Gerrit Niezen

Last night I was working through the first module in the Make Time course I mentioned on Day 7. One of the activities is to figure out what gives you energy, and what are the things that drain your energy.

Things that give me energy:

• Walking around the neighbourhood
• Yoga (I've recently started using the Peloton app to do this)
• Reading books

Things that drain my energy:

• Meetings

I'll be adding to this list over the coming weeks as I think of new things.

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Dieter Rams

This afternoon I watched Gary Hustwit's documentary on Dieter Rams, which is streaming free on Vimeo this weekend, as part of Dezeen's Virtual Design Festival.

Even though I literally have a Ph.D. in industrial design, I've never felt like much of a designer but more of an engineer. This film does make me feel like everyone should be a designer, and it would do the world some good if we all take Rams's 10 design principles to heart:

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Keeping in touch, virtually

With my family living in South Africa, and my wife's family living in the Netherlands, we're pretty used to using video calls to stay in touch with them. With the Covid-19 pandemic a lot of people are now using videoconferencing apps to stay in touch with their families, and its deficiencies are showing. From the many privacy and security issues with Zoom, to the different ways in which video calls can make us feel drained and anxious, surely there must be better ways to do this?

I've been toying around with WebRTC, trying to figure out how difficult it would be to build peer-to-peer apps that can be used to communicate directly with other people. Maybe not even using video, but just audio and text? Maybe something like an open source Animal Crossing as a decentralised, federated social network?

Today I came across two recent blog posts from Matt Webb:

• Video calls, doing stuff together, and the TV room
• Domestic telepresence at scale: some notes

I think there are some great ideas in there on how to move on from video calls, although I'm not sure telepresence robots are the way to go. E-ink portals and low-bandwidth sensors sound pretty exciting, but the actual implementations, like Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino's Good Night Lamp have not proven super popular.

I know I want to be more connected with my family, but I don't yet know what I would like to build to make it so. What ideas to you think are worth experimenting with? Let me know on Mastodon @gendor@merveilles.town.

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I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.

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Make Time

I'm a big fan of the book Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. I feel like it's the one book on productivity that didn't try to make me “more productive”, but to actually help me focus on what I enjoy.

One of the ways it does this, is to have you choose a highlight for the day. It should be a task of around 45 to 90 minutes that you're really excited about, and you then block out the time on your calendar to do that task.

This morning I chose a highlight, put my phone on “do not disturb”, closed all my open browser windows and apps, and just focused on the task at hand. After 90 minutes, something that I haven't been able to get working for ages, was finally working!

I actually just started doing their Highlight course, which has a $50 COVID discount at the moment. (No, I'm not making any money from this, I just really think the ideas in the book works.)

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I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.

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This blog is a part of the Fediverse

If you haven't noticed yet, I have an account over on Mastodon: @gendor@merveilles.town, which is part of the larger Fediverse. The Fediverse includes this blog, as it's hosted on Write.as which has ActivityPub support.

One of the cool things that comes out of this is that every time I publish a blog post, it gets posted to my feed at @gendor@gerritniezen.com (which exists in the Fediverse, and can be viewed on Mastodon even though it is not hosted on a Mastodon server).

Also, I was able to link to the Fediverse just by typing in the right handles, e.g. @gendor@merveilles.town and Write.as creates the corrects links (and hopefully also notifies the linked accounts).

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I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.

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Philosophical meditation

Yesterday evening I did something called philosophical meditation, after reading about it on David Cain's blog, Raptitude. There's a 6-minute video about it here:

I started by writing down the things I'm feeling upset and anxious about, and while I was doing that, my new fitness tracker started buzzing. It told me that I may be stressed and asked whether I wanted to do a relaxation exercise.

How about that? It turns out you can sit quietly in a room, and just by thinking about things that make you anxious, you can increase your stress levels so much that the physiological changes can be measured by the cheap sensors in a fitness tracker. In case you're wondering, I recently got the Garmin vivosmart 4, which has a heart rate monitor and pulse oximetry sensor, but links to your phone for GPS.

My mind did feel a little bit quieter after the exercise, so I'll do it again in a couple of days and see if it provides any longer-term benefits.

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.

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I'm currently on Week 5 of a Permaculture course run by Milkwood. This week we're looking at the permaculture principle of using and valuing renewable resources and services.

I've chosen the action of making natural home cleaning products. I'm already using a diluted vinegar solution as a multipurpose cleaner, but I'd like to experiment with replacing some other cleaning products in the house with DIY versions as well.

For example, I'd like to give using washing soda a go in the dishwasher, using vinegar as a rinse aid. I tried making apple scrap vinegar a couple of weeks ago, and I'd like to give that a second try after learning some things the first time round.

How is making your own cleaning products renewable? I can take some lemon rind and a sprig of rosemary I grow in my back garden, add it to the apple scrap vinegar I made with some water, and I have a multipurpose cleaner, where all the ingredients come from renewable sources.

There's a whole list of homemade cleaning products on the Eartheasy website.

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.

Photo credit: Daiga Ellaby

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This weekend I spent some time figuring out how the Barcode Detection API in Chrome on Android works, and implemented a basic barcode scanning web app. I hope to integrate with some kind of food database, so that I can easily track what goes in and out of my pantry.

I also played around with the Circuit Playground Express I got for free with my Hackspace magazine subscription a while back, specifically using it as a colour sensor. I ordered some crocodile clips off eBay so that I can also play around with the soil moisture detection example.

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.

#100DaysToOffload #CPX #electronics

A couple of days ago I read an article called Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens, which discussed the differences between streams (think Twitter and Facebook) , campfires (think blogs) and gardens (think a personal wiki). The author linked to to the original piece that describes this digital garden idea in more detail: The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral

I read that piece this morning and it got me excited about the idea of federated/decentralised wikis again. Not only should we be keeping our own personal wikis (or topic journals as Derek Sivers calls them), but we should attempt to integrate them.

So what's the use of a personal wiki, or digital garden?

And when you get to that point, where you’ve mapped out 1000s of articles of your own knowledge you start to see impacts on your thought that are very hard to describe.

And how is this different from the streams and campfires?

I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless, integrative, iterative, something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected.

Isn't this what Wikipedia is?

People say, well yes, but Wikipedia! Look at Wikipedia! Yes, let’s talk about Wikipedia. There’s a billion people posting what they think about crap on Facebook. There’s about 31,000 active wikipedians that hold English Wikipedia together. That’s about the population of Stanford University, students, faculty and staff combined, for the entire English speaking world.

I'll leave you with an example of a decentralised wiki that is being created by the the XXIIVV webring called simply, the Wiki.

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.

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Prompted by this toot shared on Mastodon by @write_as@writing.exchange, I decided to take part in some daily blogging again for a hundred days:

I used to blog daily for for more than 100 days in 2018, but have been blogging more sporadically since then, so this seems like a good time to pick up the practice again.

To have a look at all the other blogs that are taking part in this challenge, check out 100daystooffload.com.

#100DaysToOffload #day1