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Updates from the last two weeks

It's been almost two weeks since I last wrote, and I have lots of ideas for posts but all of them are too short for their own entire article. So, this is everything that seems worth mentioning from the last two weeks, combined in one post.

Short updates and thoughts

For now, I've renamed this section of the capsule to "flight log" instead of "gemlog." I eventually plan to publish these to the web, too, so a term that works more generally while still reflecting that Gemini is the primary intended audience seems fitting.
I got my COVID-19 vaccine booster dose. Felt feverish and generally bad for about 36 hours, but fine after that. I'm definitely still less comfortable acting like life is normal because of the omicron variant surge (especially an issue where I live) but I feel a little safer than before.
Onboarded someone new at work. It went much more smoothly than it has in the past. Given that we don't hire very frequently this is saying something! At least some of this is because of the HR workflow tooling I've designed and built; it's really cool to see it all come together and work as designed.
I participated in the html.energy freewrite last Saturday. It was a lot of fun to just spend an hour playing around with HTML and CSS, and it was great to be able to hang out with folks on Discord doing the same thing. I redesigned my public web presence (tris.fyi) and am really happy with how it turned out!

html.energy

my public website

For some reason, I've recently become very aware of the mechanisms I use to communicate with folks and what their privacy guarantees are. I think this is good, because it reminds me to move to XMPP/Signal with folks I care about, but I'm worried I'll start getting very paranoid about communications security, which I definitely don't want :)
I started looking into knowledge management tools again (Notion, Obsidian, Logseq) and am trying to figure out a good workflow with Obsidian again. I'm not sure it will stick, but I do need something to dump thoughts into sometimes. Using the mobile app together with Syncthing would let me collect stuff while I'm not at my computer, which would probably help get rid of the feeling that I'm constantly forgetting something.
Someone else has started using Amethyst (my Gemini server), which is very exciting to see!

Follow-up on my last post

My last post was about how I'm trying to change my content consumption and general Internet usage habits, especially with services that try to keep me hooked:

Trying to have a healthier relationship with the Internet

It's going pretty well so far, but I have a few notes about it:

I subconsciously set a goal to use my phone as little as possible, which actually was bad. I want to stay in touch with people, especially with COVID making it difficult to meet with folks in large groups, and I don't think it's a waste of time to read the news, check what's new on Antenna, or find a podcast to listen to. With this in mind, my loose rule/goal is to be mindful about what I intend to do before I unlock my phone and do something. I still catch myself trying to mindlessly open Twitter and doomscroll occasionally, but for the most part I'm able to keep to this.
I scrolled through Twitter a bit today on desktop and remembered that there actually _is_ some stuff worth seeing there. And, despite my usual annoyance with the algorithmic, engagement-maximizing "Home" timeline, it sometimes surfaces some content that is actually nice to see; it's just mixed in with tweets that make me upset and disappointed in the state of the world (which I almost never want to see). Maybe some judicious term-blocking could get it to a generally usable state for me, but I'm not sure it's worth the time right now. I may look into alternate Twitter clients and see if they have functionality that might help.
I thought about what I really need in a phone, and it's really just four things: secure text communication (XMPP/Signal), a web browser (although a lot of tasks could be done through Gemini with some work), a podcast/music player, and the ability to make phone calls. GPS navigation, Home Assistant control, and sleep tracking would certainly be nice but I could learn to live without them. It's especially interesting to me that all of this functionality could work well on an e-ink display.
Grayscale display is nice, but I'm finding myself toggling it off (to look at a picture or something) and then forgetting to toggle it back on. Maybe there is a Tasker fix for this, but it hasn't bugged me enough to find out.

Working on rebuilding Lessbroken

A long time ago, I operated a group of services (IRC bouncer, Git hosting, possibly a few others that I'm forgetting) under the "Lessbroken" umbrella, but that infrastructure has largely decayed and now only the IRC bouncer component is functional. I've wanted to rebuild a robust architecture for shared services with common authentication and management for the past year or so (and have a friend interested too!), but have been having trouble moving past the design phase of some of the components. While there are still a lot of decisions that need to be made about the project, I've finally sketched out a rough design for the authentication / authorization services that should let it function as a mostly-standalone component. This means I can actually start working on getting Lessbroken off the ground again.

The key insight I had was this: LDAP authentication is required for many of the services I'd like to provide, but administering OpenLDAP is hard and annoying. I can instead run glauth (a lightweight LDAP server supporting declarative single-file configuration) on systems that run services that need LDAP, then sync that configuration file from a central authentication service. As a bonus, this enables service-specific passwords, so you don't have to store your main account password in, for example, your IRC client configuration (for bouncer authentication).

glauth

Closing thoughts

I think it would be beneficial for me to commit to writing (mostly) nontechnical flight logs every x days or every week, or something. It's nice to be able to write relatively freely about my personal life in long form, especially since I'm usually very unorganized. No promises yet, but if you enjoy reading this sort of post and would like me to write more often, send me a note on IRC/XMPP or via email, it would be very motivating :)

Comments

Please email me at tris@tris.fyi if you have any comments on this article. If you'd like your comment published, please let me know and include how you'd like to be credited (name, and if you've written a gemlog in response to this, a URL to that), if at all.