I hope this works.
A statement that pretty much sums up everything I've done in the past 12 hours since discovering Gemini from a maya.land monologue re-posted on HN.
http://maya.land/monologues/2021/01/11/the-tragedy-of-gemini.html
Hopefully this isn't the start of another eternal September, no, the irony is not lost on me.
Feeling sleepy, unmotivated? Need something to keep you moving while you read my first blog post? Why not listen to this song.
https://soundcloud.com/weareflyboy/archie-ward-music-dance-feat-the-pressure-1
Or maybe something more relevant?
https://soundcloud.com/kllomusic/mygemini
Why oh why, my Gemini?
Seriously, why Gemini? (technical curiosity aside), I can hold a blog on any number of surface web providers (not that I ever have). From the moment I started browsing the latest page updates indexed by GUS I fell in love with a sense of community and self expression with much less self curation. And that to me is EXCITING!
The allure is such that I feel "safer" here to express myself than I would up there on the surface. Where so much is shiny and polished. Where the self-imposed internal filters of external perception are applied with higher stakes and more rigor than one would find in a smaller, more anonymous community. One where the barrier to entry is enough to at least provoke some degree of lateral thought. In a way by posting my ramblings on Gemini, I'm building my confidence and finding my voice. Albeit to a relatively controlled audience of not entirely like minded people. But like minded enough.
Having lurked online all my life I think it's time to contribute to the digital lexicon.
May it be enshrined in history or fizzle into the void. At least I'll get it off my chest.
Whether or not this is the same for others I don't really know yet, but I do hope to find out.
6 months ago I started writing a journal of sorts. Hosted on google docs and only ever contributed to when things were going south. My first foray into written self discovery was one hell of an eye-opener. There is truth to the power held in writing down your thoughts. It's as though the act of organizing an idea into something coherent enough to be understood (not always by other people) enables me to offload it from memory to disk. Freeing up resources to worry about other things instead.
Once the words are down on paper, so too are the troubles they describe. Writing is truly liberating.
This is great and i recommend it to everyone who spends far too much time in their head. But one thing I didn't count on was my lack of interest in writing down the good times. If I were to go back and look at my life through the lens of said journal I would have a completely one sided and entirely negative perspective.
This blog is my attempt to remedy this and change my own perception of life. Hopefully in a way that encourages me to pursue ideas and projects I have previously only daydreamed. Having an audience to disappoint (be it human or web-crawler) may be the catalyst I need to leave the mind and enter reality.
So this blog will be (all things going well) an eclectic mix of stream of consciousness ideas, projects and confessions.
I will be honest, with you and myself.
I will be fearless, no idea or project is too big to have a stab at. I don't need to be qualified, everyone else is yelling nonsense into the ether, why can't I join in? Yeah, sorry.
I have some goals I'd like to accomplish but the foremost one is overcoming my fear of self expression.
Even in writing this intro blog post I've re-worded much of it to avoid sounding like too much of a fuckwit. But you know, you can't please everyone and if the content of this blog isn't for you. Please leave me an insulting comment and let me know how much you hate me and my ilk. Or give me constructive criticism (much preferred).
Now to actually introduce myself so I can let your preconceived biases do the talking.
I'm an Australian guy in my late 20's. At the end of 2019 I left my almost decade long career as sysadmnin at $globalMSP and decided to do the cliche find myself while traveling the world before I turn 30 thing. I had a visa lined up for Canada to work as a laborer while traveling around the country. Having gone through a prolonged period of depression I was actually on the uptick as I walked out the door. Though I suppose running away will make anyone feel better, the change in mood was clearly noticeable to my friends, colleagues and family.
From the moment I decided to quit I was free. I would like to say I was burnt out, having been the sole storage / backup on call staff member for the past 5 years. But really I think I was just sick of having to care about things no one else did. The harsh truth was I could see myself stagnating. My career, which at one point had seemed so exciting and full of potential had become a monotonous slog.
I had allowed my fear and need for comfort to paint me into a corner I couldn't or wouldn't stand out from.
So I sold my car, cancelled my lease and moved in with my parents 1000km's away in the regional coastal town I grew up in. A luxury afforded only to those who have avoided responsibility for the majority of their life. And have parents willing to house them for an undefined period of time.
I spent some time lounging around living off my savings but before I knew it my plans of escape were abruptly shitcanned as the country entered lock down. Around this time my parents were in the process of retiring to their idyllic holiday home on a local island. Ready to live out their golden years surrounded by water and wine. So I thought, why not?
I moved to the island picked up a job working for the operations manager as a laborer. Mind you I was coming from 8 years in an office job. Prior to this the most uncomfortable thing I had to do was stand in the hot isle of a DC and occasionally lift something heavy.
For the next 11 months I worked hard. Harder than I have in my life. Every work day I, with a team of three other guys, would clear blocks of residential land with chainsaws, machetes and brush-cutters. Through dense bushland and 98% humidity I was forged anew in the fires of delightfully smelling Lantana and ravenous mosquitos. I also lost about 40 KG.
Having entered the IT industry more or less straight out of high school I was never exposed to real manual labor. As grueling as the work was, I loved it. It's not complicated so you can pay full attention to a podcast or audio-book while working. The way I saw it. I was being paid to work out and learn things I was interested in. All day long. People normally pay to go to a gym. This gym pays you!
At the start of December, after a complicated chain of events (I'm working on a post about it, personally I blame the Chinese government) I resigned from my labor job. Now with nothing but free time and enough savings to stay here for at least 6 months I'm focused on achieving something.
This blog will keep me invested and focused. I'll post frequent updates on my journey including details of my many projects and hopefully you will get something of value out of it. Even if it's only a long and rambling description of what not to do.
My first goal is to setup a dedicated Gemini server and build my first site. I feel that the momentum gained while researching Gemini and browsing through the various blogs should be maintained. So here I am. Posting my first post.
But not my last!
When I do get it setup, I'll copy this one across and link to it.
Follow me if you want to hear about things like -
A year ago I started writing a novel. I have 3 chapters and I feel like I re-write them once a month without making progress on the rest.
I’ve also written a handful of DnD campaigns for my friends.
I have a bunch of short stories brewing in need of an outlet. Once my server is up I’ll be hosting everything on Gemini.
Where it all started I suppose. I’ve recently been heavily into non fiction pulp sciency type stuff. But prior to this phase I was deep into scifi and fantasy.
I think I’ll make a post for each book I read. That could be a good way to solidify any knowledge gained. Also to assess just how much I really understand and hopefully help others decide if a book’s worth their time. Assuming you want me to be your curator. I wouldn’t recommend it.
I think the key to understanding consciousness lies not with philosophers but with AI researchers. Though not so much the ML ones. Like anyone, I’m just trying my best to understand what it’s all about.
I used to get paid to do this. I don’t think my employer knew. But it was happening none the less.
I’m setting up build logs for the following projects. All of which will be posted here.
Because I live off the grid I’ve been dabbling in growing my own food. I had a great crop of heirloom tatsoi which I split between as many salads as I could handle and as many spanicapita as I had filo pastry. I’ve begun laying the foundations for a new “smart” garden. Automatic watering, soil moisture sensors, ph sensors, etc. All tied into a central management system. Just need to find a way to stop thoes god damn catterpillars. Half my garden was gone in the space of a week!
I love crab, but all the spots here are breeding grounds for sharks. So the bastards get into the pots and the crabs don’t. Using a CNN I plan to open and close the pot door to allow only crabs in. Once I train the model I hope to be able to distinguish between male and femal crabs and allow only those of legal size and sex into the pot. Once a crab is in the pot I’ll send an alert via LoraWAN to my house so I know to go pick them up.
I’d love to expand on this with a high powered drone to ferry the pots back and forth to the various creeks around the place. Imagine a fully automated crab catching system. I think I watched too much wallace and grommet as a kid.
The beaches on this island are known breeding grounds for a range of endangered sea turtles. These magnificent creatures use the earths magnetic field to find their way back to the beach they hatched on roughly 30 years later to lay their own eggs. The eggs chill there for 40 or so days before hatching in the early hours of the morning. Using the light over the horizon as a directional beacon they make their journey into the sea.
Given the blazay attitude of the island manager and total disregard for environmental protection. I feel it would be worth creating a remote camera system for each beach, capable of detecting turtles as they come ashore to nest nest and hatch. I’ve also read some cool papers on using shell pattern geometry to uniquely identify turtles.
And I could name one of them Crash!
Using a bladeRF or similar FPGA based SDR. I’d like to implement a drone detection sphere around my house. Using a switched array of antennas I should be able to pinpoint direction, altitude and speed. Giving an aproximate location of any drones susing me out. Drone intrusion is a serious concern for me. Not just because I’m a paranoid nutjob (more in later blogs).
I’d also like to detect interfernce for my own drone as I’m concerned there is a high probability of it being jammed.
Design and build a stone wood fired pizza oven in my front yard.
The bay outside my house is frequented by yachts most days. I have maccinations to corner the drone pizza delivery market. Cost of building a drone to achieve the required lift for a couple of pizzas is outside my budget for now. But as an interim, I have an inflatable tender (which I’m in the process of repairing) I can use to ferry the pizzas from a nearby beach to the boats at sea.
I have a 500m line of sight position to a number of popular moorings from my house. I want to provide free wifi to boats there. Tying into the pizza delivery idea. The area does not have mobile reception so boaties won’t be able to call me to order a pizza. So if I offer them free wifi with a captive portal also enabling them to order pizza… OR maybe I could offer a movie night combo. Buy two pizzas get 5GB of data to watch Netflix.
After some cursory investigations I’ll probably need a couple of high gain sector antennas and some decent radio gear. Much research to be done.
Please see my subsequent posts for more projects details. If they exist when you read this...
Thankyou for reading my first blog post. If you actually made it to the end and are still interested I plan to release something once a week at the least.
<3
Adrift