# now => https://journal.miso.town/atom?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdataswamp.org%2F%7Elich%2Fnow.html follow through rss currently working as a sysadmin whose devices are still in your walls living in London ## 2026-06-26 5 months passed, was in japan - had a wonderful time still enjoying life still breathing sometimes happy sometimes sad currently studying a bit of huayen buddhism, trying to find way to rework this blog into something i do work on updated: - haiku - poems page - device reviews page ## 2026-01-18 life goes on trying to find means of finding my own place, working on various electronics and philosophy projects updated: - about page - device reviews page ## 2025-09-02 i apologise for disappearing, i just take breaks from posting publicly if anyone reads it, incredible ``` my eyes are constantly ablaze i have a headache no return ``` practicing Zen nowadays in Soto tradition, that's kinda become the main thing reading a lot about it, so that's neat i might add more html posts again, i have some old code for this place please ignore gopher disclaimer then ## 2023-07-26 time goes fast when you are out there set up a honk instance for myself, truly recommend to anyone who has time and computer time => https://honk.salvinor.in Will probably do more cool stuff with salvinor.in domain ## 2023-07-16 the final day, finally wrote my custom markdown preformatter which resolves the issue of links by allowing usage of gemtext style links, I am aware I should probably move to writing gemtext but I am not a huge fan of the idea of single line files. I've been using fmt(1) to preformat text as for me plaintext is the first format, and of course, I can then convert this pseudomarkdown back to gemtext if I want using some already existing thing so what are the lessons from this challenge: - computers we use are too fast - the software is getting worse - we tend to use too many overspecialized tools just to skip learning - building microtools using awk is fun! => ./finance.awk finance awk file => ./gemurl.awk gemurl awk file note: I'll push the notes from here to a blogpost tomorrow, will note that the content is here! ## 2023-07-15 things are calm constant feeling of being fake using irssi on host machine, got a laptop which i could set up natively but there seems to be some issue with my usb stick and i cant be bothered to find/order another one and netboot is quite chaotic i want to try writing awk file which will convert gemtext style urls to markdown friendly ones, as that is the main thing i really enjoy using `=> http://www.retroforth.org/` This is genuinely the best way to write these things. My common problem with urls in text files is that they are in non-plumbing format which does not rock a lot. Also, netsurf tends to crash on 512 mb of ram. A shame really, I believe for real 512 mb life, haiku is by far the best OS, as sites will render badly, but they will work and not crash. And we are all forced to use certain websites (mainly bank and travel websites, the rest are just additional mess). ## 2023-07-14 nothing exciting happening, just reading stuff standard way what i have noticed from this challenge that besides youtube... my workflow is essentially untouched by this challenge... things just work... of course i know my position is unique as i am a system administrator and my primary interests do not require any fast computing, nor do i have a lot of social media activity (basically none that i care about). i have left mainstream social media, and never truly returned around 2017 when moving out to study in the uk. it was connected to the events of yesteryear (i.e. assange, etc), but primarily i just hated how much in control these platforms are not even of content but how you are supposed to see content at this point if a platform or anything that i use wants to change things without my consent (and i am using it at my own discretion) then i will leave and try my best to either abandon the habit or find some alternative way --- I reminded myself of my old script for zettelkasten, it is something that rotates in my life. I have issue with most wikis are they are either overdependent on Markdown or some other way of structuring The second I need to edit stuff in other way than straight up text files I get annoyed with that. I want to develop a markup language that would be somehow between freeform plaintext, with little bit of hypertext magic when converting to html. Yes, I have way too many ideas. Though, have written a simple awk script for sorting my finances as I was annoyed with overcomplexity of ledger for my usecase (just noting the global state of my finances once a month). I am really of a strong opinion that one should (for anything more advanced than basic system usage) develop their own tools if they can. If you work in a group, this might work differently, but for personal usage, using someone elses static site generator, or a wiki engine just will lead to more friction against your own ideas. And friction leads to loss of energy, and loss of energy leads to a halt. ## 2023-07-13 yesterday i managed to not use private computer at all! sadly with haiku i just cannot find passion to keep using it, it just does not feel exciting in same way plan 9 does. i would love to say there is a rational and interesting reason for it, but well - there isnt. i just like plan9 (i mean look at the colors!). i tried porting p9p for haiku, though `ld` seems to behave really weird there, 9c seems to go through fine after minor tweaks in bin/9c file (basically just add an option for Haiku and thats it). it would be a nice mix nevertheless, if i were forced to use it as daily daily driver on 512 mb 1 ghz machine i would pick haiku everytime as with webpositive and netsurf it allows... for interfacing with the outside world! ## 2023-07-11 Managed to set up my email in plan9 after some fighting, it is impressive how fun it is to use email here - huge thanks to this guide, albeit it is very annoying that 'imap' is equated with 'gmail' here... all email providers will use imap or pop3... generally very little problems with this setup as work takes most of my time though weekend might be challenging, but might just end up cycling and that does not require a computer and god do i love board of canada playing on my mp3 player :) i am afraid the most depressing result of this challenge is that truly... truly... the main reason why we need modern computers is our active decision to use advanced js virtual machines (which frankly, are an evolution of lisp machines [I SAID IT!]) as a way of providing 'portable' applications. they are portable, but god, electron, and even standard webapps are dangerously slow. things are slower than they used to be - . this warrants an article - maybe a daring one at that also tried haiku now and it might be this challenge will migrate to haiku as when i was setting up the vm for this challenge i was tired after the cryptsetup issue, but now that is resolved! ## 2023-07-10 skipped writing article on overspecialization, still thinking about it and what to say decided to take part in **[old computer challenge]** as that is something exciting to do very simple setup, just using my desktop (which runs butchered debian 12), and seeing what happens. will mainly use this as opportunity to find inefficient stuff i have been using. also resigning from usage of mobile devices for other purposes than communication, so no taking laptop around. i wish i had some older machine to do it, but well, gotta make do with what you have i do not have too exciting plans for this week, so this is going to make it more exciting [old computer challenge]: http://occ.deadnet.se/#2023 wanted to start it with using my normal pc, but after setting mem to 512M cryptsetup didnt work... n-hours later i just restarted to pixiebooted debian and repaired the grub file so resigned, i have chosen to just use old 9front image i had, give it 512M and 1 core, and use it with powersave. i barely remember most plan9 hope using a vm does not outrage everyone, i wish i could do more correct setup but i do not want to mess up my daily usage of course for uploading stuff i do not have things set up so sometimes i will go to the main host, but that is mainly to get things to work in 9front... also i plan not to use my laptop and use my phone for communication only and to use my mp3 player (sansa clip+ with rockbox) for music, inspired by [82 mhz] [82 mhz]: https://82mhz.github.io/posts/oldcomputerchallenge_day1/ by the evening i have a complete setup, now i plan to setup my email on this so i can remove reliance on other mail clients. i feel very optimistic. ## 2023-07-02 - added back rss feed - writing article on overspecialization ## 2023-06-27 - finally designed a new style of the website - reading way too many books to state this shortly