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2024-01-02

There's some Life Stuff(tm) happening right now so it feels weird to write here at all, but I've been thinking about coziness (and relatedly: self-care) in times of stress, and specifically how it relates to my computing practice.

I'm writing up a little "my machines" page for my website, not because anyone else will care but because I will and because it feels like a "personal website" kind of thing to do. In doing it, I realised two things:

One: It feels really great to just write HTML. Markdown is great, and all, but it feels like somehow over the last 10+ years I have convinced myself that building web pages in HTML is for the birds and everything must come via a CMS or an SSG or at least a templating system. No. You can just write HTML. It's fine. Then you can style _just this one page you are working on_ exactly how you like it, and not worry about any other update anywhere else ever breaking it.

Two: I own several computers which I bought, or at least configured, to be "cozy". They are explicitly limited machines with small capabilities. They're either very old, kind of small, or just unsuited for the real world. Specifically, they are unsuited for productive "production quality" work.

One is Haiku machine made out of a thrift-store find, the other is my Cyberdeck project (A Raspberry Pi 400 with a recycled LCD panel from a laptop in a custom wooden case I designed and fabricated).

When I was stressed by work, I retreated to a contrast from work computing. Where work involves a powerful machine, Docker containers, large scale and complexity, cozy computing became the opposite.

It is about wasting time, reading and writing, talking to friends on IRC. Mastodon, at a stretch, although that's also not neccessarily cozy.

It meant programming in Scheme and C. Writing small things just for myself. Doing things by hand instead of summoning big frameworks and automation. Hand configuration: no Ansible or Chef or Docker.

Some coziness comes from affordances of the experience: 4:3 screens. A real hard-disk drive (in the case of the Haiku machine). Orange tinted screens and pleasant terminal colours. Loading times: a chance to pause. Fonts with single deck lower-case "a" glyphs. A keyboard that feels good to type on. A machine personalized: stickers, repairs, additions.

I don't have an especial point to this. It's not an article; just a few observations. In one way I feel like I need this less: I'm not working, so I don't need the contrast -- but in another way it still seems comforting. I think there is a very small anxiety caused by using an incredibly capable machine (which effectively all modern computers are). It has so much potential! And I am not using it.

I bought a 12th generation Core i5 machine back in March. It was specifically for building large C++ and Rust code bases and was to be my main computer. It was, for several months, but _man_ that thing is a beast. Apart from a few hours a week compiling stuff I am wasting it! No one cares! But I kind-of do.