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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Wed, 28 Aug 2013

Probably the best thing I've seen this year: Inspiration from Bill Watterson and Gavin Aung Than at zenpencils.com

Just go there: BILL WATTERSON: A cartoonist’s advice

Sat, 17 Aug 2013

Read this at Medium: She left Google

It's short on specifics, long on other things, but Ellen Huerta's "Why I Left Google" is worth reading if only to illustrate how it's possible to be unhappy at Google, especially if you're in your 20s.

Read the rest of this post

Sun, 11 Aug 2013

Stop looking at fucking Twitter on your fucking phone

It's not just you.

I'm doing it, too.

It's annoying. I'm annoying when I look at Twitter multiple times per day on my phone.

Are you doing it? You could very well be an annoying pain in the ass.

The fix is easy. Are you with me on this?

Fri, 05 Oct 2012

The minimalist web

Not all of these sites are the work of self-proclaimed minimalists. Most are. All are worth a look:

Tue, 22 Nov 2011

A sentence for all (holiday) seasons

A Kohl's Black Friday parody ad inspired the following from Gizmodo's Mat Honan in reaction to the ad and Kohl's in particular, and the consumer culture in general. It is, as the title here states, a sentence for all holiday seasons:

It makes me want to get rid of all the crap I've already bought, to throw all my shit out into the street and set it on fire and shed my clothes and run naked through the neighborhood with a goddamn hammer smashing out all the lights and setting all the dogs free and upending all the mailboxes and cutting the power lines down and stuffing the HVAC systems with leaves and throwing dead fish in the vents and just going utterly feral as I let my hair grow out long and my teeth rot from my mouth because when I see cynical appeals to shop shop shop, done with a knowing wink to how utterly vapid and annoying the commercial itself is, without caring that it's like a steel toe boot to the teeth because it's got an earworm that will burrow itself into your head until you find yourself standing outside of a fucking Kohl's store at eleven thirty on a Thursday night when you should be at home in bed after spending a lovely day with your family, I worry that we are at the very end of America and I think that you, Kohl's, you are the Lt. John Pike of television advertising spraying me with your indifferent contempt and I wish you nothing but failure and a grim season of declining sales and the flu.

Read the original entry, where you can also see the "parody" video.

Mon, 25 Jul 2011

Simplicity or minimalism? What's the difference?

I'm noticing many writers calling the decluttering of their lives "minimalism," instead of "simplicity," or "simple living." Is there a difference?

A quick Google search yielded the following (we can read together; I'm just link-dumping at this point):

Is this tempest/teapot time? I'll gather more intelligence on this lexical battle as time permits.

Five minutes later: These entries didn't help much. All I seem to get from this small blogospheric sample is that minimalism is more hard-core than simplicity.

But as I say in the short comment after the final link, it's all semantics. Call what you do what you wish. As for me, I'm still thinking.