💾 Archived View for caseyrichins.online › logs › 2023-01-24_Lofty-goals.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:12:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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Published January 24, 2023
I've been busy since my last entry. I've been working to purge instagram among other things. It took longer than expected to go through every saved and liked post under my interactions to first download those that I wished to save and then afterward, unlink and unsaved all the content before finally being able to execute the delete function on my account. It is such a relief to be free of that burden. I do have to still organize what I downloaded but that is a fairly simple task as the amount I download isn't close to what I had liked/saved on instagram. I have only pinterest and reddit left now. Pinterest is used mostly for ideas but I'm noticing that after not using it for a while and getting back to it, the feed is becoming polluted with content I don't want that I keep having to try to flush history on without much luck to get what I want from it. It may soon also reach the end of it's use at which time I will once again download what I have before deleting the account. Pinterest makes it much easier then instagram though to download.
The other item I've accomplished only just today was getting to inbox Zero. I'm not fully there yet but I made a major breakthrough in going from 5000 emails in my account to 650 emails. There were some sentimental emails that I wanted to keep that I ended up printing PDF copies of then removing them from my inbox so that they wouldn't be a distraction in my inbox. I'm going to continue to work on this, the major question I'm asking myself is if I really need to keep every rent statement and payment receipt for my apartment going back 3 years, in all honestly I likely don't but like the sentimental emails, I may end up just printing up a PDF copy in case I ever find myself in need of the information. I'm still working on breaking free of google as, but I still have a gamil account and data stored in drive and photos that need to be made local.
In other news I've been exploring gopher lately and being so used to having privacy via ssl when browsing I didn't like that gopher protocol data was going over the wire in the clear as it was being served back to me. I ended up setup an alias for lynx to use tor as a proxy to browse gopher to at least give some privacy over my connection since the internet at my apartment complex is shared between all the residents. Overkill, yes but the peace of mind it worth it.
I've been trying to where able in my free time to explore both gopher and gemini sites while avoiding the modern web more often. This has been difficult however as main computer has become slightly shared recently while I save to replace another broken system. I'm beginning to desire a desktop over a laptop more and more these days even as I find it comfortable to use a laptop while sitting in bed. As I work to minimize my computing in addition to my overall life, I find myself designing an ever smaller and simpler network since it is likely that I will only ever be the one to use it. The days of yearning for beefy servers sitting in a rack somewhere in my living space have dissipated to be replaced with a simple desktop that has adequate storage. I've also come to realize that I need to build my hardware so that I know that it can be trusted rather then buy an off the shelf unit.
I want to get back to trying out openbsd as a desktop system, I started down the road but then somewhere along that journey I got distracted. I'm thinking about switching distros and getting away from Ubuntu as I am becoming more annoyed/enraged at packages ending up as snaps. I don't like snaps. I've been thinking about switching back to Debian but the one thing I want/need to have the latest or as close to latest version of SSH as possible to make use of the newest features. I want to get back to terminal only based computing and am seriously considering going back to i3wm desktop setup. Gentoo as much I like it, is a burden to update on my current systems because if the compile time required to update the system but if I build a new system I might make use of Gentoo again, and this time I might not give up so easily on hardened Gentoo setup. I wonder how an SSD would last with all the writes' that may needed during compile times.
The last update I have is that I'm trying to get into the habit of writing my own personal documentation in vimwiki and trying to utilize it more so that I'm able to quickly get information I need without worrying that the bookmark I once had has become stale and the information that was contained therein is no longer to be found. In addition to documentation, I'm trying to automate my systems and setup processes as much as possible to make it easier to get back to a working state if I ever need to re-install everything from scratch.
I look forward to the coming year and don't have any resolutions to speak of but simply achieving goals as I set them should be satisfactory to achieving contentment and emotional well-being this year.