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.)
I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.
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).
I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After completing my previous air quality monitor build, I realised that I needed a proper outdoor enclosure, as I wanted to mount it outside and the 3D-printed enclosure is not exactly watertight. I looked through Thingiverse and found a design that uses a junction box as a waterproof enclosure.
The junction box was available from a UK supplier for a reasonable price, with free next-day delivery. I immediately started printing the various inserts to hold everything in place.
When the box arrived the next day, I first screwed in the bottom insert, then attached the particle sensor, and then screwed in the top insert. I also had to attach the temperature and humidity sensor and take care of all the wiring. Finally I added the ESP8266 board on top.
Once everything was installed, I turned it on. I could connect to the ESP8266 over the network, but for some reason the particle sensor recorded 0 $\mu\textrm{g/m}^3$. I couldn't hear the fan of the sensor turn on, and then realised that one of my screws was too long and was preventing the fan from turning. After loosening the screw a bit, everything was working really well.
The previous owners of our house had a satellite dish, but as we are not using it, I decided to remove the dish and re-use the hole in the wall to install a USB cable to power the air quality monitor. I tried pushing a micro-USB cable through the existing hole, but even a cable with a small micro-USB connector would not fit.
I found a 1.8 metre long micro-USB cable that was stripped and tinned on the other side, to make it easier to push through the hole in the wall and then solder to an old USB cable on the inside. This turned out to be the trickiest part of the build, as soldering very thin USB cables takes a lot of patience. I also used some heat shrink to keep everything nice and tidy after soldering.
A while back I became interested in air quality data after noticing that our local city council installed sensors next to busy roads, and that the data is available online.
When I saw that Pimoroni had a new environmental sensor add-on for the Raspberry Pi, I started thinking about building my own monitor to get more local, finer-grained data than provided by the city's open data. The Enviro+ from Pimoroni does it all, but is a bit expensive at £45. I would also need to pay extra for the particulate sensor (£25), and get a Raspberry Pi Zero W (£13) to attach everything to. That's a setup cost of £83!
A while back I bought an ESP32-based LoRa board from my local hackspace during an evening LoRaWAN workshop, and haven't really had a chance to play with it yet. I thought getting the OLED display to work could be fun as a first attempt.
First I tried the Arduino route using Adafruit's SSD1306 library, with some modifications as described here, but could not get it to work at all.
Then I found an Instructable describing how to install MicroPython on the board and get it working that way. But nope, still no luck.
Using the pinout diagram and Arduino test code in this repo, I figured out that the I2C pins had to be set as follows:
Finally, I had it working in MicroPython! I went back to the Arduino code, changed it to pin 21 and 22 (instead of pin 4 and 15 as in the original tutorial) and lo and behold, it was working there too!
