💾 Archived View for ew.srht.site › en › 2022 › 20220123-simplicity-2.gmi captured on 2022-04-29 at 12:39:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Recently ruario had their take on simplicity:
> Why do you have a [blog] on Gemini?
The answer is, "Because it is simple!".
gemini://ruario.flounder.online/gemlog/2022-01-06_Because_its_simple.gmi
I had written a reply.
/en/2022/20220107-simplicity.gmi
However, my mind kept circling around this thing called simplicity. I like high tech to some extent. I even work in a quite high tech field. But simple things or solutions are fascinating, too. So I decided to collect some of these as I experience them.
Say, you want to be informed about your body weight, for some reason.
Solution 1: Get a smart digital scale featuring high resolution (0.01 kg maybe) and a bluetooth or similar interface. Interface it with your beloved smart phone. Feed the readings into a piece of software, which will collect the readings with an accurate 1-second timestamp, and feed them into a fancy database somewhere in the modern clouds. The software will display the reading (ok, you knew this one already) and a diagram of all readings of last week, month, year ... whatever you please. You can propbaly overlay the diagram with that of your partner, room mate, or with folks around the globe. Neat, eh? You might even want to add crypto and blockchain technology such that you can never cheat on a measurement ever again, right?
Solution 2: Get a stupid digital scale featuring a resolution of maybe 0.1 kg, a sheet of paper with a printed grid (date on x-axis, weight on y-axis), and a pencil. Ok, you need to replace the battery every few years and take care of that pencil. But you should not need electricity or fancy mathematical magic to just look at the diagram. And you don't have trends and quantiles and what not, but you can "see" all this anyway. And you can cheat high and wild!
Optimization: use a mechanical scale instead. They are still available.
Image: Something happened in the first week of March 2018, see?
Of course there are many, many occasions, where paper and pencil suffice. Shopping lists come to my mind quickly. And yes, that's how I do it. Additionally we have a printed out calender in the kitchen. If something is not mentioned there, it does not really exist in our admittedly small "familiy logistics".
I do carry a notebook and paper calender as soon as I leave the house with my trusted backpack. And yes, I even use this paper based office.
