I'm probably using more Linux than ever. My laptop runs Fedora. I'm the admin on a server running CentOS.

I will keep doing those things.

But today I unsubscribed from most of the mailing lists that have been flowing through my Gmail account over the past few years.

The Debian, Fedora, Xubuntu and Lubuntu users list? All gone. So are the development lists for Debian, Fedora and Xubuntu, and most of the others. I'm keeping a few low-volume lists. For now anyway.

I was always more of a lurker than active participant on all of those mailing lists.

Lately, and probably before that, I didn't find much of value in most of that mail. Even though the quality of the Fedora lists is a bit higher than average, I wasn't getting a whole lot out of them. I'd scan the mail, maybe read one or two posts every few days, then delete the whole lot.

At this point, I see my operating system as a tool. To get things done.

I'm not interested in Linux evangelism. If you want to use it, that's great. I still do and will do.

If not, that's cool. Do what makes you happy.

I'm still a satisfied user of Linux. It's pretty much all I've run on my laptops since maybe 2009, and I messed around a whole lot with it before that, starting in late 2006 if I remember correctly.

There's more to life.

There's my family. I sure as hell want to do better where they're concerned.

Putting together coherent sentences? I'm still very much interested.

I've threatened to write about more than Linux for years. I'd like to write about things that aren't technology. It's been in the sidebar of this particular blog for as long as I've been writing it.

I see the "tech guy" on the morning news, and I wince. Is that me? Other than the fact that I'm very obviously not on TV, I worry that it is.

There's more to life than gadgets and apps.

That being said (there's always a that being said) ...

It sounds like I'm just on the other end of the same pool, but lately programming has dominated what little free time I have. I read a whole lot about it. And occasionally do it. Maybe I'll be able to tip the scales toward more doing in the near future.

I've been playing with Go, Perl, Python and Ruby. I need to focus.

Coding is what interests me at the moment.

What I'm not playing with are Linux distributions. I don't burn ISOs of anything, don't install just to see what something's like.

New releases of obscure distributions, or even not-so-obscure ones? I'm just not into it.

The ins, outs, politics and boiling pots of the Linux world? Not interested.

Give me my working Fedora system (or maybe Debian if the hardware is willing) and let me do my work, write my code, live my life.

If that sounds melodramatic, so be it.

I reserve the right to change my mind. But for now, I'm 50 other things first and a Linux user after that.

After many months during which the FileZilla FTP client would eat a ton of CPU and basically stop working in Fedora, whatever was wrong has been fixed, and the program is working once again.

After a FileZilla update caused the problem (and yes, I did contribute to the bug report), I set up gFTP because I need a working FTP client. And gFTP gets the job done. It's super fast. It's also not actively developed.

Maybe I'll go back to FileZilla. Maybe not. But it's nice to have the option.

I've been playing with the idea of using Ode as both a traditional blogging system as well as a social-media platform generating exactly the kinds of posts that I normally would originate on sites like Twitter.

With the help of dlvr.it, this is entirely possible not just with Ode but pretty much any blogging platform.

The key to this concept is that my social-media updates should originate on my system, where they will continue to live. They are mine. Twitter will have a copy, but I will have the "original."

And now I can tell you how easy it is to do this. And it doesn't just work for Ode but can be done on any blogging platform (including WordPress) that allows you to post to categories (or directories or folders) and tap into RSS for that specific category (or directory or folder).

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The documentation for Go (aka Golang) is peppered with examples, and one of those examples, for Go's net/http package, shows you how to easily create a file server.

net/http is part of Go's standard library Here is the example code from golang.org/pkg/net/http:

package main

import (
    "log"
    "net/http"
)

func main() {
    // Simple static webserver:
    log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", http.FileServer(http.Dir("/usr/share/doc"))))
}

When you drop this code into a file in a directory (in my case I made the directory web_server and named the file main.go), then either compile it with go build or run it with go run, it creates a web server on port 8080 that serves the contents of your /usr/share/doc directory, which always exists in Linux and Unix (and probably in the Mac OS X version of Unix).

To see the results, open a web browser and go to http://localhost:8080/, and you should see a directory listing. Just like any web page, you can click on the links and see what's in those files.

This example program -- a web server in five lines -- is fun to play around with. You can change the http.Dir and serve "real" web content. You can change the port from :8080 to something else.