I’ve been preoccupied over the last few months as I’m sure many others have been. Between the pandemic, the lockdown, and a death in my family, 2020 ended up being a pretty awful year. I decided I’d just put together a quick list of items I’m juggling and post them here.

Blog Upkeep

It’s obvious the blog needs some TLC. I need to go back through and find dead links and replace them with archived versions where possible. I also want to find places I’ve embedded YouTube videos and have alternate versions available, as I’m seeing more and more videos disappear from there. I also need to look into replacing Octopress, as of this writing I’m having to develop it in a docker container as it seems impossible to get Ruby 1.9.3 running on any system I have available. Truly it is a sign of the times that the tool I’m using needs ancient versions of openssl to generate static websites. The replacement preferably won’t depend on openssl, Ruby or npm.

Social Media

Due to recent events, I think I’m going to opt-out of all forms of social media other than direct messaging. I’ll have more to say about this in a subsequent post but suffice to say I think engaging in any of them at this time is unhealthy and I’ll take missing information over the alternative.

Personal

I’ve been in Kentucky after a death in my family. The speed at which video conferencing completely replaced in person meetings for work while also erasing any memory of how to communicate by voice surprised me. It has made working remotely pretty convenient, even with the time zone difference, but I’m certain most of that flexibility will be rolled back post-COVID. I’ve been investigating Jitsi and other software to setup video conferencing. It’ll be interesting to see how hard it would be for me, a simple developer babysitting a webshit data toilet, to do so without feeding into further tech centralization as a side project. The fact Skype is irrelevant and Zoom completely monopolized communication in this pandemic is something worth studying in a research project of its own.

I had to stop using my ”smart” phone as my MVNO is dropping support for 3G devices in 2021. I’m currently using a hand-me-down android dingus and I hate it. When it “stops working” (is no longer updated/supported) the next phone I’ll buy will probably end up without a keyboard as that seems to be the only option for people not wanting to buy into a tech monopoly on top of a carrier monopoly. Wonder how long until those are the same?

I’m still in the process of replacing ZeroTier with my own personal WireGuard setup for VPN to my network and server-to-server tunnels. I managed to have it set up in time for my trip home and it’s proven very resilient to my haphazard attempts to set it up. ZeroTier was very interesting but I appreciate the aspect of hosting it all end-to-end for myself without relying on a third party network.

I’ve spent most of my free time since October reading dead tree books I had queued up. I’m most interested in the hand-in-hand pace authoritarianism and monopolization seems to be moving at in the US. Reading good non-fiction is a great way to realize how bad I am at writing it.

Well that’s it, stay safe out there. The only thing that might be executed worse than public health during the pandemic is the vaccine rollout.