Daily Journal 📓

• I would apologize for some of the jargon in this, but in fact that is partially the point of this post.
• I am writing up notes from a discussion with @Flancian. We have been “chatting” on Twitter and Mastodon about various topics, and ended up booking a time to speak in person last Wednesday, January 20th, 2021.
• Very quickly on the call it was clear we were “pushing” context into each others brains so that we could get to deeper topics and explore shared areas of interest.
• Querying things like “have you heard of X?” If not, quick context as well as key terms to note and search for later. If yes, then anchor that context and go deeper.
• One of the specific areas we talked about and were exploring together is Digital Gardens, Second Brains, and, as @Flancian calls them, Agoras. His specific implementation is Anagora.
• With Fission, we have interest from a number of different people and software apps that want to have user owned files and notes, as well as thinking about how to link them together between people.
• @Flancian has written a Python server and is interested in connecting Agora at the level of a git repo filled with Markdown files.
• I had mentioned to him that I was interested in experimenting with this site, but after all the recent tinkering I had done, I had kept the git repo private and closed. To prep for the call, it was a good excuse to bring the repo for this site public. It is available at https://github.com/bmann/bmcgarden. Actually connecting it into the Agora will be documented in the future.¹
• Will connecting second brains at the Markdown layer work?
  • My site is “a bunch of Markdown files in a git repo” as its “source code”, but it gets processed by Jekyll, and actually by the double bracket backlink and other features of the Simply Jekyll theme.
  • In fact, the completely normal Jekyll behaviour of specifying what the resulting web permalinks look like from source Markdown files is completely custom per site.
  • I already know that some of the syntax of Simply Jekyll is going to be problematic for portability. I like the side notes and margin notes features, but they are totally custom.
  • I have a note to move many of them to regular Markdown footnotes, and then add BigfootJS to have a nicer display. Knowing myself, I will want to switch around the theme and engine behind this site in the future, so using more standard “source code” is important.
  • I’ve said before a couple of times now that if the various note taking initiatives / engines / apps want to interlink, there are going to need to be some conventions or specifications or something.
  • I stopped using LogSeq in part because of their Markdown formatting.² which isn’t compatible with regular posts in any other system.
  • How is the extended Note-verse going to come to some consensus? How do we layer backlinks or other supersets of Markdown for note-specific purposes together? And, to do this at a text-only layer, which in turn has to work with a build process and/or live hosting software, desktop software, and display layers across multiple different programming languages and software architectures.
  • At the very least, we need a protocol or standard at some layer, and a way for these disparate groups to form consensus.
  • Related: I wrote about a vNotes Format some time ago, but that is in fact at another “layer” — more of a wrapper or sync format.
• Connecting over the Internet
  • We can, of course, also connect over the Internet. Mostly, I mean linking to other pages, but there are some other protocols and standards that may prove useful or be the base layer on which backlinks or extended references could be built.
  • The Web Annotation Standard and Webmention are two that I have in mind.
  • ActivityPub and having someone’s agora participate directly in the Fediverse is interesting.
  • We ended up talking about convention of being able to do double brackets anywhere one can put text, like on Twitter or Mastodon, which could then be processed and sucked back into an agora. No spec, no permission, just a convention that starts being used, which is exactly how @ChrisMessina invented the hashtag.
  • Somewhere in here is the concept I was introduced to by @agentofuser, which is.
  • Micropub is another standard that I see being adopted and working relatively well. When it makes it into mobile / desktop apps like iA Writer, that’s a good sign.
• On Biases
  • Flancian is an SRE at Google. Many Google only tools from software stack to hosting.
  • What’s the simplest that will work without having to dive into more learning?
  • For me, I have a bias towards Heroku³ and 12 Factor App. Both as a way of architecting, but also on how to host to maximize user agency.
  • Making things explicit can help people and communities find connections as well as understanding.
  • Specifically, three things:
    • Goals
    • Values
    • Biases
• On Social Networks and Community
  • I mentioned the Orbit Model of looking at community engagement.
  • Both of us have found the Loomio style community management / engagement in Social Coop to be hard to get started with / put time into.
  • Flancian sees the agora as an integration hub. For Fission, we’re using the label constellation provider. Some equivalencies?
  • Can a social network do more to connect people and have them learn from each other? Similar as the Viznut Eternal September post: social networks beyond consumption or entertainment.
  • If you take two people and most of their opinions are the same, can we dig down into the areas where they are different in a way to learn why they differ? Understanding and learning.
  • I mentioned chicken fingers vs. tentacles: you have to understand the preferences and biases of another person if you hope to give them useful recommendations, because your recommendations are based on YOUR preferences.
  • An agora is a tool for building context.
  • New wording. A Stoa is shared context with explicit overlap defined by its members.
  • A data structure and a social graph that is designed toward problem solving.
  • I introduced the concept of a Squad: a collection of people with a set of skills coming together to jointly work on some tasks or goals.
  • Lightbulb moment: we are in a Stoa together — we have overlapping interests and context. The next step is to form a Squad initially of the two of us, aimed at some tasks / goals.
• Goals
  • What goals can we work on?
    • Cross post between social networks
      • Use Flancian’s agora as an integration hub, leaning into the server aspects. Like Social.Coop, form a Stoa around it to meet common goals.
      • Moa Party is what Flancian currently uses to sync between Twitter and Mastodon. It has an Instagram API, which currently isn’t working.
      • Create an Open Collective to see if we can pool funds to pay someone to enable the Instagram API again, so we can cross post our photos into that social network.
      • Make some blog posts, announce the idea, get in touch with moa.party maintainers, see who else is interested in joining this Squad.
    • Agora Interlinks from Social Posts
      • We’re already experimenting with Twitter / Mastodon double bracket linking.
      • Can we use the agora integration hub to do more of this?
      • What tools do we need to do to ingest these posts into agoras?
      • Also need to explore common patterns and conventions. How do we inter-work with e.g. hashtags?
    • Experiment with linked agoras
    • As mentioned above, Boris’ garden is now a public git repo.
    • What to do next? How do we connect?
    • Make a call for other git repo based agoras to link.
• Other Ideas & Resources
  • I used to run my own Micropub server. IndieKit is the one I recommend.
  • Making it easier for other people to run their own agora should be a goal. I created a Simply Jekyll Template repo on Github, and hooked it up to Forestry and published it to Netlify.
  • Add agora features? Add instructions on how to link into Anagora, and make the template linked in “by default”, or at least following some simple steps.

Footnotes

1. I’ve added a TODO to the Colophon, and Connecting to the Agora is where I will document the process. ↩

2. LogSeq has bullet lists that visually look like Roam Research or other outline-primary systems. The text that is created uses hashtags (which are used for headings in regular Markdown) for each level of outliner, which just looks like a page full of headings when attempted to publish using a regular Markdown renderer. ↩

3. See my extensive tagging of Deploy to Heroku ↩

• I’ve been blogging a lot lately. Daily posts about doing a walk outside. Basically “Instagram-style” photo posts with a few words.
  • Having Mb with Gluon on my phone and it “just works” is nice. I can write something short, or just keep typing and it ends up as a blog post, all written and posted direct from my phone, like this post about @kemitchell’s StrictEq project. Yes, it’s being renamed, head over to the Artless Devices Forum for longer discussion.
  • Longer posts like this music one were done sitting at my desktop, composed and posted with Mars Edit. This is good for short posts, too, like documenting some tide / calendar research I did for my mom. A side effect of spending lots of time WFH — having default desktop app tools.
  • I’ve turned on cross posting to Mastodon and Twitter automatically. People seem to enjoy my more “social” posts on Twitter, which is great. And I definitely reach different people on Mastodon, in a nice way.
  • Using the StrictEq post as an example again, yeah, I hate the “title”:

    • “The code you depend on depends on you” @kemitchell’s commercial license sales for public software

  • But I have to craft it knowing that it will get cross-posted to Twitter and to Mastodon. I guess that’s another wishlist item for Micro.blog: for non-micro-blog posts that have a title, allow for a “cross posting excerpt”.
  • Otherwise, your only other option is to:
    • 1. turn off cross-posting for the initial publish of the blog post and then
    • 2. make a micro blog length post that links to your blog post.
  • Hmm. Now that I think about it, that’s actually not bad, but I’ve found toggling cross posting to be really confusing. I need to experiment with the Mb mobile app and run some experiments to see if I can figure it out, the UI is just not good for this.
• With Trump being kicked off Twitter, the discussion about Parler being kicked off AWS, there’s lots of discussion about federated and censorship proof social networks.
  • RTd @QuinnyPig who has a good thread on AWS terms of service, and other cloud providers more broadly. Aimed at explaining even to non-technical people, a good one to share.
• I got drawn into a long thread kicked off by Stefan George of Gnosis, who wanted to post a bounty to save/store Twitter stuff to IPFS. I pointed out that Twitter archives already exist.
• From there I got into a whole back and forth, including people suggesting that Twitter data should be mass exfiltrated to setup an alt social network. Maybe at one point I would have reached for a purely technical solution like this, but here’s my final take:

• Technical tricks to try extract Twitter data is probably orders of magnitude harder than …just doing the work in building out critical mass communities.

  The difference between the two approaches? One is technical challenges, the other is marketing and community building. @bmann

• I am… somewhat distraught that a lot of decentral type people think about this issue as censorship, rather than the “let’s deplatform fascists issue” that it actually is. Twitter is in no way a public utility. Own your “distribution” — whether it’s direct mailing list subscriptions or your own community social network: run your own Discourse or Mastodon server. Twitter is today’s mass media: use it for distribution, but know that you’re there at the company’s sufferance.
• And of course, when I see lots of crypto people happily using Medium and Substack, I’m not going to take the rest of their opinions seriously. Your words need to get backed up by actions, my dudes.
• Jeff Henshaw popped back up on Mastodon — and he’s hosting his own Mastodon server. He was asking me why I’m on Mastodon, here’s my answer:

• the concept of collective ownership / maintenance.

  Nothing wrong with “multi user” systems, but we have to clearly understand that it costs people time and some server resources to run things.

  I’m working on a model of awareness that people should pay for apps — that behind that app are real people, not just corporations.

  “Exit to community” is a related theme. Plus governance, etc etc @[email protected]

• Yes, I’m posting my own content back to my own site. Which means it becomes part of my forever content, and also I can link to and include it in search.
• I guess I should document my BMC/Twitter Archive, which lives at https://tweets.bmannconsulting.com/. In a week or so, when Fission has Github/Actions support, I can start publishing this to IPFS directly, instead of hosting it on Github Pages. Doing this direct from Google Sheets to Fission would be ideal, as a little one off Twitter Archive app.
• It was really easy to setup. Michael Hawksey’s @mhawksey post explains it all: Keeping your Twitter Archive fresh and freely hosted on Github Pages.
• I just emailed Michael to see if I can send him some thank you money, or donate to some project on his behalf.
• Doing some work on the Marfa Theme for my Micro.blog site. Running Hugo locally is really fast! I still have about 200 orphaned posts that I’d like to import into Mb at some point, which I use for testing, and with Hugo it’s pretty instantaneous.
  • I’m stuck in the dark with Hugo a little bit, as I can’t prototype locally because how to structure this for Mb isn’t really documented. I guess I’ll file another issue in the help documentation, as the only public place you can kind of file this stuff. I really wish Manton Reece would just open source the whole thing or more properly make it non-commercial / source available.

• And this is from 2 years ago

• I’ve been sick with a horrendous flu since Christmas Day. TLDR, it was “just” a bad flu. collapsed:: true
  • I called the BC public health line at 811 on the 3rd evening of being sick, the nurse recommended that I get a COVID test. The next morning (yesterday) I went to the drive through at VCC and got tested with the saline mouth gargle. They didn’t test Rachael because she didn’t have symptoms. This was shortly after 9am.
  • By 9:30pm, I got an SMS notice that my test was negative. What a relief.
  • I did a log of my interactions, working backwards:
    • Fri, Dec 25th: went for a walk and realized feeling very weak. Made it home and then badly sick from the afternoon onwards.
    • Thurs, Dec 24th: cooking all morning, parental hand off of food
    • Wed, Dec 23rd: comic book and cookie hand off with Su, Evo to Granville Island to Propeller Design. Standing in line outside Rio Friendly Meats for 1hr+
    • Tues, Dec 22nd: office breakfast and then lunch, with Brooke, Katie, and Rachael
    • Mon, Dec 21st: Lyft to Revolver, see Roland, go for walk in rain with Riad, tea & whiskey at Miku to warm up, Tom Lee Music to pickup Arturia KeyStep, cab to office, Evo home
    • Sun, Dec 20th: bike to do masked pick up at Cadeaux Bakery, drop off at the office
    • Sat, Dec 19th:
    • Fri, Dec 18th: home office, biked to do a masked cookie pickup and wheat beer handover
    • Thurs, Dec 17th: home office, Fission Demo Day
    • Wed, Dec 16th: Fission office with Brooke
  • Brooke and our shared office space is part of my bubble. On the 21st, obviously I had lots of interactions with different people, but all were wearing masks and/or 6ft away.
  • Of note: I got really chilled and wet out in the rain on the 21st. Then, on the 23rd, I again got really cold waiting in line outside Rio. And, in general, coming off a bunch of work and “relaxing”, so I guess my system hit the wall and collapsed.
• So Christmas is traditionally “tinkering with my blog” time. I’ve got things running OK on Micro.blog for https://blog.bmannconsulting.com. The embed on the home page here works fine.
  • I’m doing updating of notes here only when I’ve got free time on a weekend or an evening at a full computer desktop. It takes 2.5 minutes to generate the site, which really sucks.
  • The other deficiency is that I can’t really provide a feed of updated notes. I could go and add dates to all the notes and then have a modified date as well, but really that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
  • And this Journal is looking an awful lot like a blog, which I decided I didn’t want a feed for, because it really is just me writing for myself.
  • I’m still on again / off again with Roam Research. I use it for my private notes and simple TODOs and it’s been fine.
  • Anyway, this is all working for now, and I’ve been enjoying actually blogging, with things like Bandcamp Fridays.
• via @agentofuser, Neuron is a Haskell based Zettelkasten / Second Brain implementation.
• via @rosano, the people behind Ghost are putting together Open Subscription Platforms:

  • A shared movement for independent subscription data. With everyone getting into subscriptions, it’s never been more important to be in control of your customer data.

  • And in the footer:

  • An open standards working group committed to data portability for independent subscription platforms This is mainly about data exports, not platform risk — so no discussion about open source here. I thought Ghost and Substack were pretty rivalrous, but Substack is listed right there as well.

  • Medium, Patreon, and ConvertKit get specifically called out as closed platforms.

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title: Dec 19, 2020 date: 2020-12-19 category: Journal

• Microblog Sidebar

  Got the Micro.blog sidebar installed on the front page. Yeah, my username is boris, even though Boris Jabes has the boris.micro.blog blog name :)

  Hmm. Not really usable. It doesn’t include permalinks to the entries. Going to embed it on the Micro.blog page as an example, along with requests for what I’d like to see.

• PostHog

  Also installed PostHog which I’m going to use for Fission but just testing it in the header of this blog now :)

  Forked the FOSS repo (none of their proprietary enterprise code in it), so that I could edit the README so that the Deploy To Heroku could deploy the FOSS version.

• Bandcamp Request for Design Change

  I’ve been using Bandcamp more. Whenever I’m using it on the web, I get tripped up on how small / hidden wishlisting an album / track is.

  Look at this screenshot:

  

  Rather than that little heart that says Wishlist / In Wishlist, I always hit the big heart at the top of the page…which takes me to my favourites, and doesn’t heart the page at all.

  My brain has been conditioned by Instagram and other systems that I can double-click on the big image and/or somewhere top right of the page to “heart” a page.

  So: hide that heart at the top that is actually “my favourites” and stick it under my avatar or otherwise more than 1 click away on an album page.

  Make it so that I can “heart” by double clicking the album art! Clicking to get a big album view

  …sure, give me a magnifying glass icon to embiggen it. Or, give me an “invite to heart” on that embiggened album image. Let me look at this album…oh yeah…favourite, wait, I need to cancel at top left, and then navigate alllll the way back to that tiny Wishlist under the album and click again. Wait what, there is ALSO a “view” link here once it is “In Wishlist”? And that pops open my wishlist in a new window?

  Have another giant heart top left? next to album name? or somewhere else that gives me a nice big target.

  Come on Bandcamp! Make hearts better!

  BTW, this particular screenshot page is a recommendation from @bgins, Drum ‘n’ Space, by Elaine Walker / ZIA.

• MIDI Keyboard

  The same @bgins from above makes Moon Forge, an app with Fission webnative integrated, that connects to music keyboard synths with WebMIDI.

  He recommends the Arturia KeyStep.

  I found it on local Vancouver music store Tom Lee Music. Purchased!

  Maybe I do music now?

• OK, so I am continuing working on this from Dec 5th, 2020
• I thought I’d actually install Hugo and get it working locally before I attempt to upload it into Micro.blog. brew install hugo and you’re done, which is great.
• Looking at hugo --help showed me that Hugo has a Jekyll import function.
• Since I had those social posts that I eventually want to get into Mb, this ended up perfect. I ran hugo import jekyl PATH-TO-JEKYLL . to transform those posts into Hugo compatible files.
• I forked the marfa theme and put it into the Hugo folder. Error about a missing custom_footer.html file. Pretty sure this is part of the default Mb themes, so I just created an empty one in partials, and the site built and served locally! Very fast compared to my Jekyll experience: 568 ms for 569 pages and 220 static files!
• Micro.blog has a help page about custom themes. Looks like the Blank theme needs to get merged in for files like custom_footer.html to exist.
• Looks like custom footer was the only one missing. I’ll keep track of edits to it on the Marfa Theme notes page.
• Looking at Mb plugins. Found BigfootJS again via the Mb plugin for Bigfoot. Probably better for me to use on this site rather than the super custom margin / side notes.
• Enabled the OpenGraph plugin so I get social previews.
• Added a Blog category to the navigation, for all the actual blog posts with titles, rather than just short social ones.

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title: Dec 5, 2020 date: 2020-12-05 category: Journal

Instacart Near and Far

We’re talking to Rachael’s family back in Ontario, and looking at supporting her mom and helping out so that R’s sister Kathy doesn’t have to do everything. We’re doing a test grocery delivery using Instacart to see if that works for them.

The large stores all have their own delivery, but all of the systems are terrible.

Instacart is slightly better in that it is has one mediocre interface across all the different stores.

I decided to try out an order here in Vancouver, and got delivery from T&T Supermarket, a large Asian grocery store. So, cutting noodles for dinner!

Blog Shuffling

I tried once more to import social posts from my blog into Micro.blog. Didn’t error or anything, so I emailed support.

At some point, my previous support request about getting my archive and photos pages working ended up getting fixed. Now I’m flipping around between themes again, and seeing about customizing something.

I decided to go ahead and swap the domain over from microblog to just blog, and updated the colophon. Whatever happens with the old social posts being automatically imported, I can just sit down with Mars Edit and recreate them. Hmmm. Although, just looked it up, and 274 posts is a LOT to do manually.

Micro.blog Theming

Mb runs on Hugo themes, and I had previously gotten as far as cloning the internet-weblog theme. Have to merge that with the default Micro.blog templates and in general figure that out.

I cloned the Marfa theme so I can see about figuring out the defaults.

• Went for a social distanced walk around Stanley Park with Sean Lynch. Really great discussion!

• I mentioned When Tailwinds Vanish: The Internet in the 2020s as I do to all people building Internet businesses these days.

• Sean mentioned DBT, which he described as “Jinja templates for SQL” — basically, a way to make SQL more modular and more maintainable, without having to have an abstraction layer over top of it.

• Question from Sean, who lived in Vancouver’s West End about 15 years ago, was why it didn’t seem to have changed much. That is, different businesses and a few changes, but that it seemed “sleepy”, in an area of the city that’s right next to English Bay and Stanley Park and would seem to be generally desirable to live in.

• My theories are:

• Limited Turnover: long term rentals, not a significant amount of new building to make a difference, and not a common place for things like student rentals, so not high turnover on a regular basis.

• Two buses from anywhere: to get anywhere else in/out of the West End, you’re always going to have to take at least two buses (or a bus to get to a Skytrain connection).

• I guess there have been some new buildings closer to Burrard / along the water, but that’s not really the west end anymore, and they have all been exclusive / expensive condos and townhouses, so again not large numbers of people.

• We talked a bit about housing since Sean knows I’m interested in Cobuilding. Berlin and their rent freeze came up, and also the term Overton Window , which is a conceptual tool I find myself using a lot, so now I’ll have an entry here for it.

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title: Nov 28, 2020 date: 2020-11-28 category: Journal

Flancian’s Anagora

I’ve been having a conversation with Flancian about their Anagora project: a meta / multi-user knowledge garden. They have implemented Roam Research, Foam, and Obsidian adapters so far.

Since I’m working on a Simply Jekyll Template repo that is less customized than my site here, I can use that to see about connecting into Anagora.

• Lots of catching up with people this week. It’s Thursday night / Friday “morning” and I’m reflecting.
• Today (Thursday, that is), I met up with DH for coffee, which had me reflect back to Finhaven and the path that has lead here to Fission.
• Had a call with Amanda K one morning, sent her a link to When Tailwinds Vanish: The Internet in the 2020s. She was interested in my blog layout here and was asking about whether it needed a dev or not.
• That led me over to the original Simply Jekyll, since this site is super customized and in a private repo. I forked it into a public repo here: https://github.com/bmann/simply-jekyll
• And then I setup Forestry so that Amanda could use it “without a dev”. Deploy is Netlify, because Simply Jekyll won’t run on Github Pages. I’ll need to do a proper HOWTO and properly setup the forked repo as a template repo to make it easy for people to run their own version. Sample site up here: https://quizzical-bartik-446efa.netlify.app
• That’s one framework Jekyll, a free tier git code hosting with Github, a second free tier commercial service Forestry, and then a third free tier build/hosting service in Netlify. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for “just” a blog + notes. Forestry from a day to day, week to week perspective is the most valuable part of that: the actual editing app.
• And tonight, I just finished pushing a new site for Cobuilding live. Forestry setup was a little trickier because Minimal Mistakes has complicated Front Matter at times, I’ll go back to it in a bit.
• Why are these two sites not on Fission? Forestry needs to connect to a git provider is the short answer.
• I’m doing some tinkering with Frontity, a React front end framework designed to use Wordpress as a Headless CMS, that will be a good fit for hosting on Fission.
• And now, to bed.

• Following up on [researching external drives](Nov 14, 2020), I biked over to Memory Express to buy an external NVMe enclosure and a 2TB NVMe drive.
• 
• The enclosure and drive I had researched before weren’t available and because of the pandemic they aren’t really allowing browsing. So, I had the sales person look up the different options for me.
• I ended up with the Vantec USB3.1 NVMe Enclosure and a 2TB Corsair drive. There were slightly cheaper options than the Corsair, but it was a name I recognized and I figured it shouldn’t be the absolute cheapest:
• 
• The Vantec metal enclosure, and the board that the NVMe gets installed to:
• 
• Here’s the Corsair snapped into the board. I’ve already screwed down the far side with the included nut and screw:
• 
• After that picture, there is a thermal paste strip that goes right on top, and then a heat sink (strip of metal) that is sort of wedged on top of that. You slide it back into the Vantec metal enclosure.
• You can see some fit and finish issues with the end plate that is fastened in with two screws:
• 

• Formatting NVMe on MacOS

  • For now, I’m formatting this for just MacOS. Here’s how the drive shows up in Disk Utility before formatting:
  • 
  • The option you want to pick is actually “Erase”, and you’ll get this dialog:
  • 
  • Lots of format options here. No, you don’t want to pick MacOS Extended. Apparently, Apple File System APFS is what you want. It’s also what’s used in iOS, and it’s optimized for solid state drives (SSDs). More detail on the Apple Disk Utility support guide. I went ahead and just chose the plain APFS version.
  • 
  • The default GUID Partition Map is what you want to pick for modern computers.
  • OK! Now I’ve got an extra 2TB!
  • First thing I did was create a new Steam game library folder on the new disk. I’ve only got 512GB on the inside of this Mac Mini. Inside Steam, you can now move games between library folders, which makes this a lot easier than it used to be.
  • Next up is documenting how to work with Filecoin, which was the driving purpose of this purchase!

alias:: Nov 20th, 2020

• I had a call today with Claire and Nandini of Check My Ads and Andrea.
• Check My Ads currently runs the BRANDED newsletter on Substack and were interested in Ghost.
• Andrea is starting a new business and communicating with a lot of people on a lot of different platforms, and was looking at a newsletter option of Substack vs Ghost and generally owning her content.
• I demo’d the Ghost editing interface using the DeployToHeroku version of Ghost + IPFS that I maintain for Fission.
• I had spoken with CanTrust Hosting Coop, a Canadian hosting coop, and they don’t currently support Ghost. Cooperative web hosting, tech support, and open source software development consulting is something that I’m interested in seeing more of, as I wrote in Joining Social.Coop. I’ve had a good discussion with the team at CanTrust, some of which I’ll look at posting.
• TLDR:
  • I created the Ghost and Substack pages here to collect info on those systems.
  • I can recommend and support paying for Ghost’s commercial hosting — they are a non-profit foundation producing open source software.
  • If you’re going to use Substack, use a custom domain.
  • For those for whom even $29/month is too much money, the 1 click deploy works to get started for free if you set up a Heroku account. Not really recommended unless you’ve got a technical person to back you up or are yourself comfortable with Git and Heroku already

• Art Gallery and Downtown

  • Rachael and I actually slept in a bit (for us) and had breakfast at home, and then went out to the Vancouver Art Gallery.

    I spent a lot of the week only being indoors, on way too many Zoom calls.

    You need to book an appointment ahead of time, and have to wear a mask in the gallery. There were maybe 4 other people we encountered wandering around during our booking slot.

    The Victor Vasarely exhibition — pop art — was amazing. I posted on social.coop, including a painting that matches Rachael’s new sweater. We’ll see if I get around to posting more research and photos about Vasarely later.

    Then we went to The Bay. Much more crowded and feeling uncomfortable, although masks are required. Bought a 9x13” baking pan, and a quarter sheet with a grill/tray that will be for roasting various things.

    I suggested Miku for lunch. Yes, a bit high end and pricey — but very delicious. Reflecting on how lucky and privileged we are to do things like this occasionally.

• Researching External Drives at OWC

  • I bought my RAM upgrade for the Mac Mini¹ at OWC, and thought I’d look at their external drive options too.
  • Do I need a Networked Attached Storage (NAS) device, or do I just need drives attached to the computer directly? I’m thinking that I don’t actually need a NAS, although it would do other things as well.
  • I think what I need is:
    • 2.5” SSD drives — not 3.5” spinning platters
    • multiple drives in an enclosure — I don’t think I need RAID for redundancy (this isn’t backup, for which, for my purposes, some cloud solution still works) — but some sort of spanning and ability to swap out drives
    • Thunderbolt 3 aka USB-C connection
    • at least 2TB to start — my 500GB Mac Mini hard drive is almost full, in part because of Steam games
  • The Thunderbolt Drives section of OWC is a good starting point for letting you filter.
  • I narrowed it down to:
    • Mercury Elite Pro Dual with 3-Port Hub: 2 x 2TB SSDs, USB3 rather than Thunderbolt, but it’s a USB-C connector. $799USD.
    • ThunderBay 4 mini: 4 x 1TB SSDs, SoftRAID / RAID 4, Thunderbolt 3. $1079USD.
    • Express 4M2: 4 slot M.2 NVMe SSD — the “hard drives” that look like RAM sticks. Thunderbolt 3. Comes with SoftRAID. No drives included. $279USD (enclosure only). The reviews on Amazon for the 4M2 are helpful, e.g. “not at full 4x speed unless you have four SSDs in the enclosure. It seems stable when occupying a Thunderbolt-3 slot with no daisy-chaining”
  • Hmmm. Now down the rabbit hole of NVMe drives, which are VERY interesting. OWC has a couple of enclosures:
    • Envoy Pro EX: 2TB NMVe, USB3 speeds / USB-C connection. $349USD (enclosure only is $49USD).
    • Envoy Express: a Thunderbolt 3 connection, no drives included, and looks like it’s in pre-order. About 50% faster than the USB3 connection. $79USD.
    • Looking over at Memory Express with a search for NVMe there are lots of results of different types of drives (in CAD rather than USD).
    • Here’s a USB3 NVMe enclosure Elite M.2 NVMe PCIe 2280 External Enclosure — $49CAD.
    • And here’s a 2TB NVMe drive that is Gen3/Gen4 — so “slower”, but since this is external, the external bus interface is the max speed anyway, and all NVMe drives are faster than the bus interface. XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB is $299CAD. Newer and well known brands like Samsung EVO are like $400CAD+ for 2TB.
  • Conclusion: I don’t know enough about this at all, and this is before I start researching NAS solutions.
  • I think an NVMe enclosure and 2TB drive makes the most sense right now. The Express 4M2 then becomes an upgrade to re-use the 2TB drive. And, generally, Thunderbolt 3 interfaces are just coming to market.

Footnotes

1. Still not installed! The last Amazon delivery got me the right T6 “secure” size of screwdriver, and I got two of the flush fit screws off, but the other ones won’t turn with the screwdriver. I don’t really know what I’m going to do at this point. I had read elsewhere about someone in the same situation whose screws didn’t turn out of the box, and took it in to Apple to help with having the screws removed. I’m super annoyed that I can’t get this done! ↩

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date: 2020-11-08

Went for a bike ride in the morning. Super sunny day, but also cold. Vancouver winters have been getting brighter — but also colder. Need a balaclava as the final piece of my biking gear, to cover my ears and neck.

Just spent 30 minutes setting up a UPS Payment Account in order to attempt to pay a bill online for customs brokerage fees. There is a 10-digit account number on the invoice, but of course clicking between the different options, the maximum is for a 9-digit account number (and that’s some sort of special account?). UPS Canada, a paper invoice with a tear off, suggesting I stick a paper cheque in postal mail, is not going to work well for me OR you.

I am now using the chezmoi dotfiles manager. I’ve currently got my dotfiles on Github but private, I should open them up. I am trawling through walkah’s dotfiles who is busy going down the Nix rabbit hole.

Cleaned up the office today, still stuff to get rid of, but especially with Province of BC announcing no social gatherings, it means the “Zoom room” here is going to be where I’m going to be spending a lot of time.

The clean up was in part because of getting the Amazon order from [yesterday](](/journal/2020-11-07-journal.md) — webcam, torx screwdrivers, and the PowerColor graphics card. Now I’m just waiting for the Razer Core X Chroma eGPU enclosure.

Maybe I’ll install the 32GB memory upgrade for the Mac Mini? Surprise! Once again the kit I ordered doesn’t have the correct T6S (or H or R — the “security” one with the hole in the middle) torx screwdriver. Aaarggghhhh!

Screenshot from the OWC Mac Mini Memory Upgrade video of where I’m stuck — can’t even get the bottom plate off without the right T6 “Secure” screwdriver!


Now I’m futzing with the setup of my notes / blog here. Using VS Code directly seems to make the most sense for me. I am “using” Foam and still figuring out how I want the various plugins setup. I turned off the Gray Matter theme, didn’t quite work for me.

The author of the Markdown Notes VS Code plugin, Andrew Kortina, writes up how he has VS Code configured. I’m trying out the Tomorrow Night Theme, including some of the tweaks that Kortina uses, plus the tips on changing formats in VS Code.

• OK, I clicked the buttons and made what I think are all my final purchases for my Mac Mini, other than external storage.
• But first: I bought an Asus VG289Q Monitor at Best Buy earlier this week. Got it home and the screen wouldn’t stay on?
• At first I thought the wimpy Mac Mini maybe couldn’t drive it through HDMI and I needed a USB-C to DisplayPort adapter, but those adapters don’t really exist. I looked around and the various HDMI cables now do have different “ratings” on them. I bought a short gold plated HDMI cable and yes! — the monitor works fine.
• I looked back and forth at various eGPU options. I decided the Razer Core X Chroma was the best enclosure for me. I plan on using it for both Windows and Mac over time, and as an external enclosure it’s even possible to upgrade the video card.
• I did read through the Bootcamp for eGPUs but I don’t think I will attempt Bootcamp. Who knows how much longer it will be around / keep working as Apple transitions to ARM.
• Looking at the EGPU.io builds filter with a Mac Mini and the Razer Core X Chroma selected helped me pick the graphics card to buy. There were only 2 Mac Mini builds listed, both using an AMD RX 5700 XT. I debated about getting a cheaper card, but I’d rather finish off my purchases now.
• Then I was back in graphic card comparison hell, because the AMD RX 5700 XT is just a chipset (I guess???) and many different manufacturers put together the final cards.
• I ended up with PowerColor Red Devil AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB AXRX 5700XT 8GBD6-3DHE/OC, for $611CAD. No, I don’t even totally understand what that means.
• Hopeful that this Kingsdun Torx Screwdriver Set has what I need.
• And ended up with a Vitade 1080p webcam with ring light as well.
• I did experiment with Camo by Reincubate to use my iPhone as a webcam. I have an iPhone / iPad stand clamped to my desk, and it does work — and with very good quality! But it’s not like I can keep my iPhone clamped in there all the time.

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title: Oct 13, 2020 date: 2020-10-13 category: Journal

Both Mac Mini and OWC Memory Upgrade kit arrived today. Don’t have a monitor yet, going to temporarily use the 15” portable screen that R uses for her second monitor.

Following the OWC Memory Upgrade video, step two is having a torx screwdriver. Hmmm. Sounds like a T4, T5, and T10 needed.

OK, looks like Canadian Tire has a complete overkill 66 piece Mastercraft Specialty Precision Electronics Bit

(adding notes almost a month later)

Right in here is where I put in my 2 bike rides to Canadian Tire in Burnaby in one afternoon / evening, and still don’t have the right screwdrivers.

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title: Oct 11, 2020 date: 2020-10-11 category: Journal

Ugh. Went to go for a bike ride first thing this morning and my tire was flat again. It pumped right up again and we went for a 25km ride to Burnaby Lake and back, but it’s clear that the root cause here isn’t fixed yet. I’m going to have to write this all down for Rad and get it fixed properly.

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title: Oct 10, 2020 date: 2020-10-10 category: Journal

Rachael’s Rad Mini arrived yesterday. So now we have two Rad Power Bikes. The Rad Runner is a bit too big for Rachael, especially with the center console blocking the “step through”.

It was raining, so other than up and down the street a little, we didn’t use it much.

Today we got her out on the bike and she got used to riding it around the park, and then went off to go up and down some hills. She hasn’t been a regular bike user for quite some time. We both had free / trashy bikes that got stolen from our building at some point, and never really replaced them. I’ve been thinking about writing about what it means to be a ‘biker’, both in the context of that being an identity, and different kinds of bike usage. I think Rachael and I partially identify as “non car users” — we don’t have a car, and walk or take transit most places, plus some car share usage. Anyway, I’ll leave that line of thinking for a future post.

I went to Dream Cycle on Commercial Drive to ask about a patch kit. Bought a handful of “regular” and a couple of pre-glued, since they’re cheap and I have had multiple flats on the Runner already. Why? I’m not sure. Both other times I had them fixed by Rad Mobile Service. I have put a lot of kilometers on the bike so far!

So in the afternoon I took the Rad Mini and biked it over to Main Street where I had ditched my bike at last week. Rad has Youtube videos for pretty much all of their bikes and different things that need doing, so I just watched the RadRunner Rear Wheel Removal. The little toolkit that comes with the Rad has all the pieces that are needed, which was great.

The tricky part was the way the chain has to be manuevered around to get it off, but I got it done. Yes, this is the first time I have removed the wheel of a bike.

With the bike wheel off, now I couldn’t get the actual tire off! Watching other videos, they pretty much say “don’t use a butter knife” — that you should use a bike tire lever. Dear reader, I tried to use the handle end of a butter knife. The Rad Runner has really thick, wide tires, and I couldn’t get them off.

Luckily, there is Ride On Bike Shop on Main, around the corner from the office. I took the tire over there. They told me that they didn’t have any patch kits so I gave them the one I had and asked them to take care of it.

In 30min, I went back and had a fixed tire, and also bought some bike tire levers.

Rachael had met me there at this point, and got her hands dirty (literally) helping put the chain back on. My first tire change!

Then we did our first joint ride. East on 6th, down to Great Northern Way, left on Clark and then back on the Woodland bike path north. Right on Adanac heading east to Lakewood, turning left to go north until Wall Street. East along Wall until New Brighton Park, then south along the paths by the PNE until East Hastings / in front of Playland. South until Adanac, and back home west along Adanac.

More biking to come!

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title: Oct 8, 2020 date: 2020-10-08 category: Journal

So I confirmed this morning that my Rad Runner bike wheel tubes are sold out even on the Rad website. I guess this weekend I need to get a patch kit and learn how to fix it myself.

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Set up my Social Co-op Mastodon account last night. You can find me at @[email protected]. And yeah, I didn’t manage to get boris as a username! I’ll write a full blog post about this.

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New to me: /nick lets you change your nickname on a Discord server. They also recently enabled “community” servers. Basically, Discord is used for sort of personal chat home bases, but also increasingly for community. They’ve enabled specific features for these open communities, especially if you have a lot of members. We don’t have enough members at Fission for all of the features, but it was great to be able to have a welcome screen for new users that join, suggesting them to certain channels.

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Got an intro to someone who read my Taking equity in startups as a consulting firm post and wanted to see if my thinking had evolved from then. This fits into the Startup Studio model that I’ve thought a lot about.

It just so happens that @allbombs shared a video from the Global Accelerator Network about Enhance Ventures https://www.enhance.online/.

Plus this article which contains a good framework for looking at Startup Studios and how they are financed: Sidecar funds, corporate vehicles, club deals - how do startup studios get financed?

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Via @bobsummerwill, Bruce Perens Post Open Source License Early Draft. There’s a video, which is “What Comes After Open Source” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTsc1m78BUk. I need to watch this and take some notes.

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title: Oct 5, 2020 date: 2020-10-05 category: Journal

Great lunch with @allbombs. He reminded me about the show Halt and Catch Fire, which many people have told me about but I haven’t watched yet. Rather than doom scrolling for an hour, I am going to try and watch an episode before bed to chill out.

Flat tire afterwards was less great. I’ve actually had a number of flats with my Radrunner. This time, I found the shard of rock or ceramic and it punctured the outer tire tread all the way to the inner tube. I forced it in with a screwdriver and was able to partially inflate the tire.

Found out about Lodash Style Issue Management while doing some research on trying out Ghost as a backend for Eleventy:

Turns out @jdalton uses closed issues as part of his workflow:
Feature requests are closed issues with 'feature' label and `votes needed` label, and a Thumbs up emoji reaction
Bugs are open issues tagged with 'bug' label

— Sam Selikoff (@samselikoff) May 1, 2018