Very, very early in my self-improvement journey, I tried adding a 20 minute timer to my life. Every 20 minutes of my waking life, it went off. I’d explicitly say to myself what it was I was doing (“Watching TV” or “Talking to Fred”). It’s important to have a verbal or written note of what you’re doing.
I added a specific prompt at one point: “What am I doing, and why?”. I don’t think goals are how I think about things today, but it’s how I tried to think back then (goal factoring). Today I might ask, “What am I doing, and do I want to be doing it? Do I want to be doing it this way?”
The basic 20-minute check-in process was very helpful to me. Some benefits:
Ding! What am I doing? It gave me an awareness of time. How long do things last? Our subjective sense of time doesn’t always match. For example, doing my daily chores takes about 20 minutes. A typical conversation with a friend takes 60-120 minutes for me. But the chores feel way longer to me!
What am I doing, and do I want to be doing it? Interrupting default activities (a type of inertia). Watching TV until I get bored of it takes me 2-10 hours, if I don’t have a timer. Having a timer interrupt me let me say “well, maybe this will be the last episode, then.” It’s easy to get into a low-energy state for leisure activities where you don’t notice the passage of time. And it’s important to note, I don’t have any rules. I can keep watching TV all night if I want to. This helps me avoid doing it out of pure inertia. (It also really keyed me in that TV does not really “recharge” my batteries. Other relaxation is better.)
Do I want to be doing it, or doing it this way? Interrupting bad approaches (a type of inertia). Sometimes, I get stubborn. I’ll keep trying to solve a problem in one way, for way too long. Having a regular interruption keys me into how long I’ve been doing that. I’ll notice I should maybe try a different approach or a work-around. Or give up.
Ding! Providing a check-in. I’ll just take stock, and say “hey, am I really having fun? is this even useful?”. Sometimes I’m just doing something dumb. Or sometimes I forget to have fun or take a break for too long. This is my reminder to check in with my strategic system; my emotions; my body.
One of the more useful things I did was to start logging all my technical problems. Whenever I hit a problem, I write an entry in problem-log.txt. Here’s an example
2022-08-02
Q: Why isn't the printer working? [ SOLVED ]
A: sudo cupsenable HL-2270DW
// This isn't in the problem log, but the issue is that CUPS will silently disable the printer if it thinks there's an issue. This can happen if you pull a USB cord mid-print.
I write the date, the question, and the answer. Later, when I have a tough or annoying problem, I try to grep problem-log.txt. I’ll add a note if I solve a problem using the log, too.
This was an interesting project to look at 5 years later. I didn’t see benefits until 1-2 years later. It does not help me think through a problem. It’s hard to remember to do. But, over time it’s built up and become invaluable to me. I hit a tricky problem, and I can’t immediately find an answer on the web. I find out it’s in problem-log.txt. And, someone’s written it exactly with my hardware (and sometimes even my folder names) correctly in there. Cool!
Here’s another example:
2018-10-21
Q: How do I connect to the small yellow router?
Not every problem gets solved. Oh well.
I scan each and every piece of paper that passes through my hands. All my old to-do lists, bills people send me in the mail, the manual for my microwave, everything. I have a lot of scans.
scan-organizer is a tool I wrote to help me neatly organize and label everything, and make it searchable. It’s designed for going through a huge backlog by hand over the course of weeks, and then dumping a new set of raw scans in whenever afterwards. I have a specific processing pipeline discussed below. However if you have even a little programming skill, I’ve designed this to be modified to suit your own workflow.
Input and output
The input is some raw scans. They could be handwritten notes, printed computer documents, photos, or whatever.
The final product is that for each file like ticket.jpg, we end up with ticket.txt. This has metadata about the file (tags, category, notes) and a transcription of any text in the image, to make it searchable with grep & co.
---
category: movie tickets
filename: seven psychopaths ticket.jpg
tags:
- cleaned
- categorized
- named
- hand_transcribe
- transcribed
- verified
---
Rialto Cinemas Elmwood
SEVEN PSYCHOPAT
R
Sun Oct 28 1
7:15 PM
Adult $10.50
00504-3102812185308
Rialto Cinemas Gift Cards
Perfect For Movie Lovers!
Here are some screenshots of the process. Apologizies if they’re a little big! I just took actual screenshots.
At any point I can exit the program, and all progress is saved. I have 6000 photos in the backlog–this isn’t going to be a one-session thing for me! Also, everything has keyboard shortcuts, which I prefer.
Phase 1: Rotating and Cropping
First, I clean up the images. Crop them, rotate them if they’re not facing the right way. I can rotate images with keyboard shortcuts, although there are also buttons at the bottom. Once I’m done, I press a button, and scan-organizer advanced to the next un-cleaned photo.
Phase 2: Sorting into folders
Next, I sort things into folders, or “categories”. As I browse folders, I can preview what’s already in that folder.
Phase 3: Renaming Images
Renaming images comes next. For convenience, I can browse existing images in the folder, to help name everything in a standard way.
Phase 4: Tagging images
I tag my images with the type of text. They might be handwritten. Or they might be printed computer documents. You can imagine extending the process with other types of tagging for your use case.
Not yet done: OCR
Printed documents are run through OCR. This isn’t actually done yet, but it will be easy to plug in. I will probably use tesseract.
Phase 5: Transcribing by hand
I write up all my handwritten documents. I have not found any useful handwriting recognition software. I just do it all by hand.
The point of scan-organizer is to filter based on tags. So only images I’ve marked as needing hand transcription are shown in this phase.
Phase 6: Verification
At the end of the whole process, I verify that each image looks good, and is correctly tagged and transcribed.
I did a survey of the cost of buying hard drives (of all sorts), microsd/sd, USB sticks, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and tape media (for tape drives).
Used or refurbished items were excluded. Multi-packs (5 USB sticks) were excluded except for optical media. Seagate drives were excluded, because they are infamous for having a high failure rate and bad returns process.
Per TB, the cheapest options are:
Tape media (LTO-8) at $4.74/TB, but I recommend against it. Tape drives are expensive ($3300 for LTO-8 new), giving a breakeven with HDDs at 350-400TB. Also, the world is down to only one tape drive manufacturer, so you could end up screwed in the future.
3.5″ internal spinning hard drives, at $13.75/TB. Currently the best option is 4TB drives.
3.5″ external spinning hard drives, at $17.00/TB. Currently the best is 18TB WD drives. If you want internal drives, you can buy external ones and open them up, although it voids your warranty.
2.5″ external spinning hard drives, at $24.50/TB. 4-5TB is best.
Blu-ray disks, at $23.16: 25GB is cheapest, then 50GB ($32.38/TB), then 100GB ($54.72/TB).
Be very careful buying internal hard drives online, and try to use a first-party seller. There are a lot of fake sellers and sellers who don’t actually provide a warranty. This is new in the last few years.
Changes since the last survey 2 years ago:
Amazon’s search got much worse again. More sponsored listings, still refurbished drives.
Sketchy third-party sellers are showing up on Amazon, and other vendors. At this point the problem is people not getting what they order, or getting it but without a promised warranty. I tried to filter out such Amazon sellers. I had trouble, even though I do the survey by hand. At this point it would be hard to safely buy an internal hard drive on Amazon.
Spinning drives: Prices have not significantly dropped or risen for spinning hard drives, since 2020.
Spinning drives: 18TB and 20TB 3.5″ hard drives became available
SSDs: 8TB is available (in both 2.5 inch and M.2 formats)
SSDs: Prices dropped by about half, per TB. The cheapest overall drives dropped about 30%.
USB: 2TB dropped back off the market, and appears unavailable.
USB: On the lower end, USB prices rose almost 2X. On the higher end, they dropped.
MicroSD/SD: Prices dropped
MicroSD/SD: A new player entered the cheap-end flash market, TEAMGROUP. Based on reading reviews, they make real drives, and sell them cheaper than they were available before. Complaints of buffer issues or problems with sustained write speeds are common.
MicroSD/SD: It’s no longer possible to buy slow microsd/sd cards, which is good. Basically everything is class 10 and above.
MicroSD/SD: Combine microsd and sd to show price comparison
Optical: Mostly optical prices did not change. 100GB Blu-Ray dropped by 60-70%. Archival Blu-Ray, too.
Tape: LTO-9 is available.
Tape: The cost of LTO-8 tape dropped 50%, which makes it the cheapest option.
Tape: This is not new, but there is still only one tape drive manufacturer (HP) since around the introduction of LTO-8.
One of my archiving and backup contingencies is taking one screenshot per minute. You can also use this to get a good idea of how you spend your day, by turning it into a movie. Although with a tiling window manager like I use, it’s a headache to watch.
I send the screenshots over to another machine for storage, so they’re not cluttering my laptop. It uses up 10-20GB per year.
I’ll go over my exact setup below in case anyone is interested in doing the same:
Prints everything to stderr if you run it manually
Makes a per-day directory. We store everything in /var/screenlog/2022-07-10/ for the day
Takes a screenshot. By default, crontab doesn’t have X Windows (graphics) access. To allow it, the XAuthority file which allows access needs to be somewhere my crontab can reliably access. I picked /tmp/XAuthority. It doesn’t need any unusual permissions, but the default location has some random characters in it.
GPG-encrypts the screenshot with a public key and deletes the original. This is extra protection in case my backups somehow get shared, so I don’t literally leak all my habits, passwords, etc. I just use my standard key so I don’t lose it. It’s public-key crypto, so put the public key on your laptop. Put the private key on neither, one, or both, depending on which you want to be able to read the photos.
Take a screenshot once every minute. Change the first * to */5 for every 5 minutes, and so on.
Copy over the gpg-encrypted screenshots hourly, deleting the local copy
Also hourly, delete empty per-day folders after the contents are copied, so they don’t clutter things
~/.profile
export XAUTHORITY=/tmp/XAuthority
I mentioned /bin/screenlog needs to know where XAuthority is. In Arch Linux this is all I need to do.
I just wrote the first pass at youtube-autodl, a tool for automatically downloading youtube videos. It’s inspired by Popcorn Time, a similar program I never ended up using, for automatically pirating the latest video from a TV series coming out.
You explain what you want to download, where you want to download it to, and how to name videoes. youtube-autodl takes care of the rest, including de-duplication and downloading things ones.
The easiest way to understand it is to take a look at the example config file, which is my actual config file.
Personally, I find youtube is pushing “watch this related” video and main-page feeds more and more, to the point where they actually succeed with me. I don’t want to accidentally waste time, so I wanted a way to avoid visiting youtube.com. This is my solution.
I added an articles section to my website with all blog posts up until now.
I also fixed the very, very old archived blog from 2014.
I retired at 31, and get asked about it sometimes. I wrote an article about how the math of retirement, which explains how I retired early (and some some extent, why). And of course, how and why you might want to as well.
There will probably be some more finances articles to come soon.
qr-backup is a program to back up digital documents to physical paper. Restore is done with a webcam, video camera, or scanner. Someday smart phone cameras will work.
I’ve been making some progress on qr-backup v1.1. So far I’ve added:
--restore, which does a one-step restore for you, instead of needing a bash one-line restore process
--encrypt provides password-based encryption
An automatic restore check that checks the generated PDF. This is mostly useful for me while maintaining qr-backup, but it also provides peace-of-mind to users.
--instructions to give more fine-tuned control over printing instructions. There’s a “plain english” explanation of how qr-backup works that you can attach to the backup.
--note for adding an arbitrary message to every sheet
Base-64 encoding is now per-QR code, each QR is self-contained.
Codes are labeled N01/50 instead of 01/50, to support more code types in the future.
Code cleanup of QR generation process.
Several bugfixes.
v1.1 will be released when I make qr-backup feature complete:
Erasure coding, so you only need 70% of the QRs to do a restore.
Improve webcam restore slightly.
v1.2 will focus on adding a GUI and support for Windows, Mac, and Android. Switching off zbar is a requirement to allow multi-platform support, and will likely improve storage density.
