A slice of Middleware

A palm Pilot

A quick Instagram post leads to 20 minutes of scrolling. A ping on Linkedin ends up costing me 5 minutes of my day looking at people boasting their new job titles online. A lookup of my train schedule somehow derails into rabbithole search about the origins of the Decepiticon known as Astrotrain. Lets face it: The internet is a distraction pit. Aside from housing the grandest repository of information on the planet, it also comes with a set of addictive apps that love to steal all of your time and eat up the last remaining crumbs of your attention span.

I remember when I had my very first PDA….

I remember when I had my very first PDA (You kids: That is short for “Personal Digital Assistant”. Those digital filo-fax like devices that would house your contacts (whome you could call on a separate phone), your calendar and a bunch of other handy applications like mail(and games) that would get you through the day. Via the magic of a serial cable, this thing would sync with your computer and dump swap out all of the updated info you crammed into it, with applications like Outlook Express or god forbid, Netscape Mail.

Incredible as it may seem, these things were quite productive. You would leave with a “fresh” set of data for the day, and dump out all of the updated emails, contacts, calendar requests etc … in the evening. Meanwhile you could ruin your eyes by trying to read a Ebook on them (I read a small library on them and now wear glasses), jot down notes with a tiny pen (and bastardise your handwriting) or just look cool by flipping the thing open like James T Kirk waiting for a beamout.

The time you spend on that device was your own.

The upside of it was: The time you spent on this device was your own. The You got to choose what you did next, not some pesky marketeer-psychologist-algorithm-entity that is shoving the next TikTok vid down your throat. But sync-cradles no longer exist and “being offline” is no longer an option these days. But there is a solution. How about some “middleware”, applications that allow you to enjoy the functionality of the internet without its distractions ?

Let’s try to start with Social Media. Under immense peer pressure I have found that occasionally I need to post some things on Instagram, to prevent friends sending out search parties to find my withered corpse. I hate Instagram and am especially vulnerable to Reels Video’s. I spend precious time scrolling down to the next video and wrack a huge “scroll-guilt” when I see how time slips through my fingers. I like to poke my head out on Twitter but could not care less about political retweets or watching Elon-the-idiot hogging trending topics. So I want to use social media without HAVING Social media. Can I? Answer? Yes! The answer is simple: Buffer. Its a Social Marketing scheduler for businesses but it works great for the average Joe. You can post to your personal Twitter and Linkedin profile just fine. Instagram takes a bit of fiddling, you’ll need to convert your account into a (public) creator or business account. But after that it works like a charm.

One-way Socials

So during the day I snap up some fancy pictures, snarky comments or insightful business blabla and ram the posts into Buffr. I can either post them to one (or multiple) channels, or hold the world in suspense and schedule everything for later. All of that without having any of the spammy apps installed on my phone.

One-way Socials. Yeah I know: I’m screaming into the void and not actually listening for a response, am I? That’s not completely true. I selectively pick and choose my moments where I access the Socials via the web. “Checking in” I call it. I glee over likes, read the snarky comments and snap a quippy response in a DM. That way I do Socials when I want to (and not the other way around). I filter out the crap that is force fed by ‘the algo’ and take back control of my phone (and life).

It’s a small step, but an important one if we want to take back control of our digital life and start watching the screen when WE want to, instead of the other way around.

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Noise cancelling your life. Don’t hear, but listen.

article header

It’s one of those days where I need to go outside. The dreaded world on the other side of my keyboard that requires my presence to interact with its inhabitants in order to get done. After a silent morning I hop in the car and drive off. In my personal rolling steel cage, everything is fine. The hum of the airconditioning, the soothing sounds of a podcast or a dulcet Spotify Playlist… I slide into my day. But just before work I just want to pop in for my load of take-away Java. I open the car door and am assaulted by … noise ! Honking cars, the sounds of a jackhammer and a piece of sidewalk having violent intercourse… people shouting.

… this is mostly geared towards single-celled-hard-hearing 3 year olds.

The sounds of a busy city. I scuttle inside the coffee-shop for relief and am confronted by the most terrible torture modern man can inflict upon himself in the morning hours : The RADIO.  Blasting from strategically dispersed overhead speakers there is no escape to the blaring sounds of what needs to pass for “morning entertainment” these days. A quick analysis of both the volume, the content and the delivery of ‘Mainstream radio’ teaches me that this is mostly geared towards single-celled-hard-hearing 3 year olds. Its lack of quality and content highly compensated by the overzealous delivery in volume.

Its like people vomiting into my ears .. My hands instinctively reach up to my neck and, like some kind of life jacket grab onto my noise cancelling headphones. I slide them over my ears and … relief. The auditory maelstrom is dimmed and replaced with the a soothing mumbling nothing. All I need to do is tap my smartphone and music surrounds me. In a flash I’m taken back to an old 80’s teen flick. The retro-wave beats streaming from the interwebs into my eardrums form an instant soundtrack for the  situation i’m in.  The experience is complete. Just like in the movies you ONLY hear the music and see the main character go through the motions. No pesky ambient noise, no people chattering.. Just music and motion. 

… In many ways putting on noise cancelling headphones is like putting on your  the earphones of your Walkman back in the 80’s

In many ways putting on noise cancelling headphones is like putting on your  the earphones of your Walkman back in the 80’s. A defiant and deeply personal gesture to grab those little speakers covered by their orange foam and place them firmly over your ears .Telling to world to be quiet, erecting an auditory wall around you. These days they are wireless and their noise cancelling abilities range much further then their prehistoric ancestors. But the gesture is the same.

Even their roll has changed. In the perfect storm of the pre-covid area where landscape offices, noisy colleagues and constant one-on-one Skype meetings resulted in a never ending landslide of noise and distraction … The noise cancelling headset became an essential component of the office worker. The only way to focus (and in many ways stay sane) was to pop on your headphones and cancel out whatever mayhem was going on around you. The joke of the entire philosophy behind a landscape office: Physically putting everyone in one room, only to end up with a collection of individuals fighting for selective isolation of the people around them. Paradox anyone ?

If you don’t hear me .. are you still willing to listen?

The conclusion is that we all need and enjoy our little personal audio stream that shies away from the mainstream noise around us. Just like we all have our own Twitter feed, watch our own selection of Netflix shows and are addicted to our very personal mix of insanity on Reddit, Youtube our TikTok.  My only hope is that (just like with the other social media bubbles) even though we don’t hear each other.. we are still willing to just .. listen.

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Do just about everything with a PDF (online)

Pdf’s: We love them, right? They are our favourite cross platform way to replace paper and save trees. That is, as long as it is a passive experience. Like just reading whats on the page, perusing the manual, consuming the content. But when you need to edit them it kinda goes downhill from there.

Well, not entirely: Simple tasks like signing and annotating PDFs has become a lot easier these days. Most browsers (like for example Edge on the desktop and safari on mobile) let you squiggle away with your pen or your mouse and sign your autograph (or an offensive stick figure) under any document.

But whenever you want to go one step beyond its a world of hurt. Before you know it, a simple query on Google to “ split pdf” takes you down a wormhole of costly apps, Adobe subscriptions and if you click deep enough: services that require a human sacrifice to merge 2 documents together.

A good thing I found ilovepfd.com. A free, online browser based service that lets you do just about anything to a pdf aside from the horizontal chacha. Great cross platform stuff. Love it.

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KWTV 002 – Running graphical Linux apps on Windows 11.

The first installment of our Live TV show where we talk about the stuff, geeks love to love.

LINKS

DISCORD

The action is happening over at our Discord server: Join by clicking this link

CREDITS

  • Live recording by Knightwise.

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KWTV 001 – Make Time, Prologue, Jason Scott, Axanar and Classic transformer art.

The first installment of our Live TV show where we talk about the stuff, geeks love to love.

LINKS

DISCORD

The action is happening over at our Discord server: Join by clicking this link

CREDITS

  • Live recording by Knightwise.

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Run your own Audible service with Prologue

Prologue

I love to listen to audiobooks when I have the time. Nothing is more enjoyable than being sucked into a story read by a good narrator and tearing through the pages of a book with the tips of my earlobes as I’m mowing the lawn or working out.

There are plenty of ways to do that on your phone of course and some are more tedious then others. You can download the audiofiles to you phone and use some kind of audio player (tedious) OR subscribe to an audio book service like Audible to ‘stream’ your books to your mobile device. (While they nickle-and-dime you into poverty one month at a time for books you don’t really ‘own’).

For a while now I have been looking into a way of streaming the audiobooks, documentaries and podcast series I have on my home server. A valid alternative was of course Plex. The reliable home server for streaming whatever content you have to whatever device you have. I played around with the standard ‘Plex’ client but was a bit annoyed at the fact that it’s not optimised for audiobooks. While out and about it would lose the connection to the server and forget the place I left off in the middle of the audiofile. (Not handy).

But by some serendipitous googling I came across “Prologue” in the App store: A fully fledged audiobook client for Plex . It’s quite easy to work with: Install it on your phone, log into you Plex account and point it at the folder where your audio library resides. It will index the audiofiles per folder and bob is your uncle. The free version of the app even allows you to either stream OR cache your audiofiles locally for those moments where your connection might be a bit on the spotty side. Additional features also include variable speed settings and all the dingdongs you expect from an audiobook player.

In short: I love this: It gives me the functionality and convenience of a streaming service like Audible but still allows me to “own” my audiobooks. But who says I need to stop there. Prologue is perfect to stream that downloaded collection of a podfaded podcast, or that audio rip you made from a Youtube documentary. The possibilities are plentiful. Get Prologue in the Apple (and Android) store today.

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Lifehack: 3 secrets of resilient people.

Yesterdays workout at the gym had me on the prowl for a new ‘random’ podcast episode about no particular topic. I had just re-installed the Google Podcast app in order to be able to cast my podcasts to my office speaker, when I came across a Ted-Talk daily talking about the 3 secrets of resilient people. Resilience is something we need these days. I look towards the south, where only a few miles away, towns were swept away by flash floods and people lost everything in the blink of an eye. It takes resilience to pick yourself up and continue. Lucy Home, the speaker of this short but powerful speech was a trained resilience therapist an thought she had it all figured out, until she lost her daughter in a fatal car crash and had to “move on” with her life. She gives a couple of valid insights on how to “train” your mind and your mindset to be able to “bounce back” from adversity.

One tip in particular stood out: How to deal with the perception of ‘Danger’.

To paraphrase: our minds are much better attuned to “registering and remembering” danger than happiness. It was essential in primitive times when danger was close and lethal. Today we are bombarded with sensational news of danger all around us: Newspapers going for scary headlines, the next “ohmygod” clickbait around the corner. Our reptile brain however is unable to distinguish ‘perceived’ threats from ‘actual’ threats and is (on a subconscious level) afraid of ALL the things we read online. I come back to the age-old mantra of “curating the library of your mind’ and trying to tune the information streams you consume so they don’t ruin your mood (or your perception of happiness) and it was pretty cool to find topic touched on in this very short but informative TED talk. Have a listen and ask yourself “how resilient am I?”

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Indiana Online: Digital archeology on the BBS.

Maybe its because i’m getting older but, for some reason I just love to play around with old technology. It might be a sign of age and nostalgia, it might be the direct result that the current digitital landscape is just too damn distracting and high-paced to get anything done. A lot of people go towards Yoga and Mindfullness to “slow things down”. I drag up an old computer or an older piece of tech to get my mind out of the ratrace from time to time.

As a result I’ve been toying around with BBS’s lately (Bulletin Board Systems). Ancient tech from before the internet existed. It was Jason Scotts documentary on the BBS that got me curious about this tech that existed even before I even got my very first computer. It was interesting to watch how people used limited technologies to build communities and create art. Pure nostalgia. Or was it ?

Lately a new BBS documentary has popped up on Youtube explaining the art and the allure of BBS and how they are coming back into fashion. The high paced/low privacy of modern Social Media outlets has reached a level of frustration with bold older users and younger digi-peepz that they turn away from the Facebooks and the Twitters and are going ‘back to the bbs’. The great thing about the new documentary is that it does not talk about “the old days” but instead shows you what BBS’s are still alive today and how to connect to them. I am actively following the documentary and have even managed to “get online” onto one of the BBS’s and have been enjoying reading and replying to messages of total strangers.

Aside from the soothing command-line-only interface there is another allure to the BBS: Anonimity. The freedom of talking to strangers about a variety of topics without knowing anything about them. Opposed to Facebook that takes away the myth of anonimity straight away by exposing your every detail. So it’s an interesting passtime. Just like the first forums, ICQ and IRC, I get to sit behind my “Knightwise” avatar and shout at the world. I’ll keep you apprised of my adventures as I use my monstrously heavy specced gaming machine to connect to a 40 euro Raspberry Pi in order to dail into an obsolete piece of tech. Enjoyment lies in the little things they say.

Links

Jason Scotts documentary: https://youtu.be/Dddbe9OuJLU

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Windows finally gets a decent command line.

terminal

I love spending time in the terminal, but you guys know that by now. The clean ascii interface helps me focus and keeps my jittery mouse-hand away from clicking yet another random site filled with modded transformer toys and loose whatever concentration I have left.

There are multiple command line apps you can find all over the place. The best are found on Linux distro’s, you can find some cool ones on OSX (iTerm2) but on Windows it used to be a little disappointing. Now I know working with command line applications feels like you are going back to the 80’s, but that doesn’t mean your command line interface app should look like that. I mean, type “CMD” in Windows and be Marty McFried back into the time of Windows 95 because that was the last time the Windows command line interface got an upgrade. It looks old, feels old and acts like a geriatric citizen who just had his sleep meds.

If you say “use putty” instead i’ll scream. That app also hasn’t seen the light of modern-day interfaces in 15 years and reminds me you install from some Windows 98 Shareware Cd Rom. Frustrated I have found a worthy alternative in the form of MobaXterm that lets you at least tweak the interface and provide you with handy tools like saving your session keys and doing X-forwarding. Nice!

But I got my hands on the new Windows Terminal Preview. The next iteration of the Windows Terminal command that gives you access to multiple terminals at once. Powershell, classic terminal and a direct link to your WSL installation of Linux that you put on that machine. Each terminal instance to be tweaked with your favorite settings, colors and setups. Love it !

For old farts you can even add some retro effects should you want to but I advise against it. All it lacks is an easy keyboard shortcut (CTRL-ALT T) to open up the terminal window and I’m good to go. So if you are on WIndows and want a stab at the terminal, go right ahead and try your own copy of the Terminal Preview here.

Links.

Find out more HERE.

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Back to Blogs

Pencil drawing of Don Quixote

There is so much news on the internet and social media and its all packed with fear. I don’t even know what I need to be worried about first’

— Years and Years —

‘There is so much news on the internet and social media and its all packed with fear. I don’t even know what I need to be worried about first’. It’s a line from the first episode of the TV show “ Years and Years”. The show depicts a UK family as they progress through the decades starting in 2020 and how technology and world events impacts their lives. The quote rang true, especially one year into the current pandemic. A little more then a year ago we were “sent to work from home” and the world changed. I had high hopes of this “new world” where hours of senseless commuting would be replaced by geeky activities, learning, sports and so on. To be honest .. it hasn’t quite turned out that way. Today I sometimes feel we live in a world filled with a plethora of data sources competing for our attention and trying to influence us to read, click, hunker down and consume. Facts no longer matter and rumors are just as good as long as they sell. Social media and media outlets are filled with misinformation, sensationalism and fear. The screens that I live behind seem to be saturated by two things: Work and Angst.

As a response I flee into the disconnected world of my Kindle and have read quite a few books over the last year. Not as much non-fiction and self-improvement as I would like, but at the end of a 10+ hour day my brain is just cooked and looking for an escape: Neuromancer, Game of Thrones, Dune, the Expanse, Seveneves … My mind has tried to escape the escape velocity of reality many a time only to achieve a temporal orbit around a myriad of realities.

Upgrading my mind, increasing my knowledge, working out, meditating.. Whenever I do find the time I find my personal battery dangerously depleted and fall into a unruly slumber before I can complete couting back from 10.

Diving into cyberspace I try to escape those gruesome mainstream media outlets (and even the major tech sites) because of their constant one-up manship on preaching doom, gloom and the fact that the internet is turning into a totalitarian societies favorite monkeywrech. I peruse youtube video’s on how to connect to BBS Sites. Find sites where you can download 20 year old Mac games and hunt for blogs and podcasts of likeminded geeks who just talk about what they are tinkering with. Much like I used to do back in the day that I still had time and energy left at the end of the day.

I feel guilty because of that. Because all those hours of “extra time” that I have in the day somehow did not go into creating content, doing podcasts, geeking out. I have come to see that a lot of what I do for Knightwise.com is not only for the community, but is also self care. Alternating a busy day with being creative, making content and connecting with others is a way to “recharge” for me. So I will do my best to do so again, to find that balance between real and cyberspace where I have thrived of the last years. To fight the fudd and geek out.

So bear with me as I turn ‘Knightwise.com’ back into something it used to be so many years ago. A combination of a tech blog, an online diary and a place where likeminded people can come learn, connect and relate. A place where you can follow along how I let technology work for me and an inspiration (or a warning) on how to do all things tech (or how not to).

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