So, I began reading Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, creator of Nesslabs.com and was intrigued by the idea of setting short-term goals with very specific actions and deadlines. Her original experiment was to write 100 articles in 100 working days. In the book she also discussed Andrew Kallaway’s 100 Days of Code challenge in which he publicly committed to coding for at least one hour a day for 100 days. The whole concept of making that kind of public commitment, together with clearly defined actions. ...

A Few More Thoughts Regarding Lost Manuscripts Sometimes weird sorts of coincidences occur. A week or so ago I shared my thoughts about the Death of Lost Manuscripts. This week I ran across an article on the Saturday Evening Post that spoke to the topic of lost manuscripts but provided a different take and it’s one that has given me pause. The article questioned the ethics of the posthumous publication of an author’s works. That article addressed two concerns. One I absolutely agree with and the other, well, I’m still on the fence. ...

The Death of Lost Manuscripts Every once in a while I run across an article that describes how the family of a late author finds, tucked away in a box in the attic or in the back of some forgotten cupboard, a manuscript the author has left behind. Maybe it’s a completed novel that, for whatever reason, the author chose to not submit for publication. Or, maybe it’s an incomplete manuscript that the author started but abandoned. Or, perhaps they started it but met their demise before completing it. Whatever the case may be, the author left behind as part of his or her legacy, this unfinished, unpublished work that the family chooses to complete and publish so that the world benefits from their late family member’s efforts. ...

I have watched Youtube videos for many, many years. Not only that, I actually created a Youtube channel and created videos for a while. Recently, though, I’ve begun to reassess my relationship with Youtube. Youtube can be a great source for learning. Just about anything you want to learn you can learn on Youtube. There are, in fact, entire courses available to teach you anything from philosophy, to math, languages, and, of course, a metric ton (or two) of courses on technology. I love that I can learn what I need to learn using Youtube. ...

Introduction Way back in the day (circa 2000) I was introduced to Unix-like operating systems in the form of Sun Solaris running on a Sun Sparc server. I was intrigued. And wanted to know more. Of course, at that time running a Unix-like operating system at home, on an x86 machine, meant Linux, not true Unix. Why? Well, to start, Unix simply didn’t run on x86. It has been ported to x86 in recent years, but at thetime it wasn’t. So, I started playing with Linux and have spent the last quarter century mucking my way around that system. And I think I’ve got a reasonably good handle on it. ...

Memories of Summers Past Summers in the South are hot and humid. I grew up in a time when air conditioning was not common. I had already graduated high school when we got our first home with central A/C. Prior to that we only had window units – one in my parent’s bedroom upstairs and one in the downstairs den (if we had A/C at all). The rest of the house was generally hot and sticky. Nowadays, though, air conditioning is the norm and we forget sometimes what the real world is like. ...

An encounter in philosophy

Thinking about retirement travel

Hello and welcome! If you are retired and are even minimally technically inclined or would like to be, enjoy using a computer, and find yourself using a number of services such as Google docs, RSS readers, photo editors and organizers and so on, may I suggest that you explore self-hosting or homelabbing as a great retirement hobby. Today I want to introduce you to the two hobbies, how they are different and how they are related. This is intended to be a fairly short video as I only want to introduce you to the concepts, give you some ideas of what you can do in this space, briefly discuss why you should self-host (or build a homelab) and give you some ideas about how to get started. ...

Revisiting WordStar A day or so ago I ran across an article where science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer had released his version of WordStar 7.0 for DOS, noting that it is now abandonware and, thus, he felt comfortable releasing it into the wild. What was interesting was that, as he noted, not only he, but several other quite successful writers had developed quite an affinity for the ancient software that ran on a long outdated operating system. ...