I’d go see my closest family and open up the vintage wines we’d been saving for later

Tempered glass and thick case. Specifically one of those cases with interlocking front and back pieces. Makes it look and feel like it was always an integral part of the phone. In fact it is now, after I took out the glue to replace the battery and couldn’t be bothered to put glue back.

Tore out the plastic sheet included with it and stuck a glass protector in its place. Glass doesn’t have to be expensive, I got mine in a 2-pack for just $6. Maybe the more expensive ones have some oleophobic, anti-glare, or anti-scratch, but mine’s held up nicely for over 3 years.

I don’t mind the extra heft at all and would probably have perpetual anxiety if I had to use a phone without a case.

Desktop: Librewolf, Chromium as a fallback

Mobile: Vanadium on devices with GOS; adblocking via DNS. Cromite for my secondary phone and degoogled but not GOS tablet.

What I like to call temporal horror vacui. Some things are easy to start, they do require some periodic checking, but are otherwise passive. So I’ll start a 3d print, get water boiling on the stove, or start running an offline backup. Then my mind is bothered that those are such “empty”, “unproductive” tasks, and so reactively fills in the gaps with things I’ve been procrastinating like dishes, meal prep, planning, etc.

Also body doubling. For emails, I have a good friend at work who also massively struggles with them, so every now and then, we make a commitment to each other and for an hour or two, both sweep through our inboxes, with a bit of commiseration along the way.

Anyway, it’s still a struggle that makes me wonder about seeking an ADHD evaluation … next month maybe.

On that note, I still laugh when I recall this story of some college student blackout drunk at a party, friends came up to her to ask if she needed help, while trying to emphatically shake her head ‘no’, projectile vomited and the violent motion of her head made the vomit cover everything in the room.

I use it to generate little bash and python scripts for mundane tasks, random ideas I don’t have a good starting point for, or boilerplate code I don’t have the energy to write manually. Or also to decipher cryptic error messages and logs. Nothing that I publish though, just all testing and personal scripts.

I do this with models running locally on my gpu. 14B parameters is surprisingly decent and fast enough for a 16 GB slot-powered workstation model.

For fun, since the model is local, I also toss in some excerpts of my writing, see what it can glean from my style and vocabulary, something I’d never do with an LLM hosted by someone else for obvious reasons.

Larger denominations also become much easier to smuggle. Concealing and slipping an envelope vs a whole bag.

Dirty lounge chairs because people sit on one and prop their feet up on the next

Put on a good podcast and enjoy my comfort foods

Astronaut. Or a trucker. A mad scientist, after my first science class.

I haven’t become any of the above (yet)

Phone: 316

Desktop: 294

Laptop: 79

You could say I’m making use of all the ram I’ve installed

Habit. And I’ve become good at finding outfits that look nice and are just as comfortable as ones that look more casual.

They like to say we are doing better than ever because the the numbers and technology are great. Yeah, I might not be starving, but what’s the dignity in a rising tide of techno-feudalism and serfdom? And the technology that, in another society, could have freed us from long hours is instead being used by the ruling class to further exploit us.

Imagining if trusted computing became legally enshrined and windows was the gateway to the internet. Would keep my use of it to a minimum, perhaps to fulfill work obligations, do taxes, pay bills, etc. and save anything that didn’t need the internet for another machine running Linux. I’d also consequently make much greater use of my hoarded media and ebooks.

The hospital gifted me mine

Used mini PCs, Chromeboxes, or laptops (the kind with removable batteries). As long as GPIO pins are not needed, most things can be replicated with minimal effort on Debian amd64. And when I do need GPIO, I can usually get away with an Arduino.

No, I was fortunate enough to pick up a bunch of decommissioned Celeron mini PCs from work. I run a NAS with media server on one, pi-hole on another, and a test server on a third. I meant to make things accessible from outside with VPN, but was too lazy.

I also digitize what I can. Then I separate what I actively use from the rest, separate those items into categories, pick out one or two (or three) of my favorites in each category, and donate the rest to a thrift store in hopes someone else can make better use of them. Still not foolproof though, on the shelf next to me is a keyboard and bin of cables that I haven’t touched in ages.

To quiet a squeaking hinge after misplacing my wd-40

The plug-in waterpik ones are worth it in my opinion. Finally got into a routine of flossing after buying one.

A few more things to think about if you plan on buying a cordless unit and using it frequently though. If it takes AA batteries, it will eat through them like nothing else and the battery compartments tend to get gross and slimy, worse if the AA batteries leak. Also avoid the cheap off-brand units that take just 2 AA batteries. In my experience, those don’t produce nearly enough water pressure.

Only major gripe with waterpik’s cordless units are that their water tanks are a hassle to clean and keep clean due to the narrow openings and nooks and crannies. Later got one from Guru Nanda where the motor sits atop a wide-mouth reservoir, which is much easier to clean, or even just keep separate from the motor after use so everything can dry out.