Blog

Changelog

2025-12-29

Initial publication

A Note

I know this post isn’t quite ‘shaving’ but is definitely in the same realm so I’ve tagged it ‘shaving’ for better discovery.

Preface

As I’ve aged, I’ve gotten hairier. Particularly my nose and ears. This, annoyingly, is a fairly common feature of age in humans. I’ve also been trying to move away from electrified devices for things like personal grooming.

This poses a bit of a conundrum as most everything related to grooming is electric. Especially things meant for individual and/or home use. Hell, even barber and stylist kit is very electrical these days except for maybe scissors and even then a comb + hair clipper combo can do the job of traditional scissors.

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Changelog

2025-12-07

Initial publication

Context

Historically I’ve been Not Fond of traditional telco services (sms/mms, phone calls, voicemail) as they are strongly tied to a specific device and it’s next to impossible to work with them from multiple devices. Signal, XMPP, Telegram, Matrix, Delta.Chat and others don’t suffer this problem. I can link up multiple devices and work with the data freely.

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Changelog

2025-08-20

Initial publication

Rose, Thorn, Bud

First some context and background before getting to my thoughts.

The Rose, Thorn, Bud mindfulness exercise is designed to get you to think about the day’s events. It’s basically a mini journal entry.

Some History

Recently a friend got me thinking about the old Palm Pilot, Sony Clie and Handspring Visor PDA’s (personal data assistant) and how they were particulary useful.

They existed prior to having the internet always at-hand, they are very focused environments, they use a stylus for text entry which mimicks writing in a notebook and there were a ton of great apps available.

They worked ridiculously well as pocket notebooks, date books, todo list managers, course work managers and a hell of a lot more. I should know, I had a Sony Clie during my Uni years and it’s the reason I didn’t wash out or fail out of Uni. I relied on the Clie heavily and it truly was a second brain for me.

Changelog

2025-06-15

Initial publication

On The Go Photography Backups

On the go backups can be run using an Android phone with the following hardware. A dedicated device is no longer necessary. Use a file manager that can read/write OTG disks and use the phone to copy/paste data from SD cards to backup storage.

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Changelog

2025-06-15

Initial publication

Mirrorless Camera Videography

This post is a collection of my notes on how to use a mirrorless camera for videography. These notes are specific to the Sony a6500 mirrorless camera but should be adaptable to other models and brands.

Analog Version

This post is about the digital anti bad habit notebook. For an analog version implemented as a pocket notebook, see this post.

The Post

Not going to lie : I have a few bad habits and have used my analog anti bad habit notebook to break some in teh past.

Sadly, I can no longer reliably use analog methods for my notes and similar. Due to this I went ahead and re-implemented the anti bad habit analog notebook as an Obsidian vault. So far it’s proven very helpful for tracking a bad habit I want to break and should work well for pretty much any “bad habit” one may want to break.

What’s Within?

This post contains a breakdown of how I use a computer, laptop and phone. I’ve made some significant changes over the last few years due to worsening health hassles. Everything here has been iterated over time in order to create a compute environment that makes my life easier to manage. Especially when my my health hassles are at their worst.

Feel free to borrow ideas, adapt things and generally use the contents of this post as you see fit. As always: this is a highly individual approach to computering. Take what works, leave the rest.

It would seem I’ve regained the ability to write more frequently and regularly despite my health hassles

My Preference

Normally I write posts for this blog by hand using a pen, Tomoe River paper and a clipboard. Sadly, my health hassles make this approach to writing very difficult and I do not have the capacity to write using analog methods regularly or reliably. Over the last few years I’ve had to patiently wait for windows when my health hassles doesn’t interfere with my writing. With analog I have to slowly write blog posts over the course of weeks and sometimes months. It’s quite frustrating but I enjoy writing and refuse to give it up, even if frustrated by my health hassles.

What’s Within?

This post lays out how I research topics. I’ve struggled with “research” in the past and, thanks to a friend, finally figured out a methodology that actually works for me. This post goes through my methodology, how I use it with success and the details needed to recreate and/or adapt it.

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What / Why / How

Important Context

Over the years I never really figured out how to research a topic properly. Basically if I needed to research anything I just sort of went digging around the internet, read books, read published articles and similar but didn’t really take notes or create summaries or similar. At best I’d catalog very basic snippets that I could turn into something actually useful at a later date.