A long time ago I made a Notion account. I had grand aspirations of using it as my main organizational tool. Things did not work out that way. I now use it primarily for collecting and sorting a large amount of links to sites and other neat stuff I come across in my journeys around the internet. Here are a couple of them!
arbtt: Arbtt is a time-tracking tool. It runs as a daemon and keeps a log of what you spend your time on on your computer. I’ve never actually used it. I’m hesitant to create a giant file containing all my computer usage patterns. It’s a little bit of a risk, sure, but my primary reasoning is actually that I don’t really want to know. Or I don’t need to. If you do, and you don’t want to send your data to Apple or Windows or whatever, this is probably a good choice. It’s open source and free (the way software should be).
beepbox: I’ve always wanted to make music, and five years ago I bought FL Studio in the hopes that it would cause me to make some. I don’t regret it – I’ve fiddled around with FL and I like owning it, if only because I can continue to tell myself that one day I’ll use it to make something really cool – but it often feels like far too much pressure, the weight of a “real DAW” imbuing everything with the drive to create a “real song”. And in such situations you need a tool like beepbox, something that’s just enough of a toy that you’ll be forgiven for your inability to create something flawless. I found beepbox through alienmelon’s itch.io tool collection (which is itself a great place to find neat stuff) and… still haven’t made anything real but have had a lot of fun messing around. Beepbox is an in-browser tool for making pattern-based instrumental music. It’s a sort of more complex version of beepcomp, a text-based chiptune maker which I’ve also used to make a couple loops. I really like finding stuff that shortens the barrier between people and creating something.
electric zine maker: Another in a similar category. Making a zine was already fun and low-effort and with a digital zine maker it is easier than ever before. Alienmelon’s stuff just never misses. I at least have something to show for this one: a while ago I made a zine with it. I’ve made others but lost the files somewhere along the way, and never owned any printed copies because, as I quickly learned, a risk of working digitally is that you will fail to consider things like ink color, and will choose to make the backgrounds of your pages black, and will consider trying to print them and then think about propriety Inkjet cartridges and decide you’re better off downloading it as a pdf.
hacking zines: Continuing zine theme, I went through a phase in high school of reading old-school hacking zines (I am not old enough to have been in high school when they were actually relevant). There’s a lot here and I haven’t read all of them, but I remember enjoying catslash and hax0r. Hacking used to be easy! It still can be easy, if you know where to look (maia crimew’s website proves that for better or for worse), but gone are the days of the entire internet being a gaping security vulnerability. At least, not in the same ways it used to be, now more of a terrible Frankenstein(‘s monster) of patches upon patches that will not be easy to hack but will randomly completely fall apart.
financial autonomy in marriage: This article puzzled me a lot when I first read it. I have never really heard of anyone taking an approach that was anything like this. In the online spaces I hang out, it’s not uncommon for people to bet on things, or attempt to place a financial value on things that are not usually measured in money. This has upsides and downsides, and it’s never really been my way of doing things, but even among the crowd that does, I hadn’t seen anyone conduct a marriage this way. The strategy espoused in the article involves, at first glance, a lot of overhead, and it’s very tempting to dismiss it as crazy talk. But if you look at the way people post about marriage elsewhere, money is clearly on their minds a lot, as are the other things addressed by the system in this article: division of undesirable tasks, big household purchases, etc. People already spend a lot of time thinking about their money and how exactly they’re divvying all this stuff up! This method of doing so does involve more numbers than the “usual” way (going based off of vibes and arguing), but I’m not actually convinced it’s more work vs. a different kind of work. I don’t anticipate implementing this system in my future marriage (I think to pull this strategy off successfully both people need to be able to have a certain attitude towards decision-making and money that I’m not sure I have nor might my hypothetical spouse) but it’s a good reminder that there exist ways to solve problems other than the usual ones.
teaching the iliad to chinese teenagers: I like hearing about pedagogy and I’ve never read the Iliad. I plan to at some point try and roughly follow this lesson plan; it’s amazingly detailed and sufficiently structured that the work doesn’t feel too daunting. Without having done so yet, I can’t provide a full review, but I encourage readers to try it too!
chair arm keyboard mounting: There was a brief period when I was really into split/ergonomic keyboards. I had acquired an RSI from daily computer use and was having a hard time taking a long enough break for it to fully heal. I started looking into setup upgrades, originally really wanting the ZSA Voyager which is admittedly super slick. However, the nearly $400 price tag was a bit of a deterrent, and I started browsing r/ErgoMechKeyboards for an alternative. I spent a lot of time scrolling (miserably painful at the time) and ultimately decided to build a Corne, a split wireless 40% keyboard. All told I spent probably half of what the Voyager cost, and I got to try out the Ambient Twilight choc switches , a way quieter and lighter switch than anything I had ever tried before (having spent my whole life typing on laptop membrane keyboards). The assembly process for the Corne was a lot of fun and pretty easy (I paid some extra money to get the no-solder versions of various components) and since then the Corne has sat basically unused in a back drawer of my desk, the learning curve for typing on such a keyboard (with completely blank keycaps no less) being very steep. I do not regret it and I’m sure that one day it will see use. Or I’ll sell it. Anyway, the mounting was a further ergonomic step that some users took that intrigued me a lot. I did not and do not have the facilities to do this, but I adore battlestation type computer set-ups, and this would definitely be an appealing one if it became accessible to me.
edward tufte css: I am a gwern enjoyer. I enjoy his content but I also enjoy that he has made designing and maintaining a visually beautiful and useful website experience into an art form and practiced it for many years. While reading about his web design, I came across a section about sidenotes. Gwern goes over some of their pros and cons and his own implementation of the feature. I wanted/want to add sidenotes to this blog, but for some reason (my nonexistent web design skills) have not yet been able to get them to work. I don’t know why this is and every time I’ve tried to debug it I have run into issues due to aforementioned total lack of skills. If any geniuses want to help me with that let me know. I really like what both gwern and tufte.css have going on where the focus is, as it is in print, on the user experience of the information, and not a disjointed mess, as so many websites are, caused by the information and the method of delivery warring with each other as UX designer after UX designer tries to make it slicker and cooler and more “minimal”.
This probably won’t be the last of this kind of post, if I ever manage to actually get this blog going. I collect a lot of random stuff and think that others should get to share in my spoils. Hopefully something here was new to you!