THE DAILY STREAM

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Mike· 3 years ago

Zed's alive, baby

Promised for a while, finally Zed arrives. It's written by some of the creators of Atom, but instead of another Electron thing it's a very fast-performing app written in Rust.

It's multiplayer, apparently, which as someone who was once subjected to pair programming I've always found that a little weird. But it works for Figma, right?

Anyway, I wrote this post in it. Will be nice to see it appear on Linux, a platform that is surprisingly lacking in lightweight code editors. Between the anemic GEdit and a full blown IDE you have Lite XL, Microsoft's Electron-based VSCode, and of course the influential but non-free Sublime, which has persisted. I don't love any of them, but I'm liking this so far.

Mike· 3 years ago

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I knew I hated this game

From the Public Domain Review's top articles of 2023, here's the story of The Landlord's Game, which you may know as the family-destroying force of simultaneous acrimony and boredom called Monopoly. Turns out, as you might guess from how brutal the game actually is, that it was not initially pro-monopoly. In fact, it was anti-land-ownership, the product of an economic philosophy called Georgism that posited one can't actually own land. There were even two sets of rules originally: one based on equity and wealth redistribution, the other on... you know. It was also invented by a woman, and though she patented it, somehow it was yoinked by a guy who sold a version (with only the second ruleset) to Parker Brothers.

Truth will out, I suppose, but it's pretty sad that Lizzie Magie never got her due. I guess "Go" was catchier than the Marxy "Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages."

Mike· 3 years ago

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Horizon Zero Dawn

After undertaking a ridiculous repair job on our "new" Playstation 4, the logical choice was to start playing a game. Not sure what actually got me looking at Horizon Zero Dawn, but it's one of the more fun titles I've played in a while. I decided after almost 300 hours that I was done with Tears of the Kingdom so I did the final boss and didn't look back. So you'd think I might be done with swords-and-bows open world post-apocalyptic fantasy stuff. Yet I picked it up for $10 and it is a blast. Great stealth, fun combat, solid voice acting, and a mystery to unravel. There's a post-apocalyptic melancholy to the whole thing but it's shot through with humor too.

Looking forward to getting the sequel on sale, though for some reason the DLC is only on PS5. Get a PS5? No thanks! I will be giving that $500 to my daughter's preschool for approximately 17 minutes of child care.

Mike· 3 years ago

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What a gas

There are zillions of one-horse towns across the US, and most of them have a minor story worth going "huh, that's interesting" over. Mattoon, IL, (pronounced MATT-TOON with no obvious stress on either syllable, but certainly not muh-TOON) the hub of my maternal family side — a town that barely tops 15,000 people even today — has a couple that are way stranger than that.

The first of these is the country's original Burger King. The origin story was just that an ice cream stand called Frigid Queen (lovely...) needed a king when the owners expanded to fast food, and the logical choice was Burger King. In 1968 a court ruled that the more famous Burger King can't have a location within 20 miles of Mattoon, nor can the Original Burger King operate another restaurant outside the area. It's still there, and thriving as far as I know, at least to whatever extent a little burger shop can thrive in a tiny midwest town.

Perhaps more famous is the story of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon aka the Phantom Anesthetist, a 1940s incident that has over time become known as a textbook example of mass psychosis. Atlas Obscura has an interesting article on it. They posit that wartime situations and fears may have contributed to the weird hysteria that hung over the town like a fog. A chemical fog which of course did not actually exist. They make a good case.

Look at this newspaper from the time to get an idea of the national mood. Hopeful but war-weary and still afraid of phantom Nazi or Japanese enemies attacking while most of America's men are away. So what actually happened? We might never know if there was really an "Anesthetic Prowler" or if any of the attacks actually happened. But it's a creepy story and a fun one to have in the family.

Mike· 3 years ago

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Entering the last console generation the hard way

My son's friend just straight up gave him a Playstation 4 a few weeks back. I have no idea what the circumstances are in which you have too many PS4s, but there we are.

Unfortunately, it had been in storage for a while and someone had attempted a repair on it (for what? I don't know). So after buying a couple $5 games we found the CD drive just didn't want to work. I'm not the biggest fan of digital games because of course you don't actually own them, not to mention the drive sounds like it's gonna take off even if there's no disc in it.

So I did what any insane person would do: I ordered a drive from iFixit, a site with a 40%-complete tutorial on how to replace it. Turns out, the actual method for replacing the optical drive in a PS4 Slim is "just take the whole god damn console apart." That quarter inch of thickness saved over the standard model comes at the expense of modularity.

I also replaced the spinning 500GB hard drive with a 1TB SSD, which was no big deal — there's a sled that can be loosened with a single screw and any SATA laptop drive can be plugged right in.

Overall... significantly harder than upgrading a PC. But now we have a working PS4 and have been diving into Spider-Man (him) and Horizon: Zero Dawn (me), all for about $50 and some stressful tiny screw replacement.

Mike· 3 years ago

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Has it really been that long?

Not joking, I forgot how Eleventy worked.

Mike· 4 years ago

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RIP Ryuchi Sakamoto

It seems so recently that YMO’s Yukihiro Takahashi passed, and now we lose another of the great trio, and probably the one who is most well-known internationally outside of the group. Ryuichi Sakamoto was not only the heartthrob of the band, he had an extremely prolific solo output (his most recent release came out in January), collaborated with rad people like David Sylvian, Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Iggy Pop, and has even won an Oscar for scoring The Last Emperor (and probably deserved another for The Revenant but was ruled ineligible for dumb reasons).

This article, titled “Music Sounds the Way it Does Because of Ryuichi Sakamoto”, is a great read but if you don't feel like taking the time, just trust the title. The man lived in the future but was grounded in organic and acoustic sounds, especially the piano. He will be monumentally missed.

Here is his beautiful collab with David Sylvian, “World Citizen (I Won’t Be Disappointed).”

Mike· 4 years ago

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Get things done or die trying

Nerds, creatives, and knowledge workers in general seem to gravitate toward productivity schemes and methodologies. If you're anything like me, and I know some of you are because that's part of why we get along, you might jump from thing to thing over time.

One of the first "named" systems I can remember getting into is Getting Things Done, probably through early tech blogger Merlin Mann (now perhaps more well-known as co-host of a podcast with a guy who later became "Bean Dad"). The system worked well for me for a while when I worked from home, freelanced, and had no kids. What Mann and others who jumped on the train might not have really grasped is that David Allen (not the guy from Gong) designed it for executives with assistants and both the time and power to lock themselves away for effectively days at a time while they did weekly reviews. The book came with a door hanger. Imagine your kid respecting a door hanger that says "Weekly review in progress."

Lately, I've been working with two systems that are more geared toward creative minds: the bullet journal and the second brain.

A friend turned me on to the "bujo" after I asked about the notebook she carried everywhere. The thing that its creator, Ryder Carroll, says about it is that it's a "mindfulness practice masquerading as a productivity method," and that's very true. Sitting down with a paper notebook and doing both your todos and your actual journaling is a great way to focus, be present, and stop farting around with the external for a minute. It's also great for people with focus issues or who have trouble sticking to systems, because you can just pick it back up if you flop for a while. Start journaling again where you left off. No biggie.

However, I have years of notebooks stacked up and one thing they're not good at is indexing and re-accessing information and insights that you've achieved. This is where Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain comes into play. The core thinking behind his system is almost the opposite of the bullet journal: It's only digital tools that can store and search in a way that enables us to truly offload a lot of data from our first brain.

That makes a lot of sense, of course, and it's what tools like Evernote, Joplin, Roam, whatever were originally designed for — but it also brings me back home to a reason that GTD worked for me: David Allen's core slogan was "If it's on your mind, it's not getting done." The second brain philosophy extends that to statements like "it's not able to be accessed," "it's not creative fodder," or more generally, "if it's on your mind, it's not doing you any good."

There's a lot more I love about the method but that's another post. But I still feel like I owe a lot to David Allen and his insane flowcharts designed to take things "off your mind" and turn you into a robot that always knows what to do. in this stupid-ass world where we have strayed pretty far from whatever-you-believe-in's light, it's a gift to be able to stop worrying about stuff for a few minutes.

Mike· 4 years ago

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Blog enters the 21st century

I don't even know what that means. I think things have gotten over-complicated, but the idea that I can write on my computer and publish using a git commit is pretty cool. So that's what I'm doing now thanks to Netlify. The barrier to posting was "Do I want to do a merge with SFTP" and the answer is very often "nah." This is cooler, plus I can do it from multiple computers if I wanted to.

Mike· 4 years ago

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Building a useful homelab

A while back I started getting nervous about hosted services. Google starting to limit storage, Amazon killing off their music hosting, all of these were catalysts but a desire for privacy and a kind of old-school internet experience also drove my plans.

After some semi-successful experimentation with Plex on a Raspberry Pi, I started thinking about how the same priciple could be applied to other services, like photo galleries. Turns out that not only are there a ton of self-hosted, open-source options for doing a lot of things you might want to do, most of them have been containerized to run in Docker.

The components

A computer

My machine is not that powerful. It's a 4-core Pentium Lenovo Thinkstation with its main drive replaced with an SSD. It previously ran Mint desktop as a basic home computer. But after I got an old Macbook I didn't really need it, so it seemed like a perfect box to repurpose.

openmediavault

Far and away the most popular operating system for these kinds of boxes is openmediavault, a Debian distro with no desktop but a convenient web interface that allows even a relative dumbo like myself to mount drives and share them with services like SMB or FTP.

Portainer

As you might imagine, the web UI of OMV makes one want to do everything via your browser. SSH is not super hard, but it's mighty convenient to use Portainer, a great web UI for Docker.

The Software

Jellyfin

After spending what I consider to be too much money to watch my own stuff (PlexPass at $5/month), I went with Jellyfin, an open-source fork of Emby. I tell you what, we've come a long way since the old XBMC running on an overheating computer attached directly to the TV. It has clients for our computers, iOS and Android devices, and Roku, and perhaps because it doesn't need to do transcoding for those devices, the old computer barely even has to work when streaming to two different devices.

Navidrome

Music was never a strong point of Plex, though it was capable. Navidrome implements the Subsonic API, which is pretty well supported in a range of (admittedly varying-quality) third party apps, though it's better than Subsonic itself, which is Java. Is it your personal Spotify? Not quite, but close enough.

CUPS

Of course, right? We have a laser printer with no built-in network capabilities, and frankly we've had better luck using this old box than a dedicated print server from Monoprice.

Paperless-ngx

This is a really great document archive system that lets you specify all kinds of great metadata for finding your stuff when you need it (say, tax time or when the insurance company asks for documentation). An iOS app scans directly into it, where the server then OCRs all documents. From there, machine learning tools start trying to automatically apply metadata based on your defined patterns of text.

Duplicati

It's a GUI backup tool. Easy cheesy, and now all my stuff is backed up in Backblaze B2.

Photos

This is a whole other post. What a fun and frustrating journey.

Resources

It's hard to overstate the usefulness of /r/selfhosted as well as the subreddits for all the individual tools. Lots of people of varying levels of expertise willing to help.

If you have any questions on how I did some of this stuff, hit me on twitter/cohost/FB/whatever and I can try to explain it in my just-enough-to-be-dangerous way.