I’m experimenting with using Jekyll in place of wordpress. If you want you can check out [dead link] which containly my weekly review process.
If and when I do migrate, all the posts here will be magically migrated and the URLs will stay the same so links don’t break.
Edit: I discontinued this experiment. It’s too hard to migrate the old stuff and keep it looking good, and I’d rather keep everything in one system.
I did a survey of the cost of buying hard drives (of all sorts), CDs, DVDs, Blue-rays, and tape media (for tape drives).
Here are the 2019-07 results: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2019-07.sc.txt
2018-10: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2018-10.sc.txt
2018-06: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2017-06.sc.txt
2018-01: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2017-01.sc.txt
We made a blast furnace, following David Gingery’s The Charcoal Foundry. Here are some pictures of the firing process. We haven’t melted or cast any metal yet.
Slow initial burn to drive out most of the water
Blast furnace in action to completely dry it
You can tell we’re trained professionals by the fan setup
Blast furnace meat is best meat
Richard looking dubiously at the furnace
Today’s project was a hard drive carrying case. I wanted something to securely store hard drives. When I looked around on ebay and amazon, I saw some nice cases and some crappy plastic molded ones. Even the terrible ones were at least $50, so I made my own.
I bought a used ammo case at the rather excellent local army surplus store. Then I padded all sides. I had spare EVA foam “puzzle piece” style mats from a gym setup lying around. I cut out the pieces with scissors. That’s it. I was expecting more steps, but nothing needed glued in place. I was planning on adding inserts for the empty slots, but it seems secure enough. If you’re making one, you could also glue the top onto the lid, so you don’t have to take it out manually.
Summary of “the life-changing magic of tidying up”:
Marie Kondo writes the “KonMari” method. The book ends up being as much about her mistakes in learning how to tidy as it is about how to tidy. The book conveys a certain positive energy that makes me want to recommend it, but the author also brings that energy in reaction to a kind of previous stress which accompanied tidying, which she does not seem to have completely dropped–if you are mysteriously anxious and feel you MUST discard everything after reading her book, this may be why.
The primary point she makes is meant to cure it: Decide what to keep and what to discard by physically touching each item, and asking if it brings you joy.
The rest of the method:
Marie Kondo’s best advice is realizations from her past mistakes–the sort of methods which seems reasonable to try, but end up being wrong for subtle reasons. They are:
She also has encountered her clients making mistakes. For each category of things (clothes, books, etc) there are many reasons clients may not want to throw something out. Most of the book is meant to illustrate why these things are useless, and why throwing them out is okay and will make you happier.
The fun part is that many clients were more confident and more in touch with what they valued and who they wanted once they had only possessions they loved.
za3k.com was the site of a DDoS attack. I’m pretty sure this was because my wordpress installation was compromised, and the hacker who took control of my server was herself DDoSed.
More updates to come, but the short story is that I’ll be formalizing my install and eventually containerizing + hardening everything
I’m opening the NNTP server at nttp.za3k.com (TLS or unencrypted) to the public. These are the newsgroups currently on it. It is virtually zero-traffic (no users, but also users post little).
If you don’t have a news reader, Thunderbird can do the job, or take a look at the list here.
I want to talk about three different mindsets for time management and what constitutes “success”. In all three, I’ll talk about an example problem, let’s say “writing term papers” for a student who finds this difficult, and see how each might approach the goal. My goal is not to promote one of these as best, but rather to illustrate that all three exist. Each may be favored by one person or another, or by a single person depending on the situation. I hope that by describing them, I can help people understand one another’s motivations, so as to facilitate communication. The first mindset I will call optimization. The optimizer tries to spend their time gaining resources. For example, they might work to get money. They also attempt to increase the rate at which they can gain resources. Some optimizers even try to increase the rate at which they can e.g. network or learn skills. The intuition here is that most goods are somehow fungible, and that you should try to get as many fungible goods as possible. Example of term papers: An optimizer might try to learn to write term papers, or get faster and faster at writing papers. If they got good at writing term papers, they might try to write even more (for example, taking classes heavy on papers) to take advantage of these skills. Heuristics:
Failure modes:
The second mindset I will call satisficing. The satisficer is goal-oriented, and tries to stay focus on the goal at all times. Traditional goal-based time management like GTD encourages satisficing. Example of term papers: Their specific goal might be “Get an A on all papers until I graduate”. If they can write well enough to get an A, they probably would not learn to write better. If they can’t get an A, their goal might be better served by learning to write to rubrics. The question of learning to write better vs spending more time editing on each paper would be decided by the amount of time each would take for the actual number of term papers the student expected to write for their immediate goal. Heuristics:
Failure modes:
The last mindset I will call minimization. The minimizer will try to minimize the amount of resources spent on a particular task or problem. They will especially try to avoid any indefinitely-big cost. Example of term papers: The student might try to spend the minimum amount of time possible on the paper to get an A. If they knew they were going to write several papers, they might study how to write papers faster, so as to spend less total time–even if they expected the time learning to write faster would be greater than the time to write the immediate papers (“but what if there are more papers someday”). The eventual state of the minimizer will probably be to have set things up to avoid term papers, or write them very quickly. Heuristics:
Failure modes:
Here’s how you make roasted chickpeas (aka garbanzo beans):
A small font I designed. I’m pretty proud of it.
