monovergent 🏁

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • Approximations for yesterday since neither have a proper screen time counter

    • Phone: ~1.5 hours
    • Computer: ~7 hours

    Kinda scary to see how many hours of the day I was seated in front of a screen. Should I feel less guilty that over 4 hours of that was spent writing documentation?

    What I don’t feel guilty about is screen time accrued while waiting in line. That makes me feel productive, or at least like offloading my scrolling to otherwise idle time.




  • Dual-booting, modding, or debloating Windows. And anything but the LTSC edition. It’ll all fall apart within a year given the nature of Windows 10 updates. Projects like Ameliorated, while well-intentioned, are a security mess waiting to happen since you have to disable any and all updates.

    So I bit the bullet on an extra laptop, exiled any Windows-specific projects, files, etc. to it and slapped on a copy of LTSC. I consider the machine compromised and only use it for what absolutely depends on Windows.


  • Ideally:

    • Well-organized set of frequently-used and recent files on my laptop
    • Media and old documents on my NAS, synced to an external hard drive I can remove for travel
    • Each device/non-backup drive/USB drive/SD card backed up to its own folder on a large external drive
    • A duplicate of said drive from another manufacturer
    • An archival copy of my documents and photos (encrypted on microSD ofc) that I carry with me
    • Additional copy of the most important stuff on M-Discs

    Reality:

    • Controlled mess on my laptop
    • Dumping ground of random YT videos and CD rips on my NAS
    • A well-curated external drive prepared in my pandemic free time
    • An external drive with somewhat periodic backups of my devices alongside every unsorted file. I worry that some file paths have grown too long
    • Duplicate of the two above on one large external drive
    • Another external drive with files and backups of dubious usefulness that I refuse to delete
    • An outdated copy of my documents and photos on an everyday carry microSD
    • A stack of unused M-Discs

  • Nothing worked for me until I designed my own planner. I like to take things one week at a time so every Friday afternoon, I print out enough sheets for the next week on semi-A4 paper, folded and stapled to a semi-A5 booklet.

    One full page for each day with:

    • Compact visual schedule of the day with a time grid (hours on the y-axis, 10s of minutes on the x-axis) and recurring events pre-printed
    • “Today” box to write down reminders and tasks that don’t go on a time grid
    • Section to jot down miscellaneous thoughts and ideas
    • Right half of the page entirely for a journal entry

    Front cover has the weekly overview and back cover has upcoming and assorted tasks.

    No monthly calendar, any entry that needs to persist for longer than a week or so goes in a separate hardcover A5 journal that is usually in my bag.




  • Ideally, 256 GB + microSD. 128 GB today gives me ample room for my offline maps, music collection, podcasts, and Kiwix libraries. No gaming, only the occasional video, and one photo per day on average, so 256 GB would future-proof it.

    As for a minimum, 32GB. For several years, I had a phone with 4GB of internal storage. Didn’t use the microSD slot since it seemed to drain the battery. Android takes up much more space nowadays, but I wouldn’t be too upset having ~16 GB usable space for myself.

    The SD card would be separately encrypted as a portable backup of everything important to me, accessible on-the-spot whenever I need it.


  • School is where the passion for learning goes to die and the desire to cheat is born

    In this day and age, hobbies are the last bastions of passion and curiosity. One who is engaged in a hobby is intrinsically motivated to learn and apply what has been learned in novel ways, just as the scholars of old have done. School, reviled by many a student, has earned its reputation by perverting the concept of learning and exploiting students’ passions. The desire to cheat is most unnatural among students, a telltale sign that one’s passion and curiosity for the topic at hand has been extinguished, replaced with a desire to rid oneself of a burden, the burden of learning only for the sake of becoming learned.




  • First experimented when Windows 8 took away Aero Glass and other customizations. Committed when I had to fight with Windows 10’s twice-yearly feature updates that messed with my settings and wasted space with new programs I didn’t ask for. I now keep a separate laptop just to run Windows when I have to.

    Distrohopping was mostly confined to my first year using Linux. Deepin (kept crashing) -> UbuntuDDE (went unmaintained) -> Arch Linux -> Debian. Settled on Debian Stable since it just works, I haven’t been using bleeding-edge hardware, and I don’t like things changing around too often (see my Chicago95 rice).