The one with the Milky Way
The arc of communism is long and it leans towards oppressing the fuck out of people. It’s a tendency of all governmental systems. Communism rests most of its power in the hands of government without a moneyed elite to oppose them, so it tends to move to authoritarianism faster and with less resistance.
I went to Bignor Hill the other day. It’s one of my favourite places in the whole England. During the day it looks really boring, but go there during a cloudless evening and I guarantee, you will be lifting your jaw off the floor. It’s a Bortle 4 level location and the amount of stars that you can see with your naked eye is just mind boggling.
The above is my photo of the Milky Way taken from there. It’s not a stacked picture, just a single photo from a camera on a tripod. I cannot recommend the place enough, so go there if you have the chance.
I recently read and shared a quote from LWN
The software industry is currently going through the “disposable plastic” crisis the physical world went through in the mid-20th century (and is still paying down the debt for). You can run software from 1980 or 2005 on a modern desktop without too much hassle, but anything between there and 2-3 years ago? Black hole of fad frameworks and brittle dependencies. Computer Archaeology is going to become a full-time job.
While discussing the subject, Mudge recommended a fantastic talk Preventing the Collapse of Civilization that took me down the YouTube recommendation lane (The Thirty Million Line Problem, Twitter and Visual Studio Rant). Especially the one about Visual Studio rung so true, as recently have been pondering the fact that while my personal computer is many times faster than it used to be, somehow my terminal, my text editor, and my operating system, seem to all be slower than they used to be, and things break all the time. There isn’t a day when I don’t have to solve a (however small) random problem with my setup. Sometimes the camera doesn’t work, though it should (rebooting the system helps), sometimes a random system process decides to go wild and hog all the memory and some, sometimes when I unplug my headphones it’s impossible to hear anything (until - you guessed it - a reboot). And the worst thing is that, up until that discussion, and those YouTube videos, I hadn’t even seen any of that as a problem, I got used to having to fight those little fights EVERY EFFING DAY.
I passed my English test which means that I am one step closer to being able to apply for a citizenship later this year!
My GTD setup resides in Evernote (it’s an implementation of The Secret Weapon). Recently I thought it would be awesome to be able to use a kanban board to move tasks through the Someday→Later→Soon→Next→Now pipeline. Guess what! There is an app for that, that does exactly what I needed! Kanbanote.
I am a little embarrassed to admit, that after a huge number of different apps tested, I finally settled on Habitica for my habit tracking needs. It really should not make a difference that you get virtual points from completing tasks, yet it totally does and my habits are now done more often than ever before!
Since upgrading to watchOS 7 I have been having fun washing my hands the recommended 20 seconds and watching the watch count down with a bubbly animation!