The sound of space.
Apr 23I’ve been a space geek all my life and to me, the big black universe has always fascinated me. Why? Because space is big and full of possibilities. It’s a “space” that is big enough to encompass all the possibilities of “what’s out there” that I can think of.
That feeling of “vastness” is hard to capture in ones mind. The giant black cold void that separates us from everything around is so expansive that numbers cannot capture it. What can is … Music.
As a child, the TV Series “Cosmos” has made an unimaginable impression on me. When I heard the opening tune and the dulcet tones of Carl Sagan, I would be glued to the television, focused on images of stars and nebulae and …. the Music. I was only 7 years old so I didn’t understand what Carl was saying ( I didn’t speak English yet) so what stuck is the fantastic, timeless music of Vangelis. A composer who should rightfully be awarded the honour of giving humanity the soundtrack of the stars.
There are several songs from this soundtrack that have become iconic, timeless pieces, but there is one that captures the vast cold loneliness of the void between the stars .. then “Alpha”. Melancholic, emotional and intense it feels like it is perpetually hummed by out Voyager Spaceprobes as they hurl further and further away from us every day.
So when I found this wonderful cover, performed by Jeff Pearce of the iconic “Alpha”, I knew I had to share it.
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Looking back (and forward) at Linux
Apr 21
Since we are on the theme of “Remember 20 years ago ?”, let’s talk Linux. I think it was somewhere in the last days of 2004 I heard about this Linux distribution called “Ubuntu”. I had been dabbling with Linux since the early 2000’s but it never ever “went” anywhere. Distro hopping to find a solution that I could actually use meant valiantly trying to deep dive into some distribution only to back out in a huff of frustration because there would be no way to get the hardware to work or do simple things like play an MP3. Mandriva, Suse, College Linux, Knoppix … many were tried, but none stuck.
Only when I started using Ubuntu, things changed. Suddenly I was introduced to an operating system that not only seemed to work “out of the box” it also came with some third party scripts that would auto install some of the crucial components that would turn this “quirky” operating system into something that I could viably use….
Fast forward 20 years and a lot has happened. I started using Linux in earnest. From running it on my own machines (as a secondary machine), playing with it as a server, using it to resurrect old pc’s, getting it to play nice with old macs AND converting my wife’s then 70 year old grandmother onto linux (and becoming an overnight sensation on the DIGG and having the serverfarm of my webhost go into a chernobyl like meltdown).
Today my infatuation with all things new-and-Linux has mellowed. I don’t try out every new distro and have a hard time grasping why the Linux community, who, back in the days of newsgroups, flamed everyone who asked a “non-commandline question” has become infatuated with producing hundreds of different distro’s who only differ in the configuration of their graphical user interface. The only comparison is can make is that some group of stuffy librarians turned into overcrazed car-tuning gearheads overnight. Suddenly its all chrome, rap music and showing of their “pimped out rides”. This distro craze has taken valuable attention and resources away from developing what Linux really needs: Good applications.
On many occasions I’ve been confronted by another group in the Linux community: The “Freedom” guys who insist that no piece of code should be closed source. From their laptop hardware to the bios, to the operating system and all the applications: It should all be “libre”. Although they make a good point, these “Stallmanites” ( see: Richard Stallman ) put an extra hurdle in front of the further development of Linux. To grow it needs to incentivise cooperations like Nvidia, Canonical, Valve to invest time and resources in the development of software that runs on Linux so people will actually use it.
Today Linux is still interesting to me. Maybe not so much as a desktop, or as a “geeky alternative” to the mainstream, but as an interesting tool to increase the efficiency of my work. Using scripts and interesting applications (either in a command line or graphical user interface) to get my work done faster still gives Linux its allure.
In light of that I have switched over one of my laptops to Linux to rediscover the “state of Linux” not by trying out some exotic distribution, but relying on a rock solid codebase and using a graphical interface that doesn’t get in the way. With plenty of things working in a browser and just a few applications that are not directly available on Linux, the question of “could Linux be my daily driver” is once again preying on the little free time I have.
We shall see how we fare in the next couple of days with my experimental little machine and try to deduce the power and added value of linux in my daily workflow.
Who knows … The penguin might return for real..
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Remember blogging?
Apr 21
My Gmail inbox, a wasteland of forgotten times, got an interesting email today: A congratulatory message from LiveJournal, telling me it had been almost 2 decades since my first post. … Two decades? I hopped over to Knightwise.com to investigate and did find out that indeed, in 2004 i scribbeled down my first thoughts during those exciting web 2.0 days. …
Blogging! Never before was it so easy to gather your thoughts and slam them down on a webpage, the modern day equivalent of doodling your hopes and dreams onto yellowed diary paper. A time when most of us were still hiding behind the anonymity of an ICQ account number (well, maybe not) or an original internet-handle on MSN messenger like CompuGot69 or god forbid, Knightwise.
Give a man a mask and he will show you his true nature. Whoever came up with this quote was (Machiavelli ?) was a very astute connoisseur of human nature. If i browse back to some of the blogs I read back then (and read back what I posted myself) I sometimes wonder if it was wise to put all that out on the internet. But blogging was cathartic, just like journaling. Writing down your hopes, thoughts and dreams and putting them out there (anonymously in front of strangers) was liberating. I was going through a difficult time in those days. My dad had passed away and my family was in turmoil. Babylon was burning and every day during my lunchbreak I would log into this little bubble on the internet and write up what was going through my mind.
Gradually this daily diary evolved into a more technology oriented website where I chose to share my fledgling encounters in using technology to “work for me”. Only after a few years did Knightwise.com really become a “brand” with a clear mission and a growing audience. The little online diary had become a .. product.
And I have had many a good time thanx to this little website. Opportunities have opened up for me, I’ve met interesting people and made friends for life. But the last couple of years, mainly because of my dayjob (that involves online marketing and branding) Knightwise.com has felt more like a “product” i needed to produce for an “audience” and has strayed far away from what it originally was: A diary about how I live with technology.
I wonder if I would ever be able to go back. If I would ever choose to disclose those inner most thoughts and feelings to the world. The changing nature of the internet, the loss of anonymity and the size of my digital footprint would most certainly lead to the words of “Knightwise” coming back to haunt me in my real life.
But what I do know is that “livejournal” told me a valuable lesson: How to express myself in a way that people would find interesting. I learned how to reflect on and organise my thoughts and feelings into blocks of text people wanted to read. But the most important thing was : I didn’t care if anybody did. I wasn’t hunting for likes, looking for comments or waiting for feedback. I just did it for me.
So maybe there is an “inbetween”. Where I talk about tech and how it influences my life. On what projects I dabble in and what new insights I’ve gained. To come back from a “brand” that needs to follow a “format” and bring back some of the “personal” into the digital.
So as I ponder the new Knightwise.com mission, this too becomes another factor of the new way I want Knightwise.com to feel: More like a “blog” with a “theme“ and less like a brand. I make brands for a living and Knightwise.com is my little getaway where I can leave work behind and go do something else. So it might be chaotic, inconsistent and everything that I would frown upon between 9 to 5. But .. That .. is life on the edge of real and cyberspace.
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Crawling back on the wagon.
Apr 12
It feels like ages since I’ve been here. Pounding out words on a keyboard and sending them up to the internets. Well, I guess that is life, right? Sometimes things get “in the way” and before you know it months fly by and you haven’t touched your blog at all. Shame really. Especially considering this year marks the 20th anniversary of the Knightwise.com website (there were some proto forms before that that, but those were built with Frontpage or Dreamweaver. Well as long as it doesn’t have an RSS feed it doesn’t count, right ?
Funny thing, writing about technology. In those two decades (that count as millennia in tech-time) a lot has changed. Technology has gotten faster, more ubiquitous more available and easier to use. Yet the things I create with technology have slowly declined. My creative exploits that used to dot the internet like bright colored splashes of paint have become rarities for when I find the time, the urge or the inspiration. I wonder what is causing this.
One of the reasons is that the original “Knightwise.com” mission needs to be redefined. Somehow finding ways to tie multiple platforms together, trying to span the digital ecosphere as a “cross platform geek” is slowly becoming irrelevant. Yes, open standards are still important and we should be aware of being “locked in”. But get a webbrowser and a cloud service and you can pretty much do anything on anything these days, like running Doom in a bacteria.
So I have been ruminating about my new mission, about the new direction Knightwise.com should take and have found the answer in the very thing holding me back from creating stuff in the first place: Technology. Over the last two decades, the abundance, ubiquity, complexity and connectivity of technology has created a source of static hiss in my head, dissolving ideas before they can become reality by pounding them to grit with notifications, distractions and never ending scrolling screens filled with muck and doom.
It might sound gloomy, but this digital mulch that has become my daily reality is starting to foster the seeds of a new beginning. Of a new idea where I stay true to the original mantra ‘let technology work for you’ but slowly decompose the “cross platform geek” to make room for something new.
I’ll keep you posted….
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HackerPhone!
Jul 08
In my last blogpost I had been pondering the idea of a « Lightphone » where I was specifically looking for a phone that would allow me to consume podcasts, navigate and communicate if needed.
One of the reasons the Unihertz Titan jumped out at me was because of its rugged interface and the fact that it would be pretty awesome to use as a « terminal » instead of a phone, allowing me to interact with the various command line applications I have. I thought it would be cool to use it to SSH into my home server and use all my « low distraction » apps.
I decided to « try before I buy » and not start throwing out cash and getting yet « another » device, but instead see if I could pull it off with the gear that I have.
I went for a « copy paste » of the way I SSH into my Linux machine at home on my iPad. Using the SSHelfish app you can predefine connections, execute commands upon connections etc. Basically it slides you into your terminal session with one tap on the screen. I installed it on my iPhone (the payed version of the app is worth it » and took it out for a spin.
Hacking at the hairdressers
Waiting at the hairdressers was the perfect opportunity. Instead of scrolling through the « apps » on my phone, I « logged in » to my home server and picked up the Terminal session I had open. Using Tmux I flipped between the different apps I have open (Toot for Mastodon, Tuir for Reddit, Discordo for Discord and Newsboat for RSS) and puttered along. My hairdresser was getting a little worried since the stuff he saw on my screen reminded him more of a hacker doing his thing, than an average joe scrolling Insta.
It’s harder to use, so its easier to focus
My first impressions on this way of working were mixed. The fact you have to « connect » makes it more « intentional » to « check your socials » than by just using the apps on your phone. You are less prone to getting sucked it because it takes more focus to navigate. There are no pretty pictures to « entertain » you and keep you scrolling from one dopamine hit to the other and, because of the small screen, you only have one app open at a time.
This has an upside. Because its a more focused interface, you don’t tend to scroll aimlessly. The downside is that there is no way to (easily) watch or upload media, like pictures in your Toots or posts, for that you still need the apps. As a workaround I still keep the Discord and Mastodon apps on my phone, but just not on my homescreen.
This is of course all just an experiment but my first impressions are pretty interesting. It’s a different way to interact with my « social feeds » that makes them a little less « distracting » and make me feel more « in the moment » when i’m using them. Another small step towards intentional computing I guess.
Links
The app : Shellfish (ios)
