Content tagged with "100DaysToOffload"

This is a spoilery jumble of my notes and thoughts based on Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport and it’s part 7 of #100DaysToOffload

This week I read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University. The book is about the philosophy of Digital Minimalism which is all about being more intentional about how you spend your leisure time and reducing time spent with eyes down on our phones listlessly scrolling in cyberspace in order to have a more fulfilling life. Digital Minimalism isn’t anti-tech or luddism, but about being more mindful of how we are using technology to make sure we get the most out of it with fewest negative impacts.

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In episode 6 of #100DaysToOffload I’ve been playing with some strategies for running the house with my wife.

“Do you have the login for the car insurance?”

“Which home insurance provider are we with now? I just spilled red wine on the carpet”

“What day does the mortgage come out of our joint account?”

These are questions, particularly that 2nd one, that I want to be able to answer at the drop of a hat. However, there are also a couple of other key constraints:

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In episode 5 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge, I talk about my recent experience playing with the brid.gy codebase, a fun and pleasant deep-dive into the code base for one of the IndieWeb movement’s key pieces of infrastructure.

Intro to Brid.gy

Back when I started reading about the IndieWeb Movement and playing with micropub/microsub around christmas time I found bri.dgy, a service by Ryan Barret a.k.a snarfed which transparently links your micropub website with social media silos like twitter, mastodon, instagram and others, in order to facilitate both POSSE and backfeeding (i.e. PESOS) of content.

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This is a somewhat cliched meta post about blogging and my 4th post in this year’s run at the #100DaysToOffload challenge. See the full series here

Google’s Analytics programme made the headlines this week after Austria ruled that the way that it works constitutes a breach of GDPR. I’ve been using Google Analytics on my site for a little while (mainly out of laziness since the Hugo template I use has built in support for Google Analytics if you paste your user ID number into the configuration). I’d been thinking about swapping to a self-hosted analytics package for a while but this decision was the final prompt that made me do it.

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Content-warning: depression

This post is a tongue-in-cheek poke at middle class festive traditions in the UK.

This coming Monday is Blue Monday which is supposedly the most depressing day of the year. Whether you are a glass-half full or glass half-empty sort of person, you have to admit that these first few weeks in January are a bit of a struggle right? There are plenty of reasons why you might feel like that, from the weather to that broken new year’s resolution (if you’ve already slipped, don’t worry and don’t write the year off, just get back on the horse - Rome wasn’t built in a day).

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Over the last 15+ years I’ve worked with a bunch of different web servers from Apache to Lighttpd to nginx. I like a hassle free life so while I’m typically an early adopter, I don’t tend to move on a whim unless I’m seeing a lot of positive feedback. A lot of my peers have been recommending Caddy for a while and I recently tried using it at work which finally convinced me to make the switch.

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On Friday I wrote this post about my 2021. Despite COVID, a pretty good year for me personally (getting married and all). Here I’ll outline some of my goals and expectations for 2022.

Here are my top 5 goals for 2022 in order of highest to lowest personal importance.

1. 🎓 Finish my PhD

This is my biggest aim/goal for 2022. I’ve been working on my PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP) since 2015. It’s about applying machine learning and NLP to scientific papers and news articles to better understand the real world impact that good science has on society, the economy and policy (i.e. law). I coined the phrase comprehensive scientific impact to cover these things back in 2017.

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