For some reason, I always wanted to drive a huge truck. Perhaps, it’d feel almost like a spaceship: big, autonomous, complicated. To be a captain, and be responsible for passengers and cargo. To have a quest.

Tantacrul

Tantacrul is a wonderful youtube channel about music and music software. My favorite videos:

• Music Software & Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius
• Music Software & Interface Design: MuseScore
• Music Software & Interface Design: Propellerhead’s Reason
• The Bad Way to Teach Music to Babies - Dubious YouTube Channels & Bleeping Toys
• Star Wars Music is Getting Worse - Beyond The Last Jedi & John Williams - A Music Philosophy Review
• Thoughty2, Bad Music & The Decline of the Pop Song - My Response

Dreaming of personal google

I’d love to have a robust personal search engine, something like mac’s Spotlight, but actually functional. It should search all of my text files, saved webpages, pdfs, ebooks and photos.

Recoll is very good, but I still can’t manage to build it on macOS with the Python module enabled, which I need because I want to use the web ui, since the standard UI is QT-based, and QT apps look and feel disgusting on macOS, unfortunately.

Ripgrep is another alternative, as long as you don’t need to search inside of obscure data formats like pdfs and epubs. For that, rga is great, and it even caches results. However, it’s doesn’t index data, so it’s not instantaneous. Which is fine in most cases.

So, yeah, I’ll probably write a HTTP wrapper and a simple web GUI on top of rga, and see how to goes from there. No indexing is actually a good thing for consistency, so.

Hard to blog?

What makes tweets and website comments so much easier to write than — behold! — a blog post? Somehow, even with all those user-hostile UX changes Twitter has made over the years, the traction is still so pleasantly low.

Blot.im (where this tiny blog is hosted) is probably the closest one can get to low-traction blogging. Just save a markdown file to Dropbox and that’s it. No front matter, no git, no interfaces, no publish button. It’s wonderful.

The Turn After a Storm by Hello Meteor

Get a nice pair of headphones and listen to this peaceful, contemplative and soothing album by Hello Meteor. It was one of those cases when the record ends and the silence afterwards seems like it’s missing life.

Hello, you

This is my mildly censored flow of unconsciousness. I really hope I spelled that correctyl. Here’s a cow I met the other day:

Endure for junk food

The reason I bike long distances is junk food. The formal justifications include physical activity, exploration and escape, but they all feel shallow and fake. I just love junk food. But I hate myself for eating it. The only time I can truly enjoy a grease cheeseburger with disgusting fries and a can of beer is after biking for 6 hours non-stop.

This feels wrong and stupid. Yet, I find more and more “honestly-stupid” kind of reasons in life. I meet with people so that I can be alone again, but this time, finally, without the need to socialize. Travel to be able to be home. Run to sleep. Work to rest.

Is that it?..

On extremely sophisticated tastes

What do you think when you see people get very emotional about extremely sophisticated things in art, culinary, fashion and similar areas? What do you feel when you listen to some gourmet enthusiast describing why this thing pictured below matters?

Long gone are days when I was dismissive about such things. I no longer think it’s stupid to like fancy, extravagant, expensive or exotic things. Whatever makes you happy! Although I occasionally feel dissatisfaction regarding the sheer inefficiency of such things (that fancy meal’s total cost can feed a village for a week, probably). But mostly, lately I feel kind of sad.

To me, these things scream “what else can I do in order to not think about death?”. I’m sure people are not feeling this way, and I’m not here to put words into their mouths (or thoughts into my models of their personalities). Maybe something is wrong with me to think that.

We generally think that seeking meaning or happiness in houses and cars is a bad thing, a worthless endeavour. But seeking them in art or beauty or food is different. Why?

Justify when reducing user’s freedom

Links should not forcefully open in a new tab because by enabling this the designer takes away some of the freedom from the user. Without target="_blank the user has a choice: open here or in a new window. With target="_blank" the user has no choice.

I will not add background music in my podcasts because this would take away some of the freedom from the listener. They can add background music to the speech, but they can’t remove the music if it’s present in the source.

Of course, some links require the new tab and some podcasts require music. This is not a rule about web interfaces or podcast production. It also doesn’t mean “allow as many options as possible”. This is just a reminder: if your idea reduces the user’s freedom, you have to justify it.

What am I doing

There is a popular anecdote in the frog community. Older, wiser frogs love to tell to it to younger frogs. It goes something like this: once there was a man who worked at work and ate at diners, and all seemed fine enough to him, and over the years things in his life were constantly changing for the worst, but he didn’t really notice and didn’t make decisions to fix this trend. Today always seemed not too bad compared to yesterday. A year ago was hard to recall, so he didn’t bother. He died being an unhappy, grumpy, miserable man. The end.

The boiling frog anecdote is considered extremely offensive in the frog community.

Metaphorical tales are fun and all, but I find them very unhelpful at times. If you’re stuck somewhere in life and need a push, a boiling frog analogy won’t wake you up. The whole problem is in not seeing stuff clearly, and another perspective just makes you not see stuff clearly from another perspective.

So, instead, think of an unhappy, grumpy, miserable old man regretting his lack of decisions.

The frog is fine.