Over the last few days I’ve been playing with a number of new options for the internet. I’ve written about micro.blog and an increasing interest in the “indieweb” and I am continuing to explore the opportunities available there. The one thing that has surprised me is that I’ve become interested in the Fediverse. If you’re not familiar with that term, well, which rock have you been under? Seriously, the “Fediverse” is decentralized network of individual servers that interconnect so that you can experience the whole network even though you’re only signed into the one server. With a few exceptions each server is designed around specific community interests, whether that’s technical interests, social interests, and so on. There is likely a Fediverse community for pretty much any interest you may have. And, unlike X or Facebook and other corporate entities, the Fediverse is distributed: No one owns it, no one entity controls it, and no one entity can shut it down. Oh, and it’s free to join and use. ...

In Rolf Potts’ Vagabond’s Way one of the many lessons he shares is that traveling allows one to be “someone else”. Reading that reminded me of something I’ve often thought of through the years: Who would I be if I was not who I am? Growing up we develop into the person that we think others want us to be. What I mean by that is that who we become is strongly influenced by our parents, our peers, and our community. We want to fit in, we want other’s approval and acceptance, so we follow a path that we perceive is expected of us. How we dress, how we perceive the body, how we pursue a career, a marriage, a life, is all mediated by the expectations we perceive from others. ...

Every once in while I get the itch to change things up. Recently, as I noted in my previous note on Micro.blog I ran across the idea of the indieweb and micro blogging and thought I’d give it a try. Along the way, though, I ran into a whole host of other options that are available and, frankly, I’m a bit overwhelmed. I want to try then ALL! As I noted in that post, though, the sailing has not been smooth. I did finally get to the point of getting a couple of posts from this blog posted to the saulsnet.org website though only the summaries are there. And there’s currently no link back to the original post. There’s a fix for that, I think, but I just haven’t started working on that one yet. ...

I ran across an interesting site a few days ago and have spent the last couple of days testing it out. It’s called micro.blog. What intrigued me about it was that it allows both long-form writing as well as short, Twitter-like messages. One of the frustrations I have had with my current blog is that it isn’t really amenable to sharing short, quick thoughts and observations of life I often have. This appeared to be a reasonable alternative. ...

This is part 4 of an ongoing series on moving away from Windows and onto Linux. In this post we’ll take a look at what I consider the best Linux operating system for the average user. You’ve made the decision to move to Linux. Now comes the most challenging part: Which distribution should you use? There is a bewildering number of options and it is not at all clear what the differences are so you’re left adrift in that sea of options, unable to clearly see what direction to take. ...

This is part 3 of an ongoing series on moving away from Windows and onto Linux. In this post we’ll explore several more alternatives for the most common programs that the average user is likely to use, along with a few of their pros and cons. To be honest, the average user most likely does little more on their computer than write a few documents, surf the web, and check email. Given this, the software I covered in my previous post are more than sufficient to meet those needs. ...

This is part 2 of an ongoing series on moving away from Windows and onto Linux. In this post we’ll explore several alternatives for the most common programs that the average user is likely to use, along with a few o their pros and cons. If you watch most of the Linux related videos on Youtube it becomes apparent pretty quickly that most of those videos are aimed at “power users”. That is, they get pretty deeply into the inner workings of the operating system, often using a range of commandline tools to get work done. The average user, particularly the new ones coming from Windows aren’t really interested in those details. They want to know how to get things done. Preferably, using tools that are similar to, and as easy to use, as the one’s they’ve become accustomed to on Windows. ...

This is part 1 of an ongoing series on moving away from Windows and onto Linux. In this post we’ll explore the reasons for the move and examine the two main alternatives together with their benefits and challenges. Its seems that many people are looking to move away from MS Windows. There are at least a couple of reasons for this: Windows 10 support has come to end of life. This, together with changes to Windows 11 that essentially renders many computers – even fairly recent ones – useless as they no longer meet the requirements. This alone has caused a lot of folks to look else where. A lot of people don’t like the idea that Microsoft now requires that you have a Microsoft account in order to access your computer. This also, of course, means that your files are in the cloud, which is a situation that makes some folks (maybe many?) uncomfortable. Today I want to take a look at the two primary alternatives to Windows. But, before I do that, I want to point out that I’m looking at what I believe the average user wants and and needs in a computer, not at what the tech nerds consider important. One of the greatest challenges for the average person is making sense of all the gobbledygook that the tech nerds spew. You just want a system that works and lets you get your work done and that’s what I’m aiming to address. ...

While I still spend quite a lot of time viewing Youtube videos on various topics, including technology, I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of many of those videos. Now, I watch them for two reasons: To learn about new technologies, equipment, software, etc; and, to learn actual skills for using those technologies. That is, I might watch a video to discover the pros and cons of a particular piece of software or hardware. Or, I might watch in order to learn how to do something with one of the technologies I’m already using. So, what’s the problem? ...

Okay, so in my last post I stated that I didn’t do a lot of distro hopping. And, for the most part that is true. That said, though, I do run a homelab and the whole purpose of that lab is to trial different operating systems, software, etc. In the process of exploring Omarchy and its related technologies (Wayland, Hyprland, etc) I ran across several other intriguing things that I wanted to try out. I’ve played with both Arch Linux (on which Omarchy is based) and NixOS in the past but never really gave either of them a fair shake. So, over the last couple of days I’ve been playing with both. Today I want to talk a little bit about NixOS. ...