globalization

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1. New years resolution III

   

   Im happy to tell i successfully turned one-shot old resolutions into ingrained habits! This was a triumph. Im making a note here. HUGE SUCCESS! Its hard to overstate my satisfaction :)

   Last year resolution worked great. I feel i regained some of that juicy creativity i had as a child and that i had completely lost. This also feels like a habit now. More like a quality, which is exactly what i was aiming for

   To be completely clear about it, being creative has nothing to do with being a good creative. Absolutely everybody can be creative. Its just the first step and a requirement for everything else

   As i side-note. i was able to do a handstand without support for the first time on november. So one month ahead of schedule. Its really fun to be able to control your body while looking at the world upside down

   This year i wasnt going to explicitly make a new year resolution since i have stopped thinking of them as some change that require effort, but rather the only way forward. Not sure how it works, but the alternatives just seem bad

   But lets do it anyway for the fun of it. I was kinda doing it already without paying much attention, but im going to make it formal: reduce easy dopamine fixes. The simplest example of this is checking your phone or the news every 5 minutes or picturing conversations in your head that will never happen. But you can recognize this kind of useless satisfaction in many not-so-simple-to-spot activities if you pay attention. Ive already planned a roadmap of what this would look like

   I dont think it will take the whole year to reap some benefits out of this and ive got many more small projects planned for this year. All in all, this does look like is going to be a great year!

   To finish, a small side resolution, learning languages. Ive already been doing it for the last 6 months, but i plan on keep doing it even more this next year. Its really fun!

2. Listen to accents from around the world

   

   I discovered localingual with joy, just to find out is still in its infancy… but if you like languages, the promise of a great website is there!

   Right now, it suffers three major problems. Its hard to navigate, low sample size and the voting system instead of encouraging quality, encourages the oldest/jokes to be on top (unless they are very bad or too offensive, i guess). Texas have a spongebob joke right now

   Pros? If you enjoy languages, its great to hear real accents around the world

3. You have no repos online!

   

   Git is life. I manage my own git server in git.alberto.tf. But its now set private to only committers

   The main reason is that, more often than not, im the only committer. That allows me to be carefree about using time based commits (as opposed to features-based commits as god intended) when I need it. For example to move my work from one computer to another, etc…

   Im also less careful about clumping together typos, features and fixes on the same commits

   Just by having many time-based commits make the repos themselves to not add much to the code I show otherwise. So I decided to not expose the repos by default. You are still free to use any code you find on this site

   The other reason is metadata

   Avoid awkward faces when I have to explain a commit at 4am. – “I thought you were sick!” :)

4. New years resolution II

   

   I like the idea of deliberately thinking and working on some kind self improvement task that affects you in a global sense

   One-shot changes that have a high ROI. Like changing a habit

   Last year resolution worked great and I think its been a success :)

   This years resolution will be to do more creative work. It might not look like it, but the more I do it, the more I think it is just a habit. It didnt come naturally to me, but after awhile, you actually crave for it when you cant do it

   Ive been using this method called the single word method

   Basically, you just have to add something, no matter how small, to whatever you are doing. After that, you are allowed to to quit for the day

   More often than not, what happens is that ‘one word’ end up being quite a lot because you inadvertently enter “the zone”

   And while we are still talking about resolutions one last adition. It wasnt really a resolution because it just happened a year after I quited smoking, but after 2 years I can say Im really into doing sports now

   Im really past the point when I gotta worry about underdoing and have to worry about overdoing to avoid injuries. Ive shunned doing exercise for a very long time. This has not been easy. It has not been hard either, but I could totally hear my body asking me what the heck was i doing moving so much and asking me to stop

   Working out now is part of my life in a way that I will miss when I will no longer able to do it

   PS: Side goal for this year: to do a handstand without wall support

5. Virus, Qubes-OS and Debian

   

   This is the virus venn diagram. Its pretty accurate and many people, including people that gets along with technology, is oblivious to it. Voluntarily installing crap by installing random programs you just googled in your computer hardly counts as a virus

   Sometimes they overlap tho. What I call “trawling viruses”. Using some very old exploit that should hardly work on anybody and spamming it, you can still get lots of people that never update. In this case, you dont care about anything, you just try get a quick profit and you dont really care if you slow down the target machine

   But by and large, virus try to be as invisible as possible, do their bussiness and go undetected for as long as possible. If they can make an optimization to your system, like patching how they got in, they will

   Using debian is one way to protect yourself… but they still fall short because it still uses a very old authorization model

   

   Its no secret that the authorization model in computers is really old

   Qubes-os is a system that tries to mitigates that problem quite sucessfully. Qubes-os 4.0 rc1 has been released recently. Im currently testing it on my mediabox, and will probably use it in my main machine soon

   Holger gave a talk a few weeks ago named “Using qubes os from the pov of a debian developer”. In debconf fashion you can watch it online

6. Get updates from this blog!

   

   Have you ever seen this icon and wonder what it is?

   You can see this refered as RSS, atom or just feed of a website. It all refers to the same thing: get updates from this site without having to create an account

   Its likely you never heard of this tech because it has been supressed and practically been eliminated from all mainstream webs despite being simple and functional. Google had one of the best RSS readers and they closed it

   The reason for this is that they want to be your only stop for information. You might not think much about it but your attention is the most valuable asset right now… for you and for them. They can try to push information (propaganda or ads) on you like you are some kind of kid who doesnt know better

   Luckily, this tech is so simple that is likely never going to die as long as a single reader and a single feed poster exists on the planet :)

   This is an example of what a feed look like and this is list with all my feeds

   Theres a plethora of offline readers out there both for computer and cellphone and you only have to copy the feed link into it. Ask me if you have troubles making it work or finding one that you like

   I host my own copy of tt-rss, an online reader, and it allows multiple users. If you know me, just ask me for an user and I will happily create one for you so you dont need to host your own (an online reader allows to sync all of your devices for example)

7. Music online

   $ du -sh ~/Music
   168G
   

   This is my whole music collection.

   At least half of it either I never listened to it or Im not very fond of. It includes whole discographies and whole mp3 collections from friends

   Skating is much more enjoyable with some music. I have a speaker I carry around with a 2Gb microsd card from an old phone. I usually just drop a few random albums or compilations I like

   I tried a shared list on spotify, but half of the songs I wanted to add werent available or they didnt have the specific version I like

   Recently I had to buy some memories, and saw the drop in prices! A 128Gb usb(2.0) is around 20€ and a 128Gb MicroSD for around 33€. Now I can carry my whole collection with me around. No lag, no data expenses, the version I like…

   Who wants music to be online?

8. RE:Sobering in 2016

   I published a rant about being in denial about something regarding Trumps win and brexit

   I love things that bring insigh and perspective. Recently my old english teacher published an article from Michael Moore predicting Trumps win

   Its worth the read

9. Life-time perspective

   This is my screen wallpaper. It uses a generous average of 90 years for a life-time and theres one square per week

   Every monday I colour one week

   Ive been doing this for about 6 months now and it does help keep things in perspective

   

   PS: To do the initial coloring I used gimp + xdotool

   paint.sh
   
   #!/bin/bash
   
   debug=1
   #years should be your age - 1
   years=10
   
   xdotool click $debug
   for i in $(seq 0 10); do
       for j in $(seq 0 $years); do
           xdotool click $debug
           xdotool mousemove_relative -- 18 0
   
       done
       xdotool click $debug
       xdotool mousemove_relative -- 0 -20
   
       for j in $(seq 0 $years); do
           xdotool click $debug
           xdotool mousemove_relative -- -18 0
   
       done
       xdotool click $debug
       xdotool mousemove_relative  -- 0 -20
   done
   

10. New years resolution

    Mine is a little different from the conventional ones this year

    Look beyond
    

    A fancy version of dont take things at face value theres more than meets the eye. Look for extra connections

    Only a few days past new years eve and I think its already paying off for me :)

11. Sobering in 2016

    

    Trump winning 2016 elections in US has been sobering. I was certainly in denial about something there

    Brexit tells a similar story as well

    Rajoy winning on my own country was not enough since I consider they cheated. They managed to get rid of the second candidate that the people legitimately voted for and managed to swing the final results.

    The raw number of voters that Rajoy had should had been enough to sober me up, but the truth is that they werent that many. The winner was abstention by a landslide and the total number of people that voted something else was way higher

    Trump and brexit won with over 50% of voters.

    This is something different