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The vibes are wretched.

p1k3 / 2025 / 1 / 7

It seems like I have left this thing on, probably against my better judgment.

The last time I posted here was an extended low-value ramble about a smartwatch, back in December. I kind of thought that might be the last last one before I just turned the server off for good.

I had this idea that I was going to start sending out a snailmail newsletter instead. I even collected some addresses. And, well. Maybe I’ll still do that. But it turns out that the basic operations of the United States Postal Service are among those things I’ve taken for granted my entire life that are now on pretty shaky ground. I feel a sort of anticipatory sense of futility and dread creeping into every part of my relationship to the machinery. It makes it hard to focus on what I might actually do.

I’ve been writing p1k3 since I was a teenager in the 1990s. Something like 28 years. A lot has happened in these three decades, stuff I think of as system-level events, big world-historical shit. I’ve tried more than once to write things in the mode of tracking or analyzing or confronting something like that. Or in the mode of persuading. The results have rarely been good, and looking back I’m suitably embarrassed.

But then here we are having one god damned system-level event on top of another. I haven’t been able to look away from the scroll for months now, and I’m pretty sure it’s actually killing me. I’m angry and full of loathing. My resting heart rate on the smartwatch looks like I’m 20 entirely sedentary years older. In the evenings I tend to drink and smoke with useless, instantly-regrettable abandon. My back hurts all the time from hunching over my desk. My eyes are so fuzzed out from the screens that I can barely focus to read anything by the end of the day.

p1k3 / 2025 / 3 / 24

It got hot early. A harbinger, maybe. Close to 90 a little to the east of here. 80-something here where there’s some mountain shade and running water. We had a few days of real rain, so it’s green, but I’m not sure how long it’ll last. The tree pollen is just ecstatically blasting itself onto every available surface. (Pollen: My eyes are burning, my nose runs constantly, I’m stupid and disoriented, it feels a little like I’ve been punched in the head at all times.)

Amongst the considerable dandelions and the grass doing its best to run riot while the water lasts: Domestic honey bees, a few flies, grasshoppers in some early instar that’s still a later one than I expect. The spiders are out. It still seems like things are… Missing. The fruit trees flowered abundantly, and at least with the apples it seems like they got pollinated, but it’s hard not to wonder. Everything is at least a little out of typical sync, but it’s hard to tell how much it matters from up close.

There are eerily, distressingly, few birds — some starlings, a few crows, a little slender hawk of some sort, a single enormous crane that flies back and forth over town in the late afternoons, one pissed-off bluejay (chased the hawk out of the yard a bit ago) — and I guess it’s probably because a lot of the birds are dead now. I haven’t seen a single hummingbird in the yard yet, though they’re usually here before the last snow. This place being the way it is, I don’t know that we’ve had our last snow, but it feels more likely than usual.

The headgate is open and the ditch is running, with surprisingly little incident. I’m half ready to fill my reservoir cube and start running drip irrigation off it, but the remaining half is going to be an effortful one.

I had plans to expand the deer fence around the garden and put in another raised bed. At this rate… Well, maybe in time for a late season planting. I won’t get it done this month.

I weeded and turned a couple of the existing raised beds with a potato fork and put in some starts. A tomato, a couple of peppers, a basil, a swiss chard and some collards. I scattered 5 year old spinach and chard seeds around the bed. Maybe some will start. There are volunteers: Fennel (suspect that, like the oregano, I’m going to have to kill vast quantities of this stuff every spring to keep it from taking over the entire yard for the rest of the time I live here), peas, onions, potatoes I clearly forgot to harvest in the fall, cat mint (DO NOT PLANT), feverfew (SAME). Survivors include sage that’s wintered over twice, now graduated from a handful of twigs to something you could reasonably describe as a bush, the aforementioned oregano, a little patch of lavender, a set of ragged strawberries originally transplanted from Kansas by way of Nebraska.

I don’t have ambitions about producing any food this year. I want to draw in the tiny native bees to something flowering, and pick herbs and aromatics to cook with. Maybe some greens.

p1k3 / 2025 / 5 / 13

"nothing gets you high like it used to"

i remember that conversation like it
just happened
sitting outside the king soopers with casey
at one of those rickety steel tables

there were ways i hadn't gotten
high yet, back then, but
the observation itself
has held up well all these
sixteen years, give or take

better than a lot of
what i once thought i knew

(better for that matter
than the knowing of a lot
i once really did)

p1k3 / 2025 / 5 / 1

tl;dr: These are incomplete notes on the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar, after a year and a half of regular wear. The Instinct 2 is a smartwatch, first released in 2022, that focuses on activity tracking and fitness. It has 5 buttons and a monochrome non-touch display. In many ways it feels like one of the digital watches of yore with a bunch of sensors added. Unexpectedly, I find a ton of utility in this device, and on the whole like it more than not. In line with expectations, I have major qualms about privacy, openness, and software quality. Also I’d like better documentation. If you work at Garmin, I have some thoughts.

• Wednesday, December 18, 2024
  • notes on the garmin instinct 2 solar
    • table of contents
    • background & motivations
    • the watch
    • case design, fit, appearance, etc.
    • display
    • power
    • durability
    • sensors
      • compass failures
    • software
      • on-device interface
      • mobile apps, etc.
      • gadgetbridge as an alternative
      • data syncing
    • some implications of this device
    • notes for garmin

I’m in my mid-40s and have had some health scares. I work a remote desk job, so sitting at computers is slowly destroying my body and mind. I don’t “train” much, but I do go on walks and bike rides, and spend a fair amount of time outdoors. I like watches and I wear them regularly, but I’ve been very resistant to the idea of a smartwatch in the full-on-networked-wrist-computer sense. Before the Garmin, I usually wore a Casio G-Shock (chonky old-school digital) or a Seiko 5 (a basic self-winding mechanical) any time I left the house.

I wanted to try measuring things like steps, sleep, and heart rate. For those purposes, I care more about relative magnitude and direction than absolute accuracy in numbers: Are things getting better or worse? Is something really anomalous, and does it seem like I’m getting dangerously worn down? How does measured sleep and movement line up with subjective well-being?

I’m leery of scorekeeping, metrics, and the quantified self. On the other hand, I once owned a bike computer that told me whether I was going faster or slower than my average. Paying attention to that made me a much faster rider. I wanted to experiment with similar feedback loops.

A couple of people I know had a Garmin and liked it. From reviews and forums, it seemed like it would mostly work as a standalone watch without pairing to the mobile app. A friend with a technical background had some luck pulling data off of the watch and said there was free tooling that could at least do limited things with it.

The Instinct 2 comes in multiple variants: 40mm, 45mm, and 50mm sizes, as well as standard and solar editions. There are a handful of color options (mostly gray or white). I got the 45mm solar one. I paid $450 in February of 2023, but it now lists for $400 and it seems like you can get one for $300 or so on sale.

I wrote some initial impressions after getting it:

• It seems well built.
• Button interface isn’t as honed as a Casio product, but also not that bad.
• Face looks decent.
• Garmin Connect is kind of terrible, wants a scary amount of permissions, wraps a whole SaaS with a login. I installed and registered an account, almost immediately uninstalled.
• Step counting seems wildly exaggerated.
• Heart rate’s interesting; very hard to know how accurate.
• You can get at files via USB. I tried opening an activity track with GPXSee, it works decently well. More detailed stuff… Well, I’m not sure.

The rest of this document is broken into somewhat arbitrary sections.

It’s likely you have seen this watch in the wild. (If you know anyone who casually runs marathons or has a favorite Linux distribution, check their wrist.) It’s like a lot of models of mid-tier crossover sport utility vehicles: Unless you own one, you probably haven’t noticed it. On the scale of ugly digital watches, this barely registers. The overall vibe here is “utilitarian in a cargo pants or mildly-uncool running shoes kind of way”. It’s a bit like something Casio would have made before exaggerated versions of the G-Shock became a streetware / fashion / collectible thing, but larger, more rounded, and less 1980s. I bought this at an REI, and it very much looks like I bought it at an REI.

This is, to be clear, a chonker of a watch. It’s big enough to make my Casio GW-5600J feel streamlined. My kitchen scale says it weighs 51.5 grams (with its current strap), which is actually a touch less than the G-Shock or the Seiko 5, but it’s certainly noticeable on a wrist.

Giant watches are the norm now, so there’s nothing unusual about the size. That said, I still don’t love it. It gets stuck under shirt sleeves and jacket cuffs, and occasionally caught on stuff in the environment. If I were doing it over, I might get the 40mm version even at the expense of some battery life.

The band is silicone rubber, stretchy and fairly robust, but it won’t do well with some chemical exposures (more about that in a later section).

There’s an optical sensor on the back that has to make contact with the wrist for (at least) heart rate and pulse oximetry, so it won’t take a standard NATO strap replacement. That said, the spring bars on the default strap are extremely beefy and so far I haven’t managed to pop it off my wrist.

I tend to wear other watches loosely enough for them to move a bit on my wrist, and I think I’m often wearing this one looser than it really wants for the heart rate sensor to work optimally. It’s not the most comfortable watch I’ve ever worn, but I’ve gotten used to it enough that I wear it for large parts of the day and usually go to bed with it on.

The display is monochrome, readable in direct sunlight, and has enough resolution to display little graphs for various sensors. It compares pretty favorably to classic LCD watch faces. This is almost exactly what I want out of this kind of device. Highly readable, not visually distracting.

The watch faces can be customized, both at the level of choosing an overall layout and by selecting individual widgets to display on them. For a rough idea of information density, my current watch face is set to show heart rate with a little graph, local time with seconds, date, step count, time in UTC, and local sunrise/sunset times.

{a picture could go here}

There’s a backlight that can either be activated with the upper left button, or set to turn on with a gesture (tilting your wrist to look at the watch, essentially). After years of G-Shock use, I expected to prefer the gesture thing, but it’s aggressive about activating and I kept accidentally lighting it up in darkened rooms.

The battery life on this thing is a pleasant surprise. It will frequently report remaining life around a month after a fresh charge. In practice, I wind up charging it every couple of weeks, although it’d be a lot more often if I were routinely recording GPS tracks or using the pulse ox feature.

I really like the idea of the solar charging. I’m not sure how much difference it makes in practice, although it seems like if you were stuck off-grid and put the watch in low-power mode, you could keep it limping along for quite a while. This is one of those things that I look for in just about any class of battery-powered watch despite knowing that it constrains the search space in fairly limiting ways. It just seems neat.

Both charging and data transfer are done with a USB cable that plugs into a connector with 4 exposed pins on the back of the case. I haven’t found a name for this, but Garmin apparently uses it on quite a few devices. Replacement cables from Garmin seem expensive, although you can get third-party ones that are reported to work fine. As a general rule I’m mad about weird proprietary connectors, but the physical design here is at least defensible on a watch that’s already plenty big and bound to get wet. Based on other wearables I’ve seen lately, this is an area where there ought to be a standard.

{a picture could go here}

Things I do that seem well within the designed uses of this watch:

• Wear during most daily activities
• Bike, hike, run, snowshoe, etc.
• Tube and wade in a creek
• Camp
• Garden
• Cook

Things I don’t usually do that might affect its life:

• Wear it into the shower
• Wear it while painting, staining, sanding, etc.
• Go swimming (I don’t swim, if I did maybe I’d keep the watch on)
• Work for a living (I touch computers most days; fixing cars or building houses or farming would subject any watch-like object to a lot more violence)

Things I have done that I fully expected to kill the watch:

• Spill half a gallon of gasoline on it
• Wear it for ~9 days continuously at Burning Man, and during a bunch of associated prep work and cleanup
• Press quite a few gallons of apple cider from scratch

After the gasoline, the original band developed something of an unpleasant, tacky, returning-to-goo texture and nothing I tried would get the strong gas odor out of it. (Additionally, one of the buttons seems more likely to trigger accidentally now, so I can imagine that a seal or something there was affected. I’m not aware of any changes to sensor behavior, but it’s possible that something took damage.)

I tried to order a replacement band directly from Garmin (40 bucks) and they repeatedly canceled my order for no obvious reason, so I wound up buying a handful of aftermarket ones from strapsco.com. These were cheap, but the quality isn’t great. Their “Endurance Strap for Garmin Instinct” does approximate the original, with rougher details and slightly worse materials.

I should be careful to note that taking it to the burn hasn’t killed it yet. Playa dust has an ability to stain, clog, infiltrate, and corrode that’s hard to fully convey, and sometimes things will seem fine only to fail months later.

I haven’t actively set out to destroy this watch, but I also didn’t expect it to survive this long. Again, I’m pleasantly surprised.

There are a bunch of functions on here, including at least:

• Heartrate
• Sleep tracking
• Thermometer
• Barometer
• Altimeter (via the barometer)
• “Storm detection” (barometer again)
• Compass
• Step tracking
• Pulse ox
• GPS, GLONASS, Galileo
• Solar intensity

Of these, the heartrate, sleep, and step counters feel like the most day-to-day interesting. Step count seemed high to me at first, but seems mostly in-line with reality after regular use. It can be thrown off by motions that aren’t actually walking, but seems at least directionally correct.

I’m not really sure what to do with the temperature value. I have a sense of what ambient air temperature means, and likewise for internal body temperature, but this sits somewhere awkwardly in between and thus doesn’t feel like it connects to much.

The storm alerts have become a running joke in my household. Occasionally one will fire due to an actual change in the weather, but most of the time it’s an indicator that we’re driving up or down a mountain or have taken an elevator.

The pulse ox is fiddly, and sometimes reads lower than I’d expect. I haven’t checked it against a dedicated device, let alone a known-good medical-grade one, but I have my suspicions about its utility.

The GPS (and related systems) need a clear view of the sky, but work acceptably well for recording a track or a point. This isn’t a standalone navigation system in the vein of a dedicated GPS or Google Maps on your phone, but it can record pretty good data for later use and has a basic display for tracks that could be useful in a pinch.

I had never gotten the standalone compass to give me an accurate reading in the field, despite repeated attempts at calibration that sometimes seemed to succeed. Maybe, I thought, I’m holding it wrong.

Eventually I found a long thread on the Garmin forums about the compass being unreliable because the springbars holding the strap on are sometimes magnetized.

That seems like a pretty basic design flaw. I’d be a lot more impressed if Garmin fully owned up to it instead of deflecting and implying user error, but I have to give them some credit: They mailed me a new set of springbars, apparently unmagnetized, and the compass now seems to work. I still don’t really trust it, given the failure mode, but at least I know what it is.

This took a little while to get used to. The controls aren’t placed where I expected them after decades of Timex and Casio digitals. Although there are conventions used throughout, there’s a strong feeling of modality to some of the basic features that has to be learned, and there’s a “single quick press” navigation layer as vs. a long press to access things like settings, activity recording, and timers that wasn’t super clear at first.

These are minor complaints. A bigger problem is that the whole thing leans a little too hard on menu diving, and tucks basic features like setting the time manually behind a weird number of clicks (hold middle left button with the embossed “MENU” until you get a menu, click down until you hit “System”, click into “Time”, change “Set Time” to manual, change “Time”). Sometimes, as when recording a new activity, you just have to wait for the current mode to take effect. You get used to this stuff, and I’m grateful for how much is accessible directly on the watch, but at least some of the menus could be streamlined or combined. A few should clearly be first-class functions in the main interface.

With all that out of the way, this is good software. It does an admirable job providing snapshot visualizations of recent sensor data. It’s discoverable, feature-rich, easy to customize, and can be used without pairing the watch to a phone.

It feels like someone at Garmin had my Luddite-ass use case in mind.

(There are even some real grace notes: The little carousel menu thing for some of the utility features, the cheerful “morning report” with its platitudes about going out and seizing the day that I initially hated but have grown to feel a certain affection for. The moon phase and sunrise/sunset times.)

I’ve used other Garmin hardware, so I knew this was not likely to be a strong point. As it turns out, you probably need multiple apps to access everything the watch offers. On an Android device I think that means: Garmin Connect for health monitoring data, Garmin Explore for maps, and Garmin Connect IQ™ Store for installing new apps or watch faces. Don’t hold me to that, though: The whole situation is deeply confusing and there’s overlap between what different apps offer.

The Garmin apps I’ve tried are unified in their mediocrity, and sometimes basic features like syncing data with the watch just seem to lock up. The main thing about the software, though, is that I absolutely do not trust it. I don’t want my location data and health info stored on yet another poorly-secured corporate cloud, I’m not looking for social features, and I’m trying not to add more vendor lock-in to my daily life. I think you can nominally keep data on-device, but the way the apps require account creation and a log-in, and how they’re clearly pushing a sharing-by-default agenda — well, that’s enough for me.

I did try Garmin Connect for about a month out of curiosity. There were three things I wound up missing when I uninstalled it:

• The “find my phone” feature. A godsend. I bet I’ve used this twice a week since noticing it.
• Messaging alerts. I didn’t think I’d care about this at all, but it saves so many direct interactions with the phone.
• Automatic setting of the time (when it works). You wouldn’t think this would stand out as a problem, but see above re: menu diving.

I am thus forced to admit that a watch-shaped object as a sidecar device for a phone has useful properties.

So, I guess the actually-maintained, local-only FOSS thing for this is Gadgetbridge. I had to install it via F-Droid. I won’t oversell this. It is the kind of hobbyist project that you probably expect. It contains some jank, it definitely doesn’t do everything, and installation requires that you trust a different third party. That said, it took care of my desired features. Phone finding and time setting actually seem to work better than with the official apps.

You can plug this thing into a USB port, mount it as a drive, and pull data off in file formats that are at least somewhat documented. This feels like the bare minimum, but it’s better than nothing and does at least a little to future-proof using this for data collection, route mapping, etc.

People have built tooling around Garmin’s formats, albeit not with the features of the official apps. See for example GPXSee.

I haven’t really gone down this particular rabbithole yet. It might or might not reward the effort.

In no particular order:

• Yeah, ok, so watch-shaped wrist computers are useful.
• It feels like a safe bet there are going to be more and more smartwatches. It’s less clear whether this kind of watch-shaped wrist computer will remain widely available, or if it’s a temporary aberration.
• Insurance companies have got to be just losing their minds over the possibilities for doing evil shit with data like this.
• Having this linked to a phone is useful. Unfortunately, it also means having one more bluetooth gadget to be tracked by basically all of the other phones in the world.
• This feels pretty durable, and I’m impressed at how it’s held up. But is it repairable when it breaks? Will it last a decade or more? I have my doubts. The amount of watch hardware going into landfills by now must be pretty staggering.

You’re so very close on this one, and I think by extension probably other chunks of your ecosystem.

The watch itself is Pretty Good, and as a system it almost respects the agency of a user who doesn’t want a trust relationship with your telemetry and databases. Why not offer a product that fully and deliberately respects that user?

“Trust us!” is the default posture of any entity in the position of hoovering up and retaining user data. As consumers of self-surveillance devices that phone home to corporate servers, we’re meant to assume both benevolence (or at least a lack of active malice) and competence. Nothing in the history of our experience with companies who run databases supports either of those assumptions. No company is (or stays, over time) good enough in an ethical sense to avoid doing malign things with user data. No company is (or stays, over time) good enough in a technical sense to avoid having data stolen.

What if you provided local-first tools for working with the data, opened up the code, supported more community efforts, tried harder to define stable APIs and data formats?

I won’t belabor the point.

tags: garmin, technical, watches

p1k3 / 2024 / 12 / 18

Links:

• wrt related entries here on p1k3
• wrt on CPAN as App::WRT
• wrt repo on code.p1k3.com
• wrt mirrored on GitHub

It’s been nearly a year since I released a version of wrt, the tool I use for publishing this site from a collection of flat files. I hacked on it for a while late in 2019, and got somewhere in the neighborhood of a 7.0.0 release before getting sidetracked by illness, a fried computer, and holiday travel.

I checked on the state of the code last night and realized I’d left a bunch of changes dangling and had mostly lost track of the mental state I’d built up around my plans. I even had a release blog post mostly written. I went ahead and cleaned up a few obvious loose ends and published a release, which I’ll now attempt to describe.

Minor stuff: There’s some refactoring, improvement here and there of how things outside of ASCII are handled, and probably a slightly better test suite (it’s still abysmal, though).

I decided a while ago that wrt should know what an entry’s title is, so that it can be used to do things like populate <title> tags, display navigation links for each entry, or generate an index for a site. I was already doing some of those things, on an ad hoc basis, but I wanted a general solution. Before this version, an entry like today’s would have been made up of the following files:

• archives/2020/4/5/index
• archives/2020/4/5/tag-wrt.prop
• archives/2020/4/5/tag-technical.prop
• archives/2020/4/5/tag-perl.prop

Where index contains the body of the entry for the 5th, and tag-wrt.prop says that the entry has been tagged “wrt”. The .prop extension indicates a “property”, and right now it just represents a boolean or a flag - either an entry has a property or it doesn’t.

I considered adding values to properties, based on the contents of the file, and then using title.prop to specify an entry’s overall title. So, for example, 2020/4/5/title.prop would have contained the string “App::WRT 7.0.0 …”.

It was easy to implement this, and it worked, but I wasn’t happy with it as a user. I like to change entry titles as I’m writing, and I sometimes have more than one top-level heading, or a set of subheadings in an entry that I’d like the title logic to capture. I’ve also never bothered teaching wrt to display any kind of a page / date header separately from the text of an entry, and entry titles are typically just represented with inline header tags. It seemed weird to duplicate the title into another file.

Since keeping titles in separate files is cumbersome, the other obvious option is getting them out of the body of the entry itself. wrt now does this by rendering the HTML for every entry in the archive and parsing it with a library called Mojo::DOM, then extracting the text of tags <h1> through <h6> into a title cache which can be queried later.

Out of laziness, I started adding this feature by storing the rendered HTML for each entry in memory, and accidentally discovered that by doing so I can avoid rendering most entries at least twice - once for an individual date and once for the display of every entry in a month, with a handful additionally showing up on the index page and in feeds.

As a downside, this is really slow for an operation like rendering a single entry. But at least displaying an entry can reference data extracted from all the other entries.

I feel a bit queasy about loading thousands of blog entries into memory at once in order to display any given one of them. But in thinking about it, I’m pretty sure it would have worked fine even on the machine I used to write the first version of wrt (originally called display.pl), circa 2001. In 2019 I guess I don’t really have a problem assuming that the systems I use for this will have at least half a gig of RAM. It would probably be good if wrt adjusted its behavior for really constrained environments, but my gut says that even a low end laptop or cheap shared hosting shouldn’t be too affected by this.

I’ve been using, as mentioned above, property files named like tag-foo.prop to add tags to p1k3 entries and display them on a topic index. This was partially supported (if undocumented) in wrt, but mostly made up of ad hoc stuff in the Makefile that generates p1k3.

Although it’s still not really documented and probably has lingering issues, this release of wrt now fully supports a similar scheme, where the filenames become something like:

• archives/2020/4/5/index → index
• archives/2020/4/5/tag-wrt.prop → tag.topics.wrt.prop
• archives/2020/4/5/tag-technical.prop → tag.topics.technical.prop
• archives/2020/4/5/tag-perl.prop → tag.topics.perl.prop

A property file starting with tag is treated as a link between the entry containing it and another entry path with dots as directory separators, so tag.topics.wrt.prop tags /2020/4/5 as related in some way to /topics/wrt. If /topics/wrt exists in the archive, it’ll be rendered like usual followed by a list of tagged entries. If it doesn’t exist, it’s treated as a “virtual” entry and the tag list still renders.

This is kind of confusing, but it allows for an arbitrary number of user-defined tagging schemes.

wrt 7 uses JSON::Feed to output JSON Feed data in addition to Atom feeds.

I’m not really sure how many feedreaders support this format, but it was relatively painless to implement, and at least NewsBlur seems to handle it.

wrt repl in a repository root will now yield a simple commandline where you can interactively inspect the App::WRT object. Handy for development purposes, more than anything.

I removed entry_map from configuration and hardcoded its assumptions about how entries are laid out. This is a major change if you were using it, but I’d be even more surprised if anyone had been than I already would be if anyone were using wrt in the first place. (As always, if I’m wrong, please do let me know.)

I got rid of the embedded_perl toggle, since turning it off would have broken templates. (The underlying embedded Perl feature is still in place, though I may deprecate it in future. It really shouldn’t be used for anything besides templates.)

The old (undocumented) tagging system has been ripped out and replaced, as described above.

Since it uses Mojo::DOM to parse the HTML of rendered entries, wrt will now issue warnings for parsing errors. For the most part, I don’t think this will break anything, but it may surface stuff like character encoding issues. It led to me noticing that I had some 20-year-old entries originally written in… Well, something that definitely wasn’t UTF-8, at any rate.

Apart from improving and fully documenting the tagging system, I’d like to spend some time making sure wrt could actually be used by someone else without the scaffolding and assumptions built into the one site where I routinely use it. My thought right now is to build a manual published with wrt itself. We’ll see how that goes, I guess.

In some ways this release feels a little shaky. It’s got ideas in it that deviate from the stark simplicity of most of this code’s history, and it brings the total of external library dependencies to 16, at least a couple of which are non-trivial. Mojo::DOM in particular makes me a bit nervous.

On the other hand, it adds a couple of things I’ve wanted for years, and some of the underlying changes are a good foundation for solving the problems that remain. I continue to think of wrt as both a format for storing writing and a concrete implementation of a tool for publishing that format. For what they are, I’m happy with both.

(Elsewhere: I’m thinking hard about how I take notes and conduct research, how doomed the web generally feels as a platform, and what language ecosystems I want to spend my remaining time as a programmer in. All of that might influence future extensions to the wrt format, or lead to implementations in something besides Perl. Time will tell.)

tags: perl, technical, wrt

p1k3 / 2020 / 4 / 5

Previously: org mode, vimwiki, timeslice.

Mechanisms inspired directly by: A demo & talk from Lars Wirzenius on his ikiwiki-based external brain and journal; fediverse discussion of the Org mode agenda; and possibly too much reading about the Zettelkasten.

Back in March, in the throes of a bunch of rabbitholing about note-taking, I roughed out a system for keeping short, granular log entries in my VimWiki. I agonized for quite a while about how to do this before deciding to start with the stupidest thing that could possibly work.

The short version is that I have a hotkey to create datestamped files in a log/ directory, like these:

./vimwiki/log/2021-01-04-2033-33.wiki
./vimwiki/log/2021-01-04-1719-51.wiki
./vimwiki/log/2021-01-04-1516-18.wiki
./vimwiki/log/2021-01-04-0914-03.wiki
./vimwiki/log/2021-01-04-0142-59.wiki

A new entry opens with a template like the following:

%date 2021-01-04 21:46:40.056011313-07:00
%title

I then give the entry a human-readable title, links to relevant topics, and as much text description as seems useful. A typical entry looks something like:

%date 2020-12-11 16:49:51.356943342-07:00
%title Configuring digiKam again

[[/configuration]] [[/photos]] [[/digikam]]

Digging around in the guts of an old `digikam4.db`.  Changed the album root to
point to the new path in `~/workspace/photos`.

Then, when I’m viewing a topic page like digikam or photos, I can press another hotkey to pull up a window with any linked log entries. When I’m viewing the diary page for a given day, a bit of shell boilerplate shows me all the log entries for that date.

❉

I’ve elaborated on this all a bit since March, but the underpinnings are still just a few hundred lines of hacky scripting and Vim configuration. Before I put any work into cleaning it up, I thought I’d try to outline some stuff I’ve learned.

I’ll use the time-honored form of “answers to questions no one has actually asked me”:

Why a log? Because in taking notes, I’m worried about two dimensions: Subject matter and time. A single flat wiki namespace can be workable for navigating the who/what/where, but it’s lousy for navigating the when.

I’ve also spent a lot of my life keeping logbooks, looking at logfiles on computers, writing a journal, and publishing a datestamped blog. At Wikimedia, I’ve been particularly impressed by how useful the server admin logs are, and I pretty much live and die by command-line history and bookmarks. It’s a notion with an overwhelming amount of precedent in my life.

What distinguishes a log entry from any other wiki page? Its placement in the log/ namespace and a handful of formatting conventions.

Was this actually a good way to approach the problem? Yeah, I think so, with caveats.

Is the implementation sound? Not by miles, but it holds up better than I expected. Eventually the flat directory structure will get cumbersome in the shell, and grepping through files like I’m doing some places might get less practical.

How are the ergonomics? Not that bad, but there should be as few keystrokes as possible involved in writing a new entry, and this doesn’t quite cut it.

What’s a good fit for this kind of log entry? Finding a new piece of software, writing a letter, taking notes on a meeting, setting up or decommissioning a piece of gear, finishing a book, garden/yard work, house and vehicle maintenance, phone calls, general life events, sysadmin work, etc.

What’s not? The single thing I’ve done the most of that probably makes the least sense in this format is logging individual expenses and financial transactions. This has been useful enough to convince me that tracking what I’m doing with money is a good idea, but clunky enough that I’ve learned stuff like “paid the mortgage” and “bought groceries” should be structured, query-able data. The most that I have to bash out with a keyboard in that context should be an annotation on a specific record or group of records. That’s not to say I’m thrilled at the prospect of keeping a rigorous double-entry ledger that balances out for every transaction in my life, but I can see the appeal in a way I couldn’t really before.

This generalizes I guess: A lot of the history I care about lives in structured, formal-ish systems like version control, banking, various databases — and other parts of it should. Like sometimes I log specific weather events, but usually when I want to know about weather in the past, what I’d really like is a way to quickly aggregate a bunch of data points.

That points at two categories of “log entry”: The loosely-typed human-readable kind that make sense as wiki pages, and the granular, highly-structured and repetitive kind that make more sense in something like a database table. Then there’s a third that doesn’t quite fit in either box. Sometimes I paste a lengthy shell transcript into a log entry, for example, and while that’s more or less fine, it points at a gap in the tools I use. It would be way nicer just to push a button when I’m doing something in the terminal that it’s important to remember exactly, and then it can record until I tell it to stop and let me add some tags and a summary to the session.

So what next? Well, I’ve arrived at something I’m going to keep using. I’d miss it if I quit, and it’s easy to accumulate a useful record this way. I might clean up the mess a bit and package its components as a VimWiki addon. After that, I’m going to spackle more stupidest-things-that-could-possibly-work on top to augment it, and think about more ways to surface and integrate other parts of the meta-log that are scattered all over the systems I use.

tags: data, logging, notes, technical, vimwiki

p1k3 / 2021 / 1 / 4

Links:

• related entries on p1k3
• on CPAN as App::WRT
• on code.p1k3.com
• mirrored on GitHub

Despite the bump in major version number, this one is mostly a bugfix release. A hypothetical user wouldn’t notice many changes, but I’m rearranging things further in a direction I started on a year ago, abstracting interaction with the underlying directory structure to a class that caches the full set of entries and some metadata about them. More on this in the latest commit message.

This kind of change has gotten easier as I’ve added more tests, even if the tests themselves are sort of ridiculous, which is a useful lesson.

As I wrote last year:

This was an interesting way to kill some time, both because I revisited an algorithm I’d forgotten about, and because every time I hack on a project like this I’m in a dialog with basic decisions I made before I knew how to write software at all. And maybe, by the same token, looking with fresh eyes at norms that I’d take for granted in any more modern context. wrt isn’t a good piece of software by any contemporary standard, and the approach it represents isn’t one I’d use for anything bigger than a trivial shell script at my day job, but there’s a curious durability to it all the same.

Every few years I revisit some facet of this tiny, mundane tool and apply a bit of understanding I lacked when it was first written, and some structure comes a little clearer that lives in the space between my ignorance at 20 and my experience, such as it is, at whatever age I’ve reached.

tags: perl, technical, wrt

p1k3 / 2019 / 5 / 7

Back in 2016, I wanted to check the names of existing command-line utilities in order to avoid a collision when I renamed my blogging software to wrt.

I wound up using apt-file data to see what binaries are available from Debian packages, and I’ve referenced the list of files I generated then a bunch of times since. It’s obviously way out of date by now, and today I had a similar question to answer, so here’s a scripted version of that process that worked on my current machine, running Debian Buster:

#!/bin/sh

# Make sure we've got apt-file and lz4 compression utils:
sudo apt install apt-file lz4

# Update lists:
sudo apt-file update

cd /var/lib/apt/lists
lz4cat ./*.lz4 | \
  grep -E '^(usr/bin/|sbin/|bin/)' | \
  cut -f1 -d' ' | \
  perl -pe 's/^(.*)\/(.*)$/$2/' | \
  sort | uniq > ~/used_names.txt

Then you can grep whatever ~/used_names.txt to look for binaries.

The main difference here is that the contents lists are now in /var/lib/apt/lists, as LZ4-compressed files named like deb.debian.org_debian_dists_buster_main_Contents-amd64.lz4.

I haven’t taken the time to investigate whether this data is still just loaded for apt-file’s benefit or is in some way more integrated with apt or what. Maybe I’ll revisit at some point.

Today’s used_names.txt is attached to this post just in case it’s helpful to people coming in from web search.

more: used_names.txt

tags: apt, debian, shell, technical

p1k3 / 2020 / 2 / 25

$ dict wildering
2 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Wilder \Wil"der\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Wildered}; p. pr. & vb.
     n. {Wildering}.] [Akin to E. wild, Dan. forvilde to bewilder,
     Icel. villr bewildered, villa to bewilder; cf. AS. wildor a
     wild animal. See {Wild}, a., and cf. {Wilderness}.]
     To bewilder; to perplex.
     [1913 Webster]

           Long lost and wildered in the maze of fate. --Pope.
     [1913 Webster]

           Again the wildered fancy dreams
           Of spouting fountains, frozen as they rose. --Bryant.
     [1913 Webster]

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Wildering \Wild"er*ing\, n. (Bot.)
     A plant growing in a state of nature; especially, one which
     has run wild, or escaped from cultivation.
     [1913 Webster]

tags: dict

p1k3 / 2019 / 7 / 3

outside my back window leaves swirl in the wind
and the streetlight over the alley flicks on
against the sky pale blue and pink

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2019 / 10 / 22

tags: cat, gallery

p1k3 / 2019 / 10 / 27

The prequel: On the one hand, a narrative frame within which storytelling that nominally coheres with its source material is usually flattened, trivialized, and robbed of any sense of freedom or possibility. A sure-fire antidote to the sense of expansiveness or openness that once attended a big story.

On the other hand, a frame which typically renders efforts at revelation and expansion totally incoherent.

But: Donald Glover does a heck of a good Lando.

tags: movies, star-wars, watching

p1k3 / 2020 / 1 / 7

I’m sitting in an airport bar at roughly 11am after my employer’s annual all-hands meeting in San Francisco. I have just paid $15 for avocado toast (which was pretty good) and I am carefully not thinking about how much for a mediocre bloody mary.

SFO is science fictional as fuck, in the way that modern airports along the money’s path tend to be. Automated trains along elevated tracks. Concrete shapes that would work on the cover of some trade paperback featuring a slightly abstracted spaceport. People in face masks because the network made them afraid of a potential pandemic. In the distance out the windows, through the fog slowly burning off, the surface of California’s engineered vastness.

A year ago:

Downtown SF in 2019: A grotesque and surreal environment. Gleaming towers, all the trappings of an unfathomable wealth, the sidewalks and doorways scattered with people in the throes of debilitating addiction and untreated mental illness. You’re quickly socialized to ignore the screaming and step around the bodies and assume that someone else will attend to it if this or that figure sprawled out across the pavement is dead instead of merely unconscious.

This hasn’t changed, as far as I can tell. Maybe it’s worse.

I usually try to travel light these days. A backpack with some changes of clothes, a laptop, a notebook and some pens, toothbrush and some laundry soap for the hotel sink. But of course the lightness of these habits is mostly a fiction, apart from the convenience of skipping baggage claim in airports. What I’m really carrying is ready access to credit and enough social capital to get me through any very likely situation, along with a home in a prosperous and stable region, white skin, a steady job, health insurance, and all the rest of it.

Self-flagellation about having good shit in life seems like a pointless exercise, but I’m aware these days of what feels like a divide becoming a chasm between me and the set of people tending bar, waiting tables, driving for Uber.

The threat of precarity is real for nearly all of us, but it isn’t evenly distributed. Like most people, I’m one bad hospitalization away from financial ruin. In relative terms I also have a hell of a lot more buffer than it’s likely the guy who made my drink does. As long as I stay lucky and stay useful to some slice of the technocracy, that’ll probably stay true. There’s a feeling of sickness in knowing these things. In the movie of my life, it’s something dissonant and droning swelling on the soundtrack while I bullshit my way through these paragraphs on an expensive laptop in a gleaming airport.

tags: airports, california, san-francisco

p1k3 / 2020 / 2 / 1

the old cat snoozes in his bed
i sit at my desk, wrapped up in the
immediate confusion of code and
the remote-for-now thrum of pandemic anxiety
suddenly a shadow breaks the sunlight
blazing from just above the hills through
the grime on my back windows
wondering what in the hell,
i stand in time to see a pair of enormous
crows swooping down to pause on the dead
grass

tags: birds, corvidae, poem

p1k3 / 2020 / 3 / 3

We start the day somewhere after noon with a Bloody Mary each and egg-and-cheese sandwiches on English muffins. The bloodies are from a store-bought bottle of mix, but I doctor the mix with homemade hot sauce and the eggs are bartered farm eggs, so in terms of authenticity it could be worse.

Outside: Blue skies, a breeze out of the south, a little chill but warm enough if you’re moving around. We start cleaning up around the shed we plan to tear down out back, moving piles of scrap wood and old brick and rocks to different corners of the property. There are often slugs, snails, or earthworms on the undersides of these objects. No mosquitoes yet, but here and there you see little clouds of gnats. Patches of boxelder bugs mill around where the sun warms a wall or fence.

There was snow yesterday. Today the grass is half-green, through the shag of last fall’s final growth. There are buds on the apple tree. I uncover my strawberry patch and find that most of the plants have survived under the mulch.

Later, after dinner, I start a batch of bread dough for tomorrow’s baking. This will make a week since I picked it up again, after better than a decade out of the habit. The no-knead approach where you let it sit overnight has a lot to recommend it, for a man as lazy as I am.

We try not to read the news.

tags: bread, colorado, food, garden, weather

p1k3 / 2020 / 3 / 28

I learned how to dial on a rotary phone. Listen for the dial tone. Put a finger in the hole over the number you want, turn it ‘til it stops, and let it roll back. Listen to the clicks. Repeat.

In the 90s, when half of what my dad seemed to do for a living was an elaborate resource allocation game conducted in the menu trees of corporate voicemail systems, he had this gadget that would play touch tones into the handset so you could use the old rotary phones that were still littered all over the landscape. The kind of technical ephemera that you get as one kind of network thrashes its way towards becoming another thing altogether.

If you’d told me back then that I’d mourn fundamental qualities of that phone system (with its by-the-minute long-distance charges and 14.4 modems) in a time when I have access to hundreds of computers and an always-on Internet connection, I’m not sure what I would have thought.

My parents got rid of their landline earlier this year. I don’t think they would have, necessarily, but the service had degraded beyond usability by the time they finally gave up on it. For a while there, it’d go out completely if it rained enough. There was strange crackling on the line, and finally just an error tone of some sort when you tried to dial in. This is how the old world dies: Piece by piece, quietly, at the edges, a decade or three after the fact of its obsolescence.

(I wrote a draft of this fragment a month ago, and looking through my bookmarks I guess it must have been prompted by reading “A Longing for the Lost Landline”, which is exactly the sort of NYT opinion piece you’d expect from the title.)

tags: phone

p1k3 / 2020 / 4 / 13

Interior States: Essays, Anchor Books, 2018.

An essay collection by Meghan O'Gieblyn, picked up after a friend linked me to one of the included essays, “Dispatch from Flyover Country”:

Many of our friends who grew up here now live in Brooklyn, where they are at work on “book-length narratives.” Another contingent has moved to the Bay Area and made a fortune there. Every year or so, these west-coasters travel back to Michigan and call us up for dinner or drinks, occasions they use to educate us on the inner workings of the tech industry. They refer to the companies they work for in the first person plural, a habit I have yet to acculturate to. Occasionally they lapse into the utopian, speaking of robotics ordinances and brain-computer interfaces and the mystical, labyrinthine channels of capital, conveying it all with the fervency of pioneers on a civilizing mission. Being lectured quickly becomes dull, and so my husband and I, to amuse ourselves, will sometimes play the rube. “So what, exactly, is a venture capitalist?” we’ll say. Or: “Gosh, it sounds like science fiction.” I suppose we could tell them the truth—that nothing they’re proclaiming is news; that the boom and bustle of the coastal cities, like the smoke from those California wildfires, liberally wafts over the rest of the country. But that seems a bit rude. We are, after all, Midwesterners.

O'Gieblyn comes from somewhere I half know — a life unlike mine but also not that many degrees off of it: The definite Midwest rather than the ambiguous Plains states of its western edge; evangelical Christianity rather than conservative Lutheranism and rural Methodism; homeschooling like I watched shape friends; an academic/literary path I didn’t go down.

As I went through the book, I realized I’d read a few of the included pieces before, somewhere on the internet, usually with a sense of recognition for their subject matter. These are good essays. It occurs to me that reading them from a place of immediate recognition (I, too, saw Carman in front of a packed house on a mid-90s tour) probably isn’t quite like reading them in the New Yorker as someone who grew up on a coast and feels a vague anthropological interest in the in-between places. I suppose that kind of reader is closer to who these are written for, but it’s to the author’s credit that they still work if you’ve spent time inside the frames they discuss.

tags: essays, michigan, reading, religion

p1k3 / 2020 / 10 / 9

A novel by the author of Zazen, a book I first read back in 2012. At the time, you could read the whole thing on the web, which I did, clicking through until the end. I then bought the paperback and read it again.

I got to Zazen by way of a MetaFilter thread on “The Truck Stop Killer”, a long piece she wrote for GQ drawing on her experiences hitchiking as a teenager and a bunch of research into serial killers. It’s probably one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read.

The Great Offshore Grounds is a book you can tell didn’t come easy to write, and although it’s not a slow read, it’s also not exactly an easy one. Scenes in here will stick with me for a long time. Recommended.

(Veselka, Vanessa. The Great Offshore Grounds. New York: Borzoi Books / Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.)

tags: books, reading, vanessa-veselka

p1k3 / 2020 / 10 / 11

There are two kinds of annoying biography:

1. The kind where the author hates the subject.
2. The kind where the author loves the subject.

This one, a biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow, is so far the second. I’m a hundred pages in, out of 960-odd. It’s a slightly disjointed read, in that bouncing-from-source-to-source and speculating-about-motives kind of way. It tells us how great its subject is with a regularity that quickly becomes grating. Still, it’s full of detail and deeply researched. I’m learning stuff and I’ll likely persist.

tags: books, history, reading, war

p1k3 / 2020 / 10 / 12

A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine, Tor Books, March 2019.

This evidently won the 2020 Hugo for Best Novel, which is not surprising. I thought as I was reading it “this is going to win some major awards”.

Space opera / vast empire / political intrigue in imperial capital city, elements of romance, some fairly well-handled mind/memory/identity stuff. Starts out kind of dry, works its way towards an emotional register that feels a little like Guy Kay.

First in a trilogy. I’ll be reading the followup.

tags: arkady-martine, books, reading, sfnal

p1k3 / 2020 / 11 / 13

COVID-19 numbers for late November 2020:

• WHO global numbers:
  • Current: ~61.87 million confirmed cases and ~1.45 million deaths
  • November 18th: 53.7 million cases / 1.3 million deaths
  • Early June: 6,535,354 cases / 387,155 deaths
  • Late April: 2,804,796 cases / 193,710 deaths
• NY Times US numbers:
  • Current: 13,311,031 cases / 265,940 deaths in the US
  • November 18th: 11,439,304 cases / 248,462 deaths
  • Early June: 1,883,033 cases / 108,194 deaths
  • Late April: 938,590 cases / 48,310 deaths
• colorado.gov:
  • Current: 228,772 cases and 2,521 deaths; 1,749 currently hospitalized
  • November 18th: 176,694 cases and 2,324 deaths
  • Early June: 27,615 cases and either 1,524 or 1,274 deaths

Earlier this year, I started a series of posts under the heading of “fragmentary notes from a bad time getting worse” (April 21, April 26, June 5). And then I thought well, that could pretty well just be this blog’s subtitle, so I guess I might as well ease up on the whole conceit.

I spent a lot of time reading the internet about the virus in those early months. For a while I bookmarked a lot of it. I was curious how much, so I checked:

$ cut -c 1-7 ./bookmarks-by-date.tsv | sort | uniq -c
     92 2020-03
    102 2020-04
     10 2020-05
     15 2020-06
      7 2020-07
      1 2020-08
      7 2020-09
      4 2020-10
     10 2020-11

I didn’t stop reading, but at some point it started to blur together and tracking my idea of what was going on and when started to feel hopeless: too unfocused and reflexive to carry any real signal. Around the time the bookmarking fell off at the end of April, I jotted a note about a call with my sister: It just says “the sense that we burned out on being terrified and have moved on to some form of resignation”.

In August I came down with something weird for a couple of days - the symptoms seemed right but a test by the time they’d mostly abated came back negative. No one I’d been in contact with ever got sick. My partner got an antibody test when giving blood a while later and it, too, was negative. I wrote that one off to “probably something random”.

Early on I had a lot of thoughts like: Shit, what do we do about feeding the cat if we both wind up in a hospital? Now I think that’s not very likely, and anyway I have a plan in place. Mostly what I’ve worried about is family and friends. My family is full of old people in rural middle America with the genes and lifestyle factors that get you heart disease, diabetes, and bad lungs. My friends run heavily to chain-smoking alcoholics with no health insurance.

So where are we now? I’m not sure I know. Cases are, as predicted, surging as we go into the winter. By mid-October I think I could have told you two people I knew personally who’d had it. A few days later I heard some extended family in the midwest had tested positive and now I’m sitting at maybe 17 plus some near misses.

I feel overwhelmed trying to write about the dimensions of the pandemic, nevermind the moment as a whole. I don’t think I have anything to offer a general reader on the subject. There’s been such an ocean of text about this. I’m not privy to any special perspective. I just now and then feel like there should be some index to memory of it amidst the other trivial crap I write here.

If I were trying to tell someone a few decades on a whole story about the strange dimensions of life on earth just now, I wouldn’t know where to start. I wonder what I risk forgetting.

Maybe how quickly and radically things can change. Not just at the scale of an individual life, that one I knew already, but at the scale of things generally.

How much relationships will bend and dissolve and reconfigure across the conceptual and epistemic fault lines that some system-level event reveals.

The strange paralysis that can seep through things when a polity and a culture are really riding the edge of decoherence and murderous collapse.

The way I start to see some of how my grandparents got the way they were.

How much of a self is contained and expressed in and through the places you go and the people around you. What happens when you stop going places.

tags: america, covid19, politics

p1k3 / 2020 / 11 / 29

I rearranged my office back in mid-December. This is always tricky because we have more stuff (hand-me-down furniture, old computers, bins full of electronics) than we really have house to put it in. As per usual one thing led to another and I wound up moving all of my books.

I’ve finally got just enough room to shelve most of them again, thanks to secondhand bookshelves and a partner who went on a building spree for her own collection over the summer. It’s been a couple of houses since they were anything like organized, though. Half of them have been trapped behind a cat tree and an armchair for years.

I went for alpha-by-author ordering, with a handful of category exceptions: Poetry, reference works, religious texts, computer stuff, a bottom shelf for the oversized volumes. It’s a mess because I’m doubling up to fit everything and the books are wildly different sizes. I can see one of the flimsier sets of shelves coming apart under the load as I type this, and the U–Z stacks are still sitting on the bedroom floor because I ran out of space.

So it’s imperfect, but it’s also really the first comprehensive view I’ve had of this set of books since I was 6 or 7 years younger and it was a much smaller set. It’s kind of a strange experience.

✥

From the time I started reading on my own until pretty far into college, I lived in books. As a kid I read and re-read my dad’s pile of genre paperbacks, thrived on trips to the library, spent hours arranging things on shelves, was always in the process of reading something. Once my friends and I could drive, it meant I could go to B. Dalton and Waldenbooks before we saw whatever the movie was that week. Eventually the internet started to tell me about writers and my personal canon expanded slowly outward, one novel-length trip at a time. It felt so weird to leave a book unfinished that until at least my early 20s I could remember everything I’d ever bailed on (a Hardy Boys mystery with a scene containing a skeleton that wigged me out, the copy of Cujo that my mom got banned from the school library after I accidentally left it where she could find it, …).

The books I have physically to hand in middle adulthood are a different kind of animal. There are, sure, beloved volumes from childhood, things that have changed how I think, the kinds of books I go to for solace and perspective. But looking at the whole spread, I’m honestly not sure I’ve even read more than half of this stuff.

Some of it I read but hated, or liked fine but never actually finished. There must be 30 lbs of assigned reading I’ve been lugging around since college. A dozen literary relics of relationships (romantic or otherwise) that have been defunct for many multiples of the brief time they existed. Detritus like the copy of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos that I bought used and hate-read for reasons that now escape me but must surely reflect poorly on my character. Books about math that I own because I liked the idea of being a person who would read them. Poets who just leave me with a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach. Things that looked mildly interesting on the book swap shelf at a coffeeshop I frequented in 2003, but which are in fact bad. I have a copy of Battlefield Earth for some reason. (It was probably on the free table at SparkFun.)

There’s at least as much dross in this collection as there is gold waiting to be found, and then it’s funny how much of it belongs to some now-distant idea of who I was — or wanted to be — as a reader or a thinker or a person in general.

I suppose all of that’s pretty normal for a stack of books sitting around going into one’s 5th decade. If you hold still for very long in this culture, stuff accumulates around you, and plenty of it outlasts the parts of your life that it attached to in the first place. A library is a kind of memory and an index to memory, but what it remembers can often be strangely fractured and unevenly focused across time. Not unlike the way things actually go in a given life I guess.

✣

Still and all: I haven’t let go of the idea of a personal library, and I doubt I will.

Putting this stuff on shelves makes me think of what it was like at 10 or 12 years of age, crouching on the floor halfway through reordering a stack of paperbacks, accidentally caught up in reading The Green Hills of Earth or The Call of the Wild over again. It also reminds me of what it was like at 21, wandering deep in the stacks of a big university research library: All those weird pathways and strange wonders. Outcroppings of the sublime or the sturdily useful in the most unexpected places, amidst treacherous pools of boredom and fossilized nonsense. All the times I intersected with some decades-old choice in curation and bounced off of it as a slightly different person.

I think a library should be a refuge, but it should also be something with the capacity to surprise and unsettle you. Maybe a personal one should serve as a reservoir of things you used to think and things you still might.

tags: books, libraries

p1k3 / 2021 / 1 / 1

As I look over the set of books I’ve piled up in my house, the other thing that strikes me is that, in the years these books have been accumulating, both the relationship of books to the culture and the nature of reading itself have been rearranged. Like I wrote three years ago:

Because really what I read in 2017, in most of the last several years, was the internet. Not even, in any real sense that registers, individual documents hosted on the network, or the work of authors I can clearly identify. Just the endless scroll.

…it’s like that but more so, now.

The last book I read in 2020 was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which has this bit (chapter 30):

So how you feel about your time is partly or even largely a result of that time’s structure of feeling. When time passes and that structure changes, how you feel will also change— both in your body and in how you understand it as a meaning. Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately, if we are not mistaken. Or put it this way; it feels that way to us. But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally recurrent individual human’s reaction to history. Which may just mean the reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.

The moment’s structure of feeling has changed, and you can tell it in just about every text you encounter. It’s also pretty hard to stop encountering texts even if you want to. The stuff is inescapable and much of it has a quality of self-replicating churn that makes me feel kind of queasy about the entire enterprise of human thought.

I wonder if it felt something like this when literacy really took off as a technology in the first place.

✢

Anyhow, what booklike objects did I read this past year?

February: I ordered a copy of Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes. Note-taking was on my mind a lot over the course of the year, and I spent too much time reading other people’s ideas about it. By July I managed to post some notes on the idea of the Zettelkasten that serves as a partial review / summary of Smart Notes and related things.

May: I binged my way through Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries. Popcorn SF, socially anxious heart-of-gold protagonist. I started The Elephant in the Cornfield: The Politics of Agriculture and Climate Change, by Chris Clayton, which I should probably revisit.

October: Meghan O'Gieblyn’s Interior States (essays), Vanessa Veselka’s The Great Offshore Grounds (a novel), Ron Chernow’s Grant (biography). The first two were quite good and I still haven’t finished the Grant biography.

November: Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, first of a trilogy. The first two of a trilogy by Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster and Trickster Drift. All recommended.

December: Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse. I liked some characters and scenes and ideas in this, and didn’t exactly love it as a novel. Mileage might vary.

And then The Ministry for the Future. Near future SF, barely a novel at all for a lot of its length. A book that seems more deliberately pitched to be read right now than a lot of short-shelf-life fiction is just by accident. Among other things, it’s partly an argument that the end of ecocidal capitalism is achievable, partly a claim that eco-terrorist violence is likely (and quite possibly necessary) as the climate struggle intensifies, and partly a fantasy that cryptocurrency might have some kind of pro-social role to play in engineering a survivable economy. I will be thinking about this one for a while.

tags: books, climate, murderbot, reading, sfnal

p1k3 / 2021 / 1 / 2

These are by Rosemary Kirstein, and available as e-books on Smashwords:

• The Steerswoman
• The Outskirter’s Secret
• The Lost Steersman
• The Language of Power

I came across these by way of a blog post by Sumana Harihareswara, I think with my ambient sense that I should read them enhanced by a review by Russ Allbery and a blurb from Jo Walton.

On first inspection, The Steerswoman is a particular and familiar sort of fantasy with one or two mildly interesting conceits. It quickly becomes something deeper than that, and after working through all four in the space of a couple of weeks, I’d rank them with the classics of their genre.

This is an unfinished series, the first of which was published in 1989, with a whole lot of unresolved questions. I normally try not to encourage people to take up this kind of thing; most readers of speculative fiction have been burned by some long-running series or another by now. I’ll make an exception for this one: I eagerly await the concluding volumes, but even if they’re never published, the first four are all worth the time.

tags: books, reading, rosemary-kirstein, sfnal, the-steerswoman

p1k3 / 2021 / 1 / 26

A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine, Tor Books, March 2021.

The followup to A Memory Called Empire, which I read in November of last year. More overtly Space Opera in its plot mechanics and fantasy physics, but digs deeper into the first novel’s most interesting ideas, and pays off all over the place. Doubled themes of memory, language, theory-of-mind, small cultures surviving at great cost in the face of larger ones, cultures and polities transformed by what they attempt to subsume.

I have marginal notes like “this is so fucking good” in a couple of places. If this is a kind of thing you enjoy, you will very likely enjoy this instance of it.

tags: arkady-martine, books, reading, sfnal

p1k3 / 2021 / 3 / 14

there was one i was trying to write
i had the pieces in my mind
and then the most of them
rattled out to nothing in the
juttering motion of the year

the bit i can remember, it's been
a theme of late, this little mysticism
i'm carrying in my pocket and taking
out now and then to turn over in the light:

an idea of the past
looping back into my life
20 years since i first left home
half a life-so-far ago
cycles and rhymes in the shape of the days
distant lights through the trees

i'm a natural sucker for these minor pareidolias
born to a people who still read the hand of god
in passing birds and the placement of telephone poles

or maybe i just have eyes, once in a while, for
drifts and currents in the way of things
even if i can't say what rocks and channels
give them a shape

either/or i guess

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2022 / 10 / 17

some days i think
you're only ever
talking to yourself

other days it seems like
we dwell in the
warmth of some
shared understanding

(like there's a we,
all told, lit with the light
of other souls)

it's always fleeting,
too brief, an unstable
configuration

except when it seems
bigger than the whole world

the way a mountain
in the distance
is part of the landscape
while one underfoot
is the whole of it

we're left i guess
unable to agree
what it all meant or
should mean

but i still find myself
reaching for the idea
that it meant
that it means
something

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2022 / 11 / 1

the blazing light at the edges of the ice on the sidewalk
wakes up something in my mind, some sense of the real
and i tell myself it doesn't mean anything at all
except for snow and sun and everything that entails
but then i guess that's a lot, maybe that's most of it

it's hard to find the world beautiful when it's dying
it's hard to love what you're going to lose
but then if you can't find beauty in what's dying
what else would you find it in at all?

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2022 / 11 / 30

Submitted:

1. If you haven’t adopted a somewhat science fictional frame of mind in the last decade or so, you probably don’t understand things as well as you could.

2. If you’re operating entirely on that basis, you’re still probably pretty out of the loop.

tags: sfnal

p1k3 / 2022 / 12 / 7

driving out east of denver
in the early hours after sunrise
onto the winter plains

frost and haze,
black cattle moving slow
in the muted light

the grass all gold and brown,
the sky all gray and
white, pale blue and

industry bellowing steam
into the layer of smog
just above the horizon

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2022 / 12 / 18

It’s been almost a year, so I’m putting together a release of wrt, the site generator I use for p1k3:

• on CPAN as App::WRT
• on code.p1k3.com
• mirrored on GitHub

v5.0.0 abandons the idea of running persistently under FastCGI, handles character encoding more gracefully for Atom feeds, adds wrt ls and wrt config commands for listing entries and dumping configuration values, refactors a bunch of the logic for finding and displaying entries, and fixes a slew of minor bugs. It should be substantially more performant, though as a tradeoff it uses more memory.

Here’s (I think) the full changelog since the last time I pushed this thing to CPAN:

v5.0.0 2019-04-14

  - Add bin/wrt-ls for listing entries in current archive
  - Add bin/wrt-config for displaying configuration info
  - Allow header tags with attributes
  - Minor documentation cleanup
  - Bump XML::Atom::SimpleFeed to 0.900; remove wrt-fcgi
  - Concatenation instead of variable interpolation in HTML::tag()
  - Remove hardcoded "public" from renderer directory path copying
  - Remove unused feed_url param from wrt-init and example dir
  - Remove an extraneous JSON->convert_blessed(1) call
  - WRT::entry(): fix glitch with contents list for binfile_expr matches
  - Correctly encode feed output - see https://p1k3.com/2018/5/28/
  - Add App::WRT::Util::file_get_contents();
  - Optionally cache included files in-memory
  - Add EntryStore, a class for wrapping various methods for finding entry lists
  - Refactor display()
  - Use Carp for errors
  - Remove old LaTeX markup stuff
  - Add this Changes file

v5.0.0-alpha 2018-04-19

  - Use 5 most recent entries for home page instead of latest month
  - Remove accessor methods for instance variables / configuration
  - Give absolute paths to imgsize() so it chills out on Cwd::getcwd() calls
  - Remove local_path(), recent_month(), month_before, and feed_print_latest()
  - Stop using a() in entry_markup()
  - Cache get_date_entries_by_depth() results
  - Swap out state vars for stashing things on $self in get_all_source_files()
  - Add get_date_entries_by_depth()
  - Tweak link_bar() behavior to retain link for current page

Actually, looking at some of this, I think my history of version numbers vs. Git tags vs. releases is… Less than accurate. In future I’m going to just increment the semver patch version for every commit and release to CPAN routinely.

tags: cpan, perl, semver, technical, wrt

p1k3 / 2019 / 4 / 14

few animals
are as satisfying to contemplate
as the bumble bee, all round and
purposeful

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2019 / 5 / 4

(Structural spoilers may follow.)

Previously:

• Reading: Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie
• reading in 2017

Leckie’s earlier novels have fallen roughly in the space opera / military SF zone. This one is fantasy, with recognizable genre apparatus (swords, horses, fortresses, hereditary nobility, etc.), but in terms of plot mechanics and tone it’s not a radical departure. It’s concerned with a world where gods are real and intervene routinely in human life, but once you grant the basic premise it unfolds a system of rules and consequences in a way that rings far more science fictional than mystical or theological in the usual sense.

I read the whole thing in a sitting last night, having wrecked my ability to fall asleep by combining too much of microbrew, espresso, and cheap cigars into a low-level panic attack, so I was grateful for the distraction.

The ending felt a little rushed, but on the whole I think the author may have gotten better at pacing since her first big trilogy. I would happily spend more time with these characters. Recommended.

tags: ann-leckie, reading, sfnal

p1k3 / 2019 / 5 / 6

Thesis: The complexity ratchet in technology is designed (or has evolved, take your pick) to drive the concentration of administrative power.

tags: technical

p1k3 / 2019 / 5 / 8

a may snow, all day
the skies gray and
the grass growing taller
while it falls, tulips
blooming round the side of the house
the frogs across the street
sounding low and slow through
the patter of barely frozen
water falling on the just-unfolding
leaves

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2019 / 5 / 9

I recently read At least one Vim trick you might not know, which is a pretty high-quality example of the stuff-about-text-editors blog post.

There are- very roughly- two categories of Vim users. Purists value Vim’s small size and ubiquitousness. They tend to keep configuration to a minimum in case they need to use it on an unfamiliar computer (such as during ssh). Exobrains, on the other hand, stuff Vim full of plugins, functions, and homebrew mappings in a vain attempt to pretend they’re using Emacs. If you took away an exobrain’s vimrc they’d be completely helpless.

Not too unreasonable a model of the thing, probably. I’m definitely somewhere in “exobrain” territory at this point.

I ought to write one of these eventually - or maybe follow Tyler’s lead and write a literate .vimrc. My existing one has a lot of comments, but it’s not exactly a coherent document.

tags: technical, vim

p1k3 / 2019 / 6 / 2

Maciej Cegłowski, the New Wilderness:

So why have the gravediggers of online privacy suddenly grown so worried about the health of the patient?

Part of the answer is a defect in the language we use to talk about privacy. That language, especially as it is codified in law, is not adequate for the new reality of ubiquitous, mechanized surveillance.

In the eyes of regulators, privacy still means what it did in the eighteenth century—protecting specific categories of personal data, or communications between individuals, from unauthorized disclosure. Third parties that are given access to our personal data have a duty to protect it, and to the extent that they discharge this duty, they are respecting our privacy.

Seen in this light, the giant tech companies can make a credible claim to be the defenders of privacy, just like a dragon can truthfully boast that it is good at protecting its hoard of gold. Nobody spends more money securing user data, or does it more effectively, than Facebook and Google.

The question we need to ask is not whether our data is safe, but why there is suddenly so much of it that needs protecting. The problem with the dragon, after all, is not its stockpile stewardship, but its appetite.

tags: facebook, google, panopticon, policy, politics, scale, surveillance

p1k3 / 2019 / 6 / 13

Some weeks ago, I read a New York Times review of Jared Diamond’s latest:

If you’ve ever been at a wedding or conference or on board a United connection from O’Hare, and been cornered by a man with Theories About It All, and you came away thinking, “That was a great experience,” have I got the book for you.

Jared Diamond’s “Upheaval” belongs to the genre of 30,000-foot books, which sell an explanation of everything. I travel often and see them a lot: at airport bookstores, where Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari (both of whom blurbed “Upheaval”) and Diamond, of course, deserve permanent shelves; and in the air, where I’ve noticed that a pretty disproportionate fraction of readers who read in the quiet of 30,000 feet have a preference for writers who write from the viewpoint of 30,000 feet.

…

When Diamond describes “highly egalitarian social values” as an ethos that has “remained unchanged” in Australia, despite having written a chapter about the country’s history of legalized racism, he is using a definition of egalitarian that applies only to white people. When he says, “Social status in Japan depends more on education than on heredity and family connection,” he is ignoring what it means to be born a woman. “Of course, my list of U.S. problems isn’t exhaustive,” he admits. “Problems that I don’t discuss include race relations and the role of women.” You know, the problems affecting the vast majority of Americans.

I don’t quote this by way of piling on Diamond. I’m pretty sure I won’t read Upheaval, but I also doubt it’s going to do as much damage in the world as, say, any given bestseller by the NYT’s own Thomas Friedman.

I mention it here because that review got me thinking about a time when I was really drawn to this kind of book: Big, framework-y pop science and history narratives with (at least ostensibly) a grand cross-disciplinary synthesis to communicate. Stuff like Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, E.O. Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. (Subtitles included for maximum effect.)

I pulled that specific grouping of books out of memory, but the list probably stuck in my head in the first place because I wrote this p1k3 entry, or others like it. It’s cringey material, like a lot of things I wrote in those years. I was at the time 23 years old, inexperienced, constantly drunk, and months out of a mediocre undergraduate degree with no idea what to do next. I had spent time around very smart people who were nevertheless too much in the grip of Evolutionary Psych and similar ideas, and I was too lazy by far to be a tenth as well-read as I pretended to be. In general I was insufferable, and it comes through in the text.

✵

As usual, “I didn’t understand a lot of things when I was younger” is true, but not very interesting. I have plenty of regrets, but if I couldn’t forgive myself for being a posturing jackass when I was trying to figure out my place in the world, I’d just be permanently crippled by self-loathing, which is no use to anyone.

Anyhow, what strikes me now, aside from a lot of ideological drift, is how much my own hopes and ambitions have changed since then. I once wanted to write something big, encompassing, cross-cutting, etc. I wanted, even if I didn’t have the work ethic or the cognitive capacity, to understand as much as I could and abstract it across as many domains as I could touch. I was inclined to manifestos, grand plans, programs, prescriptions, the idea of an overarching research project. At least I thought about those things a lot. And even once I’d mostly given up on designing that kind of project, maybe I sincerely thought that something more or less whole, greater than the sum of its parts, could emerge from the slow iteration of my work. (One from 2007 and one from 2016 suggest as much.)

In 2019, I still hold plenty of strong opinions (a few even grounded in experience), but I hope I have fewer illusions about their coherence or my grasp of the overall set of problems. I think a lot about just how brittle and partial and misleading the materials of history tend to be, how difficult and fallible it is to construct science, journalism, or historical narrative that doesn’t crucially misrepresent the world. The feeling that once kept me from writing fiction — an uneasiness about my ability to describe or portray any experience outside my own — has deepened and spread to other domains.

These days I’m uncomfortable, despite a long-time fixation on the idea that you should write for someone, with the idea of publishing at all, at least in the deranged and weaponized shitstorm climate of the modern network. I haven’t given up on the long project of a lifetime’s jotting and correspondence. If anything I do more of it — but I don’t expect it to yield much besides a better memory and some communication with friends. Those are good things in themselves, and I’m not seeking any broader justification for the habits that underpin them. Still, they’re very different from the work of the writer I might have become, if I’d had more raw ability and worked harder at it.

I’m not altogether sure that’s a bad thing.

❦

(As a postscript, I want to acknowledge the strong possibility that I’m still insufferable.)

tags: history, jared-diamond, steven-pinker, writing

p1k3 / 2019 / 6 / 19

I read a New York Times opinion piece by Charlie Warzel, about tracking behavior in a mail client called Superhuman – it embeds tracking pixels in all its sent mail so it can report views back to the sender. The piece starts off with a succinct and reasonably accurate reading of how this sort of thing usually plays out:

Call it the Five Stages of Privacy Erosion.

Tech Company builds popular product.

Product is exposed in the press for doing something shady behind the scenes.

Tech Company apologizes/clarifies/signals a fix.

Brief phase of collective rejoicing and moving on.

It’s revealed (usually by the same people) that Product was never really fixed.

…and then midway through it comes to this disclaimer:

(I want to pause here to offer an email-tracking disclosure and some clarification. Tracking is a tricky subject. It isn’t inherently nefarious. This newsletter tracks things like how many times the newsletter email is opened and what links are clicked, which helps to improve the newsletter. But like all privacy issues, it’s a matter of transparency and expectations. When it comes to marketing emails and newsletters, which often come from corporate entities, there’s often more of an expectation that open rates might be tracked. In Superhuman’s case, as Davidson notes, the tracking takes place with every personal email sent, which is more likely to violate the expectation of privacy.)

Which I think demonstrates how fucked we are just about as well as anything. The tracking is creepy, under this model, when you don’t expect it from an individual quite as much as you do from a company, which has legitimate reasons to hoard your data. Don’t you want the newsletter to improve?

This is the mode of reasoning that’s gotten us where we are now, after decades of principled objection from people with both functioning consciences and a coherent grasp of privacy: to an ever-ratcheting state of intrusive, unregulated, irremediable surveillance. Surveillance as a cornerstone of the economy and a baseline expectation of business, publishing, government, and law.

I don’t mean to pick on Charlie Warzel and if he reads this I hope he doesn’t take it as mean-spirited. I don’t disagree with the rest of the column, and including that parenthetical disclosure shows more self-awareness than the majority of editorializing you read about this stuff, hosted as it is on websites with dozens of embedded trackers and ad services. But! When a journalist specializing in privacy topics explains that the technology he’s calling out as creepy isn’t creepy when it’s built into the platform he writes on, it says something about what understandings are possible and allowed.

It’s possible to understand that these behaviors are inherently nefarious, but taking that idea seriously, let alone saying so out loud, isn’t compatible with keeping a lot of jobs. You always have to soften the blow, to acquiesce in ways that undermine either your own awareness or your honesty. You might try to fight it, but in most situations it’s like shoveling back the tide with a fork. I’ve tried more times than I can count and I’ve lost pretty much every time, in every way that matters.

All the same, that this is an intractable situation for anyone whose livelihood is caught up in it doesn’t change that the shady behaviors are shady. The creepy stuff is still creepy even when a respected media outlet does it for reasons that seem to bolster the media outlet’s interests.

tags: new-york-times, panopticon, surveillance

p1k3 / 2019 / 7 / 9

it was damn near a hundred again today
over at the airport where they measure
a little cooler here on the edge of things
the river is running low, like it's august in fact
as well as by date

so like you expect,
the grass turns gray-brown and gold in the sun
but all told it's been a green year in colorado
the way the locals seem to remember their childhoods:
thunderstorms in the summer afternoon,
big rains and little ones

the orb weavers, growing fat now, build outsized
webs on what will hold still long enough — my bike,
the trashcan by the corner of the house,
the bucket hanging on my garden fence

bees hum where i've let the herbs go to flower
i wonder if some of them fly home to the hive
in the cracked brick walls
of the first house i lived in here
it's fourteen years this month
or a couple of lifetimes depending on how you count

in the mountains, my niece is learning to crawl

while out on the plains my family waits to bury
my great aunt, gone at 95, who had already seen
i can't begin to guess how many lifetimes
by the year i was born

everything is always happening
all at once

and i'm not sure i can tell any more
all the joy from the grief
or the longing from the gratitude

tags: colorado, poem

p1k3 / 2019 / 8 / 19

Note: I’ve edited this since initial publication, mostly to add links to other entries, but there’s some new text as well.

Late summer into middle fall seems to be a time when things get kind of loose around the edges and I think about what I’m doing and, often enough, make decisions that change the whole structure of my life.

Not coincidentally, it’s coming up on 5 years since I quit SparkFun Electronics. They’ve been eventful years, for good and ill both. I’ve had some times, man. Even so, I wonder in a clichéd way how it’s been this long already.

Mostly, SparkFun gets further from my mind all the time. Every passing year fewer of my friends are trapped there while it decays into the kind of thing it used to repudiate just by existing. I’m still bitter, but it’s a bitterness I don’t have to think about very much. Still, it comes back in waves now and then. This time I wondered: What did I learn from all of that?

There was probably a lot. After all, it was seven years of my life, and on one end of it I was still young and on the other I wasn’t really. I probably knew a lot of things in the middle of that experience that I’ve lost since.

So, first: You won’t always know more than you used to.

❦

When I started working on sparkfun.com it was an e-commerce site written mostly in a programming language called PHP, and when I left it was still an e-commerce site written mostly in PHP. We made plenty of mistakes along the way, but I’m pretty sure we were right not to do a wholesale replacement of a functioning system using trendier tech.

If you are not familiar with the politics of programming languages, a thing you should understand is that it’s important to the way technical culture operates that some tools (and often by extension the people who use them) be understood as generally bad and without value. PHP is, in this model, marked as fundamentally misguided and thoroughly regrettable, and is thus an acceptable target of derision and mockery.

Just as important are two other facts: First, that despite its nastiness and reflexive contempt, this understanding is in many ways correct, insofar as it applies to tooling. Second, that it errs mainly in being applied so narrowly. Which is to say that yes, PHP is a bad programming language, but generally so are the programming languages preferred by PHP’s most vocal detractors. (I should know, as I have often been a vocal and ardent detractor of PHP.) I have yet to find an exception to this, though I continue to learn programming languages and may one day be pleasantly surprised.

I’ve spent most of my working life using tools that are, as I’ve written elsewhere, terminally unhip. SparkFun was an extended lesson in the difference between something’s received reputation and its consequences in practice.

See also:

• language things
• and all history unfolds before you

✪

I learned that you should be kind to customer service reps and tech support.

There were a lot of times I was unkind to the people I worked with, and I’ve learned to regret that.

I learned that “the customer is always right” is poisonous, and that there’s some joy in explaining to the kind of person who has always used that notion as a weapon that their business isn’t worth the abuse.

✴

I already knew how to program when I started at SparkFun, or at least I thought I did. While I was there, I learned how to make software. A bunch of the apparatus and the tooling, but more than anything that you have to work with people. That it’s a shared thing. That, mostly, you’re going to do it together or you’re going to fail at it.

I learned a lot about unintended consequences, and the ways that design decisions unfold into patterns you never anticipated. I learned to mistrust cleverness and prize the explicit.

Models are always wrong, maps are territories unto themselves, and shared understanding is a harder thing to build than almost any other kind of technical artifact. If people use the tools you create, even if they helped you build them, they’re going to do it in ways that break every expectation you had and put the lie to every unstated assumption you made.

I discovered all that at painful length, and then I thought that when I got into the wider technical world I’d find out how unsophisticated we’d been about the whole thing. In some ways that’s what happened, and it’s painful (but also funny) to think about how little I knew back then. In others it turns out that most people are groping in the dark and a lot of what gets sold to you as sophistication just curls back around into wishful thinking, technical debt, and bureaucratic churn.

In late 2013 I wrote this:

Programmers must, as long as we hope to be effective, sustain a dispassionate awareness that all we do is dust in the wind: That entropy is destiny, disorder is law, and futility is the architecture of existence. We succeed, to the extent that success is possible, only as long as we remember that our efforts are but brief disturbances in the ordinary course of time’s certain triumph over the integrity of all built systems. Everything you make will surely die, and unlike the children of your body or the structure of a great city, the code you write will probably die long before you do.

See also:

• on software

✵

I learned that salespeople will find a way around you, and that no one is more susceptible to marketing than marketers.

I came to think of marketing itself as an aggressive ideological cult, or maybe just the most visible part of one — a complex of ideas spidering out into most domains of human endeavor, and hungrily grasping at whatever cognitive territory remains unconquered. Marketing as a mask worn by something deeper in the culture and harder to name or delineate, let alone contradict.

See also:

• This one on the idea that numbers create meaning
• on software
• so spam is normal behavior, but what if you stopped?
• still creepy

☼

I learned that you should moderate the comments, if you have them at all, and maybe something about how.

✤

I learned to ride a bicycle again, commuting as many days as not on an aluminum road bike from the early 80s with downtube shifters and straps on the pedals. A coworker found it on craigslist and helped me tune it up - the first bike I’ve ever owned that wanted to go fast.

Despite an ocean of beer and liquor and all the attendant bad decisions, I was probably healthier then than I’ve been any time before or since. I was definitely more plugged into the landscape and the seasons where I live. Every working day bookended by little adventures.

See also:

• This one about bikes, garden carts, technological determinism, utility

❁

Some things about hiring:

• It’s hard and very often the people doing it are flailing.

• Interviews are mostly nonsense.

• Hiring your friends (and maybe relatives) is an entirely rational way to go about things, to a point. What you have to deal with is this: Some of your friends might be incompetent or worse, and even if they’re not, leaning too hard on your existing social connections reinforces all the privileges and biases and latent power structures that put you in the position to hire somebody in the first place.

☆

I learned how much quality matters and how much it doesn’t: From how hard we tried to get things right in the software and how little it probably mattered in the final analysis. From selling things that were basically pretty good and also from selling bottom-dollar no-utility garbage, both with enormous externalities.

I was pretty good at not thinking about those externalities: Cheap labor and industrial pollution in someone else’s country. Fuel oil and gasoline and jet fuel in transit. I was fully complicit, and I knew it on some level, but as long as we were getting something right I felt like we were ahead of the game anyway.

We sold stuff with open designs and open code and showed people how to use it. A faction of us free software partisans fought pretty hard on that open part, and got listened to for a while. A lot of the people I worked with were teachers in the best and simplest sense. I couldn’t begin to guess how many people learned to solder and write a simple program from SparkFun workshops and tutorials. It worked for a long time. Maybe we were ahead of the game. Maybe we made people more free, gave them greater agency in a time when the tech in general is spinning wildly out of their control.

Then again maybe we mostly taught the children of technocrats to put more tiny computers in everything, to the long-term advantage of the billionaires and authoritarian scumbags currently hastening civilization along to an end state that’d slot pretty cleanly into the Mad Max franchise.

It’s hard to say exactly.

✩

Erik Winn always said business ruins everything. I learned I think he was right, for the most part. I also learned that you have to work with people to get anything done, and that businesses are a lot of where that happens, for better and worse both.

“Community” has to be one of the most abused and debased words in the contemporary vocabulary. There’s this Greg Brown recording I half remember where he makes fun of the idea of intentional community and says that community is what happens when you have to get along with the people you’re stuck with.

Well, for years I went to work in a gray-carpeted room in a shabby building in a half-empty suburban office park, and after a while I woke up looking forward to it as often as not, because I was going to work with my friends.

The Sunday after my last day at Sparkfun:

It can be an astonishing thing, in a certain sort of life, to look around and understand that you have, and have had for a long time now, a lot of friends.

I still feel like that.

✪

A lot of what I learned from SparkFun came right at the end.

I learned never to mistake an aesthetic for an ethic. That the signifiers of style can’t be relied on as the signs of a lived belief or a worked understanding. That a keg in the break room and a high tolerance for stoner hijinks makes a pretty good smokescreen for lousy wages and bad faith.

I learned just how easy it can be to kill something from the top, even if it got built from the bottom up.

I knew for a long time before SparkFun that employment was mostly bullshit, and that the interests of the owners are not the interests of the workers. I managed to set that one aside for a while, but it all came back in a rush: More complicated by all the contradictions of experience, but true all the same.

As long as there’s no shared power that can check and hold to account the owning class and their enablers, we’re all their enablers. Individual workers are, more often than not, left with rage-quitting an organization as the only means of signalling meaningful dissent. And at that it’s a form of dissent open only to the few who are cushioned enough by their skills, family wealth, or social status to exercise it at will.

❁

It’s late on a Saturday night and I’ve been trying to write this for days without getting half of what I wanted to say into it.

I guess for now I’m going to call it good and close this set of entirely too self-serious reflections with some dialog from the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading, as quoted on IMDb.com:

CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?

CIA Officer: I don’t know, sir.

CIA Superior: I don’t fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.

CIA Officer: Yes, sir.

CIA Superior: I’m fucked if I know what we did.

CIA Officer: Yes, sir, it’s, uh, hard to say.

CIA Superior: Jesus Fucking Christ.

tags: business, hardware, sparkfun, technical, work

p1k3 / 2019 / 10 / 5

I’m old enough now that, of the famous people I admired when I was young, more have fallen in my estimation than not. At best I’ve learned about the difference between a person and the construct of their fame, and something about how to put the work I still admire in context and acknowledge its problems. At worst, well, plenty of days I’m just disgusted. The idea that you shouldn’t have heroes at all resonates in these times, even if there are a few I still find it hard to let go.

I couldn’t tell you exactly when I first ran into Richard M. Stallman’s thinking. I spent an ocean of time on Slashdot and IRC in the 90s. I probably read “The Right to Read” right after it was published. I was running a Linux desktop by late 1998, and read Steven Levy’s Hackers right around then. I was 17, which must be right about the age when radical ideas take hold with the most ferocity: You’re old enough to entertain big thoughts, but not old enough to have many defenses against taking them on wholeheartedly.

Since then, I’ve built my working life and quite a few personal beliefs on ideas that originated and developed in hacker culture. Even so, most of the people, places, and institutions that crop up in the hacker mythos have stayed in the realm of abstraction or distant figure for me.

I’ve shared both antipathy and (I hope) friendship with people from the orbit of MIT, but it was never anywhere near my orbit. American East- and West-Coast cultures crop up repeatedly in my life, but they aren’t exactly my culture either. I haven’t worked on public projects of much significance (until recently, anyway), and I don’t do conferences all that often.

As a result, I’ve never been in direct social proximity to RMS, the staff of the Free Software Foundation, or most of the people who work on GNU projects. I also haven’t spent much time on the mailing lists, forums, or IRC channels that would have given me more experience of them as distinct individuals. I suspect the same is true of many people who rely on GNU tools, advocate software freedom, publish work under the GPL, and donate to orgs like the FSF.

The way it now reads to me, RMS has behaved like an asshole for a long time, and the moment of his resignation from the FSF after ill-advised opinionating about the Epstein scandal was bound to come in some form eventually. A lot of people in that scene have written to the effect that there’s a long term pattern here, and/or that they and others tried and failed to get him to behave less like an asshole.

Some links:

• thoughts on rms and gnu
• Joint statement on the GNU Project
• A reflection on the departure of RMS
• Richard Stallman Does Not and Cannot Speak for the Free Software Movement
• Re: conflicts in the gnu project now affect guile

I don’t think these read as simple efforts at character assassination, and they appear to come from people who share the values of the movement and have put in the work to prove it.

I also find it credible that there’s been an ongoing problem here because I paid a little attention during a couple of previous blowups about RMS, and I sent this to the FSF late in 2018:

Howdy,

I wasn’t really sure where to write, but as someone who continues to support the FSF financially, I wanted to register with the organization in some way that I broadly agree with what Bradley M. Kuhn has to say here:

http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/11/22/gnu-kind-communication-guidelines.html

Regards,

– Brennen Bearnes

And then: I’ve talked with women who have said that RMS’s behavior is alienating or that they’ve stayed away from the FSF because of his reputation. I have every reason to think that this kind of thing drives people away from a movement that’s supposed to be liberatory and fundamentally concerned with human agency.

I’m not writing this to throw fuel on any fires. Not that it would be needed; reaction in some quarters has been more or less on par with the systemd flamewars of these last 5 or 6 years or the least pleasant threads I’ve slogged through on Wikimedia mailing lists.

I’m tired of that kind of thing. I’m tired of technical work and technical politics being defined by fear and loathing. I’m far less willing than I used to be to participate in the outrage cycle that’s overtaken social media and journalism. I’m weary of callouts, pile-ons, and network-amplified harassment. I’m way beyond jaded by the dysfunctions and endless self-immolation of activist culture. I have friends and colleagues who are decent people without sharing many of my beliefs, and for the most part I’m happy to collaborate with them on things that seem beneficial regardless of that.

So: As little sympathy as I have for the view that free software isn’t a political project, I understand the desire to avoid getting drawn into the unrelenting nightmare of partisan politics and its ancillary culture war.

But free software is a political project.

Software, broadly speaking, is a political project, and it’s one that has come to govern human existence. So far it’s done so mostly without the consent of the governed, and it operates to an intolerable degree in the interests of concentrated wealth and unaccountable power.

Computation is everywhere. Less and less of it is subject to the understanding or control of its individual users. Or, for that matter, to any democratic representation or governance. Systems that define our jobs and social lives are managed by a technocratic class beholden to megacorporations and billionaires. These systems' workings are opaque, their maintenance is an unrelenting nightmare, and everyone involved is fundamentally compromised.

Free software saw much of this coming and tried to stop it. It failed, in ways large and small. It’s a very incomplete set of answers to a problem of almost incomprehensible scope. But any humane future for computation is going to require ideas and practices that have thrived within the free software movement. The content of the ideas matters, and without them we’re basically fucked. That’s what’s at stake.

Accordingly: I think it’s reasonable to ask better of people with authority in our community, and imperative that we outgrow cults of personality as an organizing principle. I’m not still in this after 20 years because I admire a particular dude. I’m in this because at heart I’m an anarchist a lot of the time. Free software isn’t whatever RMS says it is. Free software is what we make of it: We who want to be free, we who want others to be free.

I’ve been using the phrase “state of total defeat” when I talk about the goals of free software and related ideas, but I recognize that that’s hyperbolic and not especially nuanced.

I’m writing this on a computer that, even if I can’t inspect it all the way down to the metal, runs an operating system and a bunch of applications I can crack wide open any time I feel like it. The OS and its package repositories are a product of anarchy in the real sense, assembled over the course of decades into a mostly-coherent whole by a distributed collective of volunteer hackers from the work of thousands of other projects.

Free and open source software has given me both a tolerable scope for my individual use of computers, and the ecosystem where I make a living. To the extent that free software was about wanting the freedom to hack and freely exchange the fruits of your hacking, this hasn’t gone so badly. It could be better, but I remember the 1990s pretty well and I can tell you that much of the stuff trivially at my disposal now would have blown my tiny mind back then. Sometimes I kind of snap to awareness in the middle of installing some package or including some library in a software project and this rush of gratitude comes over me.

The elephant in the room is that open source, combined with the networks it did so much to help build, has provided much of the technical architecture for a proprietary control over computing that exceeds all but the wildest dreams of a few decades ago.

There are plenty of ways that RMS-style obsession with terminology has done more harm than good in the last few decades. The conflation of “free/libre software” and “open source” into one thing might even be a good idea, provided the political motivations of the “libre” side of the question are retained. But it’s still worth making some distinctions, and worth knowing some history. Open Source™ set out partly to make open code palatable to business, and it succeeded in that.

In fact, tons of people taught business that open source / FOSS was a good way to get economic leverage: At one end of the scale, just people like me and a lot of my coworkers, who started out as amateurs on shoestring budgets, wanting to make a living with the stuff we already knew and liked. At the other end, straightforward predators of the sort who found tech companies and hold upper management positions: People who looked at open code and open standards and saw unpaid labor and a commons ripe for enclosure.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Netflix, Uber, and so on down the line: To varying degrees, they’ve all used FOSS as a basic technical foundation for their current empires. Google and Facebook’s history is riddled with instances of using an open technology or medium to gain the leverage necessary to subvert the tech’s openness: Mail, RSS/Atom, the web itself.

Android and Chrome use open source rhetoric and development practices to drive their adoption while operating purely in furtherance of Google’s agenda — a pattern you can see replicated in countless products and systems. Locked-down APIs replace protocols, personal computers are relegated to the status of “client”, and keystone projects like web browsers become impossible to replace without billions in funding and hundreds of engineers.

The scale, complexity, and rent-seeking of megacorps have poisoned our expectations for software and the practice of software development to an extent that’s hard to get your head around. Technical work is well-paid, at least for the skilled and well-connected, but that typically comes at the price of a livelihood held hostage by terrible people in service of terrible goals.

It could be otherwise, but I think we first have got to recognize that the existing tools of FOSS aren’t remotely sufficient to remedy everything that’s broken about software. What the communities writing and publishing all this code have accomplished is astonishing, but it remains embedded in a system of exploitation and a profoundly damaged larger culture.

Technical culture is broken, generally concentrating rather than diffusing the inequities and pathologies of the one that surrounds it. Employment is broken and jobs are rife with bullshit. What Diana Thayer calls the poverty gun — the relentless, asymmetrical threat of unemployment pointed at anyone in conflict with the whims of capital — stifles most meaningful dissent. Capitalism, however inevitable or useful some of its basic elements are, is broken.

I don’t know how to solve those problems. What I think I know at the moment is that free software is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. As something necessary, it needs to be better. As something insufficient, it needs to be a place where more people can find a home.

tags: free-software, politics, technical

p1k3 / 2019 / 10 / 20

I woke up this morning thinking about the class of technical problems where for years you hope for some kind of solution to emerge, and then when it finally does, the solution entails such an egregious technical and political context that you wonder if you ever should have wished for it in the first place.

FOR EXAMPLE, I wanted straightforward, usable transcription of speech. Well, it’s 2019 and it’s there if you want it, more or less. All it took was massive data hoarding, warehouse-scale computing, and universal networked surveillance under the control of a handful of megacorporations. A little piece of the Panopticon in every pocket. What I probably thought it would require was something on the order of better software and more computing power. What it took in practice was nothing short of a revolution in human affairs.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like these problems are everywhere. Oh, you wanted to travel to that far off place where your family lives in a day or so? Wait ‘til you get a load of the environmental, cultural, and political footprint of automotive transit. You’re gonna love it.

The crucial difference is that things like cars and the modern road network were in place by the time I was born. Now I’m getting old enough to have watched expectations I had for the future unfold in realtime. And they’ve come not just with unintended consequences, but as consequences of entire undesired systems.

There’s some kind of lesson here. Probably.

tags: idealogging, systems

p1k3 / 2019 / 11 / 4

the light through the library windows
the leaves still on the trees, just
against the fog rising from the snowmelt
on the mountainsides
the road rising gray through the grass
all bright in its browns and yellows
russets and dull greens
frostcolored and the patches of early
snow the black cattle here and there
on the hillsides between expensive
houses and failing barbed wire fences

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2019 / 11 / 7

(posted wednesday, july 13, 2022)

i'll start by saying that it's
better after a while
for you at least

the dimensions of your
life, they do expand

it's worse, too, and
sometimes for years on end

there are things ahead
that are going to destroy parts of you
there are things ahead
that are going to tear at the whole frame
of the world you inhabit
one of the things that life is
is a series of losses
that you never quite recover from

and in all that,
you're going to fuck up a lot
you'll learn most of what you learn
the hard way
you'll fail altogether
to learn far too much

but all the same you'll make some friends,
fall in love more than once
and in more than one way
wake up on some mornings
to find yourself strong and able

maybe fear will always be with you, and
far too much of it
but the walls that arise in your mind
between you and some imagined truer self
they fall away with time

along, maybe, with the idea that
there's any truer self to be found.

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2019 / 12 / 18

i took the trash out just now,
and turning around to go back inside
caught the layer of new snow in the porch light
it shines more perfectly than
any i've seen in recent memory
almost incorporeal
offers no tangible resistance to my steps
and when i scoop a handful from the ground
in the seconds before it collapses into slush
and meltwater, the outlines of individual
flakes all set on edge against one another are
visible in sharp crystal relief
gleaming stars and polygons, lattices and
near-symmetries.

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2020 / 2 / 20

This isn’t going to be well-written and it’s probably not worth your time. I’m just pinning some thoughts where I can see them and check myself after a while.

✦

As I’m writing this, the WHO situation report for today lists 2,397,216 confirmed cases and 162,956 deaths worldwide. For the United States it has 751,273 cases and 35,884 deaths. The New York Times map shows 804,701 cases and 40,266 deaths for the US, though it’s not yet reflected in their CSV data.

Both numbers are lower bounds on both the number of people infected and the number of dead. I’m wildly unqualified to guess how much bigger the real numbers are.

✮

I tried to look back in my notes and see when the virus first really entered my awareness. The best I can come up with is that I remember talking about it on the phone with my dad. I was standing in a hotel lobby at a conference in San Francisco, full of coworkers who’d traveled internationally to attend. The 27th or 28th of January, I’d guess. It was in the news by then in an escalating kind of way.

A throw away line in an entry from the airport a few days later: “People in face masks because the network made them afraid of a potential pandemic.”

I think the fear really set in towards the end of February. My mom was in town and we were in the car coming back from lunch one day. I opened a laptop to check work mail and skimmed some headlines and it hit me: This one is happening. I was nervous about her taking a plane back home. The same day she left, I drank beers with a bunch of old work friends and we very carefully didn’t talk about it.

I began stocking up on canned food and dry goods in earnest somewhere around then. Work events started getting canceled. I remember a series of social gatherings haunted by that sense that this might be the last one before things got real. A series of those conversations where people said “wait, you really think this is going to be a big deal?”

❁

I haven’t regretted those early trips to the grocery store for a second.

✪

I started bookmarking some of my reading under a covid19 tag on the 1st of March.

In the weeks after that, I argued with older relatives and talked to neighbors and realized that the nature (and existence) of the disease had become a partisan question and a focus for the kind of conspiratorial paranoia that usually centers around chemtrails and cell towers.

Fewer people tell me it’s just the flu now. My nearest acquaintance with a chemtrails / deep state / 5G / FEMA camps obsession decamped for New Mexico a while back. I don’t think the conceptual shear has gotten any less pronounced overall, though. The focus has just shifted a little.

✧

It was always clear that, at best, Donald Trump is morally vacuous and profoundly stupid. For a long time I had conversations where people who shared that premise would ask how much it really mattered. Sure, Trump was personally appalling, every bit the mobbed up piece-of-shit real-estate con artist you knew you were getting. But was this administration really any worse or more extreme in terms of outcomes than x-random 2020-era Republican would have been? I haven’t heard anyone ask these things lately.

Of course, a lot of people don’t share that premise. In the early days, back when I still had the capacity to worry about things like national elections, I said: It seems like the only way Trump is likely to lose the election in November is if the pandemic and its consequences get bad enough. I expected some kind of reversal in popular understanding if a lot of people died and a lot of jobs went away, but what we seem to be getting instead is a hardening cultural divide over whether the virus is itself a serious threat and whose fault it is if so.

So: The US is decently likely to have federal leadership which combines world-historical incompetence with actual villainy for the duration of this thing. As a bonus, we’re now a population permanently unable to agree on the most basic questions of fact about an event that’s going to reshape politics, culture, and the economy for decades.

Then again, I guess you could say the same about a majority of the really big things that have happened during my lifetime.

☆

Today I feel like the American federal project is collapsing. This is an empire not just in slow decline but in a state of active disintegration. How much of that did I think already? How deep down did I feel it? I’m not sure. Maybe it’ll look different in a season or five.

Right now you can watch the cracks open in realtime. I don’t mean that there won’t be a United States of America when we wake up one of these quarantine days. I think it’s a fair bet American militaries will still be murdering people for resource extraction long after my natural lifespan runs out. But regional pandemic compacts between state governments, defunded public health agencies, and governors making back-channel deals to smuggle medical supplies in so they can’t be seized by the feds: I don’t think this stuff is ephemeral in its effects.

Structures are failing. Money and power are going to build other structures to compensate. Channels are going to shift, boundaries and systems are going to reconfigure.

It’s useful to have read The Shock Doctrine right about now.

❃

Plenty of recent experiences have caused me to think some pretty anarchist thoughts again. The pandemic has complicated that. Or maybe it’s only informed it. My politics don’t feel any more coherent than they did 6 months ago. Maybe it would be a bad sign if they did.

The already-patchworky set of stay-at-home orders and other restrictions are about to loosen, driven partly by death-cult consensus politics, and partly just by the impossible pressures of keeping a lid on so many people and systems. Too soon and badly managed is what I expect out of this.

“Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” is simultaneously the best and worst of American impulses.

tags: covid19, history, policy, politics

p1k3 / 2020 / 4 / 21

Disclaimer: I don’t know what I’m talking about. These posts are snapshots of what I was thinking on a given date so I can check myself later.

As I write this, early Sunday morning:

• WHO: 2,804,796 confirmed cases and 193,710 deaths globally
• NY Times: 938,590 cases and 48,310 deaths in the US

In my rough personal chronology, I’m marking today, or at any rate this weekend, as the point at which it seems like any very effective degree of social distancing ended locally. A steady trickle of people in neighbors' yards, a straight up party a few blocks down the way, a trip to the beer store where it was pretty clear that no one shopping or working there had any fucks left to give about transmission-limiting measures. Big packs of old guys on Harleys and young guys on crotch rockets, rumbling and screeching, respectively, through town. It’s probably not evenly distributed, but I’m guessing it feels similar a lot of places up and down the Colorado Front Range.

So: Does the disease move like I think it does after reading far too many “an expert said this” articles, or is it somehow not as bad as all that?

I think we’re going to find out, because it seems like we’ve just about exhausted whatever social / political / administrative capacity we had to mitigate things in a lot of the US.

We’ve been stricter than average about limiting contact with people outside our household, I think. We’ve got computer jobs that can happen from home, which makes that a lot more possible. Still, the social pressure to give up on it is substantial. I can feel myself shifting into the category of humorless, uptight asshole in the context of my relationships around town. Mostly, people are going to yield to pressures like that, sooner rather than later.

I wonder what this is going to look like in a week, or a month. I have some guesses and I hope I’m wrong about all of them.

tags: colorado, covid19

p1k3 / 2020 / 4 / 26

It’s 2020, which makes RSS and its siblings something on the order of 20 years old as a technology in actual use. It’s been a bit over 7 years since Google killed off Google Reader, and a year since Firefox removed feed discovery features, the last visible form of support in a mainstream browser.1

And yet: Feeds are still widely published and remain surprisingly effective for reading a slice of the web that isn’t overtly terrible.

Maybe this is an accident, or an emergent nerd conspiracy. Feed publishing isn’t that hard for programmers to implement, and rarely comes to the malign attention of marketing departments or upper management. It remains baked into enough widely-used software (WordPress, for example) that a lot of sites probably publish feeds without even realizing it. Podcasting is a whole thing and is built on the same underlying tech, which probably helps too.

This is tech I still use every day, and I feel like more people would benefit if they knew about it, but unlike the last few times I’ve written about this topic, I won’t waste space on the (doomed) idea that a browser vendor or the software industry as a whole might behave any differently. After decades of very hard work, we’ve achieved the natural equilibrium of the web: It totally sucks. The infrastructure is all owned by assholes with bad ideas and the technology is dominated by grotesque, unwieldy nonsense.

Instead of worry about that, I thought maybe I’d just write a series of short posts linking to feeds that I enjoy or get some value out of, so look for that when / if I get around to it…

✤

Edit: How do you subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds, you might reasonably ask? Well, you need a feedreader.

On the web, I use NewsBlur, a paid option with a free trial that’s also open source. On the desktop, I’ve used Liferea. If you want to self-host a web app, Tiny Tiny RSS is popular. For Firefox and Chrome, there’s a plugin called Feedbro that doesn’t seem to be open source (which sketches me out a bit), but does seem to offer a decent user experience.

In Firefox, I use the livemarks extension to see when pages have a feed I can subscribe to and turn some of them into “live bookmarks”. For Chrome, Google offers RSS Subscription Extension.

1 I use both "noticeable" and "mainstream" lightly here, given that the features were buried in a settings menu years before their removal, and Firefox itself exists at the financial and technical sufferance of the adtech search monopoly that owns the only browser anyone cares about supporting.

tags: feeds, firefox, syndication, technical, web

p1k3 / 2020 / 5 / 8

I was pondering Amazon just now, as I sat in the bathtub sweating profusely and reading an installment of The Murderbot Diaries on an old e-ink Kindle in a sandwich baggy.

I started thinking about how I bought a DRM-free edition of the book somewhere besides Amazon and jumped through several hoops to get it in a readable format on the Kindle (a device given to me by a former employer so I could participate in a book club for reading the blend of self-help, technical propaganda, and management porn that the class of people who go through startup incubators pretty much swim in).

And then I thought: For fucksake, the sheer futility of this kind of exercise, when we as people who read books all more or less live inside the machinery constructed by Amazon. I mean, sure, I have a copy of a book that I can stash for later and read on some other gadget, which has some practical value. But if you think of it as some minor act of resistance to the bullshit status quo… I mean, it feels good, I indulge in this kind of theatrics all the time, but fundamentally Amazon still owns publishing and for fractally similar reasons total assholes still control most of the code on pretty much every device on the planet.

From one reasonable but doomed point of view, the Kindle is a special-purpose computer I own. But that elides a whole lot of its essential nature, doesn’t it? What the Kindle really is: A fragment of Amazon’s computer that happens to be physically located in my house, interfaced with both my credit card balance and my brain.

And then I thought: We’re over the threshold. It’s not so much that there are a lot of computers. 20 years ago there were a lot of computers. Now it’s more like there’s one massive computer and we’re all inside it. We’ve collapsed into the state where cyberspace isn’t just a meaningful concept; it’s very nearly coterminous with human existence.

✶

The same thought from a different angle: I was reading a thread about this pretty interesting piece of desktop software, and someone said:

This does look intriguing, but I can’t help but be disinterested in it because it doesn’t look like you can share and collaborate over the Internet.

And I thought: Right. This is where we are. Abstractions like “a kind of file that this software can read” have become implementation details for the technical class. Even for the technical class, what doesn’t open onto the network is essentially dead. And in an age and architecture when scale and corporate platform availability (Android, iOS, Facebook) are prerequisites for meaningful participation, “the network” means what’s wholly owned. The network’s the computer, the computer is the megacorporation.

✧

But that understates the case. The meta-megacorporation is the network is the computer. Amazon doesn’t own the whole machine, or Microsoft, or Apple, or Facebook, or Google, or the governments of [the United States, China, Russia, …]. Vast territories are delineated within the network, but their boundaries are permeable and ill-defined. It’s impossible to cleanly disentangle client hardware from operating systems from databases from protocols from supply chains from datacenters. Just as it’s impossible to disentangle computation from the flow of money, the flow of goods, the flow of surveillance, the software-riddled cognitive state of populations. Scale permeates everything, even scale.

So: There’s a computer and most of us live there now.

tags: amazon, business, murderbot, reading, sfnal, technical

p1k3 / 2020 / 5 / 14

Opening my notebook to where I left off, I notice that the most recent pages are full of the distracted scrawl and half-hearted jottings that result from leaving it open on my desk while I work. There’s a scratchpaper quality to all of it. Random TODOs, unfinished lists, scraps of conversation, doodles, context-free exclamations. It was probably useful for thinking earlier, but it doesn’t tell me much now.

Musing about this in writing — writing about an act of writing, its materials, etc. — is a particular kind of thing. Let’s call it meta. Meta-whatever:

• Metawriting
• Metaprogramming
• Metaprocess

Writing about writing. Programming about programming. Meetings about meetings. The mind reflecting on its own function.

Meta-whatever can be both potent and dangerously tempting. It’s not for nothing that it shows up so many places, and at times it yields deep insights or significant gains in power. It’s also striking how often it seems to trap people in localized loops and hopeless ruts.

Methodology cults like Agile, Getting Things Done, and the recently emerging nerd-frenzy over the Zettelkasten method are rife with process obsessions, semi-stable patterns of recurring inquiry/argument, and people who mainly use their methods of choice to refine their methods of choice. You don’t have to spend much time around any given large organization to notice how much effort is burned on recursive bureaucracy, or how many contemporary jobs have collapsed into closed-loop no-external-reality meta-work.

This is all frustrating both to observe and to experience, when it gets out of control.

Maybe part of the reason it gets away from people is the high from when it pays off. Runaway metaprogramming might turn into such a nightmare because it starts with sharpening your tools to a keen edge, or with an act of leapfrogging tiers of abstraction. Automating your automation can feel like the purest response to that age old imperative of the hacker, that you make the computer do the stupid shit.

Of course, follow that impulse too far, angle it the wrong way — and pretty soon you’re Mickey Mouse trying to bail while the ensorceled brooms flood the whole joint.

☆

Writing about writing might not have quite the same potential for nested, generative dysfunction, but it often produces artifacts just as unintelligible. Self-referentiality in fiction can be a real punch in the brain pan sometimes, but stories about stories get tiresome sooner or later. Taking the framework apart and putting it back together can be amazing; it can also become deeply annoying when a reader’s looking for a framework that contains something.

Sure, all narrative is a sort of trick — but artifice that’s purely interested in its own mechanics eventually leads to boring tricks. It’s like painting that’s purely about how paint adheres to a surface without any particular interest in or reference to external objects and context: There’s nothing wrong with that sort of thing, but there’d be something kind of depressing about a world where it was the only kind of painting.

❃

To circle back to notes about note-taking, because that’s where this started: It’s a fruitful line of inquiry, up to some limit of circularity, some moment where you risk crawling up your own asshole about refining a System instead of using it to learn other things and think other thoughts.

This is a reminder I need, periodically.

tags: notes, systems, technical, writing, zettelkasten

p1k3 / 2020 / 5 / 20

Background: I’m writing some posts linking to feeds that I like.

Today’s theme: Blogs that curate interesting links.

Linkblogs were once a really common form, and if done lazily can be a formulaic waste of time, but there are a few people with a real knack for sifting out the good stuff who I find worth tracking. Three examples:

• Leah Neukirchen’s trivium is a low-volume, high-value roundup of mostly-technical links that nearly always contains something worth my time.
  • Feed URL: http://leahneukirchen.org/trivium/index.atom
• Pathologically Polymathic is a linkblog by Danny Yee, author of the consistently excellent Danny Yee’s Book Reviews. Math, art, lit, news, politics, transportation, science, etc.
  • Feed URL: http://danny.oz.au/blog/rss.xml
• Waxy.org is Andy Baio’s blog - there’re occasional longer pieces in the mix, but often just quick links. Andy Baio is one of the cool kids, and thus his tastes reflect cool-kid concerns that I don’t really share, but a lot of this stuff is good anyway.
  • Feed URL: https://waxy.org/feed

I do some linkblogging of my own. You can see stuff I’ve shared lately in the “linkdump” sidebar on the front page of this site, or subscribe to:

• My public Pinboard bookmarks
  • Feed URL: https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:brennen/
• My shared posts from NewsBlur
  • Feed URL: https://brennen.newsblur.com/social/rss/98457/brennen

The Pinboard one in particular is strictly “stuff I want to remember”, not “stuff I think anyone else cares about”. It informs a lot of things I write here or work on elsewhere, and stands a fair chance of being deathly boring for readers who aren’t me.

tags: feeds

p1k3 / 2020 / 5 / 25

Back on the 25th of May, four police officers in Minneapolis murdered a black man named George Floyd on camera.

In 2018, on a list of guesses to check after 5 and 10 years, I wrote:

No meaningful reforms of policing in America will have gained any traction. When I go to look at this list again, I will be able to recall one or more killings of an unarmed black civilian by law enforcement within the previous 2-3 months.

It’s only been two years, but the pattern has held and in a basic way I expect that it will continue to hold for years and decades to come: Because American law enforcement is a violently racist system. A system that both reflects the racism of the society it operates within and actively works to entrench that racism.

George Floyd isn’t the first black person I’m aware of being murdered by on-duty cops or cop-affiliated parties this year. He wasn’t even the first one that I learned about in May.1

I’m a work-from-home white desk-job professional living in one of the whiter places on the planet, surrounded by entrenched wealth. In my small-town neighborhood, the cops speed-trap tourists on their way to a national park and are otherwise largely ignorable. How many cop murders would I have known about this year if I lived in that enormous swath of America where the police function day-to-day as a hostile occupying force?

❃

What if the pattern didn’t hold?

This time feels different than the last n iterations of this grim cycle. There’s been, as best I can tell, an explosion of police violence in response to a wave of protest that seems vast and not yet remotely contained. As I write this, people in my family are are marching. Cities like Lincoln, NE have seen actual unrest.

It’s long seemed to me that, for the most part, America knows how to neutralize street protest as a political force. The machinery contains, suppresses, deflects, and misinforms. Structures within government, law enforcement, news media, and activism itself all function to render it a kind of theater that mostly plays out for its own participants.

Whenever it feels like that machinery is breaking down, something is up.

Maybe it feels that way in part because the vicious, bullying, riot-inciting brutality of the cops is on such unguarded display right now. A display that might satisfy the longing to inflict pain and fear that fuels so much of our politics, but also throws the hypocrisy and complicity of authority into sharp relief and must put an incredible strain on the quiet consensus that usually keeps these things so manageable.

Don’t mistake this for hope. I’m not hopeful. All the same, it’s possible to imagine this as the moment it becomes thinkable to cut police department budgets, restrict police unions, end qualified immunity, scrap a bunch of surplus military gear, fund alternative forms of emergency response, and fire a lot of overt white supremacists.

✴

And then meanwhile: The pandemic.

It’s been well over a month now since I first felt like social distancing efforts had pretty well ended where I live. There’s been almost a kind of weird sense of stasis since then. Things are more open than they were. The bar across the street is having bands in again. The road’s full of cars. But I think I underestimated the degree to which people were still laying low in late April, and even now it’s clear that things are far from normal.

• WHO: 6,535,354 confirmed cases and 387,155 deaths globally
  • Late April: 2,804,796 and 193,710 deaths
• NY Times: 1,883,033 cases and 108,194 deaths in the US
  • Late April: 938,590 cases and 48,310 deaths
• colorado.gov: 27,615 cases and either 1,524 or 1,274 deaths

It doesn’t seem, here, like there’s been the wild spike in cases I feared as things loosened in April. Nor does it seem like it’s anywhere near over. Talking to friends scattered around the country about this recently, a rough consensus: America ran out of attention span, now we wait and see how much of a tragedy that is. Of course that’s flippant and doesn’t really acknowledge the crushing economic and social pressures to reopen, but it’s not exactly wrong.

☆

How does the state of the pandemic interact with mass street protest? I guess we’re going to find out.

How does the pandemic’s function as an ideological pivot point interact with mass protest? We’re going to find out, but I already know I don’t like the answer.

1 wp: Shooting of Ahmaud Arbery

tags: colorado, covid19, george-floyd, policing, politics

p1k3 / 2020 / 6 / 5

the sky turns heavy all afternoon
the cheap hardware store thermometer on the front porch
drops 20 degrees in a few hours

in the evening, it rains for a long time
we're out walking when it starts, halfway through
a habitual loop down to the river, past the labyrinth
and the parking lot full of deputies and the post office

it rains while i chop vegetables,
while we sit on the couch eating stir fry,
while we stand in the kitchen washing dishes,
and while i sit again at my desk, scratching notes
in ink and thinking that i ought to be thinking
something that weighs something

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2020 / 6 / 18

Discussed: The idea of a Zettelkasten, note-taking, index cards, wikis, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens.

This post roughly continues a thread that goes something like:

• 2006: this one about notes on index cards
• 2014: a notes.txt / TODO file format
• 2019: notes on notes
• 2020: meta meta

For the unfamiliar: “Zettelkasten” is German for “slip box”. It refers to a note-taking method where ideas and bibliographic references are stored on index cards or slips of paper.

There’s a decent chance my first exposure to the word was on a blog by Manfred Kuehn called Taking note, which started publishing in 2007 with an entry about Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten:

One of the more interesting systems for keeping such index cards was developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998). […] Luhmann claimed that his file was something of a collaborator in his work, a largely independent partner in his research and writing. It might have started out as a mere apprentice when Luhmann was still studying himself (in 1951), but after thirty years of having been fed information by the human collaborator it had acquired the ability of surprising him again an again. Since the ability of genuinely surprising one another is an essential characteristic of genuine communication, he argued that there was actually communication going on between himself and his partner in theory.

By the time I read that, I’d already spent time thinking about index cards as a way to organize knowledge, and experimented with a card box that might have become a full-fledged paper Zettelkasten if I’d kept at it. I think these ideas were on my mind because of C2’s stuff about index cards in software development, the notion of the Hipster PDA, and my friend Brent’s fixation on David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

Hypertext had been a preoccupation of mine for quite a while by the time I heard of Niklas Luhmann: HyperCard in the early 90s, the web, the wiki (with its roots in a HyperCard stack), Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Apart from introducing me to Ward’s Wiki, Extreme Programming, Agile, and GTD, Brent Newhall wrote a simple filesystem-backed wiki in Perl with some unique features. I wound up maintaining that code for years, and used it to keep a personal wiki on this site for at least a decade. (Any readers I retain from back then might remember that it functioned as a comment / “marginal notes” / linkblogging system here for much of that time.)

Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was a kind of paper hypertext. He numbered individual cards/slips in such a way that related things could be found in physical proximity, and made links between cards by referencing those identifiers.

✦

So now it’s 2020 and the Zettelkasten is having a moment. Sort of a nested moment, inside of a larger one about note-taking and personal knowledge systems. I haven’t really traced out the web of influence here, but there’s been an escalating flurry of pieces like these:

• Magnus Eriksson - Living with a Zettelkasten - 2015-06-21
• Roberto Zoia - Zettelkasten, a method for note-taking - 2018-11-13
• abramdemski on LessWrong - The Zettelkasten Method - 2019-09-20
• Clerestory - Zettelkästen? - 2019-10-09
• Clerestory - Zettelkasten! - 2019-11-09
• Nat Eliason: How to Take Smart Notes: A Step-by-Step Guide - 2020-02-07
• Jethro Kuan: How To Take Smart Notes With Org-mode - 2020-02-14
• Book Review: How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens - 2020-03-19

There seems to be a thread of interest in the rationalist / LessWrong scene. Apart from that, I’d guess much of this is due to the work of Christian Tietze and Sascha Fast, who maintain a long-running blog and forum at zettelkasten.de, sell note-taking software for the Mac, and have recently begun promoting an online video course on the method. (I believe there’s also a book in the mix somewhere, albeit one not yet translated to English.)

Unsurprisingly, the community at forum.zettelkasten.de is the most direct place to watch an entire ideological complex, complete with in-group vocabulary and evangelical fervor, crystallize around the core idea. That said, it feels like it’s spreading and mutating in the wild by now, and would probably continue to do so independent of any particular guru figure or canonical text.

If there were a canonical text in English, at the moment it would probably be How to Take Smart Notes, by Sönke Ahrens. That’s the book that gets mentioned over and over again. I bought a copy back in February, after skimming the first chapter and reading a bunch of blog material like the stuff linked above.

I decided to write up my notes here after I recommended reading it to a friend who turned out to thoroughly hate it, and seeing similar reactions elsewhere. Although it fails to make as strong a case for its ideas as it intends, I’ve personally found it helpful for thinking about my habits.

This is a short book - 170 pages with bibliography and a very brief index in this edition. It’s also substantially longer than it needs to be, which isn’t unusual for this sort of self-help nonfiction. To its credit, it’s fairly dense, but it veers into evangelism and salesmanship often enough to be frustrating, and makes claims that some readers will find questionable, if not off-putting. It also comes with a dose of pop-psych material.

Construed strictly, Ahrens' idea that “nothing else counts than writing” is too narrow a conception of work for most people. It’s simply not true for programmers, engineers, designers, customer service reps, or project managers — let alone general contractors, farmers, or electricians. Most people who could benefit from note-taking habits aren’t chiefly concerned with writing documents even when documents are integral to their work. Where the exhortation that writing is the only thing does ring true is when your goal is to produce written artifacts, e.g. to turn your reading into research output.

Smart Notes as a whole tends that way: It’s explicitly aimed at students, professional academics, and nonfiction writers. While I occasionally qualify as that last, none of those roles map to the scope of my note-taking. Accordingly, this is a book I read selectively and with a critical eye, gleaning what I could and generalizing where useful. I’d suggest other readers approach it the same, particularly if, like me:

• You don’t work in an academic field.
• You aren’t much concerned with writing papers.
• You rely on your notes to archive collections of specific facts and remember sequences of events as much as to connect and synthesize ideas.

I do think it’s a useful read if you’re interested in the mechanics of a Zettelkasten and haven’t found what you’re looking for in other writeups, or if you’re just looking to yak-shave a personal knowledge system.

I don’t, strictly speaking, keep a Zettelkasten. I have, however, been borrowing ideas from people who do. After finishing How to Take Smart Notes, here’s some of what I think I’ve taken away from it and related sources:

• Your notes can be:
  • An extension of your long-term memory.
  • A living system.
  • Capable of surprising you with new connections, forgotten ideas, and emergent patterns.
• Writing is a means of thinking.
• Read (or work) with a notebook to hand. Jot stuff down as you go.
  • Using the same notebook for everything will save you thinking about which one to write in.
  • The notebook can function like an inbox. Process things from there into permanent note storage, be that in electronic form or on index cards.
• Track citations / bookmarks / bibliographical references.
  • Luhmann’s paper Zettelkasten seems to have used a dedicated card file for this. Ahrens recommends tooling like Zotero.
• Work in small units.
• Summarize/restate ideas instead of just quoting or excerpting things. Link them to other ideas already in your notes.
  • Just reading a text isn’t the same as understanding it. Restating an author’s ideas and integrating them with your existing knowledge is a kind of self-test, and facilitates learning.
• Add stuff to your notes if:
  • It connects to something already in the notes.
  • It’s open to future connections.
• You might understand something if you can effectively teach it.
• Hierarchy is likely to get in your way. Draw connections within the whole space of ideas, without being limited to the current level/tier/box/rank.
• “To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft;” for a draft, a series of notes, for a series of notes, rearranging what’s already in the slipbox, which you’ve written as you go. “All you really have to do is have a pen in your hand when you read.”

That last one cuts pretty close to the heart of the method the book espouses. It’s focused on writing an academic paper, but if you fuzz it out a little I think it gestures at something more generally useful.

Most of the work of understanding things is incremental and piecemeal: Refining and tending a fragmentary web of memories, perspectives, practices, states, and relationships. Notes are a technology for accumulating that work and extending its durability outside of our skulls. Used well, they’re a foundation for making new things and a solid place to stand when faced with recurring problems.

Anyhow, while I find the Zettelkasten thing interesting as a cultural happening, I’m not concerned with replicating it.

In the broad outlines, the notes I keep in VimWiki look a lot like an electronic slipbox. There’s a bunch of stuff in the Luhmann / Kuehn / Ahrens / zettelkasten.de trains of thought that seems useful to borrow, and lines up well with things I’ve already learned working with wikis, version control systems, bookmarks, and a couple decades of paper notebooks. On the other hand, there’s a lot in how I model the world and how I think in writing that doesn’t fit.

I often need to think in terms of when very specific things happened: State changes to complicated systems, what happened when I ran some technical procedure, when I planted a bed of onions. While restating ideas and situations in my own words is a good way to get a handle on various things, I also find it useful to archive verbatim fragments of conversation, specific texts, chunks of code, and long transcripts of program output. Some of my “notes” are really executable scripts, and a lot of my external memory lives in source code repositories, wikis, README files, command-line histories, and issue tracking systems.

All of that’s led me to thinking in terms of logs and journals, and roughing out some tools for a 2-axis time vs. topic approach that I’ll elaborate on one of these days. I’d also like to make more room in my system for integrating drawings, photos, and structured data, though I’m not entirely sure how to go about it.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been thinking a lot about various collections of public notes (some more Zettelkasten-adjacent than others), stuff like:

• Found by way of a Zettelkasten Forum thread:
  • Andy Matuschak’s working notes are full of interesting thoughts and presented in a format I fully intend to steal from.
  • Cosma Shalizi’s Notebooks
• Danny Yee’s Book Reviews

tags: notebooks, notes, reading, zettelkasten

p1k3 / 2020 / 7 / 27

I went for an aimless drive on Saturday. It was accidental. I set out to haul the recycling and buy a can of Coke at the gas station, which they didn’t have so I settled for a 20oz plastic bottle. I left the gas station and got stuck in the turn lane where I’d usually make a u-turn back towards home and thought whatever, why not just go for a couple of miles. It felt good to be out. It was pretty weather, apart from the wildfire smoke, and the fall colors were in full effect. A couple of miles turned into 20 or 30.

I was feeling relaxed when I got back to town, turning over ideas about stuff I wanted to write and stuff I needed to do in the yard. Then I came around a curve and there were a bunch of flags waving, which resolved as I got closer into a little Trump rally: MAGA hats, banners, oversized pickups, jeering shitheads. I flipped them off as I went past and caught a full wave of rage noises, although the only specific phrases that stuck in my memory were a chorus of “fuck you!"s and a single "God bless America!”

I went back to the house all keyed up on stupid animal loathing and made a “YOUR GUY SUCKS” sign on a cardboard box, but by the time I headed out the door to stand across the street and get screamed at they’d dispersed for the day. It was down to three teenagers looking a little confused about where to stand while trading insults with drivers. A few big coal-rolling pickups with flags in the back trickled through town over the next hour or two and that was it, more or less.

“YOUR GUY SUCKS” isn’t much of a message. I couldn’t think of anything more high-minded that was also true. I just didn’t want them there, being the way they are, and I wanted them to know it.

They feel, I’m sure, the same way about me.

tags: politics

p1k3 / 2020 / 10 / 13

I’ve been lugging a lot of heavy stuff around the place lately, which has had me wanting a utility item that was a staple of the gardening and building projects of my childhood: A garden cart.

My parents own several of these by now, but there’s a specific version I think of as The Cart. It’s probably been around for 30 years, give or take. I wrote about it back in 2009:

It consists of two wheels, four pieces of plywood, and some metal tubing + trim. Its construction is far less complex than that of most bicycles. It’s easy to load, capacious, and surprisingly sturdy. The wheels are positioned so that the cart seems almost to lift itself when you tug upwards on the handle. It moves easily over broken ground. It stands square on one end for dumping or storage.

Theirs turns out to be a Garden Way cart; unfortunately a company that went bankrupt a while back. Looking for the closest approximation I could find, these are what I came up with:

• Gardener’s Supply Company - Large Gardener’s Supply Cart - USD 349.00
• Carts Vermont - Large Garden Cart - USD 399.95

I’ll probably order one of those (although reading reviews of both has me nervous about materials & build quality). I’d also be remiss not to mention the Whizbang Garden Cart, a wooden do-it-yourself design (by a guy also notable for his homebrew chicken plucker):

• The Whizbang Garden Cart Blog
• Planet Whizbang - Down-To-Earth Books, Tools & Inspiration
• Plans on offer here - find-in-page for “Garden Cart”

I’ve wanted one of these for years, but I spent a lot of this summer & fall dragging tools, dirt, and building materials around our yard, and when I saw a recent Mastodon post with a cart in the background I decided to do something about it. I spent an evening grubbing through search results, and bookmarked a bunch of stuff along the way.

Garden Way seems to have been out of business since 2001, at least under that brand name, which it appears was once the parent company of Troy-Bilt. From the depths of Troy-Bilt’s support site, an article about parts for Garden Way carts:

Problem Where can I order parts for Troy-Bilt & Garden Way Garden Carts?

Solution These garden carts are products that we have licensed another company to build and support. Service, parts and/or warranty inquiries should be directed to the phone numbers and address below: …

Older Models: Prior to the 2001 closure of Garden Way Inc., similar garden carts were sold as “Garden Way Garden Carts”.

And one about Garden Way’s bankruptcy:

Problem What happened to the OLD Troy-Bilt manufacturing company?

Solution The product brand names Troy-Bilt® and Bolens® were formerly manufactured under the parent company Garden Way Inc. of Troy, NY.

In 2001 Garden Way Inc., filed for bankruptcy and is no longer in business.

On September 1, 2001 MTD Products Inc. out of Cleveland, Ohio purchased most of the remaining assets under the Troy-Bilt® and Bolens® names from the bankruptcy court.

MTD Products Inc. then transferred the Troy-Bilt® brand to the Troy-Bilt LLC Corporation. Troy-Bilt LLC Inc. is now manufacturing Troy-Bilt® brand outdoor power equipment.

There’s a New York Times obituary for Lyman P. Wood, the founder of Garden Way:

“Lyman was an incredible mix of entrepreneur, futurist and marketer,” said David Schaefer, a Burlington public relations man who was once host to a syndicated gardening television program about Mr. Wood’s company. “Our last conversation was about how are the political systems and resources of Earth going to stand up to increased population growth.” …

Mr. Wood is known for his book, “The Have More Plan,” a 1944 volume offering a thrifty wartime population a way to live off the land.

In the 1960’s he founded the privately held Garden Way Manufacturing Company, expanding New York’s Troy-Bilt rototiller company into publishing, retail stores and other ventures.

Which brings us to the carts themselves, in their current incarnations:

• Gardener’s Supply Company
  • Large Gardener’s Supply Cart - USD 349.00
  • 66″ long, 42.25″ wide, 30″ high
  • “For over 25 years, our garden carts have been a beloved tool of gardeners everywhere.”
• Carts Vermont
  • Large Garden Cart - USD 399.95
  • 67.25″ long, 41.50″ wide, 30.25″ high
  • “Home of the original “made in Vermont” garden cart and multi-purpose hauler. Carts Vermont has the tried and true garden, firewood, and utility carts for over 30 years!”

Based on photos and slightly differing measurements, I don’t think those are exactly the same cart off of the same assembly line, but they’re close enough they must have originated from the same plans somewhere along the way.

I got closer to an origin story with this piece by Nancy Wood - Lyman Wood’s daughter:

But first, here’s a bit of clarification about the origin of Country Home Products. The article says it was founded by Lyman Wood (my father) in the 1960s and that it “became known as Garden Way.” In fact, they were two completely separate companies. Lyman and others founded Garden Way in the 1960s with the rebirth of the original Rototiller, which became the Troy-Bilt rear-end tiller manufactured in Troy, New York. That successful mail-order business provided the funding for the growth of several Garden Way divisions in Vermont, including Garden Way Publishing (books for country living), Garden Way Research (manufacturer of the Garden Way carts) in Charlotte, plus the Garden Way Living Center retail store and the nonprofit Gardens For All in Burlington.

Unfortunately, as it grew larger, not everyone ascribed to that mission. A group of dissidents in Troy who were more concerned about profits masterminded an internal takeover on January 28, 1982, ousting Lyman and other key employees in Vermont on that day. Within two years, all of the Vermont operations had been sold or closed and over 200 employees relieved of their jobs. The nonprofit, Gardens for All, was the one exception, and it continues today as the National Gardening Association.

Many of those Vermont employees started new businesses (such as Vermont Teddy Bear, Gardeners Supply and Williamson Publishing), and Lyman was no exception. Even though he was forced out of Garden Way, he was still subject to a non-compete agreement. Garden-related products were out, so he investigated other possibilities. With his friends John Gibbons (former owner of Harrington’s) and Dick Raymond (former gardening guru and author at Garden Way) he came up with the name Country Home Products.

Drama, intrigue, garden industry strife!

Anyway, based on this, it seems like the Gardener’s Supply cart is a clear lineal descendant of the original. I’m pretty much assuming the same is true of the Carts Vermont one — though I haven’t seen anything to indicate what, if any, relationship they’ve got to the original company / factory.

I wound up ordering a copy of What a Way to Live and Make a Living: The Lyman P. Wood Story, by Roger Griffin.

Mostly I just want to buy a cart, but there’re hints of a cultural history lurking in this kind of thing. Back-to-the-land ideas that were circulating in the 1960s–70s, mail-order retail, the ubiquitous rototiller infomercials of the 1990s, whatever it is that leads people to do things like burn wood for heat and can their own green beans. It’s probably roughly one step from the Garden Way garden cart to, say, the Whole Earth Catalog.

I’m not sure how much I’m really going to pull on any of those threads, but it’s a good reminder that most things run deeper than it seems at first.

tags: garden, garden-carts, lawn-and-garden, tools

p1k3 / 2020 / 12 / 5

Noun: yak shaving (uncountable)

1. Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem. I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off.
2. A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task. I looked at a reference manual for my car just to answer one question, but I spent the whole afternoon with my nose buried in it, just yak shaving, and got no work done on the car itself.

As Lars is fond of saying, “queue your yaks, don’t stack them”.

That’s good advice which I’m bad at following, but early in 2019 I started a list of yaks where I can stash problems as they come up. Sometimes, at least, I manage to put something on that list and then go back to whatever I was nominally working on. I think I would recommend this practice as a way to eliminate some brain clutter.

It’s the tail end of the year now, cold and snowy outside, and I have some days off of work, so it seemed like a good time to go through the yak-shaving list and try some things. Here then is brief documentation of some problems solved (or further complicated) along the way.

I have a Behringer UMC404HD audio interface for recording synthesizer output and other audio. You plug it into USB and it gives you some new interfaces. Works out of the box with Audacity and Ardour, no driver fiddling required. You can plug headphones into it and monitor what it’s recording, or use it as an output from the computer.

This all works pretty well, but at least on my Debian Buster system, it made juggling the builtin sound card, a set of external speakers, and the headphones plugged into the UMC404HD kind of clunky.

I searched and found out that you can use pacmd at the command line to switch which audio streams are going to which “sink”:

# Get a list of sinks - i.e. output devices, I guess:
pacmd list-sinks

# List sink inputs, i.e. apps sending audio somewhere:
pacmd list-sink-inputs

# Move an input to a different sink, for example from external
# sound card to builtin:
pacmd move-sink-input 79 0

Unfortunately, pacmd has verbose output and is tedious to work with. I was afraid I was going to wind up writing some kind of hacky wrapper script, but then people on Mastodon told me about pasystray and pavucontrol, which expose GUIs with a view of what’s playing and let you select what hardware it goes to. pasystray in particular gives you a little tray icon, which is pretty much what I wanted. There’s also pamix, which seems to expose some of the same info in a terminal interface.

These are in Debian, so:

sudo apt install pavucontrol pasystray

Not perfect, but much improved. I added pasystray to my xmonad startup script.

I have a Wacom Intuos pen & touch drawing tablet. I don’t think this version has been made for a while, but it’s probably similar to current models. It acts as both a pen input device and a trackpad. I’ve always had the problem, when using two displays, where the pen input is mapped across both screens so that (typically) whatever image I’m working on I can only use half the tablet for.

I haven’t done much drawing on the computer since I got a second monitor anyway, so I never dug into it all that deeply. This time when I looked I found a blog post from 2017 on feldspaten.org with pretty clear instructions.

I wound up running (sample output in comments):

# I didn't have this installed:
sudo apt install xinput

xrandr | grep primary 
# DisplayPort-0 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 598mm x 336mm

xinput | grep -i Wacom
# ⎜   ↳ Wacom Intuos PT M Pad pad                   id=16   [slave  pointer  (2)]
# ⎜   ↳ Wacom Intuos PT M Pen stylus                id=17   [slave  pointer  (2)]
# ⎜   ↳ Wacom Intuos PT M Pen eraser                id=18   [slave  pointer  (2)]
# ⎜   ↳ Wacom Intuos PT M Finger touch              id=19   [slave  pointer  (2)]

xinput map-to-output 16 DisplayPort-0
xinput map-to-output 17 DisplayPort-0
xinput map-to-output 18 DisplayPort-0

I left the “Finger touch” input alone, and sure enough the pen input winds up locked to my primary display while the tablet can still be used as a trackpad across both displays.

Not totally perfect and I’m not sure what the appropriate way to make this permanent is, but at any rate it removes a frustration and makes MyPaint fun to use again.

I don’t generally worry about Google’s opinion of this website, but it seemed vaguely useful to be aware of the things they’re tracking here. Profiling usually reveals something you’ve missed. So I read through the PageSpeed Insights for p1k3.com. A few things:

• They suggest inlining CSS and JavaScript files. This would be easy enough, I guess, but I’m probably not going to do it. It’d bulk up each page with a bunch of boilerplate and anyway it kind of grosses me out.

• Enable text compression: Ok, easy enough. I uncommented the line gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript; in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, which upped the score from 90 to 98, so I guess it just wasn’t enabled for… Some type. See also: nginx docs on compression.

• They suggest minifying JavaScript. There’s a copy of jQuery on here - used for almost nothing, but handy every now and then. I swapped it out for the minified version of the latest version from the official download page. That got the score to 100.

• It looks like I could tweak cache lifetimes on some files, but I think I won’t bother.

A while back I learned about the moon phase emojis:

🌑 🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘 🌑

I immediately wanted a way to display these in the terminal for (approximately) the current phase, but I didn’t initially have much luck finding a utility that would just spit out the phase of the moon without calling a web API or anything.

I realized while digging into this that gcal will display moon phases, although the documentation is impenetrable and trying to construct the right format string gave me a headache, so on to other approaches…

Paul Carleton wrote up a solution in Rust which uses a US Navy Observatory API, but I’d rather network access not be a requirement.

I did find a handful of libraries:

• Perl: Astro::MoonPhase
• Python: astral, GitHub
• PHP: solarissmoke/php-moon-phase

Of these, Samir Shah’s PHP code was the least hassle to work with. It doesn’t really satisfy my goal of “a shell script I can toss in ~/bin and use for whatever”, but it lets me stop thinking about the problem, so here’s a few lines of PHP called phasemoji (also on packagist, though that distribution isn’t set up in any kind of useful way).

Also, because I’m a dumbass, I bought a novelty domain and set up a web service. Behold: phase.city.

tags: audio, emoji, google, linux, moon, phase-city, phasemoji, php, technical, yak-shaving

p1k3 / 2020 / 12 / 28

days and days into weeks and weeks and months
and months go by with all the variation of
fenceposts outside a car window
on a road through western kansas

and then it's the late winter again
in february, we finally get a stretch
of cold weather

i leave my desk and go out for a walk one day
and see a coyote hunting prairie dogs in the
grass, a bald eagle looking down over the
half-frozen saint vrain

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2021 / 2 / 14

in the transient world
nothing is incorruptible
except perhaps corruption itself

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2021 / 2 / 28

The RMS thing has come up again. I wrote at some length about this back in October of 2019. I felt messed up about it then, and I still do. If anybody wants or needs my opinions, they haven’t changed much since I wrote that piece.

Anyway, I signed the open letter. I could quibble with aspects of the demands there, but I guess this feels like a necessary push right now. A lot of friends and colleagues are on that list, and it seems like for the right reasons.

I don’t want to see the Free Software Foundation destroyed. I would very much like to see it saved from some of the worst impulses in this scene. If that can’t happen, then we as a community probably need to stop treating the FSF as a useful proxy for the radical libre software position and put that effort, time, and money into less damaged undertakings.

At any rate: I won’t personally renew my membership with the FSF until, and unless, meaningful changes are made.

tags: free-software, richard-stallman

p1k3 / 2021 / 3 / 23

Written back in March, posted 2021-07-14. Discusses a mass shooting.

I moved out of Boulder almost a decade ago. Writing this now, I don’t remember if I thought I was making a decision about leaving Boulder. I think I figured I’d be back sooner or later. I was just getting worn out on living in basements, my landlords upstairs were about to have a baby, and it seemed like time to make a change. When I went to look, it turned out I could rent a massive old 3 bedroom house in one of the L-towns for what a decent above-ground apartment was running in Boulder.

When I left, the exodus of most people I knew in town was just getting underway. The stuff that made it permanent seems pretty concrete and inescapable now, but it accumulated gradually. One formulaic conversation about real estate and the money moving in at a time; the same story as every other place in America that people from somewhere else want to live.

Looking back on it now, those two years in a basement in South Boulder were the best that town ever treated me. Martian Acres, with Martin Park for a back yard. The bike path all the way out to Gunbarrel for work, or jamming onto the crowded bus up Broadway. Beers at the Southern Sun, breakfast at the Walnut Cafe to go with the hangovers.

There’s nothing much extraordinary about that part of town. As far as I know, it’s just 1950s and 60s development that grew into something lived in. Cheap little ranch houses on irrationally curving streets. It felt a little more real than the places the money had completely eaten by then, and by virtue of that reality also maybe a little weirder in the way things around here are supposed to be weird. They get fewer by the year, but Boulder as I knew it was a place of little pocket-universe neighborhoods. You’d find yourself in some hidden corner and think: This is how it used to be. This is why people keep coming back.

People in that part of town were good to me. It’s the part I always feel like I can still imagine living in.

✢

There are things you remember about a neighborhood. Mundane but also defining. I wind up with strong opinions about grocery stores. The Table Mesa one was my favorite King Soopers around here. Nice produce selection, friendly people at the checkout.

A couple of days ago, a guy walked in the door there and shot ten people to death with, most probably, an AR-15 knockoff. Nobody I know died, though I was as worried about that as I’ve ever been during one of these.

Some unbelievable asshole was streaming from the parking lot on YouTube during all of this. I watched more of it than I feel good about, with a more acute version of that same sick dread you feel when a tornado is bearing down on somewhere you know.

✾

This is the weather in America. If you live in a place where the violence is usually at a distance, you put it in the mental background. You figure today probably isn’t the day a mass murder hits while you’re picking up groceries or going to work. Most days aren’t. You’d take sensible precautions but there aren’t any to take. It’s like living in tornado alley, but you can’t look for a house with a basement.

I hate my country.

tags: boulder, colorado, violence

p1k3 / 2021 / 3 / 24

1. In most settings, a big van covers about 70% of the utility afforded by a pickup truck, plus you can sleep in it and the stuff inside won’t get rained on.

2. Before you buy or gift a synthesizer, remember that owning a synthesizer is like having a little robot voice whispering in your ear about how cool it would be to own more and better synthesizers and synthesizer accessories. (The voice isn’t necessarily wrong, but it will never be satisfied.)

3. However many audio cables you think you’re going to need, double it and add one for good measure.

4. Whatever comes after USB-C, I’m already mad about it.

5. In 2021, the primary determinant of what power tool you’re going to buy is usually whatever brand of lithium batteries you already own a bunch of.

   It took concerted effort by some very smart people to create a situation this thoroughly stupid. I’d boycott the whole market if I didn’t already own a bunch of tools encased in yellow plastic and dislike messing with extension cords.

6. My Casio G-Shock still works great.

Previously:

• recent observations on gear nerdery & utility fetishism (2011)
• more observations on gear nerdery & utility fetishism (2012)

tags: synthesizers, usb

p1k3 / 2021 / 4 / 11

I’m sketching an incomplete thought here. For context:

• GitHub eating open source, Microsoft eating GitHub. Google eating e-mail, the web, corporate communications. Apple with its infinite dollars and stranglehold on a class of users with deep, identity-defining emotional attachments to its stuff. All the usual monopoly-and-aspiring-monopoly stuff.
• The totality of cloud computing’s ideological and conceptual triumph in the space of a decade, to the point where people tend to view a business that owns servers and runs stuff on them instead of renting them from an approved megacorporation as aberrant and maybe kind of offensive.
• RMS and the Free Software Foundation’s apparent ongoing collapse
• A few years' experience working for a technical nonprofit embedded in a large community.
• The way most of the general-purpose computers are phones now, and how much less general purpose they’re looking these days.

❃

So, the recurring thought: A lot of the things that people gravitate towards or become dependent on in software are effectively governments.

That is, partly, things which:

• Build and maintain infrastructure
• Create / enforce standards
• Police at least some kinds of bad actor
• Extract rents / taxes
• Provide employment to a class of technocrats
• Provide frameworks for cultural affiliation
• Express or enact aspects of the civic religion

While often what a lot of us in FOSS / digital rights / free knowledge circles are striving for is some combination, depending on priors and priorities, of:

• Software anarchism - things that don’t require government, operate outside of it, or actively defy it
• Mutual aid
• Certain kinds of resource sharing and cooperation between entities that are effectively (and sometimes literally) competing governments
• Better governance

There are thus contradictions that arise:

1. Within those aims
2. Between those aims and the dominant forms of power
3. Between those aims and the needs / wants / habits of users

#2 is sort of a given, though we could do with a lot more self-awareness about just how much our work is the foundation of now-dominant powers. #1 and #3 bear more thinking about.

There’s nothing new here, and I suppose it rhymes with stuff I’ve been saying for a while. The frame, though, feels like recognizing something I’ve been bad at looking at directly.

tags: free-software, idealogging, politics

p1k3 / 2021 / 4 / 12

there was a flood once,
and then it was years before
the sound of rain on a roof
for more than a few minutes
stopped being a reminder i didn't want

you'd see it in the people who
were there — one of those rare wet
days would set in and they'd
get a little nervous around the eyes

last summer we patched together the
failing gutters on this old house
and added a section or two

it was shoddy work and the lesson i
learned about gutters is next time
i'll hire it done, but they carry water
down to the ground better than before

now, nearing midnight, it's been raining
steady since before sundown
i can hear it streaming through those
aluminum troughs, probably pooling in
the low spots i can't figure out how
to build up, trickling down into the
crawlspace we'll have to fix for real
one of these seasons

and what i feel is just the old midwestern
calm of a roof overhead in weather
the quiet pleasure of being alive in a world
that's happening at some greater scale than mine

the grass all lifting up to meet it
the birds waiting to make riot at dawn
the rabbits huddled under the scrubby
trees in the fenceline

just rain on the roof.
i'll take it.

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2021 / 4 / 27

This is a suggestion that people in business should be better at it. It’s a departure for me, inasmuch as I kind of hate business. All the same, if you work for or own a company that does e-commerce, build a web site that sells stuff, etc., this is one is addressed directly to you. (Unless the company / site we’re talking about, is for example, Amazon, in which case my only message to you is “stop that”.)

☼

My job doesn’t involve selling physical goods on the internet now, but it’s something I spent around a decade on. Since I moved on to other things, it’s been unpleasant to watch so many of the people still doing it become so bad at it.

Let’s start with this: Your job is hard to do well. It was never exactly a cakewalk, but the whole environment has changed, and mostly not in a way that favors your chances. Web retail used to be an area where you could stumble into a growing revenue stream just by having something people wanted and posting half-decent pictures of it on a barebones shopping cart site.

Now you have to contend with:

• Amazon’s all-devouring maw
• Google’s adtech protection racket
• More and faster competition from a global supply chain
• Ubiquitous phones
• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
• How you’ve probably hired marketing professionals
• The grotesque absurdity of contemporary web development tech
• …just all of it, really.

I mostly wrote code for a living, but that meant I got to see the moving parts of a web retail business: Product design, purchasing, manufacturing, inventory control and catalog management, content marketing, customer service and technical support, picking/packing/shipping, fraud prevention, taxes, regulatory compliance, etc. I know there’s a lot that might live behind any given shopping cart icon.

✺

Still, here I am. I buy things on the web: Electronics, computers, audio gear, notebooks, pens, tools, books, music, concert tickets. I feel bad when I give money to Amazon. I don’t operate under an illusion that your business is ethical, because mostly businesses are unethical, but all the same I would rather pay smaller organizations. Maybe your employees seem better treated, maybe I want to support manufacturing where you’re located, maybe I just like your product.

It’s 2021, and I am a person with money who might like to give you some of it. Help me to help you.

What I want:

• To give you money in return for a thing
• To know up front what the thing costs
• To see clear pictures and a description of the thing I’m buying, including relevant technical specs
• To have the thing shipped to me
• To know where to ask for help if something goes wrong with getting the thing

Things I won’t mind along the way if you manage not to louse it up:

• Reading some reviews of the thing from your other customers
• Showing me the similar things you have for sale
• Getting an e-mail when I place the order and one when it ships (but seriously like 2 e-mails, no I don’t want your newsletter)

What I do not want:

• To load dozens of actively hostile 3rd-party spyware services
• To figure out which half dozen actively hostile 3rd-party spyware services I need to tell my adblocker to ignore for your site to work
• To discover much later that my order has been silently canceled without notification
• To drive an hour to retrieve my order at a distribution center because you shipped it to an undeliverable address
• To be remarketed at, anywhere, ever
• To install an actively hostile mobile app in order to access and/or transfer ownership of the thing I purchased
• To give up and buy the thing on Amazon because your website doesn’t work
• To like and subscribe
• To fill out a survey
• To know I’m being A/B tested
• To engage with your brand
• Just about anything the marketing professionals you hired probably want

To a first approximation and as best I can figure it out, the business I know the most about took off because some people in college stumbled into a growing revenue stream by way of posting decent pictures of stuff or whatever. As it grew, it was built and operated by a bunch of mostly-20-something stoners and freaks, most with scant experience.

I know it’s grim out there, but it keeps surprising me in 2021 just how thoroughly almost everyone seems to have thrown up their hands in defeat. A decade ago, us misfit toys were halfway competent at this. Now what happens is the laptop fans spin furiously in order to show me a giant popover about the 16 ways you want to abuse my privacy while a couple layers of video try to play in the background and the infinitely scrolling gallery of product photos fails to load correctly for some reason, the little counters on the adblocker widgets ticking ever upward. Later, you cancel my order but neglect to mention it to me. The second time I place an order, you send it to an address I told you not to use and I have to figure out which giant FedEx building a county over has ahold of it. When I finally open the box, a cable is missing. Soon afterwards I realize I’ve been subscribed to your newsletter.

As the cast of Letterkenny would say: Figure it out.

tags: business

p1k3 / 2021 / 7 / 13

I was doing the laundry a while ago (I first started writing this in May of 2019), and I got to some stuff where I wasn’t sure whether it was actually dirty and needed a wash, or if I’d just tossed it on top of the pile on the way to the shower one night thinking I’d sort it later. Should I trust my past self to have made a definitive decision that everything in the pile was dirty? Or did my past self act on the belief that my future self would make informed decisions about the pile’s contents?

In thinking about this, I came to something like a general rule: Minimize the trust that you need to place in past and future versions of yourself.

That is, past-Brennen would have done best to make the decisions about whether something was dirty instead of deferring them to future-Brennen. And indeed I washed pretty much everything in the laundry pile because it’s easier to assume past-Brennen was sending a clear signal than to re-evaluate the whole pile, but I think in more serious situations it’s important to always keep in mind that past-Brennen is at least as likely to have screwed up as now-Brennen.

Ideally, you shouldn’t have to make leaps of faith about your past selves' correctness, and you should operate with an awareness that your future selves will have a lousy memory and shortages of time/energy to deal with your unfinished work. Consequently, you should label things, document interfaces, write tests for your software, put your keys and wallet in the same place every time they aren’t on your person, etc.

❦

I have to think about that rule and its phrasing for before I add it to my overall List of Rules, but it has promise. I’ve been thinking about rules of this sort—aphorisms, rules of thumb, personal commandments, proverbs, epigrams, whatever—for a long time. Now and then some phrase or injunction-to-self will prove itself useful for a while, and the idea of a personal canon of them seems attractive.

Two that I’ve thought about lately: The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, and my colleague Lars’s list, quoted here in full:

1. Always copy and paste a URL.
2. A will-do attitude trumps skills.
3. Always ask the simple troubleshooting questions first.
4. Externalize your memory: write things down, always carry a notebook.
5. Measure, don't guess.
6. Write flames, but don't send them.
7. Always write unit tests for error handling.
8. Aim for 100% test coverage. You'll never get there, but bugs mostly happen in the parts without tests.
9. Don't be late in telling you're late.
10. If you cannot automate it, make a checklist out of it.
11. Be careful what you reward, because you will get more of it.
12. Be careful what you measure, because you will optimize for that.
13. Don't debate with analogies.
14. Always indicate time zone explicitly.

Those are pretty good.

❀

Here’s a crack at the list that’s been floating around in my head:

• Do the dishes.
• Only break one law at a time.
• Ask the stupid questions early.
• Don’t deploy on a Friday.
• Don’t let your gas tank drop below half.
• Remember that avoiding temptation is easier than resisting it.
• Never mistake an aesthetic for an ethic.
• Don’t mistake a shared experience for a shared understanding.
• Don’t trust systems that rely on the benevolence of a few powerful actors.
• If you figure it out: Write it down.
• If you have to figure it out three times: Automate it.
• “Read the manual” is good advice; “write the manual” is a moral imperative.
• If a server is broken, first make sure that something in /var/log hasn’t filled up the disk.

It seems like there should be more of these and they should be pithier, or something.

tags: idealogging, rules

p1k3 / 2021 / 7 / 21

one thing i notice
the hotter it gets
the harder it is
to give a shit
about industry & thrift

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2021 / 7 / 23

it's always the last day of the festival
you're always packing to go home

tags: poem

p1k3 / 2021 / 9 / 20

the richness of the colors
that come early in a deep drought:

sometimes we have a false idea
of the variation within some range
we see as narrow

tags: drought, poem

p1k3 / 2021 / 12 / 2

What is it that paper has that the computer lacks?

The answer might be humility.

Paper doesn’t seek to consume and mediate all things — or at least the age in which it did so long ago fell to digital computers, databases, and networks between them.

Paper forms a part of the world computer, but in so many ways an almost forgotten part. Uncontested, or nearly so.

If it seemingly offers few features and little apparent leverage compared to software, then it also makes very few demands. It extracts little from the user’s autonomy and privacy, while remaining transferable, repurposable, cheap, generic, accessible. It’s not subject to platform degradation, malicious updates, DRM, new rents at vendor whim, or remote code execution vulnerabilities. There will probably never be a CVE issued for my favorite brand of paper, and I do not need to assume that three-letter agencies are automatically indexing its contents with the cooperation of its manufacturer.

What can be expressed on paper is vastly more constrained in many respects, but limited as it may be, it’s also open: To whatever can be expressed through ink, graphite, scissors, glue, binding, tape, staples, stitches, and filing. Paper can’t embed full motion video or execute complex instructions on my behalf, but neither are its possibilities bound by the hyper-elaborated techno-social systems that govern the display of media formats or the implementation of language runtimes.

⭒

There’s a line of thinking here that risks the kind of reductive rabbitholing on a tool fetish you so regularly get from people fixated on a process idea: People convinced that only plain text will serve as a format for any purpose. Zettelkasten devotees who will stringently insist that connecting notes remain grindingly manual. Angry holdouts lecturing mailing lists about the evils of HTML e-mail while the world conducts its business on Facebook and Slack. That sort of thing.

All the same, I think there’s something to it, just like there’s something vital that motivates a lot of hopeless impulses to digital minimalism and performative exercises in retrocomputing.

Here’s an age when the computer is the network and the network is a threat — simultaneously the only tool for thought and the thing that makes thought nearly impossible. It’s exhausting, enervating, periodically shattering. Its healthy effects are constantly overshadowed by its pathology. It’s owned by bad people and operated by a fundamentally compromised class of technocrats whose occasional glimmers of self-awareness can never overwhelm the home truth of who and what writes their paychecks.

Against this backdrop, other channels of thought can feel like an escape hatch, respite, a balm, a view of other paths that maybe aren’t entirely closed just yet. Opening a notebook, like going for a walk down by the river or messing around in a garden or sitting with friends around a campfire somewhere away from cell reception, can feel like sanity.

✮

Of course paper is a technology, embedded in an industrial economy: And this, as usual, is to say that it is an ecological catastrophe. It consumes trees, soil, and landscapes. It poisons water and air, clogs transport networks and waste streams, facilitates consumption, and often assists in extending the control of computerized systems deep into the physical realm.

All the same, in the torrent of junk mail, grocery store fliers, BPA-coated thermal printer labels & receipts, redundant bills, bank notices, invoices, address change forms, fast food packages, and all the rest of it — well, the handful of notebooks and letters I spend in any given year feel comparatively benign.

(Drafted on paper.)

tags: notebooks, paper, systems, writing

p1k3 / 2022 / 2 / 7

I read Tyler’s Why I Blog earlier today, and it reminded me of a draft I started here back in early January. I thought: These are compelling reasons to write in public, or at least I used to think so. Then I remembered I’d been been writing about not doing that any more.

I used to. Lately… Well, prior to a bit about writing on paper from the 7th, I last posted anything of length here in July. In all of 2021, I wrote 19 entries. This is the fewest in any year that I’ve had a blog, including the ones where it lived on GeoCities or still had a tilde in the URL. Reading back over the year, there’s not much weight to any of it. A few incomplete thoughts. Some rabbitholing on mundane topics. Mostly: Going through motions and repeating myself.

I could overthink this, but it isn’t warranted. The reasons not to write here are all just themes I’ve been repeating at (numbing) length for years: Self-expression in the open seems like an attack surface. A public record is, as much as anything, a liability. Kinds of text that once felt liberating now feel like an embarrassment at best. The internet in general is owned by bad people and has gone septic as a culture, even as it determines culture as a whole.

Besides all of that, writing on the internet in 2022 is a lot like photos in 2022: There’s just so much of the stuff. It’s not just that anything I write here might be used to train a language model a la GPT-3, it’s that increasingly it feels like it could be the product of one.

And so it naturally works out that instead of writing more p1k3 entries, I chat with my friends, post to a handful of people on Mastodon, and take notes in local files.

✦

I still feel some kind of an attachment to this. It’s my longest-running project, more or less, and writing here has been a lot of how I sorted out the world for myself. Back in 2017, I wrote:

On the other hand. Writing is one of the only real powers I've ever had, and the surface of this terrible website is still mine to write on. The web is dead to me, as a hope or a cause, and the world it's made — the world that so many thousands of us helped to make — is in bad shape and getting worse. But why should I give up my only real canvas, the only place where I have any voice at all?

Possibly (almost certainly) having a voice is itself an illusion, irrelevant to the course of things now. But I guess it's something.

Over time, though, it feels less and less like something. On matters public, there are infinite voices. The repetition and variation, the algorithmic swell, is vast. If I have anything to say, someone else is probably saying it better. At least if it can be said in any useful way. The usefulness of saying things itself is frequently washed out in the deluge. The impossibility of communication feels like a defining feature of the age.

The only thing that’s left is whatever’s particular to my perspective, and it rarely feels like the networked ebb and flow has a healthy use for that.

✾

Anyway, I’m repeating myself again.

For a while I’ve been thinking about changing the structure of this whole site into something less reverse-chronological, writing something besides the personal narrative that a blog lends itself to, or just publishing somewhere away from the public web. Maybe somewhere away from screens altogether. Who needs Substack when you’ve got a laser printer and a roll of stamps?

I’m not sure what I’ll do any different, if anything. It’s just hard to let go of something you’ve made at considerable length, even if it isn’t worth much, even if it’s just a habit of talking mostly to yourself. Maybe I’ll let it lie fallow for years until I get hit by a bus, or find some better use for the hosting costs and let it drop off the web without fanfare. Maybe I’ll change my mind about all of this in six months or a decade.

(Of course this is more meta-whatever.)

tags: writing

p1k3 / 2022 / 2 / 21

One earlier this month from Tyler on notebooks and paper notes.

This was a reminder that I’d been meaning to update notes on notes with the current shape of my system. My habits haven’t changed drastically in three years, but I’ve made some extensions worth describing. (In particular, I now make heavy use of the tagged log format I wrote about last year. In turn, that’s shown me some things that could be better.)

On a meta level, that document is still mostly boring technical specifics. I’d like it to include more of the why of things, the stuff I’ve come to realize after years of overthinking.

tags: notebooks, notes

p1k3 / 2022 / 5 / 29

I read this post by Baldur Bjarnason, listing "Everything I’ve learned about web development in the almost twenty-five years I’ve been practising", and this followup, which says:

Some of the aphorisms ended up not-so-pithy, but it was overall a fun little experiment that I recommend: note down everything relevant about the craft that you can think of over the space of a week.

I thought about this, and then I thought: Ok, what exactly is my craft? I do computer shit. So I started a list about that, challenging myself to be descriptive about things and not veer too far into pure advice.

A year or so passed, and I noticed this post was still sitting in my "work in progress" directory. I tried picking it back up and noticed how much overlap it would have with other posts like these:

• 2013: on software
• 2014: language things
• 2015: YOUR CODE IS TOO COMPLICATED
• 2019: this entry on the experience of working at SparkFun
• 2021: rules

This style of writing is basically catnip to people like me, whether it's of much use to anyone else or not. This post ultimately felt like a dead end, because instead of a blog post, it really wants to be some long document where I collect all sorts of aphorisms, pithy quotes, eponymous laws, and so forth about technical work and maybe just work generally. Maybe I'll start that document one of these days.

✯

Anyway, that very partial and uneven list:

1. Caching is hard to think about and breaks often.
2. Cleverness in code is generally a sign of danger.
3. Business ruins everything.
4. Some forms of interoperability are a trap.
5. Bad ideas aren't limited to bad people.
6. Good people aren't limited to good ideas.
7. An aesthetic is not an ethic.
8. The customer is usually wrong.
9. If it's written in:
   • C: It'll work, but I should remember there's a buffer overflow or something.
   • PHP: It'll probably work, but there's an SQL injection vulnerability somewhere and the cool kids will be shitty about it being PHP.
   • Python: 50/50 whether it'll just barf stack traces into my terminal for non-obvious reasons.
   • Ruby: Decent chance I'll wind up reading the source code and cursing at clever Ruby programmers.
   • Haskell: It works, but I'm not smart enough to understand it.
   • Rust: Probably works, if they finished writing it. I'm not smart enough to understand the code.
   • Go: Total crapshoot, but either way I bet the CLI has a bunch of infuriatingly nested subcommands.
   • JavaScript: Life is too short to deal with whatever package management and runtime I'm supposed to use for this now.
   • Java: If I have to find out it's Java, I'm probably in trouble.
10. Lightweight markup languages are fundamentally in tension with the range of structures that their users will inevitably want to express.
11. Design, marketing, and management are all real undertakings, but they are also aggressively self-reproducing ideological systems and political projects.
12. Environments within which small tools can be combined to operate on simple abstractions are powerful. An environment might be what you think of as an operating system, a programming language, a database, or an application. All else being equal, the ones that can bridge to other environments are more powerful.
13. There are few abstractions in computing more stable than filesystems, standard IO, text files, and the shell. Boring relational databases aren't too far behind, but the barriers to entry and data transfer are higher.
14. Technology is at least as fashion-oriented as the sartorial choices of highschoolers, actors, and musicians. Changes are driven as much by a desire for difference from the perceived status quo as anything else.
15. Technical politics are also organizational, labor, and identity politics. The currents of power they involve are illegible without taking those factors into account.
16. There's no guarantee that your technical preferences will match up with the ideas, people, or power structures you find agreeable in other domains. (Or vice versa.)

tags: technical, work

p1k3 / 2022 / 6 / 27

(Context: American west, Great Plains, midwest.)

Here’s something I notice: Buying a fast food hamburger is borderline impossible a lot of places.

You walk into let’s say a McDonalds situated at an interstate exit. There are giant touch-screen kiosks you’re supposed to order from, but even if they’re turned on they don’t really work. No one is at the counter, although if you wait long enough a teenager who doesn’t know how to work the register may appear. Don’t try to spend cash; it will snarl the transaction. (Unless the card reader is down, in which case you will have no choice, but the transaction will still be snarled.) Wait longer and you may get food, if not exactly the food you ordered. Odds are it will be grimly inedible: Appalling even by the standards of early 21st century American franchise burger joints and quite possibly unsafe to eat.

I hold no brief for the American chain fast food restaurant, but there’s something unsettling about this experience. Like a kind of implicit contract has come unraveled.

You expected that these institutions were, at root, evil. You knew that they abused animal life, the environment, the labor pool, and the economy as a whole to deliver a product which was harmful to its consumers. On the other hand, you had a feeling that they were functional. Whatever the externalities, they worked in a sense that would be recognized both by a person in a minivan at a drive-thru window and a stockholder in an evil megacorporation.

You would be somewhere that might well be a food desert and you would need calories. A local outcropping of an efficient corporate machine organized — ruthlessly and immorally — by competent people would take some of your money and give you a paper bag full of food-shaped objects in exchange.

I’m a pragmatist about roadtrip utility, and I have spent a substantial part of my life on highways, subsisting on trash from chains and truck stops. Still, I didn’t quite realize how fundamental this system seemed until I found it in tatters with a carload of sobbing toddlers and exhausted, sleep-deprived 30-somethings in tow.

tags: food, systems, travel

p1k3 / 2023 / 6 / 27

Gilligan’s Island, the first (mumble) episodes or so on DVD while killing time in a ski town (I don’t ski). I had only ever caught smatterings of this back in the era of teevee re-runs. It’s often kind of charming and also periodically extremely racist, which I guess maybe sums up a lot of mid-20th-century American television.

Reservation Dogs, season 2. I think this show might be about as good as TV has ever gotten.

A Prayer for the Crown Shy, Becky Chambers. A Monk & Robot book. I like these, they’re enjoyable, but if I’m honest they feel pretty slight compared to the Wayfarers books. Intentional I’m sure. A fine way to spend an evening without dwelling on the numbing horror of the actual world, but they don’t stick in my head all that much.

Wednesday, Netflix. This could have been good. There’s a lot of talent involved, it’s (mostly) well cast, it’s often very pretty, the costuming is a delight, and the writing is… Ok, first of all, why are they doing a Harry Potter? Second, why does Wednesday need to learn about the power of friendship? Why does she just kind of suck as a character, despite Jenna Ortega’s completely dialed-in inhabiting of the part? Why does the overall mode of this thing undermine all the appealing aspects of the Addams Family material it’s drawing on?

Letterkenny. We’re kind of always watching this.

Avatar: The Way of Water. You know what, I smoked a bowl in the parking lot before the movie, and I had a blast. It’s gorgeous. It’s the first time I’ve felt anything more than polite indifference about a 3D glasses kind of experience. Also, at this late date, and thinking back on Titanic (a movie which came out so long ago that I saw it on a youth group trip to a mall theater) I kind of enjoy the meta of “this very expensive James Cameron movie is totally gonna bomb so hard you guys, just wait”. Many criticisms of the basic ideas and form of these movies are valid, and also I am still waiting to hear that Cameron has cut Alan Dean Foster a very, very large check.

The Lincoln Lawyer, Netflix. My girlfriend was out of town. I was looking for something to watch with the cat while I sat on the couch and wrote shitty code on my laptop. It was Fine. They draw it out a bit too much. The whole plot with the tech mogul… Ehhhh. The main guy is implausibly good and decent. It’s sort of pleasantly low-key. It delivers a couple of really good lines. This is airport novel material but sometimes you just want airport novel material.

Point Break. It had been so long since I saw this. It’s way more over the top than I remembered. “Quit being in the FBI and go surfing but maybe don’t rob banks in a murdery way” is a reasonable stance. If this movie has a stance.

Supernatural. A procedural ghost murder thing with stupid but surprisingly consistent rules? The X-Files by way of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I dunno. We’re a couple seasons in. This show is completely absurd, and intermittently flat-out appalling, but if I’m honest it’s grown on me. Better-crafted than it has to be, and whoever does the visual effects knows what they’re about. More overt about its religious preoccupations than I usually expect. Weirdly obsessed with quirky vintage motel room interiors. Too much of the thing where the main characters yell at each other about the same stuff over and over again. Like many of its genre cousins, I suspect this works best as an anthology series with a frame of loose continuity and some recurring secondary characters, and kind of hope it won’t get eaten by the Big Plot stuff as it goes along. But then also, holy shit, there are somehow 15 seasons of this?

Ronin. I had never actually seen this. The car chases are legit.

The Witcher: Sword of Destiny. We watched the Netflix show. I liked it despite not being that into all the violence and only knowing what was going on maybe half of the time. I’ve been reading some of the story / book stuff. I expected it to be easier to follow the overall plot of the books than the show, and I was wrong. On the whole, this is derivative schlock in a very uneven set of translations, and it’s frequently pretty sexist, but it’s also… Kind of appealing and humane in an unexpected way?

Lucifer, Netflix. I was home alone again. I wanted pulpy and ignorable. “The literal devil runs a nightclub” is one thing as a setup, “Lucifer uses his oddly-limited and very specific powers to help the LAPD solve crimes and it’s kind of basically Castle” is another. It has its moments, but I’m not sure I’m overly motivated here. It’s a little too standard network murder procedural with hot cops. The cat was indifferent.

The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss. A couple of trusted friends have recommended this as something special, and they were right. That rare big slab of fantasy that felt like something new despite a lot of familiar genre furniture (with hyper-competent protagonist in a school setting). I am somewhat wishing my trusted friends had mentioned that there’s a second book but not yet (or maybe ever) a third. I’ll probably read the second one anyway.

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. This was great. A well-resourced action fantasy where the action and the fantasy are both good and the story is constrained enough to make for an entertaining, self-contained film with relatable stakes. Actually funny. Visually appealing in a way that’s meaningfully distinct from the standard visual language of fantasy movies circa now, which is kind of amazing for a product of a media empire that I’ve always thought of as deriving entirely from a slurry of standard fantasy components. There’s a straightforward lesson here that I very much doubt the movie machinery on the whole is prepared to learn, which is go smaller. (Even when you’re going big.) Also: Jarnathan. More bird guys, please.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. This was also great. I’m full up on superhero material in the general case, but this really stands out. The maximalist, meta-textual multiverse thing is probably getting worn out fast, but here it works and has things to say. If you’ve seen it or aren’t worried about spoilers, I recommend Eric’s Superheroes, Miles Morales, and the Fallacy of Hard Choices.

Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Flawed, I think, but kind of an amazing movie in ways I wasn’t expecting.

What We Do in the Shadows (tv show version). I guess we’re a couple of seasons behind? Somewhere along the way this kind of devolved into a mishmash of its constituent parts and characters doing stuff in a way that suggests it probably should have wrapped things up a while ago, but at the same time it’s still a pleasant enough diversion with individually funny bits.

The Bear, season 1. I was iffy on this at the start, because I’m weary of “people yell fruitlessly at each other” as a driving mechanic and stories about the aftermath of suicide are hard even (or maybe especially) when they’re done well (see also Reservation Dogs). On the other hand, I’m a sucker for workplace stuff. Anyway, it’s good. The second-to-last episode of the season is a basically perfect chunk of shit-hitting-the-fan chaos.

(Did I read a sentence like that last one somewhere else about this show? Probably. I’m not sure I’m even capable of original thoughts or phrases at this stage of the game.)

tags: reading, watching

p1k3 / 2023 / 7 / 10

Previously: reading: master and commander

After thinking for a while that I should pick up more of this series (apparently for five years), I bought copies of the following:

• Post Captain
• H.M.S. Surprise
• The Mauritius Command

I’m through the first two and about halfway into The Mauritius Command.

These remain really strange and wonderful books. They cycle through subtle and complicated human relationships, absurdly specific sailing nerdery, comedy, tragedy, violence, the machinery of empire.

Every bit worth the time, so far.

tags: reading

p1k3 / 2023 / 11 / 15

Previously:

• notes on notes
• 2020: meta meta
• 2020: the zettelkasten / the zeitgeist

I came across an argument about what exactly makes something a zettelkasten, and then thought: “Zettelkasten” is a pretty great example of how one of the best ways to fuck up a neat idea is to have a bunch of people get really excited about it.

Taking notes is one of those things in the unfortunate position of being:

1. Surprisingly deep as a subject
2. Capable of being focused back on itself

I guess nearly any practice can disappear up its own asshole under the right conditions, but some are extraordinarily susceptible.

That’s my working model of what happens. If you can say a lot about something, and you can use the something to say it, well, watch yourself. You might just be teetering on the edge of the pit. People should get a warning about the risks of this drilled into them right around the age they’re ready for something like The Neverending Story or The Princess Bride.

This post is mostly just the short version of meta meta.

tags: notes, notes-on-notes, writing, zettelkasten

p1k3 / 2024 / 1 / 11

it's december
and that old hollow feeling
biding something holy
or forgotten, reappearing

p1k3 / 2023 / 12 / 14

A windy day. The leaves clattering down out of trees surprisingly late. The sun down behind the hills by 4pm. The cat dissatisfied.

p1k3 / 2023 / 11 / 14

I revisit this thought:

the ironies of a bunch of hyperliterates using a giant text machine to bootstrap text into a thing that exceeds the bounds of comprehension and then totally overwhelms all the tools of literacy itself

I’ve spent most of my life enmeshed in language, with words as my main power, and also a lot of time dwelling on the insufficiency of language to what life is really like. These days the latter sometimes feels like the main thing about words. Or at least the main thing about the dominant culture of words, the technology and system of them.

The tools of literacy — I don’t exactly mean to run them down. We just live in a time when, for whole classes of human, a kind of hypertrophied literacy has enmeshed and eclipsed the experience of reality. This isn’t so much new as it’s just newly vast, encompassing, interconnected. The language machine is so big, so ramified, that the sheer mathematical accumulation of its products now feeds deafening oceans of noise back into the workings. Whether by this I mean the outputs of machine learning or the behavior of a few billion minds over-saturated with internet bullshit: I’m not sure it even matters.

We’ve all had our part in building this, and you can get endlessly meta about the endless meta of it, which is part of how it exceeds the bounds of comprehension. All of that is… Not really how I want to spend my time. I don’t have any grand thesis here, or at least I don’t have any grand prescription.

There was a time when I was a big word fish in a small word pond, I guess. Somewhere along the way the contemporary internet happened and also I got a job where being a big word fish was a basic prerequisite. Circa now: Sweet Christ am I ever weary of paragraphs. There’s something useful in knowing that, if I don’t chase my own tail about it too much.

p1k3 / 2023 / 8 / 13

A thought I posted elsewhere not so long ago:

the ironies of a bunch of hyperliterates using a giant text machine to bootstrap text into a thing that exceeds the bounds of comprehension and then totally overwhelms all the tools of literacy itself

p1k3 / 2023 / 7 / 7

here we are in one of those times of dying
and i'm fucked if i know what to do
i've never known, i likely never will

it was so dark at 5 o'clock that the streetlight came on
in the alley out back, and i started flicking switches
on the lamps

water poured through the kitchen window when it rained
and i got one of those fancy new reverse 911 calls
about the flash flood warning
and now in the aftermath
the mice in the walls are more agitated than usual
i suppose they may have gotten wet

now the storm has shuffled off east, and
there's a thin mist rising off the streets
and i'm on the couch, drinking iced whiskey and orange soda
out of an aluminum camp mug

i should kill the mice in the walls
(god damn them, i don't want to kill anything at all)
i should fix the windows
i should muck the rainwater out of the crawlspace
i should be stone sober, waiting for what comes next

but it's true enough:
the times you should be most in your right mind
are often the times you least want to be in that
mind at all.

p1k3 / 2023 / 8 / 1

It’s Thursday afternoon. I’m sitting outside, on an otherwise-deserted stone patio, under an umbrella, drinking my second lager of the afternoon. Motorized tourist traffic pulses through the 25mph zone at a steady 30 or 40mph, with an occasional outlier in a Tesla or a lifted truck or a very clean late model Jeep pushing it closer to 50 just to drive home the impression that its occupants feel very important and would not really mind killing a pedestrian all that much.

Some guy just went past hauling a no-shit speedboat all decked out in giant chrome exhaust pipes, which confuses me on a couple of levels. Where are you going? What are you possibly going to do with that thing when you get there? I’m sure there’s a place for it somewhere around here, albeit one that hinges on a great deal of engineering and the expressed whims of a wealthy population who should never have moved so far from naturally occurring bodies of navigable water. It’s just a striking discongruity in this arid expanse of grass, small cactus, prairie dogs, tiny rivers, looming mountains.

It’s been warm for a week now, but there are storms in the forecast and the hills are still an unlikely green. Elsewhere in the States, a record-shattering heat wave is going into weeks of duration, at least.

p1k3 / 2023 / 6 / 29

It’s midway through a rainy, stormy, cool and clouded June. The river’s up, frothing in a usually-sedate channel. I just pulled a load of laundry off the line outside, wetter than when I hung it up three days ago, and scattered it over surfaces inside the house before it could get rained on again.

My garden is yellowing in the moisture and filtered light, battered by hail. We left town for a few days and the grass tripled in height. Our negligence in mowing has tiny bees zipping around wildflowers we didn’t know were growing. Green-white flower spiders hide atop the chives. Two days in a row: A double handful of strawberries, vivid standouts in a bed half consumed by grass, bindweed, and runaway oregano.

There were grim levels of smoke, for a while, and then it drifted east. A round of those “[city] has among worst air quality in the world” headlines. I expect there to be smoke again before long. Canada is still burning, after all, and it’s only June. There’s allergy-generating pollen now. Not as bad as some years, worse than others. I can breathe, a lot of the time. My eyes itch but they aren’t streaming yet, or burning so much that I just have to close them and lay down.

I feel like I’m suspended for a moment between things that will force me to hide indoors, only half-able to think, my whole self just rendered useless by one irritant or another. Part of this I’m sure is just the faltering strength of being 40-something rather than 30-something. The shift in my relative position with respect to infirmity, the limits of the self and the system it inhabits, mortality. But then part of it feels like something that’s changed about the world. I suppose because it is.

p1k3 / 2023 / 6 / 14

The end of this month will make 26 (twenty six) years of this. I posted here 13 times last year. A low number. It included this one about not blogging much, so I won’t bother to repeat it so soon. The state of things is just, you know, all of that but more. Enough more that I go around muttering to myself about how quantity is a type of quality.

Sometimes I feel a sense of vertigo, a sense of the world tilting. Sometimes it’s just one thing that does it. Something big that changes on the horizon, or something small throws it all into relief. But sometimes it’s just: Everything.

p1k3 / 2023 / 4 / 14

the way that midmorning
on a tuesday
can be the worst time
to think of weekends
and the distance
from the last one
to the next

the way february's a
bad month to think
back on christmas
and contemplate
september

3:13 in the morning
is a grim interval
in which to see
the bedside numerals,
segments floating red
in the dark over
her shoulder

and remembering the
day past, wonder if
you'll sleep before the
daylight on its way

the threads of this life
weave in and out of
some pattern i cannot see
or they fray at the
edge of a spreading tear

i waver without saying
much, between joy and ---
well, what i cannot say.
a sense of loss or
one of foreboding?

my yesterdays all read
like missed exits
and letters left cruelly
unanswered for years on end
this time of night

i get up to write this
but all the lamps are
too bright for a sleeping
house

so i light a dusty candle
out of the clutter on
my grandma's kitchen table
and half the lines have left me
before i get them to the page

you might imagine better ones
the way i imagine all the
tomorrows i might have made
had i been better then.

p1k3 / 2023 / 3 / 2

It’s late September, and we’re back from the big burn, back from bluegrass in Kansas. Outside the open window of my mud-room office, a light rain is falling and the temperature drifts towards the 50s. Camping gear and festival stuff is everywhere. My desk and the adjacent workbench are covered in the detritus of a month’s traveling and unpacking.

(My immediate field of view just below the monitors: 2 Altoids tins (1x actual mints; 1x weed), a vintage Leatherman tool, a chapstick, 2 lighters, a pile of dusty stickers, six pens & 2 pencils, $1.42 in change, some ink cartridges, matchbox, coffee mug, 2 festival wristbands, plastic Snoopy pencil sharpener dated 1958, microfiber glasses cloth, 2 pill bottles, some washers, 3 packing checklists, button that says “God Bless John Prine”, necklace with a tiny pewter guitar that says “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS”, index card that just says “Shit.” in large underlined letters, T25 driver bit, some screws, empty nitrous cartridge, beercan pop tabs, RockyGrass stage schedule.)

I can’t find anything. Every time I locate something like a pair of glasses, a wallet or a keychain goes missing. My phone’s been absent since Sunday at the latest. I think it’s probably in a pocket, a plastic tub, the corner of a rolled-up tent. Odds are decent I’ll see it again but I don’t know when. I admitted defeat a few minutes ago and ordered a new one.

Out in the yard, a good-sized buck is sitting under the neighbor’s tree. We made eye contact for a while after I stepped out the back door to watch the rain. He didn’t seem inclined to leave. Later, he’ll probably eat more of my garden.

p1k3 / 2022 / 9 / 21

It’s pushing midnight. It’s hot and the air is thick. I’m sitting on the bed in my childhood bedroom, eating cold roast beef with Miracle Whip on a hamburger bun, drinking a Bud Light.

This room has changed since I lived here. The worn-out carpet and the twin mattress and the computer desk that used to house my Gateway 2000 are long gone. The shelves are still full of science fiction novels and comic strip anthologies though, and they’ve never painted over all the places I drew on the walls. The paint is peeling now, water damage from a leak a dozen years ago.

The house here has, in defiance of strict necessity or practicality, grown substantially since my siblings and I lived here. A series of DIY additions and renovations have added a window seat here, a family room there, expanded roof lines, an entire covered walkway. It’s excessive, but it’s hard to say it’s unjustified. I think the effort keeps them going. It’s something like an art project at this point. Decades of salvage materials and a lifetime of know-how going back into something, even if it’s not strictly the most necessary thing. You have to keep it moving. You can’t just accumulate 2×6s and daydream, you’ve got to build.

A place like this, like anywhere people live, isn’t a static fact. It’s something people keep doing.

p1k3 / 2022 / 8 / 5

One from 2019.

p1k3 / 2022 / 7 / 15

It’s 2021, and I’m sequestered in the guest house at my parents' place, waiting the results of a COVID-19 test.

When we moved to this property, late in the 1980s, you could still tell it had once been a prosperous working farmstead on the model of the early 20th century. Along with wooden barns, corn cribs, machine sheds, and all the rest, most of it decaying rapidly as pigs rooted around the foundations, there was this little house. At the time it consisted of two rooms and a partially enclosed porch. Much of the structure was full of raccoon shit and corn cobs.

Most of the original outbuildings have been gone for 25 years or better. The little house has been fixed up for guests, deteriorated again, moved a hundred feet or so, and fixed up a second time. We built a new outhouse once, but it’s plumbed now. Hooked up to the electric, insulated, with new windows and a new woodstove in one corner. The woodstove burns too hot for a building this size and my dad’s got plans to put in a wall-mounted propane heater.

We’ve always figured, and maybe my parents were once told, that this was the hired man’s house. It would make sense for the patterns around here. I know the name of a couple families that owned the farm at one time, but I couldn’t guess at who lived in the little house. A lot of the elders around here who might have had stories are gone now, along with most of the farms that they inhabited and worked.

p1k3 / 2021 / 12 / 23

what's the distance
between a nervous habit
and a ritual tradition?

maybe just time and the collection plate
or how much group dynamics and trappings of
the numinous you can gin up

but i notice how
a lot of us have lost all touch with the latter
while accumulating a distinct excess
of the former

p1k3 / 2022 / 3 / 16

sure the self dissipates and hollows
and all dignity is temporary at best
while memory itself will betray you
at every turn

but all the same, if you're lucky,
you'll look back sometimes
across the sweep of time
and discover there was some extraordinary freedom
even in places you once read as trapped and lonely

p1k3 / 2021 / 6 / 2

Earlier today I found myself in one of those moments of tractionless inaction that people at the attention deficit end of the scale come to know well. I was in the midst of staring at logs and rolling back a broken deployment of MediaWiki while outside a torrential downpour was overwhelming the failing gutters and flooding the crawlspace under the house.

I was thinking that maybe we’d lose power again, or something crucial in the local infrastructure would get struck by lightning, and that maybe I should have somebody’s phone number in case they had to pick up where I left off. Then would I even have cell service in that situation? Not if it was anything like last time. I wished again for a landline. The kind that, more often than not, still works when the electric is out. (Albeit also the kind that gets struck by lightning, sometimes, and then your phone rings violently and bursts into flame, or at least that’s what happened in my aunt’s narrative about this.)

The cat, unsatisfied with the size of his afternoon meal, was yowling piteously at the back of my head. The rollback finished, the error logs stopped exploding, I copied an error message to file a task, I opened the issue tracking software in the wrong browser and copied the wrong 2-factor auth code trying to log in and found myself locked out.

Wait 57 seconds, it said. I knew instinctively that I had just hit a cognitive limit and was destined to lose track of all the pieces I was holding in my mind and that would be it for the day, more or less. At least I’d held it together past 4pm on a day I touched production systems.

It’s often like this inside my head. Not always, maybe not even most of the time, but not seldom either. Everything happens at once, and because of that nothing can happen at all.

Stimulants of one description or another would probably help, for a while at least, but I’m scared of a dependency on legal speed and I just can’t handle caffeine the way I used to. Weed used to help me dial in on things; these recent years it typically leaves me with the working memory of a goldfish (“the little plastic castle is a surprise every time”) and sprays my attention all over the landscape like my nervous system is some kind of malfunctioning glitter cannon.

p1k3 / 2020 / 7 / 30

We loved computers: That’s a simplification, almost a category error. What happened is we found computers, we got on the network, and before long we lived as much inside the possibility space of computing as we did anywhere else.

Maybe what we got wrong is this: From the beginning, computers appeared to us as a kind of liberation. Because we were young and our horizons were close, we mistook the ways they opened the world to us for their most important quality. What we couldn’t see then was that they were born as instruments of the oppressor, and would help us become the same.

Even when we grasped that the scaffolding of computation came from power, when we were running free around those systems we felt like we understood their real purpose in a way that the institutions that built and purchased them couldn’t. Nevermind that they couldn’t exist without an industrial economy, ranked tiers of exploited workers, and a relentlessly degraded environment.

Computation was a power that we could see how to take for ourselves. It unfolded in front of us in a way that the authorities in our lives could, for the most part, barely even perceive. Sometimes they’d glimpse it and lash out in fear or contempt. We mistook their fear for a sign we were on the right track.

And maybe some of us were, for a while. But we didn’t understand that what power serves is usually power itself.

p1k3 / 2021 / 3 / 3

somewhere a little after 10pm
a mandolin, amplified loud enough for
most of town to hear it
plays a triumphant instrumental.
and then a single firework

p1k3 / 2021 / 1 / 20

Background: I’m doing some short posts linking to feeds that I like.

Today’s theme: Some stuff that complicates how I think about the world in a useful way.

✥

BIG by Matt Stoller is technically an e-mail newsletter, I guess, but Substack provides RSS feeds so that's how I subscribe. The tagline is "[t]he history and pollitics of monopoly power". Stoller is a thinktank type at something called the American Economic Liberties Project. I'm not actually sure I have much of a bead on his politics as such, and I'm frankly not smart enough to evaluate a large chunk of the claims made here, but I've found its take on monopolies pretty striking.

Feed URL: https://mattstoller.substack.com/feed/

Sample posts:

• On the Spotify-Joe Rogan Deal and the Coming Death of Independent Podcasting
• Uber-Grubhub: How the Pandemic Is Launching the Era of Online Platform Regulation

✧

A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe is a blog on medieval history that talks about stuff like coinage, charters, architecture, and administrative matters. A special kind of drily fascinating, and a window into the kinds of deep research that you don't seem to get from a lot of popularizing works.

Feed URL: https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/feed/

✪

Kiwi Hellenist offers detailed breakdowns of all sorts of stuff in classical antiquity and its footprint in modern culture.

Feed URL: https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Sample posts:

• How to make sense of ancient Greek colours
• Did Roman engineers stand under bridges?
• Spartan losers - especially good if you're looking for some 300 bashing.
• Shanties in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

✵

Snakes and Ladders - A while back, I made an effort to follow more conservative (religious or otherwise) outlets and writers, consciously trying to get outside of my filter bubble. A lot of it didn't stick, but I kept reading Alan Jacobs in various formats. He's a writer, an academic, and the sort of person who publishes in places like The American Conservative.

You should read that last as a disclaimer of many of his probable views, because he keeps intellectual & cultural company with some people I find it pretty hard to stomach. Once in a while I come pretty close to unsubscribing. All the same, I often read his work with some interest and find that it makes me more aware of a conservative Christian intellectual culture that, while super messed up about all kinds of things, is more complicated than the American talk radio / Focus on the Family / Fox News / beat-your-children side of things would suggest.

Feed URL: https://blog.ayjay.org/feed/

❁

Granola Shotgun has some rich-guy-prepper-landlord vibes, which might be offputting here and there, but also a ton of interesting thoughts and background on housing, urban planning, regulation, etc. I take this one with a substantial grain of salt, but it's filtered into my thinking about the dynamics of the American built landscape and how much dry goods I'd like to have on hand. Also uses just piles of photos, which while often individually mundane do an effective job of conveying a story or idea when taken in the aggregate.

Feed URL: https://granolashotgun.com/feed/

Sample posts:

• Methodist Urbanism: Ocean Grove
• Levittown

p1k3 / 2020 / 5 / 22

I rode my bike for utility this morning: Dropping off a vehicle at the shop and pedaling the dozen miles or so home. I’m years out of this habit, by now. I work from home and find some plausible rationale to ride more than half a mile maybe once every couple of months.

It brought me back to thoughts I used to have constantly: Speed is a kind of abstraction over distance. Rolling wheels are a kind of abstraction over surfaces and spaces not really accessible by foot or rarely traversed at less than 35mph by car. The landscape and the culture built on top of it are so much different at every speed.

p1k3 / 2019 / 6 / 25

I’m sitting in a Barnes & Noble Starbucks, a class of institution I don’t really expect to exist a few years hence. Heavily sweetened coffee drinks aren’t going anywhere, of course, but chain bookstores feel pretty doomed and it’s not really clear to me that this one can manage a transition to selling random toys and board game crap instead of books.

I love independent bookstores, and spend most of my book money at several, but I’m going to have some feelings when B&N kicks the bucket. I grew up in the country, and the mall bookstore chains in the nearest city big enough to have a mall were my primary option for anything I couldn’t get at our small-time library. Those first trips to a big, well-stocked Barnes & Noble were revelatory. The SF&F section alone felt bigger and more expansive than the entirety of a B. Dalton / Waldenbooks.

It’s strange to think of that sense of things opening up as a side effect of the end stages of an entire economy and medium, but I suppose that’s more or less what it was.

p1k3 / 2019 / 8 / 12