In July 2023 I sat down to list every place my files lived. The list had eight entries - seven online storages and one line for “external volumes” - and at the bottom a checkbox: “Finish this list”. It stayed unchecked for three years, which tells you everything about the problem.
In the earlier post about reorganizing my digital life I described the big picture: the Data Map, the disk catalog, the new NAS. This one zooms in on the clouds, one by one.
I have always been a pack rat when it came to digital assets. I didn’t like the idea of deleting files. What if I want to come back to them later? After all, they don’t really take almost any physical space compared to paper books (certainly not now, in the age of multi-terabyte hard drives and the cloud). So what I did - I kept archiving them.
It started in the late ’80s and the ’90s with floppy disks, eventually migrated to external hard drives, CDs, DVDs and with the ascent of the cloud they ended up in a variety of various storage solutions.
Time to make checkpoint number 1 - it is day 11 of 30.
So far - out of this 11 days I have 10 days with commits. The missing day was fully dedicated to working on presentation and documentation, that unfortunately ends up Confluence and Google Doc, not in some proper textual format (read: Markdown or RestructuredText) backed by a repository.
Stuff that I worked on:
some minor updates to resume (added AWS badges, fixed some typos) notes from certification courses + code fragments scripts for automation of documents / ebooks backup from iCloud to local drives Most commits went to documentation / practice code for my project “Many ways to Kubernetes” where I play with building up K8s clusters using different approaches. So far I did the “Kubernetes the hard way” - following the course from Linux Academy (https://linuxacademy.com/cp/modules/view/id/221),
My work in last few years took my away from practical coding towards DevOps. Despite the increased role of IaaC in our DevOps, this often means living in iTerm and AWS console with interaction not being captured in any form.
On writing side, lots of my output shifted from code towards writing text in Wiki’s, GoogleDocs and more and more in Slack messages. The code I write are short one-liners or small scripts with very short life span. This makes me a bit sad as there is no sense of accomplishment at the end of the day or week. The git log does not work over Wiki, AWS console, iTerm, Slack and GoogleDrive.
Today’s blog of the day is a special one. It does not deal with cloud, DevOps or distributed systems. The theme of the blog is travel, life of digital nomad and observations on life from a perspective of a smart young woman, working as Online English teacher and travelling a lot while doing so - https://bookandtravel.blog/
What makes this blog dear and interesting to me is that it’s author is my daughter Silvia. What could make the blog interesting and valuable for other audience (especially those learning English who are interested in personal development) is the format of the entries - as they combine reading and language teaching. Each post contains 10-20 emphasized words or expressions that are explained in footnotes - check this one
Installed Google Wifi - three access points. Finally I have good coverage on both floors of the appartment including the upper terrace and will be able to work at night outside during hot summer nights when temperature does not drop under 25.
The setup was supereasy and iOS app is very well made and gives interesting insights.
Happy.
When git uses less as pager the output of commands like git log disappears from the console screen when you exit from less. This is not convenient in many cases so here is how to fix this.
Just for git commands:
git config --global --replace-all core.pager "less -iXFR" For less globally (including git) - add to .bashrc / .zshrc / etc:
export LESS=-iXFR The options we set for less are:
How to make screenshot from command line # platform-edc $ screencapture -i ~/Desktop/$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S).png libpng warning: zero length keyword libpng warning: Empty language field in iTXt chunk platform-edc $ screencapture ~/Desktop/A$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S).png libpng warning: zero length keyword libpng warning: Empty language field in iTXt chunk First one is “interactive” - Cmd-Shift-3 with selection tool, second is full screen
After being away for over 4 months, I am back on Twitter. No, I did not miss the stream of 160 character mixture of news, trivia, white noise and occasional nuggets. Three main reasons:
1) Twitter seems to to become unavoidable - more and more services assume that one has twitter account. Many cyberevents rules start with "retweet this" or "tweet that" which of course one cannot do without Twitter account
Few weeks ago, I canceled my Twitter account and stopped using Twitter altogether. I do not miss it at all.
The next vector of distraction to be brought under control is Facebook. This is a tougher nut to crack - because of wide variety of people in my circle of friends, Facebook plays many different roles.
It is a connection to old friends and colleagues from the old continent and old country. It is a family connection. It is a connection to people that are not on FB through their friends or relatives that are. It is a link to people I worked with and wanted to keep in touch. It is a link to people I share common interest with This variety creates a problem of itself (which is multiplied by English/non English division). Tool that does too many things, does not do them very well.