When I joined Micro.blog, I was confused. Coming from Mastodon, I didn’t know how to wrap my head around the integration of the two (to be honest, I’m still learning what works best), and I was struggling with my blog’s CSS and various tweaks. As I learned, I started to take notes which turned into wiki articles.

Now, the MB section on my wiki is good enough to stand on its own. It contains a short introduction and a couple of notes and tricks. It’s nowhere near complete, and I plan to keep adding and changing information as I go. Most importantly, it’s meant to be read as an opinionated guide. It contains information as I understand it and instructions for my own way of doing things. It doesn’t have to be yours. As a matter of fact, if you have a different way of doing things, I’d love to hear about it.

You’d think it’s easy to use your blog as a journal, but in reality, it’s not that simple. You don’t say everything you think, and you don’t blog everything you journal.

Say there was a meeting at work. Cosmo, one of the system administrators, was leading a discussion in favor of pushing a desktop shortcut to create support tickets to all computers in our system and phase out our help@compnay.com email address. I had a couple of conflicting points to mention, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk in the meeting. I ended up sending an email instead, raising my concerns.

I will write the above in my journal, making a note of the meeting and what I wanted to say, including the email I sent. Taking this as is though and using it as a blog post doesn’t work well.

For one, using real names is never a good idea. The same goes for the email contents or anything specific. Being too specific is also boring and shrinks the number of people who’d want to read about it. I need to expand on what I have to say first.

To do so, I like to ask myself why. Since posts should usually be short and convey a single idea, I want to focus on one such why. Looking over the above paragraph, I think the here is “why couldn’t I bring myself to talk about it?” Since I’m writing a personal blog. A certain nervousness, a worry of being exposed, is shooting through my brain. Ah! Looks like I hit a nerve, which means this is personal, which means this is good.

I could write how since my high school days I had issues with confronting opposing opinions to mine. I’m not sure why it started and when, but Authority has always been something I don’t deal with too well. I either follow it too blindly or oppose it to the point of confrontation - and let me tell you, it’s not that great when it starts causing issues at work and with friends. These days I’m better because I know I have an issue and I developed ways to handle it, like the email in the above example.

Isn’t this more appealing than the original journal entry? I think so. You’d probably also agree that more people can relate to this topic. As well, there are no security/privacy issues affecting anyone but myself. Nice.

It takes some time to find those personal points and expose them. It takes even more time to write to the point, with a sense of direction. this is something I’m still struggling with at times.

What about you? Do you prefer to use your blog as a journal, and if so, to what extent? Is your “filter” different? Do you have other tricks?

Mousa has a problem. Its main actor, Karim Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, is trapped in a crappy movie.

The settings of the story are not too bad: a gifted but socially-awkward electrical engineer has a tough life at the university. He lives alone with his father and has an interesting relationship going on with him. Yehia (Karim) has a possible love interest(s) (it’s not obvious with Yehia’s shy approach, which makes things more interesting), and as he tries to maneuver those with the guidance of his sympathetic father, things go bad.

Unfortunately, things go bad not just as part of the plot, but also for the whole movie, which flatlines to a dumb terminator-turned-a-good-guy superhero flick. (Spoilers alert)

The bad guys show up for some vague reason, steal money and watches (the father was a watchmaker), run, and let the father die in a fire. Yehia, paralyzed in fear, has to watch his father die. He survives the fire and comes back, sells the house, and decides to live in the lab (the “hut”), and build a termin… sorry, a remotely-controlled robot called Mousa who will avenge his father’s death.

It doesn’t take long before his engineer-woman friend shows up. She hacked Yehia’s computers and knows his secret, but is somehow too dumb to figure out how to fix her car. She convinces Yehiya to go beyond simple revenge for his father into a full vigilante and go after the bad guys. There’s a professor at the university who has some jealousy issues with Yehia also. I’m pretty sure he will become the nemesis, but I won’t know because I stopped watching after the second skirmish between the term… Mousa, and the bad guys.

The robot animations are bad. Not awful, but seem to be a couple of years behind. I’m sure the producers don’t have the budget Hollywood movies do, but I’ve seen better animations made in Blender by college students in their free time. That, however, I can forgive.

What I’m grumpy about is the waste of talent and story. You have a good actor who plays the role beautifully. The character is smart and capable. There’s also a gifted woman who happens to be a hacker. Why not use that raw brain power on the bad guys? Do some more of that flashy matrix-rip-off hacking? Why not develop the complex relationships Yehia has with his peers? Maybe give the father more of a role somehow? Anything is better than the bad guys. They are so flat and boring evil robots would have more personality.

Director Peter Mimi is rushing to get to the juicy action part and leave the “boring” introduction as soon as possible. The problem is that the juice reeks of rip-offs and cheap effects with zero depth. The only good part is the rushed introduction.

Too bad.

My pocket notebooks 📓 showed up earlier than I thought, and I was eager to write some thoughts down over my morning coffee.

A couple of things come to mind so far:

1. My handwriting ✍️ is (still) horrible. I can barely read what I write. If I wait a week, I’m sure half of the stuff will become indecipherable.
2. It’s slow. Not terribly slow, but much slower than dictating my thoughts to text, as I do with Orgzly. Slowing down, however, can be helpful.
3. I worry about losing my written thoughts. they’re only written down in once one place, after all.
4. I can sketch! I can draw! It’s so easy to add arrows or emphasize words! This also showed me that…
5. …I suck at sketching. Not a shock there.
6. I enjoy the feel of the pen on paper, and this notebook is too small. I know what writing in a good (and flat) notebook feels like, and this is not it. I also have better pens I should use.

As with everything else, I can’t expect results overnight. When I kept a written journal, my handwriting was slightly better. I remember teaching myself to slow down and connect my letters correctly. It was painfully slow. I couldn’t keep up with my thoughts at all. I gained speed eventually. Writing was about discipline and stubbornness; nowhere near to the extension of my brain org-mode is for me these days.

Despite all this, I hope I can still find a compromise. I know that can I enjoy writing and sketching. It’s a matter of balance and time. I guess we’ll see.

Over a hundred techies responded to my question: “folks with Linux and Macs, what’s your ideal solution to work on both?” That’s a lot for a quick 3-day poll.

From the look of it, most use a physical KVM switch, which is also what I opted for. I had one that I hadn’t used in a while, and I was happy to see it’s still working.

Here it is, in all its… glory…

OK, I know! The wires! It’s screaming for help. I just finished plugging in everything to make sure it all works. I wanted to test different peripherals, and having a moving standing platform (screen and keyboard) is tricky.

Factors in favor of a KVM switch:

1. I already had one, so I wanted to try it out
2. I have one screen and one keyboard (though I also have a magic mouse for the Mac)
3. I wanted to listen to music on the Mac, so that ruled out plain VNC
4. I want to work with movie clips, and VNC can be a bit slow with animations
5. This being a work machine, I feel better not installing any more software than I already have on it.

So far, it works better than expected!

When I tried the KVM switch with a different keyboard, it didn’t detect it in the dedicated keyboard USB. I believe this happens with some gaming keyboards. My current keyboard works without an issue. I can use the USB port on the switch to plug in my headset, which allows me to rock to AC/DC (or Bruckner, depending on my mood) while working.

However, Plugging in a USB hub to the KVM switch so I have more than one USB port available, causes issues when connecting additional devices. I’m not an expert, but daisy-chaining a USB port to a USB port to a USB port will is probably not a good idea. Fortunately, I think I can get by plugging peripherals into the computers directly.

I plan to try it for a week or so and see what problems I run into. The Mac is my primary work machine, which allows me to be even more productive away from the office. It also means my Linux machine is free from all kinds of propriety software from Microsoft.

I need to clean up the wires and I’m good.

Dungeons and Dragons​ (DnD) is a game that happens in the mind. There are many props (which you still need to buy with money), but none of them are required. You don’t even need to use dice if you’re creative enough. When I was in school, we rolled a pencil on which we wrote numbers or just let the DM decide the outcome of certain things. You just need friends and a way to communicate.

I can go on about DnD, what it is, and how it’s played, but there are many people that do a far better job. As a matter of fact, the company that publishes DnD now does it for free. Indeed, The rules for the game, the same ones in thick rule books, are now available on the same website. You can download them and start playing with your friends today.

To understand the legal status of things (DnD is now under creative commons) better, I found this YouTube video helpful.

In my mind, DnD was always free. It was the one game that frees your mind and lets your imagination run wild. I purchased some of the rule books as I was going through different DnD periods in my life, but I never hesitated to make a rule on the spot, be it because I forgot or couldn’t find the official rules or because making up rules was more fun.

Like Linux and Emacs, two of the most significant tools in my life today, this important game is also free. Because of this license and the huge community of players, it’s even possible to make a living playing the game. Not just by teaching it, but also by developing it and building additional content. Doesn’t it sound a lot like Linux/Emacs and the content different YouTubers make explaining it? I don’t think this is a coincidence. There are excellent players and DMs out there (Critical Role needs little introduction), and now it’s easier than ever to join them.

I was looking into trying out the whole 100 days to offload business. Everyone’s doing it, I have a blog, so I should do it, right?

I like the idea behind 100 days to offload (let’s call it 100dtol). The goal is to get people who always want to blog to just freaking do it already. In 100dtol’s own words: “Tell us about your dog, your cat, your fish tank, or whatever hobbies you have. Someone will find it interesting. Just. Write.” This is a good way to start writing, get into the habit, and hopefully keep at it.

But I’m not starting out. I’ve been writing in one capacity or another for the last 20 years or so. It’s a way of life at this point: I have to blog. I don’t know how not to write. The need to write the words you are now reading seems to make time for itself, no matter how and where.

You know something else? I’m also not that good at it. Sure, I’m better today than I was 5 years ago, but I’m just better at it than I once was. That’s all.

As someone who constantly has thoughts floating around in his head, figuring out which thoughts to catch, tame, and then let out to the world is a big part of the process. My way of writing doesn’t fit into the “just write” bracket anymore. This post you’re reading right now? It started out as an outline. Here, have a look:

This does not include editing (at least a few hours if not a day later), checking for errors, publishing, reading the live post, and cringing at the typos that somehow made it through. Oh no, there’s no “just write” anymore. I’m past that. it’s gone baby, I’m hooked. I’m a writing addict.

So with all due respect to 100dtol, which I do have, it’s not for me. And that’s fine.