I was looking into this post about Emacs as a comics reader, and I thought it would be nice to use Emacs as a quick way to check my desktop screen captures I take through the day so I know what to delete. Of-course, Emacs has an answer: the built-in image-mode already does a fine job at going through images in the same folder, scaling the images to fit in the frame or see at scale, and even animated gifs. All out of the box.
A Note from Our Executive Director: 2023 and my personal quest for software freedom
I’ve had to decide to make an unfair moral choice: do I maximize my chance of surviving with my heart condition, or do I allow installation of proprietary software in my body?
This is a fascinating story from a FOSS activist who had no choice but to have a proprietary heart monitor placed. No one (doctors, techs, hospitals) was able to “log in” and get the data they needed for her heart.
The Pixel 8 Pro can now read body temps, if you swipe it across your face arstechnica.com
Look, I’m not saying it’s not nice to have your phone do that for you, but, aren’t there enough things that our phones do for us? There aren’t even phones at all anymore.
The last week has been meh.
The weather makes me think I’m in London, even though I’ve never visited. It’s been endlessly gray, and I don’t remember the last time we had a sunny day.
There’s work. Nothing too bad in that department, but it’s been a lot of the same in different ways.
My insomnia has been hitting me hard this week, costing me two days of exercise. It makes me feel more like an ooze or jelly than a person 🥱, and I hope to make up for it today. I want to visit a local gym again, and if they work out their prices for me, maybe I’ll have a place to run again. I miss it, but not to the point of winning over the motivation to run outside in the cold and dump gray.
Even my journal is waiting for me to finish the last couple of pages so I can start a fresh Notebook (I finally got a Leuchtturm 1917) 📕, but there was nothing worth writing about.
I’ve made a couple of changes to my Emacs workflow recently (see the posts from the last couple of days; they are a bit scattered around). The biggest change is switching from weekly files to two project files, work and personal, and scheduling those for a range of days instead of a specific time during the day. So far, it’s been working quite well. I’m going through my Emacs settings again, and I think that maybe this time, I’ll finally get to upload it to GitLab to share with other folks. About time after what, five years now?
I do have a couple of ideas that I’m working on, but the meh kept getting in the way, you know?
Soup. My brain’s telling me I need to make some good hot soup 🍜. Not a bad idea.
“Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et dis-tinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl 📚
Good morning 📷
Tried to write an org file and push it to my repository instead of using my wiki, but I ran into an issue with Denote. It doesn’t populate the list of notes (dynamic blocks) as it should. It seems Denote doesn’t “see” my org files at all. Unfortunately, I can’t look into this now because work. bleh.
Sometimes I can’t sleep. Or rather, I can’t go back to sleep. This has been a constant theme in my life for a couple of years, and this morning, I realized it’s a problem I need to address.
Quick math estimates roughly 30 to 60 million adults develop chronic insomnia in the US alone; this is based on several online sources that say roughly 10% of adults develop chronic insomnia, while a couple of research papers point to Manifestations and Management of Chronic Insomnia in Adults, which says “Approximately 40 to 70 million Americans are affected by either intermittent or chronic sleep problems, representing approximately 20 percent of the population.”
Most people usually fall asleep later than they should. This YouTube video from Health Triage speaks about an experiment where it was found that a group of people without technology and other modern interruptions would go to sleep before 10 PM, getting about 7.5 hours of sleep; this is in contrast to the little over 5.5 hours of sleep people in the US get, on average.
I counted at least six posts in this blog discussing lack of sleep. My journal and personal notes triple this number easily. On average, I have one sleep-deprived day a week, often two. Because it happens so often, I’ve also developed an unhealthy habit of “forced” sleep when I wake up because I know what lack of sleep leads to. This doesn’t help.
Being sleep-deprived sucks. I start my day at the same hour, but pretty soon (an hour or so), I hit a mental “soft cotton” cushion, which makes everything murky and slow. My lack of motivation to tackle projects, which is already lacking in general due to what falls under the umbrella of ADHD (interesting take in this study), turns into active resistance. For example, I need to argue with myself for 10 minutes just to be able to open an email.
In addition, I become more irritated by sudden noises or bright lights (similar effect to having a hangover). I avoid communicating with people and want to be left alone (being “grumpy”). Besides being rude toward people close to me, this also affects my ability to communicate at work. If I push myself (which I must), I often forget facts, misspell or mispronounce words, or even blank out mid-thought. Besides work and personal connections, I also don’t exercise or go for walks when I don’t sleep (I often exercise as soon as I wake up from a nap though), which in turn makes me feel lazy and guilty, another life “feature” I struggle with more often than not.
Because of the negative effects and how long this has been going on (the definition of chronic insomnia, for example, calls for at least three months of continuous issues; I’m probably somewhere in the 2-year mark at least), this is something I need to address head-on. I can’t just keep venting about it and hope it will disappear.
I’m aware of CBT treatment (some of this I’ve been doing with therapists) and sleep hygiene, the latter of which I don’t do well enough. I’m capable of falling asleep pretty fast, thankfully, and I should go to bed earlier, but I don’t. This is probably the first thing I should start doing immediately.
Other sleep hygiene-related things include drinking non-caffeinated tea at around 19:00 as a symbol (the last drink of the day) and possibly as a placebo. I should exercise at noon instead of afternoons (mornings are too busy) and finish by meditating for longer periods. Living in NYC means noises from inconsiderate jerks can and will happen (fireworks, motorcyclists revering their engines, construction noises), but I found that I can fall asleep despite those most of the time.
I’m also going to seek out a “sleep doctor” who might help me shed more light on this problem. Possibly looking into some homeopathic medicine as well, as it usually comes without side effects. For now, I’m going to try to nap… and edit this post when I wake up.
I feel much better now after a nap. Napping is not always an option, and it doesn’t always work. I’ve had days when I napped twice, even three times throughout the day. It’s a skill I’m developing (I keep waking up and convincing myself back into sleep if I can).
The research I did earlier into sleep centers did not yield good results. The few places I found have bad reviews. Generally, I’m trying not to look for a therapist for help since this is an option I’ve applied in the past a couple of times, and I know more or less where it leads.
This is one of those things I have to take the long-term approach, mixed with other areas of my life. Sleep hygiene should be a routine that ties into exercise, eating, and even social habits. On my wiki, sleep is one of the four elements of life, even though I still need to put that article up.
Does anyone on Windows want to try out Arc Browser (Beta)? They opened it up for today. I’ll need your email address.