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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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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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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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Messing with Macs.

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to pick up a couple of old Macs from a friend. I’ve been collecting some retro machines over the last couple of months, tinkering with them to relax from the long days of lockdown home working. One of the items on wish list was a a bondi-blue G3 Powermac. The iconic tower with the milky semi-transparent casing and pretty blue/green front. Except for misplaced nostalgia, there was no real good reason to preserve it as a working machine (I have a couple of G4”s running OS9 and OSX) so I did the unspeakable: I gutted it.

Hoist is pretty impressed with his cleanup of the whole rig.

A screwdriver, a couple of pliers and some pent-up frustration from the workweek was all I needed to turn rip out the insides of the machine, until I had but an empty shell left. Some more tinkering and I had even removed the plastic handles and sidepanels that I unceremoniously dumped into the dishwasher for a good clean. A couple of hours later I had a beautiful (empty) G3 tower.

But to use it only for decorative purposes would be a waste of space. I looked at the corner of my desk where a switch and a couple of raspberry Pi’s had been forming a tangle of cables that looked like a pool of barf from the flying spaghetti monster. So, I arranged everything nicely into the old case and closed it up.

Grapple is far from impressed with Hoist’s shoddy work.

The end result of my “trojan horse” is a happy spouse (no more clutter) + a decorative machine that now houses about 5 times the processing power (even more I think) then it used to by the addition of a couple of pi’s. Whenever I add another one of my favourite single board computers to my collection, it too will find a home inside this classic enclosure.

Re-use, Re-Cycle, Re-Vive.

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The golden forest: Testing out the Drone.

As kind of a geek-midlife-crisis gift I decided to buy myself a DJI Mavic Mini II for the holidays to reboot my creative exploits and get out of the house a little more. After some shaky backyard tryouts I decided to give the little flying bugger a decent maiden flight. I hiked out into the morning dawn to the nearby forest called “Het Wijngaerdbos”. Situated on the sloping hills at the edge of the town the forest got its name from the vineyards (Wijngaarden) that it housed back in the 18th century. As most places near where I live, it has a rich and mysterious history. Enjoy as I spin up the props and take you on a 2 minute tour.

https://youtu.be/CD1Hu9xbuUI

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Going Paperless.

Paperless.

I have a superpower. (Aside from being a sexy geek that is) and that superpower is that whenever I write down a piece of essentially important information on a piece of paper, that slip of bleached wood pulp gets transported to a parallel universe and is never seen again. I have lost countless phone numbers, ideas, concepts, plans and memo’s by writing them down. However, ask me to pull up a piece of digital information (no matter how trivial) from 12 years and 2 days ago? Chances are that I’ll have it for you in under 10 minutes.

So the logical decision for me is of course to go paperless. I have been reading Ebooks for years now and I very very rarely handle a paper book (Because It might not be available digitally). And with writing it’s the same thing. Give me a stylus and let’s go completely paperless. So what do I write on?

Writing on the iPad

I got myself a 5th generation iPad just to be able to have a very compact and light divide to write on. Instead of going for the rather large (and clunky) Apple 1st generation Stylus, I went for the Logitec Crayon. A rechargeable stylus that was designed for the educational department. It handles better then the Apple Pencil but i’ve had some issues with battery life that I need to figure out. The apps I use on the iPad mini are OneNote for taking handwritten notes and Notability for doodling. Annotating Pdf’s is done in the PDF Expert app. The upside of the Ipad Mini is of course the size (its extremely handy to carry around) but that is also its downside. The downside on the Mini is that you don’t have a lot of space to run apps side by side. Having a youtube video open while simultaneously taking notes does cramp your space.

Writing on the Surface Go


The “other” device I write on is my Surface Go. This smaller and lighter 10 inch “cousin” of the Surface Pro line is an excellent little laptop in its own right. The smaller form factor makes it a lot more “natural” to write on then its bigger Pro cousins. Having done annotations and writing on a Surface pro 4 with their 12 inch screen I can say that 2 inches makes a lot of difference. (2 inches SMALLER in this case ladies).

The upside with the Surface Go is that you of course have a “complete pc” with you. The keyboard cover is expensive but extremely handy and does not get in the way of things when you flip it back to start writing. Just like with the iPad you can split your screen and run apps side by side. Book on one end, notepaper on the other. But it is not always practical. The palm rejection acts up when you accidentally touch the ‘other application” with the palm of your hand while writing. The fact that when you are writing in landscape mode also does not help for ergonomics. The Surface go is slightly thicker than the iPad Mini (and a lot thicker) and that also gets in the way.

Flip the Surface Go into landscape mode and it’s a whole new ballgame. The screen is now almost the exact size of an A4 sheet of paper and when you put your note taking app into fullscreen mode it makes for a nice writing experience. The applications I use for Doodling here are “Bamboo Paper” (Because instead of the standard and expensive Microsoft Pen I went for the Bamboo Ink pen) OneNote for writing and Edge for annotating PDF’s.

So what do I write on ?

Which device I pick up generally depends on my mood and on what I want to do. When doing a meeting with a client I find that the iPad mini works great. It’s small enough to carry around and aside from taking notes during the meeting I also use it to walk around, take pictures of their infrastructure and write up some annotations on those. When I want to study from a book I sit down with the Surface GO. Using the Text-to-speech function in Edge I can have the book read out loud to me while taking notes. I’ll put the Surface Go in landscape mode, Open the ePub in Edge, press “play” and the put OneNote fullscreen to write and scribble my way through.

The Picard manoeuvre

But sometimes one tablet is not enough and I go for “The Picard Manoeuvre”. Inspired by the desk of this Starship Captain that was occasionally riddled with tablets, I too go for a multi-tablet approach. The output device (displaying the content I want to examine, a book, video or what have you) might be my Kindle or even a laptop. My annotation device can be the iPad or even the Surface go. The best combo I’ve tried so far when studying from a book is using my Kindle to read and my iPad mini to write on. The end result is a small and light combo I can shove just about anywhere.

Writing 2.0

In the end going Paperless has given me a lot of advantages. I have my notes with me anywhere, can change the order of pages, I can add pictures and even sound files and even put in some typed up text, screenshots, quotes and so forth. It has become so bad that I have a hard time working with “regular” paper because it lacks that functionality. The only downside with my approach is that writing on a screen is not the same as writing on paper. This takes some getting used to and does mess up your handwriting (although i’m not sure this is because of the device or the fact that my handwriting was never that great). I’m not sure.

But gone are the days where I ‘lost’ notes, annotations and the formula for warp drive. (I had it, I swear). Now .. I just “Write 2.0”.

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Mounting remote directories over SSH from Windows, Linux and the mac.

I have a Linux server that I like very much. It’s at the hart of my home network and it houses all the data and projects I’m working on. My music collection, the podcasts I’ve downloaded, textfiles and scripts I’m working on and so forth.

The downside is that I don’t always have access to these files. I work on a variety of operating systems (A Windows laptop for work, A Mac for my creative splurges and a Linux workstation to fool around with). There are several solutions to “dail in” to your home network of course but somewhere I’ve found SSH to be one of the simplest ways to access remote machines, tunnel traffic and … access files.

Sometimes you want remote files to behave like local ones.

The problem is that sometimes you want to have your remote files and folders behave just like your local files and folders, without having to worry about vpn’s, netbios or FQDN names of certain files. You just want the data on your remote machine to act like data on your local one. Enter SSHFS.

SSHFS is based on SSH, a simple elegant and secure protocol that not only lets you connect to a remote server to run commands in a terminal environment, it’s also a pretty good poor-mans VPN you can tunnel all your tcraffic through (via SSHuttle). It’s also good to copy over files via secure ftp (with Filezilla for example). But copying files back and forth isn’t handy. You want real-time access to the juice man. Let’s get you fixed up and mount your remote linux folders, natively into your filesystem on Windows, Mac and Linux.

SSHFS on a Linux client.

SSHFS on Linux
On your Linux client you need to install sshfs
sudo apt instal sshfs

sudo apt instal sshfs

Then you create a directory on your local machine where you want to mound the files
Once installed you connect to your remote machine with the command

sshfs username@remotemachine:/directoryonremotemachine /directoryonlocalmachine

SSHFS from a MacOs client.

SSHFS on Mac
MacOs does not have sshfs capabilities by default but these can easily be installed via Brew
When brew is installed you can install sshfs with the brew command.
To mount your remote directory just use the same command as on Linux/

 brew install sshfs 
sshfs username@remotemachine:/directoryonremotemachine /directoryonlocalmachine

SSHFS from a Windows Machine

That also works but it does require a little more work to get it done AND Windows won’t let you mount to a folder nativey but points you to a driveletter instead.

First off install the following two applications:
sshfs-win
WinFsp

Next all you need to do is open a command line window and enter the following command.
net use .<yourdrive>: \sshfs\yourusename@remotehost….\directorystartingfromroot 

 net use x: \sshfs\me@thedeathstar.empire....\deathstarplans R3belsRscumm

In the end.

At the end of the day using SSHFS is a great way to quickly access files on a remote Linux system while having the files and folders integrated into the filestructure of whatever operating system you use. The additional encryption provided by SSH gives you good security. Both on Linux and on the mac you will be asked to authenticate with your password. If you don’t want to do that you setup ssh key exchange (see here) on how that is done. You can enter the commands in a script that you can just run (like a logon script).


Beware then when you are doing this on Windows your logon script might contain your login and your password for the remote system in clear text. So keep that somewhere safe.

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Helium Linux: When your old machine needs some oxygen.

I have this old iMac lying around that I got off of some guy on Craigslist 2 years ago. It was a little bit of a “pet project” to tinker around with and to see how far I could take this computer from 2009. Swapping out the internal spinning-rust drive with an SSD was a very interesting piece of open-mac surgery and afterwards the machine was a tad faster then before.

Operating system no longer supported.

But the iMac would only upgrade its version of MacOs to a version that was no longer supported (El Capitan I think) so I thought let’s run Linux on it. I’ve had experience in running Linux on Macs for a couple of years now, but the installation of Ubuntu 18.04 was a little disappointing. The system was a little slow (I expected that from a 2009 machine) and got put by the wayside because it just wasn’t up to snuff.

I needed a place to focus.

Lately I’ve been having some issues with productivity. While (trying) to get stuff done (mostly when i’m writing), I’m constantly distracted by eMails, Social Media, Chatmessages and what have you. I had been looking for some ways to block them out (going offline, using apps like Focuswriter) but none of them helped. I needed a computer environment that was simple enough to let me get my writing done while being to slow or simple for anything else. The iMac popped back to mind.

Simplicity is the most complex thing to achieve.

But in order to be realy “functional” the machine needed a lighter and more serene operating system. I remembered a distro called “Crunchbang” from my netbook days. A lightweight and very geeky distro with an Openbox UI. But the distro was disconinued.. or was it?

Get me some Helium

It turns out “Crunchbang” is not dead after all. An organisation called Bunsenlabs has picked up the slack and forked “Helium” as a successor. The distribution is based on Debian 10 (not Ubuntu) and comes with a minimal of applications pre-installed. The graphical installer is sweet and simple and afterwards they run you through a text based post-install script that lets you choose what other options to install.

It’s like ‘less’ with ‘more’

The end result is a super minimalistic destkop interface with the classic openbox bar letting you open some classc apps like Firefox, Libreoffice and more. The developement team has gone out of its way to keep the interface clean and simple and to keep the apps as light as possible. In the end you get a slick, slim and FAST OS for an old machine.

A garden of Zen

I have only been using the OS for a couple of days now but I’ve managed to muddle through some pretty hefty copywriting and getting the stuff I needed done .. done. Aside from using Geany as the default Text editor and Firefox to surf around for research, I’ve resulted to mostly command line apps and scripts to get things done. (For example using MPV to play the “Mission Control” music station on Soma Fm). The end result: A fast system with minimal distractions and the very first time I’ve actually started using one of my ‘resurrected zombies’ in a production environment. If you have an old machine lying around or want to have a distraction free interface? Give it a try.

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TLDR: Anyone still reading this? – Should you still ‘write’ your blogs?

TLDR, 4 gruesome letters that are the digital equivalent of a teenager shrugging and walking away in the middle of an epic speech (or regular nag-a-thon) recited by a parental unit. It’s a sign of the time. Whenever we are presented with information that grows beyond a certain volume, our micro sized attention spans switch off and go looking for the next picture of a fluffy cat on the internet.

There, in one paragraph I have completely summarized the problem Bloggers are facing today TLDR: Too long, Didn’t read. Since we have been scrolling vertically through Twitter feeds, Instagram pictures, Facebook posts and Linkedin updates our ability (or should I say ‘interest’) to go through large blocks of text has slowly started to erode away. We want our stuff fast in easy to consume small byte sized blocks. Perferably 140 characters or less.

For writers this is a challenge: Imagine being Marten Luther King, but only getting 30 seconds to deliver your ‘I have a dream’ speech before the crowd wanders off to play Pokemon or scroll Reddit. There just isn’t enough time to get the message across.

Results ? You cut corners. Condense arguments, leave out supporting information or even facts altogether. If that still isn’t enough its time for an provocative headline, or some ye-old click-bait. And if your content just isn’t cut out for this? Tough, they have already scrolled past your post and are looking at cat video’s.

“Well, you will just have to write better material then” That is the general response you get to when you lament the problem. But should we really do that? Some stories or arguments should not be broken up into 140 characters, they should be told with all the facts or with views from both sides of the fence. The constitution wasn’t written on a post-it either. So what to do ?

Write better, snappier sentences, short paragraphs, leave in plenty of whitespace and some interesting funky examples and emphatic visual analogies the reader can relate to. That should do the trick. But what if they still don’t make it to the 3rd paragraph?

I’m thinking of exchanging the written medium for video or audio. If you don’t have the time/interest to ‘read’ something, perhaps you would like to “listen’ to it instead. The “Storytime” podcasts have always been a big favorite of my community, “Reading out” a lengthily blogpost in a gripping audio-recording does make for some interesting reading. Perhaps a video recording using an autocue to read out the text ? Would that help?

I leave you to ponder (if your eyeballs ever make it down here) the question of TLDR. Should we continue to starve our attention spans with small bite sized information? Do we want to live off ever smaller growing pieces of content? Shorter blogposts, video’s, podcasts? Do we nibble our way trough the all-you-can-eat buffet of the blogosphere ? Is it TLDR or TLDC (Too long, don’t Care).

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Death of the butterflies.

Tap.. tap .. taptaptap.. Grunt, blowing sound, tap tap TAP.. yeah, it sounds like somebody is frustrated behind their keyboard write ? Some Shmo pounding out an angry flame mail to a bunch of co-workers with half the org-chart splattered across to to and bcc field. But .. thats not the case. It”s just me trying to write up a little blogpost on a computer that suffers from dying butterflies.

Downside ? It makes EVERYTHING you type sound like an angry hate-mail to POTUS, even if you are doing a love letter.

‘Chokin the butterfies’
The butterflies I refer to are the keys on my keyboard. In Apple’s grand opus of “Thinking Different”, somebody in the giant glass donut thought it would be a good idea to radically change the way they keyboard worked on their new Macbook Pro’s. So they decided the butterfly key would be a great idea. Superslim keys that have virtually no “keytravel” (How ‘deep’ your key goes when you tap it) and that make the keyboard look like a giant touchpad. Upside ?: Cool and pretty thin (allowing them to thin-down the laptop a few millimeters). Downside ? It makes EVERYTHING you type sound like an angry hate-mail to POTUS, even if you are doing a love letter.

DD I press ‘i’ ?

But the biggest downside is that these keys are NOT dirt resistant. Tiny mote of sand or dust gets underneath your key ? Boom. no more room for travel. If you are lucky the keystrike is still recorded and you get your character on the screen, but it “feels” like you just didn’t strike that key. And that totally throws you out of the zone. If it is worse , the just doesn’t work at all and you end up POUNDING the letter out of the laptop by jamming your finger on it with too much force required.

‘Cupertino is gonna fix it’
Its a known issue with Apple and they promised to fix it in the NEXT generation. But for the current owners ? Well, there is a replacement program. Only you need to bring us your Macbook Pro so we can fix it. Well, Fix it is a big word, they are going to replace my keyboard (AND my Touch bar AND my battery, because the glued it all together) with similar hardware. So the chance that THOSE butterflies are going to “clog up” is still very real.

Well, the only thing I can do is wait for my Mac to be back. In the meantime I’ve ‘Fallen back’ to my Dell XPS 13 laptop (Running Windows 10 Pro) and that is NOT a bad place to be. The machine is slim, light and fast and the keys are .. well, better. Rattling out blogposts like this kinda feels like being a coder pounding out the next killer app. No dead butterflies here 🙂 Keep you posted.

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