isn’t really acceptable in 2022. My machines are good and I don’t want to feel like they’re from 2001. In fact, I reckon that I could do the majority of my computing with hardware from 2010 because I try only to use applications and software which are very light and fast. But a browser is, sadly, a very important piece of software. Also, Snap apps don’t use the system theme and the Snap Firefox wouldn’t use the usual folder for downloads! Nope. Not good for mi.

So I thought it was time for a change.

There was a time when I eagerly anticipated the next release of Ubuntu so that I could use the new features, but as I’ve aged I appreciate stability and speed more. I’m no longer happy with the direction that Ubuntu is going. I didn’t like Unity when it was released, and consequently since 2015 I’ve used Xubuntu instead of regular Ubuntu. I know that Unity was released before 2015, but I was busy and I thought switching would take too much time. Anyway, XFCE usas a lot fewer system resources. Since then I’ve only updated the installation once every two years when a new LTS release was published. It seems that Ubuntu no longer has what I’m looking for in a system.

And so today I installed Debian. For those who aren’t familiar, Ubuntu is actually based on Debian. I asked my colleagues about which Linux distro I should use, but I already had two in mind: Debian or Arch. They recommended that instead of Arch I should use Manjaro which is based on Arch in a similar way that Ubuntu is based on Debian. These (Debian and Arch or Manjaro), are very different from each other but both would give me the ability to have a strong, stable, and fast system which doesn’t contain much that I’m not using. After I read about them online, I decided to choose Debian.

There are a few reasons I chose Debian:

It tried to use only Free Software
It functions similarly to Ubuntu, and uses .deb and apt-get to install applications
It is stable, and I don’t need the latest version of my apps, but to avoid crashes
It’s the product of a community rather than a forprofit corporation
It seemed to be easier to install than Arch, and I didn’t really know much about Manjaro in order get best use of it

The installation was a little slippery, and not as friendly as Ubuntu; but smooth. But because of that, I felt a little cool and a little like my 15-year old self playing or tinkering with my computer. Sadly, I had to install non-free software to use my wireless card. But after that, I had a Debian system! I chose to install XFCE again and so now I am familiar with how to change the system settings to my preferences.

After the installation I found that my uder wasn’t in the ‘sudo’ group like in Ubuntu. And I had a small problem with the ‘Compose key’: I couldn’t set it! The system menu told me that the key was the one I chose but it didn’t work. I searched the web and finally found that I could set it with a config file in the home folder. In fact, I prefer this because now I can send the setting to my dotfiles. One problem continues; the system makes a loud hardware-beep sometimes when I type where I’m not supposed to. I’m searching for a way to silence this.

But I’m happy. I feel closer to my machine and like I have more control over my system again. I’m still using Ubuntu in my other computer, because I just wiped it recently to install Ubuntu 20.04 and it’s still pretty clean and lightweight. When it’s time to update it: Debian will be waiting.

Goodbye Ubuntu, it was fun, and I will always have warm memories about our time together. Truly, you made me into the person I am now. But we’re too different now. And our relationship is ending. Possibly in the future we can rekindle our friendship. Until then, have fun with Snap.

My take on the Plain Text Personal Organiser

2022-03-19

I love plain text and markdown. Scott Nesbitt’s The Plain Text Project is one of my favourite blogs, and I’ve previously written about writing a thesis in Markdown myself. One day, through The Plain Text Project, I discovered this post by Dan Lucraft around his Plain Text Personal Organizer. I instantly clicked with the idea and couldn’t wait to try it out. The purpose of this blog post is to outline my variation on Dan’s Plain Text Organiser, and how I use it to manage my life.

For those who haven’t, or won’t, read the post (you should, it’s great); Dan outlines some of the drawbacks of the “One Big Text File” (OBTF) methodology which had sprung up from a series of blogs around 2005. The idea behind this method was to keep all of one’s personal data, project management, etc in a single large text file. I was only 14 back in 2005, but in 2020 I had discovered some of these old blog posts and had even been enticed a little by the infamous GNU Emacs org-mode to cater to my project management needs. I was about ready to take the leap. Dan lists the drawbacks as: the fact that the text file must be synced religiously; the file can get very large even only using plain text; and things can get lost and difficult to find even with decent search. His iteration on the OBTF was to reconceptualise it as a digital “personal organizer” through changing the OBTF to multiple files with a directory structure, and also adding version control to keep everything in sync.

Rather splendid eh? Dan outlines his organiser’s structure in his post. He has sections built around the Getting Things Done methodology (the famous “inbox”), and has folders containing what he calls “stacks” which are lists that remain constant in size, and so forth. Seriously go read the post. I was enamoured and my brain instantly started fantasising about my own plain text folder which had to hand everything that I needed for my everyday life.

But I’m not Dan. My needs are different, my work is different, and my brain is different. So it needed adapting for my use. I was already a devout user of todo.txt, and was starting to toy with the idea of getting some form of plain text scratchpad to capture all the snippets of thoughts and tasks that I needed to jot down instantly.

So, on 2020-12-02 (a Wednesday), I ended up making my first commit in the folder that would become what I call my plain text planner. The rest of this post continues with the details of its contents and how I use it as the system as evolved over 2021 and into 2022.

Table of Contents

My folder structure

Here is the folder structure of my planner. The planner folder itself sits as ~/planner on every machine, and I have a bash shortcut p that automatically changes directory to this from wherever I am in the file system.

/planner
    * scratchpad.md
    * projects.md
    * checklists/
        * monthly.md
        * weekly.md
    * logs/
        * [log files].txt
    * todo/
        * backlog.txt
        * done.txt
        * someday.txt
        * todo.txt
    * workbooks/
        * [workbook files].md

As you can see, I’ve deviated from Dan’s organiser structure quite a lot based on my needs. I’ll go through each key feature now.

The Scratchpad

scratchpad.md is perhaps the most important file on my computer.

I first discovered the concept of a scratchpad via The Plain Text Project blog post. I’d previously seen, and even used, paper versions throughout my early PhD career but I’d always lose notes or forget to cross things off. I also never knew that they were called ‘scratchpads’.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a scratchpad is a pad of paper (or a digital file!) where you can quickly ‘scratch’ a thought or idea as it occurs if you’re not in a position to spend some time on the idea. After reading Scott’s article on scratchpads I was instantly taken with the idea and had even began keeping scratchpad file on my desktop. It was a no-brainer to migrate it into the planner.

The scratcpad.md file is arguably the file that changes the most in the entire planner, and sees the most heavy-duty use. I use it for everything. I don’t follow a pure Gettings Things Done productivity system; but a core concept I took from that was the idea of an inbox for capturing eveything that occurred. Now, as you’ll see later: a lot of the time I can just quickly add something to my todo.txt file. But sometimes I’m in a meeting and can’t, or the item is quite loosely defined and not actionable. It goes into the scratchpad to be handled properly later.

Another thing that the scratchpad file excels at is drafting emails. At Open Data Services Co-operative, both ourselves and our clients use some CRM ticketing systems to manage work and email external partners. These support markdown, but use a plain text entry input which means writing longer updates can be tiresome: there’s no syntax highlighting and no nice autocomplete features. This, coupled with the fact that I often think by writing and re-drafting constantly, means that I’ve found the scratchpad incredibly useful to have open as a place to quickly draft a markdown email or update before pasting it into the web.

This concept extends even further: I often need to eyeball some JSON data, and it’s often been minified for sending across the web. In these cases, I paste it into the scratchpad and make use of my text-editor to manipulate the data: tidying it, and adding syntax highlighting to help me read it.

I also use the scratchpad for some smaller computing tasks. It acts as an extended clipboard for when I need to do data entry and paste various things around different systems. It’s particularly useful for pasting thing off of the web, as it strips the formatting. I need to work with Google apps for work and it’s often much easier to paste into the scratchpad and copy back out of it than to paste some things between GDocs and GSheets (even accounting for the paste-without-formatting command). When I’m reading or writing Esperanto I also use it to note down any words I needed to look up so that I can add them to my phone’s Anki deck later. I also add reminders or notes to myself in the scratchpad that don’t quite fit anywhere else; or as a memory prompt.

The scratchpad.md file is really my main workhorse. It’s constantly open and getting filled, emptied, copied into, and copied from. Because I see it every day, I also keep a quote from my late father at the top of the file. In this sense it really becomes a replacement for a beautiful, messy, deeply personal, notebook. One that can be tidied and ‘reset’ multiple times a day without actually losing anything. Most days, I’ll clear out draft emails etc as and when they’re done, but sometimes notes can build up over a few busy days if I’ve got meetings or such.

The projects file, and Workbooks

The projects.md file, the workbooks/ folder, and the relationship between them evolved gradually. It was initially adapted from Dan’s post and how he treats his projects folder. He says:

Each file in this directory contains my notes about a project. A project must be fairly involved to get in here, otherwise I just keep a small set of notes in stacks/projects.

I loved the idea of creating a dedicated space for each major project area, while retaining a small handful of notes for smaller projects in a single space to prevent a cluttered folder. Dan has a single file for keeping notes on “open” projects, as well as “backburner” projects. My system doesn’t really make this distinction, as I’m usually painfully aware of which projects are open at a given moment.

In my system, projects.md is for collecting any and all notes on small projects. These are projects in the GTG-sense, in that they are semantically linked groups of items or high-level tasks. Sometimes they’re lists of “Books I want to read”. I organise the file as a single markdown file, where each project gets a H1 level heading and they’re sorted alphabetically by first character. Any actual todo items here aren’t conceived of as proper todos, but a direction to head when the project comes into my focus. In that event, any tasks to accomplish are transformed into actionable items and entered into my todo.txt file and prioritised properly. Any project notes are stored here as well. Here’s a snippet of the file:

Office / Cinema / Games room
============================

* PS2 games that would be good:
  * Soul Blade original
  * Tekken 1 - 5
  * Soul reaver 1, 2, and defiance
  * Battlefront 2
  * Future Cop LAPD
  * GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas
* Get modern RaspPi with wifi and install a fileserver + media centre


Dad Death
=========
TODO:
* get old star wars comics valued
* Write recipes in old recipe book

It goes on. If I’ve got a project to send somebody something, I may store their address there. For my “reading” project; I write rough lists of books in various genres or languages that I want to look at. I often “think aloud” in the file, and write in a brain-dump tone.

If a project becomes big and starts requiring in-depth notes or thinking, it gets migrated into its own file under workbooks/. However, workbooks aren’t just larger projects. They’re also dedicated workspaces for particular concepts, areas of work, or longer notes. It’s easiest to explain with examples.

The way that I see every file under the workbooks/ folder is like a blank school book for a given topic. Your English workbook might be structured totally differently to your Chemistry or Maths workbook, the contents will be different and working in them looks different; but they’re all recognisably places where you write in them to do work. Hopefully that comes across!

One of my most frequently used workbooks is called open-contracting.md. That’s because one of my main areas of professional work (at the moment) is on the OCDS Helpdesk. The needs of that project are thus: I need to keep track of links to various documents and tools; I need to keep track of meeting notes; and I occasionally need to paste in some data to keep for longer than the scratchpad would be suited for storing. I’ll omit details, but that workbook is structured like the following:

---
title: Open Contracting
---

Links
============

* Links to various tools, wiki pages, guides, go here.

Drafts
============

* Longer term drafts go here, if necessary they're separated by H2 (##) titles.
* Drafts can be draft emails that are started one day, then get deprioritised and get picked up later
* or they're notes I leave myself for picking a task back up.
* or longer pieces of work that isn't suitable for writing in another repo

Meetings
==============

Meeting notes and minutes go here. Each meeting gets a H2 title with the ISO date and some details e.g.

## 2022-03-01 Initial Chat with Publisher XYZ

* Meeting notes here.
* Transcripts, bullets, key takeaways
* These all get captured.
* Actions get captured in the todo.txt file

That workbook structure allows me to manage that project nicely, with any actual todo items getting properly captured and prioritised in todo.txt. I have a similar setup for several of my other professional projects.

In contrast, the dreams.md workbook is mostly a chronological list of dreams that I remember. Whereas my esperanto.md workbook has sections for writing out messages to my penpal, for Esperanto links that I find interesting, for writing responses to practice exams, and for copying wholesale poems that I find beautiful. I keep a workbook for my home where I can collect information about fixing things, ideas for decorating, etc., and I keep a workbook for noting down things that my friends and family all like so that I can buy them thoughtful presents. I also keep a special deathbook.md file which contains instructions for if I die.

The structures within each workbook are therefore suited to the peculiarities of each ‘space’ or ‘project’, so it’s hard to give a way that each one is used. Some are used as giant long-term scratchpads. Workbooks occasionally get deleted, split, or merged. But generally, they are for long-term working and note-taking for different aspects of my life.

Managing my checklists

There is a small folder called checklists/ in the planner that I use to store my checklists for things. This has two files: monthly.md and weekly.md for monthly and weekly checklists respectively. It’s pretty straightforward.

These files just contain various checklists for my routine tasks like my backups or my laptop decluttering.

In future iterations of the planner it’s very likely that these will get condensed into a single file either under workbooks/ or by itself at the top level of the folder structure.

Todo.txt for managing my to do list

As noted earlier, I have long been a relatively devout user of todo.txt for managing my to do list. With todo.txt being a simple plain text oriented system, it felt like it had a natural home within my planner and so it was a simple matter to copy in my existing todo folder from my home directory into the planner repository, and begin managing it there.

There are four files in my planner’s todo/ folder. The most obvious ones are todo.txt, for storing active tasks structured using the todo.txt syntax, and done.txt which stores completed tasks with their completion dates. Entering tasks, completing tasks, and manipulating tasks between these two files is handled by a CLI python script, which I’ll discuss in a little bit. The main features I use in from todo.txt are prioritisation, contexts, and projects. This is a typical entry from my todo.txt file:

(A) @ocds +8039 ANAC revised data feedback

This is pretty standard todo.txt syntax but I’ll explain a little bit about how I’ve adapted it for use. For prioritisations I have the rule that no two things can be the same priority. Priority means the things that comes first, or precedes other things. It didn’t appear pluralised until the 1940s. This helps me focus on what needs doing first, which is ultimately where I flounder when I’m overloaded. I also try to keep my priorities pretty minimal. Todo.txt uses alphabetic priority so can go from A-Z, but I try to cap my prioritised tasks at a maximum of D or E. This means that I have to reprioritise relatively regularly, but since the shape of my work often changes and new things comes in to focus (and clients decide to reprioritise); this is sadly an effective way of managing this. The next thing on the line is the @context. In my professional life this is usually a domain of work, like a particular data standard or client project. The +project item generally represents a smaller piece of work within that scope. Numbered projects generally refer to a ticket in our ticketing system(s) for managing tasks so I can quickly find the ticket and do my work there. Otherwise it might be a chapter of a thesis, or something like +payroll or +chores. The rest of the line is the todo item itself. Sometimes these are super atomic and actionable like write skeleton of the findings section but if the process is pretty mechanical or understood they can also be relatively high level, as in the ANAC example above. GTG and todo.txt purists may be annoyed at how I’m using projects and contexts wrong, but I’ve adapted them for my brain and the realities of my working life. This is the joy of plain text; it’s totally flexible.

The backlog.txt file is my attempt at keeping my todo.txt file relatively clean and within the scope of “things that I need to be concerned about now”. My understanding is that this is a deviation from the traditional todo.txt methodology which relies heavily on prioritisation; however sometimes I need to capture something as a task and make it effectively invisible for a while. The reason for this is because my brain gets overwhelmed a little bit sometimes, and I struggle with prioritisation a lot. This is where backlog.txt helps me. It is structured in the exact same way as todo.txt except that the CLI script hasn’t got access to it (although I want to modify this) and therefore all edits are done manually and I can focus on my actual to do list. someday.txt is my manifestation of a GTG Someday Maybe list. This file is structured very differently to the others in that is mostly consists of high level notes items such as “look into motorcycle training”.

There is somewhat of a dialectic relationship between the todo/someday.txt file and the projects.md file. The former contains things that I will look into “when I’ve got the time”. If I’ve got a few hours spare of an afternoon or the willpower, I’ll crack the file open and choose something to look into. At this point it generally gets a heading in projects.md and the item is removed from someday.txt. If the activity sparks off any other ideas for things to do, these then get added back to someday.txt to start the cycle again.

Using a CLI script for the todo.txt file

Plain text pairs with the commandline pretty well, and I love hacking little scripts together that address very particular needs. Before putting together my planner, I had been using todo.txt for a while and made heavy use of the famous todo.sh commandline utility to ease my use of it. In fact, I then went on to write my own implementation which added features that I wanted for my own workflow; specifically automatic git committing whenever an item is added, removed, edited, or completed.

When thinking about the shape of my planner I wanted to have my cake and eat it. By this I mean, I wanted to migrate my todo.txt and related files into the planner but I also wanted to retain my commandline tooling. To do this, I adapted the tool so that my todo.py script took a configuration file, thus allowing me to point it at any file on my machine to use as the todo.txt file. I also added another parameter allowing the git repo to be in a separate, distinct, directory. This means that the script can have todo.txt etc all stored under the planner/todo folder; but also use the git repo stored under the base planner folder. Now whenever I use my CLI tool for my todo list, it automatically commits to the planner git repo ready for when I push at the end of the day.

Keeping logs

Some time during 2021, I decided to keep logs of a few things. These files are stored in the logs/ folder, and each take the form of a plain text .txt file, although could easily be parsed by any CSV parser.

Each log has the same format: an ISO 8601 date or full datetime (depending on the log’s scope) followed by a , and then by whatever the log entry is. You can see extracts from some of my logs on my 2021 solstice review posts (Summer, Winter).

The logs are used pretty frequently, although some don’t get touched for a while. My most frequently used logs are:

books.txt
movies.txt
albums.txt

And I have others for things such as logging symptoms of illness in case they become important, or tracking income from my father’s estate so that I understand how much of it has come through vs my own savings (which helps me figure out that I haven’t wasted any of it…).

Inspired by my todo.txt CLI utility, I took a similar approach when I began designing a small logging utility to help me create logs quickly. This utility is much less complete, and I do want to finish it someday, but has made it very quick and easy to rapidly log albums, music, etc as I listen to them without needing to manually type a datetime. This said, I often write out logs by hand. If I’ve a few entries to log from my phone, or if they’re in the past, I’ll need to log them by hand. This hasn’t got irritating enough yet for me to want to write the feature into the CLI tool; but one day I might.

Keeping in sync with my phone

In short, I don’t.

My philosophy behind this is that I really don’t need to have access to my planner on my phone at all. I don’t want to be adding todo items or checking off tasks on the move. It’s conceivable that I might want to look at something from my planner on my phone, but generally speaking my life doesn’t work like that right now. I’m not travelling constantly (thank the gods), and I work from home between two laptops (if one breaks). While I do use my planner for “Life” stuff; it’s dominated by my professional work and there is rarely something in my non-professional life that fits the category of urgent enough to be written down but not urgent enough to do right now. My planner enhances my personal life, but it doesn’t address problems really. Even my todo.txt file mostly contains professional tasks, and the personal tasks it does contain can simply be checked in the morning as I turn on my laptop.

Up until very recently I used Markor on my phone to jot down notes and keep small logs to be transferred into the planner manually. The Quicknote feature functions remarkably similar to the scratchpad file in my planner in that it is a single text file that is designed to be constantly edited. So it was a good place to jot things on the move. It effectively acted like a OBTF on my phone, but one that got emptied or edited quite regularly. If my partner and I were watching a movie, it would get logged in the Quicknote on the phone and then manually typed up in the planner later and removed from the file on the phone. Other than logs, it’s rare something needs to get migrated across from my phone to my planner.

I still take notes on my phone, and they function in the same way. However, I’ve stopped using Markor in favour of Nextcloud Notes. This decision was tough as I thoroughly love Markor; but it was going in the direction of more complexity and feature-richness when actually what I need is just a plain text-with-markdown notepad on my phone. Nextcloud notes has a lovely, simple, interface and has the bonus of already being in sync with my Nextcloud instance. I don’t really make use of this at the moment but it’s nice to know that if I needed quick access to some notes from my phone, via my laptop, then I could do this quickly and easily.

What doesn’t go in the planner

The planner is also defined by what sits out of its scope. For me, this mostly consists of the actual work or output from projects. The planner allows me an overview of everything that happens, but it’s not an OBTF or where I want to do my creative or productive work outside of the ideas or draft emails I write in the scratchpad.

I write a lot, relatively. Blogs, papers, fiction, and the odd bit of poetry. These all have their own separate projects folders on my machine despite the fact that they are, for the most part, mostly just plain text. The planner is for helping me organise thoughts and manage my life. It’s not my typewriter as well.

I also find it difficult to manage appointments and keep dates in my head using the planner. Emulating Dan, I tried out a calendar.txt file. I wrote key dates in at the top and tried to keep a log of all upcoming events. I never wrote in it or looked at it, even with reminders on my phone. I bought a cheap analogue week-to-view pocket diary which I’ve been trialling as my memory-enhancement for dates and events. I’ve had mixed successes, but more than the plain text version. And this is fine. I’m using the affordances of each medium to suit my particular needs; and that doesn’t lesson the importance of my plain text planner in my life.

Finally, I don’t keep a diary in the planner. Some day this might change, and it was so tempting to try and strongarm jrnl.sh into the system. I do keep a physical journal, which means that I don’t need a digital one for now.

An average day in the planner

Like one would keep a physical planner open on their desk, I tend to keep the planner open all the time on my laptop.

The fist thing I do when I log into my machine is open a terminal which occupies half of a screen (vertically). I’m a heavy user of virtual workspaces, so I ensure this terminal sits across these by telling X-window to make it visible across all workspaces. I then use the terminal to navigate to my planner/ folder and open the entire folder in my text editor. This means that I get access to the entire planner through the tree menu at the left hand side of the editor. The scratchpad is always open, and I open workbooks as and when I need them. If I’m at my desk, with two monitors, the planner gets full-screened and occupies my entire laptop screen and also is persistent across workspaces. This means I can use the external screen for calls, shared documents etc while taking notes in the scratchpad or a workbook pretty easily. If I’m just on my laptop, the text editor will remain on a single workspace where I can quickly navigate to it to enter or retrieve information.

Throughout the day I’m mostly working inside a workbook or the scratchpad. If I’m listening to music, I use a commandline utility to log the albums. At the same time, I use the todo.txt CLI utility to manipulate items in my todo files.

At the end of the day, I’ve generally accumulated anywhere between 5 to 40 commits (depending on the complexity of the workday and how good I am at committing), wherein I’ll give everything a quick glance over to make sure I capture any final notes before pushing the repo.

Summary

In this post I highlighted my use of a single plain text-oriented git repo for managing my professional and personal life, which I adapted from Dan Lucraft’s “Plain text personal organizer” and I call my “Plain text Planner”. I outlined how I use a plain text scratchpad, and have a series of “workbooks” that I use to manage larger projects or scopes within my life, and how my low-level tasks are captured by integrating the todo.txt methodology within the context of the planner (aided by some CLI tools). I also use the planner to store logs and checklists, keeping them close to hand.

If you’re into plain text and are sick of productivity porn, and want to build your own system that works for you: I heartily encourage you to think about designing your own version of this. Whether you conceptualise it as a personal organiser or a planner, or a diary; that’s your call. There’s so much you can do with a little understanding of your own needs, and a lot of plain text.

2021 Winter Solstice Update (belated)

2021-12-31

Note: this post is being finished a little later than usual, in January 2022. This is because I had some PhD thesis corrections to make for a January deadline and I wanted a rest after that. I’ve dated it in December 2021 to represent when the bulk of it was written.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere the sun has finished dying and has been resurrected; beginning its slow climb towards its peak. Regardless of your spirituality this means that light and life is going to start returning to the world and this is something I am very much looking forward to right now.

This half a year has been rough. I often think of the period between the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice as “death” part of the cycle. Immediately following the peak of summer, things begin to get slowly darker and life retreats. I’ve been quite stressed this half of the year due to a few different things. Firstly; another COVID-19 death, this time my friend, mentor, and surrogate-father, Mick died in August. I won’t say too much here in case I want to write something longer later, but he was incredibly special to me and to a lot of people and he is sorely, sorely missed. To re-visit actively grieving a second time within a year, so soon after my first real experience of grief, was rough to say the least.

We’ve also had to make the decision to sell my flat and move. This is for a few reasons, some bittersweet and some negative. I made the offer on the flat in October 2020 and got the keys in February 2021, the same day as I was told that my dad was admitted to the ICU with COVID. It was fine for a while, but the problems soon started up. I’ll write an in-detail post sometime as well, but the thing that caused the decision was the fact that since November we’ve got new upstairs neighbours who’ve been waging a war against our sleep. The bittersweet reasons are that with the inheritance my dad left us combined with the predicted value-increase of the property, my partner and I could move somewhere out of the city and have a small mortgage on a decent house with space for a dog and perhaps a few human children as well.

Combined with little sleep since November, I was also struck with an illness (not COVID, apparently) which wiped me out for about 10 days. This was a scary time for me as I like my lungs a lot and it felt like they’d be broken forever. I did get my COVID booster jab, but received the Moderna one rather than Pfizer and was very poorly for a day, and had swollen lymphnodes for some time. Like a boob under my armpit. Then I’ve had PhD corrections to deal with, which I left until the last minute because my viva was very aggressive and I’ve had other things on like being ill and not sleeping and having people die.

There have been good things, too. My friend and heart-sister got married. My relationship with my partner, A, has grown in all the right ways and we’re looking forward to continuing to develop our lives together. She’s moved in with me now, and we’re seeking to get a mortgage together soon. We also got a kitten! Her name is Fröyja, pronounced [‘frœyjɑ] and she is delightful. She’s a tinker, and has also been waging a war on our sleep, but she loves to play and loves being around us. She also gets on with dogs and rabbits, which is a big plus for our plans. All-in-all, she’s added way more joy to our lives than fuss so we’re giving her a free pass.

Now that the Winter Solstice has passed, I’ve shed the albatross of my Phd corrections (for now anyway, hopefully forever), and my partner and I are working towards just getting us moved things are looking up.

Key Events

2021-08-04, Mick died from Coronovirus, aged 59
2021-08-07, my friend and heart-sister gets married
2021-10, I turn 30 years old.
2021-11-05, we picked up our kitten Fröyja
2021-11-09, we get new noisy upstairs neighbours
2021-11-20, we make the decision to sell the flat while walking across Blanchland moor
2021-12-09, my partner officially moves into the flat full-time after gradually moving over the period of 6 or 7 months

Hobbies

Nothing too much has changed in the last half year regarding my hobbies except that I’ve gotten deeper into each of these listed. No carving or crafting yet, but I’m not particularly compelled to do anything with that at the moment. I’ve come to the realisation that I think those activities are fun, but I’m not going to break my back to do things that I only have a partial or surface-level interest in. I am feeling the need to make some wooden beads for some loved ones soon, so maybe that’s something I’ll do in the next few months.

While I’ve still not gotten up any mountains yet, I have been walking in the countryside with my partner a lot. This has been deeply pleasing to me. I’ve increased my reading a lot lately, but this will go in the Logs section later.

Esperanto

My Esperanto learning has continued nicely and my ability to use the language is only growing. I hit a 400 day streak on a popular language learning app lately, where my plan there is to finish the course and then continue onto other Esperanto materials.

I attempted to read La Adventuroj de Alicio en Mirlando but my vocab wasn’t quite up to scratch in the summer and I found myself needing to look up a lot of words and getting distracted on my phone. Searching for a physical English-Esperanto dictionary yielded some results which had bad reviews, so I’ve held off. I do often read Libera Folio and r/esperanto which I find much easier. I joined an Esperanto Telegram group and actually won an argument using the language at one point, but the number of “free speech” crypto-fascists in the group put me off and I left. I now lurk in the ##esperanto channel on Libera.chat but my IRC client doesn’t accept my custom compose bindings for Esperanto characters (e.g. ĉ, ĝ, ŝ) so I don’t write in a lot as I don’t like using the x-system. I’ve also turned several apps on my phone and computer into Esperanto mode and have found it really straightforward to navigate settings menus.

I write a decent amount of Esperanto owing to the fact that I both write notes and scenes for short stories, as well as blog in the language. Surprisingly, I’ve found that I really enjoy (and am most productive) when typing short stories into a plaintext app on my phone! I think this is because of the keyboard. In terms of the blogging I have added an entire Esperanto section of this website. I’ve translated all my existing pages into Esperanto and written some posts sharing links (which also forces me to read the language). I’ve written one post purely in Esperanto, Korfratino and I plan to follow this up with some more soon, and some translations. On the note of translations, I’ve been slowly contributing translations to Markor, a markdown text editor for Android, via the community translation platform Crowdin. I also still have a local Esperanto penpal but we now exchange messages much more slowly and sustainably.

I don’t speak or listen to the language much. There are one or two Youtube channels that I get on with, and am comfortably using the Esperanto subtitles while listening without relying on any English. When speaking to myself I can usually summon the vocabulary I need pretty quickly, but this is usually very mundane and I think I’d panic if I was faced with a conversation where I needed to discuss something where I’d only read about the topic. A good example of this is I could read and write the word brakhorloĝo (wrist-watch, literally “arm-time-dwelling”) but if I heard it or needed to summon the word in speech I might struggle initially. This is just a matter of practice, I’ve found. My partner has expressed a mild interest in the language so if she takes it up, we’ll be able to practice together.

I’ve got no set goals for Esperanto in 2022, but I’d be disappointed if I didn’t summon the energy to finish off the course on the popular language learning app. I’m currently only doing one session a day, the bare minimum, until my head clears up a bit. This is working a bit better for retention compared with my previous “blitz tactic” as I’m exposed to the vocabulary for longer. I want to improve my listening, as there are some Esperanto podcasts that I want to try because they seem interesting, but I haven’t been able to follow because my listening is not up to scratch. However, I’m not sure how I should be doing this. I want to read some more Esperanto literature and I have my eye on La Ŝtona Urbo, but want to be sure I can make the most of it. I also want to do some practice exams but do not have plans to take any actual qualifications. In terms of writing, I want to write more dedicated blog posts in the language and also write more coherent prose. My prose, I think, is fine technically but I tend to write snapshots or short scenes rather than full stories. I also want to start journalling in Esperanto to get used to reading and writing the language by hand.

I continue to be interested in languages in general but don’t have plans to take up another language seriously (or at all) for a good while. I want another year or so of Esperanto under my belt before cramming too much into my brain.

Exercise

I’ve had a mixed few months regarding exercise. I’ve made some adjustments to my strength routine which gave me some gains for a while. However, I feel that it’s still stagnating a little. I really want to do something with this over the next few months. Maybe I’ll pick just a few exercises to try and progress there. In addition to that, I’ve had increasing amounts of shoulder pain in my left shoulder which is really affecting my ability to do Close Pushups. I’ve had the pain for around 18 months now, so I’m going to seek some support for this over the next few months but the UK medical system is way underfunded and gatekept by GPs. My grip training has suffered. All of a sudden it was like I couldn’t keep ahold of the towel and the bar for more than a few seconds. Instead of breaking the habit (which I’ve done a lot in the past), I’ve kept the grip training on the Uneven Hang level but lowered the barrier to entry so that I only need to do one set of 15s each side.

I have had some successes, though. Before my grip imploded, I was up to two sets of 40s per arm on the Uneven Hangs. My reps for things have been generally quite high and are only set back due to weather conditions. Because I train outside in a park, regardless of weather, I am often at the whim of nature. This is good for overall resilience but means I sometimes need to skip bridges if the tarmac is too frozen and slippery. Or if the bars are frozen, I can’t reasonably grip them long enough to do my full set of Hanging Leg Raises. I did switch up my one-legged squat routine to Half-Shrimp Squats which really did the trick. I am struggling to progress these, however, but I think it’ll be easier than what I was doing before. I was also determined to add some kind of vertical pulling motion. The one detailed in Convict Conditioning is impossible to do at the park due to how the bars are set up, but I looked at r/bodyweightfitness’ Recommended Routine and started on Scapular Pulls. I’m not convinced I’m doing these correctly, but I think it’s better than nothing. The Recommended Routine was also where I got the progression for the Half-Shrimp Squats.

Running has been dead fun and generally great. As of writing, I’ve had to skip one or two sessions here and there either due to exhaustion or circumstance. I’ve noticed that if I take a week off of my 10k, everything generally gets a bit stronger. I think that means I might be overtraining slightly. However, running is now at a level I’m comfortable with. I was previously using two sets of podcasts to do timed runs, a 1hr run and a 30min run, which were just short of 10k and a 5k respectively. I’ve adjusted these to just be a 10k and a 5k which means that they take longer on some days but I’m consistently actually running those distances. In the future I may wish to make these a 12k and a 6k but I’m going to hold off on that for a little while. My legs are taking a lot of punishment at the moment with running, squatting, and hiking so I’m aware that I need to boost my recovery or lay off on progressing for a while. Running is at a level I’m happy with. I run an average of 15km a week, and even adjusting for some time off that’s well over 700km per year which is a nice level.

Current Routine

Mon: Rest
Tue: Strength Circuit
Wed: 10k run (~1hr + change)
Thu: Rest
Fri: Rest
Sat: Strength Circuit
Sun: 5k run (~30 mins + change)

Current Numbers

Close Pushups: 2 x 10 reps
Half-Shrimp Squats: 2 x 10 reps (each leg)
Bridges: 2 x 10 reps
Scapular Pulls: 2 x 5 reps
Horizontal Pulls: 2 x 10 reps (hip height bar)
Hanging Leg Raises: 2 x 20 reps (I lower this to 2 x 15 if the bar is too slippery)
Uneven Hangs (one arm gripping a bar, one gripping a looped towel): 1x 15s

Walking and Exploring

Ever since Patchwork introduced me to walking in the mountains I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it and has been, probably, the main thing I’ve missed since the start of the pandemic. This is largely because I don’t drive (yet) and haven’t been able to access the hills, and nor do I have the confidence to navigate them solo.

However, my partner and I both enjoy this a lot so we’ve bought a book of walks in Northumberland to try and complete. These vary between mild coastal strolls to climbing The Cheviot, which is a mountain. But the benefit is that the book provides a guide to accompany the directions. Eventually I’ll graduate to just using a map and compass, but it’s nice to have a plan.

In the future we plan to supplement our Northumberland walking with walks in the Yorkshire Moors. Eventually these may turn into logs.

Logs

I’ve continued with my logging practices and found it nice to reflect on various things.

Albums

Lots of repeats here. As before, I have used DeDupe List to remove duplicates.

Jethro Tull have become one of my fave goto listens, which is really pleasant. I’ve been switching back in some Blues, Jazz etc as well. Another thing I did this half-year was take suggestions for albums from friends to expand my listening outside of my usual genres. Some nice finds were: Existential Reckoning by Puscifer; Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits; and Lately I Feel Everything by Willow. A random cool find via my Esperanto-delving was “Ombroj” (EN: Shadows) by Kronlarvo, which is probably the only Esperanto Black Metal in existence? Mixed among these are some old faves. I’ve been off albums for a while, though, so may need to take efforts to get back in soon.

Songs From The Woods by Jethro Tull
Living In The Past by Jethro Tull
Paranoid by Black Sabbath
Minstrel In The Gallery by Jethro Tull
This Was by Jethro Tull
Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull
Singing The Blues by B.B King
Duke Ellington & John Coltrane by Duke Ellington & John Coltrane
Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis
Tango In The Night by Fleetwood Mac
Heart Full Of Wine by Angus & Julia Stone
Star Wars Episode II - Attack Of The Clones by ohn Williams
Star Wars Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith by John Williams
Trøllabundin by Eivør Pálsdóttir
Collision Course by Linkin Park and Jay Z
Mugzy’s Move by Royal Crown Revue
Existential Reckoning by Puscifer
Sultans Of Swing by Dire Straits
Devil Came To Me by Dover
I See You by The xx
Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield
The Mirror Conspiracy by Thievery Corporation
Cheese by Stromae
SlipKnot by SlipKnot
Pastel Blues by Nina Simone
Reise Reise by Rammstein
1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert by Benny Goodman
I Put A Spell On You by Nina Simone
Fallen by Evanescence
Reinkaos by Dissection
Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
Vicious Delicious by Infected Mushroom
First Take by Roberta Flack
Hoitovirhe by Turmion Kätilöt
Aqualung by Jethro Tull
Diskovibrator by Turmion Kätilöt
Benefit by Jethro Tull
Heavy Horses by Jethro Tull
Lately I Feel Everything by Willow
Sour by Olivia Rodrigo
The 1st by Willow
Ardipithecus by Willow
After by Ihsahn
American Idiot by Green Day
Save Rock and Roll by Fallout Boy
By The Light Of The Northern Stay by Týr
Blue Train by John Coltrane
Portrait In Jazz by The Bill Evans Trio
Riot by Paramore
Singing the Blues by B.B King
Ombroj by Kronlarvo
Ellington at Newport by Duke Ellington

Books

This half a year has been a big one for books really. I think it’s a common enough phenomenon that one can fall out of the habit of reading, but luckily for me it’s relatively easy to build in again. I’ve since decided that I’m generally a lot happier and more content with my everyday life when reading is a big part of it. I’ve carved time for reading by simply doing it instead of other things I’d normally do e.g. watch TV, YouTube, or play videogames. I’ve also been making use of the time I’ve “gained” from having a kitten and noisy upstairs neighbours to prompt reading time in the morning. If I’m not exercising, I can sometimes get about two hours of quality reading in before work!

Another way that I’ve brought reading into my life is that my partner and I have a new tradition of reading to each other for about an hour before bed in addition to the reading we each do independently. We’re currently going through The Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. I’ve read them before and I wanted to show them to her. We read the first two then took a break to read through Bloodtide and Bloodsong by Melvin Burgess. These form a duology which is a cool post-apocalyptic interpretation / adaptation of the Old Norse Völsunga saga. I read them as a teen and they’re generally written in such a lovely haunting style that they’ve always stuck with me. We then returned to The Long Earth which we’re currently reading book four (of five), The Long Utopia. We’re not sure what we’ll do after that, but I’m sure we’ll find something as it’s a habit we’re keen to keep up.

In terms of reading content, I’ve worked out a rhythm that I’m pretty happy with. After I finally made it through Wizard and Glass by Stephen King (I honestly don’t know what took so long, the book is great but I just couldn’t focus on it) I switched to consume an old favourite in the Star Wars Extended Universe books. I’m a fan of the EU canon and haven’t really gotten into the new Disney-era canon. This flicked me into “Star Wars mode” and I rattled through some EU books that I’d been meaning to read for a while. My fave era is the Clone Wars / Rise of the Empire era. I was a little disappointed by “Revan”, as I loved Drew Karpyshyn’s take on Darth Bane. But the novel just felt like it existed to push a video game. I also put down and refused to finish the novelisation of Force Unleashed as it was… pretty awful really. I dug into reviews of that author’s other contributions to the Star Wars EU and, based on these, I’ve made a note to avoid them. I thoroughly enjoyed Kenobi as a Western-but-Star-Wars. I then started to tackle The Thrawn Trilogy which I’ve heard is spectacular and kicked off the entire EU in the first place. They were delightful, but by the end of book 2 I was starting to feel a bit of genre-fatigue and I decided to switch it up. I didn’t have a solid reading plan so my default go-to is generally something from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, which are always a treat.

Still without a plan, I discovered that the Gor novels exist, by “John Norman”. I can’t quite remember how I discovered them but heard that they were lambasted for clunky prose, male wish-fulfillment, and that women existed in the novels purely to… serve… the men. I couldn’t believe that something could be this trashy so I obviously dove straight into The Tarnsman of Gor. It was exactly as bad as everyone had said and I instantly removed the following two books from my e-reader. There’s a lot of books in total and I hear they get even worse. The book did, though, awaken my appetite for Epic Fantasy and I had fond memories of reading Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson in 2019. Knowing that he has the whole “Cosmere” thing going on, I decided to plan an attack to start reading the books set in the Cosmere; realising that I needed to do it in spurts if I was to account for genre fatigue. I devoured the first Mistborn trilogy, then swiftly consumed both Elantris and Warbreaker and consciously took a break from the genre to keep my reading momentum up. I took the opportunity to finish off Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers, which I was partway through when my father passed in February, then still felt the call of Epic Fantasy so delved back into an old favourite: The Demon Cycle by Peter V. Brett. The first three books were as brilliant as I remember, but the final two felt a little clunky and padded. I really could have done with a family tree chart for Ahmann at one point! I’m obviously not capable of producing high quality, publishable work in the genre but my take as a reader is that the final two books, The Skull Throne and The Core could’ve arguably been condensed one slightly epic series-ending book. After finishing up those I returned to Becky Chambers and then felt the hankering for some shorter stories to keep my appetite whetted while I decided what to read next. In comes Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman and Night Shift by Stephen King. I interspersed these with a classic Sherlock Holmes book that I’d never read before (I read this in a few hours on NYE laying on my partner’s mum’s sofa) and finished off the final book in the Thrawn Trilogy as it was rattling around my brain as an unfinished task.

Emerging from this I’ve felt the urge to return to Epic Fantasy but don’t quite feel up to an assault on Phase 2 of the Cosmere. I’ve also been craving some of Iain M. Banks’ The Culture lately, so delved into The State of the Art to test the waters before committing to a full length novel. Then my desire to read, and finally finish, The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons took over. I’ve previously read the first two novels and adored them, but I gave up during the start of the third. As of writing (mid January 2022) I’ve finished Hyperion and am commencing The Fall of Hyperion momentarily. I’ll take a quick break to predict and counteract genre-fatigue, then return to start the Endymion portion of the Cantos. At some point in 2022 I want to return to The Dark Tower, but I’ve developed a new love for Stephen King and I’ve heard that I’d appreciate the next few novels even more if I’d read some of his other work. So I plan to hit up a few “Start reading Stephen King” listicles to come up with a battle plan there.

I will at some point want to read some nonfiction, but right now my brain is in the mood for fiction. I think I’ll track nonfiction books separately going forward.

Wizard and Glass by Stephen King
Star Wars: The Approaching Storm by Alan Dean Foster
Star Wars: Rogue Planet by Greg Bear
Star Wars: Outbound Flight by Timothy Zahn
Star Wars: Mist Encounter (short story) by Timothy Zahn
Star Wars: Kenobi by John Jackson Miller
Star Wars: Revan by Drew Karpyshyn
Star Wars: Heir To The Empire by Timothy Zahn
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
A Concise Encyclopedia Of The Original Esperanto Literature by Geoffrey Sutton
Star Wars: Dark Force Rising by Timothy Zahn
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
The Long War by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
The Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman
Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
Mistborn: The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson
Bloodtide by Melvin Burgess
Mistborn: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson
Bloodsong by Melvin Burgess
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
The Painted Man by Peter V. Brett
The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett
The Daylight War by Peter V. Brett
The Skull Throne by Peter V. Brett
The Core by Peter V. Brett
The Galaxy and The Ground Within by Becky Chambers
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
Star Wars: The Last Command by Timothy Zahn
The Long Mars by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
Night Shift by Stephen King
The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks
Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Total books read since last Solstice: 34

Currently reading: The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons (solo) and The Long Utopia by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (with my partner)

Movies

Movies! I love a good movie. I also love bad movies. Most of these I’ve been watching with my partner, as I’ve realised I prefer to consume TV and movies socially rather than binging them alone. This said, I did watch a few nice movie across some solo Friday nights. Free Guy was surprisingly OK! Almost class conscious and definitely critical of corps so that’s good. My partner enjoyed the end of our Star Wars run, which I continued myself with the additional movies Rogue One and Solo.

There’s not much to tell really here, we’ve not watched anything particularly impactful or dramatic or in a particular genre. We’ve just enjoyed movies. Oh, other than The Mummy is one of the greatest action adventure movies ever. It has everything and I could watch it every day and be happy.

Star Wars Episode III Revenge Of The Sith
Cats and Dogs
Star Wars Episode VI Return Of The Jedi
Juno
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Kevin and Perry Go Large
Tangled
Slums of Beverly Hills
Ocean’s Eleven
When Harry Met Sally
Phonebooth
A Simple Wish
Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny
Ghostbusters
I Am Mother
The Mummy
The Mummy Returns
Free Guy
Don’t Look Up
The Terminal
School of Rock
Castaway

Total movies watched: 22

Takeaway

I mostly forgot to log these in the second half of 2021! I know for a fact that I hit my goal of having fewer than 8 takeaways throughout the year. But there were maybe two more nudo sushi (our favourite) that we didn’t log immediately and I forgot the date of. I may search my bank records and amend the logs!

In 2022, we’ve decided to aim for no more than 6 takeaways which leaves it as one every two months at an even cadence. I think this is a decently healthy level. As before, we’re not allowed any sad/angry takeaways and it must be a social event (there was one exception to this last bit at the beginning of 2022 to celebrate my thesis correction).

2021-08-27: Moji Chinese for Jack’s birthday
2021-09-03: Nudo Sushi with Alex for fun and comfort
2021-12-20: Lucky House Chinese with Alex for Solstice Eve fun and energy after mega hikes

Some housekeeping for November 2021

2021-11-12

Hey, another short post to update on the site itself as there’s been a few changes to the site that I want to document, if only for myself!

I’m thoroughly enjoying working with Jekyll and the realm of static sites. When I began, I was familiar enough with Jekyll to get a site working but the overriding of default templates confused me as I like to see all the files that I’m working with. I worked out that if I removed the reference to the theme in the _config.yml file, then I could just build from scratch which helped a lot. In the end V asked for help setting up a Jekyll site as well, since she’s also into writing multi-lingual posts and doesn’t enjoy wrestling with Wordpress’ theming. I haven’t been able to set one up for her manually, and she’s very capable; so instead I made this free Multilanguage Jekyll Site Template. I decided to go this route rather than some of the more advanced options, which are super cool but a bit too heavy-handed for my needs. Plus, the fewer plugins the better!

In terms of keeping things simple, I’ve also dramatically simplified the design of the site’s HTML. Visually, the site is fairly similar to how it always has been with a few minor tweaks — but the code is much neater. In this area I’ve had two main foci: getting pageweight down as light as possible; and reducing my use of CSS frameworks to get rid of as many <div> tags as possible. This is in order to replace it with semantic HTML tags and make the site as screen-reader friendly as I can. Posts and pages are now marked up with <article> etc, and the main site itself now has proper <header>, <main>, and <footer> tags which replaced a veritable broth of <div> tags and classes. I then applied some CSS to those, and stopped using PureCSS’ grid system. Instead, my footer is just aligned to the centre and I’ve changed the design of the header anyway.

The header design has been simplified after I read this article by SawV / JR:

Images and other heavy content can be inserted into the stories as links, instead of embedding the content and bogging down the page load. Let readers DECIDE whether they want to click on the heavy content.

That was a revelation to me. I knew I was trying to reduce page weight but was kind of attached to the approach of putting a profile picture at the top of every page. Theoretically, your browser will cache it and only download it once; but I still didn’t want to inflict it on everyone. So from now on, the site policy is that all images will be linked to. I won’t carry this forward into all future websites and web endeavours. For example, my thesis has images and diagrams and is presented as an academic piece of writing, with figures. But it’s a good rule of thumb that I’m going to need to justify deviating from in the future.

In addition to the semantic HTML, I’ve also been adding a few microformats back into the site. This is likely a hangover from my Indieweb days using Brimstone as my CMS, but I’m quite attached to them. I may remove them at some point, but they’re relatively useful to support anyone who may be scraping the site. The most annoying bit is the fact that there’s a single <div> remaining where I needed to mark up the e-content of posts. Boo. I have no real desire to begin complicating my Jekyll site with indieweb features such as webmentions etc.

In terms of PureCSS, I still adore the framework and will use it for future web applications that I may develop; but for this blog even that’s a bit heavy. It’s still getting imported, but I’m transitioning away. As far as I’m aware, the main thing that will need adjusting is the typography. Once I can be bothered to fiddle with that, it should all be good to remove it. As noted, I don’t really need a grid system for this site; the containers are enough.

I’ve modified a few pages of the site as well. Most notably; /now is now featured on the navigation menu and not imported into the index. I felt that I was trying to artificially keep the navigation menu simple rather than organically making a simple site. The index page now contains some introduction content, and instead of listing the latest 10 posts for a particular language; it lists all the posts for that language. This means that a visitor can access all posts from the index and it functions as, well, an index! Because of that, I’ve removed the /blog page as it was redundant. If I ever create a Digital Garden, I may ressurect it in a new form to hold links to articles that I actively update. I also split out the Contact details from /about into /contact. There’s also a new page, Site Notes which collects information about how I use the site, and how I build it. It was originally called Colophon because I wanted to be trendy; but it outgrew this definition.

For pages and posts, I’ve modified how the language menu works for posts with multiple languages. Previously it would add a link for each language, including the current one. Now it doesn’t add a link for the current langauge. It has also changed structurally. I was lazy previously and just made it a paragraph. When I started using the Kristall small-internet browser recently (mostly to view Gemini links, but it also refuses to render CSS on http links) I noticed how weird the language menu looked as a paragraph and thought about usability and semantics. I changed it to be a list and modified the CSS to make it appear visually how it used to. There is also a blogroll on the About page so if anyone is interested in where I spend time on the web they can see it there. It may move to its own page eventually.

I’ve expanded the RSS functionality. Now each language as a separate RSS feed for its post stream. This isn’t done automatically by Jekyll at all, and I just created the files manually by querying for posts with a particular lang tag. The original RSS feed remains and collects posts in all languages. For reasons.

I’ve added a simple HTML footer which contains three links: a link to the site’s composite RSS feed; a link to the Site Notes page in the appropriate language; and a link to the license for the content. As I note on the Site Notes page — I’m using the Peer-Production License for content because it’s explicitly anti-capitalist and all-round better than the Creative Commons.

In terms of site content, I’m pleased to say I’ve actually pulled my finger out and produced my first ever purely Esperanto post: Korfratino. I guess I’ve fallen into the trap of most Esperanto bloggers and talking about Esperanto itself! But this will pass I imagine. I think the Esperanto-exclusive stream of posts will be much less frequent until I become more comfortable expressing myself in the language and feel that I have more things to contribute using it. Until then, I’ll be writing Esperanto versions of most posts and sharing the odd translation I’ve attempted from across the web.

I think that’s all, folks!

Why your pizza tracker lies to you

2021-10-12

I was hiking round the Indieweb recently and stumbled upon this post on Ruben Schade’s site. I recommend you read it as it’s a pretty good primer but my summary of the post is that Ruben and his partner ordered pizza from their local chain via an iOS application and then the estimated times on the app changed suddenly, prompting them to go to the store to pick it up:

We ordered our pizza, then saw the estimated cooking time as forty-five minutes. This seemed reasonable; Friday night would almost certainly be their busiest time, and we weren’t in a hurry. But then the estimated time flashed and changed to ten minutes.

Upon arriving at the store, the store was clearly very busy and the staff overworked with everyone waiting for their order having been lied to by the order tracking service / predicted cooking times:

We’d only managed to get there half an hour later, so the overworked staffer told me I only needed to wait a few minutes more. But it was evident that other people had seen the same time issue on their phones, and were demanding pizza that wasn’t ready yet.

Ruben uses his time to ponder the situation by asking questions of the application design, wondering what could have possibly causes the issue:

The few minutes waiting gave me some time to think about how we got to this situation. Was there an internal API the mobile application was polling every X amount of time, or was it a push notification? Was the local client making a best guess about the time to cook based on the time of day and week, then getting overridden by erroneous data? Could it have been as simple as one of the servers not having time in sync, or was there a race condition?

Ruben concludes by pondering the role of system design in supporting people doing on the ground work:

Computers, much like the economy, are built for people. Or at least, they’re supposed to be. The worst feelings I’ve had in this occupation are the thoughts that a system I’ve designed or helped build have worked against people in some failure scenario. I hope those pizza folks made it through the night okay.

Coming from a HCI background, I fully agree with Ruben’s concerns around building systems that affect people; particularly workers and the accomplishment of “interactional work” within a setting. Strangely enough, I also come from a Pizza-making background and this is the subject of my contribution to this discourse.

From 2008 to 2014 I worked as an in-store staff member (ie not a driver or manager) in several branches of Domino’s Pizza in the North East of England. I started off in my hometown branch of Cramlington in 2008, worked my way through 6th form, and then ended up helping open up the Heaton branch in Newcastle upon Tyne when I moved there for uni. Owing to the fact that all the stores in the North East were operated under a single franchise I also spent some time in other stores in the area. I stayed until spring 2014 where I left to ensure I focused on my final year of undergraduate studies (in Computing Science). In 2014, I also began my research career in Digital Civics and HCI which lead to my PhD where I employed ethnographic methods to understand work practices. The takeaway from this (pun intended) is that I’m surprisingly well-placed to provide insight into what may have happened to Ruben in Australia.

What follows is adapted from an email I sent Ruben to respond to his post. It takes the format of a relatively thick description of the setting’s (Domino’s pizza) interactional work to organise orders and produce pizzas with support from a digital system.

Trackers, Timers, and Managers: A tale of work practice and digital systems

From 2008 to 2014 there were three ways we could receive an order at Domino’s: walk-in customers at the front desk; a phone order (most common); and a web order. In 2010–2011ish Domino’s got a new system called “Pulse” installed. It updated a few things like how orders were taken and entered into the system via the phone or the counter, and updated some of the graphics (it was a DOS programme previously!), but the core interaction remained the same throughout. So this thick description applies to both systems I worked with.

Regardless of how the order was taken it was assigned an id and entered the system to be shown on a series of screens dotted around the store which displayed various aspects of the order depending on what station you (a worker) are working at. The person slapping out the dough would see the size, crust-type, and sauce while those on the makeline would see these same details more compactly (to support recognising the pie as it came along) as well as cheese-levels, and toppings. Toppings had various codes e.g. Jalapeños were J, Sweetcorn was N, Beef was B, Bacon was K etc. Off-the-menu pizzas had, generally, two letter codes which were displayed in brackets. Any modifications to an off-the-menu pizza were presented in a sequence after the two-letter code. Some examples:

13R (BQ) -G, 2K would translate to Large (13.5 inch) Regular Crust Texas BBQ pizza, no green peppers, double bacon
11X (VS) -X Bq -F J would translate to Medium (11.5 inch) Thin Crust Veggie Supreme, minus pizza sauce, substitute BBQ sauce, no fresh tomatoes, add jalapeños (Coincidentally this is basically what I get now if I ever order)
13R X 2C W N M would translate as Large Regular Crust pizza with double cheese, White Chicken, Sweetcorn, and Mushroom

Makeline staff would also see things like side orders, as these were stored underneath the makeline in refrigerated bins. That’s the context. The interesting bit, the part that’s key to this setting, is that on every screen all staff would also see a timer.

All orders are timed. If an order was scheduled for later it doesn’t appear until the system calculates that it’s due to make, but once it appears on those screens a timer starts counting up from 00:00 in minutes and seconds. The goal was to get all pizzas into the oven before the two-minute mark (02:00), or at least try to maintain a two-minute average. These orders came down from on-high from Domino’s head office (I’m unsure if an international or UK-specific mandate) to the franchise / area managers, store managers, and eventually us lowly proles on the makeline.

The system was informed of a pizza entering the oven by the makeline staff responsible for a pizza (or a delegate) highlighting it on the screen using a keyboard (perhaps touchscreens are used now!) and “clocking it off”. This was done simply by hitting the Enter (Return) key when the pizza was highlighted on the screen. This clears the pizza from the screen, but it also has a few interesting effects in the system as it pertains to what the customer sees if they’re monitoring the order via the web. The oven was a conveyor belt-type oven which, in our store, was set to cook pizzas perfectly within 7 minutes. After these 7 minutes were up, the pizza appeared magically on another screen for the drivers. This driver-screen also had a timer indicating how long the pizza had been out of the oven or otherwise waiting to be picked up. I’m not overly familiar with this screen but I know that the time counted down, unlike the makeline screens, and the goal was to pick it up before the timer hit zero. When a driver returned they were supposed to sign in, get assigned a delivery, find it on the hot rack, and take it out for delivery. All of these stages are tracked by the system online, and relayed to the viewer. If the pizza is marked as for collection, that’s the end of its journey across the displays but the system relays that it’s ready to the customer if they’ve ordered it via the web.

The delivery time predictions and “status” of the pizza were (are?) based on the system’s knowledge of that order alone and didn’t take into account the overall status of the system ie how many orders there were and staffing levels. As far as the web app / server was concerned a pizza took 2 minutes to make, 7 minutes to cook, then it was waiting for a driver or a customer to to come in. As the pizza is clocked off the makeline, the system informs the Domino’s website that it’s in the oven. When the system thinks that the pizza has finished cooking and is waiting for delivery it will update to say so (I think Domino’s says it’s under “Quality control”) and then when it’s assigned for a driver it thinks it’s “Out for delivery” (or equivalent).

Now all this works great when the human components of the system behave as the system designers were lead to believe. It’s during rushes / busy periods that the managers misbehave and it gets fun.

As noted, store managers and staff are “incentivised” (pressurised or, as I saw in some cases, bullied) to maintain a 2-minutes-or-faster average for orders. This is often impossible during rush times and the average is going to creep up. Usually the store is trying to operate on the bare minimum numbers of staff, to maximise profits for the franchisee and the Head Office (capitalism is so fun); so people are usually doing several things at once. Managers will often stand by the oven and yell out orders for makeline staff to memorise quickly and then clock them off en masse before the 2 minute mark is up (or as close to it as they can get). This also happens on the other end with the drivers screen. After prematurely clocking orders off of the makeline the manager will then move to the driver screen to await them appearing on there. During heavy rushes the orders will be clocked off in batches, so they often yo-yo between the two screens. During lighter rushes the manager may help out on makeline for the time it takes for the system to catch up while it thinks the pizzas are in the oven, and display them. When the orders do appear on the driver screen, the manager clocks these out as well by overriding the driver logins and assigning orders to drivers.

Having spoken to colleagues working at other branches or other franchises/chains (via our Union), I can confirm that this practice was common across the sector where these conditions were present. For clarity, these conditions seemed to be: pressure to “make the numbers right” for a franchise boss or head office; and the presence of a digital order-tracking system designed to monitor time/efficiency in some way.

The effect that this has to those relying on the system updates to inform them of the status of the pizza is that the system is now not representative of the status of the order at all. Whether this manifests as an order-tracker or a predicted delivery time; both representations are totally thrown askew when the system is unaware of how it’s being manipulated to appease bosses.

Conclusions

I have no profound conclusions from this. This is a public response to a blog post I found interesting and one of the few that I thought I could legitimately contribute to a discourse on. If any system designers, HCI researchers, ethnographers, or union officials want to discuss my experiences at Domino’s please get in touch! You’ve got my permission to use the thick description for your research unless you’re a for-profit research company.

Some quick site notes

2021-08-14

Hello there. Just a short post to keep the blog ticking over. As you may have read from my previous posts on migrating the site to Jekyll, my Summer Solstice Update, and in my Now page; I’m learning some Esperanto in my downtime. I’m thoroughly enjoying it and I’m at the point where I want to try my hand at writing longer texts in the language.

As such, I’ve produced an Esperanto section of the website. These followed instructions graciously outlined by Anthony Granger. It’s probably not the most technically perfect solution that exists, but it’s good enough for me and doesn’t involve ridiculous plugins. Each page or blog post with a translation in Esperanto (or any other language for that matter!) will have a small language list underneath the page title. The Esperanto language blog posts are actually stored seperately so while I shall strive to release most content in both languages; there will be some divergence as I explore things like Esperanto poetry. I do not expect to translate historic posts into the language.

My website only has a few pages which are not blog posts, so each of those have been translated already. I’ve also separated out the “now” content away from About to its own page, but instead of listing it on the navigation menu I’ve simply imported it into the homepage so that there’s more content there.

In another note; I’m taking a break from the only social media I had left (Reddit, unless YouTube counts?) and one of the things I found was that I missed finding articles to read. So I’m going to be trawling the web and hopefully sharing some interesting links here occasionally.

And that’s it!

2021 Summer Solstice Update

2021-06-26

I once tried to establish a “Weekly Review” type of blog post, inspired by my love of reflective writing as well as seeing how Rhiaro has managed to keep it up and keep it interesting for so long. These didn’t last very long, and I’ve grown more comfortable with the idea that I don’t write shorter posts as often as I’d like. I also have a ‘Now’ section, which you can check to get a relatively-up-to-date and high-level overview of how I’m spending the majority of my time.

I do like, however, to take stock of a lot of things. This year, so far, has been incredibly evenful and we are still in the middle of a pandemic. I’ve also just begun the practice of logging a few things to prompt reflection, and I can’t think of a better time to do it than just after a solar event. I hope I can commit to a twice-yearly post about taking account of everything I’ve had going on. I have strong pagan and animist tendencies these days, and the Solstices mark the turning of the year into their two prominent “modes”. After Summer Solstice (in the Northern Hemisphere), the world begins to get darker and colder and slower. Although it often takes us a few months to notice it! So it’s good to take a pause and get ready for the wind-down. This post therefore covers the 6 month period from the Winter Solstice to the Summer Solstice, a brief period before Winter Solstice 2020 at times, plus the few days it’s taken me to write this.

Overall, this has been a mixed half of the year. A lot of chaos has ensued, but through it all I have found love, support, and laughter with my partner; who is simply a blessing to me in every conceivable way and I am very grateful for her presence.

The format of these posts may change in the future, and certain sections may be more or less prominent (or absent) depending on what I have to say about them.

Enjoy.

Key events

2021-02-12: I got the keys to my first flat.
2021-02-27: My father died from Coronavirus, aged 57.
2021-03-12: First night in my new flat.
2021-05-07: Local elections, where we stood a candidate in my ward and achieved 99 votes (a substantial increase over our usual amount, and as a minority party we’re very pleased.)
2021-06-10: I successfully defended my PhD Thesis, subject to minor revisions.

Hobbies

My hobbies have taken a bit of a back seat really; I’m not crafting much at the moment, and the opportunities for mountains is a bit scarce across the pandemic (although I did manage to get up Roseberry Topping on Summer Solstice which is half a mountain!).

I’ve mostly been resting but I’ve been able to maintain some semblance of fun as noted below. Going forward, I can’t promise myself anything yet but I’m feeling a bit more crafty lately. Once I feel the time is right, I may do some more carving! Other than the below, which are my more “active” hobbies atm; I’ve been reading, watching, and listening. These come to the for later in the Logs section.

Esperanto

Languages have always fascinated me, and I’ve had a few half-hearted attempts to learn a few. I actually hold GCSEs at B-grade in each French and Spanish although, as you may predict, these haven’t really done me much good. I also had a solid stab at learning Icelandic across 2010 to 2013, and I’ve had a few spurts on Duolingo at Spanish, and Norwegian a few times and I enjoy reading Anglo-Saxon as well as Old Norse poetry. Languages in general fascinate me, and I really love Jackson Crawford and Simon Roper for their work on the internet discussing these complex topics in a way that makes it enjoyable.

I can’t remember why I picked up Esperanto in late 2020, but I did. I think it was because I was getting an itch to start something wordy, couldn’t commit to Spanish or Anglo-Saxon grammar properly, and just needed something fun to do. Anyway, the long story short is that I fell in love with Esperanto and have been engaging with it across late 2020 and into 2021 at various degrees of intensity. Some days I’ll just be filled with the desire to read and write everything in the language, and others I’ll just do a few Duolingo lessons to keep it ticking over. But, importantly, I’ve done a little every day and it’s really helped. As expected, my reading and writing is definitely the strongest, with my speaking coming in at “strained” and my listening at “ahhh noooo what the hell are they saying”. But that suits me for now; there’s no rush but I do eventually want to get certified at B1 level. I’ve been reading (and writing) Esperanto poetry, and some short stories. I’ve also found another Newcastle-based Esperantist penpal with whom I’ve been writing for around a month, so that’s neat! We’re planning on forming a club when we’ve both got a bit less on.

One of the (alleged) benefits of Esperanto is the ability to pick up other languages a little easier. I’m not sure on the veracity of that, but I’m feeling a lot more confident with my ability to read/write in another langage, and at some point I will likely wish to return to Spanish. I kinda like the idea of being able to say I can understand “EN EO ES”. Those ISO 639-1 Es just look kinda neat lined up I guess.

Exercise

I love my exercise. Historically I’ve mostly enjoyed bodyweight strength training, but in late 2019 I began running using the NHS Couch to 5K (C25K) programme. I successfully ran for 30 mins for the first time in April 2020, just as the earth was heating up. Throughout the summer of 2020 I then embarked on the C25K+ programme to improve my stamina and my speed, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

This got stale after a while, as things do if they don’t improve, so I deliberated for ages on what to do, but finally found the Bridge to 10K (B210K) programme which picks up, relatively, from where C25K left off. I first attempted to replace all of my 5K runs with 10K training sessions, but soon found that my knees were complaining after my runs so dialled it back to one 5k and one 10k session per week. I’ve since lost a bit of my speed, mostly noticeably during the 5k sessions, but I’ve enjoyed the 60 minute runs offered by B210K.

While I’ve been improving my running, my strength training has mostly been on maintenance with a few exceptions. I re-added Horizontal Pulls into my routine in late 2019, and have kept them up. I also embarked on Grip Training which I’ve been quite successful at, especially compared to my multiple previous attempts to build it as a habit. I’ve also doubled my Hanging Leg Raises to 20 reps across the last few months, which feels great.

My training’s been a bit disrupted lately as I’ve been backwards and forwards a lot, and it looks like it’ll be this way for a few more months at least, but I’ll be working around it and after September I’m hoping to effectively just say “no” to basically everything after my current obligations run out. One thing that late 2019 and 2020 did teach me; is that my mental health, and my physical health, does indeed do a LOT better with long periods of time at home with solid commitment to my training regime. It’s nice to be validated in knowing yourself.

Current Routine

Mon: Rest
Tue: Strength Circuit
Wed: 60 minute run (~9k)
Thu: Rest
Fri: Rest
Sat: Strength Circuit
Sun: 20 minute run (~3k)

Current Numbers

Close Pushups: 2 x 10 reps
Assisted Pistol Squats: 2 x 4 reps (each leg)
Bridges: 2 x 10 reps
Horizontal Pulls: 2 x 10 reps (hip height bar)
Hanging Leg Raises: 2 x 20 reps
Finger-tip push-ups: 2 x 5 reps
Uneven Hangs (one arm gripping a bar, one gripping a looped towel): 1 x 25s, 1x 20s (each arm)

Logs

I’ve begun logging a few mundane things to prompt reflection, so thought it’d be nice to list a few of the things I’ve been doing with downtime. The logs only begin truly around March time, but I back-dated a few things, and I’ve stripped dates out for this post anyway because they’re not really important to what I’m trying to convey.

Albums

I fell out of listening to music properly a while ago. I’d still listen, but it’d be disparate songs rather than sitting down and listening to music as an activity or having it on. During my MRes in 2014-2015, there was a LOT of information coming at me and I’d never been able to listen to music while working as it’s, historically, distracted me and left me unable to focus. Throughout 2020 I got into lo-fi girl, which sort of changed that a bit.

I’m also a frequent reader of the Art of Manliness blog, and in February they republished their Top 10 Jazz Albums for Beginners. I’ve always enjoyed blues and jazz when it’s been played to me, or on films/TV, and the list presented to me lowered the barrier to entry somewhat, so I embarked on a journey of exploring some Jazz. I found myself blown away a lot of the time, especially by Duke Ellington and later by Nina Simone (although I knew that the latter was the GOAT). I committed only to listening to two albums a week to avoid overwhelm, but this was quickly thrown out and I ended up listening to at least an album a day for some time.

The jazz sparked my desire to explore new music, specifically albums, and to connect to my friends by asking for three albums that meant something to them. I like albums, I’m not sure why. I’ve always preferred albums to playlists unless I’m after a particular vibe. I’ve listened to less of my friends suggestions because I’ve since rekindled my love of rock and heavy metal and EBM/electronic; but I did get through Miss Anthropocene by Grimes and Walking on a Dream Deluxe edition by Empire of the Sun. I’ve since learned that I don’t really like Grimes or Empire of the Sun. Sorry Rosie. I’ve got a backlog to get through from a few others, but at the moment my listening is tending to a mix of Jazz/blues, rock/metal or EBM/electronic music, and historic/pagan/spiritual ‘folk’ music embodied by Wardruna and Heilung.

My album listening has tailed off a little, as I’ve had a few disrupted days and call-filled days at work where I can’t listen much. But I hope that I’m going to get back into them soon.

I’ve listened to a few albums more than once so I’ve used DeDupeList.com to remove the duplicates. I’ve also removed the dates of these, but they’re otherwise presented in listening order (duplicates not withstanding) from February 2021 to the day of writing (2021-06-26)

Alle lust will ewikgeit by Nachtmahr
Ellington at Newport by Duke Ellington
Blue Train by John Coltrane
Kind of Blue by Miles Davis
Portrait in Jazz by The Bill Evans Trio
Sempiternal by Bring Me The Horizon
The Blues and the Abstract Truth by Oliver Nelson
King of Tenors by Ben Webster
Ella and Louis Again by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
Miss Anthropocene by Grimes
SlipKnot by SlipKnot
Ella and Louis by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
Jazz at Massey Hall by The Quintet
Somethin’ Else by Cannonball Adderley
The Sidewinder by Lee Morgan
Pastel Blues by Nina Simone
Skald by Wardruna
Futha by Heilung
Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown by Sarah Vaughan
Inquisition Symphony by Apocalyptica
The Poison by Bullet For My Valentine
Duke Ellington and John Coltrane by Duke Ellington and John Coltrane
Fever by Bullet For My Valentine
Maiden Heaven by Various Artists
Maiden Heaven Volume II by Various Artists
All I Was by Tremonti
Collison Course by Jay Z and Linkin Park
Rock in Rio by Iron Maiden
Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
Meteora by Linkin Park
Gab Var Ginnunga by Wardruna
Mutter by Rammstein
Harsh Generation by Grendel
All Hope Is Gone by SlipKnot
Ragnarok by Wardruna
Yggdrasil by Wardruna
Ascendancy by Trivium
Portrait In Jazz by The Bill Evans Trio
I Put A Spell On You by Nina Simone
Shogun by Trivium
Furiosity by Monster Truck
Monster Truck by Monster Truck
In Waves by Trivium
Mezmerize by System of a Down
Sings the Blues by Nina Simone
Ofnir by Heilung
A Matter of Life and Death by Iron Maiden
Somethin Else by Cannonball Adderley
The Final Frontier by Iron Maiden
Dance of Death by Iron Maiden
Trøllabundin by Eivør Pálsdóttir
The Book of Souls by Iron Maiden
Somewhere in Time by Iron Maiden
Piece of Mind by Iron Maiden
Powerslave by Iron Maiden
Brave New World by Iron Maiden
The Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son by Iron Maiden
No Prayer for the Dying by Iron Maiden
Fear of the Dark by Iron Maiden
The Black Album by Metallica
Walking on a Dream Deluxe edition by Empire of the Sun
Led Zeppelin I by Led Zeppelin
American Idiot by Green Day
Dookie by Green Day
Edward the Great - Greatest Hits by Iron Maiden
The Path of Totality by KoRn
American Capitalist by Five Finger Death Punch
Night Train by The Oscar Peterson Trio
Under The Table And Dreaming by Dave Matthews Band
Stand Up by Jethro Tull
Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull
What The F*ck Is Wrong With You People? by Combichrist
Reroute To Remain by In Flames
Aqualung by Jethro Tull
Kvitravn by Wardruna

Total albums this half-year: 76 (86 with duplicates / re-listens)

Books

I’ve not read as much as I’d like, and it’s a shame. But my head has been full of bees for one reason or another quite a lot. Despite that I’ve been able to read a few really nice books lately.

When we were first dating towards the end of 2020, my partner introduced me to the Wayfarers series by Becky Chamber. I thoroughly enjoyed it almost immediately after picking up the first one, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. I devoured this book, and didn’t think it could be topped but I then lost myself in A Closed and Common Orbit and was touched in a very real way by the content of this follow-up. Seriously, it’s amazing. I was some way through the third book, Record of a Spaceborn Few, when my father passed so I was thrown off. It’s my intention to revisit it soon and pick it up. It’s worth reading it just for the description of the ‘Hexes’ alone.

I’m currently working my way through The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. I picked it up after I played through Red Dead Redemption, which was a distraction attempt to keep me occupied as I’d just moved into my new flat, left my PS4 with my old flatmate, and was processing my grief and wanted to keep myself busy-ish. I’ve tried to read the series once before, but got derailed on Book 4, Wizard and Glass. It appears the same has happened again but this time I’m a bit more determined to just power through, I do enjoy the book but there’s just something about this one that means I can’t focus how I usually do. I’m probably going to take a short break after this book, return to the Becky Chambers book momentarily, and then back to the series.

The Jackalope Wives and Other Stories by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) is a go-to feel-good book of short stories by an author who just speaks to my very soul and just gets it. Unfailingly funny, and Ursula perfectly captures the animism of how I see the world in each tale. Go check her out. I always enjoy this book when I go through it, and the dreamer part of me still wants to bump into Granny Harkin some day.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
The Jackalope Wives and other stories by T. Kingfisher
The Gunslinger by Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King
The Waste Lands by Stephen King

Currently reading: Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.

Movies

When I found myself thoroughly enjoying the process of logging albums and books, I turned my attention to movies. It’s easy these days to fall into a mindless loop of binging TV shows and, like albums, I’ve always quite liked how distinct films are. One thing I miss about living with my ex-flatmate is our discussion of movies (although we were great at discussing shows too!).

After I completed Red Dead Redemption, as noted above, I was in a bit of a western mood and realised that I’d never actually seen a western! I decided to start with A Fistful of Dollars as a classic, highly rated, and apparently accessible western. I enjoyed it a lot. With my brain being full of grief and of viva-prep, I then turned to the nostalgic and began a bit of a binge of easy watching either by myself or with my partner. The exception being My Dinner with Andre, which I desperately wanted to show my partner (she loved it). There’s not too much to say about these except I’ve not really had an aim or theme with movies. At one point I realised I’d never seen past the fourth Harry Potter movie, and while I wasn’t particularly excited about it I needed something a little mindless to chew on and went through the entire saga. I didn’t care for the later films, and they held no nostalgia for me. I might do a thing later this year where I pick a director and watch a bunch of their movies, as I’m a big fan of the Coen Brothers. But we’ll see. Currently, my partner asked to watch through the Star Wars movies as she’s never seen them before so we’re going through them in the Machete Order.

So, here we go. As before the dates are removed as unimportant for this post:

A Fistful of Dollars
Daddy Day Care
My Dinner with Andre
Soul
Shrek
Coraline
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Pacific Rim
Pacific Rim Uprising
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 1
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 2
It Follows
The Lorax
Sleeping Dogs Lie
Coco
Dumb and Dumber
The Cable Guy
Lost in Translation
Jurassic Park
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Brother Bear
Ice Age
Super 8
Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope
Kink
Star Wars Episode V The Empire Strikes Back
The Graduate
Star Wars Episode II Attack Of The Clones

Total films watched: 32

Takeaway

I set myself a little challenge in 2021 to only eat a grand total of 8 takeaways for the entire year of 2021 and thus save my wallet and my bowels. This would allow me one on or near each solar event at the quarter of the year, as well as an additional four interspersed how I want. In theory I could have a takeaway every 6.5 weeks, and I did have a few additional rules / context:

No sad or angry takeaways. Only happy or cosy. Basically, the job of a takeaway is to enhance a good time, rather than make up for a bad one.
A takeaway is defined as ordering for delivery or collecting takeaway food which is designed to replace the evening meal. This is an important distinction because “eating out for lunch” didn’t really count for me, as it sits in a different rhythm. That said, I’ve only eaten out for lunch a few times this year.
A takeaway has to be shared with others; no binge eating by myself, even after a fast.

This set the challenge as a prime candidate for logging and reflecting on, as each takeaway would then be associated with happy memories! In practice, I went the entire first quarter of the year up to the Spring Equinox before getting takeaway at all and then got three in relatively quick succession, at a rate of one-per-month across each March, April, and May. I’ve not had one in June, and aim to get to the Autumn Equinox without another.

2021-03-20: Nudo Sushi for Equinox
2021-04-16: Nudi Sushi for fun
2021-05-28: Pizzaholic Pizza for fun and comfort

Misc

There are a few miscellaneous things that have occurred in the last 6-to-8-month period that I’m covering here.

I migrated my blog to Jekyllbut I’m still not sure what to do with all my old Indieweb notes and all my old POSSE permalinks are broken.
I got lumped with a bunch of my dad’s old gear which I’m still sorting through, which means I’m a bit more cluttered than usual. This included my old Bionicle Lego action figures. I didn’t want to chuck them in the landfill, so managed to find takers for 90% of them on Reddit. I shipped them overseas at a loss, but I feel better knowing they’re either with collectors or with people who’re giving them to their brother.
I feel I’ve finally managed to celebrate Summer Solstice in a way that feels perfect for me. In the past I’ve either been in Spain, or by myself, and it’s been nice. However, I didn’t feel confident enough to celebrate “properly” and merely… observed them. Which is something I tend to do for the Equinoxes no problem. This year, I was with my partner and her family and it just felt… nice. They made a fuss over me which I absolutely will not take as granted, but we celebrated the day very well and very actively. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to many more Solstices to come.
I’m making plans to get a kitten soon, but I’m not sure when that will be.

Migrating (temporarily?) to Jekyll

2021-04-20

I’ve made the decision to migrate this site temporarily away from Brimstone and into a static site. The reasons for this are pretty straightforward and nothing too controversial I hope; time/effort/headspace, and workflow/what I want from this site.

Brimstone, my custom blog/cms/indieweb software, has been a bit creaky for a little while. While I stand by the code and design decisions I made when I first drafted the update a while ago, it’s still running off of Symfony 3.4 which is way behind the newest version. I tried upgrading a few times but I struggled with it. I was going to upgrade by basically re-implementing in the latest version of Symfony in order to implement some features around multi-language posts I’d been toying with but the world kept getting in the way (see recent events and this thing), and it became less and less important. The final nail in the coffin of Brimstone-as-it-was is the fact that, a few days ago, it suddenly stopped rendering <textarea> and <select> tags. I’m not sure why, but I suspect it’s a PHP upgrade on my shared hosting which has broken some of Symfony forms used to generate the HTML forms. This effectively means I can’t write any posts!

It was in my future plans to implement ActivityPub and Micropub endpoints, which would allow me to use desktop and mobile clients to post however, again, that should really come with an upgrade to the rest of the codebase. Right now, it matters more that I can write for my blog at all rather than doing it in a correct or idealised way. Life is still very much happening around me, and if I start a project now then chances are Symfony will move on a little bit further by the time it’s finished and I’ll end up playing catch up again!

The second reason is the type of workflow and presence I want this site to provide me. Over the last few years I’ve been getting more and more into managing more and more of my work and life in Plaintext (got an upcoming post planned about that too!) and it’s been a fantasy of mine for a little while to write a post in a markdown file via a text editor (for articles) or the commandline (for notes) and upload that to my site within a few strokes. My previous workflow was to write articles in a text editor and then copy/paste the markdown into a web form. Not totally crude but required a few step. For notes I’ve always just used the web form straight. I really enjoy hanging out in a text editor and writing this way. I wrote my entire PhD thesis in markdown via a text editor, so it’s a workflow I’m comfortable with.

For these reasons, a static site suits me for the moment. They also mean that this probably won’t be a short-term change. I do love writing software for the indieweb, but ultimately I just kinda like blogging and microblogging. Microblogging is something I do very intermittently, and I’ve noticed I kinda do it in spurts. I still don’t plan on going back to Twitter ever, so I’ll just hold off microblogging for a little while. It may mean more “Update here’s how I’m doing” style articles for the mid-term.

It does mean that I lose the ability to POSSE my notes and articles to Twitter and Mastodon so some folks who’d otherwise read them (friends/colleagues) won’t get the chance to do so but tbh I don’t mind that. The big change is that my URLS and, aha, “permalinks” will be changing. Tbh my permalinks was a design flaw in Brimstone and I didn’t follow the indieweb guidance on URL design. Whoops. There is also the question of what I do with my notes. I, thankfully, wrote a feature in Brimstone to export all my posts as XML files which will be straightforward to iterate over in python and convert to Jekyll posts. I will likely not post further notes but instead create a notes page that archives them, but I’ll need to figure out how best to do that as I am not a very advanced Jekyll user and the aim is to keep things simple for the time being!

In the immediate short-term I’m not going to be doing too much, maybe posting some articles. I won’t even be changing the design of the site much. After my PhD viva and corrections I’ll spend some time learning how to write a Jekyll theme and make the site look like how it used to, as I kinda liked the design. Following that, I’ve been getting into Esperanto lately (I know, I know…) and I’ve had a fantasy of being able to write a post in multiple languages and have them link to each other automatically. Turns out Anthony Granger wrote about an elegant solution to this which I may experiment with.

Anyway, that’s it from me for now: goodbye Brimstone and hello plaintext for a while. At least until compiling the site gets old ;-)

So I'm grieving right now

2021-03-01

Hi folks, if you’re reading this then either you’re a close friend/colleague, or one of the few random strangers on the web who read my blog occasionally. This post is intended for the former group.

Basically; my father sadly died this weekend just gone (2021-02-27) after a struggle with COVID-19. He put up a hell of a fight and for a while things were looking like he’d get a little better but sadly he took a rapid turn and deteriorated very quickly. At the end he went quickly and quietly, with his children around him. As you might expect; I am incredibly sad/upset and about to go through my first really heavy grieving process.

I am lucky enough to be surrounded by a very amazing group of friends, colleagues, and comrades who all effectively make up my surrogate family. The chances are if you’re reading this then you’re one of them; and if you’re one of them then you’re so wonderful you’ve probably got yourself all worked up about how you can help me through this. The motivation for this post is to sketch out exactly how you can help this and what my needs are at the moment.

The rest of this post is presented as an FAQ to help you understand how you can help atm.

How are you feeling?

I looked up grieving and it seems I’ve got the standard package tbh: I’m still feeling that it’s a little surreal and I get occasional bouts of deep upset and sadness where I’ll realise what’s going on, and have a cry. I feel deeply regretful for a lot of unsaid things, and a lot of things that were said. I get angry at myself. I get angry at the gods. I mostly get angry at our government for letting this happen. It happened to my dad and it’s happened to ~123,000 others and it was entirely preventable.

Mostly I’m very sad.

Are you seeking any professional grief counselling?

It’s only been a few days as of writing. I tend to deal with death pretty calmly, and while this one is admittedly a bit of a doozy I’ve already started processing and accepting things. I am a relatively reflective person (sometimes to my detriment when combined with my tendency to overthink); so I will be trying to keep on top of it and seek professional grief counselling when I feel I need it or if I’m not better after a little while.

As my loved ones (this covers all of you btw) you can support me by keeping an eye on me over time. You know me, and you know how I behave at work and in social settings. This thing will obviously change me in some way (giving me a new perspective etc), but if I’m fundamentally still not well after a longer period of time then I ask you to please gently let me know that I should seek help if I haven’t done so already.

What do you need right now?

The bottom line is that I require a cocktail of needing to know life goes on, and also needing to know people understand that I’m grieving and care for me.

What I would like right now is for people to message me as they normally would, about normal things, but also be a little patient with me in terms of replies. You might catch me on a bad day/hour. I might miss a reply. If I do that, please don’t stop messaging! Just leave it an appropriate amount of time based on how often we talk and just ping something else my way in due course.

Please don’t worry about me trying to “distract myself”; this isn’t that. I’m thinking and reflecting a lot, and processing as much as I can healthily. But I will need something to be there afterwards. Providing a scaffolding of ’normal’ interactions will give me something to hook onto once the initial stages of very-explicit-grieving start to wane away. I don’t want to come out of this with nothing on the other side.

OK, but can I check in on how you’re feeling?

Yes please! But as mentioned I’m very lucky and you are part of a fantastic squad of people. I get overwhelmed easily at the best of times and if I’m asked to repeat stuff to people a lot I might get a bit stressed out. That said if nobody checks in that’d be worse tbh.

Right now I’d like it if you could spare the time to check in on how I’m feeling every few weeks. That way I’ll know you’re still there and caring but I’m not overwhelmed by keeping people updated all at once.

Can I help? (“If there’s anything you need”)

You can absolutely help. I’m not going to have a lot of headspace over the coming weeks and, awkwardly, I’ve got a house move happening at the same time. If you want to help then please do the following:

instead of asking “If there’s anything you need just ask” (or similar) please just ask me if there’s something I specifically need help with now or in the near future
do a quick think about practical things you would be comfortable doing to help and ask me about them specifically, framed as a one-time offer of support
just keeping offering various things on a regular basis for as long as you’re comfortable

This does a few things for me. It shows me that you’re there and you care. This also means I don’t need to ask for help which is very important to me right now; as I don’t do this at the best of times! By thinking of something you can do ahead of time it means I don’t feel that I’m a burden or putting you out. Some examples:

“Hey, I know you’ve got a lot on at the moment. Can I pick something up from Gumtree/Freecycle for you for your new house?”
“Hey are you eating ok? I’ve got leftovers and can bring them round so you don’t need to cook tomorrow”
“Yo, doing a snack run do you want comfort food?”
“Do you need some company? I’m going for a walk and can swing by if you want to join?”
“Doing a big shop, anything on your list you need?”

You’ll notice that the above examples deal with mundane bits of everyday life that can become overwhelming during periods of stress; headspace to cook/get shopping in, and then a bit of social comfort thrown in.

Will these needs change?

Possibly. But if they do you won’t need to play catch up. These are my needs right now and one thing I’ve realised is the importance of communication of my needs to people. If they shift then it’s likely I’ll either be in a position where I need professional support which is absolutely not your duty to perform; or I’ll be on the mend thanks to you. In which case thank you so much.

Love you all,

Matt

A year of journaling

2020-11-06

As of last night I’ve been journaling every day for a solid year. I began on 2019-11-05, after several months of putting it off. I had just finished returning from a wonderful trip across Europe with one of my closest friends and was very tired and run down; owing from a really weird and busy year of adapting to my new life and work. I’d put off starting to journal for a few reasons: for one I wasn’t sure whether I’d enjoy it or whether I liked the idea of journaling from all these lifestyle blogs; I wasn’t sure what I’d be writing in my journal (like at all) and I don’t blog very much any more so was wondering if I actually had anything to say; and “people who journal” are sometimes (most of the time), quite frankly, annoying.

The reasons I wanted to start a journal were actually pretty much the reasons you’d expect. Do a search for benefits of journaling and you’ll find umpteen lists and blogs dedicated to the habit. Specifically I was keen on: boosts to mood and sense of well-being; potential benefits to long-term memory; and aiding sleep. Don’t get me wrong, I was already sold on other benefits of journaling such as it being an inherently reflexive practice and good for the soul. Brett over at AoM has been pretty good at documenting various aspects of journaling that I knew I’d like. What I knew I wasn’t attracted to was what some blogs centred around which was inevitably tied to being “more productive” and “more creative” at work due to the other benefits.

The thing that pushed me over the edge to start was actually a bad night’s sleep. The benefit I was most interested in from journaling was the potential for a better sleep. A year of stress from work, stress from travel, and stress from my then-shitty PhD thesis was all contributing to a consistently bad sleep cycle. I’d just spent nearly a month travelling across some Central/Eastern European countries, and the latter third of that I spent basically being rained on in Ljubljana and Venice. I was ready for my own bed and every single sign from my exhausted mind and tired body pointed to the fact I was due a good night’s sleep when I returned. Sadly it evaded me. During my undergraduate years I’d read about (sorry can’t find a link) and subsequently adopted a short-term habit of keeping a pad of paper next to my bed to scribble down thoughts before sleeping. This helped me get all the thoughts out of my head and onto paper and stopped my mind racing as much; like software on a laptop and freeing up memory. I abandoned the practice largely because I couldn’t build a habit, but I remembered it working and thought that sitting down and journaling and using that to process my thoughts and feelings would in some way help me sleep.

This gave me the ‘in’ that I needed to start: one of the key things to building a habit is finding a when to do it and I figured that if journaling was going to help me sleep then it’d be most sensible to tie it to my bedtime. This also had the related benefit of giving more structure to my bedtime routine which (supposedly) helps with getting off to sleep. It also gave me a what to journal about. As noted part of my apprehension was centred around not knowing quite what to write about; the slew of journaling prompts just really didn’t appeal to me whereas the idea of just sitting down and getting thoughts out of my head and onto paper seemed reasonable enough as a start. I checked AoM for advice as it was the only site that had written about journaling in a way that made it seem appealing (I swear I’m not a shill for Brett) and this gelled with what they were saying: “Just write about your day. No need to get fancy with those cute little journal prompts. Some days might be pretty routine, but other days you might be feeling philosophical or have a problem that will require you to write more in-depth entries. Just write what comes naturally to you on that day.” (source). With these two points aligned, I had my motivation raised and my barrier to entry reduced sufficiently to start.

I actually had the next day off of work when I arrived back home so spent it around Newcastle centre acquiring bits and pieces and made a point to swing by a stationary shop to grab a notebook that I wanted to use as a dedicated journal. Not wanting to intimidate myself I bought a nondescript A6 lined notebook; figuring that the small page size meant I wasn’t going to be feeling bad about not filling up an entire page with thoughts. Turns out this was definitely the right move. My first entries were barely half a page of A6 each but worked well enough for me to continue and build the habit. Here’s the first page of my journal:

2019-11-05: First day back home after my travels; didn’t sleep well. Watched a movie, read, and bought some misc useful items. Turns out nobody in NCL stocks safety razor blades except ‘Cuban Cigar Club’. It’s cold out and I love it.

2019-11-06: Tired. Back to work today and [redacted] already extended my work day into my evening -_- In the grand scheme of things it means nothing but it irritated me a bit. I did, though, love being back at Goodspace.

And honestly that was it. Really mundane right? As the muscles for journaling were flexed I found myself writing more and more each time. I went from a single paragraph to a main paragraph and a reflection on a problem. Then from that to writing two paragraphs, and then around three or sometimes four. By 2019-11-14 I had found my perfect balance which was to write until I’d just-about filled an entire single side of A6 lined paper. By that point I was using it as a reflective practice and actively teasing out lessons from the day:

2019-11-14: A pleasant day overall; work was 360-based; then Goodspace Tea-Thursday; then CPB Meeting.

An interesting reflection on work – whereas OCDS is stressful because of the granular and specific time tracking which causes me to stress about the time taken / spent on items… 360 is stressful because I don’t do it enough to know all the moving parts and I’m often left needing to do some personal triage before I can get any work done.

A lesson from this is that I should hold a personal version of the weekly check to keep on top of the 360 work

I am aware of the irony that I was not attracted to the benefits of journaling for productivity and that this entry was entirely about making myself really productive. As it happens, I work in an amazing worker-owned business and do stuff I’m passionate about. Other things in my life became regular features of my journal such as my current challenges and approaches in my strength training and running (I took up running around this time too, on 2019-11-17 apparently), my dating life, my struggle with particular thought patterns, my attempts to control my yo-yo eating habits.

As each of these found their way onto the page I was able to interact with that part of my life a little bit more. It’s not all problem-solving and deep reflection. Some of my entries are very mundane and quite a lot of the early ones involve pointing out things that have made me happy. One thing it did allow me to spot was trends; if I’d been writing about struggling to control snacking for around five days in a row it meant that I could dedicate some time to figuring out what was causing that, or realise that it was more of a problem than I thought. With 2020 being so bat-shit (as a result of late-stage capitalism mind, not it just being weird) journaling has helped a lot there too. It lead me to making a few changes since writing down the positive realisations about my relationship to myself and others made that stick. As a result I feel I’m genuinely a better person for it. I’ve clearly kept up the habit as it’s a nice way to sign off my day and I get a lot from it. I’ve managed to totally fill two of the little A6 books and I’ve started on a third. I think once I’m finished with that one I’ll “graduate” to an A5 book. Again, I’ll not try and force myself to fill an entire page but the extra room might allow me to do some interesting things.

I don’t really have a ‘winning formula’ as I sit down to write a page in my journal but I do seem to have a habit or a framework. I start with giving an overall impression of my day, then go into the detail about some key events in it and how they made me feel. Being a worker and a human being with hobbies these tend to appear more often than not and I find myself writing about strength training, writing my PhD, cool open data stuff, my awesome flatmate, food etc. I don’t expect this to change particularly but I’ve thumbed through my older entries in preparation for writing this post and I’ve noticed that my focus and style does evolve and change over time, in the order of months rather than days; so I’m excited as to where I’m going next and what my journaling may look like in a year’s time. I’m aware that recently there’s been a bit of a push-back against journaling (e.g. here and here). I think those are making some good points and I’m not so emotionally tied to or dependant on journaling that I’m defensive. In fact I do see myself stopping journaling when it ceases to be useful to me. Until then I’m a bit late to the game because I didn’t spend most of my 20s journaling and I haven’t really reached a point where it’s stopped being useful or becoming a burden. One day I’ll retire the practice but until then I’ll keep writing about my boring day.

Oh, and I do sleep better now ;-)

Finding joy in converting a file

2020-09-15

Just had a really nice experience where a loved one asked me to facilitate the conversion of an ebook from epub format to PDF for reading on her computer.

Since converting data is kinda my jam, and I am well-versed in Pandoc this seemed like a one-command job. Pandoc complained at the file being converted for some obscure reason, and manually trying out a few different options under --pdf-engine didn’t yield any results. I next tried Calibre, the popular ebook management software. It has facilities to convert between various readable formats although I’ve historically found its results to be spotty (this might be a case of garbage-in-garbage-out, though). Calibre similarly complained, citing the same reason as Pandoc (something about font encoding I think). Ever the debugger, I asked Calibre to convert the file to mobi which it kindly obliged me. Feeling bold now I asked it to convert the original epub to docx – another success!

With my docx in hand I braced myself and opened the new file in LibreOffice. A quick skim indicated that there were no obviously mangled paragraphs or destroyed pages. From there it was a simple matter to save as PDF et voila – task accomplished! This might mark the first time in history I’ve been happy to see a docx file.

This experience brought me joy because it reminded me of something. I’ve worked in standards for a few years now, and spent a lot of time designing technologies that tried to get it “right”. Where right is either the most technically efficient way, or using the right participatory design technique in the right place, or using the right analytical framework. This exercise gave me a chance to playfully engage my creative problem solving. The “right” thing to do technically might’ve been to try and fix the encoding of the epub file, and I certainly never envisioned using LibreOffice to generate a pdf file when I have the power of Pandoc at my fingertips. But it was nice to play around and hack my way around the problem by stringing tools together in a pipeline.

You should write to your MP, here's a template

2020-09-11

Dear…,

This year has been extremely difficult because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The difficulty has been exacerbated by the Government’s mishandling of the crisis, which looks set to worsen with the withdrawal of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme at the end of October.

The Job Retention Scheme, fought for by trade unions and employers as the means to avoid an immediate collapse across sectors and mass job losses, has provided welcome support for the 9.6million people who have used it. The Government have already tried to remove it in April and again in June, and it was only extended to 31st October because of public pressure. We are still in a global pandemic and the increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases is very worrying. Many businesses are unable to trade as normal. Millions of workers are still reliant on the Job Retention scheme and are now facing an agonising worry over the future of their jobs.

The Government needs to support workers and businesses to avoid a catastrophic wave of redundancies and job losses. Other major economies have committed to long-term furlough schemes with Australia and Ireland’s schemes lasting until next March, while Germany and France’s continuing until December 2021. There is now widespread support for a common sense extension to this life line for workers and employers.

I urge you to call on the Government to change course and extend the scheme to at least March 2021 and to create a sustainable plan for the future including support to:

The hardest hit sectors, such as aviation and leisure.
Those areas placed in local lockdown where businesses cannot reopen.
High-risk people who cannot safely return to work.

The economic and human cost of mass unemployment for years to come is unthinkable and it is the responsibility of the government to prevent. Extending the Job Retention Scheme would cost a fraction of the £500bn used to bail out the banks during the global financial crash. The Office for Budget Responsibility projects a nightmare scenario of unemployment spiralling to 4.1 million by the end of the year, with 1.3 million people going straight from the Job Retention Scheme to claiming Universal Credit. And unemployment in a second virus wave could hit 14.8% – close to one in every seven, higher than France, Germany and Italy.

We are far from through this crisis. Cutting the Job Retention Scheme now would significantly damage our economy in the long-run, devastating key sectors with a tide of redundancies. The human cost would be devastating.

I appreciate your urgent support in this matter; we must act fast in order to protect the futures of our businesses and employees. Urge the government to extend the Job Retention Scheme.

Yours sincerely,

Writing a thesis in markdown

2020-07-17

In my dark and murky past as a full time PhD Student and in my current alter-ego as someone writing up a PhD Thesis on the evenings and weekends I have spent a lot of time writing things. A lot of academic writing occurs in either Word or LaTeX and since my undergraduate I’ve been firmly in the LaTeX camp; using it to write papers, essays, etc. When I started my PhD I was originally planning to produce my thesis in LaTeX and actually wrote the first drafts of my initial few chapters in it.

I ended up migrating away from LaTeX and these days I, like many others online, try to do most things in Plaintext or Markdown. I don’t want to spend too much of this post saying why as there are entire blogs dedicated to this. Suffice to say that it dovetails very nicely with my views on minimalism and simplicity and allows me to focus on the writing. Just as LaTeX got out of my way when trying to write before, so markdown gets out of my way even more than LaTeX does. In this instance it has made an otherwise troubled PhD experience much more pleasant than if I were to attempt to finish my thesis by other means.

My toolkit

If you’re a general fan of either plaintext or markdown then chances are you’re familiar with the majority of these tools.

The core toolset:

A text editor (any text editor will do)
Markdown for markup, using the Pandoc markdown flavour
BibTeX for my references / bibliography storage
Pandoc for converting to various output formats
Zotero and its associated Firefox plugin to manage my bibliography and export BibTeX

Additions:

Git for tracking changes and publishing the source
PureCSS for styling the HTML output
BetterBibTeX is a Zotero plugin that generates nicer BibTeX citation keys for citing things

These may seem quite numerous and complex but thankfully I’ve been working with each of these tools independantly for years and it was very straightforward to put them together. It may be strange to hear a stack of 8 tools being described as “simple” or “minimalist” but the benefit of these is that they’re each very good at one specific job and ultimately they get out of my way when it’s time to write which is something that Word Processors just don’t do. Whether it’s MS Word or even LibreOffice Write; I just can’t seem to master the art of sitting in front of a word processor and writing. I’m constantly fighting with formatting, pasting, and images jumping around. Not to mention the crashing.

Both PureCSS and BetterBibTeX literally disappear once you’ve added them to the toolchain. There’s an initial 2 minute setup where you install BetterBibTeX into Zotero and, maybe, adjust the citation key format to your preferences. After that it just kind of fades away as you benefit from nicer citation key exports.

Zotero and its connector would be part of any academic toolchain as an alternative to proprietary systems so I’m not sure they count as additional burden to be honest. That said once the Zotero Firefox connector is installed it becomes second nature to hit the button and grab the citation for writing.

Git is effectively just my cloud storage and back-up solution. If you’re using a Word Processor to manage this you probably have back-ups on USB keys (good) and a cloud solution (also good) such as (probably) Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive. This supports syncing. Since my thesis is so tiny, effectively being in plaintext, this is handled by Git without any complaint and it also makes sense to allow me to track changes to individual files. The thesis is stored online in a git repo.

Pandoc facilitates the conversion between the markdown source and formats that people want to read it in. For fun and convenience I wrote a small build script that allows me to build the the thesis quickly since pandoc commands can become quite long. I run this once at the end of every writing session.

In Practice

This is all well and good but what does it look like in practice?

Here’s my folder structure:

* thesis/
  * notes/
    * note-files.md
  * out/
  * src/
    * figs/
      * fig-files.svg
    * bibliography.md
    * chapter-01.md
    * chapter-02.md
    * chapter-03.md
    * chapter-04.md
    * chapter-05.md
    * chapter-06.md
    * chapter-07.md
    * chapter-08.md
    * harvard-newcastle-university.csl
    * index.md
    * thesis.bib
    * web.css
  * templates

The notes folder is just that. If I’m working something through or wanted to take extensive notes on something to have by the thesis but that wouldn’t make sense or would clutter it when it came read a draft of a section they go here.

The out folder isn’t actually included in the git repo as it is where the “builds” of the thesis end up. When you run the build script it automatically generates the thesis in this location.

The src folder is the actual content of the thesis. It only has one subfolder called figs for, you guessed it, figures. Each chapter has its own file which is pretty straightforward. index.md contains some front-matter for configuring the builds and adding metadata. This effectively just makes it easier to manage the pandoc commands. It looks like this:

title: A Rough, Transparent, Draft of my PhD Thesis
author: Matt Marshall
bibliography: src/thesis.bib

css:
 - https://unpkg.com/purecss@1.0.0/build/pure-min.css
 - src/web.css

link-citations: true
csl: src/harvard-newcastle-university.csl

thesis.bib and web.css should be pretty self-explanatory as files: the former is my BibTeX library generated from Zotero and the latter is some custom css that I apply on top of PureCss to make the HTML version look prettier.

The templates folder contains a template for a HTML frontpage used by the build script. In the future it may contain custom pandoc templates for LaTeX or such to generate a thesis with some obligatory frontmatter such as a Newcastle University logo (blerugh).

That’s all there is to it really. 99% of the time I just live in a markdown file for each chapter, and then run a build script to build the thesis in my desired output format.

Referencing workflow

When I need to reference something I need to interact with Zotero but it’s so simple it’s almost embarassing.

In my web browser I hit the Zotero connector button to trigger saving the reference to my Zotero library
In Zotero the reference is already highlighted so I’ll check it has all the information it needs
BetterBibTeX has already done its thing so I copy the citation key over into my document using the pandoc citation syntax e.g. [@strohmayerTechnologiesSocialJustice2017]
My text editor’s autosuggest magically starts suggesting it to me whenever I start typing @ in case I need to type it again.

When I’m done writing for a bit or want to check how a paragraph reads I’ll export the Zotero collection used for my thesis into thesis.bib.

Working with others

When you’re writing a thesis it’s generally recommended that you send your work to your supervisor and hopefully they’ll get back to you with comments and opinions on it.

Unfortunately my supervisor isn’t really a markdown person so I was worried initially that there would be a tool/workflow gap. Thankfully from my writing-papers-in-LaTeX days there was the well established practice of using Pandoc to convert the document into a word file and sending it over to receive feedback which is what we’ve landed on.

Originally I was going to try to get dokieli set up on the web version of my thesis to facilitate feedback there however I didn’t want to create any additional hoops to jump through. I landed on the workflow of sending my supervisor my chapter in a DOCX file and then receiving that file back with comments which I keep open while I work on the changes in markdown.

I don’t store the feedback in the git repository as this would get bulky quite quickly and I feel that’s a separate concern. I manage feedback by sticking the feedback into a folder that’s synced to my NextCloud instance.

Challenges

There is one very distinct area that I’ve found a challenge when choosing to write my thesis in markdown which is automatic numbering for sections, tables, and figures. Sadly Pandoc doesn’t support this to my knowledge. There is a fork of Pandoc called Scholdoc which is puported to understand Scholarly markdown; a markdown flavour that is purpose-built for academic writing. Its syntax includes provisions for figures and float environments which is pretty neat and the output formats are limited to HTML 5 and DOCX which are fine by me. Theoretically it is exactly what I needed.

Sadly I never got Scholdoc to work and it looks like the last update to the Github repo was way back in 2015 so I suspect it may be abandonware. My solution thusfar in my thesis has been to manually number figures by chapter e.g. Chapter 3 Figure 1 is Fig 3.1 but it would’ve been nice to be able to have this done automatically and update as I add/remove/adjust figures.

If I’m honest it doesn’t bother me too much and forces me to keep it simple and not rely too much on figures in a chapter. If it becomes a problem in later chapters when it comes to crunch time I may introduce an intermediary step where the thesis is converted to LaTeX and tweaked before being transformed into its final PDF form although that would sadly clash with my original plan of using print styles on HTML to manage this.

Summary

I’ve put together a very simple toolkit and structure to write my PhD thesis in markdown. This enables quite a nice and relatively natural rhythm for writing as well as allowing me to present the thesis in various forms for the web and collaboration with my supervisor. There are still challenges and I lose some benefit from not getting automatic numbering which I do with LaTeX, but overall has resulted in a very nice writing experience. I’d recommend this to anyone.

In fact I wrote the first draft of this blog post before I searched the web for writing a thesis in markdown and it turns out this is already an established practice. I’m glad to say that, at a brief glance over the landscape, many of the same things I’ve said are shared experiences. I’ll stick to my own toolchain here but I recommend people look at Tom Pollard’s PhD Markdown Thesis template and I found this post from The Urbanist a pleasant read as well.

Happy writing.

Why The Guardian is utter tripe

2020-07-06

I’ve just discovered via r/swoletariat this absolutely fucking unreal 2018 Guardian editorial from Zoe Williams

Do you boast about your fitness? Watch out – you’ll unavoidably become rightwing

Great start there. Bit rich coming from a person whose editorial board posts transphobic shit and Israel apartheaid apologism

Yesterday was Fitness Day. Sorry, let me give that its proper title: #FitnessDay. The space bar is always the first casualty of a manufactured social media movement.

Sweet, hot take! It’s not like hashtags are the most basic way of linking together commentary on a topic in our modern age. Hypertext is based on linked documents, Zoe.

Do too much, and the self-love develops a carapace of self-sufficiency. This is especially a problem for cyclists, who come to think of themselves as an off-grid warrior class, having performed their commute drawing on no more resources than their own glutes, and maybe a sports drink. Unavoidably, over time, this makes you more rightwing, as you descend into an aerobics-powered moral universe where only the weak need each other, and all the strong need is a waterpouch in their backpack that pipes straight into their mouths.

Bit of a fucking leap there imho. How does that work? I enjoy exercise for a variety of spiritual and physical reasons. Not once have I ever thought of myself as self-sufficient, a “warrior” (in a non day-dreamy / roleplay sense). I also don’t own a water pouch. Rude.

How heroic do you find the armed forces? And is that just those in active combat, or also the ones who fix army IT and count parachutes? I found the questions on YouGov’s recent poll peculiar, but I often do when they ask us to make qualitative judgments about one another (do benefit claimants want to work? Are migrants ambitious? – there is no possible answer beyond “I’d have to take this on a case-by-case basis”).

So we’ve tried to draw a straight line from liking exercise to soldier-hero worship? Sweet. No problem there at all.

From the people who brought you the Ostrich Pillow – which lets you nap anywhere, the next best thing to being a baby – comes the three-way hood: you can wear it as a hood, or as a snood, but its unique selling point is “eclipse mode”, where you pull it right over your face and that alerts people to the fact that you don’t want to talk to them. So, someone has just reinvented a pillow case, for a generation of people who have forgotten how to deploy a simple, offputting grumpy face. It’s the hood that says hell-in-a-handcart.

Wait what? This is the conclusion of the article. I’m really confused now. What has this to do with anything? Are we just trying to glue together random pieces of “individualism bad”? I get the sentiment; rugged individualism is misconceived at best and outright fascist propaganda at worst. But as mentioned before we’re hardly the voice of solidarity are we The Guardian. That concluding paragraph indicates that this is nothing more than a strung-together vitriolic ramble. What the hell?

Don’t fucking read The Guardian folks. It’s centrist tripe.

State of my phone 2020-06

2020-06-15

My phone intersects on various aspects of my life such as minimalism, de-googling, FLOSS, etc. As a result of that I’m often posting lists of apps on various subreddits to share my practices and I thought it’d be neat to collect it all here.

I have a barebones android phone without any of the Google framework in; meaning I don’t have the playstore etc. My apps tend to be from F-Droid so non-commercial, open, and quite pragmatic.

My minimalism here is embodied through only really carrying around what I need on the phone, as there’s not really the chance to get distracting apps and choosing apps with very minimal or functional designs.

A lot of my apps are default system apps which are generally omitted from this list. My main tension point is around the audio apps as I have three – one for each podcasts, music, and audiobooks. I’ve not found a good single app that does all three well at all and each of the ones I’ve chosen are exquisitely designed. So I guess they’re minimal in the sense they’re really good at one thing.

Apps that I use:

Audio – AntennaPod for Podcasts, Voice for audiobooks, and Odyssey for music. I tried to use the default Music app for android but it’s become abandonware and wasn’t playing tracks in any reasonable or predictable order. Odyssey is blazing fast, looks pretty, and follows material design well.
Cloud sync – Nextcloud as my dropbox alternative and DAVx^5 to sync my calendar and contacts to my Nextcloud server without Google’s involvement. DAVx^5 kinda gets out of the way and I don’t need to open it ever, but included it here for completeness
Email – default android email client
Web browser – GNU Ice cat mobile
File browsing – I’ve recently switched to Material Files after Amaze had become abandonware. I tried to use the default system file browser, honestly I tried. But it wasn’t showing folders properly, wouldn’t copy/paste well at all. I hated it but tbh I hate Google even more for making it abandonware.
Security – I’m a tecchie so carry around encryption keys in OpenKeychain and passwords in Password Store
Messaging – Signal
Notes – Markor
Wellbeing – Loop Habits Tracker to track habits like exercise, diet, etc. and Red Moon to make my phone less harsh on my eyes
Maps – OSMand+
Misc – I use Newpipe for YouTube videos although the context of my phone this is usually to use its audio download feature to nab a music track. I also, weirdly, have Loyalty card keychain installed. I only have a Co-op membership card myself (co-ops ftw), but carry around my friends’ cards on this to nab them the points for things.

And that’s it really. Other than the clock / calculator which I use sometimes and my sadly proprietary banking app. No social apps. I also installed a minimalist greyscale icon set and have a greyscale wallpaper. Occasionally Telegram makes an appearance on my phone for specific times when I need to contact someone who uses it, but mostly I use Telegram on my laptop.

Routine is a tool, not the point

2020-01-31

I seem to have given off the impression that my routine is the most important thing in the world to me and while this is partially true on the surface; it is for wholly different reasons than most people think. I think folks might view me as having this rigid, highly-disciplined, approach to constructing my day. And that deviation from it causes me severe distress. From my perspective, I’ve developed routines as a tool to ensure that I manage to fit in the things which are important to me.

Contrary to what neoliberal “self-help” books say to you, we don’t each have the same 24 hours a day. The ruling classes have staff and people they pay to do labour. Beyoncé has a staff to deal with mundane things so she can focus on what’s important to her either personally or professionally. This means that within a given rotation of the planet some people have several hundred hours of other people’s time feeding into their lives, and 24h to do what they want. Some of us (probably most of us) don’t even necessarily have a full 24h or even 18h to ourselves (18h presumes only a 6h sleep by the way). We work (notably for others), we have responsibilities of care, to feed ourselves, to provide for a family (whatever shape your family has).

Not all of this work is drudgery, and is an essential part of being human. The work that we enjoy naturally energises us and the work we hate naturally exhausts us. I’d also argue that sometimes it’s more complicated than that and something we hate doing under certain combinations of circumstance becomes something we look forward to doing under different conditions. For example; I thoroughly enjoy cooking for myself and others but if I’ve had to work late I often dislike the fact that now I need to spend some of my previous evening time just feeding myself to be able to work the next day.

Often it’s little things that can keep us going. Small moments to take for ourselves to feed our wellbeing. We’re told this all the time through the class-war that is self-help, and even through well-meaning interactions with others (usually Liberals).

What is not often talked about is the stress that comes about when you’ve done the reflecting and have arrived at a bunch of things that you know make you feel better; but you’ve been unable to fit them in because of X or Y. You then get to experience the underlying problem of not having the space for feeding your well-being (which was the problem in the first place) but now you’ve got an additional level of stress caused by the fact that you now know you could’ve felt better and what you could’ve done to achieve this if only things were a little different.

In my experience something about knowing this makes it feel worse; you can now imagine how you could’ve felt just a little better as you deal with the next round of things-you-have-to-do. Does eating spicy pizza once a fortnight/week/month make you feel good? Does meditation, running, or strength training? Maybe you like to go to the pub for a quiet drink at the end of week, or a local gig. Good on you for knowing this (seriously) but now you also know you haven’t been able to do these things. Ignorance wasn’t bliss, but this now feels a little sad and you can feel yourself fraying at the edges.

Routine is the way I manage to actually fit a few of my favourite things in. I’m not inflexible at all and in fact, given the appropriate space, will fall into more of a natural rhythm than anything resembling a routine. I know that exercise is one of the foundation stones to making myself feel well. I get up at an early hour and don’t stay up late because that’s what’s necessary to being able to fit it in consistently and in a way that makes me happy. I know that spending some time alone during the week reading or watching a movie on my laptop is essential to keeping me sane, so that’s why I’ve drawn a line around some of my evenings.

It can come across as rigid, as if the routine itself is what keeps me going - but it’s the activities within it that I care about. The routine is the tool, not the point. In order to do what I love and feel non-alienated from certain elements of my life I need to feed my soul. In order to feed my soul I need to create the time to do so. Except we cannot create time. So I draw a line in the sand based on my needs.

For some things it’s not even about time but just scheduling things on certain days to ensure I get around to them. I have a bunch of favourite foods and while I enjoy most things, there are certain things that transcend culinary pleasure into a joy. Sometimes it’s pizza, or sometimes it’s sushi. You get the point. I seem to have a rough schedule of eating these things on particular nights to the point where it seems quite funny to outsiders. Friday, for example, is spicy-veggie-bbq pizza night. Sunday lunchtime is veggie-sausage-wraps. Every second Thursday I give up my evening to do activism, so I buy in some sushi. It’s not that I need to have these things on those exact days - it’s just roughly the best time I’ve chosen to fit them in and ensure I get around to eating my favourite foods. Is it weird to make sure you eat your favourite foods? I hope not. I enjoy most food and actually only eat things I like; but certain foods just make me feel warm and fuzzy inside and I kinda like feeling warm and fuzzy.

All of these things serve to put fuel in the tank. If I have enough fuel in my tank it means I can enjoy very spontaneous things or have energy to work really hard in a given direction for a while. If I’m enjoying myself and I’ve built up a good foundation, it doesn’t matter to me that I skip a single workout or don’t get to eat pizza for a few weeks. But every time I don’t, I lose a little bit of what I know makes me serene and happy in a particular way I need. It’s not that I don’t enjoy heading out to the Philippines for work, or staying up late at a pub quiz with friends – I just need the energy to do it. To get that energy I need to make time for things that put the fuel in the tank.

So yeah - my routine is my tool, not my point. I kinda just want to keep doing things I enjoy and in a world where I own less than 100% of my time I’m going to need to schedule them in. Thank you to everyone who’s patient with me when I say I can’t come out to play because I want to stay in and eat pizza before getting up for a 0600 strength training session in the park.

Review of TURF @ Goodspace in Newcastle upon Tyne

2019-06-28

This was posted as a review to Coworker.com as part of the nomination for the 2019 Coworker members’ choice awards. I am reproducing it here for longevity and access, in case someone searches for Goodspace and the original review is no longer up

It is hard to describe in words how unique and special TURF @ Goodspace is, and how much good it has done both for personally for me and the city of Newcastle at large.

To get the standard stuff out of the way: the staff are beyond friendly and incredibly helpful; the wifi is blazing fast and can handle international conference calls (Google, Skype) without breaking a sweat; the facilities are great (unlimited tea and coffee for your stay); the space is very comfortable with a variety of desks, nooks, and crannies to cosy down in and get some work done; the rates are incredibly affordable (since they’re a non-profit) and flexible. You can come in for half a day or book a permanent desk (like I do). The space is always immaculately clean and the atmosphere is always relaxed and productive.

Further to being just a generally good place to work, spending even a short amount of time in the space should be enough to realise that TURF @ Goodspace is special. TURF itself is a large open-plan space operated as a co-working space within “Goodspace” who also provide affordable office space to small charities in the Newcastle area as well as the most affordable bookable meeting spaces in the city (for groups such as political parties, churches, activists, etc). This means that when you come to work in TURF you’ll be meeting charity workers having impact on local peoples’ lives and joining a vibrant community of people who genuinely care for each other. Goodspace is managed by a charity which means they’re not motivated by profit and aren’t liable to cut corners; they’re motivated by creating a space which is friendly and safe and to have that impact the city positively through the work they enable.

This spills over into the culture there. You don’t just rent a desk from Goodspace – you become a member during your stay there. If you’re around long-term you’ll get a say in the overall running of the space, but members visiting for a few hours or a few days are equally valued. Since the charity which runs the space cares about the staff they’re both passionate and well-skilled at their roles and will bend over backwards to accommodate you – and they’re always looking for ways to make Goodspace even better. In addition to their outstanding performance at their roles Goodspace go above-and-beyond by creating regular events for members and staff such as on thursday where tea and cake are brought out to encourage everyone to take a well-deserved break. It’s an opportunity to catch up with everyone’s projects and personal lives, and swap ideas and learn from each other. In the space reception there are regular collections / distributions for food banks, the Red Box Project and many more. The community at TURF and Goodspace all look out for each other and in turn have a great deal of positive impact in the city.

Even though TURF @ Goodspace is the most affordable co-working space in Newcastle, I would pay to come here even if it were double the cost of competitors. It’s like somebody consciously took all of the positive aspects of working in an office, and replaced all the negative aspects with empathy and respect for each worker there. Additionally every single pound spent here goes directly back into the Newcastle community since Goodspace provide: charities with affordable infrastructure; their workers with a living wage and good living conditions; and impact through affordable bookable spaces. In a world where co-working is dominated by WeWork and Regus I feel very lucky to be able to access Goodspace every day.

Review of the VIP Inn Berna Hotel in Lisbon

2019-05-18

I was staying in Lisbon for work and chose the VIP Inn Berna for my accommodation because it was reasonably priced, located very near where I was working, and looked comfortable enough. All hotels are basically all the same anyway. I arrived late in the evening, and the check-in process was very smooth. The young woman on the front-desk was incredibly helpful and spoke immaculate English, assisting me greatly.

Warm, tired, and in desperate need of a shower I ascended the elevator to my room which was clean and spacious. I put away my things and stepped into bathroom to enjoy a cold shower. The shower was attached to the bath and operated with the tap; using one of those manual valves to switch the flow of water between the tap and the shower head. I turned on the water and pulled the valve. Nothing happened. I then noticed a trickle coming out of the tap. “Oh,” I thought, “the valve must not be set all the way.” I pulled the valve and sure enough I had wrongly set it before, and as I moved it to its proper position I was hit in the head and thrown backwards.

I’m not sure how long I was knocked out but I awoke confused and wet. After a few moments I realised what had happened. The force of the water erupting from the shower was great enough to knock me backwards. Blurry-eyed, still dazed, I climbed to my feet to resume the shower and was instantly beaten down again with a powerful but brief spray of water. I lay there for a time collecting myself as clarity of thought gradually returned, this would have been peaceful if it were not punctuated intermittently by attacks from the errant shower head. I collected myself, and struggled to my feet.

Bipedal once more I surveyed my surroundings, understanding fully for the first time the nature of my foe. The sheer force of the water birthed from the shower head had animated it and the bathroom equipment was now enjoying its emergent vitality by sustaining a course whipping around the room; the jet of water powering its journey. The periodic blasts of water I had experienced while laying dazed were a by-product of its quest to escape.

Bracing myself for another blast I began my first assault. I took a step forward and reached for the shower head but no sooner had I done so than it turned to face me directly; unleashing an icy torrent of water that hit me like a punch. “That was weird”, I thought as I once again lay defeated on the floor of the bath. Above me, the shower head gleefully continued to make full use of its newfound dexterity.

The cycle continued. I would brace myself, rise to challenge the serpent, and recieve a beating for my arrogance. I began to wonder whether was this Jörmungandr the giant snake that surrounds the our world. My muscles bunched into knots and my spirit cried for release but I refused to submit to this aqueous demon. I demonstrated my defiance by rising to one knee one last time. This itself was a struggle but nothing compared to what was in store for me when my nemesis once again turned their gaze upon me. No sooner had I attempted to rise than I was subject to an extended spray at full force. Gritting my teeth I raised my arms in front of me as a shield; it was like that we stayed. Locked in battle. At some point, I’m unsure when, I had begun screaming in rage and pain. Time ceased to exist. There was only this. There was always was only this. There could be only this. Only this pain and a burning hatred of the evil forces that condemned me to this hell.

An eternity passed and my torment receded. Bringing me back from the precipice of madness; the serpent gave ground. First one step, then another. Eventually I made it to the source and I reached out blindly. My fingers, numb with pain and cold, grasped the tap and I slowly turned off the water.

The world crashed back into existence and I took a moment to appreciate the sweetness of creation. Drawing back the flimsy shower curtain I gazed upon my face in the bathroom mirror. I was so young when I entered that shower, in the prime of my life. Now my face was lined with age and battle. I stared at the wrinkled creature in the mirror and wept for the years I had lost. Had my battle with the serpent really cost me years? Wearily and with aching joints I made my way back to the bedroom – how feeble I was now! How weak and slow. I lay on the bed and rested a while.

I awoke an hour or so later and caught a glimpse of myself in the bedroom mirror; my youth had returned! I danced with glee and realised that the most likely explanation for my previous appearance is that the shower serpent’s watery assault had stripped all of the oils from my skin and left me a wrinkled husk.

I am keen to return to VIP Inn Berna, as I think I left part of myself behind. This is not poetic language – I think the shower took a tooth.

8/10 would recommend a stay.

Capitalism and the Planet - a happy May Day to all

2019-05-01

Today is 2019-05-01; May the 1st. Commonly referred to as “May Day” the date holds two very special meanings to me and is, I feel, particularly important this year.

The first of these meanings is a very old one. May 1st has traditionally been a spring festival in the Northern Hemisphere. The neopagans have generally re-appropriated this as Beltane. Following the Equinox, it is a fire festival and a celebration of life returning to the Earth after being dormant in the winter. Flowers are out, and everyone dances. It is a reminder of how we are deeply connected to the planet and turning of the seasons and the natural rhythm.

Later in the 19th century, the 1st of May was chosen as the date of International Workers’ Day and adopted by the labour movement. In the UK we have a bank holiday associated with the day, that generally falls on the Monday after the day itself. We nearly lost May Day as a bank holiday – in 2011 the Tories tried to scrap it and move the bank holiday to October to create a “United Kingdom day”. I hope I don’t need to explain how reactionary that sounds.

With the advent of Extinction Rebellion (XR) I feel the twin meanings of May Day are beginning to converge; and I hope they do as we approach class consciousness. While XR lack a clear direction and severely lack class analysis – it is the beginning of a mass movement that can be mobilised as a weapon in the war against the ruling class. The ruling capitalist class is the one that oppresses the working class with one hand and abuses the planet with the other. The two are not disconnected, but intrinsically linked in the inefficient, unethical, capitalist mode of production. Workers are driven to poverty wages while the oil and gas industries lobby the bourgeoisie state. Public mass transport – an inarguably more efficient and more environmentally friendly transport system – is privatised leading to ticket prices increasing every year while the service spirals into decline. It is workers and the public who bear the brunt of this; faced with an expensive and unreliable service of course most will use private transport. Those who can afford it anyway. That way the car industry remains happy, as to the oil and gas as demand is increased. The privateers running the “public” transport industry can feast on the scraps; workers without the capital to invest in their own vehicle who are now held in neo-serfdom as they pay daily or weekly tithes to the lords of transport. The cherry on top is capital’s appropriation of the green message; that it is our fault for using cars all the time. If only we chose to use the bus or the train instead of the car. It’s our fault. Don’t mind that 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. The problem isn’t the system, it’s the fact you use plastic water bottles. I live in Newcastle, and I don’t actually remember ever seeing a public water fountain ever.

On this May Day, remember that the struggle for the planet is the struggle against capitalist oppression. To all my spiritual friends, I wish you a happy spring festival. Once the celebrations are done, remember to get angry and stay angry at the ruling class who are stripping us of our deep spiritual connection to the planet.

(Almost) Off into the sunset; what I've been up to for the last six months

2019-04-12

I last wrote something longform in this blog in February, about how 2018 was a long and brutal year for me. The post reflected on 2018 and low-key announced that I’d landed myself a new opportunity. I wanted to give a sort of update, sort of belated announcement of what I’ve been up to for the last six months since October.

On October 8th, 2018 (2018-10-08T09:30:00+01 for all you ISO 8601 fans) I started my first day of work at the Open Data Services Co-operative (ODSC); my dream job. Why my dream job? Well:

the work follows naturally from where my PhD will leave off (status update on that later) in the open data world. ODSC support many amazing open data standards such as Open Contracting (OCDS, not to be confused with ODSC), 360Giving, and International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) among others. It’s meaningful work, that I adore doing even in the midst of “the daily grind”
it’s remote work. I’ve been looking to transition to remote work for a while; partially to escape the UK if the far-right rise up, but also partially to experience a bit more of the world. This is a relatively low-key requirement for me but the fact I’ve managed to find work that ticks this box so early in my post-academic career has been mindblowing for me.
and most importantly – it’s only a bloody worker co-operative! Many know I lean quite far to the left and that democratic worker control is a really important thing for me. Worker co-operatives are pretty much the best a worker can get under capitalism and ODSC have proven time and again that they (we!) value each of the workers and strive to provide an environment that grows each individual in a way that means we strengthen the group. I’ll add an obligatory footnote that we don’t really discuss politics much at ODSC (besides Brexit) and that, unless someone’s really good at hiding it, I’m the only commie there. There are many political stances that advocate for the worker co-operative model and I believe that ODSC nurtures members with a wide variety of political views. As a group we are by no means a-political but we’re certainly not positioning ourselves as a leftist organisation.

I’ve by no means hidden my new job from anyone, but I’ve held off of making a proper “announcement” online for these last six months. That’s because the probationary period at ODSC is six months. So… I am ecstatic to announce that as of Monday 08th of April I am a full worker-member of Open Data Services Co-operative!! I have never been more proud to contribute to an organisation as I have ODSC. During my time there I have been moved to tears on more than one occasion due to the genuine passion and care that these people have for each other and their work. Whether it’s writing a policy to give workers generous parental or sick leave, the daily act of reminding you that you’re working too much and to take some time for yourself, or the systematic way they’ve incorporated expressing gratitude to others as part of the culture there via a dedicated IRC channel – I leap out of bed every morning to go to work and return to bed grinning after the day’s done. As a full member now, I am expected (and keen) to become more involved in working directly on the co-operative itself. For now I’ve elected to join the Staff Welfare group (to scratch my Shop Steward itch) and Finance (to actually learn about the financial processes of running a business). I’ve participated in three quarterly Ordinary General Meetings (although my first one was on my third day and I didn’t contribute much!) where there is always a rollercoaster of emotions as we discuss the future of the co-op. I am under no illusion that being a member in a worker co-op is (shock-horror); work. This is work that I’m looking forward to. I’m more than happy to trade the false stability of market-salaries and keeping my head down being told what to do for control over my destiny and furthering the cause of worker control. I was braced for a future filled with workplace struggle through union battles and, for a while at least, I get to redirect that potential energy into the co-op.

This has been a far-cry from the late days of my PhD; where I was experiencing a lot of depression and anxiety and would outright not feel up for making it into the lab some days. It’s safe to say that the environment ODSC have created for me to visit every working day has been the major contributor in my recovery re my mental health. There have been other factors, too. A massive shoutout goes to my new flatmate Rosie who has provided a wonderful environment to grow in. Seriously, thank you. Another focus of my gratitude is my lover V who has been a bulwark of support and patience these last six months and who provided an amazing rest period over the Winter Solstice for me in Madrid.

The journey of my PhD is not yet over. I’ve still got a thesis to write. My writing has been… slow. Part of that is due to fear of the thesis, some of that has been lingering anxiety reactions from the trauma of my Phd, and some of that has due to being plain tired at the end of a fulfilling-but-long working week. My supervision is slightly better now, but still not ideal. I’m debating playing with my options for extending the write-up through looking at extensions or dropping to 0.5 for the writing year (if that’s even possible!). At the moment, though, I want it done. It rattles around my brain at night (though I’ve actually been able to rest). I’m ready to write it but we’ll see what’s a healthy rate for me. The lessons I’m taking forward into the next six months are that I need to be better at getting what’s owed me from my supervision, and that integrating writing into my new life is key. I owe it to my participants and myself after last year.

I’m not sure when I’ll next write something that isn’t a response to evaluating some open data, or some thesis. My priorities aren’t with a blog until my thesis is done. I can’t say that I’ve left my old life behind but it’s certainly fading to nostalgic sepia tones; a series of loose ends that just need a few knots tying off before the sails are rigged and I can cast off.

2018 was a Long Year

2019-02-16

2018 was a long year.

I’ve put off writing a little reflection on 2018 for a while now. Part of that has been due to how tired I am. Part of that will be simply due to my priorities not laying with updating a blog. Part of that will be me not wanting to sit down and take account of everything that happened.

I hit burnout this year. It had been building for a while. You know the kind of burnout? The kind where you can spend every week day exercising and doing fieldwork and analysing data intensley and then can’t summon the emotional fortitude to pick up the phone to make a GP appointment, or speak to a supervisor. Unfortunately I think it was a pretty typical progression; supervision for my Phd has been problematic for a while. I’ve had five named supervisors for a while, and no real supervision. I’d not see a supervisor for months at a time, and when I did see them I felt obliged to tell them everything was ok. To essentially lie to them about how I was feeling about my PhD. That’s its own problem really – eventually I want to write a piece about life at Open Lab and the issues around supervision there, and how I never felt that it was possible to approach or speak to anyone. To sum up my experience; for the latter half of my PhD (around halfway through Stage 2) nobody ever asked to actually see my thesis. Not once. I had to attach it in its current state to my annual progression panel. That caused me a lot of anxiety. The progression panel were fine with the state of the thesis – I had publications. My supervisors were usually attentive to my work when it was CHI time.

The environment in Open Lab turned actively toxic. Patrick Olivier’s abusive management style was beginning to be reproduced by some of the academics in the lab. The other professor in the lab, Pete, sat back and claimed ignorance when confronted with the reality. I know this was not a genuine claim. The emotional support I was giving others was necessary but also taxing. Partially due to the specific way I was suffering under Open Lab made me feel I couldn’t speak up and thus others kind of presumed I was fine. Nothing was put back in my tank. As much as I love my friends and colleagues at Open Lab, I am upset they never really made efforts to ask how I actually was (with a few notable exceptions).

At the same time, my relationship with B was growing steadily worse. Not due to her, but because of my ignorance and self-absorption in my own mental health issues. I’m so sorry for everything. I can explain it. I did genuinely have mental health problems, and probably have for a while. Probably will continue to have for a while. I can’t excuse it. My relationship to Helmsley Road (my home of seven years) was also deterioating. The walls that had once acted as shelter and opportunity, and an incubator for my growth started to steadily warp into something else. It had been building for a while. I couldn’t leave because of the financial uncertainty that came from my funding running out and my perceived dependance on my pull-up bar and the “flexibility” of the landlord. I would sit there, being the only one who ever did any cleaning for years, feeling trapped.

It came to a head in August. I couldn’t take any more. I sent a ‘state of the union’ style email to all five of my named supervisors. I received a mixed set of responses from ones that actively blamed me to ones that took responsibility for their failure. I also spotted my dream job, and in September I was offered a role at the Open Data Services Co-Operative. I also moved flat and broke up with B. All of these rapid changes across the last quarter of 2018 also took their toll. It was really tough, and those decisions each have had their lingering negative effects. But they’ve given me the chance to start the next stage of growth. There’s been a few false positives with the mental health. I was feeling better and then took on too much again, and once again it came to a head recently where I was socially exhausted and nothing was putting back into the tank.

Right now, I’m fairly positive I’m on a better trajectory. I’ve got steady employment, meaning my anxiety over money is a lot less. I’m in a lovely new flat with an amazing new flatmate and the place is very much what I need in a home. It has a central hub around the kitchen table where I spend time alone and time with my flatmate. I’m still writing my thesis. I still miss B, but I need to be alone to recuperate and reflect to rebuild my foundations. I watched the sunrise over the beach today; an annual ritual of mine. The solitude and headspace felt right. I’m ready to put in the work to make myself happy again.

I think 2019 is going to be a long year too.

Another List of Stuff I Own (December 2018)

2018-12-01

Back in May I posted a list of stuff that I own in reflection of what I found the most useful. I’ve just changed my living situation, shed a lot of clutter, and am also in a major period of reflection. I’ve since acquired a few new things as well here and there. As such I thought I’d do another list.

This one will be slightly different. In the previous list I didn’t take into account clothes, and grouped some items together which compacted the numbers slightly. This time I’ve expanded them out, just to see what duplicates I have and take an absolute total overview of all of my things. In contrast where I’ve conceptually or physically reduced things into the same space I’ve collapsed these in this list too. A good example of that would be my list of video games; I’ve gotten rid of all of the boxes and collapsed the discs into a single disc holder; so they’re physically and conceptually reduced to a single item of my collection of video games. Last time I also took an overview of where the items were stored in attempt to see what clusters of things I could reduce. This time I am presenting them in a table along with a high-level frequency of use and some high-level descriptors of how I use them.

This list doesn’t acknowledge items in the kitchen that I technically own since, now that I’ve changed my living situation, I am sharing them with my flatmate R. These will likely come with me if/when I move out, and technically could count as my possessions; I’ve ommitted them because they’ve taken on a much more communal character since the last list.

The Stuff

Last time I counted 282 items, without clothes but including some kitchen equipment, and some items collapsed. This time with the clothes expanded but a few items collapsed here and there and including things like hard cases used to store other items, we’re at 218 items. This is quite a marked improvement considering I counted each pair of socks and underwear individually!

Item	Used For	Frequency
Laptop	Work, thesis, recreation, research	Daily
Laptop Sleeve	Protecting laptop	Daily
Bluetooth keyboard	Ergonomics at work	Daily
Bluetooth Mouse	Ergonomics at work	Daily
Display Connector	Conferences, Monitors, Watching Movies	Monthly
Phone (OnePlus 5)	Work, podcasts, communications, recreation, navigation, banking	Daily
Bluetooth Headphone (Sony WH-H900n)	Work,Podcasts, Watching movies	Daily
Case for Bluetooth Headphones	Protecting Headphones	Daily
Lamp	Reading at night	Weekly
Goat Skull	Sentiment, Decoration	N/A
Gemstone Cat	Sentiment, Decoration	N/A
Gemstone Bottle	Sentiment, Decoration	N/A
Steel Water Bottle	Drinking at home, drinking at work, drinking during travel	Daily
Steel Tea Cup	Drinking tea at home	Daily
Beard comb (travel)	Grooming	Daily
Tweezers	Grooming	Weekly
Earplugs (repurposed)	Sleeping	Daily
Eyemask	Sleeping	Daily
Glass jar	Storing beard comb, earplugs, twitter, tweezers	Daily
Diary	Writing, notes, planning	Daily
Fountain pen	Writing, notes, planning	Daily
Bottled Ink	Writing	Monthly
E-Reader	Reading	Daily
Bluetooth Earphones	Training, travel, back-up	Weekly
Earphones Case	Protecting Earphones	Weekly
Bone and wooden necklace	Sentiment, Decoration	Daily
Glasses	Seeing, work	Daily
Glasses case	Protecting glasses	Daily
Plastic Bag	Protecting Phone (waterproofing)	Weekly
Runes	Mediation, Reflection	Weekly
Lip Balm	Healthcare	Monthly
Card Reader	Banking	Monthly
Wallet	Daily carry	Daily
Card – daily banking	Banking, daily carry	Daily
Card – Co-op membership	Community, daily carry	Weekly
Card – Bills account	Banking, daily carry	Monthly
Card – driver’s license	ID	Monthly
Card – National Insurance	N/A	Occasional
Key lanyard	Daily carry	Daily
Key – Bike	Daily carry	Daily
Key – House	Daily carry	Daily
Victorinox penknife	Daily carry, grooming, opening packages	Weekly
Key lanyard	Holds boat keys	Monthly
Key – Marina	For marina	Monthly
Key – Boat	For boat	Monthly
Key – Bike (backup)	Back-up	N/A
Key – Unknown	N/A	N/A
Key – Unknown	N/A	N/A
USB Charger	Charging everything	Daily
USB-C Cable	Charging phone	Daily
USB-Micro Cable	Charging kindle, phone, headphones, lights	Daily
Letter	Sentiment	N/A
Letter	Sentiment	N/A
Scrapbook	Sentiment	N/A
Book – Yachmaster Logbook	Sailing training	Occasional
Book – Competent Crew Skillbook	Sailing training	Occasional
Book – Sailing Essentials	Sailing training	Occasional
Traditional Board Game Set	Recreation, Social bonding	Occasional
Important Documents	Record Keeping	N/A
Electronic Extension Chord	N/A	N/A
Medical Box	Healthcare	Occasional
USB Hard Drive	Back-up	Weekly
Plant Food	Feeding plants	Occasional
Laptop Charger	Charging laptop	Daily
Steel Cutlery Set	Eating at work, travel, zero waste	Daily
Steel Lunch Box	Eating at work, travel, zero waste	Daily
USB Power Bank	Travel, daily carry	Occasional
Pouch	Storing USB Power Bank	Daily
Mechanical Pencil	Drawing, notetaking, sketching	Weekly
Plastic Ruler 12cm	Drawing, sketching	Weekly
Plastic Pencil case	Storing Mechanical Pencil and Plastic Ruler	Daily
USB Hard Drive	Back-up	Weekly
USB Pen – 2GB	Media transfer	Occasional
USB Pen – 8GB	Installing Ubuntu	Occasional
USB Pen – 2GB	Media transfer	Occasional
USB Pen – 128GB	Back-up, Media Storage	Occasional
USB Pen – 32GB	Back-up, Media Storage	Occasional
SD Card – 16GB	N/A	N/A
SD Card Adapter (Micro to full)	N/A	N/A
Hardcase – USB Drive	Protects USB Drive	Daily
Carabiner	Daily carry, utility	Occasional
Card – Travel Money	Travel	Occasional
Card – Organ Donor	N/A	N/A
Card – Madrid Metro Pass	Travel	Yearly
Card – EHIC	Travel, healthcare	N/A
Card – Library Membership	Community	Occasional
USB Charger	Back-up, travel	Occasional
Adapter – US	Travel	Occasional
Adapter – EU	Travel	Occasional
Sewing Kit	Repair, zero waste	Monthly
Passport	Travel	Occasional
Penknife – Opinel	Crafting, Utility	Occasional
Steel Pins	Grooming, Repair	Occasional
Sewing thread	Repair, zero waste	Monthly
USB-C Cable	Phone, Back-up	Occasional
USB-C Cable	Phone, Back-up	Occasional
USB-C Cable	Phone, Back-up	Occasional
USB-Micro Cable	Charging, Back-up	Occasional
USB-Micro Cable	Charging, Back-up	Occasional
Camera – GoPro	Travel, Vlog	Occasional
USB-MicroSD Converter	Data transfer	Occasional
Pouch	Storing GoPro + USB converter	Daily
Really Useful Box	Storing Spare cards, travel gear, gopro, organisational	Daily
Studio Headphones (Audio Technica)	N/A	N/A
Hardcase – Studio Headphones	Storing Studio Headphones	N/A
Phone (Moto G)	Back-up phone	Occasional
Towel – Tenugui	Washing, cleaning	Weekly
Towel – Red	Washing	Daily
Shoes – Daily Driver	Daily Driver	Daily
Shoes – Training	Training shoes	Weekly
Trousers – Cargo	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Trousers – Jeans	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Hoodie – Black	Daily Driver	Daily
Hoodie – Grey	Training Hoodie	Weekly
Bandanna	Clothing, everyday	Daily
Cloth	Cleaning	Weekly
Washcloth – Black	Washing	Weekly
Washcloth – Black	Washing	Weekly
Underwear	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Thermal	Clothing, everyday, travel	Weekly
Socks – Thermal	Clothing, everyday, travel	Weekly
Cloth	Cleaning	Weekly
Vest – Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Underwear	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Underwear	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Sports	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Tee – White	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Tee – White	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Tee – Light Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Tee – Light Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Tee – Black	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Tee – Black	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Henley Tee – White	Clothing, everyday	N/A
Henley Tee – Black	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Underwear	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Underwear	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Underwear	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Vest – Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Underwear	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Underwear	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Underwear	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Underwear	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Handkerchief	Hygiene	Weekly
Towel – Blue	Hygiene, washing	Weekly
Shorts – Grey	Clothing, Sleeping	Daily
Shorts – Black	Clothing, Sleeping	Daily
Tee – Blue	Clothing, Sleeping	Daily
Socks – Black/Grey	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Underwear	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Shirt – Flannel	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Shirt – Loose	Clothing, everyday	Weekly
Towel – Purple	Training	Weekly
Waterproof Trousers	Daily carry, training, commuting	Daily
Tee – White (poor quality)	training	Weekly
Trousers – Jogging – Black	Training	Weekly
Tee – Thermal	Training	Weekly
Shorts – Swimming	Travel, social, recreation	Occasional
Toiletry Bag	Travel	Occasional
Party Flag	Activism	Occasional
Training Band – Orange	Training	Occasional
Training Band – Green	Training	Occasional
Training Band – Purple	Training	Occasional
Dremel Kit	Crafting, Utility	Occasional
Extension Chord	Work, Utility	Occasional
Waterproof Poncho	Travel, daily carry, back-up	Occasional
Steel Water Bottle	Back-up, travel	Occasional
Electronics ScrewDrivers Set	Utility	Occasional
Mess Tins	Travel, camping	Occasional
USB-Mini Cable	Charging PS3 Controller	Occasional
Bamboo Cloth	Cleaning	Weekly
Bamboo Cloth	Cleaning	Weekly
Re-usable Bag	Shopping, zero waste	Occasional
Re-usable Bag	Shopping, zero waste	Occasional
Re-usable Bag	Shopping, zero waste	Occasional
Re-usable Bag	Shopping, zero waste	Occasional
Re-usable Bag	Shopping, zero waste	Occasional
Re-usable Bag	Shopping, zero waste	Occasional
Re-usable Bag	Shopping, zero waste	Occasional
Re-usable Bag	Shopping, zero waste	Occasional
Travel Bag – Clothes	Travel, Storing clothes	Occasional
Tie – Black	Formal Events	Occasional
Bedsheets – Blue	Utility	Daily
Bedsheets – Black/Grey	Utility	Daily
Blanket – Black	Relaxing	Weekly
Blanket – Leopard	Sentiment, Relaxing	Weekly
Backpack – Canvas	Daily carry	Daily
Backpack – Nylon	Training bag	Weekly
Playstation 4	Entertainment	Weekly
Playstation 3	Entertainment	Occasional
Beard Trimmer	Grooming	Weekly
Clippers	Grooming	Weekly
Hair Scissors	Grooming	Weekly
Nail Clippers – Hands	Grooming	Weekly
Nail Clippers – Toes	Grooming	Weekly
Safety Razor	Grooming	Weekly
Razor Blades	Grooming	Weekly
Bike	Transport, commute, recreation, exercise	Daily
Vest – Hi-Viz	Transport, Safety	Daily
Bike Lights	Transport, Safety	Daily
Bike Lock	Transport, Safety	Daily
Dressing Gown	Clothing, relaxatiom	Daily
Fleece	Clothing, warmth, daily	Daily
Shemagh – Palestine	Clothing, everyday, solidarity	Daily
Waterproof Jacket	Daily carry, training, commuting	Daily
Washcloth – Red	Washing	Daily
Games Collection	Entertainment	Weekly

Summary

I’ll be reflecting on this properly over the coming weeks when I have some down time. Initially, my thoughts are that there were a lot more items marked as “Occasional” than I would have liked. I’ve also noted some surplus in some areas, such as the re-usable bags. Having a few is good, but I think I’ve got a bit many to just consider as “back-up”. I think I can bin several of my USB pens as well, especially the ones used for “media transfer” which basically just means “watching movies on the PS4”.

There are a few things I want to repurpose for general use as well; my grey hoodie is nice as a bit of training uniform to get me in the mindset but rotating it into use as a daily driver when my black hoodie is being washed would be useful as well. I’ve thought about this with my towels as well, having a rotation of three where one is in use, one is being used for training after it’s been used for washing, and one is in the wash ready for the next cycle.

For now I’ll be keeping track of my stuff in a spreadsheet, and I’m sure I’ll find some way of accurately tracking how often I use it or where it fits into my life.

Goodbye Twitter

2018-11-10

“When it comes to the overwhelm; the easiest way to solve that is to turn it off. Really just turn it off” - Patrick Rhone in Minimalism: A Documentary About The Important Things

Since around a month ago on the 5th of October I’ve had myself locked out of Twitter. I achieved this by ensuring that two-factor authentication was turned on, and by asking my friend S to change my password (I actually did the same for her). This way I couldn’t log in because I didn’t know the password, and if she proved untrustworthy she couldn’t log in without access to my phone or email.

I thought my motivations for this were pretty straightforward; less distractions. I’d developed a bit of a Twitter ’twitch’, and endlessly scrolling the site or flicking between it and Mastodon was dramatically affecting how much I’d been able to achieve in recent months. I did the same thing when I staged my withdrawal of Facebook I didn’t think it was too much of an issue; since I don’t have any social media apps on my phone, I can’t receive the summons of notifications. Turns out it had permeated my life in a few other ways.

My desire for input and entertainment have decreased

I thought I had a pretty good handle on curating my input. I only subscribe to a few YouTube channels and Podcasts at a time, which I’ve arrived at from years of striving to understand the form and topics of media that I like to consume. What I hadn’t quite landed on was the connection between Twitter / microblogging’s rapid-fire, consumable, format and its ability to increase my overall desire for just… input. It’s like how my stomach expands whenever I often have too-large portions. The pace and overall serving size of reading Twitter or other microblogging sites just increases my appetite for mindlessly consuming more entertainment.

Really, that’s what concerns me the most. I do believe that humans deserve to have a good time, and relish the playfulness that comes with our existence on this planet. Not everything has to be work. I just think that there exists a semantic difference between enjoyment of a playful activity and entertainment. As a phenomenologist at heart, I think that there just might be a difference between an activity being entertaining and the phenomena of entertainment. One is an attribute, that tells us and others that this activity, work, or interaction holds our attention and brings something into our lives. One is its own phenomena; that says we’ve extrapolated the attribute of being entertaining into its own noun and created this Thing which we seek out instead of thinking about the material thing that we’re actually doing or watching or reading. For me, entertainment amounts to what I do in order to distract myself from what matters. I’m fine with something being entertaining, or sitting there being entertained while doing or experiencing something, but I’m very cautious about something that exists almost purely in my mind to distract me or hold my attention. This is not to say that Twitter or Mastodon are products of pure entertainment; they’re very valuable communications tools. For me, the phenomena was that they were entertainment and they served that purpose of distraction.

I’m not sure about you, but I don’t want to turn around in a few years, reflect on what I did with my time and come up with the answer of “Oh, I consumed entertainment”.

Quietness is my new favourite thing

Linked to the above, I spend a lot more of my time in quiet these days. Previously I used to consume podcasts in the evening, and have a selection of YouTube channells I would enjoy checking up on. I still do, but now my actual hunger for these things has decreased significantly. I don’t feel the urge to consume content as I get the opportunity these days, and while I definitely still enjoy listening to podcasts about various topics or watching YouTube videos or reading satire on the web; these things have fallen into a “natural” rhythm rather than being a relatively constant demand or hunger in my mind.

Since locking myself out of Twitter, I’ve not logged into Mastodon either (sorry fediverse! You’re still my favourite), only visited YouTube once a day and usually to retrieve some specific information (usually around propagating a plant cutting), and barely read any web articles during the work day. It’s almost like what happened when I started fasting in the mornings, and my body just started telling me what its actual needs and desires were rather than the holding pattern firing constantly.

I’ve still got a way to go with curating my input and determining what I’m doing purely to entertain myself rather than fulfill myself. But I’m a lot happier in the quiet now.

I think I’m done with reading Twitter

I… I don’t think I’ll go back. One thing Twitter was useful for was keeping up with world events because of the trending hashtag system. I’m pretty sure I can find a workaround for that somewhere. I will maintain my Twitter account but treat it as a bot (I may actually rename it to Marshallbot) which just posts my content from Brimstone.

I was using the direct messaging feature in Twitter somewhat at the end, so I think I’ll use the api to wire them into Brimstone’s inbox (which I promise I will finish at some point!) and outbox so that people can actually get in touch with me if they need to.

Anyway, catch you later Twitter. Maybe. Probably not.

Gratitude List Autumn 2018

2018-10-09

Every three months or so I do a gratitude list in order to try and cultivate gratitude, stem my desire for novelty, and seek tranquility by training myself to want what I already have. I usually write these in a notebook, but I am of the web and thought it would be cute to publish it as a blog post that I update every day.

A is for Autumn. Crisp outside, the right levels of light, and a favourite season of mine
B is for Bees. I hope we can save them, as they give us honey and mead.
C is for Chickpeas. Delicious, nutritious, and straight from the Earth
D is for Dogs. They are all good boys, and I’m glad we evolved together.
E is for Eggs. For me, they’re pretty much the perfect food
F is for Fruit. Ensuring I get nutrients along with my sweet fix
G is for Games, as ways of bringing play into my life
H is for Houseplants. Givers of oxygen, calmers of my mind.
I is for International Worker Cooperation. The solution to global capitalism.
J is for Jars. Allowing me to reuse them and store things in style.
K is for Kin. Through experience, I am glad of my friends and kin for making possible all I have achieved.
L is for LineageOS. You help me run a phone free from Google.
M is for Mentors. Teaching and guiding me.
N is for Novels. One of my favourite mediums for stories.
O is for Oranges and their variants. Always delicious and about as sweet as I’ll go.
P is for (my) Pull-up bar. Temple and teacher, it forges me anew constantly.
Q is for Quiet, and for the ability to find moments of it everyday.
R is for (the) Red Flag. The People’s Flag. The Workers’ Flag. Uniting us in struggle.
S is for Stories. The building block of society, I adore stories of all kind.
T is for Tea. Like a blankie for your insides, it solves all problems.
U is for Unity. Together we may move mountains.
V is for Vegetables. Like, they’re literally free food from the ground.
W is for Water Bottles. Specifically the steel ones; helping me stay hydrated without waste.
X is a tough one. Not much I know begins with X. I guess I’m thankful for X-Rays in Medicine. I’m thankful that I’m well but if I ever get sick, I’m sure they’ll help.
Y is for (my) yacht. A gorgeous little thing that I hope to give proper attention to soon.
Z is for Zotero. You’re open source, flexible with me, and do your job well.

Quick thoughts on Minimalist Design Patterns for Brimstone

2018-08-01

Minimalism is one of the inspirations I draw from when hacking at Brimstone. So far this has manifested by removing things like excessive UI elements, cumbersome Javascript and CSS frameworks (thankfully PureCSS exists), and streamlining things such as how Posts work and are displayed.

I had a thought recently when considering the About page, and how a more minimal approach might look. At the moment, the approach is still relatively minimal; the UserProfile object has a field which can store text used to render the About page using markdown. If it’s null or empty, the templates don’t render a link to the About page and the controller redirects any attempts to directly go to /about to the index page.

How then, do I think it may be improved? Obviously these are rough ideas – I also don’t think there’s anything explicitly wrong with the way things are done currently. What might seem simple to me might not be simple to others, and in fact I think there’s an argument that these design patterns could add complexity in some regards.

Under both of the following proposals, the UserProfile object has the about attribute removed, and controller logic is changed to accommodate the new pattern.

Idea 1 - Using a Post for an About Page

Under the current design, the About page is simply a text field containing markdown that is rendered when the visitor calls /about. This works basically exactly the same as a Post but is a bit less versatile e.g. Posts store a lastModified attribute which can inform the reader if/when the Post was last edited and give some idea of freshness.

Under this design pattern, Post receives a new boolean attribute which marks it as the About page. A form or button is implemented, along with a controller to handle elevating a Post to this position with the following logic:

post = post // from controller
previousAbout = searchPosts(where: about == true)

if ( previousAbout is not null ):
    previousAbout.setAbout(false)
fi

post.setAbout(true)

return new Response(200)

The About page template can actually remain, with the controller simply changing the variable it passes into it to achieve the goal. Another consideration, however, is the header templates logic when choosing to render an /about link. Currently it utilises a UserProfile object already passed in to the template which is used for H-Card generation and Site titles as well as visible elements such as the name and profile image. Since the UserProfile object also contains the About page, it simply checks to see if it’s null or not to decide whether to render the /about link. If I made the About page a Post, the controller would need to inform the template separately, unless the UserProfile maintained a 1-to-1 relationship with a single post, which is nullable. This changes the previous controller logic above to:

post = post // from controller
userProfile = user.getProfile()

userProfile.setAbout(post)

return new Response(200)

Which I actually prefer. The UserProfile still has an about attribute, but it’s a reference to pre-existing content and can be switched without a search of the database and it prevents duplication; where since Post already contains the necessary attributes for a good About page it makes sense to leverage it.

Idea 2 - Using a tag for an About Page

This one also utilises Posts, but with a slight twist. Instead of elevating a single Post to become an About page, what if we simply used a Tag? That way, the user could add content to their about page on-the-fly simply by tagging a Post with an about tag?

I don’t think this is without issues – for example how do you order things? What about reordering things on the page? How about editing posts, you have to hunt them down (admittedly just a search for the tag about…)? There’s also the issue of the header rendering the /about link from earlier – this means every controller needs to do a search for Posts tagged with about and check the length of that result, to decide.

I’m sure there’s a way around this, and I really like the idea of a cumulative About page which can be made up of otherwise disparate content, for now I’m going to try out Idea 1 and see how that goes.

Initial thoughts on the new laptop

2018-07-22

After years of performing hard labour, my poor laptop finally deteriorated to the point of becoming almost unusable. It had lived with a pretty bad fractured screen, a missing power key and a broken left trackpad button for a little while but that’s not what did it in. What did it in was the power connection. Over the last few months, it had developed a wonky connection to the power charger where it wouldn’t charge. It started off small, where it wouldn’t charge some times. Then that changed to around 50% of the time, and then finally to most of the time. It got to the point where I was having to constantly press the charger into the port, oriented at a specific angle, in order for it to charge. It would then charge very slowly, and heat up to burning temperatures. Since the battery life was pretty diminished (the machine being around 4.5 yrs old), it seemed time to look to replacements.

I’m generally loathe to replace any electronics that have a bit of life left in them, as I think I probably could have repaired the machine if I knew anything about soldering power connectors. I don’t, however, and those around me who do were unable to spare the time to teach me or to do it themselves. Such is the life of a PhD in Open Lab. I might actually keep the machine, and attempt to repair it later. As it stands; the machine was basically unusable for any form of work or recreation so I replaced it. The requirements for any laptop purchase for me are:

Has an i5 processor
Has between 4gb - 8gb of RAM
Has at least one USB 3.0 port.
Ideally has an SSD of any size, or an accessible drive bay so I can install one
Can run at least Ubuntu Linux without me having to hack it too much with drivers.
Doesn’t take up the better part of a grand. Ideally within the £500 range.

A new factor this time for me was weight. I usually don’t mind as my laptop tends to stay at home, but I’ve been doing a lot more travelling lately and both my home (now dead) laptop and my work laptop (Macbook Pro 2011) are relatively heavy. I looked at some Dell solutions, and even looked at refurbished Macbook Airs but for the specs I was after; they were just too expensive. Finally, I turned back to my old friend PC Specialist who had supplied my previous laptop and a machine for a partner.

After a quick browse the Enigma VIII popped up and I was surprised at how well it seemed to match my requirements. It was touted as an “Ultra thin 14.9mm design” which intrigued me. A very quick search told me that the Macbook Air touts a 17mm thickness, which made this seem very promising. I configured the options which basically consisted of selecting NO OPERATING SYSTEM in lieu of the default Windows 10 and knocking the price down to £558 incl VAT. This seemed reasonable enough, but I hesitated for a while. The reason being that I’d previously purchased the Lafité III for my partner and had a bit of trouble with the Wireless drivers for Ubuntu; they would drop Wireless signal every 10 seconds or so and not automatically reconnect. Anyway when my laptop’s performance dropped off a cliff towards un-usablility I took a chance and ordered Enigma VIII, figuring I could just return it if it proved rubbish.

It took around a month to arrive due to a short delay in PCSPECIALIST getting the parts. I wasn’t overly annoyed since the staff were incredibly forthcoming and transparent about the expected delivery times via phone call and email, and also offered me several options should I decide I wanted a different machine or to take my business elsewhere. I’ve had the machine a few days now and my initial thoughts are very good.

Out the box:

Xubuntu works out the box, with wireless working during installation via USB. I disabled the UEFI first thing, and booted from USB. Within 10 minutes I was staring at the XFCE login screen. The screen with full 1080p graphics works beautifully, and the machine is blazing fast (although aren’t all new machines?). The size is a lovely middle-ground between the 13" machines that I find too small sometimes, and the 15" machines that I sometimes find unwieldy. The weight feels feather-light compared to my previous machine and my office machine, to the point where I might actually bring this laptop on field visits with me.

The keyboard is lovely to type on, although the spacebar is a little unresponsive at times and doesn’t type a space. The trackpad also sticks a little.

One thing I am quite pleased about, is the casing. I was in two minds about the aluminium casing – I love how modern it looks/feels, and how sleek it is. I have long-term concerns about being able to access components like hard drives for replacement. This is alleviated as the bottom of the machine has clearly accessible screws and a barely-visible seam which means I can remove the bottom of the chassis to facilitate repairs (which I admittedly would need to teach myself to perform first…). My old Fusion T also suffered injuries to its power button (which came clean off and got lost) and the left mousepad button, which also came clean off but I managed to keep it from getting lost. The integrated trackpad/mousepad buttons on the Enigma VIII, and the power key being fully integrated into the keyboard means that this won’t be a problem on this machine. Hopefully.

Adjustments made

I had to adjust the trackpad sensitivity inside Xubuntu, making it doubly sensitive to get it to respond the way I like it. I can’t remember ever having to do the same on my previous build.

Niggles

This is more ideological, than practical. During Xubuntu install I made sure that I explicitly didn’t choose to install third party software (ie this). After install, I generally fetch vrms from the repos to do a check on my machine. On the Fusion T I would get the message that I had no proprietary software on the machine except when I occasionally installed Skype (dw I purged it after each use). On this machine, however, it seems that there’s some non-free packages that have made their way in!

Non-free packages installed on Persephone

amd64-microcode                     Processor microcode firmware for AMD CPUs
fonts-ubuntu                        sans-serif font set from Ubuntu
i965-va-driver                      VAAPI driver for Intel G45 & HD Graphics family
intel-microcode                     Processor microcode firmware for Intel CPUs

Contrib packages installed on Persephone

iucode-tool                         Intel processor microcode tool

4 non-free packages, 0.2% of 1817 installed packages.
1 contrib packages, 0.1% of 1817 installed packages.

I’m unfamiliar with the packages in question, and the processor microcode tools seem quite important (unsure why I have an AMD one, though). This might be a change in Xubuntu and they might be including it. The graphics one seems like a necessary evil. I am surprised at the fonts-ubuntu package, though. I was sure that the Ubuntu fonts were free and open? They might be released under their own license or under a license that vrms doesn’t count as free, therefore marking them as nonfree. It still remains disappointing.

Conclusions

I’m feeling pretty good about the machine. GNU/Linux power management has never been amazing, but I’m in the honeymoon period where I can work for around 5-6 hours easily without needing to charge the machine. And when I do, the charger works without me needing to perform blood sacrifice. I’ll do a proper performance analysis review some time soon, probably. Maybe. Until then, I’m optimistic I’m going to develop a nice relationship with the Enigma VIII.

Brief reflections on my relationship with photos

2018-07-04

As part of my ’leaving behind Google’ process, combined with my minimalism journey, I recently exported and curated an entire archive of photographs I’ve collected. They’re mostly concentrated around 2011 – 2015, but there are a few even back to 2008 from my days doing stage shows and there’s another little concecntration more recently from when I finally upgraded my smartphone.

I learned a few things about what I value from this process. I downloaded all the images, imported them into Shotwell to have it automatically sort them by date where it can, and then traipsed through chronologically to sort the wheat from the chaff. it took around two hours, which was a lot longer than expected. The tl;dr version of this is that “I don’t need to keep around 90% of the photos I do take”, my thoughts behind this are below.

I take a lot of photographs of landscapes and buildings that I don’t actually care about

Whenever I go on an adventure out somewhere like a city, or the cliffs, or an abandoned building, I’ve almost compulsively took photographs across the day. I say the word compulsively because the impulse to photograph things does not come naturally to me. I was late to the smartphone game and until recently the camera on my phone has been subpar. Since catching up, I’ve been feeling the need to ‘document’ my journeys and this has involved taking a lot of photographs of stuff like beautiful landscapes and buildings that I appreciate. Thing is, I don’t actually care about these photographs.

Don’t get me wrong – I appreciate a good building or landscape and if you show me photographs you’ve taken I will absolutely sit and listen and look at the image whole-heartedly. It’s just that, once I’ve sat and appreciated a good view I don’t often feel the need to revisit it. I deleted most of my photographs of mountains, sunrises at the beach, and cityscapes. I kept a few, but these were really heavily tied to personal achievements and much more representational of a point in time than anything else.

I care a lot more about people and stories than I do about places and events

Related to above, the photographs I found myself keeping were the ones featuring myself with others. Turns out the people in my life are much more important to me than the fact I’ve had a day out somewhere, or saw a nice building. Most of my fond memories are tied with visiting friends, or going out on adventures with them. I like spending time alone as well, which is why I deleted a lot of empty landscapes and selfies, but whenever I came across a photograph of myself and a loved one together it was often my favourite photo of that time period.

The same holds true for stories vs events. I don’t care so much for a “Visited Niagara Falls” photograph of the falls, I care about a group picture that we took that acts as a prompt for me to tell myself or tell another the story of the creepy food court staffed by probably-ghosts. Sometimes the story is a selfie of me pulling a stupid face atop a mountain. But yeah – I kept all the photographs of myself and others doing stuff.

I prefer it when others take photographs of me

I’m not a particularly good photographer, although sometimes modern cameras can compensate for that. I’ve grown accustomed to selfies but I’m still not overly comfortable with them and for that reason I prefer it when others take photographs of me. That way I have documentation of myself from another’s perspective. It also makes me feel valued that they’d consider taking a photograph of me.

Also, and this is no small part, it means I get a photograph of a story without having to deal with all the other photographs in another person’s collection.

Most of my photos are purely utilitarian

Around 80% of my photographs are taken for a single-use, disposable purpose (is there a comparison with one-use plastics there?). Most of the time that purpose is “Hey look at the thing!”. Since I quit Facebook, it’s been less about sharing to the masses and more about messaging specific people about a thing I want to show them. Stuff like “My lunch is much better than yours” or “Look at this thing I’ve just spotted on the street”. It’s like picture messaging a la snapchat but because I don’t actually use snapchat, the image sticks around on my phone and makes its way into my collection when imported.

I can live in the moment a lot more

I mentioned earlier than I take a lot of photographs of beautiful scenery. I’ve somehow associated appreciating something beautiful with archiving it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I’ve just expended energy taking the photo only to never look at it and then expend more energy deleting it later.

What I’m taking from this is that I can take that energy and transfer it into experiencing the moment a lot more. I already do appreciate a good scene-as-it-happens, but if I walk in with the knowledge that I don’t need to take a photograph of it, I think I’ll be more inclined to appreciate it.

I need a mode in apps and cameras that allow me to take a photograph to show people a thing, on various platforms/services, and then instantly delete the local copy of the photo so it never makes its way to a collection. If anyone knows an app like this, please let me know¹.

Update 2024-10: I modified this link to remove a mailto reference to my personal email address, as a SPAM prevention measure. ↩︎

Brimstone

2018-06-06

Update: Brimstone is now retired and archived, and this website is currently generated by a static site generator. Please see the Site Notes page

Brimstone is the code I use to run this website. You can find the code on Gitlab and, for the time being, on Github. I want to keep this post as a living post, and keep adding to it. That way I hope this post acts like a philosophy.txt.

The code isn’t anything special. I write it for several reasons:

I like to blog, and wasn’t happy with a third-party service like tumblr or Blogspot because
I like to own my data, and I met someone at a conference who sold me on the idea of the Indieweb and POSSE.
I like to write code. I have a CS degree, and am currently doing HCI research where I don’t write a lot of code anymore.
I like to make my own tools. For the above reasons, this makes writing blog software useful for the time being. I can develop a tool around my own practices, that helps me achieve my goals.
Diversity is pretty neat, and although I doubt anyone will actually use this software – I like the idea that by writing this code I’m contributing in a small way to that diversity.

Goals

The goal of this software is to provide a simple, lightweight, option for publishing text content online that allows a user (me) to:

own the data and
share copies of the data via social media, with citations back to the original copy
not deal with any particularly cumbersome Javascript on the front-end while writing posts.
Fire up an instance with a minimal setup e.g. a box with PHP, MySQL and a webserver of choice.

And allows others to view my content in a way that suits them. So far this includes:

scraping my site for content marked up in microformats
subscribing to my long-form text via rss
Seeing versions of my content appear on social media feeds.
Viewing the front-end of my site without any Javascript executing.

Why not use Wordpress, Ghost, etc.?

I have no explicit issue with them - but they’re not really my thing. I’ve used wordpress for a variety of things in the past and it suits those things, but I wanted something light. I’ve never really used Ghost, but already you’re dealing with a fully-fledged CMS with complex management options and theming potential. I wanted something that does not put any Javascript on the public-facing portion of the site, and only uses minimal Javascript for the UI in the admin-panel. I also wanted something that didn’t require a lot of configuration.

Equally as important, I wanted to play and develop a few skills.

Ok, so what’s it built on?

The current version of Brimstone is built on the Symfony PHP Framework. To run the current version you will need PHP 7.1, and Composer to install the vendor packages.

It’s released under the GPL 3. This means that if you fork Brimstone or use any of my code in projects, you’re also obliged to release under the GPL. Symfony code is released under the MIT License which, thankfully, allows me to use MIT components inside of a GPL’d project.

Ok so what does it actually do?

It does pretty much what any home-brew blog software can do, but specifically:

Basic blogging and microblogging with Posts.
Write Posts in Markdown (a la Daring Fireball syntax) – no heavy interface required.
Posts are type-inferred. You can write short notes (like tweets) and longer articles (like blog posts) from the same interface, and they display differently based on your choices – no explicit configuration necessary other than deciding if you want your post to have a title.
Long-form articles are available via an RSS feed for people to subscribe to
POSSE Posts to Mastodon with citation back to post on the site
POSSE posts to Twitter with citation back to post on the site
Posts on the site are marked up with microformats for Indieweb feed compatibility
Speaking of the Indieweb; you can send webmentions just like this one to mention others in your posts.
There are no comments for your posts stored on the site, but you can receive webmentions on them which get delivered into an inbox as notifications in your admin panel so you can see what people have said.
You can export all your posts in an XML file, and import posts into the system from an XML file given it has the proper format.
You can also download posts individually as Markdown files
Basic controls for hiding/showing posts, in case you want to appropriate posting for keeping private notes.
You have a short profile which you can fill out, and this gets marked up as an h-card for indiweb compatibility.
You have an optional ‘About’ page to fill out just like a post; if you don’t want it keep it blank and the About link disappears from the site.

A List of Stuff I Own (May 2018)

2018-05-28

I recently decided to do an inventory of all my things that I have in my flat. This list is meant to represent a snapshot of how things look when I’m at home on an average evening / day. I’m sure I’ve left stuff out. The goal is to post something like this every so often and reflect on the things I have.

This list is organised by location, and then sublocation. It’s designed to help me make sense of where my clutter lives. I’ve left out wall decorations, house plants, and clothes; as I want to make a separate post about clothes and the others are carefully curated anyway.

A quick Ctrl+F of the source code for this post reveals I have 282 items. I want to be clear I don’t think there is a magic number of items I’m trying to achieve, but this is a lot more than I expected. And I haven’t even considered clothes.

Bedroom

Walls + Floor

hiking / day-wear boots
‘deck’ shoes
training shoes
black washcloth
tenugui handtowel
black handtowel
5x reusable carrier bags, assorted capacities
2x black bandanas

Wardrobe

rope
bergen backpack
canvas satchel
travel compact clothes bag
laundry basket
day bag

Door hanger

thermal jacket
shemagh / keffiyeh: western-style (brown)
shemagh / keffiyeh: saudi style (red + white, dyed black)
shemagh / keffiyeh: palestine style (black + white, tassled)
polish
black hoodie

Shelf

dremel + bits
drill bits
sinew thread
leather awl
thick needle assortment
respirator
respirator
safety goggles
plant seeds
drill bit set
plant food
mess tins
large camping knife
corded drill
pyrography set
scrap leather (used as protection when carving)
stock leatger (10mm and 4mm thicknesses)
assorted sandpaper sheets
measuring jug
steel ruler
files x3
assorted plastic ring sizers
blowtorch head
IKEA furniture keys
coping saw
hacksaw
fancy dipping pen
yarn + naalbinding needle
tin camping mug
talc powder
waterproof poncho
store brand disinfectant
butane gas
silicon waterproofing spray
surface cleaner

Large tin used for storage

13x assorted pieces of bone (cleaned, stock for carving)
vanilla fragrance Oil
mango fragrance oil
apple fragance oil
100ml amber bottle with dropper
3x 50ml amber bottle
3x ingots of beeswax (~2g each)
screwdriver w/ wooden handle
35 ml measuring cup
2x steel hipflask fillers (for pouring oil)
2x pencils
2x rolls of electrical tape
ram’s horn (cleaned)
lump of calcite (carving stock)
rough carved bone jewelry (mjolnir necklace)
hex key

Really useful box

leather cord
black paracord
electronic screwdriver set
craft knife
wood chisels x 5
binder clips x6
steel ring sizer
essential oil: lemon
essential oil: eucalyptus
essential oil: cedarwood
essential oil: bergamot
essential oil: wintergreen
essential oil: peppermint
essential oil: petitgrain
essential oil: lime
essential oil: tea tree
essential oil: birch
essential oil: orange

TV stand

laptop
laptop stand
ps4
hard drive
television
surge protector
V’s blanket
Black blanket
floor cushion
floor cushion

Chest of Drawers

Drawer 0

clothes

Drawer 1

Current clothes
Bike pump
Suncream
Moisturiser
Dusters
Titanium Beard comb
steel beard comb
cartridge razor suspended in oil
Beard oil

Day Box

Runes
custom notebook
pocket notebook
Front door keys
Wallet
Opinel pocket knife
Glasses with case
mirror
boat keys
back door + marina keys
ditty bag (empty)
pencil case with pen, pencil, ruler
butane lighter
mystery key
compass + V’s hair
beard beards x3
thread
box

Beard Box

Drawer 2

B’s drawer. Wilderness

Drawer 3

Ps3
mini USB cable (for ps3 controller)
micro USB cable (for ps4 controller)
Bracers thick
bracers thin
black tie
red washcloth
red hand towel
jumper/sweater
swimming trunks
formal trousers
Grey hoodie
purple hand towel
white tee
black jogging trousers

Games

Ps4 Crash trilogy
Ps4 Fallout 4
Ps4 Skyrim
Ps4 Horizon Zero Dawn
Ps4 Borderlands Handsome Collection
Ps4 Lego Star Wars Ep 7
Ps3 God of War Collection
Ps3 Metal Gear HD collection
Ps3 MGS4
Ps3 MGS5 Ground Zeroes
Ps3 MGS5 Phantom Pain
Ps3 Assassin’ Creed 2
Ps3 Assassin’ Creed 3
Ps3 Assassin’ Creed 4
Ps2 Soul Reaver 2
Ps2 MGS 2

Grooming Kit

beard trimmer
clippers
cleaning brush for clippers
clippers mains charger
beard trimmer mains charger
badger brush
dove soap
hair scissors
cartridge razor base
toenail clippers

Bedside Table

lamp
decorative statues
steel water bottle
Phone
nail clippers
tweezers

Drawer 0

ocarina
backup drive
spare earbud ends
hard drive + USB keys
medicine box
studio headphones
TV remote
ps4 controller
ps3 controller
kindle
USB cables w/ ditty bags
documents w/ wallet

Tin

Gopro w/ pouch
Sewing pins
backup phone
portable battery
measuring tape
spare usb charger
vapour rub
spare bike keys
black sewing thread
NA plug converter
EU plug converter
EU plug for USB charger
passport
sewing kit in tin
Barclaycard
Newcastle library card
Anthony Nolan card
ehic card
HSBC main account card
ucu membership card
CPB membership card
organ donor card

Drawer 1

bike lock
sex toys
lubricant
condoms
bike rear light

Under Bed

Steel bowl
USB mains charger
USB C cable
Micro USB csble

Books

Convict Conditioning (CC)
CC 2
CC 3
C-Mass
naked warrior
complete calisthenics
competent crew skills
sailing essentials
yachtmaster scheme
scrapbook

Day Bag

Cutlery
Lip balm
USB cables
Audio recorder
Spare keyring rings
Hi-vis jacket (for cycling)
Hi-vis arm band (for cycling)
Lunch Box
Water bottle
Waterproof jacket
Waterproof trousers

Bathroom

Dove soap
Black handtowel
Toothbrush + case
Toothpaste

Kitchen

decorative drinking horn
whiskey glass
pewter stein
ramikens x4
Chinese bowls x2
Chinese soup spoon x2
Chinese condiment bowl x2
mandolin
lunchbox
plastic food storage x10
bamboo reusable cloths x5
slow cooker
hand blender
food defrosting plate
sushi hangiri
sushi nigiri press
spider
bamboo rolling mat
silicon rolling mat
engraved spatula “sushi”
engraved wooden sushi board

Sitting Room

Camping chair
ab wheel
“Henchgripz” horizontal bar
resistance bands x4 (assorted strength)
wooden board game set
hnefatafl board
battleships set
carved walking stick
solstice tree (stored)
solstice tree decorations (stored)

Accountability Work: Examining the Values, Technologies and Work Practices that Facilitate Transparency in Charities

2018-03-19

This is the paper we submitted and had accepted into CHI 2018. I’ve converted from LaTeX src to markdown, but for some reason it won’t generate a bibliography skeleton :-/ I’ll try my best to fix it. Anyway, hope someone finds this useful

Authors: Matthew Marshall, John Vines, Pete Wright, David S. Kirk, Toby Lowe and Rob Wilson

Abstract

Charities are subject to stringent transparency and accountability requirements from government and funders to ensure that they are conducting work and spending money appropriately. Charities are increasingly important to civic life and have unique characteristics as organisations. This provides a rich space in which HCI researchers may learn from and affect both held notions of transparency and accountability, and the relationships between these organisations and their stakeholders. We conducted ethnographic fieldwork and workshops over a seven month period at a charity. We aimed to understand how the transparency obligations of a charity manifest through work and how the workers of a charity reason about transparency and accountability as an everyday practice. Our findings highlight how organisations engage in presenting different accounts of their work; how workers view their legal transparency obligations in contrast with their accountability to their everyday community; and how their labour does not translate well to outcome measures or metrics. We discuss implications for the design of future systems that support organisations to produce accounts of their work as part of everyday practice.

Introduction

This paper discusses the role of data technologies in Charitable Organisations (charities) as they are required to adhere to transparent and accountable standards in their work and their financial practices. Charities play an important role in society, often addressing issues of importance to populations and communities where both the private and state sectors have not engaged or lacked resources @salamon_rise_1994. Due to the nature of much of their funding - through grants and public donations - charities across the world are often required to demonstrate to their stakeholders a commitment to their aims and a competency in their financial practices @macmillan_relationship_2005 [@oliver_what_2004]. Modern technologies that enable large scale production and consumption of data play an increasingly important role in mediating transparency for organisations by supporting the online reporting and publishing of financial data @meijer_understanding_2009, while the production of open data is widely claimed to be synonymous with transparency in dialogues around government and business @coleman_lessons_2013 [@goldstein_open_2013; @gordon_making_2013]. Recent work within HCI has examined the use of open data by charities for constructing narratives @erete_storytelling_2016, the use of data for metrics for reporting and understanding organisational finances @elsden_resviz:_2016, and has provided insight into how digital systems can provide more comprehensive forms of transparency in these organisations @marshall_accountable:_2016. However, thus far there is little understanding of how technologies like these, and more commonplace data technologies, and data work, integrate into the daily, lived, work of charities.

Our research sets out to examine this gap in knowledge, aiming to understand how transparency and accountability are manifested through the practices of charity workers. We report on a qualitative study of work practices in a charity that conducts youth work for economically deprived and migrant communities in the North of England. Over a period of seven months the first author engaged in ethnographic fieldwork at the charity’s main community hub and office, participating in both delivery of community-facing activities and administrative work. The fieldwork was oriented towards developing a praxeological account @crabtree_doing_2012 of how financial work is performed within the organisation and how they account for their spending and activities. The findings from our fieldwork provide insight into the tools and processes used by members of such a setting to organise and make sense of their activities and finances and, more crucially, the work that is required to make this transparent and accountable to others. We also discuss the tensions that exist between the everyday execution of charitable work and the legal or contractual obligations to account for it in particular ways. In doing so we highlight how organisations can navigate these issues in order to make themselves accountable not only ‘on paper’ but to those who rely on their projects and services.

This paper contributes to HCI by providing an in-depth understanding of the everyday work practices in charities and the ways in which social technologies are supporting, or could be designed to better support, transparency and accountability. We demonstrate that transparency and accountability are complex and multifaceted, and their manifestation in charity work practices presents a rich space which we explore in this paper. This is an important concern for the HCI community as it strives to better support the needs of communities and organisations that serve civic and social needs whilst facing barriers to their work. Through understanding the communication needs of charities, HCI may address the ways technologies may be designed to better facilitate and enhance the work and relationships that are key to sustaining an organisation’s efforts in producing value for civic society.

Charities, Transparency, and HCI

It is generally understood that charities play an important role in society. They perform work in areas and matters generally left unattended by state or private sectors. This includes driving grass-roots development and social care @salamon_rise_1994, the creation and sustenance of Social Capital @field_social_2003 [@mendel_doing_2014] within communities and for particularly marginalised populations. It can be said that a charity’s very existence indicates a substantial need for its model of service delivery, due to the failure of the market to regulate for-profit entities which may engage in potentially harmful or exploitative practices @hansmann_role_1980.

Accountability is a cornerstone in the public’s relationship with organisations, but this is more pronounced in the context of charities for at least two reasons. First, due to the impact a charity can have, making an organisation accountable for actions it takes ensures that it is true to its mission and does not abuse the trust of the public and other stakeholders who might support its cause @frumkin_accountability_2006 [@jacobson_lifting_2005]. Second, since charities are mostly financed through public funds via government grants or direct donations from citizens, it is often argued that they should be held accountable and act transparently in regards to their financial practices. This is to ensure that they are seen to be using funds both appropriately and efficaciously. Furthermore, due to the nature of charitable funding, this means having multiple and diverse stakeholders to which they must be accountable @krashinsky_stakeholder_1997 [@macmillan_relationship_2005].

Literature in Public and Voluntary Sector Administration discusses multiple ways in which an organisation can be said to be accountable. This can include: the extent to which its stakeholders can direct its activity @koppell_pathologies_2005; how it can be called upon to justify its actions @fox_uncertain_2007; and how it can be made to adhere to responsibilities through legal frameworks @koppell_pathologies_2005. These theories of accountability impact the way that charities conduct their everyday operations regarding work and spending. Accountability shares a complicated relationship with financial transparency; the latter often being cited as means to provide the former @hood_accountability_2010. Koppell describes transparency as the foundational element for accountability upon which all of the other forms are built @koppell_pathologies_2005. Fox conceptualises an intersection between the two called ‘answerability’ @fox_uncertain_2007. For organisations there are many ways to be transparent such as passively revealing information or actively engaging stakeholders @oliver_what_2004 [@schauer_transparency_2011], or choosing to focus on outcomes or spend @heald_varieties_2006. The position of this paper is that all forms of transparency share a concern over the dissemination and consumption of information. The purpose of being transparent, therefore, is ultimately to facilitate interactions between an organisation, its work, and stakeholders (such as funders or the wider public). The provision and interrogation of data through digital technology is an increasingly used mechanism to facilitate this interaction, and therefore to achieve accountability @meijer_understanding_2009 [@oliver_what_2004].

Recent years have seen HCI researchers examining the role of data in everyday interactions, and the ways in which people interact with data itself. This includes data visualisations and interactions with data supporting personal goals, individual reflection, and shared awareness in social networks. At an organisational level, studies have demonstrated how charities have used open data to form narratives around local conditions @erete_storytelling_2016, while others have highlighted how visualisations around organisational metrics (including funding) support the use of data for reporting, understanding, and providing insight within highly politicised environments @elsden_resviz:_2016. In the personal sphere, concepts of data lockers allow external processors to interact with one’s data while maintaining personal control @mcauley_dataware_2011 and data itself is likened to a boundary object forming part of the infrastructure of everyday life @star_institutional_1989 [@crabtree_human_2015].

Most nations have legislation that stipulates a degree of transparency by ensuring that charities and other Non-Profit Organisations (NPOs) submit documentation for auditing and, subsequently, public consumption. Examples include the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) @internal_revenue_service_annual_2016 and the Charity Commission @hm_government_charity_nodate. The focus of these systems is typically on input transparencies i.e. the money a charity spends. This is, in part, due to its ease of measurement; however such input transparencies have been shown to be ineffective when determining how appropriate a spend is @heald_varieties_2006. Previous work in HCI has critiqued such systems for lacking detail and context about the work of organisations, and failing to represent non-monetary elements such as the efforts of those who volunteer for a charity’s projects and cause. The recommendations from this prior work are for new digital systems and processes that provide a more comprehensive and value-driven alternative to simple financial accounting @marshall_accountable:_2016. Additionally, imposed or expected transparency measures are often seen to be in conflict with effective practice regarding to organisational independence, confidentiality, and privacy @cukierman_limits_2009 [@schauer_mixed_2014]. In this way, the concerns of charities around transparency can often reflect privacy issues discussed as concerns around the use of personal informatics that are discussed by McAuley et al @mcauley_dataware_2011. This is because charities may wish to communicate an accurate view of their work and its value but may have concerns presenting data about activity or spend that can be misinterpreted by others who may not understand its context. Furthermore, on a pragmatic level, being transparent can create additional work for organisations due to the effort involved in audits, monitoring and reporting that they are legally or contractually obliged to perform. It also means charities have to expend further effort to communicate their practice and value (as opposed to values) in order to maintain a relationship with their stakeholders @macmillan_relationship_2005.

The work reported in this paper builds upon previous research in HCI around the design of systems to facilitate transparency and accountability in charities @marshall_accountable:_2016, and work that discusses the use of data for interaction by and between individuals and organisations @crabtree_human_2015 [@elsden_resviz:_2016]. Where previous investigations focus on the design for interfaces to interact with data, or the ownership and processing of the same, it typically fails to account for the work needed in organisations to compile this data in the first place. As such, our research set out to ask: how is work performed and money spent; how is this accounted for in a charity; and what are the processes that make these accounts available to others? In asking and examining these questions through ethnographic fieldwork, this research seeks to provide insights around the ways in which digital systems can be designed to better facilitate the work of ‘being transparent’ as part of everyday practice in charities.

Research Approach

Our fieldwork was conducted over seven months with a small charity, ‘’ (a pseudonym), in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The organisation has three full-time and four part-time staff (pseudonymised for reporting): Martin (Manager, full-time); Andrea (Senior Youth Worker, full-time); Danny (Youth Worker, full-time); Lydia (Administrator, part-time replacing Charli who had the role when fieldwork began); Sofia (Youth Worker, part-time); and Ludoslav (Youth Worker, part-time). The charity has an annual financial turnover of approximately 130k, and operates across two buildings: ‘The Project’, a community hub and central offices; and ‘The Play Centre’, a building designed for young people’s play. We approached for this research on the recommendation of a collaborator who represents Charities across the local region; they were presented as an organisation who have a significant presence in their community, whose work is value-driven, and are exemplar of small charities with flexible funding. They were also presented as being enthusiastic about becoming involved in research of this subject and scope, which was confirmed upon initial discussions with the lead researcher.

Fieldwork and data collection were primarily ethnographic in nature @crabtree_doing_2012, formed of participatory-observation activities at . This involved shadowing, assisting with accounts preparation, and interviewing staff, volunteers, and service users in-situ.

Our fieldwork began in early 2016. Initially, this came in the form of weekly visits by the lead author to in order to participate in their daily administrative and planning sessions. These were targeted to coincide with the shifts of the part-time administrator so that the researcher could engage with their work as well as that of other staff members.

After several visits, fieldwork expanded to include participating in the organisation’s work as a volunteer youth worker on a weekly basis. This further facilitated the lead author’s integration into the charity, and provided opportunities to participate in and observe performing their work in order to develop a deeper understanding of their practices. Through this participant-observation, the lead author was able to develop a vulgar competence @crabtree_doing_2012 of organisational processes from which to learn from and reflect upon. At this point, visits became more frequent and occurred several times a week with days being spent partly participating in administration and planning, and partly in the performance of a volunteer role in community sessions and projects.

During this time the researcher was given a range of duties to perform such as: everyday purchasing of equipment for activities; attending meetings with stakeholders; being involved in strategy meetings with partners; creating monitoring materials such as questionnaires; and compiling financial accounts. They were also given copies of the yearly accounts spreadsheets to inspect, with instruction to ask any questions as required. Informal interviews often occurred in-situ, either when the researcher was seeking clarification of an activity as it occurred in-the-moment, or when reflection on fieldnotes lead to a question which could only be answered by the setting’s members. These informal interviews were not audio-recorded, but were integrated into the data corpus through fieldnotes and fieldwork diaries.

At later stages of the project, the researcher engaged workers in focus groups that were centred around a structured discussion whilst performing an activity. Three of these events were held, approximately 3 weeks apart and lasting an average of 105 minutes. The purpose of these activities were to provide a space during fieldwork to give participants an explicit opportunity to reflect on the researcher’s findings together, and to discuss their held notions of transparency and accountability as well as how potential future technologies may affect their working practices with regards to this. With the consent of participants, the sessions were audio-recorded and then transcribed. Further to this the researcher produced entries in their fieldwork diary which incorporated photography and reflections on the event.

In total, the seven-month ethnography comprised 49 unique visits and engagement in 27 volunteering activities. After each field visit the lead author would transform relevant field notes into a fieldwork diary entry which was examined by themselves and other authors prior to and during analysis, and elaborated on using discussions with setting’s members as fieldwork continued. This resulted in 70 pages of fieldnotes and fieldwork diaries.

Findings

Our findings are compiled from field notes and diaries collected during the lead researcher’s immersion in the organisation, as well as transcripts from the audio recordings made during focus group events. These were used to develop praxeological accounts of interactional work @crabtree_doing_2012 regarding the organisation’s activities around reporting their work practices to others. These accounts focus on how members of the setting achieve their goals through interactional work and are grouped based on the activities they relate to: Accounts of Spending; Accounts of Activities; and Accounts of Hidden Work.

Accounting for Spending

We describe here how the charity spends money, and what is involved in producing the accounts required by legal processes. Spending occurs in two ways: core organisational costs (salaries, building rental, etc.); and spending which is based in the activities of a given working day. These each have distinct mechanisms through which money is spent, and accounted for.

Everyday Spending

Everyday spending is made accountable internally by funnelling spend through two senior staff members. Charli, the charity’s part-time administrator, described this:

Charli: “The staff get paid back through expenses, and only Martin and Andrea are allowed to make expenses claims which they’ll make generally when they notice their bank accounts are getting low”.

Charli’s comment tells us two things. The first is that two senior workers, Martin and Andrea, are the only ones allowed to make expenses claims for purchases. This allows them to ensure that all claims are deemed appropriate since they may monitor purchases and remove the possibility of abuse by other staff members. Their personal practices are also indicated by Charli – they only make claims when they “notice their bank accounts are getting low”. That this is possible to do also indicates the practice of storing transaction records for compilation and reimbursement. While this may initially seem restrictive, we observed practices involving the devolution of purchasing work to other staff members, allowing multiple workers to make necessary purchases. We observe that this devolution of responsibility could occur in two ways. We describe both of these in a vignette below, which details events that occurred across two days of fieldwork:

Whilst helping prepare for a ‘Community Activity Day’, Sofia and I were tasked with producing a grocery list for the BBQ. While walking to the store we were approached on the side of the road by Martin in the minibus. He asks us if we’re “off to buy food?”. Sofia affirms and Martin replies “Here, take this” handing her his bank card, “Do you know the PIN?”. Sofia nods and Martin chuckles, saying “Aye. Half of [district area] know that PIN now” and driving off. When shopping, we explicitly choose the cheapest possible store-brand products. I ask about this and she tells me “We can’t be seen to be buying brands really”. We use Martin’s card to pay and later, Martin returns around an hour later and retrieves his card and the receipt of purchase from Sofia, checking over it briefly before putting it in his wallet. The next day, I was walking to the Play Centre when Martin pulled up in the minibus heading in the opposite direction at speed. He stops only to hand me 20 and tells me “We need toilet roll for the Play Centre. Go get some from [convenience store] across the road, the cheap pack at the back of the shop”. After making the purchase I head to the Play Centre which is already full of activity. I find Andrea and hand her the money, which she takes and asks me for a receipt. She stores the receipt together with Martin’s cash in her back pocket.

This illustrates how spending is funnelled through the senior staff whilst still allowing the organisation to distribute the labour of purchasing by devolving responsibility. Sofia is handed Martin’s debit card so that it is his money that is spent, and this acts as a buffer between the member of staff and the organisation’s finances. This buffer is also present when Martin hands cash to the researcher so that they can participate in spending. There is also both evidence of an immediate internal checking process and an awareness of wider notions of being responsible with spending. Martin checks the receipt that Sofia presents to ensure appropriateness, and Sofia does not wish to be “seen to be buying brands”. Sofia may have to justify purchases if called upon by Martin, and in context of the charity’s overall budget – this is due to the perceived appropriateness of a spend. This is also seen when Martin explicitly provides the researcher with instructions to purchase the “the big cheap pack” of toilet roll. Overall, these internal measures show that the organisation may attest to being responsible with money when able to present context but this is unaccounted for via formal means.

Staff Salaries

In meetings with Charli during fieldwork, the researcher discussed with her how staff are salaried at :

Charli: “Danny and Andrea get paid full time, I get paid part-time. Martin works full-time but he’s only paid part-time.”

Charli lists several of the staff and their pay-schemes, but noticeably says here that Martin is working full time but only paid for part of his work, indicating that his salary is variable even though his role is central to the organisation. During a subsequent fieldwork session, Martin elaborated on this:

“It’s what’s best for …I don’t care how much I get paid, and it’s money that I have to end up looking for. I put salaries down for the last few years, and it took a while to put Danny up to 20k when he started because of money. With the [Large Grant] coming in now we can start thinking about putting the salaries back to normal.”

Martin’s discussion of the staff accepting lower pay provides insight into the values of the organisation. The staff are dedicated to the organisation’s work, and are aware of their impact on its finances; accepting lower pay in order to “keep things going”. Where Martin discusses having to look for the money to pay staff, he also touches upon how raising pay creates an increase in labour as he is required to expend effort sourcing funds to make up the difference. Further into fieldwork, Martin provides additional insight into this during discussion about staff salaries and standard pay increases amid the adjustment:

Martin: “We’re putting salaries up which is a big relief for everyone. I’ll be on 30k, but not really because that means more tax so you have to judge it carefully. Because of the tax brackets, past a certain point it makes no sense to give me a pay increase because of how much it’ll cost. An extra hundred to me per week will be several thousand a year to the charity which I have to find and justify finding. This way everyone still sees their pay increase, including me, but I’m not too worried about finding the extra cash. It’s still the least you’ll ever see another project manager get paid round here though. Some larger organisations have six or seven heads on about 100k; nearly a million you need before you even get anything done.”

This emphasises Martin’s awareness of how staff salaries impact the organisation; he is willing to keep his salary lower than that of comparable positions in the area (“round here”) and demonstrates that he would need to justify to others a pay increase that required searching for a disproportionate amount of further funding. Martin also mentions how the staff will be relieved that the salaries are being brought in line with standard pay rises; illustrating that the salary cuts have tangible effects on staff and further defining their position as a value-driven cohort. When Martin discusses the salaries of larger organisations he also reveals his views on what money and people are supposed to do in an organisation; they are supposed to be put towards the organisation’s work and paying head staff large salaries creates pressure from extra work and financial requirements “before you even get anything done”.

Compiling Accounts

All income and spending must be accounted for formally through compilation of ‘the accounts’; records of financial transactions that must be produced, audited and presented to bodies such as the charity’s Board of Trustees (like a corporate executive board who act in a supervisory capacity for a charity) or the Charity Commission (UK governing body). Compiling accounts was an activity the researcher was involved in during fieldwork, generally performed alongside the administrator (Charli, and later Lydia). When initially instructed in the task by Martin, we were given insight into the role of financial accounts in the organisation and what is involved in the task:

Martin: “We have this budgeting tool. It’s an Excel spreadsheet really […] this lad who used to work for us set it up, we can add funders and add spending and stuff and we can use it to see how much we have left in each budget. At the end of each financial year this gets sent to the accountant so they can sign it off for us.”

This encapsulates two things about how this work is performed. First, we see that it may be performed by several people, and that this role may be more transitory than others in the organisation. During the course of our involvement, the role of Administrator changes from Charli to Lydia, and was previously occupied by another prior to research beginning (the “lad”). This brings into question how well administration tasks fit with the value driven nature of the organisation’s other activities. It also reveals how the organisation views using the spreadsheet when doing budgeting; Martin refers to it as a tool, with which he can present an account of the budget to himself, and can be used to generate another account to others (one which is legally or contractually stipulated). Other features of the tool are brought to light when Martin details the process of ‘Costing’ to the researcher:

Martin: “This lets us see how much money we have in each fund, and then in the other screen here I can assign it to a funding pot and then this updates.”

At a later point in fieldwork, Martin elaborates on this practice, and how the organisation benefits from it:

Martin: “I do this when someone tells me that a report [to a funder] is due. I’ll see what the fund says I can spend it on, and then I’ll cost things to it and move things around so that each fund is happy. Sometimes I do it when we need to spend money from a fund that’s due and I can go back and move things so it’s used up, then there’s loads to put in the report. Or sometimes if we need money for something, I’ll go and free something up from a fund by moving things to other funds.”

As shown, costing work is related to the reports that funders stipulate as part of their funding arrangement with the charity. Martin shows that the organisation has some flexibility in the way that it costs things, and uses this to justify spending that may have been outside of the original proposed use for the funding.

We did, however, witness that there is an inherent tension when presenting accounts for auditing; a legal requirement for charities. Auditing processes require accounts to be ‘ratified’ (checked and signed) by an accountant, and often experience conflict when engaging with commercial accountants. We describe this below:

During a meeting, Martin asks to speak to me about the accounts. “I’m not happy with the accountants at the moment, they’re being problematic”. I ask why and he responds “They just want us to use [commercial accounting software], do you know [that brand]? The accountants don’t like that we don’t use [brand], and I think that’s because they can just import it and have it do their job for them.” At a later meeting with trustees Martin speaks again on the issue, “We’re thinking of scrapping [accountants]. They’ve upped the price to 1300 …, and they’re trying to force us to use [a brand] so we do their job for them. We’ve spoken to a woman we found on [a listing] who says she’ll do it for 20 an hour and she’s happy to do them in whatever format we want. She’s been in and looked already and she’s told us that we’ve already done the job, and all she’ll need to do is double-check a few things and sign it off. We have to make sure she’s got the right, y’know, qualifications, to do that but aye it looks much better.”.

Here Martin shows us that there is an explicit point of contention that arises when commercial accounting models are misapplied to charities. The accountants use expensive commercial software and apply it as a de facto standard, presenting a barrier to the charity engaging with the auditing processes required of them. These attempts to influence ’s toolkit and thus their accounting practices demonstrates a conflict that, in order to become transparent in a particular way, they must use methods imposed upon them that do not support their own practices of accounting for money.

Accounting for Activity

As well as having to account for financial spending, are also required to account for their work activity. Accountability here is notably experienced through both formal procedures and more interpersonal interactions with the community. We outline below how the organisation navigates this, in order to explicate the work practices that support communicating the organisation’s activities to others.

Curating qualitative records

We observed the workers engaging in the production and curation of qualitative records that assisted them in presenting an account of their work. Some forms of record were stipulated as legal requirements, whereas others were produced at the prerogative of workers:

During a session, I observed Andrea taking photographs using her phone. She would often approach participants to take a photograph of them. Whenever possible, Andrea would call to another youth worker and ask them to get into the photograph as well. The next morning, I have been tagged in photographs by ’s Facebook account alongside the other workers and young people in the photographs.

Andrea’s behaviour shows her producing a qualitative record of the event and activity that occurred. She can be seen collecting photographic evidence of their attendance in-situ, and using this to elaborate on the context of their work. The practice of uploading these to a social media profile produces an account of their activity for others, and tagging people in photographs on the platform encourages those tagged to look at them and potentially allows others (such as parents) to glimpse the activity as well. As well as on social media, print out a selection of photographs in a poster format, which are displayed around their main community hub. The workers reflected on this practice in a group discussion:

Andrea: “Part of it’s capturing that moment in time because it’s gonna be gone. Y’know, and it would be very easy for them to forget […] So you’re capturing it for them, you’re capturing it for their parents to see what they’ve achieved, or for the [Young People’s Award] so they can prove whatever it is they’ve done. You’re putting on the wall as a celebration, you’re putting it in the annual report for funders to see and also for young’uns to see […] Like loads of kids will be like ‘will this be going on the wall?’.”

Martin: “We just take lots of pictures because it becomes a resource for us as well. The ones on the wall are of the Young People’s Award because they’re positive images. Sitting down two people and talking one to one and that — it’s not very entertaining.”

We see here how the organisation use a resource bank of records built up by photographs for different types of accounts, to different people. This illustrates the elasticity a record may possess; Andrea relates how photographs may be used as evidence for participant’s involvement in an award, whereas Martin conceptualises them as “positive images” and a resource for the organisation’s future needs. Andrea also explicates how the photographs are shown to parents in order to provide an account of their child’s activity with . We also see how the photographs are repurposed to provide an account of value in the annual report, and to provide a personal record for the young people when it’s placed on the wall in “celebration”. The ability for these records to form a resource from which different accounts can be derived also sits in contrast to other forms of work that perform that, as Martin indicates here, are more difficult to account for (“Sitting down two people and talking one to one and that — it’s not very entertaining”). We observed this first-hand during fieldwork when Martin expressed frustration at the records that are required to keep of their meetings with service users, and how it is difficult to present these to others:

I followed Martin to a filing cabinet that was unlabelled. He took out a folder to show me an example, “Here. This is a monitoring form we have to fill out every time we have a chat with someone. You say who it was, what you chatted about and what the outcomes were. Standard ticky-box stuff. We’re meant to keep this, and we do by the way, but nobody ever asks to see it. I’ve got files here from ten year ago which haven’t seen the light of day. People complain at us that we’re not doing our job and ticking boxes but we are, but nobody ever comes in. Nobody ever asks.”

Martin’s frustration indicates that while he is fulfilling legal and stipulated obligations designed to make accountable for their work, they are not given the opportunity to demonstrate this properly. When Martin describes how photographs of these chats would be “not very entertaining” we also see that whilst could theoretically generate records of these, the effort required to do so would not result in a substantial gain for the charity when trying to demonstrate their value.

Accountability of activity in the community

In contrast to the perceived indifference of regulatory bodies, we found that the workers at saw themselves as being highly visible and thus accountable to their local community both in their roles as youth workers, but also as individuals within it due to an inherent visibility of their presence. This is characterised by Danny’s conception of accountability during a group discussion:

Danny: “There’s the visibility in and out of work. It’s not a one-way thing, I’m not Danny the youth worker during the day and I’m not Darts-Danny at night I’m both and I’ve got to be very aware that young people and the families that I work with, […], I live in the same area as them and they are watching me constantly. In and out. I’ve got to be visible. It’s… an awareness of your role within the community. And I think another one for me, being accountable is remaining humble and just thinking that I’m very much where I’ve come from and I’m very like the young people I work with and they know my family.”

With this, Danny shows us how he sees his role in the community by living and working in the same area. Danny provides a view that accountability for his actions as a youth worker is lived in each moment. He is constantly watched by those around him, even when outside of work during his recreation activities and can therefore be seen as a whole, rather than only through a lens of his output at . The researcher saw this value in practice through the way that configures their Social Media presence:

Andrea: “We didn’t like having a Facebook ’Page’ because it treats you like a business and wants you to pay so everyone sees your posts. We want to be seen in the community. So we made the account a person instead and everyone is our friend and the kids message us at stupid hours …When Facebook changed it so that you couldn’t have a company name as a person, we changed our name to ‘Martin ’ as Martin doesn’t use Facebook himself. [The community] know it’s all of us though, not just him.”

Andrea emphasises the value-driven nature of the organisation’s work through how they’ve chosen to configure their Social Media presence. She notes that whilst there is a pragmatic benefit in how personal accounts are seen on the Facebook platform, this embodies their desire to be seen as part of the community. Later, the organisation takes steps to maintain this dynamic by capitalising the identity of a worker, Martin, for use as a profile name. When Andrea elaborates on her belief that the community understands they are interacting with all workers through the Facebook account, she belies her belief in the dynamic that the workers are visible and present as part of the community and are not abstracted by their involvement in the organisation – being visible and accountable.

Accounting for Hidden Work

Hidden Work here refers to the effort required by the workers to make their work productive, and has been termed Unproductive Labour in Political Economy @marx_contribution_1970, and Articulation Work in CSCW texts @schmidt_taking_1992. We concern ourselves not only with how this is performed but how it is accounted for and communicated to others. In this context it refers to effort expended by workers at the charity in addition to what the task demands in-the-moment. An example would be the planning required to execute community sessions ahead of time. We found that accounting for this hidden work occurs only in conjunction with its performance, during meetings, or discussions about activities and planning – it is rare for those outside of the organisation and immediate community to be made aware of this work. Accounting for hidden work is thus more informal, and often complicated by the nature of ’s activity. We elaborate on these points below.

Responding Work

A lot of hidden work arises from ’s open-door policy, which requires an immediate response to community members coming through the door for their services or informal discussions – disrupting the processes by which workers are performing (and accounting for) hidden work. This came to the fore in one discussion during fieldwork:

We were discussing another youth project operating in the city, as have recently acquired a Play Centre and are finding ways to use it most effectively so have visited other charities to learn from them. It’s mentioned that the other project execute elaborately planned evenings of activities for their attendees and Danny exclaims “They’ve got the time they don’t start until half four! As soon as that shutter goes up we have work to do!” He gestures at street-facing window towards the front of the room. The group nod in agreement

Danny is discussing how ’s activity cannot be judged against that of another organisation with different working patterns. He also makes reference to the open door policy and its effect on their working day regarding planning and makes clear that these informal meetings are conceived of as ‘work’; there is effort expended when conversing that prevents them from performing other tasks. These conversations must be engaged in because they also form an important part of how organise their work. This was elaborated on during a group discussion with the researcher:

Andrea: “So aye, [anon] is a good example. […] I know he was doing football, I knew he was doing work experience so he’d have the time and you just think well it would be really good for him to do it for his future. Y’know, so having a conversation with him to say look are you interested in this?”

Engaging in conversations that arise from the open-door policy can thus translate to outcomes, in this case a beneficiary getting a work experience placement based around a hobby. This qualifies Danny’s earlier utterance that the organisation has “work to do” as soon as they start: these conversations are work that must occur for to achieve its goals effectively, but it is difficult to provide an account of this to others.

Understanding Hidden Work through Context

We note that hidden work is rarely accounted for outside of the organisation and immediate community. During fieldwork, however, Martin related how outsiders may be introduced to the context of the organisation to understand the labour required to perform everyday tasks and achieve outcomes:

“It’s like when this guy from [a funder] came in to check. Most funders don’t and they don’t understand us. He came in and he loved it. He said that he was amazed we could keep the place running, we had so much going on around here that we deal with on a daily basis.”

From this we also see that Martin understands the difficulty of accounting for this labour to others — most funders do not visit and thus do not understand how the project functions. That the funder is amazed at the scale of everyday work and effort being expended shows that this is not captured or represented elsewhere; and can be accounted for only by being present and producing one’s own account from the context of the activity. We later saw that this problem is compounded; and we illustrate this with a vignette of activity leading up to a scheduled evening event in the organisation:

I was due to attend a session with a group referred to as the ‘Slovak Lasses’ group, comprised of young Slovak women aged between 15 and 24. The sessions run from 1600 approx until about 1830, and the plan is to run a BBQ event for the attendees. From 1545, two participants had turned up alongside a part-time worker and sat at computers visit Facebook. Danny is also on Facebook using the account and has several chat windows open. When prompted, Danny responded that he is “chasing up” the rest of the group to make sure that they were coming. Whilst passing, Andrea convinces the attendees to accept her taking a photograph of them. Danny signs off the computer at 1630 and at 1655, there is no sign of other attendees. Danny is visibly concerned, pacing back and forward. He mutters that “we should sack this group”. Sofia nods then says “this is ridiculous. We have two young people and four staff”. I am dismissed by Danny who says “You can go if you want. It’s a bit weird if we outnumber the girls and we have loads of staff in”.

This example shows two things. First, it reinforces the issue of hidden hork only being able to be accounted for in-the-moment. Danny performs the additional task of ‘chasing up’ participants; work which emerges as the evening progresses and is only visible to those in the room. Secondly, it raises the issue of how the ’s efforts would appear if mapped to outcomes in an accounting process. Sofia indicates that such a mapping would not appear favourable (“We have two young people and four staff”), and Danny hints that this is not an uncommon occurrence (“we should sack this group”). has to balance the goal of maintaining a relationship with the beneficiaries – which can lead to important outcomes – with the need to make and be seen making effective use of their time and labour resources. The slower and seemingly less productive execution of the event also directly contrasts with what Martin describes as the funder’s surprise at the high levels of activity during a visit. This likely results from an intersection of elements such as the specific beneficiaries, the time of day, etc. but when isolated from context these two incidents each paint seemingly irreconcilable views of the organisation’s daily life.

Inferring Hidden Work

We did see that hidden work may sometimes be inferred by other members of the organisation, in addition to those present as it occurs. This is often achieved through the records that are produced as a by-product of activity in conjunction with the worker’s implicit knowledge of each others’ work practices:

I was participating in a planning session for the evening’s activities; initiated when Danny and Andrea each took out large workbooks. Andrea asks “Where’s Martin?”, to which Danny responds that he is “down the allotment”. Andrea looks puzzled at this and Danny elaborates, “He’s seeing how [the gardener]’s getting on” and turns the notebook to show Andrea. There is a task list which shows ‘allotment’. Andrea looks at this, and nods.

This shows that workers may use records to infer the activity and thus the work of others in the charity. Danny shows Andrea a workbook entry which contains only a single word that allows both Danny and Andrea to construct a context around Martin’s current whereabouts. We see how Andrea and Danny understand that work is being performed at the allotment, and that Martin’s absence indicates that it is him performing it. We also see how the workers are able to infer the nature of this work, as Danny is able to ascertain that Martin is checking up on someone whilst there. Similarly, we saw that financial records such as receipts could be re-appropriated and used for this inferral:

Martin was having lunch and moving items on the table out of his way, to place his laptop there and write a report. Moving a pile of paper, he turns to inspect it and finds a receipt, saying aloud “What’s this? Ohh. It’s the pancake stuff for tonight; Sofia’s been shopping.”

The receipt makes Sofia’s work accountable internally, as Martin recognises that the items are a list of ingredients to make pancakes, an activity commonly run by the charity. He infers that there has been effort expended in acquiring these materials when he says “Sofia’s been shopping”, and can attribute this to Sofia through knowledge that shopping was a task to be completed and that Sofia was assigned to it. The receipt also pertains to the charity’s activity – running a session involving cooking. This shows how accounting for this hidden work hints at the organisation’s work towards goals. Notably, this we see how a record may exist within several contexts: evidencing expenditure, the inferral of activity, and the by-product of work related to activity (a cooking session) that may be accounted for.

Discussion

Our findings demonstrate that those working in a charity may experience accountability in multiple ways, with reference to their values, work, and responsibilities both as an organisation and individuals. Our results show how legal and financial frameworks surrounding the organisation has a pronounced effect in the work required for a charity to account for the use of resources – both financial and labour – and also that members of the setting can experience this accountability as part of their everyday work in the organisation. We also saw evidence that the organisation and its workers view themselves as inseparable from their local community, thus accountable to it; this relationship requires a maintenance effort similar to the legal demands of government and funders.

Our findings show how conflicts may emerge from the ways in which the charity views itself as accountable to various stakeholders such as its community, its funders, and governmental bodies. In one key instance, we see how must be accountable to funders by reporting their use of grant money whilst simultaneously tailoring activities and spending with regard to the emergent needs of their beneficiaries. This conflict is rooted in the accountability pathways that they must engage in: charities are controlled by their funders to ensure that their spending falls within a specific remit, and this conflicts with a need to be responsive as an organisation and act in accordance with the needs of beneficiaries. This is discussed by Koppel as Multiple Accountability Disorder (MAD) @koppell_pathologies_2005 and compounding this is the various ways in which the organisation is required to make itself transparent. As discussed, transparency is often seen as a foundational element of accountability but the relationship between the two is nuanced – where various forms of being transparent may generate different forms of accountability @koppell_pathologies_2005 [@fox_uncertain_2007; @hood_accountability_2010].

This raises questions around the role of technologies in charities and how they allow workers to navigate conflicts inherent in their accountability requirements. In the following sections we discuss design considerations for future systems that seek to assist charities in managing the tensions associated with becoming transparent and accountable.

Support the Accountability of Work Practice

Our research began by examining accountability from the perspective of public and voluntary sector administration, where organisations may be accountable to others through a number of different pathways such as producing answers when questioned @fox_uncertain_2007 [@koppell_pathologies_2005]. This is demonstrated in our findings as much of the work involved in ‘doing accountability’ involves workers producing answers for stakeholders in the form of reports on spending and how activities were delivered in relation to this expenditure. We posit this offers HCI an opportunity to affect change through a form of accountability with which it is intimately familiar: the accountable nature of work @garfinkel_studies_1967.

While ‘work’ in Garfinkel’s terms refers explicitly to interactional work in the accomplishment of ordering social settings, these interactions are what form the basis of an organisation’s accomplishment of its goals. For example, our findings show that a receipt of purchase obviously means someone has been shopping, and is also incorporated as evidence in the financial accounting process. We show that an organisation can account for the work that it does towards its goals but that the emergent nature of outcomes means that this only provides a partial view. We see that visitors to comment upon activity there as the work and the context of that work is made obvious; yet the accountable nature of that interaction is not supported through systematic processes for reporting.

Making accountability accountable here, then, involves producing systems that allow the communication of organisation’s accomplishment of their work practice in relation to their goals. This should be in such a way that the work of an organisation is made obvious at a glance. Our findings demonstrate that the charity appropriates social media as an ‘organisational accounting device’ @dourish_process_2001, making their activities observable and reportable to those who care to look. As such, we propose that technologies be developed to support the communication of work practices in context with organisational goals. For instance, accounting software that appropriates social media features such as timelines, tagging, and events to contextualise financial records or work toward outcomes. This would provide a resource for both workers and stakeholders and in doing so may begin to address the current chasm between reporting processes and the emergent nature of outcomes; making it clearer to all parties how the work of a charity sits in its local context.

It is imperative to ensure that these systems cannot be used to control or monitor the actions of workers, effectively ‘managing’ productive labour to make this accountable to funders @harper_looking_1992. Systems should instead provide workers with means to produce accounts of their work flexibly, and express these accounts in a diverse manner. This enables the different forms of transparency that predicate various accountabilities @koppell_pathologies_2005 [@fox_uncertain_2007; @hood_accountability_2010]. Such systems will thus need to enable the configuration of transparency to support making work accountable for those who care to look. We discuss how this may be achieved below.

Enable configuration of Transparency

Charities such as are shown to engage simultaneously in multiple forms of transparency to satisfy their accountability requirements. While regulatory bodies and funders are concerned with spending money and monitoring output this is widely accepted to be divorced from the true impact of an organisation’s work @heald_varieties_2006. Simultaneously, take efforts to make themselves transparent and accountable to their community through practices such as using social media and having open-door policies.

These efforts are in line with calls to partake in more active forms of transparency which are seen as more communicative @oliver_what_2004 [@schauer_transparency_2011]. We see here, however, that this often requires extra work on behalf of the workers to articulate their results and efforts to the community on top of compiling reports for other government entities and funders. Important here is the narrative form this transparency takes, and HCI has previously seen how charities can construct narratives surrounding their work through the use of Open Data @erete_storytelling_2016. engage in a process which involves them collecting data which they fashion into narratives. Digital tools also play a role in ‘Costing Work’ to satisfy requirements that spending appears to have been in accordance with funding conditions, but is actually spent as the charity responds more directly to beneficiaries. This is an example of how charities may feel compelled to frame their work by tailoring reports to meet expectations @lowe_playing_2015, and demonstrates how the values embedded in the design have negative impacts on how the organisation may achieve its goals @pine_institutional_2014.

While previous HCI work calls for qualitative forms of accounting @marshall_accountable:_2016, we put forward that new systems must do more than simply incorporate additional metadata into the accounting process; they must be designed with embedded values that better reflect the needs of an organisation and its beneficiaries. As these may differ between organisations, systems should seek to support workers in easily matching their records to the required format per request without much additional labour. Providing interfaces to retrieve, combine, and present data in a multitude of ways would go some way in supporting charities experiencing multiple accountability requirements. Doing so acknowledges not only the conflict of multiple accountabilities and transparencies; but the problem that is the effort required to manage these conflicts separately. This would allow organisations a material means to configure transparency based on context. It also presents new opportunities for stakeholders to engage charities; if systems allowed the controlled retrieval of information @mcauley_dataware_2011, then stakeholders may actually assist in configuration work and create new ways to interpret the data that is more meaningful for them.

This may be achieved practically through providing lightweight, interoperable, data collection tools and interfaces (e.g. mobile and web applications) that allow workers to easily collect, combine, and process information based on evolving needs but operate independently without commitment to one platform. Thus the design embodies values of organisational control and flexibility to support workers collaborating in curating an organisational account. This account would then take the form of an interrogable dataset that can be configured to meet the mode of transparency and accountability required for a given purpose. Providing this configurable form of transparency requires that systems consider the means by which the dataset is created, curated, and queried. We address this below.

Create Contexts through Linked Accounting

We have seen the challenges of accounting for Hidden Work; the activity behind what is being accounted for. This challenge also manifests in terms of the increasing demand for charities to not just account for their activity, but for their outcomes - the effect of their activity on the lives of those with whom they work @lowe_playing_2015. Holding organisations accountable for delivering outcomes (e.g. improving the health of a community) has been critiqued as they are often the result of overwhelmingly complex systems, which any given organisation cannot control, and therefore cannot be held accountable for @lowe_new_2013. Our findings demonstrate that a disconnect exists in how organisations may perform work and how it is reported upon; such as being concerned about numbers attending a group.

Historically, the ‘Linking Processes’ between input of work and money to work output and eventual outcomes has been problematic and poorly understood @heald_varieties_2006. People often seek to create ‘program logic models’ which connect activity to outcomes as a linear model of cause-and-effect @schalock_measuring_2003 but as discussed; outcomes are generally emergent and such models are not representative of how they come about.

Since outcomes emerge from complex systems interacting @lowe_new_2013 [@lowe_playing_2015], we have proposed that digital technologies support configuration of transparency. The role of Linked Data @bizer_emerging_2009 is central in this for two reasons. First, data is a boundary object @crabtree_human_2015 [@star_institutional_1989] that may be appropriated and adapted as a means of providing ‘alternative lenses’ on work and spending @elsden_designing_2017; as such, Linked Data supports the configuration of transparency by providing the material means to combine and show information in context based on need. This allows organisations to rapidly produce lenses on their work to satisfy reporting requirements while predicating only that an initial link be developed between income, work, and outcome to support traversal and presentation of the data. Second, Linked Data implies interoperability with other datasets which speaks to the complex nature of outcomes discussed above. These linking processes could support charities, or other actors, linking multiple datasets to better understand the complex nature of how outcomes are emergent; and from this produce a context that better situates the role of the charity in producing that outcome.

Such a system also has grounds in the legal procedures necessary to audit a charity’s financial accounts. We note that these are somewhat federated in nature; there exists a standard and agreed upon mechanism for having one’s accounts verified and signed, yet multiple actors may perform the ratification. This ecosystem resembles that postulated by the Dataware Manifesto @mcauley_dataware_2011, and creating a Linked Data set within a charity would support this process through the controlled sharing of data. This federation may be achieved through making digital tools independent and interoperable, as described above. Furthermore, linking data could see this form of federated system used to produce other forms of transparency; processes acting on Linked Data could be used to create new interfaces around work and spending that support the more active forms of transparency discussed at the start of this paper @schauer_mixed_2014.

In doing this, systems would support the creation of ‘Linked Accounting’. That is to say these systems may engender accounting and reporting process built upon the premise that organisations are being asked to account for outcomes that have no control over, but their work (and spending) is accountable and may be linked to outcomes as having taken place. This shifts the focus of ‘accounting’ in charities towards the accountable performance of work, and contributes Linked Data for the wider community to use in mapping and understanding the complex systems contributing to outcomes.

Conclusion

In this paper we set out to explore how an understanding of the everyday work practices of charities could be used to inform the design of systems that seek to support them in becoming transparent and accountable. We explicate that the complex nature of transparency and accountability manifests as a variety of interconnected work practices that are experienced by the charity workers, and how socio-technical systems that are used by organisations also affect these same practices. We then present implications for the design of future systems that embed values of worker control and flexibility in order to support charities navigating their obligations in everyday practice. We discuss this by drawing upon our understanding of the accountable nature of work practices, and how this may be captured and represented through interoperable digital systems that allow charities to configure transparency and accountability in accordance with their needs; leading to the concept of ‘Linked Accounting’.

Charity organisations and the HCI community share important civic and social concerns, and the reduction of barriers to a charity’s efforts through digital technologies has far-reaching implications for society. Future work should seek to further engage with charities to collaboratively develop and deploy these systems to discover how they may be appropriated into work practice to achieve organisational goals. Care should be taken to ensure that these novel accounting technologies are developed so that they are not used to control the actions of workers, but used to provide the workers a flexible means to deliver work, and to have this interpreted in a diverse number of ways. In doing so HCI may affect civic change through engagement with this rich design space.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded through the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital Civics (EP/L016176/1). Data supporting this publication is openly available under an ’Open Data Commons Open Database License’. Additional metadata are available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.17634/154300-63. Please contact Newcastle Research Data Service at rdm@ncl.ac.uk for access instructions.

My relationship with self-care

2018-02-06

I’m genuinely unsure what I want to write about right now. To be completely honest I’m finding it difficult to motivate myself from moment-to-moment. I’m sort of in a low-energy phase, and I’m not sure how long it’s going to last. In these phases I usually like to make excuses to myself to perform behaviours I know are unhealthy for me in the name of self-care. It’s not that these behaviours are unhealthy per se, and when done properly as part of self-care I imagine they’re incredibly helpful for a lot of people. The sort of things that I’m talking about are spending an entire day watching TV, or waking up later in the day and having a ’lie in’ during the week, or eating a lot of rich take-away food (usually British-Chinese).

On the surface, these usually seem like sensible avenues of self-care; you eat some comfort food, or relax for an entire day watching TV instead of stressing about things. I understand that (or at least I think I do!). I guess what I’m saying is that I can often have a destructive relationship with these things, in that they often have a detrimental effect on other things that I want to do in my life at the moment. Having a low-energy day watching TV seems nice on the surface, but that activity rarely brings me the sort of visceral joy that I actually need to drag myself out of whatever rut it is I need to pull myself out of at the moment. I think, for me, what counts as true self-care is prioritising and performing activities or actions that genuinely bring me joy in their performance; or at least their accomplishment. Things that invigorate me. I guess the conclusion I can draw from this is that, previously, I thought of self-care activities as having a particular aesthetic – one that required me to be passive. I think, then, that self-care should be explicitly energising.

So, what then energises me? What is to be done? If I have a quick think there’s a few activities that come to mind wherein I feel genuinely brimming with energy afterwards:

Strength Training, obviously. I will continue to sing its praises as a catalyst for growth.
Waking up early and just doing something. Either reading or listening to audio. Strangely, staying in bed an extra hour or so doesn’t really energise me when it’s a habit.
Building things I want to build. At the moment my ‘building things’ todo list is mostly software, but I’ve been putting it off for ages.
Eating right. Although sometimes a bit of a chore, eating right is good for my body which gives me physical energy, and when it’s a habit I tend to feel really good about myself as well.
Strenuous activity. Stuff like walking up mountains, or sailing. I suppose Strength Training could fit here as well, but it has its own ‘space’ in my life. I don’t do enough of these things at the moment. Although the immediate aftermath of the activity is always “Ooph I’m really tired and need a rest”, about a day or two later I’m raring to go and conquer whatever activity comes across my path.

So, yeah. I suppose there’s a self-care plan of sorts? I dunno, if nothing else then at least I’ve mapped what I’m missing at the moment :-P

A mundane snapshot of stuff on my Phone

2018-01-22

I’ve been absent from writing longform posts lately (or shortform for that matter tbh) for a number of reasons. To ease me back into it I’ve decided to do a short series of “Mundane Snapshots” which will essentially consist of elaborated lists of stuff I’m up to at the moment. The purpose is essentially to re-carve out the time I want to spend writing / blogging and make writing a habit agin.

To start with, I’ve decided to just talk about the state of my phone. Modern phones are quite personal; they know a lot about us due to the usage data we give them. For most of us, we likely have a commercial OS such as Apple’s iOS or a Google-centric variant of Android. This is true of me too, although over the last 18 months or so I’ve been working really hard to try and remove my reliance on Google and proprietary services in general, so I thought it would be nice for me to take a ‘snapshot’ of my phone and its installed applications to reflect on my current relationship with it.

Installed Apps

Accounting Scrapbook: This is a dev version of an application that I built for my PhD. There are plans to release a modified version for general usage via F-Droid soon.
Amaze: This is my file browser. I installed this as it was fairly simple, had a nice material design, and was a good FLOSS replacement for ES File Explorer which is proprietary.
AntennaPod: No joke possibly the best podcast client I’ve ever used. As it does what you’d expect, I use it to subscribe and listen to podcasts. This is probably the single app that I use the most on my phone.
AnySoftKeyboard: A nice FLOSS keyboard. When Google started trying to force the GBoard on me I got concerned about what information it was sending back up the pipe, so I found AnySoft to replace it. Installed via F-Droid, it’s a nice and very beautiful FLOSS replacement but not without flaws; there’s no swipe-to-type so I had to retrain myself to use a regular ’tapping’ style and when I go too fast I mis-spell stuff and add in extra full-stops into the middle of sentences instead of spaces. What is nice, however, is that it has a modular design so I can install foreign-language keyboards to speak with my Icelandic buddies without a dedicated Icelandic keyboard app.
Budget: Technically this app’s full name is Budget with Envelopes and I found it on F-Droid. It’s a simple budgeting app where you create collections of money and then add or take from them, and it displays a total at the top as well as keeping a log of transactions. I originally downloaded it whilst researching for Accounting Scrapbook and will probably bin it when I finally get around to making an alternative that works better for me; but for now it’s great. I have an on-again-off-again relationship with the app in terms of usage and will often go through a 3-month phase of logging everything, before taking some time out.
Google Calendar: Grumble grumble. I’ve not yet found a decent alternative to using Google Calendar without shelling out some dough, and atm it’s not a massive priority to do that. I’m debating integrating Cal-Dav stuff into Brimstone to set events up, and then gradually move calendars over to be hosted via Brimstone and interacted with using the Android Open Source calendar application.
DuckDuckGo: This has been my default search engine for a long time. When I made the switch in-browser, I also ripped the Google Now / Google search app out of my phone and installed DuckDuckGo via F-Droid. It still has the same interaction of “Hit the home button and swipe up” to instantly bring up the search, and has a lightweight built-in browser which is Tor compatible. I generally use it 50/50 as a raw search engine, and also as a browser which has JavaScript enabled as I disable it in my main browser.
F-Droid: My app store. An absolutely divine app that reminds me of the first time I opened the ‘Ubuntu Software Centre’ back in 2008. I use it to search for apps that meet my needs; ie if I don’t have a specific app in mind. Sometimes I also do have a specific app in mind and want to get the F-Droid variant (e.g. Telegram). I update the repos often and look forward to updated from F-Droid all the time. I adore it.
Forecastie: A lightweight weather app and widget. I’m terrible for not checking the weather so I decided to find a FLOSS app that did it for me. I enjoy it but don’t manually check it that often. Usually the night before training.
Gallery: Full title is Simple Gallery. I got concerned that the stock gallery was still somehow sending my data to Google as it was also pulling down info from Google services. I haven’t removed the Google Services entirely so wanted to ease myself in. I found it on F-Droid and it’s been a great simple gallery app that does everything I need it to; copying / deleting / cropping / rotating / sharing (also viewing, obviously).
Google Settings: A bare minimum of my apps rely on the Google Services Framework and it’s my understanding that this is the app that encapsulates it. I hate it living on my phone, but I need it for calendar and Contacts sync atm alongside muh banking app.
Habits: I started tracking habits a little while ago and it’s a really neat little app. Uses some fancy maths I don’t quite understand to produce a ‘Habit Strength’ and is incredibly flexible with how I go about organising and setting up my habits. A perfect app that I enjoy so much here’s links to it via F-Droid and Play Store if you haven’t made the leap to F-Droid yet.
HSBC Mobile Banking: Pretty self explanatory. One of the few apps I am going to struggle to replace as it relies on the Google Services Framework. No idea why. I use it to shift money around accounts and pay bills. When going fully FLOSS phone, I will likely either keep a spare phone with the app on and no sim attached, or switch back to the physical securekey token and use the web interface.
K9 Material: An unofficial fork of the popular K9 Mail client. It handled PGP keys and encryption. It does everything I need and handles multiple mail accounts etc. Is good.
Markor: A lovely little app which allows me to take notes in Markdown format, and also maintains a local copy of a Todo.txt file. I use it sparingly at the moment but it replaced Google Keep and sometimes I need a shopping list.
Messaging: The stock SMS app for Android. I don’t actually use it, but I can’t seem to disable it or hide it from view for some reason :-/
MuPDF Mini: I occasionally download PDF files to view. This lets me do that. At the moment I don’t interact with it much at all, but there was once a period where I had to view PDFs a lot on my phone and I think it’s handy to have.
NewPipe: A client-side YouTube scraper that lets me watch YT videos without explicitly tracking me through an account. It also provides me the option to download a video or just its audio and I use this feature the most. It also lets me maintain a client-side list of subscriptions which is awesome to check if any of my favourite channels have uploaded new content without needing to sign into the site. I understand Google probably understand that it’s me, but I enjoy that there’s an extra loop for them to jump through.
Odyssey: Material design, lightweight, music player. What more could you want? I use this a fair bit to listen to music, but I mostly listen to Podcasts atm.
Open Camera: One of the first apps I replaced. It’s a full-featured camera that nontheless has a wonderful light interaction. I mostly use the white-balance feature as sometimes I take pics outside or in the house. I’m not really a photo oriented person so most of my photography is of mundane things that I want to send to others as a “Look at this thing”.
OpenKeychain: Lets me maintain a keychain of PGP keys, add others’ keys, and sign stuff. I like it.
Orbot: Tor connector. Most of my browsing is run through Tor, just to keep folk guessing I think.
Orfox: Tor-oriented version of Firefox. It’s a tad out-of-date now and what I really should do is get the latest version of the Firefox app and just configure it to be the same, but it’s handy just to have it pre-packaged. I use it a lot, mostly to sign into my Brimstone install at Mrshll.uk and read the news or post stuff.
OsmAnd~: Maps application. I finally made the jump from GMaps to OSM on the phone. Been fine. Very rarely have I needed to use GMaps services. OSMAnd specifically has come a long way since I last had it installed and it does routing very nicely now compared to how it used to. There’s still an issue with the flow of interaction in choosing the start point and destination, but otherwise this app is golden. Offline maps was pioneering.
Red Moon: A red-shift application like f.lux that makes my screen darker and lighter and redder depending on the position of the sun. Combined with my low brightness setting, when shifted red it’s hard to read the screen so I invariably just use my phone less. I like that.
Signal: Currently got the GSF-dependant variant but I’ve heard there’s another option available. It’s my default SMS app and I’ve convinced a few close peers to use it for that sweet encrypted chat. Love it.
Telegram: Basically the bulk of my social interaction is through Telegram on my phone. I’ve fallen out of love with the app for a few reasons lately, and will try to switch to using only Signal soon – but a lot of people switched to Telegram to chat with me and as such I feel obliged to stay. I got the F-Droid variant which apparently does stuff differently.
Wikipedia: I look stuff up a lot. This is installed via F-Droid but it gives a tracking warning so I’m a bit suspicious at it. I use it in bursts, usually in the evenings before reading a book.
Yalp Store: This app is a nice way to ease yourself out of using Google Play store. It basically provides access to Play Store apps without needing to sign in via a Google Account. This means I can update stuff like my HSBC app and Signal whilst I figure out my next moves in removing my reliance on the Play store.
Stock Android Apps: Calculator, Contacts (Google variant), Phone, Settings

Well, that’s it I guess. Hope that wasn’t too boring to read. It was fun to write.

On Screens

2017-11-01

Ramble alert; a lot of these thoughts are stream-of-consciousness and unrefined. Be gentle with me.

I’ve been thinking a little bit about screens lately. This all sprung from reading a book (fiction) and somebody mentioning a screening process. If you’re a native English speaker, you may not have thought about the relationship between this word and the screens we interact with every day. A screening process is a filtering process. And we interact with screens every day, to the point where a common critique of our time is that we’re “addicted” to screens, and everything is filtered through them. This, of course, is not a new critique. But it made me think.

The etymology of screen is is an upright piece of furniture providing protection from heat of a fire, drafts, etc.. It’s easy to see then, how the noun turned into a verb. To screen something, to protect something from something else, some natural force. Obviously words change and evolve, but if we take that we may hold simultaneous meanings of a word as the march of progress bestows them; then I find it curious and scary that we continue to use the word screen to refer to the things that demand more and more of society’s attention. I mean, physically it makes sense – the screen as developed was (probably) originally designed to protect the mechanisms producing light, or the people from them. I imagine there’s some interesting physics going on regarding exactly how things are rendered onto the screen. Why not call it a display, then? We definitely use that parlance occasionally: “touch screen display”, “LCD”, etc. To display something is to present it, however. A screen is designed to protect – if we’re physically interacting with the screen by touching it, then why is it not an interactive display? Why still screen? What is it protecting us from? What is it filtering, and screening?

These are admittedly hollow observations – I think at this point, it’s fair to say that people are concerned about the filtering and screening process that takes place in the digital sphere of our lives. I repeat; this isn’t anything new and certainly not something you can’t find by asking a search engine “Why Facebook is bad”. I just think it’s interesting that we continue to use the term screen to refer to our windows into the rest of the world; if these were truly deep and meaningful connections with information, why is it being screened? It makes me wonder what will happen when we finally get those Brain-Computer Interfaces we’ve been clamouring for. Will those be treated as screens? We’ve already seen the heights and depths of human potential on the Web – from vile racists to support groups, poetry to Men’s Rights groups (note: Men’s Rights are the bad ones there), forming new relationships and enabling perverse stalking. It’s bad enough what these things can do to us now, so what happens when these things aren’t filtered through a screen? Humans have been erecting screens around themselves forever – from the old pieces of furniture to shield one from heat or (hell forbid) another human’s nudity. Perhaps there’s a reason we keep resurrecting the screen, ripping out its soul of semantic baggage and making it possess our new devices and creations. Perhaps shielding oneself from another is actually what we want? To force screens to live on, continuously changing what a screen can be, what forms it may take, rather than entertain the possibility of creating and sustaining a new interaction, unshielded by the enslaved spirit of our ancient screens? The obvious trade-off, is that by engaging with this, we give up some part of ourselves to the screens. We feel what the screens allow us, what we told them to allow us to feel. Most generations from the 1950s onwards have had screens as perverse, pervasive, guardians throughout their lives. It makes you wonder, was this humanity’s silent agreement with itself? To screen ourselves, protect ourselves from ourselves? We’re moulded by our interactions, and we’ve screened them for nearly 70 years. If our screens are our guardians, what does it say about the presence of vitriol on the web, over television? Is there a beast inside of us, even more vile than the one we screen?

How do you know it’s you in the mirror?

Suspicious Emails

2017-10-20

Note: Looking back on this post, it was clear that I was experiencing a standard type of SPAM email address designed to get people linking to alternative web pages for common resources. I hadn’t encountered it at the time, and it was still unusual at that point for people to email me about a blog post so I got over-excited.

I woke up this morning (20/10/2017) to an e-mail from someone called A, who is (as far as I can tell) an accessibility intern at Accessible United. She notes an accessibility issue with the “Home” page with the url mrshll.uk/2017/4, in that I linked my definition of Kaizen to the wikipedia article. A tells me that Wikipedia is very inaccessible for people with sight impairments, and asks if I’d consider linking to another url which she gives me. Apparently they “take open-source Wikipedia articles and make them web-accessible”. My first pass of the email was read as “Oh my, someone actually read my post”.

Then I started noticing little things; the link that was presented as being problematic was mrshll.uk/2017/4, which seemed a little odd. If they were referring to the Kaizen Post, why not actually just say “In your post about Kaizen I found a problem”? It’s not infeasible that someone looked through a backlog of my posts, but April was a little while ago and they’d have to trawl through loads of Notes/Twitter stuff. Then, they described their preferred URL as a service which “take[s] open-source Wikipedia articles and make[s] them web-accessible”, but the URL given was from financereference.com :-/ Which, fair enough, did what A described and had very clearly parsed or copied text from Wikiepdia. It might even be more accessible, I didn’t check The website as a whole, however, seems to be about learning finance things. I have an adblocker on so I can only presume that there are ads there that are supporting the site.

So what do I think happened? I think that financereference.com paid a service to use a web crawler and find pages that linked to Wikipedia articles that they also have versions of. I think that the web masters of these pages were sent automatic emails trying to convince them to change the reference, and I think that this is for the purpose of bolstering financereference.com’s Page or Ad ranking. Ofc I could be totally wrong and talking out of my bumhole. It could be a genuine email. On one hand, I don’t want to ‘fall’ for this and take part in bolstering the traffic of a site that resorts to these tactics, on the other hand – accessibility is a genuine concern for the web and I should be promoting the sites that at least attempt to do accessibility. I guess I’ll post a link to the site in an edit to the page, in addition to the Wikipedia one. It won’t really cost me anything and if, by some miracle, people actually find my blog and read it then they’ll at least have an accessible link to visit in order to learn more.

All about the sleep

2017-10-18

This week I’ve modified my training routine from circuit repeated on Tuesdays and Fridays to a Mon-Wed-Fri routine outlined in ‘Good Behaviour’ in Convict Conditioning. The reasoning behind this is to give each exercise some specific attention and my gains a shot in the arm.

The first day, Monday, went amazingly. However this morning was pretty dire and I felt extremely tired during the whole thing. This is largely due to the fact my sleep was more terrible than on Sunday night. My nutrition was pretty good, but my discipline for Tuesday evening was pretty non-existent. I’m going to redouble my efforts to ensure that I get an amazing night’s sleep each night, media fast and all that.

I’ll give it a month of ‘Good behaviour’ and try to gain some reps on each exercise, and get a jump on Handstands. Then I’ll re-evaluate.

Going to Ground

2017-10-10

I blather on about Strength Training a lot, because it means a lot to me. In the past, Training has been a way for me to go to ground, so to speak. It serves as a space that is mine, a ritual space that offers emotional decompression from both sides of the ‘yin/yang’ spectrum: if I’ve got some pent-up aggression or frustration, the act of moving around and grunting and brutalising myself is very cathartic; whilst simultaneously it’s a nurturing act of self-care, and an activity that is fundamentally much more constructive than similar outlets I’ve had in the past (e.g. clubbing). As well as this, I’ve went through the majority of my life knowing I’m not particularly attractive, and training helps me feel good about my body by allowing me to glimpse the physical feats that it’s capable of (even if I remain convinced I look like shit :-/).

But what happens when the place you go to ground is itself a source of frustration for you? Something I’ve been avoiding confronting since around May is that, actually, my training is stagnant or perhaps going backwards. I lopped a round or so off of the work sets in my circuit to account for being tired one week, and those haven’t reappeared in ages. Similarly, I’ve seen my form deteriorate on my two favourite exercises; ones where I was incredibly close to finally approaching the progression standard for the movements.

There are many reasons that could be to blame. I could simply be tired, due to poor sleep hygiene and stress in work or what remains of my romantic life. I could be bored with the routine I’ve created myself; a system that once represented growth and playfulness and freedom now may symbolise the stagnation. It’s supposed to be ever growing with me, yet every attempt I’ve made to stimulate it or shake it up has failed. I don’t think I’ve been pushing myself too hard; my routine was objectively more intensive before and I was performing a lot better than I am now.

I guess my next approach should be to ‘go to ground’ for my ground. Go back to the source, what pushed me to train the way I do? ‘Coach’ recommends revisiting the ‘good behaviour’ routine once in a while; saying that it offers even intermediate and advance trainers some room to grow.

Either that or I go full warrior-monk, suspend my PhD, and don’t show my face until I’ve nailed one-arm pull-ups… :-P

Flatmates and Housework

2017-10-03

I’ve lived in the same flat, with the same flatmate, for a little over 6 years now. We moved in at the tail end of September in 2011, as we were both starting undergraduate degrees. From that point, we grew and developed and carved out a little home in the flat as the years progressed. Permeating that homeliness feeling for me, though, is the knowledge that my flatmate’s father is our landlord. At first this didn’t matter too much, as we paid our rent the same and chipped in with chores.

As with any living situation, we were a tad more vigilant than usual with our cleaning at first. Gradually, we grew a bit more lax as students do and our cleaning fell out of routine and into the situation where it would be one of us who breaks. Fun fact, the person who broke was always me. As I’ve gotten older and matured a little, my tolerance for living in filth has deteriorated and I’ve begun cleaning regularly as part of a weekly routine.

The result has universally been that my flatmate has either not noticed my efforts, or has actively revelled in not having to do cleaning. Now, I know he’s not malicious so I doubt he’s revelling. Every week my cleaning routine extends to include another item as I gradually break and despise the state that it’s in. To clarify, I had cleaned the toilet and the bath prior to a conversation about cleaning duties – and a significant number of weeks later, I was again forced to clean them due to their state.

Now, I’m unaware of a lot of things due to my inherent privilege. I’m aware that housework has historically been imposed upon women as unwaged work, and here I am as a man complaining as soon as I’m forced to do it. I fully support the wages for housework movements, and what they represent for women and the working classes across the globe. I get that doesn’t automatically give me a right to complain, and certainly doesn’t give me a right to latch onto Federici’s amazing work to claim wages for housework myself. That said, I spent in excess of 2 hours a week cleaning up after my flatmate, with absolutely no acknowledgement or recompense and that is definitely a theft of labour. Even a surface level analysis would reveal this: the job cleaner exists, ergo housework is work that deserves wages. As such I’ve decided to trial out reducing my bill payments to my flatmate to reflect the efforts I put into cleaning our communal space. It’ll be based on an hourly wage of about £10 an hour. I’m not sure what will happen, but considering how often my flatmate complains about money – my bet is that he’ll sharply develop a cleaning habit.

Dying Light

2017-09-22

It’s always a bittersweet time of year for me. I adore the autumn, and the crisp cool air that’s supposed to come with it. The change in seasons is especially obvious to me when I do my morning’s training routine. I watch the light fade away little-by-little each morning until I’m training in complete darkness, and this generally only changes in the Spring when the light returns and the world is reborn.

The upside to this is that I get to train underneath, and subsequently watch, the stars. Those tiny pinpricks of light flaring billions of kilometres away, that have fascinated humanity for countless aeons. I fall into the same trap. There’s often times where I pause what I’m doing mid-rep in order to stare at them for a bit. There’s something about having my muscles and sinews aflame, staving off the cold, that makes me want to stare quite literally into space.

I like how these same stars have borne witness to the greatest events and saddest catastrophes of my species. I like how they are indifferent, and by their nature shine upon me the same as they did all of history’s greatest heroes and villains. I like how they’ve witnessed the rebirth of humanity over and over again, how new generations enter as the old leave, how political systems change and revitalise or condemn their adherents. I like how there’s a moment, at the end of every set, where I push myself forward just a little bit further and I feel something inside of me shift, and grow stronger.

I like how every day, similiar to my species before me and after me, I am reborn underneath those stars. Happy Equinox.

Essentialism

2017-09-12

Last night I just finished a book on ‘Essentialism’. I came across it throughout my travels on the net, as it came up in comments sections of a lot of Minimalism stuff I’ve been reading. Essentialism basically sells itself as the work-life balance counterpart to Minimalism. That is, where Minimalism is concerned with the cognitive and emotional drain caused by physical clutter; Essentialism is concerned with the job or todo list clutter that permeates your work, and can creep into your personal life. The basic mantras of Essentialism are: “Do one thing, well”; and, perhaps more pertinently “If you don’t priotise your life, someone else will”.

To be honest, there was nothing particularly groundbreaking in the book for me. I’ve done a lot of reading around lifestyle and happiness things and they all basically boil down to one thing, which is balancing hedonistic pleasure with purposeful and mindful activities. Essentialism did reinforce my personal work practice of not half-arseing two things but whole-arseing one thing, and why it’s a lot more productive to work this way in both employed labour and personal activities. The only thing which stood out to me really was the explanation of the word Priority and its place in everyday parlance.

According to the book (and I didn’t check its sources yet; though it did list them), the word Priority entered the English language in the 16th century and means literally “the thing that comes first”. Pretty straightforward. The interesting thing is that it didn’t have a plural form until the turn of the 20th century, when the Industrial Revolution had propelled modern Capitalism to grand heights. I realised then that I’ve only ever really heard people ask me what my “Priorities” are, never the one thing that’s most important to me. So I guess I want to talk about that.

I could list the things most important to me, and they’d sound a lot like the list everyone else would give: enough money so that I can not worry about a roof and food, plus a little extra for treats now and then; the flexibility to make sure that I can enjoy my training regularly; keeping good company, both romantic, sexual, and friendly; access to good food and water.

They’re all way too generic really, but I think they all boil down to one simple theme which I will be taking up as my single priority from now on: Strength. All of the above listed things make me a stronger human being in some way shape or form; they provide means to strengthen my body, mind, and emotional core (spirit?). I guess that means I could theoretically fit everything into that mould, but what I really want is to start asking myself “How does this make me stronger?” for everything I do. It’ll help me discern what play-time is required for recharging batteries and stimulating creativity vs what is a habit formed by addiction (ie Netflix). It’ll make me reflect on how and when I ’treat’ myself to snack food, when actually I need to balance the emotional gratification with the nutrients my body needs to thrive.

Anyway, it was nice to know that other people have the practice of shutting out the clutter, and it reinforced my fortitude for continuing to do so.

A slice of PIE

2017-09-05

Maybe because I’m sentimental, and maybe because I’m a nerd, I’ve been exploring the ancient world of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture lately. For those not as nerdy as I am, PIE is a term used to describe the common ancestor for all peoples whose genetic lineage traces to prehistoric Eurasia. This includes peoples from Northern Europe, the British Isles and Ireland, mainland Central and Western Europes, Eastern Europe, India and what the West terms the ‘Near-East’.

PIE studies usually centre around reconstruction of the language and, subsequently, the culture of the PIEs. Using comparative techniques known to people like linguists and mythologists, a fairly decent reconstruction can be made in a lot of areas (according to our current techniques and understandings of them, anway). PIE stuff generally satisfies me on several levels then – history, language stuff, and most importantly the shared human heritage of a very large number of people in the Eurasian landmass and our relatives who immigrated to the Americas, Australia and Indonesia.

Part of my personal exploration of this has involved delving into the shared religion of these peoples. A lot of religions trace their roots to the PIE religion, and whilst the names have been reconstructed using fancy techniques I don’t understand, it brings me joy to realise that members of our species once engaged in ritual practices around the worship of these people.

And this is why I want to discuss my Slow Cooker.

I came across the goddess *Haéusōs. She is characterised as the goddess of the dawn, and her descendants include the Greek Eos, the Germanic Ostara (Easter) and the Vedic Uṣás among hundreds of others. Interestingly, the PIEs are thought to have conceived of the hearth, a fire that forms the centre of the home’s social world, as a small piece of the Sun (and therefore the dawn). *Haéusōs is therefore associated with the Hearth as one of the primary and most important deities; since the Hearth was such an important concept in the PIE social universe.

Recently, *Haéusōs is making her importance known to me in my home. Now, I’m not particularly religious in the theistic sense but I am a stickler for ritual and for anything that connects us to other humans (including dead ones). So I will continue to elaborate. I’ve been streamlining myself and sidelining some bad habits lately, and among my toolkit is my slow cooker.

Slow cookers are fucking brilliant. They aren’t amazing with dried legumes, but still. You just load them with things, set them away, and turn up 6 hours later to find delicious food. If that’s not pagan ritual magic I don’t know what is. Anyway, since I’ve been using my slow cooker a LOT more, it’s sort of become the centre of my world at home. Food is my big vice, and the better quality of food I can prepare for myself the better. I’ve been living off of slow cooked chilli this year, and have recently begun playing with a slow cooker daal. It’s amazing. And I’m only going to start on more elaborate things. Anyway, my point is sort of that as my slow cooker becomes more and more important as a tool in my daily life, I feel that it’s grown somewhat akin to the Hearth of PIE history. It’s nice that, even with the advances in technology, I can maintain a practice that humanity has shared for time immemorial – sitting down to a damn good warm meal at the end of the day, one which has been heating through for hours.

All hail *Haéusōs.

Equinox planting

2017-09-01

It’s Autumn soon, (on the 22nd September). It’s incredibly stereotypical to love this time of year, but I do. Maybe that’s something inherent in humanity, maybe something about the temperatures, or the foliage or the fact that we’re getting more sleep as the darkness encroaches on our schedule makes us feel a bit more alive.

Maybe it’s more societal. The summer harvest is in, the big growing season is over and now we sit back and relax for a few weeks before the weather begins and makes everything just a tad more strenuous. Maybe, due to our agricultural heritage, we’ve made the school and academic years begin in Autumn (to let the kids help with the harvest). Maybe it’s because coffee shops great and small, both the lumbering giant franchises and the sickening quaint local stores, have convinced the population that they need their seasonal fix of pumpkin spice or whatever it is. Maybe it’s that everyone is kind of tired of forcing their recreation backlog into the summer, when they’re supposed to be active, and now have the excuse as the nights draw in to just lump themselves in their caves with loved ones.

Whatever it is, I don’t care. I love the autumn. I’ve always associated it with new growth, which is weird because what follows is the winter and everything is dormant. The habits I start to form in this season, the seeds I plant now, always yield the most in the years to come. It was autumn that I convinced myself to try out strength training (and look where that got me), it was conversations in the autumn that lead me to picking up Marx, and Federici, and start engaging with philosophy.

Already I can feel stirrings in my body as I desire to enter a new period of growth and change. I’m not sure where it’ll lead me, what seeds I’ll plant. I’ll scatter as many as possible and see what grows.

Memento Mori

2017-08-29

Remember that you will die. I’ve been thinking a little bit about death lately, and specifically; my death. I’ve never particularly thought about it before. When beginning this exercise, I thought that the notion of my own death would terrify me. I thought that the realisation that the sum of all of my neurons firing will someday be extinguished unceremoniously in the grand scheme of the universe.

I’m not particularly nihilistic, and to this date my life has been entwined in certain purposes or the other – mostly boiling down to the desire to spend quality time with or away from other members of my species. The notion of death doesn’t make me want to leave a legacy, or climb the highest mountains, or sail the longest oceans. Contrary to my biological programming, it doesn’t particularly make me want to have offspring, or seek to make the world a better place on a macro level. I suppose that’s quite selfish.

Maybe it’s because I’m still entrenched in academia; but death just kinda feels like a deadline. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to die by any means. I generally find a lot of joy in my everyday existence, and if possible I’d want that to continue forever until it becomes actively terrible. I just kind know that I get some time, it flies by, and then it ends.

I dunno, this was quite a strained and hollow prompt to follow. Reflecting on death is important and people should do it; as a culture the British are terrible at discussing the concept comfortably and resort to euphemisms in order to avoid confronting mortality. That sounds deep enough to end a blog post on, so we’ll go with that.

Decluttering Update

2017-08-25

This year I’ve really been on a decluttering journey. I’ve gotten into taking a more minimalist approach to my personal space, and throwing away lots of stuff I didn’t need. I think I’ve written about it this year already, but I can’t be bothered to search for the previous posts and link them. Sorry.

I’m writing this at the end of a pretty good, purposeful week. One might think, then, that this post will be full of profound reflection and insight. Actually, I’m knackered and I can’t think of what I want to write. So I’m just doing an update on my decluttering goals at the moment :-P

These efforts are, for the most part, concentrated within my bedroom. It’s not bad at the moment, tbh. My partner says that “[I] have no stuff!” and that “[I] had hardly anything to begin with!”. Take her words with a pinch of salt, though, as she is a clutter-bug. She loves clart. Anyway, I’ve completed a whole bunch of decluttering in the bedroom context:

Replaced a few of my low quality tees with ones of higher quality, and removed duplicate colours. (Basically halving my tees)
Got rid of a whole bunch of clothes I don’t use
Learned the ranger roll and folding techniques so that all my upper body clothes fit into one half of a long drawer, and my underwear fits in the other half
Condensed my lower body clothes to a single set of work trousers, a single set of cargo trousers (for the weekend), and two pairs of bedtime / lounging shorts for around the house
Removed my branded and too-small hoodies, replacing them with an unmarked black one for simplicity.
Removed specialist shoes and taken to wearing a single set of medium quality hiking shoes for all occasions, as I’m lucky enough so that I don’t need formal shoes.
Reduced the redundancy of my training gear so that it’s only one set, which gets integrated into a weekend wash. It also occupies only one half of a long drawer inc. training shoes.
Removed or drastically reduced items in the dried food store in my cupboard, moving them to the kitchen context.
Moved all my craft gear into the cupboard
Removed my desk, and desk chair, replacing it with a small end table which holds everything and I can sit on the floor.
Moved my portable storage drawers to inside the cupboard and reduced items in them so that two drawers are unoccupied.
Removed all items from under the bed, either placing them in appropriate slots or discarding them. Bed now acts as the holding pen for my bags, which are in constant rotation so do not accumulate dust.
Removed posters that weren’t bringing me joy.

I’ve also made similar efforts in the main room. Although this by its nature is limited to the presence of my bookcase. I’ve been removing all of the physical books for which I have a Kindle-readable copy of, providing it’s of a decent formatting. I donated the books to charity. The effect was significant, and there are only two shelves occupied on my bookshelf now. To compensate for the removal of these redundant copies, I bought a USB memory stick to store regular back-ups of my digital library.

I don’t know whether there should be any closing remarks, now. I guess that the only thing to say is that this is only half the battle, and that maintenance is key. Already during my decluttering phase I’ve bought new items – a few books here and there, and a Hangiri. The difference is, that all these things are serving an explicit role and purpose for me (at least at the moment). I’m enjoying removing all the stuff I don’t like, keeping the stuff that has purpose to me or brings me joy, and filling the place with plants.

If I do anything interesting soon I’ll write about it. I don’t think my landlord will help me store the bed so I can replace it with a folding futon, but we’ll see.

Every morning

2017-08-22

It still amazes me what happens when the sun rises. I know, it’s cliché and it’s incredibly soppy, but I don’t care. I’m lucky in that how I like to configure one my core habits involves me getting to see a lot of sunrises, especially during the late-summer and mid-spring months.

During the majority of summer, the sun has already risen by the time I head outside to train. At this point in the year, I can already feel Sol beginning to wane ahead of the winter. I can see it winding down as the light that greets me as I open the door is now just beyond the horizon. This morning, it was extra humid – my most hated weather of all time. The damp heat saps my strength and fills my lungs, so I took an extra minute or so during a rest break. I took a look around and appreciated that the night’s deep colour had given away to cold blue-grey of early morning. I smiled to myself and got on with the rest of my training, finishing around 15 minutes later as I’ve routinely failed to push past my maintenance routine into progress. By this time, the air was pink, and I lay on the ground watching the birds flit around. As my body rested I bathed in the atmosphere and routine I’ve come to know so well – at 0535 someone (I’ve never found out who, nor do I wish to) empties a lot of glass bottles into the bins in the alley. A few minutes after that the first of the neighbourhood cats comes by, across the wall. It ignores me.

When air turns gold, I move. I’m sore, but only for a few moments. At this point, when the sun has risen, the rest of my world has risen with it. I can faintly hear people talking as they walk in the streets towards wherever they’re going. Cars are frequent sounds. The house across from us has its lights on now. I wave back at the young woman who waves at me from the window. I stretch, put away the ladder I use to access my pull-up bar, pick up my towel from the ground, and re-enter my flat.

I’m not sure what the purpose of this piece of writing is supposed to be. I’m not sure it needs one. It just fascinates me that, for all of our societal evolution, we’re by-and-large still just silly apes that begin moving when the big ball in the sky appears. For all of the supposed life and energy in the night, it is still mostly dead.

I dunno, I just had a nice morning, and wanted to share it.

Boats and a fear of success

2017-08-18

I should buy a boat cat.jpg

So, I bought a boat.

It’s something that I always said I would do. I say I’m going to do a lot of things, but usually saying them gives me that little boost of dopamine as I fantasise about it, or get a social reaction, that proves just strong enough that I’m not motivated to do the thing anymore. This has been true for a whole variety of things in my life – learning a variety of skills, starting particular habits, etc.

I think the dopamine is only part of it. I often find it very difficult to start something, and it’s true of my PhD as well as personal goals. I leave emails unread for up to a day when they’ve got feedback or tasks attached to them. I don’t ring the bank to sort out my two-factor auth when I really need to cancel a standing order. I think part of it is the fear of success. I know fine well that I have a whole bunch of tasks ahead of me that need working on, and I know that if I did them, they would be completed (at least initially). I think part of me fears what comes after, when I’m completed my todo list and there’s no longer a bullet pointed list directing my actions. I’m not sure where this comes from (probably the UK school system…), but I fear success because I fear that I’ll be empty without any larger goal driving me every day. If I keep something on the todo list for tomorrow, it means that tomorrow has purpose. If I keep saying I’ll buy a boat, I’ll have a goal.

But I bought the boat. So what now? I’m in the process of having it moved here from its current situation. I delayed on that party because I was scared of the impact of my finances, but also partly because then I’d have it – and I’d have to live up to the promise I made myself to do the thing I keep saying I’m going to do.

I keep saying that my goal is to take the boat across Europe and sail to somewhere off the coast of Spain, Italy, or Greece. It’s warm there and the sea is calmer, so I can spend my days relaxing. I also say that I will work remotely, getting one of those jobs listed on the Digital Nomad site. I keep saying this because I love the image, and I know in my heart of hearts that I would love it if I managed it.

I take a step back, and look at my situation: I’m pretty ok financially, except for student debt. This boat malarky has cost me half my savings this year so I’m as comfortable in the idea I can get a mortgage after my PhD. Fuck me that smacks of privilege. Other than that, there’s nothing genuinely holding me back. I’ve began a journey towards a lifestyle where all of my personal effects have purpose to me, and so are not numerous. I’m not tied down to a property. I have the skills necessary to work remotely. I have a relationship with someone who knows I’m going to be leaving on travels at some point. I can actually do this, and I’m scared that I probably will.

I’m scared that I will sail across the Mediterranean, and have the adventure of a lifetime. I’m afraid that I’ll spend a few years living aboard a boat (or series of boats), and grow and nurture some side of me that I didn’t know was there. I’m scared that I’ll complete the task I’ve set before me because when that’s complete… what next? I know I’ll receive another Call to Adventure at some point, but that’s invisible to me; grounded in the circumstances of a future that remains in flux. Every day it shifts. I’m scared what it’ll mean when I do it because I’ll have done it, and I’ll sit thinking about all the things I didn’t do when I could have.

I guess the only thing to do, is to do the thing. More boat updates coming soon.

Fasting Pt 3: Towards my Media Fasting goals

2017-07-25

This is the third and final post describing my future plans for fasting on two fronts. The others are located here and here. The previous two posts focused on my need to fast, and the details of how I’m planning out my dietary fast. This post will outline my first cycle of re-evaluating my relationship with consuming media, through an ’entertainment fast'.

The motivation from this comes from a concept that I read about concerning an ‘Information Fast’; wherein the person fasting stimulates their output and creativity by deliberately removing themselves from all forms of information input. The reasoning behind this being that in this age of fast information flow, it’s easy to become overly focused on getting a piece “just right” in planning before moving to execution. In academia this looks to me like “Oh I’ll just read a few more papers before getting started on my Lit Review chapter” and in my personal life like “Oh I’ll just look up a few more carving/smithing/etc videos before getting started on that project.”

For me, this methodology definitely holds true. By removing input and working only with whatever I currently have, I end up producing more things or just doing more things that bring my greater peace of mind. I mentioned in my earlier posts that my evenings were the nexus of fragility in my tasks, chores, routines, and goals. I’m tired by the end of the day and all I want to do is consume media. Usually this takes the form of TV shows and YouTube videos, and specifically I have an issue with consuming too much video media in my diet. Other forms of consumption bring a much deeper feeling of joy when I make time for them in my life, and I always seem to get more done in terms of chores when I limit video media.

My plan going forward then? I suppose I can outline things that I want to limit, and things that I want to increase.

Limit:

YouTube
Netflix

Increase:

Reading
Cleaning / Tidying
Podcasts
Handiwork hobbies

On the surface, it appears that the solutions going forward are obvious – Podcasts should take the place of video media as my immediate relaxation technique in the evening. I adore listening the Podcasts, I’m not sure exactly why. I like listening to people talk, I love the subjects that they deal with, I like how it gives my eyes a rest from a screen. Moreover, Podcasts also let me free my hands for doing stuff like Cleaning and Tidying, and also small handiwork things. Some handiwork things will require a degree of concentration meaning listening to Podcasts is not advised, but surely I can just carve out (heh) the space for them first and deal with the nuances later?

In terms of reading, I think that this will work wonders as well. Podcasts do a lot for me, but they’re substantially less “moreish” than video media. Largely because currently there’s very little prompting me to watch one more. With Netflix and Youtube there’s autoloading and suggestions – they’re actively trying to keep us hooked. I use a 3rd party app to parse Podcasts so I have a set number of channels that I like, and I construct my own queues. When they’re done, they’re done. That means when the queue ends at a predetermined time of the evening, I should have finished my chores and be ready to read.

My partner is around on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings. Luckily, Fri - Sun are basically “off routine” in terms of how I live my life, since a lot of my chores and goals can be met prior to the evenings on weekends. This means that for four days a week, I’ll be effectively creating a space for myself in my evenings where I only let certain things in, and no “Watch next” can derail me.

I’m excited for this – I’ll update people as and when it’s appropriate. Probably after a week, then probably after a month.

Fasting Pt 2: Towards my new Dietary Fast

2017-07-21

Earlier this week I outlined my need to fast on two fronts. In summary, I feel that my evenings are the weak link in the chain of my life that bad habits tend to creep in on; it’s when whatever plans I had in the morning become derailed in lieu of consuming poor nutrition and over-stimulating media, resulting in poor sleep. All of this has a knock-on effect all about my life, but it’s mainly felt when I train. This post is about the first front of these fasts; the dietary one, in order to get a good handle on my nutrition.

I’m actually pretty accustomed to fasting these days. I started in 2014/15 during my MRes year engaging in two 24-h fasts on Wednesdays and Sundays to deal with the poor eating habits I’d developed during the Autumn and Winter months. This worked nicely, but the habit was fairly fragile and I couldn’t maintain it after some disruption occurred. When I later adapted my training routine into a circuit, I was left with some free mornings and basically started using them to skip breakfast and enter an intermittent fasting routine on those days. Even now when I need to occasionally skip a meal unexpectedly, I can actually do so in relative comfort.

So my dietary fasting will be an intermittent one; since that’s what I’m most accustomed to. However, there need to be a few changes to ensure that I adapt and eliminate the risky evenings.

Intermittent Fasting (IF) is generally achieved by deliberately skipping a meal, or consuming your day’s calories only within a given window of time. Where I’ve read about it (mostly Nerd Fitness), people seem to generally skip breakfast, magically have a daily routine which includes the ability to train around late morning, and then break their fast. They’ll then eat their last meal of the day around 1900ish.

The general wisdom seems to be that you train in a fasted state, and then your calorie window begins. People are usually fasted for around 18 hours, including the 8 hours sleep they get and the time in the morning. Since I train in the morning, this will need to change. I’m unable to schedule training for mid-to-late morning, and unwilling to move it into the risky zone of my evening – that’s the point! So I’m adjusting the fasting practice to suit me.

If I train from 0500 – 0600(ish) and begin to consume my daily calories immediately after that, I will need to skip my evening meal in order to achieve the ‘window’ effect of eating and achieve a fasted state. Now, since I train before breakfast anyway I’m always mildly fasted but this will be a step up from that. I’m a little bit anxious, but I think since I’ve spent several years training before consuming any nutrition then this will just be the next level, and I’ll adapt. If we put 8 hours on the clock from 0600 then my window ends at around 1400, and I need to space my meals around that. It’s going to be a tad socially awkward, as I generally like to socialise with others over the midday meal. I’ll also fill up very quickly and possibly struggle to eat my ‘dinner’ ahead of the window. But I’ll experiment to see what works.

On the night before training, I’ll therefore be fasting from 1400 to 0600, which is a fast of… 16 hours! Mission achieved, theoretically. From the nutritional angle, I’ll be using this opportunity to jumpstart a practice I’ve wanted to start for a while: meal prepping, and eating more simple foods. I’ve always got a tonne of mixed views around Paleo and Keto (although of the two Paleo always appeals more than Keto) but I’d like to at least reduce my reliance on grains for my main meals.

Currently my two consistent meals are breakfast and lunch. Post training breakfast (which is the only time I HAVE breakfast) generally consists of between three and four fried eggs. Lunch, on the other hand, consists largely of a four-bean chilli that I’ve batch cooked in a slow cooker. Of these two, my lunch isn’t generally that ‘Paleo Friendly’ but it’s important to note that I’ve experimented with different forms of carbohydrates, and my body really only reacts negatively when there’s large quantities of grains such as bread and pasta. I react slightly better to rice, but I get very bloated around my gut and start storing surplus body fat a bit more. This generally doesn’t happen with beans for some reason, and I’m thankful for that.

The ’extra’ meals I’ll be prepping will largely consist of things I’ve wanted to add back into my diet for a long time: organ meat and veggies. I’ll be producing some really simple dishes of fried vegetables and organ meats with a variety of spices in order to achieve this, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m sure that, if nothing else, my body will really appreciate the extra green matter. I’ll be throwing in some sweet potatoes here and there but largely, it’s going to consist of veggies and some liver.

I’ll be taking a few exceptions to the days, generally where I intersect with rituals and companionship. Health isn’t just nutritional and training. Friday nights are ‘Curry Night’ with my partner, which contain rice and some sugars in the sauces, as well as naan breads. And Saturdays I tend to make sushi or an East Asian-inspired dish; again including plenty sugars and grains. I’m not going to force myself to deal with these until they actually present a problem, if they ever do. The point of this exercise is to eliminate unhealthy practices that I’m not happy with.

Anyway, I’ll write about how it goes later. I might actually take some quantified measurements!

Strength Training, Fasting, and Emotional Labour

2017-07-18

It’s that time of year when I get really reflective around my strength training. I’ve been going through somewhat of a slump for the last few months; this has manifested as only performing one work set per training session, instead of my customary two or three. There’s a whole bundle of reasons for this I could pin it to: poor sleep hygiene, Summer (I’m a winter creature), poor diet, boredom with my routine, etc. I’ve also noticed that, as a trend, the more emotional effort I expend on playing around with crafting/making/materials/whatever, the less energy I’ve had for physical training. It doesn’t quite make sense, physically. I only really craft on the days that I’m not training, yet when looked at through an emotional lense it becomes a lot clearer what’s happening. One need only look at my Web habits over the last year or so to notice the change in focus. Where once I spent all of my free time lapping up information around physiology and being inspired by the feats of performance from my Strength idols; those idols are now replaced with a pantheon of craftsfolk, makers, and hackers as I immerse myself in a world of people making stuff.

Up until this week, I’ve been concerned with this. I adore strength training, and it greatly upsets me when I cannot perform how I know I should be performing if not just for the emotional bankruptcy I’m undergoing. I also adore playing with materials (I hesitate to use the words ‘crafting’ or ‘making’ as I feel they’re very loaded), and the joy that these things bring me is on par with that of calisthenics. In fact, on the surface, they’re arguably occupying the same slot in my brain – forcing me to operate on physical, mental, and emotional levels. The intersection of those parts of my being, when activated, very clearly brings me the most joy I receive in my life wherever it appears. I was concerned up until the other day, when I was re-reading some Marxist philosophy and was duly reminded how Labour is the life essence (Marx says species essence) of humankind, and that it takes Labour to perform any task; including recreational activities. I then began reflecting on how I was expending my time, what activities I was engaging in.

I personally have a finite amount of energy for things which can hold my attention or to which I can invest myself emotionally. This is not just on the micro, ’things I can do today’ scale; but on the larger ’this is what my life comprises of at the moment’ scale. Everything from Strength Training, to making stuff, to my romantic relationships, to which books I want to read, to which tv shows I’m watching currently seem to draw from the same well. Like any water cycle, the energy from this well eventually returns but like how we’re running out of water globally, I feel that I’m drawing too much out of the well at a rate that means it’s often dry when I need to invest some time into something – like my training. One can only do so much, pay attention to so much. This is without getting into how this same well is being robbed by advertisers demanding attention everywhere I look (trying to stop myself from getting sidetracked into a rant).

Another key issue that I feel I’ve been having is that my diet isn’t really working for me at the minute. It’s a lot better than it’s been historically – my bean chili thing has done wonders for my fibre intake and my wallet, and my morning eggs are wonderful too. The issue is that they sit in context alongside the ill and weary part of my diet that drags me down. The evening. I’m always prepared for breakfast, and I’m pretty solid and making sure I’m sorted for lunch, but the evening meal has always been risky for me. The evening is a dangerous time for my gut, as it’s a time where my willpower is at a low from the day’s strains. It’s a time when I’m tempted by takeaways (mostly I manage to resist) or the shortcut of just stuffing a pizza in the oven. It’s the time when I’m tempted to snack. It’s the time when, where once I had plans to spend the evening doing something, I spend my efforts consuming media. When I eat terrible food, my gut becomes inflamed and if I have training the next morning, I’m not operating with strength in that part of my being. Maybe I haven’t slept well due to poor food and media consumption providing the wrong forms of stimulation. In short – I feel that my evenings are the weak links in the chain between the instances of my Labour that hold together my life. It’s where it all goes wrong.

And it’s where I’m going to put things right.

For me, the solution is Fasting. This time, on two fronts. Two concurrent Fasts, dealing with two different facets of my poor consumption habits. First, the Dietary Fast. This will deal with the weak link of consuming poor nutrition at the end of the day. It’ll take the form of an Intermittent Fast; wherein I consume my daily calories within a given time frame, and then fast the rest of the day. Usually this is achieved by ‘skipping’ a meal at the beginning of the day, and breaking the fast after a training session. Since I train early morning, I will be taking the opposite approach, and skipping the third meal of the day. If I give myself a fairly standard 8-hour eating window, this effectively means I am fasting from around 1400 to 0600 the next day.

The second Fast is a media one. At first, it’s simply going to include all forms of video and web content in the evening. No TV and no Movies except on a night where I’m with my partner and it forms part of our bonding. This leaves me free to read or listen to podcasts whilst working on some crafty type project. This is the Fast I’m most excited about, if I’m being honest.

I’m out of time now and need to start my work day. I’ll go into the details of each Fast in separate posts. For now, I’ll briefly outline what I want to achieve from their execution. At the core, I wish to rebalance my well of emotional Labour by removing things that demand my attention, as well as tinker with my gut’s health to improve the digestion of food and transfer of energy into my neuromuscular system. By removing the ability for certain forms of input at a recurring time period I’ve identified as ‘at risk’, I’m also disallowing the harmful habits I’ve formed from gaining further purchase on my destiny. Maybe in time my needs will change, and I will have left my poor habits so far in the dust that I’m no longer at risk for them – but until then, Fasting is my way of cutting out the rot I feel has set into my daily existence.

GE2017 Reaction: I feel the sun

2017-06-13

Note: This was written on the Friday morning (9th Jun) following the result of the UK General election

As I write these words I have been awake for 28 hours. I began with some strength training; then did some writing at the lab; then I went to a meeting with my fieldwork partners; then I got tattooed; then I stayed up all night following the election; then I showered/dressed; then I left my flat and smiled as I felt the sun on my face.

This is the first General Election that I’ve ever stayed up to watch. I’ve voted in three now. The previous two, I’ve woken up to disappointment. I’ve seen the Tories sit and dismantle the futures of myself and my generation, whilst the Liberals sit impotently in the corner watching. I’ve listened in horror as my older relatives of both blood and association have actively revelled in denying us opportunities that they enjoyed throughout their lives, and I’ve been downtrodden when I’ve heard that others of my age bracket admit that they don’t vote because they don’t care.

Since casting my first vote, I’ve grown from naive Liberal, to idealist Green, to diet Socialist, to Marxist-Leninist. A tale as old as time. To me, the Labour Party was always the party of Blair. The party of war, who brought terrorism to our nation. I was always told that not voting for Labour was voting in the Tories. I saw this in action in 2015. I watched as a small ray of hope when a democratic socialist by the name of Corbyn showed promise as Labour leader. I watched as I saw the theories of media control and Murdoch-puppets became flesh before my eyes with the echoes of sound-bite smears ringing in the voices of those I interacted with daily.

Last night changed all that. I watched my generation mobilise. I watched the stirrings of socialism become enacted at the ballot box. I saw my peers come together and defy our elders, and I saw us begin to unite as a species. I watched as a man that everyone said would destroy the party galvanise a people – members of my species! – and begin to wrest back control from those who sustain themselves through exploitation, lies, and fear.

I get this isn’t over. I’m not silly. The Tories are still entrenched, and now they know they’ve got a fight on their hands. The Murdoch machine will be working at full steam to swing public opinion. I won’t be surprised to find that UKIP make a comeback with Farage to split the working class vote again.

That said, this morning I left my flat an entered the street of a country that showed me its potential once more. I felt a faint sense of unity and connection with the land that I’d spent my life growing inside of. I looked towards the sky, red eyes blearily adjusting to the daylight, and I felt the sun on my face.

Unpublished ACM Submission

2017-05-31

In Open Lab we go through what I call the CHI Cycle, in that we’re expected to submit work to the ACM SIGCHI Conference CHI. I managed to get a paper in there once. Last year I submitted some work I’d been doing with a charity, and it received very mixed reviews. The purpose of this blog post is simply to ensure that a HTML version of that initial submission remains online and in the open, as a first step towards putting all of my research out in the open. I will edit this in the next week or so to put the peer review comments up as well :-)

Introduction

This paper discusses the role of data technologies in Charitable Organisations (charities) as they seek to become transparent and accountable in their work and their financial practices. Charities play an important role in society, oftentending to issues of importance to populations and communities where both the private and state sectors have lacked engagement (or resources) @salamon_rise_1994. Due to the nature of much of their funding, through grants and public donations, charities are required to demonstrate to stakeholders both a commitment to their aims and a competency in their financial practices @macmillan_relationship_2005 [@oliver_what_2004]. Data technologies play an increasingly important role in mediating transparency for organisations by supporting the online reporting and publishing of financial data @meijer_understanding_2009, while the production of open data is widely claimed to be synonymous with transparency in dialogues around government and business @coleman_lessons_2013 [@goldstein_open_2013; @gordon_making_2013]. Recent work within HCI has examined the use of open data by charities for constructing narratives @erete_storytelling_2016, the use of data for metrics for reporting and understanding @elsden_resviz:_2016, and has provided insight into how digital systems can provide more comprehensive forms of transparency in these organisations @marshall_accountable:_2016. However, thus far there is little understanding of how technologies like these, and more commonplace data technologies, and data work, integrate into the daily, lived, work of charities.

Our research sets out to address this deficit and better understand how transparency and accountability manifest in the daily activities of charities. We conducted a qualitative study of work practice in a charity that conducts youth work for economically deprived and migrant communities in the North of England. Over a period of 7 months the first author spent an average of 2 days a week conducting ethnographic fieldwork at the charity’s main community hub and office, and participated in both delivery of community-facing activities and administrative work. The fieldwork was oriented towards developing a praxeological account of how financial work is performed within the organisation @crabtree_doing_2012. The findings from our fieldwork provide insight into the tools and processes used by members of such a setting to organise and make sense of their activities and finances and, more crucially, the work that is required to make this transparent and accountable to others. We also discuss the tensions that exist between the everyday execution of charitable work and the legal or contractual obligations to account for it in particular ways. In doing so we highlight how organisations can navigate these issues in order to make themselves accountable not only ‘on paper’ but to those who rely on the charity’s projects and services.

This work contributes to the field of HCI in two ways. First, we produce an account of a charity’s work practices as they relate to data technologies, financial transparency, and accountability. In doing this we extend HCI’s discussion of technologies and organisational accountability @marshall_accountable:_2016 by illuminating how this relates to the lived practice of those whose work these technologies will impact. Secondly, in discussing the tensions that exist in these settings, we extend current work in HCI around sharing data for sensemaking, human-data interaction and organisational transparency, by presenting a set of design recommendations for future systems. In doing so, we discuss how HCI can affect real change in charities worldwide by facilitating engagement with their work’s value, and communicating this to others.

Background

It is generally understood that charities play an important role in society. They perform work in areas and matters generally left unattended by state or private sectors. This includes driving grass-roots development and human services @salamon_rise_1994, the creation and sustenance of social capital within communities and for particularly marginalised populations. Social Capital @field_social_2003 [@mendel_doing_2014]. It can be said that a charity’s very existence indicates a substantial need for its model of service delivery, due to the failure of the market to regulate for-profit entities which may engage in potentially harmful or exploitative practices@hansmann_role_1980.

The importance of their role and their funding mechanisms makes accountability a cornerstone in the public’s relationship with Charities. This is for, at least, two reasons. First, due to the important role that charities play in society, making an organisation accountable for actions it takes ensures that it is true to its mission and do not abuse the trust of the public and other stakeholders who might support its cause @frumkin_accountability_2006 [@jacobson_lifting_2005]. Second, due to the fact that charities are often funded with grants from private or public funds, it is argued that they should be held accountable and act transparently in regards to their financial practices. This is to ensure that they are seen to be using funds both appropriately and efficaciously. Furthermore, due to the nature of charitable funding, this means having multiple and diverse stakeholders to which they must be accountable @krashinsky_stakeholder_1997 [@macmillan_relationship_2005].

There are multiple ways in which an organisation can be said to be accountable. This can include: the extent to which its stakeholders can direct its activity @koppell_pathologies_2005; how it can be called upon to justify its actions @fox_uncertain_2007; and how it can be made to adhere to responsibilities through legal frameworks @koppell_pathologies_2005. These theories of accountability have impact on the way that charities conduct their everyday operations regarding work and spending. Accountability shares a complicated relationship with financial transparency; the latter often being cited as means to provide the former @hood_accountability_2010. Koppell describes transparency as the foundational element for accountability upon which all of the other forms are built @koppell_pathologies_2005. Fox conceptualises an intersection between the two called ‘answerability’ @fox_uncertain_2007. For organisations there are many ways to be transparent such as passiveley revealing information or actively engaging stakeholders @oliver_what_2004 [@schauer_transparency_2011], or choosing to focus on outcomes or spend @heald_varieties_2006. The position of this paper is that all forms of transparency share a concern over the dissemination and consumption of information. The purpose of being transparent, therefore, is ultimately to facilitate interactions between an organisation, its work, and stakeholders (such as funders or the wider public). These interactions are what mediate accountability, and these interactions are increasingly facilitated digitally @meijer_understanding_2009 [@oliver_what_2004].

The ideals and beleifs surrounding use of data and personal informatics has seen the field of HCI explore the politics and design of systems that facilitate interactions with data. At an organisational level, studies have demonstrated how charities have used open data to form narratives around local conditions @erete_storytelling_2016, while others have highlighted how visualisations around organisational metrics (including funding) support the use of data for reporting, understanding, and providing insight in highly politicised environments @elsden_resviz:_2016. In the personal sphere, concepts of data lockers allow external processors to interact with one’s data while maintaining personal control @mcauley_dataware_2011 and data itself is likened to a boundary object forming part of the infrastructure of everyday life @crabtree_human_2015.

Modern transparency efforts often legally stipulate that charities and other NPOs submit documentation for auditing and subsequent public consumption. Examples include the US’ Internal Revenue Service (IRS) @internal_revenue_service_annual_2016 and the UK’s Charity Commission @hm_government_charity_????. The focus of these systems is typically on input (i.e. the money a charity spends). This is, in part, due to its ease of measurement; however such input transparencies @heald_varieties_2006 have been shown to be ineffective when determining how appropriate a spend is. Previous work in HCI has critiqued such systems for lacking detail and context about the work of organisations, and failing to represent non-monetary elements such as the efforts of those who volunteer for a charity’s projects and cause. The recommendations from this prior work are for new digital systems and processes that provide a more comprehensive and value-driven alternative to simple financial accounting @marshall_accountable:_2016. Additionally, imposed or expected transparency measures are often seen to be in conflict with effective practice with regards to organisational independence, confidentiality, and privacy @cukierman_limits_2009 [@schauer_mixed_2014]. In this way, the concerns of charities around transparency touch upon personal concerns around privacy that are addressed by McAuley et al.’s Dataware Manifesto @mcauley_dataware_2011 as charities wish to communicate an accurate view of their work and its value but may have concerns presenting data about activity or spend that can be misinterpreted by others who may not understand its context. Furthermore, on a lived and pragmatic level, ‘being transparent’ can create additional work for organisations due to the effort involved in performing audits, monitoring and reporting that they are legally or conractually obliged to. It also means charities have to expend further effort to communicate their practice and value (as opposed to values) in order to maintain a relationship with their stakeholders @macmillan_relationship_2005.

The work reported in this paper builds upon previous studies in HCI around the design of systems to facilitate transparency and accountability in charities @marshall_accountable:_2016, and work that discusses the use of data for interaction by and between individuals and organisations @crabtree_human_2015 [@elsden_resviz:_2016]. Where previous work investigates the design for interfaces to interact with data, or the ownership and processing of the same, it typically fails to account for the work needed in organisations to compile this data in the first place. As such, our research set out to ask: how is work performed and money spent; how is this accounted for in a charity?; and what are the processes that make this available to others? In asking and examining these questions through ethographic fieldwork, this research seeks to provide insights around the ways in which digital systems can be designed to facilitate the work of ‘being transparent’ as part of everyday practice in charities.

Studying Transparent Practice

Our fieldwork was conducted over a period of seven months with a small charity in the UK based in the city of [anonymous for peer review]; Pallet (a pseudonym for the purposes of reporting the research). The organisation has three full-time and four part-time staff (Table [tab:participants]), and an average financial turnover of approximately 130k. Pallet are a youth organisation that perform work with young people aged between 8 and 25 years in a catchment area typically seen as experiencing tensions related to economic deprivation and a high immigrant population. The participating organisation was approached due to a recommendation of a collaborator who represents the third-sector across the entire region; Pallet were presented as an organisation who have a significant presence in their community, whose work is value-driven, and are exemplar of small charities with flexible funding. They were also presented as being enthusiastic about becoming involved in research of this subject and scope.

Fieldwork and data collection were primarily ethnographic in nature @crabtree_doing_2012, formed of participatory-observation activities at Pallet. This involved shadowing, assisting with accounts preparation, and interviewing members of staff, volunteers, and service users in-situ. Near the conclusion of fieldwork three workshops were conducted that acted as an opportunity for members of the organisation to engage in checking and elaborating on the emerging insights of our fieldwork, as well as stimulating further reflection on their practices and their use of data and technologies.

(r)

: Details of Participants.

[tab:participants]

Ethnography

Our ethnographic work began in early 2016. Initially, the fieldwork came in the form of weekly visits by the lead author to Pallet in order to participate in their daily administrative and planning sessions. At this time, visits were targeted to coincide with the shifts of the part-time administrator so that the lead author could engage with their work as well as that of other staff members.

After three such visits, fieldwork expanded to include participating in the organisation’s work as a volunteer youth worker on a weekly basis. This further facilitated the lead author’s integration into the charity, and provided opportunities to participate in and observe Pallet performing their work in the community in order to develop a deeper understanding of their practices. Through this participant-observation, the lead author was able to develop a vulgar competence @crabtree_doing_2012 of organisational processes from which to learn from and reflect upon. At this point, vists became more frequent and occurred several times a week with days being spent partly participating in administration and planning, and partly in the performance of a volunteer role in community sessions and projects.

During this time at the organisaiton the author was given a range of duties to perform such as: everyday purchasing of equipment for activities; attending meetings of stakeholders; being involved in strategy meetings with partners; the creation of monitoring materials such as questionnaires; and reconciling financial accounts. The author was also given copies of the yearly accounts spreadsheets to inspect at leisure, with instruction to ask any questions as required. Informal interviews often occured in-situ, either when the researcher desired clarification of an activity as it occured in-the-moment, or when reflection on fieldnotes lead to a question which could only be answered by the settings members. These informal interviews were not audio-recorded, although integrated into the data corpus through fieldnotes and fieldwork diaries.

The seven-month ethnography comprised 49 unique visits and engagement in 27 volunteering activities. Some 70 pages of fieldnotes and fieldwork diaries were generated, and elaborated on with discussions with settings members, as activities occured.

Workshops

In the final stages of our fieldwork, a series of three workshops were conducted with workers at Pallet. During the first workshop, four staff members and one volunteer staff participated. Only three of the staff were available for the second workshop. However all four participated in the final workshop, alongside one trustee of the organisation.

The purpose of these workshops was to provide a setting in which the workers could reflect further on their practices as an organisation and discuss the role that technologies and data play, and might play in the future, in the daily operations of the charity. The workshops were also an opportunity for members to check the preliminary insights from our fieldwork, and to offer further elaboration on specific points. In total, three workshops were run at three-to-four week intervals. The workshops each lasted an average of 105 minutes, with the first being slightly longer than the subsequent two due to the personal schedules of participants. All workshops were audio-recorded (with permission) and written transcripts were produced.

The first workshop was designed to elicit reflection on how the organisation communicated its spending and activities internally as well as with stakeholders. Participants engaged in a collaborative process using common office materials (e.g. corkboards, post-its) to build up a rich picture @monk_methods_1998 of Pallet and its ecosystem. First participants noted individual elements of their processes including: staff; stakeholders; assets and resources; government bodies; funders; and beneficiaries. Participants notably chose to represent these elements on a loose spectrum from to . Once these elements had been added, the researcher prompted discussion of information flows around Pallet between different elements, using examples derived from fieldwork. These were captured on the rich picture using coloured string and map pins to represent different flows and activities. After some time doing this, the researcher moved the discussion to the flows of financial capital. This portion of the workshop followed a similar process, using examples derived from fieldwork to prompt reflection on these flows, again which participants mapped onto the rich picture using coloured string and pins. Finally, the session concluded with a targeted reflection on tension points the participants felt were identified in the workshop.

The second workshop had the purpose of exploring in further depth the relationship between the participants and data about the organisation’s finances and work practice. In this workshop, participants were first given nine scenarios written by the lead author, which imagined a variety of potential interactions with data about the organisation’s activities. The participants chose to read each scenario aloud in turn, and discuss each one before moving to the next. After each scenario was discussed (approx 60 minutes in total), the participants were asked to design their own vision for supporting accountability and transparency in the organisation. Participants were told that their designs did not need to be technologically feasible, and could resemble ‘magic buttons’ to do what they wanted. Participants, again, opted for a group dynamic where they spent a brief time sketching or writing, and then discussing the ideas in depth between each other and the researcher.

The third workshop was designed to allow participants to build further on the concepts that they’d discussed in the previous workshops. Based on a design brief given by the facilitator, participants used commonplace materials to construct ‘magic machines’ that an imagined future version of Pallet would use to perform tasks related to transparency and accountability. After approximately 45 minutes of building individual machines, workers took turns to explain them through demonstrating their use around the setting (the charity’s main office). Here they would physically take the researcher and other participants to areas in which the machine was imagined to operate as they elaborated on its functions and their interactions with it.

Findings

Our findings are compiled from field notes and diaries collected during the lead researcher’s immersion at the organisation, as well as transcripts from the audio recordings made during workshop events. These were used to develop praxeological accounts of work @crabtree_doing_2012 around the organisaiton’s activities related to producing accounts of their work, both financial and otherwise.

The findings presented here are grouped based on the activities they relate to: Accounts of Finances; Accounts of Outcomes; and Accounts of Unproductive Labour. Unproductive Labour here refers to the effort required by the workers of the charity to make their work productive @marx_contribution_1970, and we concern ourselves not only with how this is performed but how this is accounted for and communicated to others.

Accounting for Spending

Spending from funded projects occurs on an everyday basis for things that are required to achieve the charity’s immediate outcomes and goals, as well as having core costs such as staff salaries and bills which are paid through other processes. In this section we describe how the charity account for everyday spending, staff and core costs, as well as what is involved in producing ‘the accounts’ required by legal processes.

Everyday Spending

One of the first things we observed during fieldwork is that everyday spending is accounted for internally by instituting a system of funelling all spend through two senior members of staff. Chelsea, the charity’s part-time administrator, described this in the fieldwork:

Chelsea .

Chelsea here indicates that Mike and Andi use their personal bank accounts to make purchases for the organisation in order to ensure that any expenses made can be deemed appropriate. That they only claim for expenses when they also indicates that there is a practice of storing records of these transactions in order to compile them and reimburse the spender. We also observed that although all spending must be funelled through either Andi or Mike, often other staff members made purchases as part of their everyday work. This occurs in one of two ways, both of which we describe in a vignette below, which describes events occurring over two days of fieldwork:

I had been called to help with the planning and execution of the ‘Community Activity Day’ at the Play Centre. The day itself was taking place on the first of June, but I was participating in the planning on the day before. After I had arrived, Sonia and I were tasked with producing a grocery list for an outdoor BBQ that was occuring as part of the day. After a quick discussion regarding items for the menu, we needed to come up with quantities. I asked Sonia what the expected turn out was and she said “Probably at least 70”. We agreed to plan for around 80 attendees and proceeded to leave the centre towards the supermarket, where we were approached on the side of the road by Mike in the minibus. He asks us if we’re “off to buy food”, and when Sonia replies that we are he says “Here, take this” and hands his debit card over, before asking Sonia “Do you know the PIN?”. She nods affirmatively and Mike chuckles before saying to me “Aye. Half of [district area] know that PIN now” and driving off. When we are in the supermarket, Sonia and I traverse it looking for the items we need — Sonia makes a point to purchase the cheapest possible store-brand products, searching for them on the shelves and looking frustrated when none appear available. When I ask if it’s possible to get one of the others she tells me “We can’t be seen to be buying brands really”. After we have everything in the basket, we purchase it using Mike’s card. Back at the project hub, Mike returns around an hour later during lunch and retrieves his card and the receipt of purchase from Sonia, checking over it briefly before putting it in his wallet.

On the day of the ‘Community Activity Day’ I was walking towards the Play Centre in order to volunteer my labour, when Mike pulled up in the minibus heading in the opposite direction (at speed). He stops only to hand me 20 and tells me “We need [toilet roll] for the Play Centre. Go get some from [convenience store] across the road, the big cheap pack at the back of the shop” before driving off. I turn around, find the store and make the purchase, and then make my way to the Play Centre. Inside, the Play Centre is already full of activity with adults and children moving around. I find Andi and hand her the money, which she takes and asks for a receipt. I find the receipt in my pocket and hand it to her and she stores it together with Mike’s change in her back pocket before assigning me my role for the day.

This vignette first illustrates the ways in which spending is funeled through the senior staff whilst allowing the organisation to distribute the labour of purchasing by devolving responsibility for the physical purchase. Sonia is handed Mike’s debit card so that it is his money that is spent, and this acts as a buffer between the member of staff and the organisation’s finances. This buffer is also present when Mike hands cash to the researcher so that they can participate in spending. Further to this, that Mike checks the receipt, and Sonia’s awareness of not wishing to be shows a checking process that means that Sonia may have to justify purchases to Mike if called upon. This also shows that the staff involved in purchasing are aware of the charity’s overall budget and tailor their purchases to ensure it’s appropriate; also seen when Mike explicitly provides the lead author with instructions to purchase of toilet roll.

Staff Salaries

Table [tab:participants] lists the staff at Pallet. There are three full-time staff: Mike, the manager; Andi, the senior youth worker; and Dean, a youth worker. The three part-time staff are: Lynne, the administrator (replacing Chelsea who had the role at the start of fieldwork); Ladislav, a youth worker; and Sonia, a youth worker. When ethnography started, the administrator role was performed by Chelsea.

During discussion with Chelsea at the start of fieldwork, we discussed with her how staff are salaried at the organisation:

Chelsea:

Chelsea lists several of the staff and their pay-schemes, but noticeably says here that Mike is working full time but only paid for part of his work, indicating that his salary is variable even though his role is central to the organisation. During a subsequent fieldwork session, Mike elaborated on this when asked:

Mike’s discussion of the staff accepting lower pay provides insight into the values of the organisation. The staff are dedicated to the organisation’s work, and are aware of their impact on its finances; accepting lower pay in order to . Where Mike discusses having to look for the money to pay staff, he also touches upon how an increase in pay creates an increase in labour as he is required to expend effort sourcing funds to make up the difference. Further into fieldwork, Mike provides additional insight into this during discussion about staff salaries and standard pay increases amid the adjusted salaries:

Mike: “So we’re putting the salaries up starting next month which is a big relief for everyone. I’ll be on 30k, but not really because that means more tax so you have to judge it carefully. Because of the tax brackets, past a certain point it makes no sense to give me a pay increase because of how much it’ll cost. What is an extra hundred to me per week will be several thousand a year to the charity which I then have to find and justify finding. This way everyone still sees their pay increase, including me, but I’m not too worried about finding the extra cash. It’s still the least you’ll ever see another project manager get paid round here though. Some of the larger organisations have six or seven heads on about 100k so that’s like nearly a million you need before you even get anything done.”

This again shows Mike’s awareness of the staff salaries having an impact on the organisation; he is willing to keep his salary lower than that of comparable positions in the area () and demonstrates that he would need to justify to others a pay increase that required searching for a disproportionate amount of further funding. Mike also mentions how the staff will be relieved that the salaries are being brought in line with standard pay rises; illustrating that the salary cuts have tangible effects on staff and further defining their position as a value-driven cohort. When Mike discusses the salaries of larger organisations he also reveals his views on what money and people are supposed to do in an organisation; they are supposed to be put towards the work of the organisation and paying head staff large salaries creates extra work and financial pressure .

Compiling Accounts

All of the organisation’s income and spending must be accounted for formally through the compilation of ‘the accounts’; records of financial transactions that must be reconciled, audited and presented to governing bodies. This compilation of accounts was one of the activities we involved ourselves in during fieldwork, generally performed alongside the administrator (Chelsea, and later Lynne). When being initially instructed in the task by Mike, we were given insight into the role of financial accounts in the organisation and what is involved in the task:

Mike:

This example encapsulates how the organisation views using the spreadsheet when doing budgeting; Mike refers to it explicitly as a tool, with which he can present an account of the organisation’s budget to himself, and can be used to generate another account to others (one which is legally stipulated). We did, however, witness that there are often tensions arising from Pallet’s use of their spreadsheet. We describe this in a vignette below:

It was the start of the day and we were having a scrum, after everyone says their job for the day Mike asks to speak to me about doing something with the Patchwork accounts. “I’m not happy with the accountants at the moment, they’re being problematic”. I ask why and he responds that “They just want us to use Sage [business accounting software], do you know Sage?” I respond that I don’t, and Mike continues “The accountants don’t like that we don’t use Sage, and I think that’s because they can just import it and have it do their job for them.”

Here Mike shows us that there is an explicit point of contention between Pallet and their accountants when the accounts are audited. Pallet have developed an in-house tool that allows them to present an account of spend to themselves and others. Yet because the file cannot be read by the accountant’s software then this makes it incomprehensible to them. Mike then elaborates and tells us how the accountants are trying to influence Pallet’s practice to suit their own, and postulates that it is to reduce the labour of the accountant. That Mike starts by telling us that he’s shows that he feels that the organisation have fulfilled their obligation to produce an account of their spending. Further insight to this was provided during later fieldwork, when the researcher attended a trustee’s meeting, and it came to discuss the accounts:

Mike:

This extract shows us that Pallet are willing to seek other accountants to perform the task who are more suited as partners as they might cost the charity less money for their services but more importantly are flexible and accepting of Pallet’s accounts regardless of format. Additionally, when Mike discusses both the price increase in reference to other organisations () and checking the new accountant’s qualifications, he also demonstrates how they view their relationship; the accountant must become accountable to them and the other charities that the accountant works with). This holds true for the current accountant in terms of their service cost, and the potential new accountant having the correct qualifications for the job.

Accounting for Outcomes

As well as having to account for their financial spending, Pallet also produce records of their outcomes which they demonstrate to others. We saw many examples of this during fieldwork, and present an account of one here:

During a community play session in the park, I saw that Andi was often taking photographs using her phone. Whenever she wasn’t actively engaged with young people, she would navigate to the others in the group and attempt to take a photograph of them; often to a mixed response from the young people themselves. Several of the group were very willing to be photographed, usually the young Slovak boys who took up exaggerated masculine poses such as scowling or muscle flexion. Others were more reserved, and stipulated that they only be photographed alongside the others, so that they were not the sole subject of the picture. Whenever possible, Andi would call to another youth worker such as Dean or Ladislav and ask them to get into the photograph as well. I am photographed with young people several times. The next morning, when I wake up, I have been tagged in photographs by Pallet’s Facebook account and see that most of the workers have also been tagged as well as the majority of young people in the photographs.

Andi’s behaviour shows her producing a qualitative record of the event and activity that occured. She can be seen collecting photographic evidence of their attendance in-situ, as well as using the setting to elaborate on the context of their work. The practice of uploading these to a social media profile produces an account of their activity for others to see, and the tagging of people in the photographs on the platform encourages those tagged to look at them and potentially allows others (such as parents) to glimpse the activity as well. As well as on social media, Pallet print out a selection of photographs in a poster format, which are displayed around their main community hub. The workers reflected on this practice in the first workshop:

Andi:

Mike:

We see here how the organisation use a resource bank of records built up by photographs for different types of accounts, to different people. Andi relates how the photographs she takes can explicitly be used as evidence for the young people’s involvement in the Duke of Edinburgh award, whereas Mike conceptualises them as and a resource for the organisation’s future needs. Andi also explicates how the photographs are shown to parents in order to provide an account of their child’s activity (achievement) with Pallet. As well as this, we see how the photographs are repurposed to provide an account of value in the annual report, and to provide a personal record for the young people when it’s placed on the wall in . The ability for these records to form a resource from which different accounts can be derived also sits in contrast to other forms of work that Pallet perform that, as Mike indicates here, are more difficult to account for (). We observed this first-hand during fieldwork when Mike expressed frustration at the records that Pallet are required to keep of their meetings with service-users, and how it is difficult to present these to others:

I followed Mike through to the back office, and up to a large metal filing cabinet that was unlabelled. He opened it and took out a folder to show me an example, flicking through saying “Here. This is a monitoring form we have to fill out every time we have a chat with someone. You say who it was, what you chatted about and what the outcomes were. Standard ticky-box stuff. We’re meant to keep this, and we do by the way, but nobody ever asks to see it. I’ve got files here from ten year ago which haven’t seen the light of day. And people complain at us that we’re not doing our job and ticking boxes and we are, but nobody ever comes in. Nobody ever asks.”

Mike’s frustration indicates that although he is fulfilling legal and stipulated obligations designed to make them accountable for their work, they are not given an opportunity to actually do so. When Mike describes above that photographs of these chats would be we also see that whilst Pallet could theoretically generate records of these to show to others, the effort required to do so would not result in a substantial gain for the charity when trying to demonstrate their value.

Accountability inside and outside of work

We found that the workers at Pallet saw themselves as being accountable both in their roles as youth workers, but also as members of the community. This is characterised by Dean’s conception of accountability during discussion in the second workshop:

Dean:

With this, Dean shows us how he sees his role in the community by living and working in the same area. Dean provides a view that accountability for his actions as a youth worker is lived in each moment. He is constantly watched by those around him, even when outside of work during his recreation activities and can therefore be seen as a whole, rather than only through a lens of his output at Pallet.

Accounting for Unproductive Labour

Unproductive labour is the labour required to perform the work to achieve the outcomes for the charity. In other words it is the work needed to make work productive @marx_contribution_1970. In this context it refers to the additional effort expended by workers at the charity in addition to what the task demands in-the-moment. An example would be the planning required to execute a community session ahead of the labour required by session as it occurrs. We found that accounting for unproductive labour in the organisation occurs only as the labour itself occurs, during meetings, or discussions about activities and planning — and that it is rare for those outside of the organisation and immediate community to be made aware of this labour. This is often complicated by the organisation’s open-door policy, which requires that they respond directly to community members coming through the door for their services or informal chats. This particularly came to the fore in one discussion during fieldwork:

The workers were sitting down at the central table, discussing another youth project that operated elsewhere in the city. Pallet have recently acquired a Play Centre and are in the process of finding ways to use it most effectively, and so have been visiting other charities to learn from them. It’s mentioned that the other project in question produce elaborate and planned evenings of activities for all attendees at their centre whereas Pallet wouldn’t consider that. Dean sits up straight and exclaims “They’ve got the time they don’t start until half four! As soon as that shutter goes up we have work to do!” As he says this he gestures with his pen at the large window towards the front of the room, where Pallet’s hub faces the street. The rest of the group at the meeting nod silently in agreement

Dean is primarily discussing how Pallet’s work cannot be judged against that of another organisation with different working patterns. He also makes reference to the open door policy and its effect on their working day regarding planning. He also makes clear that these informal meetings are conceived of as ‘work’; there is effort expended when conversing that prevents them from performing other tasks. These conversations must be engaged in because they also form an important part of how Pallet organise their work. This was discussed during the first workshop:

Mike:

Andi:

This shows how the process of engaging in conversations that arise from the open door policies can translate to outcomes, in this case a beneficiary getting a work experience placement based around a hobby. This qualifies Dean’s earlier utterance that the organisation has as soon as they start: these conversations are labour that must occur for Pallet to achieve its goals effectively, but it’s difficult to provide an account of this work to others. During fieldwork, Mike related another anecdote that illustrates how outsiders are often surprised at the labour required to perform everyday tasks and achieve outcomes:

From this we also see that Mike understands the difficulty of accounting for this labour to others — most funders do not visit and thus do not understand how the project functions. The funder is also amazed at the everyday work that occurs and was surprised at the effort being expended; which shows that this labour is not represented to them through other means and becomes accounted for only when there are others there to produce their own account.

Inferring Unproductive Labour

We mentioned that unproductive labour is generally only accounted for by those performing it as it occurred. However we saw during fieldwork that unproductive labour can often be inferred by other records that are either kept by workers or produced as a by-product of their activity:

I was participating in a planning session for the evening’s activities which was initiated when Dean and Andi each took out large workbooks and opened them. Andi asks “Where’s Mike?”, to which Dean responds that he is “down the allotment”. Andi looks puzzled at this and Dean elaborates, “He’s seeing how Liam’s getting on” and turns the notebook to show Andi. On it there is a task list which shows ‘allotment’. Andi looks at this, and nods.

This illustrates how records kept by workers can be used to infer the activity and thus the work of others in the organisation. The list offers proof of Mike’s whereabouts that Andi accepts as canonical, yet only the word ‘allotment’ is written. This tells us that, generally, there is labour that is performed at the allotment and that Mike can be found performing it. In addition to this we see that, in addition to being necessary for financial accounting, receipts can also be used to infer the labour of others:

Mike was having lunch and moving items from the tabletop out of his way, so that he could place his laptop there and write a report. When moving a pile of paper he turns to inspect it and finds a receipt, saying aloud “What’s this? Ohh. It’s the pancake stuff for tonight; Sonia’s been shopping.”

From the receipt Mike can recognise that the items are a list of ingredients to make pancakes, an activity commonly run by the charity. He also infers that there has been an expense of labour in acquiring these materials when he says , and can attribute this to Sonia by other mechanisms that he is privy to.

Hidden Unproductive Labour

As discussed, unproductive labour is necessary for the subsequent performance of activities that translate to outcomes. Whilst most of this labour can be inferred by the activity, or made visible to others through things such as task-lists, some of it cannot as it takes a form that doesn’t lend itself to recording. We illustrate this with a vignette of activity in the organisation leading up to a scheduled evening activity:

I was due to participate in an evening session with a group referred to by the workers as the ‘Slovak Lasses’ group. This group was comprised of young Slovak women aged between 15 and 24. The ‘sessions’ all run from 1600 approx until about 1830, and the plan is to run a BBQ event for the attendees. From about 1545, two of the ‘lasses’ had turned up alongside one of the part-time workers and positioned themselves on the end of the row of computers on one wall. They are checking Facebook actively. On another computer, Dean is on Facebook using the charity’s account and has several chat windows open. When prompted, Dean responded that they were “chasing up” the rest of the lasses to make sure that they were coming. As she passed through to go to a meeting elsewhere Andi convinces the two Slovak lasses to accept her taking a photograph of them on her way. Dean signs off the computer at 1630 and returns to the central table. At 1655, there is no sign of the lasses and Dean is visibly concerned, pacing back and forward. He mutters to the room that “we should sack this group”. Sonia agrees looks at me and Dean in turn and then says “this is ridiculous. We have two young people and four staff”. I am dismissed by Dean who turns and says directly to me “You can go if you want. It’s a bit weird if we outnumber the girls and we have loads of staff in”

This example illustrates two things which are problematic for the accounting of unproductive labour at the organisation. First, that the unproductive labour required for the execution of the outcome is occasionally hidden and cannot always be inferred from the activity. As we’ve previously discussed, the execution of an event often entails unproductive labour to ensure that it can occur in the first place, and that this is accounted for by the workers through processes of internal task lists or status updates and can be inferred through records of spending generated such as receipts. What is not immediately transparent is the existence of Dean’s task of having to ‘chase up’ the beneficiaries of the event, expending additional effort to make the event possible on top of the labour that has already occurred; and this labour cannot be discovered or revealed by any means that the organisation use to account for time or effort. Second, the outcomes often don’t reflect the scale of the labour input by the workers. Dean spends several hours on the computer engaged in conversation to the lasses, and labour has already been expended organising the event with the attendees prior to the night — whereas only two beneficiaries can be accounted for during the activity. Dean’s utterance of indicates as well that this lack of commitment from the lasses is not an uncommon occurrence and thus that the workers often input labour to the group that is not reflected in how the success of the outcome is measured is problematic. Additionally, Sonia indicates that several staff have committed labour to the event () which further skews the mapping of input to outcome somewhat when it is accounted for.

Discussion

Our findings demonstrate how the charities experience their accountability in terms of their values and labour as individual workers and as an organisation, and how their interactions with technology can shape their interactions with those they are accountable to. We find that the organisation and its workers engage in everyday interactions and processes that they have designed to make themselves accountable by requiring them to justify their actions, and make them answerable @fox_uncertain_2007 to each other and their stakeholders in the immediate community. Accountability, and financial transparency, is lived in-the-moment and affected by their relationships as individuals to each other and the communities in which they reside as they respond to their needs @koppell_pathologies_2005.

The ways in which this lived accountability manifests is also subject to the data technologies that can be used to capture practice. We see how accounting for outcomes in charities resembles the practices of storytelling seen in previous HCI studies @erete_storytelling_2016. Meanwhile the only way to capture and account for effective financial practice is to become subject to the transparency measures known to have little impact on work value, namely accounting for spend @heald_varieties_2006. In this way, both values and effort are hidden to the outside, but can be accounted for to those closest to charity and who benefit directly from its work. As such we see that organisations express their notions of accountability and transparency through the socio-technical systems which are constrained by the characteristics of systems that they have to hand. This in turn implies that systems deployed in this space have signficant effects on how organisations see themselves as being accountable.

Previous work in HCI also proposes new ways for systems to account for the work of organisations in this space @marshall_accountable:_2016 and speaks to the danger of focusing on the flows of financial capital over the organisation’s outcomes. We build upon this discussion now by presenting the ways in which the working practices of those in charities further affect the design of systems that facilitate transparency and accountability with regards to work performed by charities and the value that work has. Whilst the value of ethnographic work should certainly not be limited to providing design implications for systems @dourish_implications_2006; our work’s purpose to explore charity working practices and illuminate how these do affect system design. As such we turn now to explicating the characteristics of systems that seek to operate in this space.

Hegemonise

Workers at charities can often see themselves as being accountable to members of their immediate community for their practice and their spending, as opposed to others who are removed from this work but can stipulate responsibility to document it @koppell_pathologies_2005. Systems put in place by these actors must be engaged with, although we see that working practices can be adjusted to navigate around formalised measures designed to provide accountability. We note in particular that the behaviours workers engage in to become accountable for financial spending could be considered subversive in terms of system design; most noticeably the sharing of access tokens (PINs and debit cards) to personal bank accounts. This touches on prior work in HCI @vines_eighty_2011 which demonstrates how formalised security protocols in systems such as banking are negotiated in settings where there is need for a flexible approach in order to distribute to labour of purchasing securely using social accountability, rather than that imposed by digital systems.

We suggest then that digital systems in this space need to acknowledge and interact with imposed systems and formats, and hegemonise them in addition to this. Hegemonising in this sense refers to the fact that organisations have practices that they have designed to make them accountable to those around them, regardless of the policies and systems imposed from above. Therefore new digital systems in this space should afford organisations the ability to focus on their everyday accountability whilst being able to produce required documentation as a by-product. This allows them to become accountable to those whose opinion they care for in terms that matter to them, whilst remaining accountable ‘on-paper’ and acknowledging the difficulty of affecting policy in this space.

We see this above with subversion of digital accountability in spending, and this must hold true with systems deployed to provide more qualitative accounts. Qualitative accounts can be envisioned as allowing stakeholders to interact with the value, labour and outcomes of the organisation, but mapping this in a system can be problematic. Digital technologies could facilitate data collection and interaction with labour by creating data trails @weiss_digital_2009 or engaging in practices akin to ‘life logging’, but a system that maps this against outcomes may risk devaluing the effort of workers in this space as we see that the mapping of outcomes and labour is not straightforward. In financial matters, it is difficult to represent the thrift of workers when involved in purchasing, or willingness to sacrifice salary for the organisation. In this we see reflected a discussion that measurement of outcome reduces the ability to perceive the work of an organisation @lowe_new_2013 that presents a point of tension for the production of more comprehensive account. To address this, digital systems deployed in organisations must hegemonise other processes and formats to allow workers to concentrate on their everyday accountable practices.

Federate

If we are to produce technologies that allow charities to hegemonise the processes governing their accountability to others, then the systems we deploy must operate in a manner that allows them to function both independently for single tasks as well as considering the wider ecosystem in which they exist. Producing accounts in charities is naturally a federated process whereby multiple systems interact to produce, process, and present accounts and accounting data to a variety of actors. Producing accounts, and facilitating accountability, with digital systems in charities should also be federated in nature.

Where accounting for outcomes and finances occurs in charities, it consists of producing, processing, and then presenting various forms of data. These procedures mirror processes and models discussed by McAuley et al @mcauley_dataware_2011, which are notably federated. A federated system could facilitate the capture of heterogenous types of data that are suited for the desires of the organisation, and allow other tools to engage in the processing and presentation of this work. In this way it becomes a kind of federated toolkit that can be used to provide accountability through different views of the organisation based on the format and requirement of the consumer.

To illustrate how we envision the form that these federated toolkits may take, we present some characteristics of them here. We imagine them to be lightweight, heterogeneous, and able to function independently as well as in a federated manner. One can envision a mobile application that captures spending for the user associated with time and location, can share this with a web-based piece of accounting software which may also receive and associate data from other sources such as images or video produced using a variety of other applications. Other actors in this federation could process the same data in other ways, tailored by and for those who desire to use them.

These federated toolkits can provide scability and flexibility for organisations to document their practice, outcomes, and values for others. Imposed transparency measures dictate the format in which work and spending is encapsulated, whereas federated toolkits can allow these to be subverted, navigated and even hegemonised by allowing organisations new ways to capture their work and its value. It also can be envisioned that as the work of the organisation evolves, and engages with new stakeholders, this could facilitate an active form of transparency @oliver_what_2004 whereby those interested in an organisation’s work can commission accounts that are meaningful to them based off of the data collected, and request new information that has not been captured to date, making them organisation reflexive and responsive to them.

Conclusion

In this paper we set out to explore how the everyday working practices of charities would affect the design of systems that are deployed in order to make them accountable for their actions and spending. We did this by explicating the how the obligations for a charity to be transparent and accountable are lived and experienced in everyday practice, and how they account for this practice in terms of finances, outcomes and labour. We then discuss how these practices are shaped by the socio-technical systems and technologies that the organisations have access to, and present implications for the design of future systems that facilitate transparency and accountability in charities with regards to their form and operation within everyday practice. We draw out how imposed formats and procedures mean that systems that facilitate new forms of accountability must hegemonise this formats so that charities can subvert these and concentrate on communicating their work and values in terms that matter to them, and how that can be achieved by producing federated toolkits.

Future work for HCI should seek further engaagement with charities to collaborate, develop, deploy and study these systems and how they are appropriated by workers to achieve the goal of operating accountably. The invisibility of labour, and tensions around how this could be presented in relation to outcomes, finances, and values should be considered from the perspectives of both workers and stakeholders in charities. In this way, HCI can address global challenges facing charities and impact the experiences and lives of those who interact with them.

Acknowledgements

[anonymous for peer review]

Am I a Maker?

2017-05-26

Recently, I was in the kitchen at work enjoying my calories and chatting with a friend/colleague whose PhD is in Making and portable Making. She’s doing a really cool thing at the minute building a portable Making Space (this is grossly butchered, I’m sure it’s much more nuanced and cool than just a “portable Maker Space” :-P). During the conversation she mentioned that people had donated bits of kit to the Space to add to its functionality, and I proffered to throw in one of my mini-blacksmith forges so that people could smith stuff. The conversation around that resulted in me being asked about my Making stuff, and then ultimately in being offered to co-produce a small booklet on my Making for her project.

The thing is, I haven’t ever really considered myself a Maker before. I’m not particular interested in electronics, except where I might want to string up some LEDs somewhere. I like to contribute upstream to FLOSS projects, but I do this a lot less often than I’d like. I don’t really get creative with 3D printing and laser cutting. I enjoy various crafts and associated crafts materials, but in my head being a ‘Maker’ has always been associated with a particular aesthetic. My colleague sent me her example booklet and the first page really intrigued me; she described her style of Making, and that gelled with something that one of my favourite Makers had recently said around styles as well.

For context, I had always known that my colleague was into knitting and after hearing her discuss it, I had always thought of it as part of her Making practice – but I had never considered this in terms of style. This got me thinking; if my practice intersected with Making, what is my style and how would I describe it? (Humanist btw).

For all this revelation, I still get confused when I ask myself the question about whether I am a Maker (Marxist ideals aside). My understanding of the aesthetic of Making has grown to include the things I described to her that I did. From conversations with others, mainly around the lab, and mainly concerned with the Newcastle Maker Space – I understand there to be a sense of exclusivity around some Maker Spaces. From these same conversations, I also understand that this is probably Cishet White-Male related… Another issue I have is that my skill in all of these practices is really malnourished and underdeveloped. I try to do too many things. I suppose that’s maybe in the spirit of Making, but that label has always implied (to me at least) a certain degree of comprehension as well as the playfulness. That a Maker can often think of how to achieve a goal; whereas I still haven’t really been able to flex those muscles to hack around a problemspace too often.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I think maybe my discomfort comes from the taking of my own practices of exploring my humanity through creating things and playing, and just describing it as Making. Not that I have an issue with Making as a practice, I think that this stems from how I think of my Making ‘style’ as humanist. What I do is what just comes naturally to humans until it’s beaten out of them by society. I am a Human and I make stuff, small m. I think that, maybe, describing myself as a Maker would belie an arrogance around my practice that I just don’t possess. This is different for others of course, but making stuff (not Making) is inherently human; and I don’t like that the label of Maker would set me apart from the rest of my species other than a relatively small group… that Makes me sad.

The Simple Peace of Mending Socks

2017-05-04

This piece was originally going to be about bone carving and my love/hate relationship with the material. When I wrote it out, it seemed forced. I waxed poetical about the porous nature of bone allowing it to keep a smooth finish and be perfect for needles, etc whilst absorbing oils from skin and getting a natural patina over time. I whined about how it’s an awkward sod since it can be quite hard (hard in material terms), and how my lack of experience and proper tools (mainly experience) is resulting in difficulty forming even basic shapes for stuff like naalbinding needles.

It seemed forced, and I think it was just on my mind at the time due to frustrations. What I really want to do with this piece, is write about socks. Specifically, socks with holes in them. Throughout my upbringing, I absorbed through cultural osmosis the trope that ‘men’ often wore socks with holes in them, and that their partners (in my preteen head this was usually equated to ciswomen) often berated them for it. I never really thought about it. When I moved out of home to go to Uni, I had acquired an abundance of socks and I threw many away for being threadbare or basically tubes. Many remained, or were replaced over the next few years. Often, they would develop holes.

It wasn’t until a serious relationship in 2013 that this came up as an issue. My partner at the time (let’s call her V) found it absolutely deplorable that I had holes in my socks, and I remember walking into the bedroom one day to find her sorting through my socks and discarding the ones that she found particularly offensive. I seem to remember being shocked, but fairly amused and I trivialised the matter; laughing it off, letting her get on, and moving on.

Skip forward a few years, and I’m in another serious relationship where my current partner (B) has taken issue with socks that have developed holes. I’ve laughed it off and wiggled toes at her. And generally after a stare or glare we move onto finishing getting dressed and getting on with our day. This Christmas, I was sitting in a café in Madrid with V and the issue of the socks came up. This time, she framed it as an issue of male privilege. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t quite get it at first. I quickly and recursively ran through my head why I didn’t feel the need to dispose of the socks, and justified it to myself that I hated waste, and that purchasing new socks when some only had small holes in them was wasteful and offensive to the labourers who made them as well as environmental concerns for the planet and the water involved in producing cotton socks.

All of this, on the surface, is true. I do hate waste, and I would find it grating in my red-blooded veins if I saw people trivialising sweatshop labour by essentially viewing clothing as disposable. However, that wasn’t my way of thinking at the time. In fact I simply hadn’t thought at all about the socks. When I realised that the privilege alarm bells started ringing. In my current framework, not having to worry about something is tantamount to privilege. After that, all it took was a quick two or three minute explanation by V to see the “socks with holes” trope as a product of patriarchy. Women, in general, are held to a ridiculous standard of personal hygiene and appearance under patriarchy; and in addition to this they’re expected to worry about not only their own appearance, but that of others as well. I think we can all agree on that. I’d never before realised that this extended to socks, but it totally makes sense. In a perfect world, all people across the world could enjoy their holey socks. In this world, I’d have to up my game to be subject to the same pressures as my women comrades and try to lessen the places where they may feel stress due to my actions or inactions regarding these issues.

Next problem. If I hate waste, and can’t have holes in my socks, what the hell do I do? Obvious answer: fix my gorram socks.

I’m lucky in that my parents were each brought up in proper working class families during the 60s and 70s. Whilst they climbed a rung on the class ladder and afforded me some economic privilege growing up that they’d not enjoyed; our money situation was such that they didn’t just replace things willy nilly when it could be fixed. To that end, I have strong memories of my mother busting out the sewing kit once or twice a year for my school trousers when they’d get holes in the crotch. And every few weeks for loose shirt buttons etc. My point is, I’m lucky to have parents who managed to impart to me that attitude of “If it is broke, try to fix it first” when it came to bits and pieces. Eventually, around the age of 14, I managed to pick up some rudimentary sewing skills from my mother and the bits of the Web. Enough to sew my own gorram trouser crotch closed! This is a practice I’ve kept up to this day. Whenever my work trousers get a hole, I sew it shut. My skills are not perfect, but it beats dropping £20 on new trousers when 98% of the fabric on a current pair is intact.

Why I’ve never thought about fixing socks before now, I’ll never know. Anyway, starting after my return from Madrid I began to sew the holes in my socks shut whenever I saw them. I did throw out a whole bunch of socks that were beyond saving. What has this got to do with an inner peace, albeit a simple one? I could wax poetical again about carrying on a tradition in my family of fixing stuff rather than buying new ones. I could probably talk about the rhythmic motion of sewing thread, and how I can sit outside and listen to the sounds of the suburbs as I fix my socks. All of this is true. What I think about when I’m fixing my socks, however, is trying to do my small bit to lessen waste, and fight against my own privilege. I feel that every stitch is a small step towards an apology to those whose socks I’ve never given a second thought to even though they’re under pressure to be perfect, and who’ve wrongly felt responsible for the holes in my own socks.

Mostly, I like mending things. I like mending things about the same as I like trying to create new things. When I’m carving, I look at everyone else’s projects and compare my efforts to theirs (I don’t come out looking too good). When I’m mending socks, there’s no real pressure to make it look a particular way. I’m pretty much just restoring its function. I can happily work with my hands, and make a hole disappear, and it’s not designed to be a beautiful piece of work. The pressure is off, even though others will be able to fix socks faster/better than I can; they’re not going to have access to my socks. I invert the sock, I sew the hole, I invert it again, and find a slight scar from where the material is bound but that’s it.

I like that a lot.

A Collection of Old Journal Entries

2017-04-25

It’s currently 2023 and I’m trying to tidy up the archives of my blog a little bit. The 2017 phase of public-journalling was fun but there is a disproportionate number of posts of this type in the feed and it’s not representative of the type of things I like to blog about now.

I don’t want to remove these posts entirely, but they represent a much younger Matt Marshall. I’ve done a lot of growing since then and I want to ensure that anyone reading them has that context going in. These will likely come across as a little cringey, because they are. That’s fine and I can own that just as one owns the photos of their blunderyears; but I want to be able to preface them with a chuckle and a wink so that people understand what they are.

So, this post is dated with the same timestamp used for my final “Journalling prompt” post of this era. I’m doing the compilation and editing on 2023-06-11T17:00:00+01, as I recover from a day in the sun. I’ll order the posts chronologically. I hope they’re not too bad, and the blog ends up a bit tidier for it!

Table of Contents

2017-01-24 “A Positive Habit”

I’m embarking on a journalling challenge. I’ve embarked on them in the past, and never managed to get a grasp on the habit. To counter that, I’ve added in some accountability by spending 30 mins to an hour with my colleague A every Tuesday morning to dedicate some time to the project.

I’m trasposing the daily prompts provided by AoM into Weekly ones, and cutting out the first two. Today’s prompt is Decide on a positive habit, and write out the steps it’ll take to get there.

The positive habit that I really want to build is meditation. I’ve always told myself that my morning strength training affords me some reflective and meditative time, but if I’m being entirely honest it’s not the exact type of meditation that I want to build. It’s a very anabolic period where my body has blood racing through it and hormornes are kicking off everywhere. I want a more chilled out, quiet and catabolic, period where I sit and meditate. I’ve read about tons of health benefits, and it’s something I feel would just benefit me personally quite a bit.

So what of the steps? I’m trying not to look up things online (dedicating this time to writing). Reflecting for a moment on all of the knowledge I’ve gleaned about growth and habit building, generally I’ve found the steps are somewhat akin to

Know your enemy (also known as collecting underpants): what have others done? Where did they fail? How did they succeed?
Plan your approach. What this entry is about, setting out the steps (meta eh?)
Dedicate time. It has to be a priority, at a particular point in the day/week.
Low barrier to entry. For me, I’m an evolver when it comes to daily habit building, not a revolutionary. Start low, with a minimal commitment.
Regular. Drilling in the habit is hard when the accountability is low. Daily is best.
Language. I don’t have to meditate once a day, it’s just something that I do.
Accountability. Who am I accountable to for this?
Logging. Need a dedicated log that serves as a repo of progress; even if I don’t look at it.

Ok, so now I know how I build habits. How does that apply to meditation?

Zero Day – spend 30 minutes researching daily meditation, what people meditate on, what helped others build the habit, how do people set up their environment?
Daily habits are best. When have I got the most time? If I’m not training I’m sleepy when I wake, so morning meditation presents a risk. It’d be good to have an evening habit, but too late in the evening and I’m likely to put it off. Afternoon or early evening would be best, so between 1600 and 1800. Simply go into bedroom, and meditate on the floor.
Low barrier to entry. I only need to meditate for 2 minutes. Knowing me, I’ll want to do a bit more once I get going. But 2 minutes a day isn’t a barrier to me, and builds to over 670 minutes over a year even if kept at this minimal level.
I have a spare notebook that I’ve not used for ages. This can serve as a temporary meditation log.
I can use Google Drive (eurgh) and a friend in order to log the days boolean style so that they can chase me up if I don’t do the thing. I might give them money which they dripfeed back to me in order for me to build the habit properly.

Risks

There are some risks to this habit that I can already see looming. I think I can tackle them, however.

Noise My flatmate, and our upstairs neighbours can be very noisy. There is a risk in meditating in my room. Once my initial barrier to the habit has been smashed, I can move outside into the back yard with the firepit (a repurposed wok) and meditate there.
Scheduling I work evenings on Mondays, and some Saturday day times until the evening. My low barrier to entry will be used to combat this, as 2 minutes can be performed before work on Saturdays. I am also lucky enough to have a quiet space at the Lab to utilise at 1500 on Mondays where I’m at the charity.

So. There we go. Now all I need is accountability.

2017-01-26 “Via negativa”

As it turns out, I’m way too impatient to wait a week for my next journal prompt. Today’s prompt is Via Negativa. According to AoM this term originally comes from Christianity where one explains their god by focusing on what they are not. This term, then, can apply to personal growth by a focus on not doing things. Ie avoiding bad habits. Today’s journal will thus be discussing a habit that I want to get rid of, a habit that’s holding me back, and how I plan to eliminate it from my life.

My habit, funnily enough, is idleness. Those closer to me may sound shocked by this, as I’m always dipping into personal projects; and I’m famed in particular for my early rises in order to undergo my morning strength training ritual. I’m generally thought of as being in quite early to the Lab, which is how I justify extending my personal evening time by leaving at 1600. However, as my training schedule has developed over 2016 I’ve begun training literally half as often as I used to. I now train two very heavy days (Monday and Thursday) whereas I used to include the Tuesday and Friday as well. This means I’ve not had motivation to wake up early on those days, and have used the time to “get myself some extra rest” as part of the catabolic phase of my weekly training/life. Don’t get me wrong, this has had some very good impacts on my training and I’ve continued to improve steadily. My problem stems from the empty space that has been left behind. I resort to laying in bed, watching YouTube or Netflix to “chill out” before work and inevitably wind up spending way longer than I want to and have thus developed an unfortunate habit of arriving into the lab a bit later than what I’d normally be comfortable with. This has been consistent since September at least, but I think it was creeping up on me beforehand.

On top of this, the non-habit of empty space means that I feel frustrated that I’ve resorted to consuming entertainment instead of working on my goals or projects. It’s not that I feel that I can’t enjoy entertainment at all, it’s just that I want a particular balance of production and consumption in my personal sphere that’s been thrown off-balance. One of my goals is also to read more philosophy and more fiction, instead of video. Provided that I go to bed early enough, I can still give myself extra rest by sleeping in until 0630 and then working passively and at peace that I’m actually doing something that has purpose for me (purpose being a key element in happiness).

Sorry again for another Guardian link. Of all the broadsheets that review things they’re often the first in my searches, and are at least not explicitly right-wing

I think the main steps to producing a blueprint of eliminating my bad habit is to replace it with a good one. I mentioned that I’m sleepy when I haven’t trained, so until I’m already in the habit of meditating then I’m not comfortable jumping in there. This also provides space for a greater variety of activities in my life, by using my mornings better. The goals that spring to mind at the time of writing are:

Stretch more
Meditate
Read more, either philosophy / politics, or fiction
Listen to more podcasts
Get a better handle on dusting my bedroom (as opposed to expending the energy picking up after my flatmate)
Write more code for Brimstone
Journalling (meta!)
Meal prepping

Since I’m a creature of schedule and habit, it’s probably best for me to produce a weekly schedule of these morning activities. They have to be completeble by about 0730 so that I can get into the lab nice and early to begin my day there; giving me more time in the evening (We’ll deal with idelness in my evening routines later…). Having a few weeks, or a month, of performing each of these activities on a daily rotation will give me a good overview of where my priorities are and what is sustainable (as well as which activities can be performed concurrently). Here’s my proposed schedule:

Monday Strength Training (routine established)
Tuesday Podcasts + Stretching
Wednesday Reading and tea
Thursday Strength Training (routine established)
Friday Journalling

I’ve deliberately left of my Saturday and Sunday schedules, as they’re often dependant on a work schedule or how late my partner returned from work the night before. I’ve also deliberately left out certain goals, in order to really focus on the low barrier to access ones. All of them are really low barrier to be honest, but in terms of the physical or cognitive grinding; I’ve chosen the easiest.

What I need now, is accountability for these. I could check in with a close friend / colleague each morning; just by sending a message telling them what I was up to and what time I woke up? That’s the positive aspect of accountability. I need a consquence as well, and that’s the tough part. Conversations with colleagues before have resulted in them being uncomfortable with the idea of donating my money to a nasty cause, and there’s nothing else really they could do. I could ask them to walk over to my desk and yell “Shame!” at me?

I will need to reflect on this further.

2017-01-31 “A Letter”

Today’s journal prompt is to write a letter to a loved one. The hardest thing for me to get started with this prompt is to decide on a loved one to write to. I am very privileged in the regard that I have had the opportunity to amass a host of people whom I love (or have loved) very dearly, and in a comfortably diverse series of ways. Romantic, friend, undefinable, etc.

…

Got it.

Hi, we speak often; but you know me well enough by now that messages and Skype calls don’t scratch the itch that I get around writing long-form communications. Sometimes, when we’ve not spoken in a while and I have no way of knowing if you’re ok - I’ll email you. You know this, of course, but what you don’t know is that the mere act of emailing you - of forcing myself to form a comprehensive paragraph to express my concern and dump my three months’ of emotional baggage into something you can read and follow; helps me more than you know.

Then, of course, there’s the anticipation of a reply. “Are you ok? What if you don’t reply? What if you’re ill and I can’t do anything?” becomes mixed with “I love reading your replies. I can’t wait to just look down at my phone, LED blinking, and see that email icon” in a swirling vortex of adrenaline and anxiety that I can’t turn off. Selfish right? I’m sorry. Emailing you because I become worried about you, quickly becomes about me. Sorry for that.

Anyway, digressions from my point. I think this letter is becoming a letter of gratitude in my head. What I’m trying to say with it, is what I’ve tried to say a million times, in a million ways, still hasn’t got across the message that I want to convey. Thank you. Just that. Thank you. You’ve saved my life in so many ways. I was headed down a dark path, a one filled with spite and hate. I needed your guidance. And now look at me. I’m definitely not perfect, but when I look at the alternative path - turning right instead of left at the junction where we met, I see nothing but images of what I was to become had I continued down the road; hollow people leading lives without purpose and without true joy. People who rely on the half-artificial dopamine rushes, without the growth that is supposed to come with it. MRAs, basically. That was a dangerous path, and one I’m glad I didn’t tread.

I still remember the light, dancing through the red brick arches as I walked towards you. Strands of damp hair were clinging to my shoulders, and my gym bag was digging into my right neck. I remember the light, the golden light of spring morning, bathing the world, and made the grass appear the most wonderful shade of green. I saw you see me, I saw your face light up. Of course I remembered you, how could I not? I remember you saying “Hi” and hugging me closer than I’d ever remember a relative stranger hugging me. I remember the light, making your skin appear as the softest substance I’d ever seen. What would’ve happened had I turned right, as I was supposed to that day? Ever since, then - I always turn left.

Part of me feels that I’ve robbed you by remembering you this way. You’re not my saviour, and you’re not a narrative construct who plays an important role in a male life. You’re a person, whom I still love dearly in that way that we do. I’m glad that our paths became entangled, I’m glad that we did something for each other, and I’m glad we both understand that. I’m sorry if I sound sycophantic, or that I’m reducing you to a narrative device; it’s honestly not my intention, it’s just I can’t think of any other way to describe the impact your life had on mine. And I can’t think of another way to emphasise how much I’m grateful.

Thank you, I will forever turn left.

2017-02-03 “6 Word Memoir”

Today’s journal prompt was to Write a 6 word memoir of your life so far. I must admit that I’ve cheated in that I peeked ahead, and I’ve been ruminating on this one since I actually looked at the prompts. I guess the whole point of this exercise is to force one to sit down and actually think about their life.

I’ve looked back on the hard events of my life. High School, University, various relationships. I looked back at remembering my mental and emotional frameworks at those times; how my interests and passions have evolved. I thought about the people who affected my life. What I’m trying to say is that this was a hard task, but here we go.

Restless. Fell down, got hurt. Grew

2017-02-03 “Reflections on Career Path”

You get two in rapid succession this time, since I cheated on the last one and spent the bulk of the dedicated time ahead of the scheduled journalling hour. This prompt is to reflect on career and to write a timeline of it. I’m going to keep this one short to start with, and then maybe add more in later since I’ve been ranting about how the power of the Internet is that we’re free from static paper-emulation and that content can be dynamic etc. Time to put my money where my mouth is I suppose.

My labour in the sphere of what you’d probably call ‘career’ has, by-and-large, been concentrated in the academic sphere to date, but it’s worth reflecting on how I got here.

2002 – 2008 (Middle and High School)

The reason I’ve went this far back is that I have very distinct memories imagining various careers and lifestyles for myself at this age. Now, 6 years is a long time and where I grew up in Northumberland we still operated on a three-tier school system. So not only does this time period consist of over half a decade at formative years, but it also covers two different schools and the growth involved with moving to a new one.

Early on in Middle School (aged 10 and 11) I was primarily interested in Mathematics. I’m not sure why, now. I remember, though, that by the time I had hit aged 12 this had shifted significantly towards English. My favourite subjects quickly became English, History, and Science. In fact, actually - Maths became my least favourite subject aside from PE and it’s more patriarchal cousin Games (sports). I was known for a being a tubby in the Middle school years. It was during this time that I got drafted into the school Christmas Play, this time taking the form of a Pantomime version of the Nativity story called “A Lad in a Manger” and I fell in love with acting. I kept this up for a while, and enjoyed performing in the play the year after this. That being my final year at the school, I didn’t know if I was going to continue. At this time I very much wanted to embark on a career in acting, on the stage as opposed to in films. I dreamed about it regularly.

My final two years at the Middle School also saw me develop a very sincere love of creative writing, and I spent a lot of time devising stories and plot lines with some writing friends. At this point, I was always more excited at the macro-scale world-building than the gritty wordsmithing. In my final year (aged 13) I became Head Boy as well. This didn’t really lead to anything except a bit of an inflated ego going into High School, which was sharp sorted out.

I began High School with much the same enthusiasms I did when I left Middle School, and did well across the board in all subjects. I did exceptionally well in the subjects I was passionate about. The British School system, whilst fundamentally broken was basically built for people like me. I did well at exams, and in classrooms. At home, my parents were from working class family backgrounds, and they’d used their drive and limited class-mobility to provide us with a slightly better environment than they’d had. Namely, a supportive one for doing well at school.

During High School I began to care more about my writing than I did about acting. I did join a local theatre group (BATS) to continue with that passion, but I co-founded a Creative Writing group with peers and support from a teacher and this formed the basis for what I wanted to do for a career. I would run home from school, and sit in front of the family computer for hours and hours; writing out various chapters of my envisioned fantasy epic. Being a published author drove me, and the thing I wanted to do most for a career in the whole world. The other thing that I got into, was HTML. Whenever I wasn’t writing terrible fiction, I was writing terrible HTML pages. You can read about how bad I was here. I didn’t particularly envision a career in web development, however, and I needed a back-up plan if the world didn’t recognise my literary genius… At this age, I hadn’t yet begun to question my parents’ fallibility; and my passion for the Sciences lead my father to get excited and convince me that I wanted to be a Pharmacist. His reasoning was “Pharmacists get paid a lot of money, and they don’t get the blame as much as Doctors do as they just dispense the drugs” Obviously I can’t just blame him, but I took that logic to heart; why wouldn’t I? My parents obviously knew best, they had jobs, and I was good at the sciences (very good). This caused me a lot of pain later on.

My GCSEs came and went. I sailed through them on my ability to revise a bare minimum, and do well at exams. I came out with some sterling grades (especially in Chemistry and English), and made my way to the 6th form sign-up day at the school.

2008 – 2011 (6th Form College)

Between receiving my GCSEs and signing up for A-levels, I scored a job working for the local Domino’s pizza franchise. This provided a little pocket money, the knowledge that I didn’t want to make pizza for my career, and (as I would learn later on) - the ability to undergo severe physical discomfort by gritting my teeth to earn under minimum wage due to my age.

When I began 6th form college, I took what I was good at and (thought) that I enjoyed. This happened to be Chemistry, Physics, Biology, and English Literature. I still had the mentality of a successful GCSE student, though, and didn’t put in any effort beyond getting myself some stationary. That in combination with my new proper girlfriend (ooh) and my job at Domino’s, meant that my college work didn’t really take priority - after all I managed to do well at GCSE without effort! I got way more into computing at this point, and had begun to be using Linux as my main OS since about April 2008 at the end of my GCSEs. At home instead of homework, I’d be reading wikis on file permission systems, and playing around with “penetration testing” software.

I got smacked around the head with my first exam results - essentially Ds and Es in everything except for English Lit (B) and Chemistry (U). This was the first time in my life I’d ever failed at anything ‘academic’ and the experience promptly forced me into my first ever genuinely reflective period. I realised two things. First - that I hated the idea of being a pharmacist, and studying chemistry and physics; wanting instead to work with computers (although at the time I didn’t think I’d study at degree level). The second, that people re-sat Year 12 at 6th form all the time and I wouldn’t be alone if I did this. So I went to the college heads and told them what I wanted, they agreed to let me resit the year.

So resit it I did, and I was a changed Marshall. I re-sat the year with a Double Award in ICT (giving me two A-levels at the end), I-Media (a meaningless course I basically took to fill the timetable and because it complimented ICT), and Science in Society (scratched my itch in science mostly). Armed with the knowledge of how to balance priorities now, I managed to sail through the ICT tasks, and did pretty well in SiS. I-Media bowed before my years of experimenting with Open Source media software and file formats; Audacity, GIMP, OGG, etc. I worked hard, bonded with new friends, and basically had a lot of fun in my two years of 6th form. I even developed a work ethic, staying behind in Computer Clusters on non-Pizza days to finish sections of reports.

I began to tire of the endless slog that seemed to be school, though, and was put off of the idea of university initially. I won’t pretend that the idea of debt scared me - I never even really thought about it. I was tired of taking work home with me and not being paid. I looked into apprenticeships in being a ’tecchie’, the support for organisations and schools. Luckily, a friend who was ahead of me in 6th form had been through that system and served as a warning of what could happen - there were very few jobs in it, as tecchies often buried themselves in until ready to quit and it was a recession. Positions rarely opened up, and rarely in towns like Cramlington.

As my grades were pretty solid, and I began experimenting with more computing things like Python scripting, I took the idea of attending university seriously. After a quick discussion with a few peers, and teachers, I decided to give the whole thing a shot and applied to a bunch of local universities; with the idea of having Newcastle as the dream (good credentials) and Teeside as the back-up (living away from home). I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career at this point - only that it involved technology, and that I wanted to put off the decision for a few years. It was off to uni then!

2011 – 2014 (Undergraduate Degree)

I managed to score an offer from Newcastle University and consigned myself to spending 3 years of being that student who lived with their parents, and who got the bus every morning. I have to admit, it put a bit of a downer on the whole experience. That I’d just broken up with my then-girlfriend (pretty messily too) didn’t really help matters. My saviour came in the form of my current flatmate, I, who was moving into a flat ran by his landlord father and was in search of a flatmate. I ran some quick maths, quit my job at Domino’s and moved in.

Actually, quitting didn’t really happen. I handed in my notice and worked it. I then ran into an old manager I’d had, who was opening up a new store in the centre of Newcastle. I hesitantly agreed to work for him. Turned out to be a good decision, and I managed to have the money for an actual social life during the first few years of my degree.

In terms of a career, I envisioned a post-degree career in the Royal Navy. I’m honestly not sure where I came up with the notion. None of my family were particularly militaristic. The idea pretty much arrived in my head fully formed. It made sense both financially (security was more important than luxury to me) and in terms of lifestyle. I’m a creature of ritual and routine, and I liked the idea of long stretches of working with breaks in them. I got as far as signing up, and undergoing the medical, physical, and aptitude tests (passing them), before I met a person who changed my life entirely. I’ve said enough about this event tbh, and risk trying to make it out to be something that it wasn’t. What this meeting did for me though, was open my eyes to feminism and the influences of patriarchy. This lead very much down a road to where I am now. The effect this had on career plans was a bit prospect-killing. I didn’t want to serve a nation that the workers didn’t own, and especially one ran by a Tory government and a decrepit monarchy.

In the 3rd year of my undergraduate, I realised that I needed to delay for another year in order to ensure that I had time to think about stuff and potentially get a foot in the door somewhere. I transferred from the BSc to the MComp, which would give me a funded Master’s degree and a year to think about things.

In my 3rd year I also found myself really enjoying the Interaction Design and HCI modules. Coincidentally, the lecturer for the second semester module told us about a Centre for Doctoral Training that they’d managed to get funded - giving people the opportunity to apply for PhDs in the area. I looked at it. I liked it and, after speaking with the lecturer and the Prof who was head of the lab, I applied. I somehow managed to get through the interview process (I genuinely think it was because I was technical and they needed technical folks for the inter-disciplinary model) and I was in! I transferred back to the BSc and collected my certificate from a desk in the Uni office.

2014 – 2017 (Present at time of writing)

I started the MRes with anticipation and excitement, as it looked like I was going to be having a chance to develop full fledged projects using my technical expertise. The MRes year itself was incredibly challenging, and changed me in a lot of ways. I was introduced to a vast quantity of different and deep worldviews. My conceptualisation of Satanism was challenged. My understanding of feminism deepened. When I began the MRes I was a whiny fledgling; and the challenge forced me into a very serious period of reflection that lead to me seeking a greater understanding of strength, and the hero’s journey that I found myself on.

This is the journey that I still find myself on today. Very much entrenched in the Road of Trials. I came into the MRes not particularly knowing what I wanted from a career other than “build cool stuff and help people”. That mantra stays with me today, although I think the way that I envision it playing out has changed. My PhD thus far has only involved building stuff at the very recent stages of it (Feb ‘17). My work with charities, specifically a charity, has lead me to question my desire for an academic career. The whole process of applying to be an RA seems to be pretty straightforward, but there is very little security in that role and acquiring a permanent position (ie Lecturer) seems to be a tooth and claw process. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not naive about positions in or as a charity – getting funding for those seems to be equally as tough. Both domains talk about ‘impact’ a lot. Both offer opportunities to do the things I want to do - build cool stuff, and help people. Both involve taking less money than working in the private or government sector. Neither provide particular job/funding security. The Third Sector does seem to offer a reprieve from the self-centred, career-driven, realm of academia. There are those in the sector that try to climb ladders, and end up as CEOs etc; but it seems to be the expectation that in academia you climb over each other to grab at lectureships handed down. Survival in the Third Sector doesn’t seem to depend on climbing ladders made of your peers’ potential, but treading water.

Both gloomy images. Let’s see what happens.

2017-03-07 “A Day In The Life”

Today’s journalling prompt is “Write about your day, or if you’re journalling in the morning, write about the previous day”. This is actually a really nice one for me, as it gives me the opportunity to quickly reflect on whether I’m hitting some of my goals I laid out in previous journalling days, as well as give people a quick snapshot into what I do with my life day-to-day.

I’m writing this on Tuesday morning, so will be writing about Monday. Mondays are a strong start to the week for me.

0450 Wake Up

I wake on a Monday at 0450 in order to exercise/train. I usually wake up a bit before this, actually, but I wait until the 0450 mark because my flatmate is usually smoking in the back garden where I train until about 0430. I grab my training gear, my training diary, and my water before I head outside.

My routine consists of a progressive calisthenics circuit derived from adapting the movements contained in Convict Conditioning. I perform two warm-up rounds of easier / standard variations of most of the movements, and then three ‘work’ rounds of my current stage. Currently a typical work round will consist of

Close/Diamond Push-Ups x 12
Box Pistol (Knee high box) x 5 (each leg)
Classic Bridge x12 (performed for reps, like a Push-Up)
Assisted Pull-up (purple band, no idea what the assistance is in newtons)
Hanging Straight Leg Raise x 5

I normally perform the work rounds three times, and then finish with some fingertip knee push-ups and some bar hangs to strengthen my grip. Yesterday, however, I was feeling really drained and tired and I felt myself beginning to doze during the 2 mins of rest between rounds. I put this down to erratic sleep, and the fact I’d just gotten back from a physically intensive holiday in Spain with plenty of hikes and climbs. So I performed one work round at maximum intensity and thought I’d call it a day until Thursday, and catch back up then.

0530 Rest and reading

My training usually finishes at approx 0600, so I found myself with an extra half an hour. I used it to doze on the sofa, and read the odd Wikipedia article about various bits and pieces of philosophy and political economy that I’d been trying to wrap my head around.

0545 Breakfast and dishes

I quickly grew bored with resting, but I’d cooled down from exercise so didn’t want to go back to it. I needed to cook my breakfast and a carbohydrate component for my lunch so I set some potatoes to boil, and started off a jalapeño omelette. I ate my breakfast, checked the potatoes, and did some leftover dishes. Over breakfast I listened to a podcast I’d been meaning to catch up on whilst I folded my training clothes into a pile.

0630 Tea time

At 0630, I wake up my partner, B, from her slumber and navigate the fallout by ensuring she is presented with the proper tribute. Tea. Our morning ritual is thus that we lay in bed for a while, cuddling and sipping tea. We usually chat about our week ahead as well.

0720 Get ready

I’d normally begin my getting ready process a bit earlier than this, to account for needing to cook something for my lunch. However, since I had extra time due to a shorter training session I’d already performed this task. My getting ready routine essentially just looks like heading to the bathroom to wash quickly, and returning to the bedroom. Usually during this time B has dressed herself and began helping out by making the bed (something for which I am ever grateful because she’s awesome at it). She then takes her wash bag through to the bathroom and I get dressed and pack my bags. We’re usually ready together for about 0745, and leave.

0800 Workish

My lab is only about 10 - 15 minutes walk away from my flat, so I usually arrive at this time in the morning. I spend a few minutes going over some stuff from a few weeks ago, when I’d left for Spain, and head upstairs to the ‘Design Space’.

My tasks for my PhD at the minute are quite diverse, including some development work and some writing, but I wanted to focus on writing yesterday. I’ve got to start and deliver a rough methodology chapter by the end of the month so I spent the majority of the morning reading other thesis methodology chapters that included a lot of ethnography in order to understand the animal that I was dealing with. I also picked up a few book chapters on the subject, and skimmed them.

During this time I also spent a few minutes at a time chatting with my friend, K, over instant messenger as she needed a chat about some stuff.

1200 Lunch

I ate lunch, 5-bean chilli which I’d batch-cooked plus the potatoes I’d made before, with my colleagues A and J. Afterwards, I drank some tea and moved back into the Design Space.

1245 Workish

I spent my afternoon revisiting the reading I’d done, and searching for some papers around Marxism and Ethnomethodology. I want to take a bit of a Marxist critique of the labour of transparency in my thesis (also I’m a massive fan of Marx), and need a solid way to link that analysis with the Ethnomethodology I’ve been performing. I found one good one, and printed it.

During this time, the WiFi in the workspace must’ve been playing up as everything requiring the internet on my machine was taking forever and I spent ages waiting at the printer for my documents to be printed. I only got about an hour of solid reading in.

1500 Fieldwork / Volunteering

Mondays I go to the West End to visit my research participants. I booked a taxi at 1500 and it arrived for about 1520. I skimmed a paper whilst I was waiting outside.

My fieldwork generally consists of arriving at the charity, and spending some time with the staff where I can show them some of the software I’m building, and then help out with various things. Today the manager, M, and I got some free play equipment from another organisation and brought it to the Play Centre that my partners run. It was some blocks to play with and some plastic hockey sticks. From about 1630 the staff and the young people arrive at the centre (8-12 yrs). The hockey sticks went down a treat and we actually spent the majority of the session playing an enormous game of hockey between two opposing sides. Afterwards, the charity used the free bread alongside some cheese and salad (and crisps) they’d brought to get the young people to construct their own sandwiches. There was only 10 mins left after that so people played for a bit before filtering out.

Leaving took a while, and I spent some time chatting with M about various topics that were on my mind such as reflexivity in ethnography (this was actually me probing him to check that he realised that I was still performing research as I volunteered etc. He knows.), and also the state of the working class in Britain at the moment. After a few stops in the minibus, he drops me off close to my flat at about 1900

1900 Relax

I don’t usually eat dinner on a Monday, however I had some leftover curry I’d cooked the previous day. I threw it in the microwave, changed into my ‘home clothes’ (loose shorts and a baggy tee) and stuck Netflix on for two episodes of a cartoon show. After that I checked YouTube to watch some of my favourite Blacksmiths forge an axe, and then I turned off my laptop in order to concentrate on reading my book at about 2115. I’ve decided to tackle the ‘Wheel of Time’ again. It’s loooong. I started Book 3 of 14 last night. After a few hours of reading I turned out my light at 2300.

2017-03-10 “Levelling up, a roadmap for myself”

Today I’m going off-piste and giving myself my own journalling prompt. Last year I read the book Level up Your Life by NerdFitness founder Steve Kamb. The book, whilst very nicely written, is essentially just a swiss army knife style summary of some of the things I’ve also been reading over the last few years. Namely, it contained a very condensed version of the Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, some advice on goal setting, a bit of minimalist philosophy, and a (relatively) low barrier to access exercise regime in order to allow people to “live a life of adventure”. I should note that whilst I enjoyed the book, it read very much like the “if I did it so can you” that is common amongst white middle-class cisstraight males. THere was a good section covering different socio-economic circumstances, and Kamb did a good job of pointing out others who could act as mentors for those with different backgrounds, but I feel that this is worth noting.

All in all, I enjoyed the book as it served as a very good summary of a lot of other things I’d been reading such as Happiness By Design, some minimalist stuff, and even The Spirit Level. Also worth a note is Homo Deus as it also covers some of the same themes in part.

The common themes in the books was that purpose is an essential part of how we derive joy in our life. Both from our actions (we could speak of Marx’s theory of Alienation as well here…) as well as the objects around us. I’ve since embarked on a de-cluttering mission designed to evaluate each of the objects that I have about my personal space and get rid of the things I don’t need. On the other hand, this has also involved an evaluation of personal habits that I want to affect change in. Unfortunately, the change I want to engage in occasionally requires that I purchase or otherwise bring new items (shudder) into my life. The fact I want to save money towards a mortgage doesn’t help with this cognitive dissonance.

To get around this, I’ve began utilising Kamb’s concept of “Levelling up” with my purchases. A purchase that I make should enable me to do something. This can be making an existing process more efficient, in attempt to reach a grander goal, or can allow me to do something new within the context of an existing hobby (e.g. a new pull-up assistance band). This post, therefore, is a way of cataloguing all of the things I have floating around in my head and how I think that they will level me up in various aspects of my life.

Bike Gear

I recently got a bicycle from the charity that I work with, for my consistent volunteering on Mondays. The reason I wanted a bike in the first place was to make me more mobile, without having to invest in learning how to drive or actually get a car. As I exist primarily in urban areas, it’s relatively easy to peddle around a my bike affords me cardiovascular exercise, recreational activity, and increased mobility between places (and therefore a net saving on time spent travelling).

At first, my bike sat unused for a month or so, then I began to take it on recreational trips. I couldn’t use it for commuting, since it didn’t have a lock. After a few recreational trips, I purchased a lock and some lights in order to be able to use it for quick jaunts to and from the city centre, and to local supermarkets (obviously role-played in my head as scouting and supply missions). What follows is a brief summary of my envisioned level ups for my bike:

Helmet, will make me feel more confident using the city’s roads as means of travelling more effectively throughout the city
Hi-Viz Vest I am changing my clothes habits to be more layer based. A Hi-Viz jacket will combine with the helmet and the lights to make me more confident on the city’s roads, as well as enable safer night cycling. Such mobility!
Bike multitool Will allow me to perform basic maintenance on the bike, as by this point I will have invested enough points into it that it’ll begin to get used quite frequently and thus see some wear and tear.
Spare inner tubes and hand pump Punctures happen. Spare inner tubes, combined with the multitool, will allow me to adapt to dangers on the road. Puncture repair kits are a bit naff. This adaptability also increases me roaming and exploration capacity for when I’m out just riding, as opposed to commuting or travelling.
Panniers These will allow the bike to become a much more effective transport steed, allowing me to perform much better-planned shopping trips.
Phone case By this point, discounting any unforeseen requirements, I will have made myself quite secure and adaptable on the bike and it’s time to take some longer journeys. A phone case that straps to my handle bars will allow me to plot longer journeys to commute between the city centre and some of the outskirts, as well as the outlying towns and places of interest.

The next question I need to answer is how do I determine when I’ve earned the level-up? I obviously don’t want to fall into the trap of just buying a whole bunch of bike gear and then never using it. I’ve obviously started to use it, but I think that every month I should have clocked up so many trips on the bike based on what I want to use it for: recreation and commuting. There’s no magic number during the month, but consistency should be the key element.

Cooking and diet

One of my current goals is to consistently ensure that I am not just defaulting to purchasing lunch at work when I could have prepared a meal. I bought a slow cooker some time ago, and have recently began using it again very consistently. Whilst I definitely enjoy the act of cooking things, when it’s required in order to prepare a meal later I prefer to batch-cook and reduce the amount of labour required when it’s divided across meals.

Since returning from Madrid, I’ve been really into making chilli in my slow cooker. This is good. Combined with the increased mobility from my bicycle I’ve been able to retrieve supplies and cook them really effectively. A quick reflection over my cooking practices has shown that this has been key in preventing me from defaulting to delicious yet unhealthy and expensive takeaway food. The fact that I know am ok with fasting in the evenings has also contributed to this. Where I’ve been falling down, however, and causing myself some stress, is that I require a means of cooking the carbohydrate portion I enjoy with meals (generally rice or potatoes) whilst minimising the attention I need to pay to pots boiling over.

On a Friday and Saturday, I also treat myself to a large bag of crisps. I’ve largely been successful in reducing snacking, but it’s been creeping back in. Some way to increase the healthiness of the snacks is required, that isn’t overly labour intensive.

Rice Cooker I’ve been banging on about getting one of these for absolutely ages. I really want one. The ability to just turn it on, and then do something else for 20 minutes whilst the rice cooks will mean the absolute world to me. Combined with my slow cooker, this would effectively reduce the cognitive effort required to plan and produce my lunchtime meals to near-zero, with delicious results.
Mandolin Something I’ve fancied for a little while, but haven’t been able to justify until recently. A Mandolin will allow me to slice vegetables really thinly, which make for good sandwiches (good for scouting missions to the cliffs), and more importantly: good for crisps. I absolutely adore crisps, to the point where I have zero portion control. If I could offset the cost of crisps to producing them myself it would be good. I am not alienated from the product and thus lose an element of consumerism, and I get a bit more control over what I put into my body. Seems like a win win.

There are various other specialist items I want, but can’t quite justify yet so I won’t even mention them. In terms of determining when I’ve earned the level, I think that a similar approach to my mobility levels will be appropriate. This probably means I can get my rice cooker soon (in fact I am going to) since I’ve been realllly consistent with my slow cooker this year. I’ve only bought lunch on special occasions, where I’ve already brought in my chilli! The mandolin I can get some other time, really. One thing I’d like to try and do, though, is cook something like a curry in my slow cooker. That would be a good way to make the most of it.

Home space and Minimalism

It sounds really weird to say that you want to purchase things in order to become more minimalist, and in fact that’s often my problem with the diehard approaches that people take to it. This section stems, therfore, from the relationships I have with my physical space at the moment and the ones that I desire to have in the near-future.

I’ve always enjoyed a reconfigurability for space. I like the idea that you can make the most out of something by just shifting some things around. I also enjoy large open spaces, which is difficult when you’re trapped in the smaller bedroom of a flat. Unfortunately this requires some equipment to facilitate this reconfiguration.

Electronics Trolley I don’t much care what the material is, but a small trolley that would replace my main desk with the ability to move would be a fantastic thing for me. Currently, I envision that this allows me to enjoy the space of my flat’s communal space whilst other people are engaging with the main television there. The trolley would contain my games consoles, a space for my laptop, and a power strip; being topped by the smaller television that I essentially use as a monitor. In the mornings, I could wheel this out of my bedroom into the front room to play games whilst my partner watches netflix on my laptop, or if I wanted to work she could keep the trolley in the room whilst I took the laptop to work on.
Hard drives and USB pens Having recently experienced a catastrophic drive failure, resulting in the loss of nearly all of my personal data history from 2010 – present, this is a sore one for me. Currently, I have a 500GB external drive sat on my desk that requires power, and is pretty static. We mainly use it to watch The Simpsons of an evening, but it’s useful for quick back-ups etc. My problem with it is that it takes up room, and requires a separate plug in the power strip. Replacing this with a 1TB 2.5" drive would make this more portable and require less power. It also turns out that my television can accept a USB input. With USB pens being relatively inexpensive these days, I can envision a dedicated USB pen for TV shows (ie cartoons) so that I don’t need to power both my TV and laptop in order to engage in our nightly rituals. The smaller drives would allow them to be stored away in drawers for space saving as well.
Futon The big one. I’m talking about a proper Japanese futon as opposed to the ones associated with Ikea (not that I have a problem with those). My reasons for this being that I find sleeping close to ground very comfortable, and there are numerous health benefits to sleeping on the floor. The futon will provide a degree of comfort in exchange for a slight reduction in health benefits (a net gain compared to a bed) but, excitingly, is designed to be rolled up and stored when not in use. This basically allows me to reclaim the space taken up by a bed, prevents me from laying on the bed during the day (and therefore not sleeping), as well as providing a nice nightly ritual that signals to me that it’s bed time.

These are all relatively big purchases, and I wouldn’t be making them for a little while yet. Especially since all of them explicitly require new purchases to be brought into my home. In order to level up to these things, I want to have gotten rid of swathe of things first.

Clothes

I’m generally really good with clothes as I don’t go clothes shopping a lot. In terms of the ’levelling up’ aspect of this part of my life, though, sometimes I like to change my clothes around a bit for variety and to experiment. I don’t think this is unique at all, and everyone does it. Eventually, I want to create a capsule wardrobe which I can just continually wear, and provide a lot of variety.

The main thing that I noticed when evaluating my wardrobe, however, is that I actually currently own less items of clothing than recommended by most minimalist guides! The reason for this is that I am fortunate enough to have a working environment in academia that is relatively relaxed in terms of the clothes that I wear. I’ve never owned a full suit, partly due to this and also partly due to the investment being useless since my body changes constantly due to training (mainly waist growth, although that’s levelled off for the moment). Similarly, I’ve outgrown all of my old shirts and never bothered to replace them. I mainly exist in a state of switching between Workman’s trousers, Cargo trousers, and a variety of tees.

Whilst happy with this, I did mention that I crave a bit more variety, and I also think that I can condense a few of my duplicate tees into a few nicer quality ones, that fit better and have been made by slightly-better-paid slave children (I joke but this really upsets me that it’s difficult to escape this practice).

Tees I used to by my tees from Primark due to their inexpensiveness and liking the cut. As my body has filled out thanks to push-ups the tees, even when bought larger, have begun to hang off my body in a way that I don’t necessarily like all the time. I recently played with getting a plain tee from Gildan, and I like it much better. It fits good, I like the colour, and the cotton is of higher quality so it actually feels nice on my skin and I don’t overheat. In future I would like to replace my Primark tees with Gildan ones, effectively collapsing the amount of tees that I have in my drawers. To illustrate, I have three of the same blue tee from Primark. I can collapse them all into a single higher quality Gildan tee. This means less clothes, but will likely mean I can wash the majority of my clothes in a single wash as opposed to only half. That appeals to me for future potential travelling.
Shirts I’ve been trying to break into the shirt game for a while but have been put off for a number of reasons. Mainly, I don’t want to invest in a nice shirt when I could outgrow it in 6 months (thanks pull-ups, you tough-yet-rewarding dickheads). Not-nice and cheap shirts make me overheat rapidly. Ideally I want about three shirts. A flannel one, and two cotton of different colours. Combined with my tees I should be able to make a fair few outfits from that.
Hoodie A project I’ve been tossing around in my head for a little while. I currently have three hoodies; work, weekend, and training. They’re all also different brands and qualities. What I would ideally like to do, is purchase a good quality build of hoodie and then modify it so that the arms zip off. This means it becomes an all-year hoodie that’s modular and adaptable so I can use it for travel, training, and commuting (or wearing around the house).

This is probably the easiest part to decide when to level up. Whenever I’ve decided that I’m sick to death of wearing a particular set of clothes, I’ll allocate some of next months’ budget to condensing the wardrobe in a particular fashion.

TBC

This post has been the product of a morning’s reflective journalling, and I’ll likely have some leftover itches to scratch and reflect on. So I might update the post when I know more about what I want. Until then, this is more than enough to strive towards in the quest of my life :-P

In the order of prompts, today should be a reflection on the Hero’s Journey. Turns out, I already did one a little while ago. So I’ve turned to the next prompt, which concerns friends. I’d like to quote the prompt verbatim.

From ancient times, men developed their manhood within a group of other men. Do you have a gang of friends who push and support you? If not, how could you make some good friends?

If we strip away the ‘masculine’ parts of this, it boils down to a good question about the nature of the people I surround myself with, and what they do for me, and of course what I do for them. Instead of literally listing and “reviewing” my friends (which would be creepy, yes?) I want to take the opportunity to reflect on what my social network actually means to me.

I am incredibly fortunate in that, with a few exceptions, I’ve always managed to find myself alongside some close friends. It’s very rare that I’ve been sat wanting for raw social contact, and often in my late-teens/early 20s I’d actually have to make excuses in order to get time alone. I’ve also been lucky in that I’ve very rarely had to explicitly call in favours in terms of care from my social network, although they’ve almost uniformly jumped to action when they saw I was ever in need.

At a foundational level, this is incredibly heart-warming. For the most part, I know that if I ever stumble that there’ll be some form of informal care thrown my way at some point (I use the term informal meaning not state or otherwise professionally mandated, not sure if that’s accurate!). On the other hand, I very often feel isolated from others (as all must do sometimes I suppose). Specifically, I often look to others as peer mentors a la Hero’s Journey mechanics, and I make a heavy use of symbolism in my day-to-day life. Whenever I bring this up in one manner or another amongst various circles of peers, it inevitably invites discomfort and occasional light-hearted mockery of my mannerisms and ’eccentricities’. Whilst I understand that this is a crucial part of bond-forming (when done in a circle of friends), often it still leaves me feeling alienated as I continually find that the way I engage with my life and with others’ is disregarded by them as relatively amusing. To take an example, fundamental things like my drive to wake early and engage in physical strength training is mocked as “a waste of energy” by some circles, whilst they can somehow justify sitting and binge-watching Wrestling as if that is the pinnacle of self-determination.

At yet another level, my slide (some would argue that ‘descent’ is a more appropriate term…) into Communism and Marxist philosophy has somewhat ironically resulted in alienating me further from peers that I once held in high esteem as moral guides. I do engage in several Marxist and Communist circles, but these have been mostly limited to online activities since the scene around Newcastle (with occasional exception) is pretty dire. I am from a relatively rich nation, with a white cisgender background, I live in a city with a strong multicultural presence (probably weak compared with other cities but whatever), and I have spent the last 6 years of my life in higher education. To say that I am surrounded by liberal ideology is an understatement. Up until recently, this was a boon, and gradually afforded me the social and mental faculties to begin the reflection and study that eventually lead to my Socialist leaning. My point, though, is that my leap to the left and subsequent growing disdain for Liberalism has resulted in a tangible feeling of alienation from those I spend physical time with. I can go online and enter a world of glorious revolutionaries, but on a day to day level I feel ideologically isolated from those who form my close friends and colleagues. At first, the debate around various topics was fun and engaging, however as I began to debate more serious issues I felt the alienation further. Things like defending violent protest was met with looks of disgust, which is fine. I get that. These are relatively non-mainstream views and they require defending, it’s just that when I did defend them (inelegantly, admittedly as I often find it difficult to vocalise my exact line of reasoning), the response to my defence was relatively hollow but more specifically echoed as I was outnumbered. I felt like I had to make a decision between continuing to argue whilst outnumbered 3-1, and risk ruining a series of incredibly close friendships, or backing down and looking like my ideas were half baked. Since my need for social contact vastly outstrips my desire to be proven right, I chose the latter. In defence of my friends – my internal conflict was my construction, and I may have misread the situation and consequences of further debate.

On another note, my liberal friends provide a good way to break the Marxist-Leninist bubble I can sometimes find myself in due to my directed readings of philosophy and news online. I get exposed to some pretty good things, which I have to reconcile, that I otherwise wouldn’t if I exclusively hung out with Commies. My colleagues at Open Lab do this for me a lot more than other friendships, though. To that I am eternally grateful.

I need to tie this post off now, and produce a positive message for myself. In summary, I have a series of really close friends. On whom I know I can rely for pretty much anything, pragmatically, in terms of support. In contrast, my mannerisms and political philosophy have resulted in feelings of alienation from them as I cannot engage with them on those terms. I am feeling starved of co-located contact with like-minded Commies, and every time I use the word ‘Comrade’ it rings hollow. To rectify this, I am seeking to become more involved in local Communist and Cuban and Palestinian Solidarity groups (there’s a lot of crossover), whereas before I just attended a few meetings here and there.

Onwards and upwards eh?

2017-03-17 “Project Outline”

I’m being naughty again today, and picking up a journal prompt that I’ve really fancied for a while, instead of moving forward linearly. The prompt is to identify a project that I want to complete with my hands, and detail the steps / resources / help I will need. I recently got into crafting things with my hands, in various shapes and forms. Nothing of particularly good quality, but being able to express my creativity with manual skills is nice.

I’ve had my eye on a project for a while, which I’d like to try and create a first iteration of for one of my closest friends, K. She shares a lot of the same aesthetics that I do around physical artefacts (ie a medieval fetish), and appreciates a good custom gift. What I’d like to do, is to make her a custom notebook and leather notebook cover, which she can swap out for notebook ‘refills’ at her leisure. Ideally, integrated into the cover, would be a small piece of carved bone that acts as a holder or clasp to close the notebook.

There are several reasons that this appeals to me. Primarily, it’s that I’ve always fancied working with leather and enjoy making things for K because she gets embarrassed that she’s “not as crafty as [I am]”. For transparency’s sake, I don’t count myself as crafty at all; just willing to get mucked in. I have close to zero technical skill in the materials department. The next reason, is that it’s a good opportunity to try out a project as there’s a deadline. If I don’t have a deadline, I won’t do it. I also like the idea of this being a mixed materials project, and if it goes right then I can also implement some stuff with bone and the laser cutter Finally, I love notebooks so this will let me play around with making custom stuff for them.

Steps

As with any project, the main steps involved will be Research, Design, Implement in an iterative cycle that will teach me what goes wrong. The lower level steps that I can foresee at the moment are:

Research basic leather sewing skills, and notebook cover designs
Research basic book-binding skills (already done kinda)
Design the interior of the custom notebook
Design the exterior of the custom notebook
Fabricate the custom notebook
Acquire leather for the exterior, and leather sewing kit
Measure and cut leather based on dimensions of the custom notebook
Sew leather in accordance to the pattern derived from the Research
Attach leather cord so that the cover can close and cover the notebook
Carve a basic bone “thingy” that is attached the chord and allows it to knot over itself
Test some leather cutoff on the laser cutter
Option 1 If laser cutter on leather works nicely, derive a small pattern from somewhere and implement on notebook cover
Option 2 If laser cutter on leather is nasty, leave plain

I’m sure I will learn of more steps, and can break them down further, but that’s good for now.

Resources

Most of my resources will be raw materials and some tools I haven’t acquired.

For the notebook itself I will need

Paper of some sort, a high gsm will be nice, yet it remains to be seen whether K prefers lines/squared/plain/etc or a mixture.
Covering, likely a high gsm coloured paper or a cardboard sheet.
Staples, for binding. The notebook won’t be particularly dense. Considering that each sheet of A4/A5 paper gives 4 pages when folded (presuming both sides are used) then 25 pages gives a 100 notebook.
Printer, in case I decide to make a version of the notebook with prompts / reflections. And to print a custom cover design.
Design software, in case I decide to make the version with prompts etc. Likely Scribus and Inkscape.

For the leather cover I will need

Leather Sewing equipment. An awl and leather sewing needle, and sinew or fake sinew.
Scrap leather, to practice on (acquired)
Leather, for the final piece
Bone, for carving (acquired)
Bone carving equipment (acquired)
Leather cord, to wrap around the cover (acquired)
The lab’s laser cutter, to test with.

Help

Most of my help will come from the internet, as I don’t particularly know anyone who’s quite into the same crafts that I am. I’ve already been reading about designs that I like. I think I have a design in my head that shouldn’t be overly complicated, and my inexperience can be passed off as giving the piece a “rugged” look.

That said, I will be asking around some of the makers and craftsy folk I know; mainly at work. Even if they’ve never done a similar project there might be a “Oh well leather has this weird characteristic that…” or equivical tidbit that I don’t want to miss out on.

Suppose I’ll try to update folk on my progress at some point. I really should start this.

2017-03-21 “Nostalgia”

Today’s journal prompt is to reflect on the period of my life for which I have the greatest nostalgia, and then distil what I find nostalgic about that period into actionable things for me to implement in my life at the moment. This is quite a tough one for me since, as a general rule, I try to ensure that I’m happy as I progress through life; I feel that if I’m ever unhappy and pining for a past state of being, then I’m doing something wrong in the present. This generally prompts a series of reflections to identify an area I’m unhappy in, and implement changes to get it to work. For the sake of the post, however, I’ll pick a random period and run with it.

Most people I’ve spoken to about when they were happiest are happiest about High School. Certainly this is the case for my partner, B. I’m not sure why really, as I became steadily happier when I left School, 6th form, and my family home behind in order to pursue my degree. My High School years were a very mixed bag, and I certainly don’t like the person I was when I was back there. Same goes for my first year as an undergraduate. Whilst I am nostalgic for the sense of freedom, and relative lack of responsibility, and a few of the romantic entanglements I found myself in; I lead a much more fulfilling life now. I suppose if I absolutely had to pick a period of my life to be nostalgic about, it’d be the second year of Uni.

The second year of Uni was the year that I began strength training, although I started it with Powerlifting. It was the year that I had my ego broken down and rebuilt through training, as well as meeting V. It was the year I discovered both Feminism and Socialism. I was also doing very well at Uni, and making a name for myself with the staff there doing extra jobs here and there. If I was to distil this, I’d say that what made me happy about this time period was primarily excitement, anticipation, and playfulness at my newfound sense of discipline and purpose with strength training - learning for the first time that I can actually shape myself mentally, emotionally, and physically, into the human being that I want to be. At the same time that this training made me receptive to this sort of thing, I became involved with V which changed my life in a lot of positive ways and gave me a sense of being loved and feeling valued as a romantic partner. These two aspects of my life – growth and nurturing, combined with my part time work at Domino’s and my studies at Uni gave my life an all-round feeling of actually being a life as opposed to being just something I did.

Some parts of that are difficult to recapture and be actionable. Namely my romantic situation. I’m in a position of a sorts where my role has been reversed, and I currently try to make somebody else feel valued on a daily basis; using the strength that V once helped build in me. I’m not trying to say I’m shouldering a burden, or that my romantic relationship is in dire need of reconfiguration, or that I’m ultimately unhappy. I flit between states of unhappiness and periods of contentment with my partner. What I’m saying is that it’s frustrating giving a lot, and not receiving what you need to nurture yourself in return. V must’ve been so patient. On the other hand, I have maintained my strength training to this day, albeit in a more calisthenics-y form. It still fills me with joy, it still prompts a reflective period. Progression occurs at just the right pace in order to keep me excited at it, whenever I pull off a hard set or add a rep. Forever thankful for it. Love it.

My work life balance is also something I feel quite happy about at the minute. There was a period last summer where I wasn’t very happy with anything. And I was trying to reflect on what it was that was making me so unhappy. I started implementing little patches here and there, and experienced a shift in attitude for some things, and I’ve ultimately arrived at quite a happy place. I’ll give you some examples:

Buying a new PlayStation let me recapture the feelings of being 10 and 12 years old, playing video games of a weekend/evening. This is tempered with constraints that I put onto when I am allowed to play as my perception of time when playing becomes slightly skewed.
Making things with my hands, no matter how bad I am at it. Instead of watching other people build cool stuff I’ve just started getting mucked in and de-alienating myself from the act of production.
I read a lot, like I used to. I was unhappy wasting my evenings and portions of my weekends even though I was entertained. I thought back to when I was 14 and spent all weekend with my nose buried in a fantasy book; I gave it a shot and now I’m reading every night, morning, and all day Sunday. I’m very happy.
Getting rid of clutter. Whilst I arguably owned more things as a child, due to toys being relatively plentiful (thanks Aunties!), each and everything I owned was used and served a purpose. Since December I’ve been engaged in a conscious effort to declutter my life and get rid of things that I don’t need or use. I’m a lot happier for it, and I’ve partially managed to recapture that feeling of living in a spacious room at Uni for the first time in a while. This is still an ongoing process, but I’m happier for the decluttering.
Changed my diet and eating habits. I was trapped for a while in what I call “The Takeaway Spiral”. First, I adore takeaway food. Like, really. Whether it’s chemical or nostalgia I don’t care. The next step of the spiral is a period of stress removing some of the time that I take to cook things from my life. That leads to a takeaway, which leads to cravings, and also a lack of energy because holy hell is takeaway bad for you. That leads to a downward cycle of the same, until I finally break out. I have rearranged a few of my dietary practices to minimise the input of labour and maximise nutrition, whilst lowering costs and also producing meals I’ve historically loved to eat.
I’ve set aside time for things I’ve always envision a “Perfect Marshall” would be doing such as writing.

I think the point I’m trying to make in this post is that nostalgia is a useful tool, and I’ve kinda been using it for 6 months prior to this post in order to prompt growth. This post has been useful, especially compared to the doom and gloom of a few of the previous posts. All in all, I’m happy; and I’m on the up. Road of Trials come at me, my foundation is solid at the moment.

2017-04-04 “Distractions”

Today’s prompt is to reflect on the distractions in my life, even if mildly beneficial, and to understand how they eat up my time. This is something I’ve been reflecting on a bit recently, as I’ve just been through a roughly month-long catabolic period of my life and have had some downtime to think about it. I’ll start first with mapping the distractions that I encounter at various points in my week and/or day, as I’ve got a fairly regular schedule. I will then outline a few of the solutions that I want to begin implementing, including one that I will definitely do today because I’ve found that even talking about things into the future gives me that sweet dopamine rush I need to ignore the problem for another week.

I suppose that I can’t really unpick what distractions are if I don’t outline what my goals are. What’s a goal for some might be a distraction for others, and vice versa. I have some short-term and long-term goals:

Short Term

Build and craft more things, on a weekly or twice-weekly basis
Go through an entire week without spending a penny more than what I budgeted for
Finish my accounting software for my PhD
Get rid of a bunch of items I don’t need
Write about 10k more words in my thesis
Train my arse off at Pull-ups
Stretch a bit
Begin boxing
Reach the point where snacking is a rarity, occurring once a month or less

Mid-term

Save money for a 12%-15% mortgage deposit on a cheap flat
Take 30 hours of sailing lessons and buy a small boat
Finish my Phd with a straightforward, solid, thesis.

The short term goals are the ones that are the most easily derailed in this, as they are the ones that are more easily put off until another day. These are pretty easily divided into Morning, Daytime, Evening, and Weekend periods of time. It should also be noted that I feel myself revving up into an anabolic phase of the year; one where I have high energy and relatively high focus. This means that I can seize the opportunity to make headway and lay the groundwork for when I retreat back into low-energy mode.

Distractions in the Morning

I’ve already discussed distractions and goals in the morning. To summarise; since mid-2012 I’ve built my morning schedule around waking at 0500 in order to train, and recently my training schedule has become condensed to the point where I have several mornings free. I’ve used the time to catch up on sleep, but the gap once occupied by training has lead to a stagnant period of time that I often don’t make the best use of. I enjoy the extra sleep, but I waste the time in the morning I leave myself.

These distractions often take the form of YouTube videos; they’re easily digestible with a cup of tea in the morning and I actually find myself watching various craftspeople a lot so it feels productive at the time. The problem with this is that watching things makes time speed up, and I end up at 0830 without realising what happened.

Part of the issue is that it’s very tempting to just grab a cup of tea, and then head back into bed with the laptop. My first step will be to ensure that I take my tea in the main room of the flat, on the sofa. I’ll then use the time when it’s brewing to stretch, and listen to podcasts, whilst planning for the next hour (see previous goals)

Eventually, I will have a Japense futon instead of a bed and part of my wake-up ritual will be to fold it away. This means I won’t be able to lie in bed at all. Baby steps, though, and first I think just leaving the room is a good idea.

Distractions during the day

I get my first round of distractions when I arrive at work early. If I arrive before 0800 (as I do following a training day, notice how my morning sets the entire tone for my day…) I will often spend a few minutes browsing for articles to read, usually news articles, or if it’s a Monday I’ll catch up on the weekend’s Cracked.com. My excuse to myself is that I’m revving up to do some work and just starting my engine by engaging with consuming content on the computer. This inevitably leads to the same sort of problems I describe with morning YouTube; I end up with around 10 tabs open waiting to be read. Ofc, these are usually good articles and neglecting them is a bit silly too – but there must be a better way of revving up my engine than this?

My initial thoughts are that I should spend 10 minutes at the end of each working day giving myself tasks to do on the following morning, to get myself into gear. I could also begin utilising Pomodoro for a bit and see how that works out? I think revolution is better than evolution here.

Distractions in the evening

My main distraction in the evening is akin to my distraction in the morning – consuming video content. This time, it’s usually more focused on raw entertainment such as Netflix, rather than entertainment wrapped up in the guise of being a tutorial for me to convince myself is worthwhile… ahem.

Anyway my non-partner evening routine kinda looks like this:

Get in
Cook, or not, depending on the day
Convince myself I’m going to read or craft
Turn on the laptop “for a bit”
Realise it’s 0830 and I haven’t done anything.

I think, all I really need to do here is to just decide on a day and force myself not to turn on the laptop. I have two evenings a week to myself fully; Tuesdays and Thursdays. If I go with Thursdays being no-laptop days, I have to force myself to do some more interesting things. I’ve actually laid the groundwork for me to engage in other stuff, look:

Practice ocarina
Carve, or work on my forge for blacksmithing
Batch cook, or prepare for curry night
Read philosophy, or fiction
Go out and do a martial art like boxing
Cycle to the coast

I’ve spent a lot of time slowly adding features to my life that make it interesting, yet I often ignore them in lieu of watching Always Sunny in Philadelphia or other people crafting on Youtube.

Actually, yeah. Fuck it. Today’s Tuesday. No laptop.

Distractions at the Weekend

Weekend distractions are a strange beast for me, as I like at least half of them to be relatively low-energy things like walking about and reading. The distractions in this sphere generally come from a few sources:

My partner sleeping in, and me desiring a cuddle, so spending an hour with her from 0930 to 1030 (even though I’ve been up since 0700).
My dad wishing to visit, me agreeing out of guilt, and him taking up like 4 hours of my time that I wanted to spend doing something out.
The Playstation, if I feel the desire for it; I like the idea of spending a few hours on it as part of a larger day, but can’t really do portion control.

Solutions to this are actually pretty straightforward: get up, and make my partner a cup of tea without getting back into the bed. Limit my father’s visits to once a month, or so, and just limit the Playstation for an after-dinner thing.

Summary

Seems easy. But it won’t be.

Starting on it today. No laptop after 1600.

2017-04-11 “If I were a folk of leisure”

Today’s journalling prompt is to imagine that I have been provided with a liveable income for the rest of my life, not too much money so as to be rich, but enough so that I didn’t need to work. The point of this being to reflect on how I would spend my time as that would denote the priorities in my life. Again, this is something I’ve been thinking of recently as the possibility of actually having a mortgage and owning a house in the future seems like a tangible possibility, whereas once it seemed like it could never be. I should qualify that.

It’s no hidden conspiracy that my generation has been dubbed Generation Rent because of the dire situation of the UK Housing market. Whilst I shan’t get into the ins and outs, it basically means that house prices are ridiculously high and that my entire generation is being sucked into a neo-feudalism where we live in a permanent state of paying rent to landlords. If you think my use of the term neo-feudalism was a bit dramatic, re-read the language in that previous sentence. Permanent, rent, landlords. Aye.

Anyway, I’m incredibly privileged to have gone to University, even if it landed me in crippling student debt, and to have earned myself a 1st Class Computing Science degree from a respected school which, if the media is to be believed (hmm), is hot as shit right now. So once I finish my PhD, the chance to slide into full-time employment seems real. This would grant me a salary, and therefore the ability to get a mortgage. Having already wrestled the lifestyle inflation demon mostly to the ground (damn you crafting), my basic monthly expenditure is pretty low when I’m not on holiday or buying for people’s birthdays. This means, with careful planning, that I could pay off my student debt and my mortgage relatively quickly. Although that would still likely leave me approaching the age of 40…

Anyway, I had a romantic notion in my head of what I would do once my basic expenditures are taken care of. This romantic notion consists of moving from full-time to part-time work in terms of income, and using my spare labour to focus on other aspects of my life that would suffer under the tyranny of a 40-hour work week. I would spend more time training, and a lot more time crafting. I would probably increase the amount of time that I spend volunteering, and attempt to travel a lot more. I don’t plan on having kids, or living with a romantic partner. What follows is a short scenario of my romanticised view of a day in the life of leisure

A Day in the Life

It’s a training day. I awake at 0450, and rise. A few minutes are spent gathering and folding my bedding into a cupboard, followed by the futon mattress that I sleep on. I dress in my training gear and move outside to train. My backyard is simple, and small, but has a pull-up bar bolted to the wall just out of reach if standing, and a simple shed at the bottom of the space near the gate. My training session consists primarily of calisthenics strength exercises, but is followed by a series of either sprints or Tai Chi movements depending on how I am feeling that day.

After an hour of training, I move inside and strip off to wash in the bathroom basin. My training clothes are either sent to the laundry basket or folded into a drawer depending on their state. I dress in my leisure clothes, and begin cooking myself breakfast which consists of eggs fried in lard, and some pickled vegetables on the side. Breakfast and the obligatory two or three rounds of tea are accompanied by the sound of a podcast pumped from my phone through a small speaker system that mimics the aesthetic of a tabletop radio.

Since I am not working today, I take a look at a large corkboard that adorns the wall of my kitchen. On it are lists of chores, tasks, and projects that I am working on. I shift through them and select two projects and several chores that are disparate enough to give my day a varied feel.

At approx 0830 I cycle down to my allotment garden, and spend two hours de-weeding, and tending to the chickens that I keep. I harvest their eggs and cycle back to my small flat. Once the eggs are safely in the fridge, I wander to another room, and select some material for today’s project. I dedicate four hours to working the material in the manner for which the project demands. This could be a carving project, a metalwork project, or a materials project. What matters is that it is physical and places me into a focused state. I break for lunch, a stew that I’d made in batch, and then get back to work. After the material is worked in the way that I want, I tidy up after myself and move to my workstation where my laptop sits. My second project of the day is digital, and is working with the material of software and electronics. I glance at the small notepad on my workstation to read the note I left myself upon finishing last session, and begin where I left off. I take breaks as often as I need to with this form of labour, and often spend several minutes pacing the kitchen waiting for tea to brew whilst I work through a logic problem. At the end of the session, I upload my project to an Open Source project repository in whatever format is appropriate (software source code, electronic circuit design, etc)

It’s evening now, and I’ve not explicitly planned to do anything, and I know that the next day holds neither work nor a training session. I ring around a few friends, and decide to head down to the Quayside where I’ve a small sailboat moored. Together we skipper the spool down the Tyne river and just out of its mouth, and eat an evening meal that is prepared by BBQing meat and vegetables on the boat. Around 2300, we sail back up the river and I am home by midnight. I unpack my bedding, and lay down to sleep.

2017-04-18 “Kaizen and Handstands”

Goals are nice. Goals are inspiring, and they can often form the motivation to get you to perform that first set of push-ups, or write that first 1000 words of a thing, or begin Googling how to learn a skill. For me, I have a tendency to visualise myself at the end point of a journey having achieved everything that I want to achieve in that sphere. I breath it, I think about it before going to bed, I fantasise about it at work. Then, usually, after three or four days, nothing has changed and I’ve taken no steps towards the thing.

Of course, I blather on about growth and how I’ve developed all the gorram’ time - so how can both things be true for me? The goals that I’ve achieved, and areas that I’ve developed in, have consistently been due to their nature as progressive journeys that are undertook and not a ‘state’ of being. The prime example for me is my strength training. Another would be my forays into crafting and making, or journeys into philosophy, socialism, and feminism(s). In each of these areas, I have managed to develop a strong habit of ‘doing’ or at least achieving what needs achieving to grow in them (usually reading or performing an action). The Japanese have a word for this; Kaizen. Continuous improvement. Usually westernised as the ‘get 1% better every day’ approach to improvement. In my language; making a goal into a journey. Today’s prompt is to take something that I want to achieve in my life and speculate on a Kaizen approach to making headway towards that goal.

For a while now, I’ve been trying to motivate myself to get into doing handstands. The context for this is that Handstand Push-ups (HSPUs) are the final movement in my strength training system that I need to incorporate in my routine to give me a strong basis in most human movements. It’s obvious to me that it’s time now, and has been time for a while, to begin my handstand journey. To look at me, I have a relatively developed musculature around my upper torso and arms; however the muscles associated with vertical pressing (ie handstands and HSPUs) are under-developed compared to the rest. My shoulders are tiny compared to my triceps. More importantly, I can feel this with the movements I perform on an everyday basis and during training; I’m weaker pressing than I am pushing, or even pulling now.

So how to proceed? Kaizen would teach that I need to do three things:

Start doing the thing
Keep doing the thing
Get a little better at the thing each time.

The issue I’d normally have with training a new movement is finding the time to slot it into my strength routine, but since the first level of HSPUs is simply learning the headstand; I think I can get around this by making it an everyday practice to drill home the motor skills. Little and often.

Starting today here’s my plan:

Perform a headstand every day, working towards the goals set out in Convict Conditioning
Attempt to perform the headstand in the evening, scheduled for 1800.
Once intermediate level has been achieved (defined in Convict Conditioning as holding position for 1minute), begin performing two headstands a day, morning and night.

I’ll probably check in with my training partner-in-spirit D, to keep me accountable.

2017-04-25 “Nostalgia Redux”

Content alert. This started as a rant, and not a particularly thought out one. I think there’s a perceivable shift in tone when I realise that my frustration may be rooted (at least partially) in privilege. I hope it’s ok, now. It needs work.

I’m seriously sick of nostalgia. Yeah, I get it, nostalgia is cute and warm and it reminds you of when you were a child. It’s kinda about that that I want to rant about. Nostalgia is why reboots and sequels to 80s and 90s franchises make bajillion moneys at the box office, and as a result of this Hollywood producers see them as safe bets and, after a few more years of this; we’ll have an entire generation of producers who’ve never seen an original idea. Yes there are exceptions, but the trend is there.

Nostalgia is the basis for the entire fucking raison d’être of the Conservative movement. Look at this shit:

Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes retaining traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization. By some definitions, Conservatives have variously sought to preserve institutions including religion, monarchy, parliamentary government, property rights and the social hierarchy, emphasizing stability and continuity, while the more extreme elements called reactionaries oppose Modernism and seek a return to “the way things were”.[1][2]

Look at that crockpot of bodily humour. Traditional social conditions. Fucking nostalgia. Right there, fucking everything up. EU Referendum? Nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of the British Empire, imperial measurements, and polio. Fuck it.

On an individual level, my generation has coined the term adulting to define their surprise at being able to function at a basic level in society. Yes, I get it; society sucks atm. Really, and I feel genuinely bad for people who feel uncomfortable in their adulthood, who’ve been failed by the systems in place that should provide them with that security as a member of society. My partner is obsessed with growing older, and how it’s terrible. Part of that is the Capitalist-Patriarchy telling (and selling) her that she as a woman has an expiration date on her value. Part of it is a nostalgia for being a 12 year old cuddled up with cartoons (I know because I’ve asked why she’s always hating being an adult). I honestly don’t get it. When I inquired further, both her and her sister said that they hate the stress of being an adult and fending for themselves. The diehard socialist in me agrees that yes; you shouldn’t have to worry about that, as we should all be chipping in to institutions that worry for us. I get it.

I’m quite privileged. I don’t have to worry about a large number of social conditions faced by various intersections of the population. I try my best to be an ally in training, but I stumble at times. What I’m trying to say is that growing up, and out of childhood is not a bad thing. And I’m sorry for anyone who’s had their adulthood suck for various reasons.

I was going to write this next paragraph as a “you”. Then I realised I have absolutely no right to dictate the experiences of others. For me, this is my answer to those who ask why I’m rarely nostalgic for the past; why I’m never trying to recapture my childhood.

I’ve never been so stressed, but I’ve never had so many important things to keep me occupied. I’ve never been so worried about money, but I’ve never had money of my own to do things with. I’ve never been so concerned about eating right and exercising, but I’ve never before taken pride in the body that I inhabit and been so aware of the effects of what I do with it. I’ve never stressed out about living with a mucky flatmate, but until then I’d never operated entirely by myself. I’ve never worried about what I’m going to do after my PhD, but I’ve never before had qualifications to my name that can let me make choices. I’ve never before worried about finding time for my hobbies, but I’ve never had so many interesting things that I want to do! I’ve never had my heart broken before, but I’d never loved another human being so deeply before. I’ve never had to explicitly make time to catch up with friends, but I never had such a diverse cast of friends all around the world before.

I’ve never been so exhausted all the time, but I’ve never been so driven. That’s why I’m not nostalgic for the past.

Pulling away from Big Google

2017-02-09

This is designed to be a living article, and will be edited as time progresses. I will do my best to highlight edits as effectively possible for transparency’s sake.

Yesterday evening, a friend of mine pointed me to a post, which pointed to an article that detailed how Google has dropped its ban on personally identifiable Web Tracking. The article was dated Oct 2016, which means it’s ancient in Web-years. The fact I’ve only heard about this now is concerning in and of itself tbh.

What does this mean for you? Google has always tracked you, and built a profile around you. However, it’s never combined the ‘profile’ that they build for you with the personally-identifiable name that they have from your use of their services (GMail). They bought ad-service DoubleClick back in 2007, and that’s how ads follow you around the Web. What’s happened now (actually, what happened in 2016) is that Google have changed their policy to allow those ads access to your name and other information that Google has about you. Better yet, they can now build “build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct.” (quote from same source as before).

Ok, terrifying. What can we do? The long-term answer is obviously a struggle for privacy over profit, and has implications for class warfare and revolution against capitalism. You can begin by cluing up on privacy stuff, I recommend Bruce Schneier, and Cathy O’Neil. From there, move into privacy activist circles, and understand the political economy of the web. Recommended reading here is Dmytri Kleiner’s TeleKommunist Manifesto, which is a fantastic read even if you’re not a comrade. It’ll clue you up on how the Web began usurping the disintermediation abilities that were the initial great leap forward granted by Internet. Perhaps, even join your local Pirate Party if you don’t have an existing, larger scale, allegiance.

What about the short and medium term? The answer is that you need to totally and utterly remove your dependence on Google. This isn’t easy. And as more information about more services becomes available, it’ll get harder. But the more people who do this, the more that Google gets the message. Hit them where they hurt - wallet. You’re their product, and if they can’t sell you they can’t get paid as much. This being said, this process is a journey and a struggle, and it’s messy. It becomes easier if you’re not fussed about using other, proprietary, services to replace Google ones. If you’re an Open-Source head like I am, it can get a bit dark at times and you might need to learn some basic tech skills to scaffold your own ecosystem. I’m sorry :-(

Anyway, here’s the list of alternatives to Google stuff that I’ve come up with so far. Most of the edits to the article will be made here. I’ve divided it into various “arenas”, although the intersections of devices and services and cross-platform nature of the web makes these divisions a bit meaningless at times. Whenever I come up with a viable alternative format – I’ll let you know. Note, there is already a comprehensive article about this from elsewhere. The purpose of this piece is to try and gear it towards my friends/colleagues as well as acting as a checklist for myself, to provide an overview of the software and services that I use.

The Web

Google Search, use DuckDuckGo
GMail, this is a fucker. If you’re not bothered about other corps, then maybe try Yahoo Mail or Microsoft’s LiveMail/Hotmail/whatever. If you’re fortunate enough to have the capital you can perhaps purchase a privacy-focused email account. A DIY solution would take about £30 for a Raspberry PI, and the ability to follow a tutorial. A hack/workaround would be to only use the mail service from a local client running on your phone / PC, with access to PGP capability. See below
Google Calendar, I’m still working on this. Sorry.
YouTube, you could refuse to access it. But that’s shooting yourself in terms of access to media / information / entertainment. I postulate that a really activist thing to do is to take from YouTube without giving back (ie giving your usage data to Google). Start by signing out, and accessing the site in private browsing. A level up from this could be to disable Javascript in your browser, or access the site using Tor. Tor isn’t perfect, but it’s a start.
More soon!

Your PC

Uninstall Chrome. Ffs uninstall it now. Get Firefox. It’s so much nicer, and sync works well across devices. Levelling up from this means using Tor but it’s not perfect and it means taking a bit of a speed hit. I use Tor sparingly for specific purposes (all innocent, actually), and Firefox with a host of security-plugins.
Install an adblocker, The traditional goto for blocking ads has been AdBlock plus; but it turns out that they’re scabs. I use uBlock. These go as browser plugins.
Use Local Email Clients Remember when email was a piece of software that lived on your PC? It still should. Even if you’re using a web-hosted email server, you can install Thunderbird. If you still kinda need GMail, you can connect it to here. What’s the benefit then? Firstly, it gets you used to the idea of running email on your local machine instead of firing up a web browser, breaking the twitch. Second, you can pair it with GPG and the Thunderbird plugin Enigmail to begin encrypting your personal communications to each other.

Your Phone

(This section mainly applies to people with Android devices)

Brimstone: Plans and Situated Actions

2017-01-30

I’ve grown a bit restless with Brimstone (the software that’s running this site) at the moment. I’ve been dribbling in features here and there to keep myself occupied, but I think it needs a bit of an overhaul both visually and in the background.

TODO

Change the CSS and page structure from Bootswatch to Materialize I’ve never enjoyed doing my own CSS other than a few small bits, so this move is largely just for the visual appeal and a vector for removing JS
Remove Admin Section reliance on JavaScript I’ve never enjoyed writing JavaScript either. During the restructuring I’m going to be changing the admin section to have minimal JavaScript, and elegant rollback. Currently the features that rely on JS are posting Notes and Replies, and favourites. Since this is the bulk of interactions with the software, I think it needs changing a bit. I like some shiny interactive features, but these shouldn’t be necessary to create particular forms of content.
Condense Notes and Posts into single data structure The bulk of my content is written as Notes, which are a shameless emulation of Tweets and were actually the first type of content I produced. Posts are the longer, blog-post style, pieces of content. There’s literally no other reason other than my excitement and stupid categorisation of content that they need to be separate. I’ll do content inference instead; pieces with a title get published with an ‘Article’ template, and those without get a ‘Note’ template. With a location field, it means I can also infer check-ins as well as add richer data to all posts. This might not work for later content types such as exercise data as they don’t share many common fields. Syndication templates can also be produced.
Restructure the URLs to content and implement redirects for old Tweet citations
Feature to import all tweets between certain dates to create a backlog of content
Implement a basic exercise tracker
Implement a basic spending tracker
Produce summaries of my content (heavily inspired by Rhiaro
Implement proper user management to let people ‘install’ the software themselves, without editing files to create a user.
Release the source on Github.

That’s a lot to do, and I’m thinking of dedicating an evening a week to the project. We’ll see how it goes. For now, you get bonus points if you understand the relationship between the title and the content of this post.

Thoughts on Minimalism, Zero Waste, and Class

2017-01-06

Over the last few weeks I’ve been going through something of change as I become determined to declutter everything and regain some of the peace of mind that I’ve lost as I’ve accumulated half a decade’s worth of stuff in my flat. This entry is very much just getting a few thoughts rattling around my head and onto ‘paper’ so that I can sleep at night in peace.

I’ve always had a cognitive dissonance regarding Minimalism. At first glance, I find the execution of the lifestyle incredibly classist – a lot of modern minimalism focuses on condensing your old items into digital equivalents. The prime example is the bookshelf becoming the eReader (usually the Kindle because branding grumble grumble). Now, I know that thanks to the ‘miracle’ of modern Capitalism that personal electronics are cheaper than ever (ie don’t insult refugees for having smartphones) but the digital divide is totally a thing and has class implications. Amazon (that paragon of virtue) do sell their eReader at a relatively low cost but £56 (as of writing) is still a lot of money, especially if you’re struggling to get by. On minimum wage in the UK that would take basically an entire full working shift to earn. And that’s presuming you’re working that long and consistently, what with zero hour contracts destroying the ability of the working class to do much of anything except beg for hours from their employer. The middle-class person could easily adopt minimalism; just grab their eReader and destroy the book shelf. That initial investment still remains a potential barrier to access to many Proles, however.

Side note: Sorry for the multiple Guardian links, I’m not the biggest fan of The Guardian (white middle class liberalism for the most part) but their journalism isn’t too bad and they’re often within the first few links of a DuckDuckGo search on a given topic since they’re broadsheet and cover a lot of issues

What I do like about minimalism (aside from some aesthetics) is that is does begin to remove one from consumerism to a degree. The main danger, of course, is falling into a trap of going on a spending spree in order to transition to the lifestyle (see above Kindle). If executed with reflection and care, however, I understand the lifestyle to discourage unnecessary spending as a habit and encourage reflection. Which could often lead to personal realisations about the effects consumerism on one’s life as a rudimentary form of class conciousness. Maybe? I also enjoy how minimalism encourages creativity in thinking about space and its ability to be reconfigured given the right equipment (again, given the right equipment… barrier to access right there). I’ve been lucky in that I live in a ground floor flat with one other person for the last few years, and we haven’t generally fight for control of communal space. Lately, however, our social dynamic has been changing somewhat and I find myself being more and more reluctant to leave my room – the ability to reconfigure the space would be of extreme benefit in allowing me to dissociate its various functions and get into various ‘modes’ (e.g. sleep, work, relax etc).

Zero Waste kinda appealed to me a while ago since I’ve always been fairly against waste in theory but have felt paralysed to execute it properly. As Commie, I also think that Zero Waste as it’s been presented to me is overly liberal, and borders on the neoliberal. Lauren from Trash is for Tossers even says in her Tedx talk that "[She] lives this lifestyle for [her]". Obviously, it’s better for the planet – and she says in her talk that consumers are not being given a choice in some cases (e.g. cleaning products) but in other cases she simply switched to farmers’ markets, weigh houses etc. for her food. What if you’re living in city suburbs where they’re not available? We have a single market that closes at the end of the day (y’know, when most people are still at work). Proles often can’t afford to bulk buy, and often they can’t afford to shop in places other than the supermarket for their food. What about the packaging used for bulk food? The onus should be on institutions for waste production, and they should be removing barriers to engaging with minimal waste. The 5p bag tax has done wonders in the UK, but surely it should be the supermarkets paying for it? They should be giving out paper bags, or canvas bags at a reduced cost, shouldn’t they? Instead it’s the consumer that bears the cost of when the forgot to grab their bag. My proposed model: tax the supermarkets on their consumption of plastic, and force them to offer discounts to people who bring in bags, which they’ve been able to acquire cheaply.

That all being said, I’ve always been a fan of thinking differently about waste, and repurposing things. I celebrate the Zero Waste movement for fighting back and demonstrating alternatives, as much as I deride them for being overly liberal in appearing to place the blame squarely on the individual.

The reflection-y bit.

If I think about these two things, I’m definitely gearing more and more towards them as shifts in my day-to-day operation. I’ll never be entirely minimalist - but I want my space and possesions to have a purpose. I’ll never be entirely zero waste until the revolution comes and waste is minimised by the state processes of my glorious Communist Utopia. I rarely drink hot drinks on-the-go. I already drink water from a steel bottle instead of buying it, and I do my shopping with a backpack and a tote bag. Occasionally I need a plastic one, but that’s growing much less frequent. Might be my goal to reduce it to zero entirely?

I want my space to be configurable, and my possessions to have an explicit purpose. I will need back-ups, so as to be Anti-fragile, but less stuff means more flexible with situation; means less tying me to a physical location; means more mobile.

I want to contribute to the trend of ecological awareness and reducing environmental impact by reducing household waste. I might keep a waste diary, actually. Anyway, expect a little bit more from me on this relatively soon as I simplify and repurpose my living habits :-)

Year in Strength 2016 - Reflections on Strength Training

2017-01-05

Exactly one year on from my previous reflection, it’s time to do it again. Once again, I’ll be going through a reflection on each of the Big Six from Convict Conditioning (CC) owing to my training drawing heavy inspiration from the approach, my view on some of the decisions I’ve made, and finally a few higher level goals for me to shoot towards in 2017.

Let’s go.

Push-Ups

Remember when I said 2015 was the year of the Push-Up? 2016 definitely ran with all of the improvements that I made to it and then some. As of writing, I’ve upped my Close/Diamond Push-Ups to 3x12 reps, which are all relatively smooth and pretty deep with decent form.

Where I feel that I fall down with Push-Ups at the moment, is actually in my warm-up sets of standard form ones. I feel that since I’ve neglected my torso this year (more on that later) then my hips begin to sag somewhat during these and I actually find them more difficult than my work sets.

All-in-all, although I’ve not yet begun approaching the ‘Progression Standard’ of reps for Close Push-Ups in CC which would take me towards the one-armed variants of the movement; I feel that the extra time has made my form and performance of these much better than they would have been otherwise and I’m so, so, pleased with these. Currently my favourite exercise.

Squats

If there was one word to describe my squatting in 2016 it would be stagnation. I’ve really let these go. Whilst my performance of Full Squats and Close Squats during my warm-up rounds have seen progress in form, my work sets of Box Pistols have seen a deterioration in form and no gain in reps. In short, I really need to get back onto the wagon of some heavy leg training in 2017.

I believe that a good approach will be to lock down cadence and form, and build up to a respectable 12 reps with the current height of Box Pistols, and then work from there. Lock that down, and worry about them later. This may sound like neglecting them further; but I’m working in achievable baby-steps so as not to discourage myself.

Pull-Ups

Pull-Ups have always been a rollercoaster for me, and I think that they always will be. 2016 saw me finish with negatives (and get rid of muh launching chair, RIP) and begin with… assistance bands! After I couldn’t go from negatives to half movements, I finally admitted that I needed some help. The admission of requiring assistance didn’t particularly hurt me, but the fact that I required equipment did.

This being said, my experience with the bands has been nothing except positive. I’m performing the full Pull-Up motion for a decent number of reps with the bands, and progressing nicely. I’m currently on my third band and on 3x9 reps out of a desired 3x12 (Pulls are heavy and hard and any more would really take effort I think). The brand of band I’m working with have a series of 6 bands total, so that fact I’m on band number 3 means I’m progressing nicely. The first band was way too much assistance and I blasted through it, and took that attitude to the second band. This was tougher but manageable, but I took just a little bit longer. The third band I’ve been deliberately taking my time with and I hovered at 3x8 reps for a while; getting the cadence right so I wasn’t using momentum. They feel magical and much better.

A successful year on the Pulling front.

Leg Raises

Again, stagnation is how I would describe my progression in Leg Raises this year. I’ve been hovering at Hanging Straight Leg Raises for a while now, but my form and cadence has been shocking for the most part. There are snatches of glory, where I performed a set or two of really good, strong, movements in a few sessions across the year – but for the most part I’ve fallen prey to the traps that Coach Wade warned about in CC1.

Still working at 3x10 reps, and there’s an excuse for the poor cadence (will become clear in the Good Decisions section) – but this is the main thing I hope to improve in 2017.

Bridges

Similar to Push-Ups, my Bridges in 2016 have benefited from a concentration on form. I think the arch of my Bridge could be improved somewhat, but in terms of the actual performance of the movement – it’s been great. My fear of them has declined loads, I’ve begun performing them outside instead of in the comfort of the main room, and the sessions where they’re smoother have begun to become to norm rather than the ‘good days’.

Upped from 3x10 to 3x12. CC’s Progression Standard for the movement is 2x15 which means I’m very close. I think I’ll halt them there, though, instead of moving onto the next movement – in order to lock down form and concentrate my recovery efforts on Pulls.

Handstand Push-Ups

Once more, I did not train HSPUs this year. Considering the progress my training has made in general, I’m perfectly ok with this. I’ll reiterate what I said last year; that I remember reading/hearing that HSPUs and Pulls have a positive knock-on effect on each other, so I might begin training a few basic holds in the series to begin this but I’m not setting any hard goals in order not to discourage myself.

Good Decisions

There are two stand-out good decisions that I made this year – condense ALL of my strength training into a single routine, performed in a circuit. It’s a pretty intense hour, but it’s allowed me to get some really good cardiovascular benefits. I began about February moving Leg Raises into Day 1’s routine and began performing them in a circuit. Then I moved over Bridges in March. I remember this being particularly painful, and speaking with my then-colleague A about how drained I was afterwards and how out of breath. After two weeks and I adjusted and resumed my training as normal.

When I went to California I performed a lighter routine with Pulls as part of the circuit. When I came back, I kept it and integrated my Pulling work into the main circuit. This has been phenomenal. Again, it was a bit draining and I felt a bit “Wow” after the session, but over the summer this effect lessened somewhat and now I’m very much ok afterwards. To highlight how effective this approach has been I’ll give you an anecdote:

My friend, D, began CC around the same time that I did in 2013. Whereas I dicked about with Powerlifting for a while - he committed himself straightaway to Calisthenics. D has what I would cheekily call an ‘Elfin’ body type. He has very low body fat, and a smaller frame. This meant that he did really well and powered through the movements – surpassing me quickly on all but Squats. Mostly he rubbed it in with Pulls as I’ve always struggled with them (Orcs eh?). I didn’t see him much at all this year and an opportunity came about in late December to spend the day together and we decided to do a spot of training. I said he could do what he wanted but that I was going to be circuit training. I pre-warned him not to be too harsh on me as I was deconditioned from a week in Madrid. He opted to join me in my circuit, but only managed my two warm-up rounds. It turns out that he’s still training with the large 5 minute rests whereas I’ve cut rest times down to 2 minutes, as well as opting for the circuit approach.

It’s often hard to step outside your own box. And, with apologies to D; it felt really good seeing evidence that my year’s training had given me abilities and endurance beyond what I had expected or felt that I deserved. The circuit also has the additional benefit of condensing my weekly training into two sessions which are intense but have a lot of recovery time.

My other good decision was to opt for the assistance bands in Pull-Ups. I’ve seen a positive change in performance of the movement, self-esteem, and musculature. Not to mention knock-on improvements to other movements which I feel is in part due to my progress here.

Bad decisions

My bad decisions can be summed up by allowing Squats and Leg Raises to stagnate. I’m really disappointed in myself for these specific things – but overall my experience of training in 2016 has been overwhelmingly positive (making this one of the few good things to have happened this year right?)

Battle Plan for 2017

I want to begin this section by saying this – battle plans change. I’ve tried to work on making my training as flexibile as possible (I only need 2 days a week, I only need equipment for 1 exercise etc.) but when I’m disrupted I often can’t progress the way I want and I often fall to a ‘baseline’ routine without the bells and whistled. My goals here are going to be a mix of specifics, and high-level aims, with the knowledge that they’re going to change and evolve. Here we go:

Really go for it on Pull-Ups and Grip training. Progress at least 2 bands in Pulls, and try a full progression in Hangs
Spend some time fixing form on Box Pistols
As above, for Leg Raises
Do a static headstand now and then
Begin a short, daily, stretching routine to be performed in the evenings
Do some sprint work to further my cardio
Up reps on Close Push-Ups, and Bridges, to 3x15 without affecting form negatively
Maintain a positive attitude

Bring it on. It’s gonna be a good year.

Week in Review - 20 Dec 2016

2016-12-28

I’m going to start doing little weekly posts for personal reflection. Here’s the highlights from week beginning 20th December

Flew to Madrid and met with V
Trained with one of the two Madrid city Quidditch Teams
Had some male privilege checked
Ate some Romanian holiday food
Removed Google Play Music from my phone
Decided to begin intermittent fasting again, following some research
Read through some backlogs of books on my Kindle

A bit of DeGoogling

2016-12-11

As I grow increasingly concerned with my reliance on Cloud Services, and the exposure of my data to the corporate overlords, I’ve been “taking back control” bit by bit.

This really began at the start of my MRes in late 2014, when I made a decision to revert to Firefox back from Google Chrome. I had originally moved to Chrome at the beginning of my undergraduate degree because the browser finally released an Ubuntu version and they offered better syncing services (Firefox sync sucked). This, coupled with my new smartphone and the aesthetics of Google’s apps, drew me in and I handed over the keys to my life.

Today I’m in the throws of a De-Googling, slowly claiming my life back piece by piece by removing reliance on their services. As I said, I began by reverting to my old friend, Firefox. I still require Chrome for Netflix on Ubuntu due to bollocks proprietary Silverlight stuff on Netflixs’ part, but I’m back on board with Mozilla for browsing.

My Phone

My phone was the next battle-ground. It’s intrinsically tied to Google services, being an Android phone. I went through a phase of adoring Hangouts as “the iMessage Killer”, which ended as soon as I experienced the snooping. I had sent my friend an SMS via Hangouts regarding dinner; she’s vegan and I was reassuring her that the meal I was cooking would be vegan as well. For a week after this, I was getting adverts on YouTube about vegan chocolates. It freaked me out, so I removed Hangouts and installed Textra. I’m currently trying out Signal. This became coupled with a frenzy of disabling Google apps on my phone. Play Books, Hangouts, loads. By the end of it, I had removed tons of Google apps. However, look at what I’m still left with:

Authenticator
Calendar
GMail
Google Search (I’ve disabled Google Now, though)
Google Settings (for some reason, I’m not even that sure what it does)
Keep
Maps
Play Music
Play Store
Street View
Translate
Voice Search
YouTube

Which is somewhat concerning. Ever since discovering F-Droid I’ve made it a mission to replace all/most of the apps on my phone with versions from their whenever possible, even if it means losing a feature or two. This has manifested in many different ways, but has provided me with a few opportunities to address the Googleage on my phone.

I’ve 99% replaced Authenticator with One Time Pad, and just need to transfer my Facebook across. This requires a Facebook log in though; something I’m not willing to do until the new year. I used Open Street Map for a long time, but missed Google’s navigation features whilst I was in California and got sucked back in :-( I replaced the Google Camera apps on my phone with OpenCamera.

Reflecting on this, F-Droid’s biggest impact isn’t how it’s provided me with opportunities to attack Google apps; it’s the decreased reliance on Google’s Play Store of apps. It’s now instinct for me to check out F-Droid instead of Play, and I’ve replaced around 12-15 apps on my phone with F-Droid equivalents. Google no now longer get that usage tracking from me (if they ever did).

Services

This is the fucker. Google’s entire schtick is services, and I’ve been there from the beginning as the beta tester for GMail. Here’s the state of the battleground for me in terms of service-usage for Google:

I’ve removed reliance on Google Search by using DuckDuck Go. About once a fortnight I require a quick search to Google for comparisons if I can’t find something that might rely on the context of being tracked. This is happening less often.
I deleted my G+ account. I didn’t manually delete my photos so they’ve probably still got them
I moved back from using GDrive to using Dropbox, and I store as much using BitBucket as possible.
I still use YouTube, and subscribe to stuff. I don’t really see a way around that.
As mentioned, I still use Maps. Trying harder next year to tackle this using OSM wherever possible.
I use GMail. It’s familiar, and I’m aware that it tracks me. I mainly use it as a ‘back up’ address, and places where 99% of my subscription emails go. I do use the .uk address provided by my host for most things – but I hate my host and this has put my reliance on that into question.
I use Google Keep as cloud notes are pretty neat and I like the app a lot. I’m thinking of mocking up a quick clone, sans some features, to use myself or outsource my todo list to Trello (Trello has a lot of Google signin though and I’m not sure how much they track me)
Play Music. This is the current front, alongside Authenticator (which is lower priority)
I occasionally use Google sign in for some services.

In the trenches with Google Play Music.

In 2012 I outsourced my music library to Google Play Music. I got sucked into using ‘devices’ (a phone and a tablet), and needed a way to sync across them. Play Music allowed me to ‘pin’ music to the device and then swap it out for others when it got full! Amazing! And Google were letting you upload your own tracks. I didn’t possess the critical faculties at the time to understand what was going on. By handing Google control of my music library I had provided them with an insight into who I was through my data, but I had also given them the power to determine what I was allowed to listen to and when. When music becomes confined to these walled gardens, then it can’t be shared freely among the people. Google users may have access to a particular band that iTunes users don’t. Governments can decided that Tchaikovsky is a bad idea and order it blacklisted from these stores.

No more. I’m going back. Using Google’s little app thing, I’m downloading my entire music library back to my external hard drive. We’re going full circle back to the Marshall of 2008 where I have an Ubuntu machine, Rhythmbox, and my external drive. I tried to do this before, but I want to remove another service. I think last time, Google didn’t download some of my tracks properly. This is a risk I’m going to have to deal with I think. I don’t listen to that much music anyway.

On the phone front, I’ll be trawling F-Droid for the best music players. I might even do one of those weird review-blog things. Yes. Rsync + USB cable will be my syncing services now.

Riding Shotgun (or Getting a Grip)

2016-12-05

I’m a massive fan of bodyweight training, and got into it just as it became the training method du jour. Part of me wants to think I was ahead of the game, but I was probably just caught in the first or second waves of the hype.

Anyway, I’m a big fan of the system presented in the Convict Conditioning (CC) series published by DragonDoor. I don’t quite buy into the hyper-masculine tone sometimes and I take it with a pinch of salt when they discuss the history of its author Paul Wade but I love the system. Through my years of training I’ve picked up Grip training (presented in the second volume of the work) several times; once very seriously. I can’t remember why I stopped the last time, I think maybe it coincided with returning from California. I really enjoy Grip work, specifically the Bar Hang which has been the vast bulk of my training.

It’s also been a characteristic of my training that I’m not overly concerned with the size of my muscles. I’m mildly concerned about gut-fat, and that’s usually monitored through the proxy of others and my current trouser-size in inches. For the last week, though, I’ve been going over the CC training manuals for Grip training and have taken it up again. And there was a promise there by Coach Wade that forearms tend to bulk up very quickly. I’m quite curious as to if this is true and if so, how fast it can go. I’ll be recording the hanging variation with the session number relative to when I restarted the training, the date, the sets/times of the hangs, and then finally the measurements for each of my forearms. The measurement being the circumference of the forearm 2.5cm below the elbow, when extended. I won’t be recording my progress of Fingertip Pushups for Grip Extension as these stay at a healthy 5 reps before and after the hangs.

So here we go:

Session 4 (05/12/2016, Bar Hang)

Hang Time(s): 18s Left Forearm: 30cm (exactly!!) Right Forearm: 31cm (exactly!!)

The difference doesn’t bother me as I’m right-handed and it makes sense. I’m not sure what a “thick” forearm is tbh, and I don’t want to delve into bodybuilding forums to get a distorted view of it. For now, let’s see what happens between now and the Equinox.

Hero's Journey: Call to Adventure, or Road of Trials?

2016-11-15

I’m a bit of a poetic shithead when it comes to thinking about my life, challenges, and achievements. I listen a lot to Elliott Hulse and try my best to see my life as a long journey and development process. Constantly striving to become the next “better version of myself”.

Through Elliott I was introduced to the work of Joseph Campbell; the mythologist most famed for his work around the Hero’s Journey, which I’ve since lapped up. For those unfamiliar, it goes something like this:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Cambell

Viewing my life through this framework on both macro and micro scales has been of huge emotional benefit to me. It encourages reflection, forcing me to take account of everything going on in order to make sense of it and make some estimation of where I think (and where I feel) I am in a cycle of the journey. The journey is divided into 17 distinct parts, across 3 Acts:

Act I - Departure
- The Call to Adventure
- Refusal of the Call
- Supernatural Aid
- Crossing the Threshold
- Belly of the Whale
Act II - Initiation
- The Road of Trials
- The Meeting with the Goddess
- Woman as Temptress
- Atonement with the Father
- Apotheosis
- The Ultimate Boon
Act III - Return
- Refusal of the Return
- The Magic Flight
- Rescue from Without
- The Crossing of the Return Threshold
- Master of Two Worlds
- Freedom to Live

I heartily recommend reading through The Hero with a Thousand Faces if you want to read thoroughly about this. For now, however, there’s a pretty good summary here, and I always liked how Elliott discusses the framework.

Anyway. To the point.

I’m currently at a turning point in my life, and am trying to figure out if something I’m experiencing is a new Call to Adventure, or a trial on the Road of Trials. I’ve been living with my flatmate for over 5 years now. I arrived at this situation through a very explicit call to adventure, where prior to starting University he messaged me off-hand on social media with “Fancy moving in together in my dad’s flat in Newcastle?”. That kick-started the adventure of my undergraduate degree: I received mentorship and talismans from allies, I was tested both academic prowess and personal qualities, I met with a goddess, and I ultimately transformed through my experiences at undergraduate and was tested at the end.

Living with my flatmate has been a mixed bag. I must first acknowledge that without him and the opportunities that this flat offered, I would be a lot worse off. Seriously. 100%. Forever indebted. He’s been on his own journey and trials during our time here, culminating in his own equilibrium. Recently, though, I’ve had a distinct urge to just get out of the flat and my day-to-day experience of it has become increasingly frustrating. I live in an area densely populated by students, who are increasingly noisy. My flatmate and I have opposing schedules and interests; I wake up early to train, and he’s knocking about during the night. These things cause frustration, yes, but why do they justify my feelings of irritation?

Important to remember is that my landlord is my flatmate’s father. Which is how this whole thing has been possible. We paid discounted rent as students, and my rent increased this last year. My flatmate’s didn’t. I also remember speaking to his bandmate and learning that he didn’t actually pay any rent. These sound bad, but I think that I understand the reasons for it, related to my flatmate’s own Road of Trials. I get that; I’d be a pretty bad Communist if I thought that he didn’t deserve the safety net. That it’s privilege inherited from his bourgeoisie father is a cognitive dissonance I have to reconcile at a later date.

It’s not so much the economics that bother me, so much as the politics of space. I strive to have as little impact on the communal space as possible, through both cleaning up after myself like a normal person, but also my hobbies aren’t particularly imposing: I wake up at 0500 to train in the backyard, and I read books, and I wear headphones, etc. My problem arises from what I perceive to be a lack of courtesy and respect flowing the opposite way: his dishes pile slowly grows and absorbs all useful items; he smokes weed and the stench of it flows into my window, preventing me from sleeping (in summer I can’t sleep with the window closed, it’s too hot); he plays the drums; he’ll sleep in until the last moment and then rush into the shower, not checking that people need the bathroom to finish off morning routines they’d otherwise be delayed on; and he never cleans.

All of this has resulted in this urge, experienced largely these last two years, to just. Get. Out. Why haven’t I? I can’t tell whether being on the receiving end of these behaviours / events / experiences is part of my Road of Trials, and I’m to grow and learn to be less pissy and more tolerant as a result. Or is it the beginning of a new Call to Adventure? By remaining here am I refusing the call, and growing more bitter as a result? It’s scary out there. That’s the point. I see my comrades with their own spaces, or a shared equilibrium with their house mates. My partner and I want to consider getting our own space, as we feel a bit suffocated (she lives with her parents and visits here). I think part of it is fear. I’m afraid that I’ll be stuck paying lots of rent to a shitty landlord, unable to get out. I’m afraid that after my PhD I will be poor, and homeless. Surely that means it’s a call? My flatmate has been away for a fortnight, returning today. I’ve really enjoyed his absence. My colleagues at the lab describe being able to afford their own flats slightly further afield in Gatehead without sweating it. I think that they’re all signs.

But what if they’re not?

Marked for Release (or Letting Go)

2016-10-30

Earlier this month I wrote about how I felt about stuff. I was sort of building myself up to perform a census of all of my things and then decimate them. I’ve done some similar things before, on individual drawers or shelves; so felt I could force myself to do it on my life as a whole.

Well, as it turns out; producing long lists of my possessions is quite boring and I gave up before I’d even really started. Preferring instead to focus on a few problem areas and deal with them independently, before taking the census sometime around the New Year after I return from Madrid. I also did some quiet reflection on the matter of stuff, and when I went wild camping in Scotland last week, I was confronted with how fundamentally useful having decent quality stuff is. I’ve had some mess tins for around 7 years now, and they come in useful every time I camp (around once or twice a year atm). My current conclusion is that having stuff around me isn’t necessarily bad. I’ve discussed how I’m a sucker for ephemera, and my issues about minimalism. I think the caveat is that the stuff needs to be a reflection of who I am in that moment of time, and have a life either through history or current use. If it’s useless, or an ornament without specific sentimental value to me, it’s going.

Progress

I started yesterday with my bookcase. I have plans for this. As I get into various crafts and acquire materials and tools for them, I’m struggling to find places to let these things live in my room. Offloading some to vertical shelves in another room of the house will be a good start. It also lets me trim down my book collection to what matters the most.

First on the chopping block were my Church of Satan books that I acquired in 1st year of Uni, before I realised how fundamentally broken the CoS is. I still identify as a Satanist, but a very different sort. I used to idolise LaVey as a wizened philosopher who saw through the veil of moralism blinding the world. No longer. I actually smiled as I retrieved his “biography” from my shelf. Now widely acknowledged to contain fabrications. Same for my copies of The Devil’s Notebook and Satan Speaks!. I enjoyed the pithy tomes at the time, but they’re gone now. Also on that same chopping block was The Satanic Scriptures by Peter Gilmore. I’d grown sick of this for a while, as it attempted to apologise for Satanism’s connection with Fascism. Basically justifying it through “aesthetics” and “water seeking its own level”. Social Darwinist shite. Anyway they’re gone. I have some (poorly formatted) .mobi versions that I can turn to if I need quotes. I also chucked The Satanic Rituals, although kept my copy of The Satanic Bible. TSB will be going to my colleague Nataly as she wishes to understand Satanism and it’s a good place to start. I might scribble some critiques in there. Anyway, I’m currently reformatting the .epub version for use on my Kindle so it’s doesn’t look like a piece of shit and I always have a copy.

In the same fell swoop I also liberated some of my misc books. Some of them were the ones that V had left with me. I’d read through them, and felt justified letting them go and be books to someone else. Iain Bank’s Raw Spirit also went.

As I write this I’m going through a census process for my Calibre library. I have digital versions of varying qualities for much of the fiction on my bookshelves. This, I feel, is the important part. Fiction books are wonderful and special and I will always love them and cherish them, but so can others. A story is no longer bound by physical medium when it can be shared digitally, but there’s a barrier to access stuff like Kindles and then finding DRM-free books. I think I need to liberate some of the stories that I’ve not touched in over 10 years from my shelf, and let them be books for someone else.

This morning I’ve already confirmed that I have fairly well-formatted digital versions of two of my favourite series The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (and Brandon Sanderson), and The Culture by Iain M. Banks. Both of these series share some important characteristics for me:

I read them at two very formative points in my teens. Different, but each impactful. I remember running home to read each of them in turn.
As a series, they each take up the most room, and the second most room, on my shelves respectively (Wheel takes the most).
Some of the volumes in each series haven’t been touched by me for 7 or 10 years respectively.
The latest volumes in each series were bought to complete the set, with an empty promise that it would prompt me to read the series again. I have well-formatted digital versions of these too.

So the revelation that they’re going to be released today is bittersweet. I hope that someone, somewhere, enjoys them as much as I did. In a beautiful turn of symbolism, though, the physical space that they left will be occupied by books by feminist, or socialist (or both!) authors that I desperately need to catch up on. A wise, young, Romanian woman once told me as she kissed her goodbyes in the airport “Matt, if you ever go home with someone and they don’t have books; don’t fuck them”. I then read that if one was to apply this rule then it should also extend to the types and authors of books; no women authors? No dice. While I am not in search for new partners (my current one would take issue), I think this rule should definitely apply to my bookshelf. I’ve never excluded women from my bookshelf, but I need to make a more conscious effort to put them there. Time to grow.

Thinking about 'Stuff'

2016-10-19

I’ve been thinking about stuff and my relationship with it. It mostly kicked off when I read Rhiaro’s post about nomadism, but if I reflect a bit then I think it’s been brewing for a while.

Unlike Rhiaro, I am not a nomad. I like visiting new places, and I love the romanticised concept of ’travelling’ but there’s always been a financial and a class barrier to me engaging on that type of physical journey (for the most part). She would disagree, but I tend to think that overly-romanticised travel is pretty classist. My experiences have always, therefore, lent themselves to building up a ‘home base’. A sanctuary (sounds pretentious but emotionally I think that’s probably most accurate) into which I can retreat during anabolic periods of my life.

This obviously lends itself to having more stuff. I moved to my flat Sep 2011 and brought with me three books, a new desk lamp, my clothes (which all fit into a single chest of drawers), my desktop computer, my laptop, a desk and chair. A year later, my desktop was deceased and I had a new laptop. I also brought in my bookcase with all its books. As my experiences grew I needed to acquire more and more things to deal with them; formal date? New shirt (cheap). Winter? Coat. The room in my flat certainly isn’t the smallest room I’ve ever had but it’s gotten to feel a bit more cramped as time has progressed.

My point is that, although I totally love the idea of minimalism and I extoll any philosophy which encourages us to stop buying stuff we don’t need or truly want; stuff like challenging yourself to own less than 100 things is going to lend itself to spending more in-the-moment as you prepare for less eventualities. Unless your minimalism is incredibly functional, it’s a middle-class minimalism for those who can afford in very literal terms to be flexible with their situation. Maybe I’m just misunderstanding minimalism, but it seems to me that if plan a day out and don’t bring a pack with a water bottle and some food then you’re saying you can afford to spend that in-the-moment without much thought to your financial situation. Maybe it’s not a lot of money for you to drop £10 on lunch that day, but that £10 for some people could be put to better use. I am definitely guilty of this.

Aside from deriding the middle-class form of minimalism, I do appreciate the aesthetic of less clutter. I do, however, have to juxtapose this for my love of personal effects and boxes of ephemera both aesthetically and emotionally. I love when you walk into someone’s house and they have stuff that they’ve clearly had and cared for; for years! I love that just by being owned by a person, a mass-produced item can take on a personality and characteristics from its mundane place in the lives of people. People have experiences and histories, which can usually be captured by the items they associate with them. Treasure chests of memories are a trope for a reason.

On that note, my colleague and comrade @tripsandflips and I had a discussion about this the other day and she made an interesting point which got me thinking about that. Books aren’t books if they’re not being read. The more I think about it, the more I agree with this sentiment. As much as I love stuff’s history, I think I have trouble letting go. Some of the books on my bookshelf haven’t been touched in years. Some of them are very special to me, but as I think about them I begin to realise that it’s the story that they contain that is special. I might release them from their shelfy prison to let them be books again. I’ve come up with a solution to help them on their journey as well – instead of using the first page to claim ownershop of a book ie “This book belongs to XYZ”, I’m going to try and start off logging the tome’s personal history. I’ll write “This book has been enjoyed by Matt Marshall” and encourage others to leave their mark. I think that’ll be a good practice to try and start.

My final point of tension is that I’ve begun my journey into crafting and trying to produce things for myself an others. This in itself lends to having multiple tools and stores of materials around. I used to get around my desire to craft by telling myself “Programming is your craft. Go build cool digital stuff!”. I can no longer do that, though. I need to smell the beard oil and feel the bone dust caught in my pores.

I’m not sure where this ramble through my thoughts on stuff has lead. If I was truly honest with myself, I’d say it’s probably a precursor to my taking a census of everything I own that isn’t stored food. So… expect lists I suppose?

Quick Evaluation of Brimstone CMS and my Silo Use

2016-10-11

I have a bit of a weird relationship with the Indieweb. I’m not really sure where I stand in that nexus as I’ve made no attempts to connect with the community, but draw inspiration heavily from Indieweb user Rhiaro and often look on the wiki when I’ve got work-paralysis on Brimstone and want to procrastinate by adding another half-finished feature and not fix muh bugs. Anyway, from the Indieweb I learned of the term “Silo”. Defined as

A silo, or web content hosting silo, in the context of the IndieWeb, is a centralized web site typically owned by a for-profit corporation that stakes some claim to content contributed to it and restricts access in some way (has walls).

They share characteristics such as preventing easy export of content in standard formats, and requiring you to use an identity exclusive to that site (ie your Facebook account. Since I recently underwent evaluations of my Facebook use, and subsequently began my tactical withdrawal from the platform, I thought I’d evaluate my current state of play. It’s coming up a year since I started development over here.

Silo Use

Here’s the state-of-play when it comes to my use of Silos

I use Twitter a lot, via POSSEing. I still need to sign in to the site to check my notifications. I like microblogging and it’s the best way to let others see my content.
I’ve just begun withdrawing from Facebook. I removed all of the photos I could, locked down my privacy settings (I might still be discoverable though), and unfollowed everything in my News Feed to stop drawing me back in.
I still use Messenger (Facebook), although only check it in the morning and evening. I haven’t received a message via the platform for days. I use Telegram to speak to the people I speak to the most. Mainly some close friends and colleagues.
I downloaded all my Facebook data to save my photos but I’m not sure where to put them. I think Google has a few of my photos.
I removed my Google Plus account years ago but it was full of images, and I doubt Google actually destroy it.
I’ve got a tumblr and a blogger somewhere but I’ve never seriously maintained them past maybe two posts from 2011 and 2013 respectively.
I’ve never had a MySpace
I have a LinkedIn :-( But that’s kinda for just accepting requests from old colleagues. Sort of what it’s for I suppose. It gets updated once a year if I get a paper in or medal or something (so rarely).
I use Google as my main identity provider for oAuth SSO purposes, and GMail is pretty nifty even though Google are pure evil and I just presume my GMail is open to the capitalist class.

Brimstone CMS

Here’s the state-of-the-art when it comes to my indieweb software

I auto-POSSE Notes to Twitter.
I can write longform blog posts in markdown
I can check in to places and can retrodate them.
I fixed the bug with datetimes (my ignorance) and now my blog isn’t just one stream of notes for readers.
I have inline tagging for Notes and tags for Posts.
I have an RSS reader which I can create a newsfeed from.
I have a control panel which is heavily Bootstrap’d.
It draws in Twitter, and renders an aggregated RSS newsfeed in two different tabs.
My AJAX is terrible.
I can favourite a tweet and it goes to twitter.
I am working on favourites over here, for both RSS items and storing Twitter faves.
My AJAX is terrible.
I can view Twitter profiles up to the 20 or so tweets returned with a single request.
I can see all my friends/followers from Twitter, and follow/unfollow them via terrible AJAX
My Gravatar profile image and my Twitter account are hardcoded in, and need generalising.
The whole CMS needs a set-up screen and a settings page if it’s ever to be released.

Features I’d like

Images for notes and blog posts. Storing them is more of an issue than the feature itself atm.
Track exercise and set goals. I used to use Fitocracy a lot and would also like to digitise some of my old training diaries for posterity.
Statistics to run over Notes, Blog Posts, Training sessions etc.
Probably should integrate some indieweb H-feed reading.
Probably should allow for webmentions, etc. Communicating with others etc.
Probably should mark up my feed with microformats
Track time invested in various skills, hobbies, and activities. Could be useful for a CV someday but also I could toy around with having a page in the style of an RPG character sheet, which is auto-updated as I invest time points in developing skills.

Summary

I’m not too bad in the way of Silo use. There’s a lot to do on Brimstone but now I actually have myself a TODO list. Should be a fun year.

The Great Reclaim: Where I am with social media

2016-10-04

A little while ago I reflected on my Facebook use, discussing what I used it for and how I felt about it. It’s been about four months since then, so I thought I’d see where I was with that.

Since writing about my concerns over my Facebook use I’ve went through several bouts of limiting my activity on the site, to varying degrees of success. In June I took a two-pronged approach. The first was deliberate and conscious Facebook “fasts” on alternating days. This dealt with distractions at work. I’m used to fasting, so this was a pretty simple concept to wrap my head around. I’d do a quick Facebook check early evening, and not check it again until the same time on the following day. The second prong was to log out of Facebook on my phone’s browser, and to clear my browsing history so I couldn’t just click a thumbnail on ‘most visited’. This worked for a long time, up until I was experiencing a week with an above average amount of waiting around outside, checking my phone. Signing back in on my phone lead to me getting hooked on the notifications again, and the advent of CHI-writing time at work meant I was looking for distractions. I got off the wagon.

In July, however, I managed to solve the majority of my mindless browsing by giving myself my RSS feed in Brimstone. Both the investment in the development process and the result, as well as a conscious ritual rule of “Always check the site before checking others” meant that a lot of my ‘getting updates’ has shifted over here. The effect of this was lessened somewhat when I joined a few groups and all of the notifications and News Feed posts that includes became a factor.

Finally, early this month (Oct ‘16), after months of guiltily removing Facebook pages from my phone’s “most visited” browser page; I declared that I am to instigate my tactical withdrawal from the site and to maintain a skeleton profile there. All I did for four months was share news articles anyway.

Motivation

I think it’s important to make explicit my motivations for the move. So that I can be honest with myself, and others.

Control over identity. I’m pretty open with my thoughts and feelings online. Actually, the majority of my online identity is centred around what is fundamentally mundane activity. I must be so boring to those who end up following me. That being said, I want a large degree of control over that content. Facebook exposes me to the machinations of the platform. They take some half-baked measures to placate the privacy conscious, but I’ve liked and said some pretty stupid things in the past that I want to be able to remove with a large degree of ease. I also get to control how it is displayed, collated, stored, and fed.
Ownership of content. The main reason tbh. All for-profit social media platforms derive their commercial value (regardless of revenue stream) due to the content produced by their users. These can be posts/articles, likes, media content, etc. How this content is processed to produce value is of a different matter. Most often they’re used to either provide a profile for targeted ads (through likes etc), or a draw for those ad services to find a home (content). The thing that remains, however, is that the value is derived not from the platform itself but from its use. More explicitly, the content and labour of those using it. Facebook’s share prices go up, but its users don’t get a share. I admittedly maintain a Twitter presence mediated through this site, and even though Twitter gets versions of my posts they always have a citation – and I always own a copy.
Reclamation of Time. I spend a lot of time checking Facebook. I won’t pretend to know exactly how, but I think it’s obvious that the News Feed and notifications systems are designed to keep me checking in and posting content (Time Hop anyone?). It’s quite frankly embarrassing how instinctual it is to open up a new tab and type fa + enter and spend the next 15 minutes like a zombie. Obviously I know that the social interactions make Facebook use more than just slaves. We’re connecting with people. Their whole spiel is, for the most part, true. It’s my relationship with it that’s unhealthy, and unhealthy relationships need adjusting.

Current Status

The first thing I did when I declared my tactical withdrawal was to download all my Facebook data, mainly for the photos, and then promptly remove what I could from the site. Up there now is only my current profile picture, banner, and a few shared albums I can’t touch. I have this data to do stuff with later. This act was, for the most part, related to investment. If I don’t need to sign in to get to my photo history, that’s less motivation to do so. I removed all of my old profile guff too such as quotes, affiliations, gender identity. Everything I could.

I did encounter a problem when trying to remove old posts and content. Using the timeline review bollocks I can go back and see old activity and undo it, but there’s no tool to do it en masse. I tried a few greasemonkey scripts to no avail. Will try again soon.

Next was to prevent my inclination to post new content. I set my post status to “only me” in case I got weak. Presumably this applies to shared posts as well. Boom. No more bothering people with glorious Communist propaganda.

My inclination to check the site was dealt with through sheer determination. I spent an entire half hour unfollowing everything that entered my News Feed and refreshing the page to start again. Friends, pages, groups. Nothing was safe. Eventually Facebook told me that they couldn’t show me anything and that I should add some friends to see some content. I did, for the most part, preserve my connection to friends, pages, and groups by remaining friends and a member, or liking it. They’re still there (largely for messenger purposes). This means that if I ever decide to go back on Facebook, I need to consciously choose what I follow and then seek it out like a surgeon. Next time I sign into Facebook, I hope that there’s a tumbleweed there for me.

I need to keep Messenger. Too many people use it and it’s socially irresponsible of me to try and force people into using alternative services just to talk to me. I’ve made my peace with that. Currently I’m signed into Messenger at home, but not at work. I check it in the morning, evening, and before bed. So far it’s been relatively quiet and uneventful.

I’ve not checked the site for about a week now I think. I have a lot more time on my hands. I do more at work, and at home I’m more motivated to spend my time productively on the things that matter to me.

The Plan

I forgot to remove people’s ability to tag me in things, and post content on my wall. I’m waiting until the end of the month to sign into the site and deal with that stuff, alongside any other issues I perceive of during that time period. If I sign back in now I might get tempted back. I need to break it as a habit first and foremost; so a good month off will be good.

Feature Creep, and Doing.

2016-08-16

I have always had a problem with the dreaded Feature Creep. Not only with software development, but in life generally. I take a lot of pleasure in the doing of something, and when I stumble across something that I feel I may enjoy doing I get incredibly excited at the prospect of its doing. If that made sense :-/

I experienced this quite early on in my strength training journey – attempting to integrate a full Calisthenics system with a Power Lifting one. When I finally dropped my Power Lifts to focus on Calisthenics, instead of relishing the extra time and simplicity I instantly started trying to do various different forms of calisthenics training (my foundation was always Convict Conditioning, but I was attempting to Grease the Groove on quite a lot of things too, and was rushing the addition of extra exercise progressions).

I’ve most recently experienced this with Brimstone, my little indie blog project. I’ve only recently gotten around to actually fixing the main feed, and integrating everything together. Mainly, features creep in and keep me awake via RSS feeds (it’s getting shinier back here, btw). The same can be said with my PhD. People keep trying to introduce ‘features’, or aspects of the research. For the most part I welcome it, and their interest in it is exciting (if pressuring). But there’s only so much I can do.

The most dangerous feature creep I’ve experienced is that which I indicated right at the start of this post. The doing features of my life. I take a real, carnal, pleasure in doing things, taking things in, and being part of things. Throughout high school and 6th Form (college) I was involved in a local theatre group. When I got a job making pizzas, I found it difficult to manage acting alongside 6th Form, the job, and a new girlfriend (oh myyy). So acting was dropped. I managed to get by in 6th Form without too much feature creep. My Open-Sourceness became more pronounced, so I suppose that was one thing I was doing, but otherwise I was pretty simple. I watched a lot of TV shows.

When I came to Uni, the acting came back in and I am ashamed to say that I let some good friends (and splendid talent) down by dropping out in the most heinous way possibe: ceasing to show up. I was busy being a Computer Science student, an active Satanist, a fledgling executive member of Rocksoc, and I had a new girlfriend (this one was a model! ohhh errr). I also still had my job slinging pizzas (in a different shop), and my social life was abuzz with clubbing and friends. Also now I had to cook for myself!

Years later, things are looking tamer; but I worry about feature creep still. The things I like to do keep growing. Every time I enjoy cooking something, especially if it takes effort, I long for a ritual of doing it daily or weekly. My Strength Training is so ingrained in me now that I can’t help but do it – but it remains something that I do so it affects my day significantly. I enjoy doing maintenance on clothes and boots. I enjoy doing reading, and writing. I enjoy doing development, especially adding new features to software. I’ve recently took up a light practice of making, which is absolutely rife with doing things – lots of things! Also carving, if there ever was something that was doing; carving is it. Since developing an interest in Politcal Economy, and being awakened as a Feminist (or ally) I’ve being doing those things. Oh, and after a nice long spell of being out of the habit of doing being a Satanist; I’m being enticed back in by a new and sexy UK community.

I don’t know what to make of all this. Juxtaposing the desire to experience rich variety against the desire to not feel bad for not doing something is becoming tougher every day. Is it wrong to love drowning in it?

Saving on Sushi

2016-06-22

Ever since I discovered it, I’ve been an enormous fan of sushi. I’m not sure that it’s anything specific that I love, as it’s more that sushi seems to lay at the intersection of qualities that I like in food: East-Asian cuisine in general; finger food; rice-based; served chilled; usually associated with fish; rich with etiquette rules that I can learn and follow; and requires some investment of time to learn how to prepare.

The problem with my love of Sushi comes from the fact that I have quite a large appetite to begin with, and the finger-food nature of the dish means I could theoretically just sit and eat it for hours at a constant rate without stopping. As such, whenever I buy sushi (usually at work, for lunch) from the local sushi box I end up purchasing between £12 - £15 worth of it; which is much more expensive than I’m comfortable with. I usually write it off as a treat and aim to buy sushi no more than once a month, although sometimes I indulge on a weekly basis.

I’ve attempted to make sushi a few times in the past, with varying degrees of success, largely as a novelty for myself and my friends. However, as I grow increasingly concious of the amount of restaurant/takeaway food I buy at work; my love of cooking has combined with my love of sushi to prompt me to make the dish as a lunchbox to save £££. My sushi is far from perfect, but it’s mine, and I’ve been using the Level Up Your Life hack to motivate my cooking of it, by rewarding myself with more sushi equipment every n times I make the dish instead of buying it. So far n has been arbitrary based on the next piece of equipment I want: 3x gets me a Nigiri press; 5 gets me boards to make into sushi plates; 10 gets me a Hangiri; 30 gets me a Narihira.

So far so good, right? Aye, but everything costs. Those who know me know that although I despise capitalism, and place far greater weight onto the value of the purchase rather than the financial expenditure (see also my PhD), I also only have so much income and would like to actually save some money by adding in my effort and love. Y’know; own the value of my labour.

The Maths

If I were to buy sushi at Nudo, I’d spend roughly £13. This is not a slight against Nudo, as their sushi is so good I can happily spend that amount. This would get me: a large box of 12 pcs; a long box of 7 pcs; and a short box of 4 pcs. That’s £13 for a total of 23 mixed maki, uramaki, and nigiri. That’s about 57p / pc.

On reflection, that’s a really good deal, and the individual boxes are prices so that a normal person without my appetite would be getting a really inexpensive lunch. But I’m me. So let’s make sushi.

As with everything cooking related; there’s a bit of a startup cost. That diminishes as more dishes are made etc. I’m going to be working with rough numbers for now, and updating as I figure everything out.

Sushi rice 1kg = £2.60
Nori (seaweed) 10 sheets = £2.50
Rice vinegar 500ml = £4
Salt = N/A (Have it in the kitchen)
Sugar = N/A (Have it in the kitchen)

So far we’re up to about £9, or maybe £10 if the rice vinegar is a bit more expensive. Unfortunately, due to silly Americanised recipes, I measure my rice by volume rather than by weight. I’ll measure it when I get home, but for now I use about a third of a packet of rice per session which makes approximately 30 pcs of sushi depending on how I distribute the rice across different rolls. For that I use about 70ml of vinegar, and about 5 pcs of Nori. So per session I’m using about 86p of rice, 52p of vinegar, and £1.25 of Nori. Of course is is approximate.

That brings our current total of “Cost to feed Marshall lots of sushi once” to £2.62, but we’ve not factored in the fillings. Which is where is gets fiddly, as I’m not very efficient at using them yet.

I’ve still not clocked up that many hours making sushi, so I’m still quite tentative with what I use as a filling. I generally stick to crabsticks, cucumber, and salmon. Recently I’ve been going for prawn mayonaise as well – but there’s so little of it used when you’re making three different fillings that I may as well not, and it adds to the waste of salmon as well. Maybe when I get better, or am making large batches for other people, I’ll include them again.

Salmon fillet = £6
Crabsticks = £1
Cucumber = 50p

I’ve found that the portions in which all of these are all more than what I need to make the sushi pieces, but it’s difficult to tell. I generally use enough of the salmon so that I’d probably only get another roll out of it (and no nigiri), and the crabsticks have plenty left over but they’re snacked on rapidly so don’t feed into any other meal. I’d say that with careful pre-portioning, I’d be able to split the salmon fillet prior to freezing so that I don’t waste it, and I could actually probably use more rice to make more nigiri. The cucumber is the most wasted bit, with me using only a few strips of the half I usually portion off. Again, this works better when I’m making sushi for others, but if we’re calculating cost for me I’d have to say I would use £4 of the salmon, and the cucumber can last a week in the fridge to be used for more sushi. To err on the side of caution, I shall say that whilst the food can (and should) be utilised elsewhere, it’s still an investment per portion so I’ll have to use all of it. That’s £7.50 for fish and cucumber.

The current cost of “Feed Marshall lots of sushi” is at £10.12, giving me a saving of only £3 per meal. However, when you take into account the fact that I usually get between 30 and 35 pcs of sushi out of the rice and toppings, I calculate the conservative cost of 34p / pc. That’s a saving of 23p / pc for every time, cumulative until the heat death of the universe.

I’m actually pretty sure I’ve calculated this wrong, tbh. I’m sure it’s lower. Whenever I’ve made sushi using 500ml of rice, I’ve generally made enough for myself and a friend to have at least 20 pcs each; or enough so that I can take a portion to work the next day. And when a friend is buying in, I charge for half the ingredients. I think I’m saving more than i give myself credit for.

Expect calculations soon.

Reflections on my Facebook use

2016-06-15

It’s long been a goal of mine to stop using Facebook for the majority of my social interaction on the web. The seminal blog post Get your loved ones off Facebook explains just some of the nefarious practices of the site, and since I’ve on a massive data ownership push lately I’m not overly comfortable with the notion of Facebook ad tracking (rant on ads coming soon). Do I also need to mention their dodgy newsfeed experiments?

Other than that, the centralising of the web into a commercial communications service frightens me to death; my socialist (cough communist cough) leanings already mean that the fact Facebook is a large corporation extracting profit from millions of workers who are essentially working for free (see Dmytri Kleiner) makes my skin crawl. On top of that, they’re looking to launch their own web platform bundled into Messenger which will allow companies to use their services and develop apps/bots that interact with customers through Messenger. The principle is that if you’re a start-up and can’t really afford to invest in your own infrastructure, then you can use the service to reach your customer base digitally nontheless. I love the idea of commissioning platforms generally, but the corporate hegemonising of Messenger’s app platform is sickening. A better approach to commissioning is (shameless plug for my lab) App Movement but I think even the centralised way that the platform operates doesn’t make it a true grassroots approach.

Facebook recently also diversified its ‘Like’ function into ‘Reactions’, giving us a slightly less narrow range of ways to express our feelings at a post whilst still providing them with button clicks. This also provides them with an extra dimension of data to sell to advertisers, as people are now increasingly sharing links instead of status updates so the data they receive needs to be enrichened. In fact, the Belgian police force recently advised against using reactions for this reason.

I also feel that there is an obvious problem about a single large corporation owning what is arguably one of the most widely used communications platforms in the world :-/.

So this all adds up to me beginning to pull out of Facebook; or rather saying I will. No matter how much I complain and tell myself to just get out… I find myself browsing the site as consistently as ever. The next part of this post is largely a diary entry reflecting on my Facebook usage and trying to devise ways in which to get out.

What do I use Facebook for?

Upon reflection, I find that the main activity that I use Facebook for is actually semi-mindless browsing of news aggregate. This probably doesn’t surprise most people, but it surprised me because I thought that I was a lot more involved than that. I’d say that the majority of my Facebook usage comes from mobile (browser, not app) whilst commuting, idling waiting for people to arrive etc. Of this, I’d say that most of my interactions with Facebook stories consist almost solely of either clicking to read, liking, or sharing. I’m not even sure why I like things tbh – I don’t look back on it. It’s largely just a habit formed from liking friends’ posts.

I do appreciate my friends’ posts. Particularly a few closer friends who post interesting content, and share interesting articles I wouldn’t normally read. I sometimes comment on statuses to show support or a more concrete form of appreciation than a Like. I also enjoy Facebook groups, the communities that arise from them, and actually I enjoy Page content quite a lot (again – news for the most part).

I rarely post statuses. I’d argue that over the last year (and certainly over the last six months) the content I’ve submitted to Facebook has consisted by-and-large of sharing articles/news that makes me angry / happy / sad, and also posting images that form humble-brags of what I’m up to or have produced (like my sweet-ass Sushi plates) in attempt to validate my activities. I’m also tagged in quite a few photos from when I’ve visited others that I enjoy seeing

The messaging service is another one that I use a fair amount. There are those who I speak to largely through Messenger, and would miss out on conversations with them otherwise. They’re relatively few and far between though, and the thing I’d miss out on is actually the group chats. I’d also probably miss out on random people contacting me, which is always fun.

So what do I do?

I think I can tackle the mindless browsing fairly simply. I’ve already begun the process of adding an RSS reader to my site, which will allow me to browse news aggregate here rather than visiting Facebook. I should actually start making a log of what I like to click on / find interesting in order to get a good map of what to start bringing in. Content discovery (ie new feeds / sources etc) might be tricky, since I won’t be pulling in Facebook posts such as shares from friends. I might actually go back to using StumbleUpon, and then adding feeds as I discover them.

Friends’ posts present a problem, although this forms a relatively small part of my Facebook interaction. I won’t be pulling in Facebook content here, I’ll need to keep up with them some other way (or sign into Facebook to see them specifically).

Posting statuses and sharing articles won’t be a problem. Sometime in the future I might POSSE to Facebook (with an explicit request of course, unlike Twitter) when I want to share links to people. Posting photos also probably won’t be an issue. It’s on the books to integrate images and gallery functionality into Brimstone, and if I’m absolutely desperate for people to see my humble-brags then I can just POSSE a link to Facebook as a post. Tagging will just have to bugger off for now.

Messenger provides a trickier problem, as I do value the group chats and relatively random encounters a lot. Individuals that I’m serious about talking to, for the most part, are usually willing to contact me via Telegram. I might consider hooking up a notification over here to notify me of a message, or a new conversation but that is a lot of effort. For now I’d be satisfied just using messenger.com and avoiding the main Facebook site.

If you’ve read this, thanks for reading to the end. As mentioned this was largely a diary entry for reflection on my use of Facebook and the cognitive dissonance that I experience when browsing it.

Accountable: Exploring the Inadequacies of Transparent Financial Practice in the Non-Profit Sector

2016-05-09

This is a copy of the paper we submitted and had published at CHI 2016. I wanted there to be a HTML version. I converted from LaTeX src to Markdown for posting on this site but there’s a few errors I need to fix up before it becomes properly readable. Bear with me

Authors: Matthew Marshall, David S. Kirk, and John Vines

Table of Contents

Abstract

Increasingly, governments and organisations publish data on expenditure and finance as ‘open’ data in order to be more transparent to the public in how funding is spent. Accountable is a web-based tool that visualises and relates open financial data provided by local government and non-profit organisations (NPOs) in the UK. A qualitative study was conducted where Accountable was treated as a technology probe, and used by representatives of NPOs and members of the public who invest their time or effort voluntarily into such organisations. The study highlighted how: current open data sets provided by public bodies are inadequate in their representation of funding structures; the focus on finance and fiscal expenditure in such data makes invisible the in-kind effort of volunteers and the wider beneficiaries of an organisation’s work; and problems arising from the interoperability of open data technologies. The paper concludes with implications for the design of future systems, considering the domains of transparency and accountability in relation to the findings.

Introduction

This paper discusses the design, development and evaluation of “Accountable” – a web-based tool that visualises and relates financial data provided by non-profit organisations (NPOs) and local governmental authorities (LAs). Accountable was designed to allow the general public to explore and understand the fiscal practices of trusted organisations. In the UK, the financial data of NPOs and LAs are systematically uploaded and presented online as a requirement of financial transparency and auditing protocols set by the government @newcastle_city_council_payments_2015 [@northumberland_county_council_payments_2015; @gov.uk_register_2015]. Although its purpose is to allow for public scrutiny, this data is not rendered easily accessible and exists in unwieldy formats such as large spreadsheets of supplier payments or aggregated expenditure figures. Data placed online has the potential to feed into the practice of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), which seeks to solve problems and answer questions using publicly available sources of information @steele_open-source_2012 [@bazzell_open_2015; @glassman_intelligence_2012]. This suggests that data regarding NPO and LA finances could be used for citizen interrogation of their practices, or for demonstration of the work that they perform. We designed Accountable to explore and support such practices, and to understand the opportunities and limitations of existing ‘open’ financial data provided by these organisations.

In order to examine these issues, we conducted a qualitative study, where representatives and volunteers of NPOs discussed the work they do and issues around financial transparency, and were asked to interact with the Accountable system. Our interviews provide insight into the structure and nature of how NPOs interact with LAs as local funders, spend the funds they receive, and produce accounts for governing bodies. We also highlight tensions between the perceived and actual values of back-end work such as administration in organisations that operate on a not-for-profit, or charitable basis. Building on previous work in organisational transparency and non-profit performance measurement @henderson_performance_2002 [@fox_uncertain_2007; @hood_accountability_2010], this paper comments on the potential of future systems to support the accountability of NPOs. We suggest how interactive financial systems can better reflect the work of NPOs, and discuss the data standards and requirements necessary to facilitate this.

The contribution of this work to the field of HCI is twofold. First, the paper begins to explore the relationship between the fiscal practices of trusted organisations and their stakeholders. In doing so, we build upon previous work around finance and technology in HCI by exploring interactions in an organisational context. We also open a new avenue of financial HCI research concerned with interactive financial data supporting transparency, accountability, and the impact of the work these organisations do. Second, the paper presents recommendations for the design of systems which seek to engage with fiscal transparency in the non-profit sector, including designing for visibility, how visibility might be achieved through capturing qualitative financial data, and the use of standard data formats to allow systems to support interrogation. We thus outline how HCI research and the design of interactive systems could affect global dialogues on transparency.

Background

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In most democratic societies, fiscal transparency and accountability are increasingly desirable qualities in both governance and business practice @hood_accountability_2010 [@oliver_what_2004]. The popular narrative nods towards a causal relationship where increased transparency leads to increased accountability; the more information about an organisation that is openly available increases the ability of interested parties to call its decisions into question @fox_uncertain_2007 [@hood_accountability_2010].

NPOs and LAs in the UK have a legal obligation to be transparent. The Charity Commission collects and displays the financial data and reports that are provided by registered charities and NPOs as part of their legal requirement for charitable status @gov.uk_how_2013. Likewise, the Local Government Transparency Code @gov.uk_local_2015 stipulates that LAs publish a list of all their expenditures over a certain amount online @newcastle_city_council_payments_2015 [@northumberland_county_council_payments_2015]. Charities submit annual accounts and reports, as well as complete a Summary Information Return (SIR) reporting on their activities. The development of trust is a keystone in the relationship between an organisation such as an NPO or LA and its stakeholders; those who have an interest or claim in the organisation’s activities and performance @krashinsky_stakeholder_1997 [@macmillan_relationship_2005; @ortmann_trust_1997; @conroy_non-profit_2005; @eikenberry_marketization_2004; @jacobson_lifting_2005]. This is compounded by the fact that a stakeholder funding an NPO might not necessarily be the one in receipt of its services @macmillan_relationship_2005. Commercial organisations are commonly said to be performing well, or meeting their goals, if they make money. The nature of an NPO, however, doesn’t lend itself to traditional performance measurements such as ‘bottom-line’ profits when establishing the organisation’s effectiveness @henderson_performance_2002. Instead, measurements might focus on how much the organisation spends on its services or projects versus how much is spent on management or general costs. It is still difficult, however, to determine whether a program has met its goals; all that is fully known is that money has been spent on it, failing to capture value that is non-monetary @henderson_performance_2002. Non-financial outputs can be communicated (i.e. what the NPO actually does), but this information can be hard to capture systematically, and demonstrating the value of work is a global issue for NPOs @henderson_performance_2002.

Clarifying Transparency

The assumption that transparency equates to accountability has been questioned. Fox argues that transparency covers the dissemination and access to information, with accountability being the measure of how, and to what extent, the public can call on those in authority to justify their decisions and issue sanctions @fox_uncertain_2007. Fox concludes that there exists an overlap between transparency and accountability known as “answerability”, where information is freely available and can be used to produce answers about institutional behaviour – although this can only be achieved when the institution is appropriately transparent @fox_uncertain_2007. Schauer notes that “To be transparent is to have the capacity of being seen without distortion”, and that for information or processes to be transparent, they must be “open and available for scrutiny” @schauer_transparency_2011. This definition notably lacks commitment as to who may take advantage of this transparency, how they can be expected to do so, and how this generates accountability @schauer_transparency_2011 [@oliver_what_2004; @hood_accountability_2010]. An “open” data set about an organisation’s finances may be online, but whether this reveals anything about its behaviour or provides a mechanism for scrutiny is questionable @schauer_transparency_2011 [@fox_uncertain_2007]. Furthermore, both Schauer and Oliver do not equate transparency with knowledge, describing transparency as a facilitator of knowledge “at best” @schauer_transparency_2011, and a journey instead of a destination @oliver_what_2004.

The open data based on the accounts of local governments and charities in the UK is an example of what Heald calls input transparency, which fundamentally lacks context @heald_fiscal_2003 [@heald_varieties_2006]. It is data that describes resource allocation (as can be seen in Figure [screen-inputdata1]), and is easily measurable; however, it does not address links between the input and the outcome @heald_fiscal_2003 [@heald_varieties_2006]. Simply exposing spending data does not qualify as transparency since reporting the amount spent on a service does not indicate how well funded it is; nor does it hold the organisation accountable to its decisions @fox_uncertain_2007. Schauer and Oliver respectively describe notions of passive transparency and old transparency, which is the view that simply making data available in this fashion is enough – and that an organisation does not need to concern itself with the promotion or interpretation of the data published @schauer_transparency_2011 [@oliver_what_2004]. In contrast, they each promote alternative notions of active transparency (Schauer) or new transparency (Oliver). Both of these notions regard transparency as an act of communication that concerns itself with the organisation’s responsibilities @schauer_transparency_2011 [@oliver_what_2004]. Fox similarly describes a clear transparency that describes policies, information access, and data about the behaviour of institutions – which can promote answerability @fox_uncertain_2007.

HCI, Money, and Transparency

In recent years, HCI began to study the relationships that individuals have with money and finance. Work around the design of technology to support budgeting and the management of a range of different incomes has highlighted the ways in which technology typically acts to obscure finances, rather than to make them more transparent, and easily accounted for @vines_pay_2014 [@kaye_money_2014; @snow_fostering_2015]. The values placed on transactions have also been explored both in an individual context (such as the banking practices for the older old) @vines_eighty_2011 [@vines_joy_2012], and at a community scale (such as the Bristol Pound or at emergency relief centres) @ferreira_spending_2015 [@vyas_more_2015]. However, research in HCI thus far has primarily focused on issues of personal finance or how members of communities respond to new financial systems and services; there has thus far been no work venturing into understanding what role technology may play in supporting fiscal transparency and the accountability of organisations and institutions.

Recently, tools and platforms have been developed that take open data (input or passive transparency) and attempt to present it in a manner that allows interested parties to interrogate it to a deeper degree. TheyWorkForYou @mysociety.org_theyworkforyou_2015 is an example of a service, which takes published UK parliamentary data (via the Parliament API @houses_of_parliament_developing_2015) and transforms it into a simple format to be used by the general public. The site provides comparisons of Members of Parliament (MPs) with other MPs and breakdowns of how a single MP has voted on various issues @mysociety.org_theyworkforyou_2015. TheyWorkForYou stands as an example of how Passive Transparency by an organisation (in this case the UK Parliament) can be transformed into a form of Active Transparency that potentially makes an individual MP accountable for their actions in parliament. With this as a starting point, this research seeks to answer the question: what are the requirements for interfaces that support active transparency, in particular around NPO and LA financial data?

Designing Accountable

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Accountable is a small-scale web tool that was designed for the purpose of exploring the ways in which future systems might support new transparent fiscal practices for NPOs, LAs, and their agencies. For the purposes of our research, we framed Accountable as a technology probe. Hutchinson et al. describe technology probes as having engineering, social, and design goals. As such, Accountable was intended to explore: the engineering challenge of scraping and reading unorthodox and irregular online datasets; the design challenge of visualising this data in a way that is interpretable and interrogatable by members of the public; and the social challenge of representing the practices of value-driven organisations in both monetary, and non-monetary terms @hutchinson_technology_2003. The name ‘Accountable’ was derived from the notion that trusted organisations should be accountable to their stakeholders, and that this should be seen as a proactive act of demonstrating their value instead of a response to auditing processes.

In the following sections we discuss the open data that underpins the Accountable systems, the way in which different data is visualised and represented by the tool, and the details of our study design and subsequent findings.

Data Acquisition

As discussed, NPOs and LAs are held to different transparency requirements by the UK government. They also interact frequently, with NPOs often acting as service providers for LAs. As NPOs often seek contracts or funding from LAs, it was decided to explore LA datasets in addition to NPO data in order to understand how the practices of NPOs are affected by LA transparency requirements.

NPO Data

In the UK, NPO data is presented online via the Charity Commission’s website. However these are produced in the charts and graphics generated via embedded Flash applications, making it difficult to scrape or parse useful data from the site. Individual reports produced and submitted by the NPOs themselves are also stored on the site in a downloadable PDF format; this presents another challenge for automatic retrieval and parsing.

In order to produce an interface on Accountable for participants in our study to interact with, a single NPO was selected and the data presented on the Charity Commission site was manually entered into the system. For the purposes of our study we selected a local branch of a well-known national NPO, chosen because the name would be familiar to participants. As with most financial data of NPOs that appears on the Charity Commission site, the data in this case primarily related to aggregated expenditure across categories such as “Charitable Activities” and “Investment Management”. Accountable used this data to present calculations focused on comparing percentages from the 2014 income, 2014 expenditure, and financial history (2010 - 2014) of the NPO.

LA Data

The data representing the accounts that LAs are required to publish on their websites was acquired from two different English LAs (LA01, LA02). This data is related to all spending over 250 for various services, and provides details about the expense such as cost, vendor contracted, and the department responsible (among others). Both of the LAs provided this data in PDF and CSV formats.

Attempts to automate the retrieval and parsing of the machine-readable LA datasets were met with issues stemming from heterogeneous data structures. The data provided by each LA was structured very differently, each requiring a bespoke parser, and was inconsistently formatted, including between data taken from the same LA. The subset of each LA’s 2014 data was deemed appropriate for the purposes of the study, and each were internally consistent enough to be parsed effectively. Heterogeneity between the two datasets was a result of differing LA structures. It was necessary to map data to a common format that could describe data from each source. The vendors or suppliers in receipt of LA funds were easy to determine from the data, but was difficult to categorise each transaction (i.e. what funds were spent on).

Design Rationale

Accountable was designed primarily to read data provided by NPOs and LAs, and present it in an easy-to-digest format to promote Active Transparency and encourage scrutiny and interrogation of the data.\

NPO Data Presentation

The presentation of information for NPOs was largely inspired by TheyWorkForYou website @mysociety.org_theyworkforyou_2015, which as noted uses parliamentary api data to present sentences in “plain english”, so that laypeople can compare MPs. This technique was applied to NPO financial data in Accountable, as an attempt to better describe their activities to interested parties.

Since, for the purposes of our study, Accountable was representing only a single NPO’s data, a “Quick Numbers” section (Figure [screen-accountable]) was developed in lieu of comparison with other NPOs. Using calculations based on the financial data presented by the Charity Commission, this section highlighted financial expenditure and income in various circumstances such as earning money through shops or spending funds on supplying services. The number of volunteers and employees are also presented. Additionally, whereas the Charity Commission often use terms such as “Governance” or “Trading to raise funds” to describe data in Accountable we avoid excessive use of this terminology. Instead data was described in simpler terms (e.g. “activities such as running shops or hosting events”). Finally, financial history was also presented as a chart (Figure [screen-chart]), with data from 2010 up until the most recently available records (2014), to complement the “Quick Numbers” section.

LA Data Presentation

Accountable allows users to scrutinise LA spending via comparing spends on services to another LA. They can select a category from each of the LAs to compare spending between the two organisations and services (Figure [screen-accountable]). These categories represented how expenditure in LAs is divided into its services. Care was taken with wording when describing expenditure, as the data does not necessarily pertain to what money has been spent on, only the service or department in the LA that spent it.

Records that had missing or redacted information were highlighted on the page to support scrutiny. The system defined missing information as any empty field, while redacted information is any field containing the word “redacted”.

As with the NPO data, expenditure data is also displayed on the profile in graph and table form to provide an overview. Displayed are the Total, Largest, Smallest and Average spends by the LA, a breakdown of the spending “via service”, and the Top Vendors by both frequency (number of payments) and payment total (total paid to a single vendor). The number of vendors to display can be configured by the server, and was set to 10 for demonstration in the study.

Study Design

Our study focused on NPOs because of their position as both a producer and consumer of fiscal transparency. Furthermore, austerity measures in the UK have affected the services that LAs are able to deliver themselves, and therefore NPOs often seek service contracts or funding with LAs. As such, NPOs also represent stakeholders interested in LA financial data.

To gain insight into different aspects of financial transparency, the study aimed to explore perspectives on the data from representatives of NPOs as well as members of the public who had a self-stated interest in the activities of these organisations. Participants were recruited to take part in individual interviews or a group workshop depending on the nature of their involvement with NPOs. Those involved in volunteering, fund-raising, or donating to NPOs were invited to workshops to promote discussion and partake in a constructive critique of the Accountable and Charity Commission systems. Those representing an organisation in an official capacity, such as managers or trustees, were invited to interviews. This was in order to provide a space where they may feel more comfortable discussing their organisations’ potentially sensitive financial matters and practices in private. Participants are listed in Table [tab:participants].

Participants and Process

Representatives of NPOs were recruited for interview via an independent charity whose remit includes supporting the voluntary and community sector in Northern England.

Workshop attendees were recruited with a call distributed through our institutional mailing lists and social media. Explicitly requested were participants who regularly donated time, money, or effort to one or more NPOs. These participants were offered a 10 gift voucher or a donation of the same amount to an NPO of their choice for participation.

The interviews and workshops shared the overarching ambitions of exploring: how financial processes inside NPOs were represented; what NPOs and their stakeholders desired to see about NPO finances; and how they desired this to be communicated. The investigation process was adjusted to suit the context of an interview or workshop, as detailed below.

(r)<span>2-4</span> <span>**Participant**</span>  <span>*Gender*</span>   <span>*Interview / Workshop*</span>  <span>*Role(s)*</span>

: Details of Participants.

[tab:participants]

Interviews

A total of 7 semi-structured interviews were held with a variety of representatives from different NPOs. One interview had two interviewees from the same organisation, totalling 8 interview participants. Organisations each focused on different issues including the support of parent and toddler groups, support for those with mental disabilities, and community development. Most organisations focused on localised settings (i.e. community support in a specific area of the city), although one organisation supported other organisations across the local region. Each interview lasted approximately 30 to 45 minutes. Participants were either directly involved in daily activities as managers, or were trustees of the NPO.

During interviews, participants were first asked about the work that their charity did and the techniques that they used to achieve this. The interviews then discussed how the NPO spends and divides up funds based on the work that they do. Participants were also asked about how their organisations sought funds, interacted with an LA (or multiple LAs), and presented their work and achievements to parties such as the Charity Commission and others interested in the organisation.

During interviews, participants were shown the Accountable prototype, which was pre-loaded with data from the local branch of a popular UK charity. Participants were asked to imagine how the data in the system could represent their organisation, and how they felt the data communicated the relationship between their work and financial practices. Discussion was prompted around the critique of Accountable, directed towards the data, its presentation and communication by the system. Following this, participants were asked about their interactions with the LA, and shown copies of printed LA data and LA profile pages in Accountable. Again, participants were asked about their impressions of the data – what they felt was, and was not, shown. Participants were asked about what they, as a representative of their organisation, would like to see about LA spending and how it pertained to their activities.

Workshops

A total of 2 workshops were run, each with 3 participants, lasting between 60 to 90 minutes, split into three main activities. Each participant had experience working with one or more NPO – their experiences included work with small-scale organisations such as support groups, drugs information and advocacy, Non-Profit festivals and events, as well as larger multinational NPOs. Workshop activities were designed to promote rich discussion for analysis alongside interview data.

To begin, participants were asked to introduce themselves by discussing recent work that they had done for an NPO, in what ways they felt that their contribution had helped the organisation (or otherwise) and how the organisation had communicated this to them. Following this, for the first activity participants were introduced to “Janet”, a persona developed for the workshops to support discussion around the practices of an NPO @mcquaid_when_2003 [@miaskiewicz_preliminary_2009]. Janet was described as often volunteering time, money, and effort to a popular NPO’s local branch. The group were given print-outs of the NPO’s data taken from the Charity Commission; this included both print-outs of the Charity Commission web pages as well as the annual reports submitted by the NPO to the commission. The group was then asked to discuss the data both in reference to their own experiences and Janet’s – highlighting and discussing what they felt was useful, or lacking in the data.

After some time with the data, participants were introduced to Accountable, and invited to explore and critique the data in a similar way. They were again asked to focus both on what they themselves and the Janet persona would have thought of the data and take the same considerations as with the printed Charity Commission data. Comparisons between the two presentations of the data were encouraged.

Finally participants were then given the opportunity to create their dream “profile page” for an NPO. Once finished, the group was asked to discuss the designs further, focusing on why they included certain details and to compare designs.

Data Collection and Analysis

Interviews and workshops were audio recorded and transcribed. The lead researcher coded the transcripts using an inductive thematic analysis @braun_using_2006, chosen for its epistemological agnosticism. During coding and clustering, differences in analytic interpretation were collectively discussed by the authors and resolved before codes were compiled into themes. As the interviews and workshops each concerned NPO finances, from different perspectives, the two datasets were treated as one thematically coherent data corpus.

Findings

The separation of interview and workshop participants emerged from both practical considerations to participant schedules, as well as an assumption that participants running NPOs may hold different views to other participants; which could have led to a tension in workshops that was counter-productive to discourse. We actually discovered that all participants, regardless of status or commitment to NPOS, held similar views about their work and that there was a large degree of coherence between the two groups. Our analysis of the data resulted in five themes, discussed below.

Making Volunteer Effort Visible

Many of our workshop participants volunteered their time as opposed to contributing financially to NPOs, with F01 explaining how they “help with organising stuff like […] phoning people and making sure they’re coming”, that she “[answered] calls”, “ran a workshop” and did “odd stuff”. This was echoed by F02, who also explained how she donated skills: “I made them a website and set up a Facebook page…” (F02). Another participant said he wasn’t “into the whole money thing” (F05), preferring to donate his efforts and skills rather than money. Perhaps unsurprisingly, volunteer effort was also seen to have an incredibly large impact on the running of NPOs. A lot of what might be defined as frontline services are delivered solely through volunteer effort; I04 explained how their organisation exists to support “parent and toddler groups across the city, and they are volunteer led”. This participant went on to explain how there are “111 parent and toddler groups” (I04), which are all “giving their time for nothing” (I04). Another participant explained how their role primarily exists to provide infrastructure support to “volunteer led” (I05) activities. Volunteer effort is also seen to be important from a funding standpoint as “you are getting asked more and more things like, ‘How many volunteers do you have?’” (IO5). In NPOs, the volume of volunteers can be quantified into “full time equivalent employees”, which are included in funding bids; “two half-time workers, for instance, that would obviously be one full-time” (I05). Of importance here is the hours that are being given to the organisation in order to assist the delivery of its services.

While volunteer effort and contributions were clearly seen to be important from the perspectives of both stakeholder groups, there was a feeling that these are often poorly represented in existing public reporting processes. The financial data on the Charity Commission website included details about the number of employees and volunteers that an NPO has. It was explained how the number of volunteers represented here was an important indicator of the organisation’s health. Looking through the example data taken from the Charity Commission website and used in Accountable, one participant went on to explain how it is useful to contrast the numbers of volunteers with the number of employees an organisation has: “You employ 190 people. That’s a lot of people. You’re talking, basically, about a medium- size enterprise level, and [in this case] you’ve managed to engage less volunteers than you have employees. That doesn’t look good.” (I06). As such, it was considered that at a simple level the open financial date provided enough information to begin interrogating the work of an organisation.

While offering a useful starting point, it was clear that the presentation of data in relation to the equivalent numbers of full-time staff (be these paid or volunteers) was too simplistic. I06 went on to explain further that the data presented here should not be taken at face-value and was lacking a necessary degree of detail: “it doesn’t tell you how much they donate in terms of time.” (I06). Furthermore, it said little about whether the same people were donating time, or whether a large pool of people donated small pieces of time, or the type of work and skills they were giving which may influence the economic and social value of performed work. This was echoed by I03, who felt it would be more meaningful to see information that articulated: “so many people volunteered, which equates to X number of hours, which put in X amount of time, so money-wise, monetary value would be… X” (I03).

Accounting for Projects

When asked about how they organized the funding of activities in the organisation, the NPO representatives explained how their funding is often tightly tied to specific projects: “money is given per project, so we only spend money on projects that we’ve specifically fundraised the money for” (I03). One participant explained that the funding they receive is “all in chunks” (I04). An organisation will also use examples of past projects when applying for funding as means for building a case for further funding on a “project by project basis” (I07). These types of funds were thus described as “restricted” by participants, in that they “have to spend [the funds] on that particular piece of work” (I08). Therefore, “often the health of a charity financially is about how much they’ve got in unrestricted funds” (I08), which can be used to start new activities or projects, or to provide match-funding for new bids.

When discussing these issues, participants started to explain how there was no reflection of the compartmentalisation of funding in the financial data presented by the Charity Commission. This is despite it being seen as a useful means for indicating the activities of an organisation, as well as communicating the ways in which its activities might be restricted based on the funding it has received: “This gives a whole picture, I would assume, of the whole organisation, and maybe [example charity], like us, have different project areas” (I04); “this is the other thing; it doesn’t tell you what proportion of that funding is actually restricted and how” (I06). It was noted by several of the NPO representatives that this lack of detail was all the more confusing given that typically organisations have to divide their accounts into individual projects for their own accounting processes and for tax and funder auditing. However, it was felt that “when it all comes together on this bit of paper as your end-of-year report, I can’t see those figures in that report” (I04). The headings and definitions provided by the Charity Commission also did not explain the project – context of what an organisation was doing -– “Then the spending – again the vast bulk of it on charitable activities. That’s not very meaningful is it?” (I08). As such, the annual reports produced by individual organisations made available on their own websites (and occasionally also uploaded to the Charity Commission website as additional information) were instead seen as the go-to information as they highlight “the major projects of the past year”.

Both interview and workshop participants stated a desire to see the activities and projects of an NPO presented alongside the financial data to support its interrogation. Interviewees stated that having a view of the data that “gives you a percentage of your income and how it’s spent on the project” would be more meaningful, and that “you’d probably want to break it down to project activities, grants, and some sort of, also, qualitative accounting” (I06). I07 explained that a project-by-project breakdown “[is] one of the things that will basically get the attention of maybe a potential funder. Listing the project and then your achievements, I think that would be the dream type of one-pager.” (I07). This was echoed by workshop participants who had volunteered for NPOs, who explained that they would hope to see “some key events that they have organised in the past few years and how much money they’ve spent on it” (F03), and “a section about the activities, because that’s what I don’t think was in there so much” (F04). These participants also highlighted how their interest in the future work of an organisation was also promoted through the types of projects that it ran and had funded: “A section saying what they plan to do in the future and maybe even backed up with a rough idea of how much money is going to be spent and where they’re going to get it from” (F01). There is a palpable sense of projects and concrete activities being “what most people would be interested in” (F04) when looking at an organisation, both in terms of demonstrating and interrogating what work that organisation had done in a given period, and what it hoped to achieve in the near future.

Administration and Charitable Spending

A clear point of tension in our data related to the different perspectives participants had on what are and are not acceptable activities and roles to fund in an NPO. Some of the workshop participants viewed NPOs spending money on administration or governance as a negative, expressing instead a desire to see funds go directly to charitable activities: “I would want to know. Now I don’t really want to donate to [a specific animal charity] because I feel like the money is not going towards the [animals], it’s going towards the people that run it.” (F02). When asked about how much they would expect an organisation to spend on its charitable activities, this participant went on to state: “I would expect a charity to spend almost all of what it gets [… and not] stockpiling, it suggests they don’t actually need it. Maybe they’d like to put some away for some big projects. I’d expect them to spend maybe 90% of the income..” (F02).

The NPO representatives however were very conscious of the public perception regarding administrative costs. I05 explained that “nobody wants to pay for a chief exec’s post, for instance, but it’s a vital post in the organisation”. Contrasting the workshops, interviewees viewed administrative costs as part of the work itself and would often incorporate this into funding bids and project proposals: “We have, on most of the projects, a management fee, which supports the work of the management committee” (I04). I05 went on to explain how “that’s where a lot of organisations will have a set figure for each piece of work that they will take off in terms of overheads, somewhere around 12% usually, to cover those costs” (I05). As such, from the perspective of an NPO, administration or governance was seen as as an essential component that allows for effective delivery of front-line services: “we can’t function unless we have an administrator or finance officer” (I05). However it was felt there was a growing difficulty in accessing funds for these types of roles and duties:

**.

The lack of funding for paid staff time was often led to quandaries in terms of access to other types of funding. I05 went on to explain how: “There is quite a lot of money out there for capital spend, so if you wanted to buy some equipment to take young people to do an activity […] But there is no money to pay the staff to get them there” (I05). As such, organisations become more reliant on volunteer commitments – however, paid staff time is often required to write funding bids in the first place, or to manage critical aspects of them when funded.

Invisible Beneficiaries

An NPO typically exists because of the needs of its beneficiaries. Without them there would be no reason for the organisation to operate, and their experience and changed circumstances are often considered direct evidence that the organisation is performing its duties. In the open data hosted on the Charity Commission, the ways in which beneficiaries are engaged with and how they benefit is not detailed; who the beneficiaries of an organisation’s activities might be is not mentioned in an organisation’s overview page. Annual reports produced by NPOs for the Charity Commission do provide brief insights into beneficiaries in reference to the Charity’s aims. However, generally speaking there is little to no detail given as to how the financial data reported for the purposes of public accountability relates to the activities that these organisations do for the communities, individuals or issues it seeks to support.

Several of the NPO representatives highlighted that the lack of evidence around who benefits from the work of their organisations was at odds with their own internal reporting and auditing processes. One participant explained how they carefully collected information about all of their volunteers activities: “we do that indirectly through monitoring, […] we’ve got a quarterly monitoring system where we input our stuff into their database, and they pre-populate these things to say ‘You’ve seen this many people this many times’…” (I03). Through internal auditing and reporting mechanisms like this, our participants explained how they had a good understanding of the numbers of beneficiaries that the organisation had come into contact with and, to varying degrees of detail, the quality and extent of this contact. Quite often these were embedded within the (private) reporting processes to the funders of specific projects or activities. That this offers the potential to link project financial data with the “work done” was not lost on these participants: “… the information I would like to put across would be first of all the project, like what was funded, then what we did […] this is the impact that we had’.” (I07). I05 explained how their organisation had a good understanding of how many people gained or were ‘impacted’ upon by a specific piece of work, and that this could demonstrate a link between funds received and quantity, if not quality, of outputs: “Because then […] you can really look at how much work is costing per person…” (I05).

Workshop participants mirrored these sentiments, noting that they would like to see: “something like what kind of changes have been made to people.” (F03), “[It] only works if it’s a charity that’s supposed to help humans, but the number of people that are being impacted by their work..” (F02). Explicit throughout these again was making “what impacts they’ve had”‘ (F02) more visible and “the things they’re most proud of” (F02). Participants saw description of work as a way of judging whether organisations were performing in accordance to their remit, “I kind of like this sort of having objective and achievement next to each other” (F05).

Revealing Funding Opportunities

NPOs seek out funding opportunities from a variety of sources, including LAs. During interviews, NPOs were asked about their interactions with LAs and discussed the LA data on the Accountable system. It was noted by some participants that this data provided a potentially useful resource for understanding how LAs went about allocating their funds and how much of those funds were being allocated to organisations in the charity or non-profit sector. Our participant representing an organisation that provides infrastructure support to other NGOs explained how LAs have a remit to ensure that a certain amount of funds are distributed to NPOs based in the local region. Therefore, the public availability of data like this is useful to “churn through” and attempt to make sense of: “we can then get back to the council [LA] and highlight how they are not delivering on this requirement” (I05). However, they admitted that the data as archived and made available is difficult to parse, and that it was often impossible to tell whether the money was being spent on activities or services that could by provided by NPOs, leading to a large amount of “reading between the lines” of the data.

Other participants from NPOs also critiqued the data presented. This in part echoed the points of I05; several of our participants found the data and information contained in these extensive spreadsheets “impossible” to make sense of. When reviewing the visualisations of this data on Accountable the participants explained how this made the data easier to explore and compare across different LA service areas and departments but did not appear to be immediately of relevance to their running of an NPO. Rather than seeing LA data on expenditure, they were more interested in understanding what funding opportunities may be present in an LA’s budget: “I’m not sure how useful it is for me to know the council break-up, because I need to know what money is available to use, what pots […] it’s more detail I need” (I03). Another participant qualified this around searching for money for their projects: “that’s what I would like to know really, if they still have money for a project where we can bid or an application that we can submit or something like that” (I07). It was clear that the perceived impoverishment of the LA data as provided in its archived and visualised forms was tied to a wider set of concerns NPOs have around awareness of what money is still available, what budgets have yet to be spent, and how potential funding streams and individual funders themselves might be better aggregated and brought together. This was explained in depth by I07:

Discussion

Our findings highlight how, regardless of presentation, the ‘open’ financial data provided by the Charity Commission is neither an adequate vehicle for demonstrating the work of an NPO, nor a detailed resource to be interrogated by those either invested, or interested in, its activities. Interviews with representatives of NPOs further highlighted that the funding mechanisms and structure of work performed by organisations are not necessarily reflected in the financial data submitted to the Charity Commission, and thus a large amount of context and meaning is lost in its presentation. This was reinforced by our volunteer participants, in that they deemed the financial information presented by the Charity Commission was not useful for what they were interested in seeing about an organisation’s spending – namely its activities, projects and work. Currently, the aggregated financial data highlights only ‘bottom line’ figures, such as totals spent or earned by an organisation on high-level categories such as Charitable Activities and Trading to Raise Funds; a figure which is known to have little relevance to NPOs @henderson_performance_2002. Returning to the discussion of literature that opened this paper, this is exemplar of Heald’s input transparency as sums of money are presented without the contextual information essential to explaining or justifying the work of the NPO @heald_varieties_2006 [@heald_fiscal_2003]. Our findings note how the work conducted by an NPO or charity is inextricably bound to funding that gives projects structure, and at the same time restricts what funds can be spent on. Organisations and their investors desire to see projects and activities reflected in the data to contextualise it and give it meaning.

Furthermore, the lack of contextual data on the Charity Commission indicates that it understands transparency as Schauer’s Passive Transparency @schauer_transparency_2011, in that what is presented is high-level expenditure data without comment to its interpretation or the responsibilities of the organisation. This is true even when the annual reports of NPOs are taken into consideration, since accounts and spending are not directly tied to activities, projects, or aims and objectives. Beneficiaries of NPOs are only talked about in high-level terms, and the substantial efforts put forward by volunteers are similarly lost as details are not carried from the organisation to the Charity Commission. There also exists a tension between the perceived and actual value of administrative costs of an organization, which are often also directly linked to an organisation’s ability to deliver services. Organisations are finding it increasingly difficult to raise funds for essential administrative roles or purposes, yet are expected to be showing that they have invested the majority of money into providing for its beneficiaries. That administrative work is a key part of service provision is not clear in the data presented to those investing in an organisation; leading to issues of trust as the data does not reflect commitment to its purported aims and objectives @macmillan_relationship_2005. NPOs also discover issues when seeking funding from LAs, as it is unclear what funding remains in the LA budgets that could benefit their work.

The results of our study raise a number of questions around the role open data technologies in NPOs and other trusted organisations. In the following section we discuss a number of the implications this raises for the design of future systems that represent and provide access to data, and for the procedures of capturing and organising such data.

Design for Visibility, not Transparency

Confusion about what constitutes organisational transparency indicates that producing systems to support it may be limited in scope, as the term is open to interpretation @schauer_transparency_2011 [@oliver_what_2004]. Rather, design work around the opening up of information in the non-profit sector might be better focused on making visible the projects and work of the organisation. Funding, as discussed, is most often tied directly to a single piece of work or project. Visibility of this work, however, is lost when the focus is on aggregated expenditure. If the annual reports provided to the Charity Commission were to outline investments based on specific projects, then a direct link can be seen between expenditure and the work of the charity. Work thus becomes visible, and data becomes concerned with the responsibilities of the organisation as well as its audience; fitting with notions of active transparency and answerability in the process @schauer_transparency_2011 [@oliver_what_2004; @fox_uncertain_2007].

Systems seeking to support the communication of an organisation’s work through data should, therefore, be designed for visibility instead of transparency to avoid misconceptions about what it is they’re trying to do. Regardless of whether a system is designed to interrogate or demonstrate NPO behaviour – this research underlines how little of an organisation can be seen when presented with input transparencies , how this fails to make them interrogatable and, thus, unaccountable @heald_varieties_2006 [@heald_fiscal_2003; @fox_uncertain_2007]. Outcomes would likely be incredibly difficult to measure through financial data – or in some instances impossible to measure in any known tangible way @heald_fiscal_2003 [@henderson_performance_2002; @hook_making_2015] – yet organisations had a deep understanding of their beneficiaries, which could be more indicative of their activities. The efforts of volunteers also have a profound effect on organisations; participants indicated that many activities were entirely volunteer- led, and that the number of volunteers can be a measure of an NPO’s health. Therefore, we suggest that making visible the effort of volunteers, and the number and type of beneficiaries will go some way to accounting for what a non-profit organisation is doing. We might imagine therefore that systems like Accountable might provide enhanced comparisons between the number of employees against volunteers, and the volume of beneficiaries who may have come into contact with volunteers over the course of a project or set period of time. While still far from perfect, this might support organisational accountability in reference to their stated aims and objectives, as well as provide data that reinforces the value of their services.

Our findings also highlighted tensions between NPO expenditure on administrative functions versus the direct spend on beneficiaries and charitable activities @oliver_what_2004 [@henderson_performance_2002]. While members of the public and those donating money to an NPO might expect funds to be directed straight to charitable activities, it is clear that that administration and governance costs are a critically important feature of effective service delivery and the completion of projects. As it stands, open data around the activities of NPOs does not communicate well these administration costs. An initial reaction to this, given our notion of visibility, would be to highlight how much of project or activity spend is tied to administrative work and roles; however, doing so may in itself reinforce existing feelings of mistrust between the public and NPOs, especially given recent stories in the popular press that propagate (potentially misleading) views on the misuse of public and donated funds by some organisations @hope_true_2015 [@wilding_it_2015]. Instead, we suggest that it isn’t the cost of administration and management that needs to be represented, but rather the cost of it not existing; in other words, in what ways does having various paid staff roles provide a critical infrastructure and enable the day-to-day volunteering and charitable activities that NPOs are commonly expected to perform? Furthermore, it is important to use this data to contextualize what is and what is not reasonable staff costs, and how this may scale depending on the size and scope of the organisation. Providing this, however, requires going beyond the primarily numerical data associated with the types of open financial data provided by LAs and the Charity Commission. We address this issue in the following section.

Produce Qualitative Accounting

The focus on presenting ‘bottom line’ spending data is both an input transparency and data that is known to be ineffective of determining NPO performance @heald_varieties_2006 [@heald_fiscal_2003; @henderson_performance_2002]. Even if we were to take projects into consideration, financial spend is inadequate to determine whether an organisation is meeting its goals as it fails to reflect whether a spend is appropriate or not @heald_fiscal_2003 [@henderson_performance_2002]. Our findings reflect these issues, as organisations noted the efforts they were taking to continue to effectively deliver services while struggling with a lack of administration staff. To more appropriately indicate the reasons and activities behind NPO spending data and to support designing for visibility, we suggest moving to include additional qualitative information in financial reporting.

Incorporating the capture of qualitative information in accounting practices would go some way to making visible the efforts of the organisation and provide context to expenditure. Our study’s findings noted that organisations keep track of information such as volunteer activity, and the number and location of services that they provide to beneficiaries; however, such information is typically captured relatively informally and often in an unsystematic manner. Furthermore, the intertwining of funding and projects also indicates that a contextual reference for spending can be created by entering this data alongside financial transactions. Metadata about spending, such as project or activity, approximate location, number of beneficiaries, and volunteer effort, would provide a better view of the work NPOs were doing with specific types of funds. Visibility would be enhanced through the presence of the qualitative data, which would also provide greater insight about the output of the organisation, increasing accountability @heald_fiscal_2003 [@fox_uncertain_2007]. Outputs (e.g., the number of people using NPO services) are not necessarily immediately or directly linked to eventual outcomes (e.g., how did people gain from participating in these sessions), but they do give a better starting point than input data for those looking to understand the potential impact of an organisation’s work @heald_fiscal_2003 [@henderson_performance_2002]. NPOs can use this qualitative financial data to reinforce claims about the extent and quality of their work @heald_fiscal_2003 [@macmillan_relationship_2005]. Alignment of activities and goals was something that participants expressed keen interest in, and as such using data to present this would benefit organisations attempting to demonstrate their work and commitment to their aims and objectives @macmillan_relationship_2005.

Support Interrogation through Common Formats

Currently, the systems that are used to hold NPOs and LAs accountable for their financial expenditure do not support interrogation or scrutiny since they cannot be effectively retrieved and inspected. An issue that became immediately apparent in the design and development of Accountable was the need for common data formats and standards. While this may appear to be a moot point, it’s a critical one as we observed and indeed experienced first hand how despite the popular rhetoric of public accountability and transparency, existing ways of archiving and presenting data fell short. For example, considering the Charity Commission data, use of Flash technology to generate web pages @adobe_adobe_2015, and irregularly formatted PDF format reports, meant the underlying data could not be easily retrieved. Furthermore, while there appears to be some benefit to providing tools for NPOs and other stakeholders to interrogate LA financial data, structural differences between LAs and inconsistent approaches to categorizing data made it unclear as to what money was being spent on @newcastle_city_council_payments_2015 [@northumberland_county_council_payments_2015].

One recommendation that comes from this is to ensure that systems designed to support public accountability move away from technologies and practices that make the underlying data inaccessible for scrutiny. In our specific context, it is likely that at the time that the Charity Commission site was developed technologies like Flash were the only viable option to effectively chart information. Modern web technologies can, however, achieve the same effects whilst allowing the data to be mechanically retrieved. Since these charts are likely populated from information stored elsewhere on the system, it is feasible to implement alternative views in standard formats or feeds – such as that provided by the UK Government’s Parliament API @houses_of_parliament_developing_2015. At the same time, while the LA data sets are already provided in a common file format, they would benefit from the imposition of data standards to ensure that field names and date formats are common across different geographical areas and jurisdictions. This highlights not just the need for new ways to present this data, but also the production of tools that allow those who manage or oversee such open data to think through how they collate and structure data for audiences in ways that allow it to be inspected and compared with other related organisations.

Conclusion

In this paper we have set out to explore issues to do with the role of openly available data in supporting the public accountability of trusted organisations. We did this through the specific example of the financial practices of non-profits and local governmental authorities, and the ways in which they publish aspects of their spending online in the aid of supporting transparency around the spending of public and donated funds. While data describing the finances of trusted organisations is seen as a means for making these organisations more accountable to the public, our study highlighted how such data makes information about the (often voluntary) efforts of the organisation and its beneficiaries invisible. From this, we have discussed how technologies intended to support the accountability of trusted organisations should strive for visibility of activity rather than prevailing notions of transparency through data. We have highlighted the implications for the presentation, capture and organization of data.

Outside of finance, our findings show that there is a need for adequately representing human processes in Linked or Open Data in ways that are legible to people. Financial data is produced and exposed by organisations in order to make them transparent and accountable, but as seen with our specific examples of UK Charity Commission data this requires further annotation to make visible the activities of the organisation. In the specific context of designing for the non-profit sector, this means considering visibility instead of transparency for data technologies to be framed around an organisation’s activities instead of how much income and expenditure they have generated and spent. In our case, the funding, spending, and activities of NPOs were all found to orbit around a project structure; with funds granted and restricted to specific projects and activities, including administration costs. Capturing metadata about project funding, volunteer activities, and beneficiaries in financial records leads to a more comprehensive vantage point from which to hold an organisation accountable. Achieving this will require future consideration to data formats and standards that support this, giving HCI research an opportunity to help shape future international discussions on transparency and accountability.

Acknowledgements

We’d like to thank our participants for giving their time to take part in our study. This research was funded through the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital Civics (EP/L016176/1). Data supporting this publication is openly available under an ‘Open Data Commons Open Database License’. Additional metadata are available at: 10.17634/154300-3. Please contact Newcastle Research Data Service at rdm@ncl.ac.uk for access instructions.

The End of the Tunnel (is in sight)

2016-04-22

I’ve been strength training since October 2012 with Starting Strength and the Power Lifts. I started training bodyweight / calisthenics early 2013 as a supplementary system, and ditched the Powerlifting for Calisthenics full-time in October 2013. That leaves me with two solid years of bodyweight strength under my belt, plus about a half year. It might be a surprise for some, then, to learn that I still suck at Pull-ups.

I’m a heavy guy atm, weighing in at approx 106Kg. I’ve definitely been lighter; when I first started training the gym scales clocked me in at 79kg. Whilst I doubt the accuracy of those scales, I think the mass gain is approximately right if you count the fact I’ve probably added a percent or two of body fat alongside any muscle mass. This isn’t exactly optimal for bodyweight pulling work such as Pull-ups, but I’m feeling stronger and in better shape than I did when I was powerlifting at all.

Coach Wade of Convict Conditioning said that Pull-Ups are the great equaliser; it’s pure relative strength. I think that’s definitely true. I’ve struggled with them for years. I spent an entire year on his gorram Horizontal Pulls, and remember the joy that I felt graduating to Jacknifes. I struggled to perform them at the gym, and my pull bar here at home isn’t quite set up right for them (too close to the wall) so when I quit the gym to focus on training here at home, I needed to find a way to train Pulls. It was about this time I started swapping exercises out for Start Bodyweight and reading up on Al Kavadlo’s approaches.

During 2014 I tried my best to train Pulls. “This year” I told myself. I started doing Negatives, then Half Pulls. I remember trying to Grease the Groove, I remember trying the Armstrong program over the Easter break. I remember having a session where I felt I could finally do Pull-Ups, then the next session feeling that they’d escaped me once again. I realised that I wasn’t getting the full range of motion, and became disheartened again.

Late 2014, when I started my MRes, and into 2015 I admitted to myself that I wasn’t performing full Pull-Ups, but needed to train them somehow. I moved to Negative Chins, and when I managed to get good at those, Negative Pulls proper. I think I graduated to Negative Pulls sometime in March 2015. Since then, I’ve consistently worked my way up to 3x10 reps, then missed a session and instead of picking back up where I left off – moving to 3x5 again. I know why; fear of failure. I fear that I’ve been performing my Negatives wrong this whole time, and graduating will only make it true. This, of course, should all be part and parcel of one’s journey of self-construction through training.

Now, in April of 2016 I see the end of the tunnel for the first time.

My approach to exercise has always been one of a brutish minimalism; coming from a background of Convict Conditioning, Naked Warrior, and the Kavadlo Bros how could it not be? I want the most effective exercises to train my entire body. These also happen to be exercises that I love, but that’s a bonus really. Coach Wade promised this with the Big Six and the Convict Conditioning System. No equipment other than a bar, and optionally a towel. I throw in an old chair to perform negatives off of as well (such a hedonist). That mentality shows whenever I dismiss the need for fancy toys and tools for training – even my training gear consists of a cotton tee, hoodie, and sweat pants in alternating shades of white, black and grey. Oh and some cheapass sandshoes that I get for £7 and replace once a year in September.

Recently growing tired with my lack of overall progress on the Pulling front, I was prompted by a fellow practitioner to invest in one of those elastic assistance bands. That way I could focus on form under a full ROM and gradually move through different band sizes until I was pulling myself up like normal people. I ordered the biggest one that evening, and I’ve had my first session with it this morning.

Fuck me. It’s definitely given me a confidence boost. I actually think that it’s giving me a bit much assistance, since it’s the top-tier band and I cranked out 3x5 without much bother. There are parts of me that are sorer than they’re used to though, so that’s a good thing; and I’m definitely going to need to double-check my form at some point. What’s important for me currently though, is that it’s given me hope that I’ve started on a relatively clear path on the road to mastering the Pull-Up. I can see the path is a bit rocky, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel and I can see where I might slip up instead of just running in place.

This is going to be a good year.

Grumbly Review - VidaHost hosting (is bad for devs)

2016-04-12

Warning: I’m going to have a bitch here, although I think I make some good points; the purpose of this piece is pretty much just as therapy for my coder-rage.

I’ve been hosting mrshll.uk with UK-based hosting company Vidahost for a little while now, and as the year has went on I have increasingly grown to dislike them. Tbh, I only have myself to blame as I bought their hosting package in a fit of urgency without any particular market research as to the best hosting company for my needs. I was young age of 22 and I didn’t see myself developing much web software in my little spare time, so shoved up a holding page and got on with my life.

That changed when I began seriously developing my own indie CMS, and I learned very quickly that I was going to have to jump through hoops.

The Good

First the good. Gotta start on a positive.

Decent PHP support I develop Brimstone CMS in Symfony 2.x, and I can’t recall a specific incident that’s made developing the application harder by being through Vidahost. They let you use .htaccess, and let you choose your PHP version pretty much all the way up to PHP7. I’ve largely been able to fire and forget.

Splendid customer service Every time I’ve posted a support ticket to Vidahost I’ve had some pretty swift replies, and they’ve usually responded within about 25 mins day or night. Most of the time they solve the issue within an hour, and the rest of the time I’ve been on Stack Overflow and realised I was the problem all along.

Easy spin-up of basics It’s been pretty easy for me to add subdomains, MySQL databases / users, email accounts, etc. The basics that you expect a hosting company to do. Some of the one-click installs for Wordpress etc are also pretty nifty.

The Bad

Here we go.

Slow I’ve noticed that sites I’ve developed on other hosting services have had pretty similar speeds to having everything run on localhost. Not Vidahost. It’s relatively sluggish in a Web circa 2008 sort of way. I’ve even just pushed a feature involving more Twitter functionality, with shiny ajax requests for favouriting (screw the like/heart combo), and it’s broken it straight away and gives me timeouts on pages that were admittedly slow before – but not game-breaking.

Shit SSH Vidahost begrudgingly let you SSH into a domain’s hosting area in order to play around. For serious users of a web framework you’ll probably need command-line access to run various tools or scripts that come bundled with your framework (Symfony and Doctrine for example). Every time I push a feature or update a template, I need to ssh in to update the database schema or clear the template cache. This is obviously not a problem except that Vidahost don’t allow you to add any SSH keys, meaning you need to remember a password that they auto-generate for you. I’m not necessarily complaining about the auto-generation – it stops people from choosing silly passwords and potentially weeds out those who don’t know what they’re doing, but if you’re that security conscious surely the extra step of letting me use SSH keys makes it equally secure? Grrah. Also, I know it’s probably best to err on the side of caution and let SSH sessions expire pretty quickly – but I’ve logged in, switched to my text editor to make a very quick change (like, uncommenting-something quick), upload it, and then the session’s frozen and I have to re-log in. Bah.

PHP Session clear-up I’ve got a whole control panel back here that most of the dev time is spent on. I can log in, and then interact with Twitter and post blog posts and all sorts of standard CMS clart. I’ve had it before where I’ve logged in, and then went to write a Note (Tweet) which is sent over AJAX, only to have the server respond with the login page as the session’s been cleared. This process taking roughly 20s. Wtf? That’s mental.

SSL Certificate aka. Vidahost love to squeeze you for cash. When I knew that I wanted to build an indie site and I would often be sending my password (or precious blog posts) across the pipe I knew I had to encrypt it. So I looked at the SSL options. I was presented with the option of paying £40 for a fresh cert, or £20 for the privilege of having them install a home-generate one. I parted with my cash. When Mozilla’s Let’s Encrypt came of age I enquired as to whether Vidahost would be supporting this, as Let’s Encrypt is designed to be automated (my logic being that after an initial set up effort they could set domains and certificates away running forever and be happy). Wrong. Vidahost responded with a resounding “Sorry!”, presumably whilst rubbing themselves in £20 notes and bathing in the tears of web devs everywhere.

Conclusions

Use vidahost if you’re just looking to set up shop with a presence on the web and use stuff like Wordpress. Don’t use them for any serious development work. I can’t wait until my hosting expires and I move to Digital Ocean.

Please use PDF

2016-03-01

Update 2021-04-18: Please don’t use PDF. I do like PDF as an open standard and a format for finished documents, but I’ve actually grown a bit since this post and I think it’s best to use plaintext for most things. I’d be much happier receiving undergrad coursework in markdown files

I’m currently marking undergraduate Lit Reviews, and everytime I open up J. Bloggs’ folder to see their work and see a gorram .docx file I actually want to cry. Word files are terrible generally, but I should also not be expected to fire up an entire office suite just to view a document. If I ever end up in charge of setting undergraduate coursework I’m making it a rule that every document should be submitted as .pdf where appropriate. Here’s why.

(Nb: After this point I’ll start referrring to file formats without the . and the italics since I’m writing in markdown and really can’t be bothered to keep it up until I write a proper editor)

A .pdf file represents a finished product

A pdf file represents a finished document that you’re willing to show the world. The whole point of a pdf is to “present documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and Operating Systems” (Adobe). It contains all of the information needed to display the document correctly – typefaces/fonts, layout, sizes etc. Screensize not withstanding, I see a pdf the same on my machine as you do on yours. It even compresses it; I once had a 50MB OpenDocument file crunch down to barely an mb when exporting as pdf.

If you send in a docx file (or even odt or tex), that sends a particular message to me. That message roughly translates as “You aren’t meant to see this yet”. Those files are software-specific files for document creation and represent the toolkit you’re using. If you were doing graphic design for someone, and handed in the work you would export it into a format that you knew they could see such as a png or svg. Obviously graphic design is a bad example, since you often send in source files as part of the hand-in, so that the client can mess up your work later on (or their team can tweak it for printing etc.). More accurately, if you were painting somebody a picture you wouldn’t hand them a palette of wet paint. So don’t hand in docx, tex, or odt files.

.pdf is an open standard

I could rant on about how awesome open standards are, but there are many who’ve done so already (and more eloquently then me) such as these guys. Adobe used to control pdf but they made it an ISO standard in 2008. There’s still problems, obviously – but being an open standard is the first step towards solving them for everyone.

It gives you the freedom to choose your toolkit

This one is probably the most important one for me as a technologist generally, but also having been through undergrad programmes (and currently doing postgrad stuff). I came to Uni as a fully-fledged Linux snob and couldn’t use MS Word if I tried. I’d just completed an A-level in Double ICT which involved a lot of document creation, so I knew first-hand how terrible doc and docx files were to use in other office suites. Opening a document in LibreOffice that was created in MS Word is one of the most painful experiences a F/LOSS user can ever go through due to formatting errors (although I’d argue that’s docx’s fault rather than Word or Writer, but that’s another blog post).

If you’re working collaboratively on a document, you should have a discussion about tools used for document creation. This is important inside and outside of academia (I had an experience recently with LaTeX-Word conversion on a paper). If you’re working on your own, however, producing a pdf as a final product means that you can choose whatever system you want to produce it in and nobody else is affected. I began producing all my reports in LaTeX a little while ago, but I can also jump back to a word processor whenever I want without much change in output at the other end. I can even use PHP to turn a web page into an A4 pdf report if I so choose and achieve the same results.

Conclusions

Whatever your opinions are on the pdf standard, simply having a standard that represents a finished product is a good thing. You should be handing that in whether it’s a CV/resumé, a short-form report, or a thesis. How you produce it therefore becomes a relatively minor issue, and should be invisible on the other end. Pdf is how we should achieve this short-term, and then we can begin fixing that standard once we have that mindset.

I'm going to run to Mordor

2016-01-22

For a while now I’ve thought about my overall fitness goals, as opposed to just my strength goals. I’ve been strength training since Oct 2012, which is a little over three years and I’ve never particularly done cardio. I’d heard cardio interferes with strength gains, and I’ve been deathly afraid of that. The truth is, however, that my training is beginning to plateau and I still haven’t conquered the Pull-up, which requires a good weight-bodyfat ratio. I’m also a bit sensitive about what I perceive as a bit of a gut developing, since my large waist protrudes a tad when I sit. I also get out of breath way easier than I did when I began training, probably due to the extra mass I’m shifting around.

tl;dr I need to up my game on the fitness front.

I’ve set a goal that by the Equinox this year (March 20) I will have shifted all of my strength-based calisthenics training to a single circuit, instead of a two-day split. If I leave some of the CC2 bolt-ons like my grip training to the second day (giving me more time overall to deal with it), it also frees up the majority of that time for a bit of cardio. I hate running, but it’s a handy skill to have down and I’ve attempted it in the past too. This time I plan to nail it, by having a good goal but taking it relatively easy. I’m going to run to Mordor.

I got the idea from Nerd Fitness, where they calculate the distance from the Shire to Mordor in miles (eurgh) and advise making it a goal for walking. I’ll be running it in stints in the morning obviously, but I think it’s kinda cute and motivating as hell.

The Plan

The distance between Hobbiton in the Shire and Mt. Doom in Mordor is 1779 miles according to Nerd Fitness. They’re US so they obviously use a filthy imperial measurement, let’s update that:

1779 miles is 2863.023 km

Ouch. Sounds like a lot more, but a nice standard metric instead of imperial bollocks :-P (Sorry US-friends!). Problem is, that that .023 km on the end bothers me. For the purposes of goals and nerdy role-playing I’m also saying that once I’m in Mt. Doom I’ll need to do my business and get a safe distance away. So I’ve rounded up to 2865 km. Goal set, awesome.

Now the attack plan. Aside from grip training, I’ll have a whole training session of up to 1hr total in order to run a distance. I’m a creature of habit, so having a standard distance to run laps of will help a lot. I’ve not got access to a track immediately (plus they get muddy), but my street is set up with roads and back alleys that can be used as a loop. Cracking. This also feeds into my role-playing as some sort of urban ranger type, nice. I did some measuring on Google Maps, and one loop of the “track” is measured as 646 m. To be on the safe side, let’s round that down to 640 m per lap. Attack plan set, let’s calculate.

(2864*1000) / 640 = 4476.5625 laps *

Ouch. That’s gonna take some doing. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like those decimal points hanging on. Let’s round up.

(4477640) / 1000 = 2865.28 km

So, by rounding up I’ll have run a total of just over my set amount. I doubt there’s a way I can ever ensure both figures don’t have hanging decimals so I’ll leave it there lest I go insane.

So, that’s how I’m going to get to Mordor. To keep me motivated on the way I’m going to code a bit onto the site in order to log progress, and keep a few extra milestones along the way – stuff like distance from Newcastle to various landmarks etc. All I need now is some decent running shoes!

Jar of Broken Dreams

2016-01-10

I wrote this a little while back in 2013, when I desperately wanted to eat some peanut butter out of the jar but there was none in the house. I posted my lament on social media and claimed that tragic poems had been written about less. Someone challenged me to write this, and about an hour later this poem was written.

This was dedicated to an old friend, Amy Henwood (and to all of those without peanut butter tonight)

My cupboard stands now filled to brim, yet I care not for what lies within. Not jams or curds or the sweetest tea, can ever aspire to satisfy me. Pasta, rice - I have them in spades, yet only memories of the scent of thee pervades my cupboard, now a barren womb in which an empty jar entombs my long lost love; mere dregs of spoils. And now my blood begins to boil.

I remember days long past, when they made jars that were built to last. I’d spread you, love you, nibble and bite. as you filled my days with light. In morning or eve or as dusk fell, you’d always have me under spell of desire to reach to take you down and allow me to once more drown in tears of joy at your sweet embrace. Now bitter anguish streaks my face.

Rest now my prince, my fire and muse, one who I never thought to lose. I’ll move on but there’ll never be another — you’ll always be my peanut butter.

Year In Strength 2015: Reflections on Training

2016-01-05

Another year of strength training is under my belt, and since it’s in every strength enthusiast’s best interests to look back and reflect on their training every so often I thought I’d take this opportunity to do so. I’ll be reflecting on my progress on each of the Big Six from Convict Conditioning, as well as reviewing a few of the decisions I made this year.

Push-Ups

2015 was definitely the year of the push-up for me. I’ve always struggled with upper-body pushing, and although this year was no different – I feel my approach has come along leaps and bounds.

When starting calisthenics, I was desperate to master the push-up and raced my way through the first four stages towards Full Push-Ups, and this showed in my form. During the summer of 2014 I made a start on Close (Diamond) Push-Ups, and was shocked at how difficult they were. Yes, I fell straight into the trap Coach Wade has spent the better part of his career warning me against. For the latter half of 2014, I performed sloppy Close Push-Ups for sets up to 15 reps, and wondering why I couldn’t get past that point.

I resolved to change this in 2015, and since then I’ve been working on form. I would start at 3x5 reps, then move slowly up one rep per set per session until I hit 3x10. I would then realise that there was something else wrong with my form, and I would resolve to fix that and begin again. This recently culminated around August/September for me, when I admitted to myself something I’d been avoiding saying out loud – “I’m not going deep enough”. One of the benefits of Close Push-Ups is that you can tell if the depth of your movement is appropriate because your chest should touch your hands. Mine wasn’t. I spent the last quarter of 2015 concentrating on depth, and squeezing my glutes, and it paid off immensely in terms of both strength and musculature by the time I reached the 3x10 again.

Squats

My old friends. In short, I feel I neglected Squats as a whole this year. Late 2014 and early 2015 saw me performing Balance Assisted Pistols outside using a lamp-post and a towel. After hitting 3x15 per leg (and staying there a while) I felt that I was pulling down with the towel too much, and swapped them out for Box Pistols. I made it up to a good 3x10, but moved down to 3x5 to work on form, and never really bothered to move it back up. I think my form’s deteriorated a bit too – I bounce a lot I think, and my negative is a bit fast and uncontrolled.

Overall, I think Squats have went backwards; they’ve certainly not progressed particularly.

Pull-Ups

My eternal foe. I still haven’t progressed to the point of Full Pull-Ups, but I’ve accepted that as 100kg+ (Orc body-type) I’m going to find most pulling motions difficult. That said, I again think that my approach to Pulls has been a lot better, and that I’m a lot stronger for it.

I’ve been focusing on negatives a lot this year, since my set-up doesn’t allow for very smooth jacknife pulls. I reduced the work sets to 3 to match my other movements, and began performing negative Chin-ups up until 3x15 reps. This took a while (and I destroyed a few launching platforms), but It was definitely worth it. After this I swapped grips and started performing Negative Pull-Ups in full, which is where I am now. I think I’m afraid of success here, since I don’t quite know what I’ll do after Negatives – every time I approach 3x10 and there’s a blip (e.g. I miss a session due to a conference etc) I don’t jump back in at the 3x10 but reduce back to 3x5. This obviously has benefits for form, but I think my justification is wrong.

Overall, I’m deeming my Pull-Up progression in 2015 to be moderately successful.

Leg Raises

I’ve been consistently strong in Leg Raises, and I’ve progressed at approximately a linear rate since beginning them. Early 2015 saw me progress to the final stages of the Leg Raise – the Hanging Leg Raise.

This has been a mixed bag for me, as noted I powered through the initial stages generally and managed to hit the final stage. I have noticed, however, that my form is not strictly perfect. I’ve had a few problems here and there with cadence, and with a slight bend in my legs – likely due to tight hamstring muscles. My thick abdomen is testament to my overall progress though, very pleased.

Again, deeming 2015’s Leg Raises to be a moderate success.

Bridge

I’ve always enjoyed Bridges. My rate of progression with these has always been moderate, and relatively steady. In 2015 I tackled the Head Bridge and the Half Bridge, progressing finally to the full Bridge sometime in June or July.

I feel that my progress with the Bridge has been very good overall, I feel quite strong in the movement, although I do think there’s a little room for improvement in terms of depth and cadence (especially on the negative). Very pleased.

Handstand Push-Ups

I did not train any vertical pressing movements such as the HSPU this year. I felt my efforts were better concentrated on the Close Push-Up and the Bridge. This is something I regret only slightly, as I wonder what my strength would have been if I had trained them.

I remember reading that Pull-Ups and HSPUs each have a positive knock-on effect with regards to the other. This makes sense as a lot of the upper shoulder muscles are involved. Once my initial plan of attack is complete during 2016, I resolve to begin training the HSPU series.

Good Decisions

I believe I made three very good decisions this year regarding strength: first, I gradually lowered rest between sets to 2 minutes, and changed my workout structure to a circuit or superset structure; I also began resting more often, training only 4 days a week with weekends and Wednesdays off; I began eating a lot more, including switching from vegetable oil to olive oil.

The combined effect of more intense, shorter workouts and more recovery days have had a very profound effect on my training. I’m no longer shattered when I drop into the first set of Push-Ups, I sleep better overall, and I’ve been able to push past a few plateaus. The eating has been a mixed bag: more calories and in particular more meats, veg and potatoes have allowed me to recover well and gain a lot of strength (and size); but with my increased appetite I’ve also fell prey to eating a shittonne more chocolate than I used to. It’s not all bad, but something I’ve noticed that I could have avoided.

Bad Decisions

In terms of training, I think the worst decision I made this year was letting myself become afraid of performing certain exercises. I noticed it particularly with Bridges (since they’re difficult), but it’s been creeping in with Pulls too. I’ll get ready to perform a set, and then hesitate and put it off for about 20 seconds. I know people sometime psych themselves up, but the fear of failure really got to me sometimes. I used to get the same when I performed Barbell Squats back in my Dark Ages of fitness.

I also let what training means to me become a bit perverted. This might warrant its own post, but it revolves around personal flexibility and resilience. I became so focused on my training routine and hitting strength goals, I forgot part of why I train in the first place – and that is for personal, rather than purely muscular, strength. If I got sent to a conference, or attended an event, I would get very anxious about missing training. I would also become downright pissy. That’s not what training should be doing to me. It’s not strong, and it’s certainly not healthy.

I think I’ve managed to brush past these mostly in the last few days. I just took a 2.5 week break over the Winter’s start and New Year, and as of writing just completed my first split routine back. I didn’t particularly hesitate due to fear of failure (slightly present, but not a lot) and I didn’t lose much in performance. I was conservative with my output (6-8 reps instead of 10) but overall I was as strong as I was before my break. I think that unless I’m in the middle of a big push for a benchmark I can relax a little bit and start to enjoy training, and the strength it gives me, even more in 2016.

Tags vs Categories: All hail tags

2015-12-29

I’ve just recently completed most of the CMS portion of the site, allowing me to publish a few of the posts I’ve been working on over the Winter-break. I made a few design decisions along the way I’d like to share, mostly related to tagging and organising content.

I currently have two main types of content. Posts and Notes*, I worked on my Notes first since it gave me a way to syndicate out to Twitter, play with the Twitter API, and not have to write any serious post content. I then moved onto (largely) finishing off Posts. The Tag entity has many-to-many relationships with each, allowing the two types of content to share tags.

* I actually think I broke some IndieWeb rules by calling my blog posts ‘Posts’ instead of ‘Articles’. I think ‘post’ is meant to denote any type of content!

Don’t be afraid of the #hashtag

Starting with Notes affected a lot of the design process. My Notes are totally and unashamedly supposed to emulate Tweets. This meant I was already producing Notes with inline hashtags as they were syndicated out to Twitter. It was easy enough to write a bit of code to parse a Note for hashtags and create Tags as a Note is uploaded. Each time a Note is written, it’s parsed for hashtags, which are extracted, checked against the database, and either updated or created accordingly. Easypeasy. This allows me to use tag inline in Notes.

I knew I wanted to be able to tag Posts so that they showed up next to Notes in tag searches, but it didn’t quite feel right hashtagging them. I was wrong. Hashtagging is absolutely fine for Posts. Although you can argue that a hashtag is geared towards microblogging since it can be discerned inline as opposed to added in a separate ‘Tags’ form, I honestly don’t see why this makes them entirely unsuitable for use. The hashtag now has a wonderful history of use-cases, being used for: social justice movements; events and community dialogue; and even organising protests. Tagging your posts with hashtags allows you to contribute to these global dialogues, or at the very least acknowledge them.

Let the Tag take charge

Two things became apparent in my code when I was building Tags. First – I’m at least initially going to forget to put the hash on my Post tags. Second – Hashes are going to look horrible as url slugs.

My Tag model thus consists of two fields, the name (full hashtag) and the slug (hashtag minus the hash). I did this mainly because I thought it wasn’t particularly good practice to have to add (or remove) hashes when displaying or retrieving tags from the database. When tags are created, their name is set. Inside the setName() function, all tags are converted to hashtags if they’re not already. The slug is then updated automatically to the stripped version without developer input. This is to counteract my own stupidity. This mainly gets used in Posts, as tags from Notes are generally extracted if they’re a hashtag already.

Tags can be categories

Most of the arguments I read on this matter seemed to follow the line of “Categories are for broad, high-level descriptions of content; Tags are for low-level, post-specific descriptions”. I don’t buy that at all.

Tags are created dynamically, as and when they’re needed by the user tagging something. As you, or your user, writes content tags will inevitably recur. Why can’t you just tag some content with a tag that happens to be a high-level description of a post? That way you’ve created a category organically through use of the system. I read an argument about a downside of tags (link below) being the browsing experience, and having to generate a tag cloud to filter out the most popular tags. Erm, couldn’t you just create a panel with a list of manually ‘pinned’ tags that act as category filters? If you or a user notice a tag recurring quite a bit in content, and it’s a broad description – just slam a link to it on your Blog’s index page. You need to do this anyway with Categories, why not just save the hassle of manually assigning them?

In conclusion, tags are generally a good way to go. They can describe and categorise content at low and high levels, they’re generated organically on the fly, and if you go with the hashtag then you’ve got the opportunity to participate in community (or global) dialogues.

Long live the tag.

Fifteen Years Later (A trip down memory lane)

2015-12-29

When I was about 9 years old I became obsessed with the idea of having a website. I can’t remember what drove me to that obsession, but it was very much there. Being 9, I was obsessed with PlayStation 2 games and particularly – cheats for them. I wanted very badly to open up a website called “Cheat Master Cheats”, or some such (side note: cheatmaster.com redirects to a scam site. Missed opportunity on my part).

We’d very recently got “The Internet” at home, and I have a very strong memory of thumbing through a book my mother had bought called either “The Internet” or “The Web”. It was about the size of those English to [language] pocket dictionaries, orange, and had a photograph of an owl on the front. Checking the contents, I found a section discussing website creation. I can’t seem to remember exactly what the book told me, but I remember being disappointed and put off by how much work it seemed to entail.

My desire to carve out some internet space was put on the back-burner for a couple of years, until a guy called Ben joined the school in Year 7 (2003). He owned a forum! It had an address and everything. I thus discovered ProBoards.com, and soon signed up for one myself, claiming mattmarshall.proboards26.com. I got all my friends on it, spent every night in front of the PC either chatting or administering the site. I discovered extensions, putting html and javascript in the headers via settings. I also themed it a lot. The forum died off pretty quickly after all my friends got MSN messenger in about 2005, but my desire to carve out web space didn’t go down.

One of my closest friends at the time was Mark. Mark is brilliant, and I wish I was a bit of a better friend to him both now and in the past (especially in the past). At the time I was just beginning to build myself an identity, and Mark helped me with that. I was desperate to create, Mark was even then a creative, and with the advent of YouTube and websites dedicated to content creation Mark and I founded a site. I bought a domain name, but I couldn’t afford the hosting (they wanted money???) so we hacked it together to forward to some free file hosting from a site called Ripway. They didn’t allow much free upload, but I can’t remember if they limited us on number of files or on megabytes.

We created several ripway accounts to get around this. My first attempt at the site was to use some software I’d previously bought from my ICT teacher called Serif Webplus (side note: I bought a few of these, the most notable thing about Serif was that they weren’t Adobe. Currently looks like it’s come a long way since 2003). This proved infeasible to host using our crude workaround as it relied on large background images being chopped up into tiny pieces and imported into the page. So I started chewing on HTML. I was of course terrible (I was actively afraid of CSS and spaced everything out by the pixel specific to my monitor, everyone else be damned). And then we started producing what we thought was content.

Bless me. I remember countless nights spent in Mark’s room (he had his own computer) cutting together videos shot with an EyeToy used as a webcam. I thought we were going to become internet personalities. Mark and I created a recurring character, a regular ‘challenge’ slot , and a few spoofs of adverts (edited using Windows MovieMaker of course). We also recruited a few of our more creative friends. Kat had a camera and studied media at GCSE, so we re-shot a few videos. Apple iPods had very recently become a thing, along with Podcasts. We discovered Audacity (which remains some of my favourite software today), and with help from it and the Internet Archive (more free file hosting) we recorded our first podcast. We also ventured into parody songs, coming up with the name “WhyTunes”. That still makes me chuckle today. I also seem to remember us playing around with Adobe AfterEffects. I also became obsessed with Open-Source stuff around this time.

Adolescence resulted in us just not bothering with the site after an initial flurry of activity. Among other things, I think me being a prize dickhead during my teenage years helped with that a lot. I remained mostly friends with everyone afterwards though, we just didn’t do much anymore.

Then Facebook happened, obviously. I think my need for broadcasting my brain was satisfied with that for a long while. I got facebook during my A-levels, and after completing them it made sense to go and study Computing Science. I completed my degree(s) and here I am now.

Fifteen years later, I’ve finally got my own website where I publish my own content. I won’t say I’ve come full-circle, but I’ve went from refusing to use paragraph tags because they confuse me to writing my own content-management system for fun. The web, and staking a claim in it, was what drove me to my love of all things digital and Computing Science in the first place – which made me who I am today. I still love the web, I still want to inflict myself upon it, but now I have the tools to do so. I finally did it. It only took me 15 years and two degrees to actually get around to it.

If it wasn’t for Mark, the thirst for producing digital content could have dried out long ago. If that had happened – I wouldn’t have studied Computing Science, I wouldn’t have done a degree at all. I wouldn’t have had all of these wonderful experiences that came from attending Uni, which rebuilt me into a semi-functioning adult.

Thanks Mark, really.

(Oh, and all of our old content is still on archive.org. You know what to search for dude).

Reflections on Notes and Pretty URLs

2015-12-05

So I’ve been chipping away here and there getting bits and bobs of the site done. “Chipping away?” You ask, “There’s bugger all here! Just a feed and a shitty blog without comments, what’s there to chip away at?” Well, over in the Control panel I’ve been faffing on with SSL and aggregating content from Twitter etc. to make myself feel a bit less lonely. I’m about two-steps away from just saying “Fuck it, may as well make myself a full Twitter client”.

I digress. This is my first toe-dip into the Indieweb, since I’m a bit tired of not owning my data. Currently I have two types of content, Posts and Notes: Posts are Blog Posts; Notes are basically, and unashamedly, Tweets. I try to follow pretty url rules in Posts, e.g. mrshll.uk/blog/pretty-url-here.

Notes (re Tweets) on the other hand, I don’t feel they’re particularly affected by pretty urls. Certainly not particularly enhanced. I currently use the id field of my Notes as a slug which generates urls like mrshll.uk/note/1. Would that be enhanced with a pretty url? My Notes are Tweets. Shall we look at the url of an individual tweet?

http://twitter.com/statuses/672366693830795264

This of course redirects to

https://twitter.com/LaffertySean/status/672354821299675136

(Sorry Sean, this tweet was in my immediate history from when I was faffing on w/ the Twitter API)

In both cases, Twitter use what at least resembles an id, timestamp, or hash for the slug; not pretty but it does its job because the length of a Tweet doesn’t really justify using any content in the url slug (plus hashtags etc). I feel I’m justified with using ids as slugs in Notes, there may be a security issue… but since all of my CRUD urls are behind some nice firewalls I’ll stick with it now. The IndieWebCamp page on Notes doesn’t seem to mention anything other than notes having a permalink.