I found myself saying in a comment elsewhere that I was having trouble getting my writing mojo back. And it’s true! I’m inspired when I can’t sit down to write and when I can the inspiration seems to move on. What can you do? Well what I’m going to do is give you a bit of everything that’s happening:
The weather’s improving and it’s getting to be nice enough to ride. So up until Saturday when I took my bike to the shop for it’s annual servicing, I was getting back out on the road. I love the way it feels out in the world before the sun comes up. There are little or no drivers on the road and sometimes I’ll see a coyote or deer if I’m really lucky. Here are what they look like these days:
Bonus: if you get out for a pre-dawn ride, you can see the sunrise while you’re out. Check this photo out – it looks so quiet and peaceful (and it was!) but it’s also just a few km from a few different subway stations and that light you see off in the distance in the pink sky? That’s over Highway 401 in the stretch of what is North America’s busiest highway. There’s beauty everywhere, people.
I’ve been chipping away at “free” (read: you are the product) services. That often means paying a few bucks here and there. So now we’ve eliminated all of the crappy google results, AI summaries, promoted content and added the ability to filter out whole sites (like Amazon) from results. I’m doing this with Kagi. There is a subscription but it’s small and so worth it:
I’ve also helped Sage get further from big tech. She returned her iPhone to the company she leased it from and is now using an older Android phone. But I’ve “de-googled” it, removing all the google login requirements, tracking, ads and unnecessary software that companies like Samsung stick in your phone. The result is a privacy-focused phone that just has what she wants. For the curious I did it with GrapheneOS. Installing it was super easy with simple instructions and a web based interface.
Without Apple we lost our “Family Chat” on Messages. But don’t worry. I fixed that and improved it a bit. I installed Mattermost and self-hosted it on the same platform I host many other apps I self-host: Pikapods. Mattermost is great – it’s basically like Slack or MS Teams with multiple channels which we use for topics like requests for things people want me to cook, TV shows we want to watch (one channel for each combination: me/Sage, me/Daegan, all three of us, Sage/Daegan) and it’s been really fun. Bonus: No Apple AI, no training anyone else’s AI, no cost other than $1-2/month to host it.
People talk about it in a sinister way – and really the way it is being done is quite often sinister – but what I’m finding is that the classic “If the service is free, you are the product” is true. Of course it’s true – people have to pay to keep the lights on. It took a while for me to really fully grasp having come up in an Internet where it really was free, being mostly made up of universities subsidised by tuition and grants. Usenet and IRC servers cost money to run but usually were on a server in some university and few to no individuals had to pay for their upkeep. Programming of apps and maintenance of servers (and before that BBSes) were just a labour of love supported by occasional donations/memberships. So is it surprising that the apps we love today used by hundreds of millions are selling our data, drowning us in ads and maybe charging us too? Of course not. So where I can now I’m just spending the money to pay for the services I want – and so far that’s been excellent. Even this server you’re reading on now is self-hosted. It isn’t free at WordPress so there are no ads, and it’s not paid at WordPress so we pay a bit less (and it goes to a Canadian company). I do recognize that the result of this, though, is not unlike what happens with a paid healthcare system coexisting with a free one: two-tiered service where those who can afford it get the better service. I feel like I’m getting a much better Internet experience but I’m also having to pay for it which not everyone can do.
I’ve been doing lots of listening to music and it’s still algorithm-free which has changed the feel of what I listen to. I do sometimes miss just saying “Play something nice to cook dinner by” and seeing what comes but now that is coming more in the form of album listening. As I continue to take control of more of my data I have gathered my own statistics on my listening via my last.fm profile (anything I play gets tracked and has been for over 20 years). You can really see I have two settings lately: quiet music for reading, working or relaxing, and energetic music for moving about the world and exercise.
I’ve also been reading – I’ll share books in another post but meanwhile, here are some interesting articles I’ve read (another plug for free/self-hosted software: I find most of this in feeds I follow using a self-hosted FreshRSS Instance, read them offline and tag them as “Interesting” to share with you on Obsidian.
I love this story that many thought was just an urban legend. In 1981 a pediatrician saved a premature baby’s life. Thirty years later in 2011 that baby was a paramedic and saved the pediatrician who saved him. That story is here.
Did you know that the oldest living wild bird (that we know of) is 74-75 years old? They were banded in the 50s and tracked ever since – and they’re still going.
Have you all been following this nonsense with the Pope and the president? Need some inspiration about how Catholics have dealt with creeps in the past? Here’s a great story about how back in 1924, students from Notre Dame dealt with the KKK. Hint: some say this is where their nickname “Fighting Irish” came from.
I really liked this article: We all talk about limiting our, or our children’s screen time a lot these days. But what about screen space? Many of us remember what going on the Internet was in the 90s – there was one place to get it: one computer in one room whose connection had to be shared with anyone who wanted to make a phone call. That limited our time online. What about if we did the same now? That’s the gist of this article. This is also part of why Sage downgraded her phone. Where she could use the web, stream music or chat on WhatsApp or do anything an iPhone could do with nearly limitless data, now she has removed everything from her phone except for tools for text messaging, email, and voice calls. Want to take a photo? Get the digital camera out from her backpack. Need to make a note? Write it on her Hipster PDA – an elegantly simple tool: a stack of index cards.
By Teo – My New Hipster PDA with the SpacepenUploaded by McGeddon, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link
I’m not quite to that same level though lately I’ve been doing something similar. Before going out the door I tap my phone on one of these:
And then all of the distracting streaming short form video and social media apps are locked. My phone just sends messages and takes photos. While I am out I cannot disable this at all. To get access back I must go back home and tap on the brick again to unlock it. You can find out more about this or get your own here.
I’m not much of a fan of AI but man, the things it’s making us think and learn about ourselves is fascinating. Did you know that a woman recently had a funeral for her AI companion? That story is here.
And this one’s even stranger. A friend of mine hosts an in-person storytelling show and often says in the intro that they have done research on the brains of people hearing stories and that their brains “light up” when hearing the story in the same way that they would were they experiencing the story. Which is fascinating. I think some similar neuroscience is at play in this phenomenon where people start feeling like AI generated videos they’ve seen of themselves are actual memories. It feels like a Black Mirror episode. You can read that one here.
And speaking of Black Mirror, Sage and I just discovered a Korean show very much like it called SF8. We found the first episode a little strange and not so compelling but the second? So good!
What’s coming up for me? At this point I’m still in the planning stages – and I haven’t really gotten much past “Make another cup of coffee” at this point in the day. But I do have a couple of goals that are starting to congeal out of the mist:
First off, today I’m going to pick up my freshly serviced bike. The plan for this is to start daily rides (and filming – this somehow motivates me and I find them nice to watch when I am sick or when I’m trying to motivate myself to go out when inertia strikes). I’ll make it a bit more regimented with routes planned up front and mileage targets. This means likely 20-25 km/morning for a while and ramping up the distance on the weekends. The first big goal is to do the 200 km ride I bailed out on last spring. That’s tentatively planned for Victoria Day.
My bigger plan is to knock out a 300 km ride as well this year. At least one but possibly two in a row. I’m getting intrigued by ultracycling again and the idea of doing that planned 600 km trip to Montreal in two days not the original three I planned is exciting. Imagine being able to get to Montreal in two days. The fastest I’ve done it before was in 6 days so it’s a huge difference. VIA Rail continues to let me down with bike transport so I’ll probably have to plan for a return trip by bicycle too. We’ll see how fast I do that one. 1200km in four days? Who knows?
Can you tell I’ve been reading this?
Interesting story about the paediatrician and fire fighter. Good luck with your cycling plans this year.