Notebook</th>	Content</th>	Form Factor</th>	Epistemic Effort</th></tr></thead>
Pocket Notebook</td>	Unstructured information from conversations, back-of-the-napkin calculations</td>	Slim, passport-size dot grid notebook</td>	Extremely low, just whip out the book and scribble in it</td></tr>
Spring 2024 Linear Algebra</td>	Crystallized, heavily refined topic notes, complete with heavy formatting and diagram</td>	Thick, hardcover dot grid notebook</td>	Very high, this is meant to document my understanding of concepts such that I can "load" that information back into my brain, notes are written in dedicated day-long sessions</td></tr>
Summer Internship Daily Journal</td>	Daily notes about accomplished tasks, meeting notes, and reminders</td>	Medium-size lined journal</td>	Medium, they're working notes but I should be able to get a good picture of what I wrote about later</td></tr> </tbody></table> Mashing these all together into one notebook would never make sense. I can't just keep a giant tome of knowledge in my pocket for quick notes, and the organizational overhead of such a solution would be insanity. Furthermore, having notebooks be compartmentalized offers many benefits. Accidentally putting my pocket notebook in the wash and ruining it doesn't affect my ability to pass my math test. I can leave my internship journal in my cubicle so that I don't need to carry it around after work. To put it simply, separate notebooks for different use cases means each can be tailored for that specific case</strong>.</p> This is pretty intuitive to most. Even in grade school, it's common to have different books for math and art class, and to use a lined book for math and a sketchbook for drawing. But when it comes to digital notetaking, the focus is instead on having a one-size-fits-all solution, a single Roam/Notion/Obsidian Graph/Workspace/Vault that fits every piece of information of every type from every area of life into it.</p> So after spinning my wheels on finally dealing with my lack of a note-taking solution, I finally thought to apply the same logic as my physical notebooks. I started off by setting up a Notion workspace for university. This use-case takes advantage of Notion's strengths, such as the block editor allowing for more free-form structure and the web-based nature making it so that I can access my workspace from shared computers, while making the caveats a non-issue, as what I need for school falls squarely within free-tier, and data sovereignty doesn't matter as much for me since this doesn't hold very important information and what is stored in there for the most part is only relevant for a 3-month semester. I then started using Logseq for work notes. This use-case needs certain capabilities that Logseq has, such as full data sovereignty and easy installation, and benefits from what would otherwise be a caveat for me, the fact that Logseq is based on a Zettelkasten approach, with use of tags and search. The Zettelkasten approach would not at all be feasible for most areas of my life, but is perfect for work, allowing me to quickly jot down information with minimal setup or organization overhead.</p> Finally, for personal notes I'll be (partially) using Obsidian. I include the "partially" because while my Obsidian vault is meant to serve as a hub for information gathering and synthesis, it is not meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution, even within the areas of my life not covered by school and work. This vault, as with every other knowledge system I have, has an intent statement</a>, and is restricted to specific use cases. As I find myself in need of more places to store knowledge, I plan on using the tools that make the most sense for that use-case, in an effort to keep each digital "notebook" focused, intentional, and maintainable.</p> Part II: Publishing</h2> Over the past year or so, I've made substantial changes to the workflow for publishing to this site.</p> This site is a static site, generated by a bash script I've named `bliss</code>(see the` `colophon</a> for more details). After an article was added, I'd run the script locally to generate the site files in a subdirectory of the GitHub repository, then commit and push everything, then point GitHub Pages to that subdirectory and serve it. This had a number of friction points:</p>` I needed to be on a machine that had the script's assorted dependencies installed, and just hope there were no breaking changes or platform differences with any of them</li> It was a multi-step process, with steps that needed to be run in order</li> It was a sit-down process Ultimately, this wasn't ideal, but it felt like the best workflow at the time, since GitHub Actions/Workflows felt strange and impossible.</li> </ul> Since that time, I've "seen the light" of CI through heavy use of Gitlab CI at work. It turned out that CI itself is not strange and impossible, just GitHub's implementation. I've been able to understand how to work with GitHub Workflows better as I've become more proficient with CI systems as a whole, but I'll maintain that it's a really obtuse and difficult-to-use system, and they could do way better. I finally bit the bullet and started migrating all of my personal sites and little projects over to Gitlab</a>, meaning that it's now seamless to use Gitlab's excellent CI to deploy projects. This site is now finally deployed via CI, as it should have been all along, meaning that publishing is now as simple as copying my Markdown draft from Obsidian into a file, committing and pushing it to Gitlab, and sitting back.</p> Epilogue</h2> With these new "friction-reductions", I hope to start writing (and especially publishing it) much more consistently. One of the best parts of my day is opening my RSS reader and seeing new unread blog posts, the ideas and musings of all sorts of people who take the time to share what's in their head for no motive other than the desire to spread information and the joy of writing it down. I too hope that I'm able to put things out there that inform, inspire, or hell, that are at least an interesting read.</p> Write An Intent Statement For Your Knowledge Infrastructure 2023-08-01T00:00:00+00:00 </p> Nerds (like me) love trying out new tools.</strong> At least in the circles I follow, there's been this new Renaissance of information management and sharing. Using personal knowledge management (PKM) software is gradually becoming more common among knowledge workers, a good few people are starting digital gardens</a>, and there seems to be more and more tools billing themselves as a new way to write or think.</p> However, this can quickly become a trap. I found myself in this situation with a tool I've been recently trying called Anytype</a>. For those who are unfamiliar, Anytype is a pretty new contender in the PKM space, and it's got a lot going from it, from open-sourced code, to encrypted sync, and a pretty nice UI to boot. However, it's main draw is the type system. As the name suggests, users can make any type, with it's own attributes and templates, and structure information in whatever way makes sense in their head. And by god, it's addictive</strong>. It's a really powerful feeling being able to structure information in the exact intuitive manner that makes sense to you.</p> But all of this ended up backfiring on me a little bit. I was so caught up in the fact that I could</em> map out a lot of my mind in this tool that I didn't stop and ask myself whether I should</em>. I've been helping my partner build up her own knowledge infrastructure recently, and after explaining the virtues of organization and intent to her I went to add some notes into Anytype and I realized that I had a bit of a mess on my hands. My knowledge infrastructure was a total mess, littered with types I came up with on a whim, and a ton of essentially boilerplate information. I don't need an entire object for a youtuber just because they publish a single course that I plan on taking one day. That information isn't actionable or meaningful for me in any way, and not every piece of knowledge needs every attribute represented in my personal knowledgebase.</strong></p> Ultimately, I realized that I was missing intent</strong>. I was creating notes and trying to offload knowledge, but I didn't have an end goal, a specific idea of what I wanted out of my private knowledgebase. This has been further complicated by the fact that I'm slowly building up a public knowledgebase</a>, and not having a clear intent means that it's hard to navigate what should be private and what should be public.</p> The simple solution for this problem is an intent statement, a document that outlines the intent of a given system.</strong> I've already been doing this in smaller ways, for example whenever I spin up an OS on one of my computers, and enter that information into my notes, I write a small intent statement indicating what the machine is for (Is it my primary machine for some time? Does it have a specific purpose that it's set up for? Am I just spinning it up to try out a particular piece of software?). Having my intentions thought through, written out, and in a place where I'm reminded of it results in a more organized way of thinking about my systems. Having an intent statement grounds me into thinking about what I need to do with the system to meet my goals for it, rather than what I could do with the system. </p> My intent statement for my Anytype knowledgebase ended up being structured like this:</p> Intent</u></strong></p> Broadly speaking, my Anytype knowledgebase is going to focus on working documents, contrasting with my public knowledgebase that serves to hold more crystallized notes and knowledge, notes that are more divorced from their immediate context in my life. For example, the public knowledgebase would have the information on how to install Tailscale on Fedora Silverblue, while the private knowledgebase would tell me whether I've installed Tailscale on a given Silverblue installation using those instructions.</p> Use Cases</u></strong></p> System Documents</strong></p> Notes on hardware and software will likely be moved into my public knowledgebase, but the details of how my systems are set up will be in my private knowledgebase, for operational security reasons and because they're rapidly changing working documents.</p> Implementation</strong></p> The "Computing Hardware" type and set.</p> Drafting Box</strong></p> A private place for me to synthesize knowledge together into thought-out writing, like the posts on this very site.</p> Implementation</strong></p> The "Drafting Box Draft" type and set.</p> Project, Course, and Book Tracking</strong></p> A place for me to keep track of my progress on courses I'm taking, projects I'm working on, and books I'm reading. Essentially state management</a> for these categories.</p> Implementation</strong></p> The Project, Book, and Online Course types and sets.</p> Idea Formation and Iteration</strong></p> A private place for me to outline and form ideas for projects, as well as iterate slowly on them until I decide to implement them</p> Implementation</strong></p> The Idea type and set.</p> Miscellaneous Notes</strong></p> A place for me to put minor personal notes that don't really warrant a dedicated area, like grocery lists or what my brother wants from Chipotle. Essentially a replacement for Apple Notes on my phone.</p> Implementation</strong></p> The Note type and set</p> </blockquote> I plan on adding intent statements to all of my public and private knowledge systems, as part of a broader initiative for all of my information systems to have "batteries included</a>". For example, you can now read the intent statement for this site here</a></del> [EDIT 2024-02-25: This page has since been removed, and is now located within the colophon</a>].</p> Joplin 7-Month Retrospective 2023-07-04T00:00:00+00:00 My existing note management solution hasn't been cutting it for a while now. My current approach to notes and knowledge management has been to keep things in Joplin</a> (with my 5TB university OneDrive as the backend), as well as use Simplenote</a> as a "drafting box" for things like blog post articles and some small temporary notes. However, Joplin hasn't really lived up to what I hoped it would enable for me when I first set it up around 7 months ago. While there are many gripes I've had with it, below are the biggest three I had, and the ones I really hope the platform can sort out in the future.</p> Gripe #1: Plugins Aren't What They're Chalked Up To Be</h2> Starting with a (somewhat) small one, the plugin system is very rudimentary, and doesn't actually deliver the customizability advertised on the rool's website. First of all, plugins are desktop only</strong>, meaning that if there's a plugin that plays a significant role in how you use your notes, you don't get to use it on the go. Contrast this with Obsidian</a>, where there's mobile plugin support, and a significant amount of supported plugins</a>. Furthermore, plugins don't sync between devices</strong>. This means that for every device I set up, which is a lot given the amount of laptops I rotate through, I'd need to manually install and configure a whole host of plugins. Combine that with a relatively poor plugin ecosystem compared to other applications, and I opted to just not bother with plugins.</p> Gripe #2: Poor Desktop UI</h2> This was a much bigger deal-breaker for me. The desktop application flat-out sucks</strong>. It already gets significant points taken off for being an Electron application, which switching to a HiDPI laptop has made me absolutely despise. However, it's also not even a well-executed Electron application, with a frustratingly laid out UI, very little customization, and odd visual glitches like this one that constantly popped up</a>:</p> </p> The desktop client feels like it gets very little love compared to the mobile one, which is frustrating for an application like a note-taking application where a lot of work will be done at a computer with a keyboard. It's bad enough that a lot of people who do use Joplin, like Chris from Linux Unplugged</a> interact with it exclusively using a VSCode plugin. However, I want to keep my code editor and my notes application separate, and the VSCode plugin has also proven to be unreliable, which was the impetus for Chris finally ditching Joplin.</p> Gripe #3: Sync Issues</h2> I haven't even dared try to install Joplin on my newest laptop, lest it erases my existing notes and I have to fix it again</strong>. While I appreciate the effort Joplin goes to in order to support a variety of backends, unfortunately I've been faced with a number of sync issues from the beginning. It's become routine to export my Joplin notes, because sync will often break out of nowhere right in the middle of syncing some changes, and the only way I can get it to complete is to take an export, delete all of my notes locally so that they get erased remotely, then restore all of my notes from the export. I shouln't need to do that regularly in any piece of software, let alone with something as irreplaceable as my notes. A lack of trust in the sync solution has really dissuaded me from continuing to use Joplin recently, and until I can get my notes somewhere else, it'll likely continue to be that way.</p> Takeaways</h2> I don't mean to completely rag on Joplin. There's a lot that's done right on the backend, especially when it comes to the freedom to sync your notes the way you want. However, I can't help but feel that Joplin has a long way to go to be the Evernote replacement it purports to be, and a lot of users are probably better served looking at other solutions for managing their information.</strong></p> The Best Windows XP System Is... A Dell Latitude From 2013? 2023-07-02T00:00:00+00:00 Important Note:</b></i></small></summary> In this article, I describe running Windows XP in 2023. When running older Windows, particularly XP, remember to be very careful about connecting the machine to the internet</b>, as these unsupported mainstream operating systems are vulnerable to a whole host of malware. I personally kept this install of Windows XP offline as a precaution.</i></small> </details> I've wanted to have a reliable machine running an older version of Windows for a while now, so that I can run older software and period-correct games that I have sitting around. However, I haven't had a great solution to this so far. Desktops are mostly out of the question for me, as I move around a ton being a college student, and they're big and clunky and just a hassle. However, laptops from when XP was in it's heyday require a lot of babying, often have faulty batteries, and rely on flimsy IDE laptop drives. A potential option I was leaning towards is to use a netbook, as they have more modern hardware but were still built to run Windows XP, however gaming would be out of the question, and using disc-based software (or even installing Windows XP in the first place) is much more of a chore without a built in disc drive.</p> When thinking about this recently, however, I remembered an interesting detail. When downloading Windows drivers for my Dell Latitude E6530, I noticed an odd entry in the list of platforms that had drivers for the laptop: Windows XP</strong>.</p> </p> This was initially quite shocking for a machine that was made in 2013, with a third generation i5 and other modern specs, but it makes reasonable sense given that these laptops were enterprise and education machines, and there are still enterprise users today, like the US government, that make significant use of Windows XP. Digging around a bit more, I found that, at least in this Latitude E6xxx line, this laptop and it's sister models in the E6x30 generation were the last laptops to have Windows XP support, with 2014's E6x40 Latitudes dropping support. With this discovery, I decided to see just what the experience was like installing XP on this laptop.</p> The Laptop</h2> </p> The Dell Latitude E6530 is a 15-inch business laptop released in 2013. My particular laptop has an i5-3320M CPU</strong>, paired with an Nvidia NVS 5200M GPU (1GB VRAM)</strong>, 8GB of DDR3 RAM</strong>, and a 128GB SSD</strong>. It also has a pretty nice keyboard, and a great selection of I/O. This may not be a brand-new gaming laptop, but it's certainly not the type of hardware you'd expect to have support for XP!</p> Getting it Ready</h2> With the relatively young age of this laptop, I first had to change some BIOS settings to ensure that everything would work well with XP. This included:</p> Setting the system to Legacy Boot rather than UEFI</li> Disabling Secure Boot</li> Setting the SATA mode to ATA</code> rather than the default AHCI</code> or RAID</code></li> Disabling Nvidia Optimus</li> </ul> None of these newer technologies were around back when XP was around, so it's important that we disable them to prevent any installation errors. I believe Dell does ship a driver for Intel RST (the RAID</code> SATA mode in the BIOS), but as I'm just using an unmodified installation disc I decided to keep things simple.</p> Installing XP</h2> As this laptop has an optical drive, the actual process of installing Windows XP was pretty smooth. I installed a bog-standard copy of Windows XP Professional SP3, just went through it as a normal user would, and the whole process took just under 15 minutes.</p> The rough part was installing the drivers that started this whole saga in the first place. After downloading all of the relevant drivers for my model from Dell's website and copying them over to the laptop, I was greeted by this error:</p> </p> Eventually, after poking around at Dell's website for a while, I found that each driver offered an alternate download of what seemed like an older driver format, and these packages worked correctly on Windows XP.</p> </p> After getting all the drivers installed, and modifying some settings to taste, I was left with a pretty clean Windows XP desktop:</p> </p> Thoughts</h2> The machine performs extraordinarily well on Windows XP, pretty unsurprisingly. While XP can only see 4GB of the system's RAM, it barely even sips at the RAM, and the CPU usually idles at 1% usage. Software runs snappily, and some games, like Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, play pretty well.</p> I think this generation of Dell Latitude makes for a great XP machine to have around, and offers significantly more utility and reliability than something like a netbook, period-correct laptop, or a desktop.</p> Building up an RSS Feed 2023-06-16T00:00:00+00:00 I had put off building up a personal RSS feed until just about 2 months ago.</strong> I don't entirely know why it took so long, but a lot of it was certainly choice paralysis. There's so many reader and sync services that it takes a minute to figure out which one to use, and it took me needing to download some variety of RSS reader to test the RSS generation of this site to finally start building my feed. I currently use NetNewsWire</a> on iOS as my primary method of consuming RSS content, as I personally find that smaller screens allow me to focus on reading more than the large, distracting canvas of a laptop screen.</p> With the ongoing Reddit API fiasco</a> resulting in me not using the site</a>, RSS has served as a much healthier way for me to consume interesting, independent content. These few days have really shown me the merits of consuming and curating content on my own terms. The biggest barrier with RSS, however, is actually building up a feed of people to subscribe to.</strong> Without the algorithms that drive sites like Twitter and Reddit, you as the user need to put in that effort to seek out content.</p> To get my RSS feed list, I started with the dozen or so blogs that I had in my "Blogs" bookmark folder at the time, serving as a nice base of content I already know I like. After that, the amount of effort to find more content went up a good bit. The types of sites I follow tend to be individual people writing medium to long form content somewhat infrequently, so it would take a pretty large feed to have around 5-7 pieces of interesting, high quality content to read every day. As a result, I had to start "feed speed dating".</p> This consisted of finding aggregated lists of links like blogrolls, webrings, and ".clubs", and going through each link. When I'm visiting a person's page, I first check whether they've posted in 2023</strong>. I then, as a general rule, go through the first page of their posts, and see if I can find two pieces of content that catch my interest</strong>, and if so I'll add them to my RSS feed. I'll often read some of their posts too, since this has become a nice free-time activity of mine.</p> Pages I've used to find content, in no particular order:</summary> The Forest</a></li> tmo's blogroll</a></li> Luke's Wild Website blogroll</a></li> Kev Quirk's blogroll</a></li> Ru Singh's blogroll</a></li> Manuel Moreale's blog list</a></li> Manuel Moreale's "I'll Read It"</a></li> Riccardo Mori's "Reading List" posts</a></li> Ye Olde Blogroll</a></li> This list of developer sites with "/uses" pages</a></li> List of engineering blogs</a></li> XXIIVV Webring</a></li> Tin Cans on a String Webring</a></li> geekring</a></li> 1MB Club</a></li> 512KB Club</a></li> 1kB Club</a></li> XHTML Club</a></li> </ul> I'll unfortunately not be tossing my own hat into the ring today, as I plan on adding my blogroll to a wiki section of this site that I have yet to build.</i></p> </details> Using RSS to entertain myself rather than just scrolling something like Reddit has tremendously increased the value I get per period of "reading time". When I open NetNewsWire (which has a great UI by the way, I strongly recommend it), I'm greeted by content I know</em> I like, and that has had thought and effort put into it, rather than having to scroll endlessly to dig up the bits of content that I'm there for. I hope this small resurgence of independent websites, RSS feeds, webrings, and all of these goodies I missed out on by not being alive in the 90s continues.</p> Trimming Down The Nerd's Cookbook 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00 I've finally had a chance to do a little cooking again! After being cooped up in a dorm room for two semesters with a shabby excuse of a kitchen shared by the entire floor, I'm back home, with decent burners, a good spice rack, and even an actual fridge</em>. Now that I'm doing some more cooking, and hopefully will continue to do so for the forseeable future, I want to have a home for some homegrown recipes. This is even more pertinent now than before college, as I'm a recently-minted vegetarian and as a result often adapt recipes I've loved making in the past to work with my diet. Thus, I took a look at a project I've used once in the past, nyum</a>.</p> It's a shell-script-based static site generator that takes in Markdown and spits out a full recipe site</a>, with search, a nice layout, and more. Overall a pretty neat little way to spin up a personal cookbook. However, ever since starting to really work with simple, shell-script-based static site generators, like the one used for this site, I don't like settling with someone else's way of generating a site, I want to hack on it and adapt it to my tastes. And the amazing thing about these simple static site generators is that it's incredibly easy to do so!</p> As such, I forked nyum</a>, and made a number of changes. I first tackled deployment, modifying the script to build to docs/</code> rather than _site</code>. This allows me to simply deploy the site onto GitHub pages without any additional hassle, as Pages lets you deploy from docs/</code> (but not any other directory for some absurd reason). I also removed the rsync deployment script, GitHub Action, and supporting code inside build.sh</code>.</p> Next up was design and load times. My design language on I Need More Coffee</em> (and other tangential pages in the works) is based around basic HTML, using system fonts, and dithered images, which results in simple, inherently responsive design, as well as blazing fast load times. As such, nyum's use of webfonts and a header icon wasn't going to work for me, and I stripped them out. I did keep the other UI icons, as they serve a purpose and I couldn't be bothered to adapt the layouts to work without icons. Honestly, in my opinion, my "trimmed down" version looks better than the original, but that's just my taste so your mileage may vary. I also dithered the images in the demo site to be able to compare resource usage between the original nyum and my planned usage.</p> And boy do they compare</strong>. I ran 4 gtmetrix</a> reports between the two sites:</p> Original Homepage</a></li> Fork's Homepage</a></li> Original Cheese Buldak Recipe</a></li> Fork's Cheese Buldak Recipe</a></li> </ul> The fork's homepage loaded 3x as fast</strong> (301ms vs. 958ms) and transmitted less than a tenth of the data</strong> (13.6KB vs. 186KB). The recipe page similarly loaded 3x as fast, but there wasn't as much of a delta in the amount of data transmitted as a vast majority was image data, and the particularly heavy image of the Cheese Buldak didn't want to reduce in filesize tremendously even when dithered to 4 colors and reduced to 1024px wide.</p> On the whole, a few simple changes resulted in a substantial and noticeable decrease in load times and resource usage of this simple site.</strong> I hope you'll check out the demo site</a>, or my actual cookbook</a> (it only has the sample Strawberry Smoothie recipe for now, but will have more recipes soon, I promise).</p> Update (2025-07-22):</strong></p> I've since taken down this deployment, as I've found that I don't use the cookbook all that much. The code for the trimmed version is still available on my Gitlab at ineedmorecoffee/cookbook</a>.</p> </blockquote> Learning How to E-Mail Pt. 1 - Primary Mailbox 2023-06-02T00:00:00+00:00 Note: This post is the first part of a planned multi-part series on learning how to manage my e-mail. Check back soon for part 2!</em></p> </p> It feels like my generation never really learned how to use e-mail correctly.</p> I had a school provided e-mail since I was in 4th grade, and have had my own personal e-mail, the one I still used up until recently, for over a decade. Because e-mail, and other aspects of digital life, were something pushed at us from childhood rather than being a conscious choice to set up and use as an adult, it seems like I, and all of my peers, just kind of use</em> e-mail, creating accounts, getting signed up for newsletters, racking up unread e-mails in the thousands, without any sense of order and organization. It becomes this chore and burden, wading through all sorts of automated annoyances just to dig out that one important e-mail from an employer or classmate.</p> For the longest time, my solution to this was simply to ignore it. To not use e-mail on my phone, or to just ignore the unread count on my mail app when I eventually needed to use it on my phone. I then switched to a series of e-mail apps that employ their own filtering to make a “focused inbox”. But ultimately, these are just bandaid solutions, trying to deliver a “quick fix”. When I found myself missing important college application e-mails because one of these mail apps was filtering them out erroneously, I decided that enough was enough and that I would fix my e-mail situation.</p> For this first phase of sorting out this messy, disjointed cluster of accounts that comprises my e-mail infrastructure, I decided to focus in first on my primary e-mail address, the one I ask people to contact me at and that handles the important accounts in my life.</p> Stopping the Flow</h2> The first step I took was to stop the flow of junk e-mails that was flowing into my primary inbox. Despite having a separate e-mail address designated for extraneous accounts and anything that was likely to get me a lot of e-mails, I still had a daily flow of newsletters, CollegeBoard Student Search Service</a> e-mails, and other noise that I just didn't want cluttering up my inbox. Inspired by this Reddit post</a>, I took this dead simple approach to stopping the flow of unnecessary e-mails for good:</p> Mark all e-mails as read</li> Every day, open my e-mail and look at the dozen or so new e-mails I receive</li> For all of the unwanted messages, unsubscribe from the mailing list or block the sender</li> Repeat steps 2 and 3 for around a week or two until the flow of e-mails slows to a crawl</li> </ol> This is seriously all it took.</strong> To speed up the process for myself, I also retroactively went through the previous two weeks of e-mails and unsubscribed from all senders I didn't want to receive e-mails from.</p> This simple step solved the initial problem that spurred me to take on this project, and allowed me to start using my primary e-mail in a good old fashioned mail application like Apple Mail, without missing a single important message amidst noise.</p> Taking Control</h2> Another thing that has irked me about my e-mail situation thus far has been how it's kept me tied to Google. I have worked on slowly (but not completely) de-googling my life for some time now, largely tackling low hanging fruit like switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox years ago, as well as ending my Google Drive and Google Photos usage, switching off of Google Maps, and overall minimizing my personal Google product usage to just YouTube and GMail. Having so much importance resting on a Google account bugged me though, with recent stories showing just how easily Google is ready to lock you out and never respond to you again</a>, leaves me somewhat uneasy. Furthermore, Google is an advertising company, and between adding features I don't need, and serving ads in my inbox, I'm sure my e-mails are being scanned and analyzed in 10 different ways.</p> Thus, I decided to finally make the somewhat scary jump off the GMail address I've used for a majority of my life, and switch to a Proton</a> account, with an address on a domain that I own. Proton gives me secure and encrypted e-mail that I'm paying for with my wallet rather than my data, and using my own domain means that if Protonmail goes under for some reason, or simply if I find a better offering elsewhere, switching providers is a matter of changing a few DNS records rather than painstakingly migrating dozens of accounts like I'm having to do for this transition (it's certainly an ongoing process that I'm only in the beginning of).</p> Protonmail's Easy Switch</a> feature made the first few steps of the switch pretty easy, as with one button I had my 12 or so years of e-mail history in my Protonmail account (meaning to find an important e-mail in the future I'll only have to search one account), as well as setting up a forwarding rule to forward all mail from my GMail to my Proton address. From there, most of the work really revolved around cleaning up my inbox, as well as dealing with accounts, as mentioned above.</p> Cleaning Up the Mess</h2> Note: The mail organization in this section should have been performed</em> before</strong></em> moving my inbox history over to Proton. I didn't, however, so I resolved to instead keep my Proton mailbox as my organized and pruned copy, and simply mass archive all messages in my Google account.</em></p> Nobody ever told me that you're supposed to move e-mails out of your inbox.</strong></p> As a result, a lot of talk about organizing e-mails, with folders and labels, has felt like alienspeak to me. It wasn't until I thought about it recently that it made sense, that an e-mail inbox is an intermediate place for mail prior</em> to it's final destination, rather than being the final destination itself. Yet another aspect of e-mail that I had never learned about due to e-mail being pushed at us from too young of an age.</p> With this new insight, another goal was added to my e-mail extravaganza: getting to 0 messages in my primary inbox, while purging all unnecessary mail from the past decade</strong>. I started with ~18,000 messages in my inbox, and it ended up taking around a week of intermittent cleanup sessions to get that down to 0.</p> I first started by searching for e-mails that I knew I wanted kept, and archiving them so that they didn't accidentally get deleted. This included filtering for senders like family members, partners, my university, and past employers. I then used creative search terms to try and capture large amounts of e-mails I knew I wanted gone, such as:</p> " sale" (the leading space was important in not picking up unrelated messages)</li> ".edu" (to get rid of spammy e-mails from colleges)</li> "newsletter" (to get rid of various company newsletters)</li> "notification" (for various services that I didn't disable e-mail notifications for)</li> "verify" (for all of those e-mail verification or two-factor messages)</li> </ul> I then systematically filtered through my inbox, finding different senders and either trashing or archiving all of their messages, and finished it off with a manual review of a couple hundred messages that didn't get categorized through any of the above actions.</p> </p> At long last, I was faced with a completely empty inbox.</p> Conclusion</h2> With admittedly some work, yet not an impossible amount of effort, my personal mailbox has gone from being that drawer full of junk that I try to open as little as possible to being an organized space that I feel ownership of and have control over. It's a pride point of my digital life rather than an annoyance. I hope that my journey to make this step off Google, and take control of my inbox, my e-mail address, and my e-mail management, inspires others to do the same and make e-mail work as it's supposed to.</p> The next step in this process, beyond migrating accounts to my new e-mail address, is going to be to apply some of these insights to my other inboxes, as well as deleting and consolidating e-mail accounts where possible to create a comprehensive e-mail handling strategy that extends beyond just this personal address, and I plan to outline that journey in a second part to this series.</p> Resources</h2> r/degoogle</a> - This subreddit has some good resources and links about degoogling in a broad sense, and has others going through a similar transition away from GMail. r/privacy</a> is also a great resource, but more general.</li> The Inbox Zero Series</a> - A really useful collection of insights about e-mail management and how to handle it effectively. The series includes a post on processing an inbox down to 0</a>, and this may be a good starting point if you have more e-mails to work through than I did.</li> </ul> Appendix A: Choosing an e-mail provider</h2> There's a good few options for paid e-mail providers out there that fit some of my requirements, and while I chose Proton, that may not be the best choice for everyone. This appendix goes over some of the providers I considered, and why I did or did not go for them. I primarily looked for providers that I pay for with money, rather than data, that were at least somewhat privacy-respecting, and that would let me use my own domain name. Another important factor for me was longevity, for my primary address I'm not interested in buying into a specific provider and workflow unless I know it will be around in the long run, and doubly so for encrypted mail providers that often require users to only use their applications to access e-mail rather than being able to use any IMAP/SMTP client.</p> Proton</a></h3> This is the provider I went with, as it was reasonably priced, fit all of my requirements, and had the additional bonus of being encrypted and secure, as well as providing other services alongside e-mail such as cloud storage and calendar management (I have yet to significantly make use of either, but they're not bad perks to have). I also believe in Proton's longevity, and feel confident that they'll continue to be around for a bit.</p> For $4.99/mo</strong> ($47.88/yr) on their "Mail Plus" tier, you get 15GB of storage</strong> (more than enough for me at the moment), 10 e-mail addresses</strong>, and the ability to use 1 custom domain for e-mail. The 15gb of storage can also be shared with Proton Drive</strong>, their cloud storage service, and the plan also gives you the ability to create 25 calendars</strong> on Proton Calendar.</p> It's not all sunshine and roses however, as there are some drawbacks. The first is that their web client isn't perfect. It's good enough, but doesn't have any "select all" feature, and can be slow at times. They do let you search the contents of e-mails now, which is a pain point that some have mentioned in the past, but it's not perfect. The biggest drawback, however, is not being able to use third-party clients on mobile</strong>. On desktop, you can use a third-party mail app like Thunderbird with their Proton Bridge</a> application, but this isn't available for mobile, forcing users onto the official Protonmail app. This is understandable, given that IMAP and SMTP were never designed with encrypted e-mail platforms in mind, but is nonetheless unfortunate. The iOS app isn't too bad though, so this is a compromise I'm willing to make for the promise of additional security.</p> Fastmail</a></h3> Fastmail came in second place for me, as it's a lot of the good of Proton, but without any encryption, meaning that it doesn't suffer from a lot of the drawbacks that Proton has. It advertises privacy-first e-mail, and doesn't have any ads. It also offers a bit more for a similar price to Proton.</p> For $5.00/mo</strong> ($50.00/yr) on their "Standard" tier, you get 30GB</strong> of storage, 600 e-mail addresses</strong>, either on your own domain or on one of their many domains</a>, access to their calendar service</strong>, as well as the ability to use any IMAP/SMTP client.</p> Honestly, Fastmail has a very compelling offering, and I've seen others on the internet using it, so it was a very tough decision between this and Proton, but ultimately I settled on Proton due to Proton Drive, as well as simply having a bit more experience with the platform (I've used their free tier for a few accounts here and there over the years and have watched it grow). The encryption is also a solid "nice to have", even if I'm not entirely sure how much I care about it due to pretty much all of my e-mail correspondence being with GMail or Outlook addresses, meaning my messages end up passing through Google or Microsoft's servers anyways. There is still a chance I may move to Fastmail later, and I'm considering giving their free trial a shot, but am somewhat unclear how I would actually go about testing their services.</p> Tutanota</a></h3> Tutanota was also in contention, being Proton's primary competition in the private and encrypted e-mail business. Their pricing is certainly pretty good if you just want e-mail and calendars, and they have similar promises as Proton of encrypted e-mail storage and end-to-end encryption of messages between Tutanota users.</p> For €1.20/mo</strong> (€12/yr), on their "Premium" tier, you get 1GB storage</strong> (but this can be upgraded à la carte for a reasonable price), 6 e-mail addresses</strong>, custom domain support</strong>, and unlimited calendars</strong>.</p> The big downside with Tutanota is that they don't an equivalent to Proton's "Proton Bridge", meaning that IMAP/SMTP clients can't be used, even on desktop. They do have native desktop applications in addition to mobile, but I would prefer the freedom to choose which client I use for mail on the desktop. Additionally, as stated with Fastmail, I'm just more familiar with Proton's offering, hence why I opted for them over Tutanota.</p> Honorable Mentions</h3> Posteo</a> - Great price, but seems like more of a barebones offering compared to the others. I may consider this service if I need a cheap secondary address under another domain.</li> iCloud</a> - $0.99/mo for 50GB or $2.99/mo for 200GB, as well as custom domain support and a whole host of other features is a great deal, and I already pay for the 200GB storage tier for iCloud Photos anyways, but I want to reduce my reliance on Apple services rather than increase it. If you use a number of Apple devices and are fine with getting bought into the ecosystem, however, this is arguably the most compelling offering out there.</li> </ul> Resources for a Resource-Saving Internet 2023-05-18T00:00:00+00:00 A while back, I stumbled upon korayer</a>'s RE;FERI</a>. This site outlines a number of resources about creating lightweight websites, and most notably includes the template for a CSS grid system, allowing one to create websites with layouts more complex than just a linear text document, but without any bloated JavaScript. I was intrigued by the possibilities, but didn't want to continue having to view the site in Google Translate, so I created my own fork</a>.</p> </p> Translation</h2> I don't know German (the language the original version is written in). As a result, I relied on a combination of Google Translate, as well as my own intuition on the message being conveyed. This has resulted in what I feel is a reasonable interpretation, but please do open an issue</a> if there's anything I've grossly misinterpreted</strong>.</p> Dark Mode</h2> One aspect of the original RE;FERI that bugged me was the lack of a dark mode</strong>. In 2023, every website has a dark version, and I knew from my work on this site</a> that it's incredibly easy to add a dark mode to a simple HTML site</a>. As such, my version of RE;FERI supports a dark mode</strong>. This is achieved using just the <meta name="color-scheme" content="dark light"></code> tag to indicate to the browser that a dark mode is available, and then some mode-specific CSS styling for links, highlights, and some other custom elements to ensure consistent readability across modes.</p> Next Steps</h2> I think this system, and having a version in English with a dark mode, will allow me to easily create more pages for I Need More Coffee</em>, as well as other personal projects, that preserve the simple, lightweight, and quick-to-load nature of this site. For starters, I plan on using it for the verification page</a> I discussed in a previous post</a>. I'm excited to see what I, and others, can create with this.</strong></p> View the example site here!</a></strong></p> Update (2025-07-22):</strong></p> I've since taken down this translation, as there's a number of things that make the template less than ideal for use as a starter. Rasmus Andersson's raster system</a> is likely a better starting point for anyone who wants to make similar grid layouts</p> </blockquote> Doing Some Admin 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00 It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted to this site, which is quite unfortunate. In that time, I’ve finished off another semester of college, shoved all my possessions into my trusty 4Runner, and hopped on a flight to Isla Verde, Puerto Rico, where I’m writing this post from.</p> </p> I’ve also taken a renewed interest in making this place my home on the internet, inspired by the numerous other folks on the internet I’ve added to my RSS feed over the past few days (I definitely want to add a blogroll</a> to this site at some point, maybe even a blogroll-roll of other blogrolls and webrings I’ve used to find numerous sites for my RSS list). With that, I’ve decided to do some admin and refactor, as well as better define, all of the subdomains and repositories that comprise (or will comprise) I Need More Coffee</em>. Many of these changes haven't happened yet, but will in the coming days or weeks, and may be accompanied by their own posts.</p> Subdomains</h2> I want to use I Need More Coffee</em> as a home for a larger portion of my online presence, and as such I've decided to start using some subdomains to add other types of pages beyond just this blog. Here are a few subdomains I may add in the future (or may have already added).</p> \| Subdomain \| Purpose \| \| @</code> and www</code> \| Will continue to point to this site, with the amount of pages kept to posts and other hyperrelevant pages. \| \| pages</code> \| Will serve as a central location for one-off and auxiliary pages that don’t need to hold to the same design language and purpose as pages on the main site, from full-size assets for posts to small project-specific sites. \| \| verify</code> \| A single verification page</a> outlining my entire online presence, verifying that these accounts are mine and that others may not be. \| \| wiki</code> \| Will be the future home of a wiki or “digital garden” of sorts. Could either take the form of a published Logseq</a> graph, or maybe something more minimal. \|</p> GitHub and Repositories</h2> I'm also making some changes to this site's presence on GitHub</a>. The organization has been renamed from I-Need-More-Coffee</code> to ineedmore-coffee</code>, as it looks more elegant and is less effort to type. The repository that houses this site</a> has been renamed from i-need-more-coffee.github.io</code> to main</code>, which does technically mean that it's being served as a "project site" and as a subfolder of my main GitHub pages site, but this doesn't matter much as I'm pointing my apex domain to this repository, and will be manually specifying subdomains for any other repository I enable GitHub Pages for.</p> \| Repository \| Purpose \| \| main</code> \| Contains this site. \| \| pages</code> \| Contains the files for pages.ineedmore.coffee</code>, will consist a simple directory of HTML files. \| \| verify</code> \| Contains the HTML for verify.ineedmore.coffee</code> \| \| meta</code> \| Contains meta-information about how the various sites, repositories, and subdomains are organized and managed \|</p> The "Future Link"</h2> This is a new addition to the site that I intend to use in the future, a placeholder page that I can link to, and then later replace with a link to a new post that did not exist at the time of the original post. I've written a little bit more about it on the page itself</a>.</p> Edit (2023-07-20):</strong> A lot of this stuff is no longer relevant, between abandoned projects and a move to Gitlab for hosting and code. See this post</a> for much more recent updates.</p> Unleashing the Potential of an AOSP Flip Phone 2023-04-12T00:00:00+00:00 Note: I go into a bit of background on this phone during the first portion of this article. If you want to skip straight to the setup guide, scroll down to "Unlocking the Potential".</small></em></p> Around a week ago, I noticed a flip phone being auctioned off on my city's surplus website. I've been looking around for interesting phones as part of a separate project, so I jumped on it and bought it, not entirely knowing the rabbit hole I'd go down in my attempts to push the capabilities of this device.</p> The device in question is a Kyocera DuraXV LTE</a></strong>, a rugged flip phone from 2017:</p> Device Profile: Kyocera DuraXV LTE</strong></p> </p> Key</th> Value</th></tr></thead> Release Date</td> September 2017</td></tr> Release Price</td> $264</td></tr> Device Type</td> Flip Phone</td></tr> Primary Display</td> 2.6 inch 320x240</td></tr> Processor</td> Snapdragon 210</td></tr> Memory</td> 2GB</td></tr> Storage</td> 16GB + microSD</td></tr> Battery</td> 1530 mAh</td></tr> Camera</td> 5MP Rear</td></tr> Operating System</td> AOSP 7</td></tr> </tbody></table> This phone's hardware is definitely unique. It appears to be a slightly upgraded and heavily ruggedized cousin to the Kyocera Cadence</a> (this becomes relevant later), and has this interesting "rounded hexagon" motif going on. The buttons arent too bad, the D-Pad feels nice, and overall it generally feels much higher end than the usual budget KaiOS feature phones.</p> What's really interesting about this phone is the operating system it's running. With modern flip/feature phones, outside of generic ones that use an RTOS, the two most prominent options are the veritable battalion of KaiOS phones</a> on the low end, with their basic apps and limited functionality, and full on Android feature phones, like the AGM M7</a> and Xiaomi F21 Pro</a> where the only differentiating factor from a low-end smartphone is the form factor. However, somewhere in the middle, there is a category of stealth Android phones, phones that use a locked down version of AOSP but don't make it clear to the user. This Kyocera phone is just that, a flip phone that on the surface appears to be a boring, basic interface, but is secretly hiding Android goodies underneath</strong>. These phones at an initial glance seem to be even less capable than KaiOS phones, typically not even letting users install applications. However, with just a bit of tweaking, we can unlock all sorts of functionality.</p> The First Attempt</h2> When I first began investigating this phone, and slowly realized it had Android guts, as well as it's similarity to the Kyocera Cadence, I stumbled upon Apps4Flip</a>, a website that offers custom applications for Android feature phones similar to this one. They offer utilities such as a custom application menu that can be launched from the notification screen, a cursor that can be invoked to simulate touchscreen input, and a couple utilities like a file manager, office suite, weather app, and a variety of applications relevant to those of Jewish faith. The purpose of this site seems to be to enable certain sects of Orthodox Jews to add more functionality to make these phones viable for daily use, which is essential to them as devices that can access the unfiltered internet are considered terefah</em> (not kosher)</a>.</p> However, after spending a couple of days figuring out the basics of what this device can do using their software, doing some experimentation, and reading up on places like r/dumbphones</a>, I decided that I wanted something different</strong>, and I wanted more. Apps4Flip's solutions feel like the only options when trying to search around for information on extending the capabilities of devices like these, but there are also some drawbacks to using their software</strong>, namely:</p> The code to the versions of the applications they distribute is not open source</strong>, which makes it hard to trust these apps, especially when they're from an unknown party.</li> They've allegedly repackaged and redistributed an open source application, while claiming it as their own</strong></a> (they've since walked this back and credited the original developer on their Apps page, but doesn't it doesn't inspire the most trust).</li> Their launcher doesn't display all installed applications.</strong> I noticed this when I attempted to install F-Droid. I thought that the install had failed as there was nothing in the launcher, but then I noticed a notification from F-Droid. Judging by the fact that the launcher does display MATVT Cursor</a>, they are likely filtering for com.android.cts.</code> package names.</li> </ul> Overall, I felt like there was the potential for so much more, so I opted to wipe the phone and start fresh, this time with the challenge of not using any of Apps4Flip's software.</strong></p> Unlocking the Potential</h2> From the aforementioned couple days of experimentation, there were a few key insights gained:</strong></p> APKs can be sideloaded by Bluetooth transferring them from another device</strong>, then selecting the file transfer notification to run the app installer (This also works with the built-in browser, as I found out later, but Bluetooth transfer is much more convenient).</li> Any compatible APK can be installed</strong>, not just ones with com.android.cts.</code> packagenames, which apparently is the case for some phones.</li> Applications that register as launchers can be installed</strong>, and the phone will give you a prompt to choose a launcher app to use every time you unlock, but while in any other launcher there is no consistent access to the all-important notification menu</strong>.</li> </ul> Armed with these insights, I reset the phone and went through the following setup:</p> DISCLAIMER: This phone is a spare/test device for me, and as such I had very few qualms with removing core system applications (primarily the default launcher). While the phone seems to be functioning fine, you won' be able to get any system apps you uninstall back without resetting the phone!</strong></em></p> Step 1: Enable Developer Mode</h3> Enabling developer mode on this phone is very similar to any other Android phone. Simply navigate to Settings -> About phone -> Software information</code>, select Build number</code>, then press the OK</code> button 7 times or until a prompt at the bottom of the screen says that you are now in Developer Mode.</p> Now, when we navigate back out to the main Settings</code> menu, there should be an additional option labeled Developer options</code>. Select that and scroll down to USB debugging</code> and turn that on</strong>. This will allow us to connect to the phone with adb</code> later to grant applications special permissions.</p> Step 2: Transfer over Some Apps</h3> Download these 4 APKs to a computer or another Android device:</p> Keikai Launcher</a>: The launcher we will be using to replace the default. It's pretty ugly on this phone due to some icon issues, but it's the one I've found that works best with the D-Pad</li> MATVT Cursor</a>: A cursor application that we can use to simulate touch input. Essential for interacting with apps at times</li> F-Droid</a>: A marketplace for free and open source Android apps, and a great place to find simple apps that work well with this device</li> Aurora Store</a>: Allows us to download applications from the Google Play Store</li> </ul> First, transfer over Keikai Launcher.</strong> We'll need to do this twice, as when we attempt to select the notification the first time, the phone will prompt us to open Settings to enable "installing apps from unknown sources". Follow the prompts and toggle the setting on, then transfer the file again and install it. Now, every time we unlock the phone (if it's locked with a PIN code), the phone will prompt you to choose between "Idle Launcher" (the default homescreen) and Keikai launcher.</strong> Having access to the default homescreen is crucial at this stage, because it gives us consistent access to the Notifications menu.</p> Next, transfer over MATVT Cursor.</strong> Once the application is installed, we will need to use adb</code> to grant it certain permissions, as I wasn't able to successfully do so from within the application. WebADB</a> is a great tool to run adb</code> commands from the browser if you aren't interested in installing the tool locally.</p> After connecting to the phone with adb</code> (or WebADB), run these commands (if using WebADB, remove the adb shell</code> portion from each command):</p> adb shell appops set com.android.cts.io.github.virresh.matvt SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW allow adb shell settings put secure accessibility_enabled 1 adb shell settings put secure enabled_accessibility_services com.android.cts.io.github.virresh.matvt/com.android.cts.io.github.virresh.matvt.services.MouseEventService adb shell am startservice com.android.cts.io.github.virresh.matvt/com.android.cts.io.github.virresh.matvt.services.MouseEventService </code></pre> Note: The last command may fail or error out (it did for me). I've still been able to use the cursor perfectly fine, so I can only assume that the last command either is still doing what it needs to do, or isn't entirely necessary.</em></p> Lastly, go into the MATVT application and override the activation key</strong>. I overrode it to key 17, but feel free to remap it to whichever keycode</a> works best for you.</p> Once these commands have been run, we should now be able to invoke a virtual mouse by holding the *</code> key (if you overrode the activation key with key 17).</strong> Holding the key for a short time while in mouse mode will also allow us to scroll using the virtual mouse, but this can be hit-or-miss at times.</p> Now, transfer over and install F-Droid</strong> and Aurora Store</strong>, and set them up. With just that simple step, we now have a phone that can download applications off both the F-Droid and Google Play stores!</p> Step 3: Polishing Things Up</h3> Right now, our phone still pesters about which launcher to use whenever we unlock, which is good because right now, we need the consistent access to the notification menu that the default launcher gives us</strong>. However, this is still annoying, and can result in some inconsistent behavior especially when using the back key.</p> To give us access to the notification menu without relying on the default launcher, we can use the Button Mapper</a> application from the Play Store. This neat tool allows us to bind actions to any key on our device</strong>, including launching the notification menu.</p> After installing the application and granting it the appropriate accessibility permissions, add one of your buttons as a "Custom Button" and bind it to launch your notification menu</strong>. I also took the chance to add a few more key bindings to get back some more normal Android interaction. This specific phone has dedicated hardware buttons for PTT</a>, including a big red side button, so I decided to bind multiple actions to it and make it a "home button":</p> Big Red PTT Button:</strong></p> Single Tap:</em> Home</p> </li> Double Tap:</em> Recents</p> </li> Long Press:</em> Notifications</p> </li> </ul> </li> Top Right "Stop" Button:</strong></p> Long Press:</em> Screenshot</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Now we can get rid of all that inconsistent launcher behavior by simply removing Kyocera's default launcher</strong>. To do this, first open adb</code> (or WebADB) back up, and list the applications with adb shell pm list packages</code>. Then, look for one with a package name that looks something like jp.kyocera.home</code> (I'm really annoyed at myself for not writing the exact package name down). Remove the application with adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.example.changethis</code>. At your own risk, feel free to "debloat" and remove carrier apps while you're here. I've chosen to keep everything as-is and just disable these extra apps for now, but I may experiment with how much of these I can remove in the future.</p> Once the default launcher is removed, Keikai launcher should now act seamlessly as your primary homescreen!</p> Conclusions</h2> Overall, with this setup I think this phone feels far more liberated than with the Apps4Flip suite of apps, as we now have access to a full launcher, multiple app stores on-device, and much more granular controls with remapped buttons. The biggest barrier with this phone now is D-Pad support in applications. Some apps, like the official F-Droid client</a>, and games, like Crossy Road</a>, treat the D-Pad as a first-class citizen and work exceptionally well. Others, like Spotify, don't work at all with the D-Pad and require fully using mouse mode, which can be cumbersome. Many fall into a middle category, where some UI elements can be selected and used with the D-Pad, but other parts need mouse mode. I think there is potential for a part two of this post as I explore more of which apps give the humble D-Pad the love that it deserves.</strong></p> This phone is a super intriguing device, and now that I have a solid base setup I'm excited to try and see what further capabilities can be added!</p> ex librīs 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00 During some internet exploration a few days ago, I stumbled upon a blog post</a> where the author details making a bookplate for their personal library. Sufficiently intrigued, I began doing a little research on this historic practice, and ended up creating my own.</p> What is a bookplate?</h2> A bookplate</strong> (or ex librīs</em>) is a label affixed to the inside of a book, often on the front endpaper</a>, indicating the ownership of the book. These get quite creative, with a wide variety of designs, subject matter, and techniques used</a>.</p> The actual medium varies widely as well, with traditional bookplates having their designs hand engraved into copper</a>, being printed onto paper with an intaglio press</a>, and then glued into a book.</p> When looking at modern day bookplates, I saw two main categories. Many bookplates use self-adhesive paper</strong>, such as ones offered by commercial sites</a>. Others, including the author of the post that initially inspired this, use stamps</strong>, as besides the initial cost of the stamp, they are exceptionally cheap and easy. However, there is controversy around stamped bookplates as bibliopholes argue that they degrade a book, and decrease it's value rather than increasing it.</p> Why bookplates?</h2> An equally interesting topic is the reason for even using bookplates in the first place. Bookplates originally stem from other methods to indicate ownership</strong> and dissuade theft</strong> of a book, such as book rhymes</a> or book curses</a> printed within a book. They're also surprisingly old</strong>, with the first "modern bookplate" being from 15th century Germany. Over the following centuries, it became very common for affluent people with personal libraries to have their own bookplates, and have been extremely helpful in helping modern historians trace the ownership of old books</a>.</p> Around the late 19th to early 20th centuries, bookplates became more common among middle class American households, as they gained wealth and sought to emulate the customs of "old money" families. They also started varying more in design, branching out from the traditional crests and coats of arms to have more unique art (I was particularly struck by Albert Einstein's</a>). Unfortunately, bookplates fell in popularity by around the 50s, likely due to cultural changes after World War II and the switch to primarily paperback books.</p> Creating my own bookplate</h2> Armed with more knowledge and a newfound appreciation for the ex librīs</em>, I decided to create my own. I enjoy customizing the objects I own, and this seemed like a fun way to add a personal touch to my own books. I haven't been a super prolific reader since I was a little kid, so my bookplate is more for my arsenal of journals and notebooks, but I do hope that having a bookplate encourages me to purchase and read more books as I build up a humble personal library.</p> Design</h3> The first portion to tackle was the design. I opted to design mine digitally, as it would give me the most flexibility. I downloaded Inkscape</a>, and started messing around with some text to come up with this very minimal design with the Inter</a> typeface:</p> </p> Note: The images on this site are dithered</a>. The SVGs are located here</a></em></p> This one was pretty easy, and looked pretty clean and modern, but I decided I wanted something with a little more character, so I pulled out my legal pad and sketched up this concept:</p> </p> After an afternoon learning the basics of Inkscape, I then had this design, featuring the EB Garamond typeface</a>:</p> </p> The motto, ad īnfīnīta mystēria</em>, means "to infinite mysteries" in Latin, and reflects my disposition to always learning more. I then chose the coffee/tea mug as it's simple, and something warm and caffeinated is always a great companion to a good book.</p> Medium</h3> With a design in hand, the next decision to make was whether to print the bookplate out or turn it into a stamp. Looking at the prices to get a custom stamp made, I decided that it would be simpler and quicker to simply get some self-adhesive paper and print the bookplate on that.</p> I found these letter-sized shipping labels</a> for cheap enough at my local Wal-Mart, and they seemed decent enough for the job.</p> As my design was 2 inches by 2 inches, I determined I'd be able to fit 20 of them on my page, and used the montage</code> command that imagemagick</code> ships to create a printable page with the bookplate tiled 20 times (I'm sure there was a more elegant way to do this):</p> montage -geometry 1024x1024 -tile 4x5 exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris_print.pdf </code></pre> I then printed this out, cut them using a paper guillotine (this ended up being way harder than I thought), and had my bookplates!</p> </p> With bookplates in hand, I promptly went and stuck one in the center of the front inside cover of the each of the journals I'm currently using.</p> </p> Conclusion</h2> This was a really fun little delve, and I really liked the end result. If this intrigues you as well, why not make your own? I think seeing someone's bookplate in a book I buy secondhand would give me a little extra appreciation for it and make me cherish it that much more. Bookplates are very individual, so there's no need to stick with conventions or try to fit any one style. Make one in whichever style and medium makes you happy!</p> I'll likely stick with this design for a while, but may update it eventually as my own tastes change. Who knows, it could be fun to be able to look at my books later, and be able to determine when I got them just by the bookplate design.</p> To check out the SVG files for the two bookplates I made, check out the repository</a>.</strong></p> Resources</h2> History</h3> Wikipedia</a></p> Book Riot Article</a></p> Atlas Obscura Article</a></p> Inspiration</h3> Original Ray Patrick Article</a></p> Ukrainian Bookplate Collection</a></p> Bookplates of Influential Men</a></p> Other</h3> Bookplate Ink - Commercial Bookplate Seller</a></p> Printable Shipping Labels</a></p> A First Post 2023-04-03T00:00:00+00:00 A first post is always very difficult to write. This one is definitely more of a placeholder than a grand occasion, and may get deleted later, but a first post it is nonetheless.</p> I've been putting off getting this blog/"brain dump"/"digital garden" set up for weeks now, so I'm very excited to finally have a place to put some of the article ideas I've had saved in my notes for a long time.</p> I'd also like to start the #100DaysToOffload</a> challenge, and I suppose that makes this post the first out of 100.</p> I hope you enjoy reading as I populate this site over the coming months :)</p> - Sohal</p>

How I Read Books

2026-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

As a young kid, I used to be a voracious reader. We'd go to the library every two weeks or so, I'd check out so many books that we'd have to put them on multiple library cards, and then get through 50-70 books in a matter of days. Granted, these were mostly smaller chapter books (and a healthy dose of manga), but it was a constant part of my day.

But then, something changed. As I got older, computers and phones took up those little bits of boredom that used to be filled with books, and life's increasing commitments made for less idle downtime where I could read. Reading on the bus was replaced with driving, lazy Sundays became endurance training days, and the little bits of downtime in between were replaced with time scrolling on my phone.

As of the past few years, however, I feel like I've been able to reclaim reading as a habit. A lot of voices online talk about "bringing back reading", and espouse the virtues of being well-read. But what many don't discuss is how to read, especially as an adult in this day and age.

Phones, and more specifically social media platforms, fit into our lives so well because they're engineered to. There's teams upon teams of engineers at Meta, ByteDance, and Youtube tweaking algorithms to make it easy for social media to be a habit. Nobody's engineering books to fit into our lives, so it's up to us to figure it out instead. This is not meant to be a manual on how to build a reading habit, I simply want to share what's working for me, in the hopes that it inspires you to critically think about how books can fit into your life.

I'm splitting this up sort of by genre, since different types of book fit into my routine in different ways. For each type, I'll discuss when I read them, and how I actually read and digest the information.

"Serious" Books</h2>
For books that I really want to take lessons away from (think self-help books or dense nonfiction), I've found it important for myself to own the book and to read messy. Nonfiction is essentially a 4-step process: The author does research, then translates that into words that represent their understanding. Then, we read those words, crunch on them, and translate them into an understanding in our mind. That "crunching" can sometime be a big barrier when reading dense and difficult books, and become a barrier that makes it less appealing to keep reading. Some might consider this sacrilege, but to me making annotations, underlines, and highlights is a way to reduce that difficulty and make a book more digestible. It also makes the book feel like more of a mental investment, encouraging me to continue reading and finish the book. Robin Rendle has a great short essay on this</a>, it's worth a quick read.
I've had to carve out dedicated time to read these types of books consistently, since reading, annotating, and understanding takes focus and effort. I try to sit down with a book at least once a week on Sundays, even if it's just for a little bit. I've also found these books a great way to kill time on flights when I'm trying to stave off sleep.
Fiction & "Fun" Nonfiction</h2>
For books that don't really need annotation, and that I'm reading more for the narrative, I've found that the best way to get myself to read is to simply put the book on my phone. I have to credit my girlfriend with this idea. I'm not the biggest fan of reading on my phone, compared to on an e-reader or a physical book. But on a trip to Copenhagen with her, I noticed that during little bits of time here and there, such as short subway trips or waiting for dinner, she'd pull out her phone and start reading. By the end of the trip, she had gotten through most of a book.
After thinking about it, it's a remarkably simple idea: if I'd be on my phone anyways, why not be reading a book, even if it's not as good as reading on other mediums? Always having a book on my phone means that there's always something to read when the occasion strikes. Since then, I try to always have typically a lighthearted nonfiction book on my phone that I'm reading, and will often pull it out during those little idle moments, or when I'm our for a solo dinner while traveling.
Textbooks</h2>
I never really touched textbooks until my second semester of university, where I quickly found that in certain classes, when they said we needed to be reading the textbook, they meant it. I find textbooks difficult to parse. The text is often dense, the important information is buried in paragraphs of less relevant background and caveats, and the order/grouping of content that is intuitive to the authors isn't necessarily intuitive to my mind.
The way I've been able to solve for all of this is by distilling out what matters to me. When I read a textbook, I'll also have a notebook with me, and seek to turn that notebook into a summarized version of that textbook. Crucially, I'm not making notes or annotations, but rather trying to create a book that could teach me the concepts I need to know independently of the original textbook. In the same vein that Wikipedia makes information more accessible by distilling original sources and existing literature into balanced, readable articles, I try to distill down the original textbook into just the details, formulae, diagrams, and terms I need to know, displayed, grouped, and ordered in the way that makes the most sense to me specifically.

End Notes
As I mentioned earlier, these are just examples of how I fit books into my life, based on my own anecdotal experience. Do you have an interesting or counterintuitive way you've been able to fit reading into your life? If so, please let me know</a>! </blockquote>

Why I Always Need A Minimap

2025-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an Instagram reel (that I can unfortunately no longer locate). The reel posed the question of why the author always felt the need to have a map on in their car, before cutting to a montage of racing game HUDs, all of which contain a minimap.
That reel made something click for me, because it was an odd instance of something being really relatable without me even knowing it. I definitely get a bit unsettled when I'm in a car and don't have a good way to have a map immediately visible, and visible in a position that's easy to glance at, even when driving in locations I'm familiar with.
Even more specifically, I have a strong preference for having Apple CarPlay in my car, and due to a current situation where I'm swapping back and forth between one car that has Carplay and one car that doesn't, I can really tell a difference in my comfort, despite having a phone mount in the other car. The difference, I realize, comes down to Carplay letting me always have a map in sight, even without navigation. On Carplay's homescreen, the map will always show, whether navigation is currently active or not, and will even proactively show routing to destinations like home and work, a common trait of racing game minimaps.

This desire to have a minimap extends to other places. For example, when playing Minecraft, I find it really difficult to keep interest in the game unless I'm playing with a minimap/mapping mod, like VoxelMap</a> or Xaero's Minimap</a>.
So why do I feel a compulsion to always have a map available? I did some digging, and found some interesting information that explains a stunning amount about myself.
Allocentric vs. Egocentric Cognitive Maps</h2>
Let's get into some psychology. This is a simplistic explanation of what I've found, and I might mess up some terms, please bear with me.
Psychologists have found that there are two types of navigation that humans can employ1</a>:
Egocentric navigation is centered around the self, and represents space from a first-person, body-centered frame. This type of navigation depends on sequences of turns, remembering views from a specific orientation, and using landmarks. People who are proficient in egocentric navigation tend to prefer turn-by-turn routing and navigate well by "feel". They are also able to multitask better than allocentric navigators when following a set route, as following a familiar route takes less mental load for them. However, egocentric navigators have a harder time quickly re-orienting to novel situations, like figuring out how to get to their destination after missing an exit on the highway.
Allocentric navigation is centered around the world, and represents space in an environment-centered frame. This type of navigation depends on building a more abstract cognitive map of a space's layout and positions of landmarks. People who are proficient in allocentric navigation tend to prefer using a map, and have good map skills, such as the ability to quickly draw out novel routes or map shortcuts, as well as a better ability to navigate using cardinal directions. Allocentric navigation has more cognitive load than egocentric navigation when following familiar routes, and allocentric navigators can struggle with turn-by-turn or more informal navigation, but in turn they can adapt better to novel situations, and can reason well when looking at a birds-eye perspective.
Ultimately, these are just navigation types, not distinct categories. Both types have their proficiencies, and the best navigators (such as those who do it for sport), exhibit a strong ability to engage both types of navigation2</a>. That being said, for many people, there seems to be a proficiency in one type or the other.
Anecdotally, it's pretty clear to me that I'm decently proficient in allocentric navigation, but am not great at egocentric navigation. I'm fairly good at reasoning on a map, plotting novel routes, and estimating distances, but I definitely feel that additional cognitive load even when going to familiar locations, which I think is why having a minimap is comforting, giving me a way to see the world around me in a birds-eye view, even when I don't have navigation actively going. When I'm trying to decide what to do, I instinctively open a map and work from there.
On the other hand, my girlfriend might be more biased towards egocentric navigation. She's very good at working with turn-by-turn instruction, following familiar routes without giving it too much focus, and in general working in more of a sequential manner.
Correlations</h2>
Some studies have found some interesting links between ability to navigate egocentrically or allocentrically, and other traits.
One study 3</a> found that the ability to navigate egocentrically was a predictor of better episodic memory, the ability to recall events one after another. The authors propose that this is likely due to a lot of overlap between the way the brain performs the two tasks, both of which involve processing information sequentially, whether it's one turn after another or one event after another.
Another study of 5-7 year olds4</a> found that egocentric performance corresponded to better leadership abilities and social skills, while allocentric performance correlated to adaptability, but also with elevated levels of cortisol (the stress hormone).
This area of research seems to still be growing, and is especially concentrated on the implications of the links between these navigation types and memory-related conditions, such as whether certain navigation abilities can be used as indicators of certain cognitive impairments, or if training egocentric navigation can help improve the memory of those with conditions that affect it.

End Notes
Ultimately, this is all very complex psychology, and our understanding is still evolving. This is by no means a perfect breakdown of exactly how these navigation types work or contribute to our overall navigation abilities. I do think that understanding these two types of navigation is very interesting, and helps contextualize my own preferences and proficiencies, as well as give me some ideas on how I can make improvements to my life that leverage my predisposition to allocentric reasoning. Did I get something wrong? If so, please let me know</a>! </blockquote>

^1
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10216306/</a> </div>
^2
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0280435</a> </div>
^3
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2020.574224/full</a> </div>
^4
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/brb3.1532</a> </div>

Sometimes Form Matters More Than Function

2025-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

I have struggled with task management for my entire life. I have an extremely poor working memory, and as such, after leaving high school and losing the baseline structure of tasks and responsilities that it provided, I started relying on to-do lists a lot. However, my relationship with to-do lists hasn't exactly been perfect.
What I've Tried</h3>
I initially tried to have iOS Reminders as my "source of truth", where I would flag tasks that were most pertinent, and they would appear on a widget on my homescreen. This worked well for school assignments, with specific deadlines, clear guidelines, and a definitive deliverable at the end. However, this just resulted in tasks surrounding my personal life (like working on this site, or handling financial matters), languishing hidden in a list somewhere, or perpetually sitting in the flagged section for so long that my mind automatically glossed over the entry.
At some point, I added in carrying a small pocket notebook around everywhere, and using that to plan my day. This helped plan out time within a given day, but didn't really do anything for longer-term tasks and initiatives. Additionally, the pocket notebook lacked visibility, relying on me to remember to take it out multiple times in the day and look at it to remind myself of my day's priorities.
Eventually, I separated my task management systems for school and work. At work, I had been organizing my tasks using the team's kanban board for close to a year at this point, and figured that this would be the solution to make personal task management make more sense. I figured I needed more options, more structure, more dials. I moved personal tasks into a kanban board on Todoist. This really didn't last too long, and resulted in a lot of things falling by the wayside while I tried to make this even more flawed system work for me.
I ended up back on paper task management while this system was languishing, this time using a printed daily "worksheet". This got me through that period, but also didn't make efficient management of the increasing responsibilities I had as an adult happen.
Then, I gave something radical a try. I had heard about this app called Tot</a>, initially from Episode 169 of the Cortex Podcast</a>, where John Gruber mentions it, and how he uses it as a simple way to store lists of links. For those that have never heard of the app, it's described as a "tiny text companion", a simple way to store text.

The app is basically just a note app with a very simple UX. You're restricted to 7 notes, each corresponding to a color, and that can be switched to with a simple bar at the top of the app. Each note has flexible content, supporting basic Markdown formatting, as well as "smart bullets" (checkboxes) and dividers. It's a pretty barebones app, unfortunately only available in the Apple ecosystem, but it has what I think is the perfect UX for a scratchpad.
The limitation in amount of notes at first seems absurd, until one realizes that it's a strategic trade. In exchange for the limit in amount of notes, the user gets a really strong understanding of what is contained in each note, through that color association. It also has a great homescreen widget that shows the first few lines of a chosen note (I have mine set to show the first few lines of the yellow note). Finally, it integrates really well with Apple Shortcuts, allowing me to do things like have a shortcut that adds a specific set of tasks every Sunday, or set up my iPhone's Action Button to let me dictate text that immediately goes into one of my notes.
Why Does This Work?</h2>
I've been using Tot as my method for keeping track of life for a month or two now, and it's been a resounding success. I feel like I have a way clearer picture of what's going on, and a way to actually express what I need to get done.
I think this boils down to the fact that personal tasks, responsibilities, and goals are messy. School has clear structure, deadlines for specific assignments at specific times, with a limited time beforehand to actually work on them. Work (in my case) is similar, with a defined structure for task assignment and management shared by my entire team. However, things like weekend projects, handling finances, oddball tasks, and so forth often don't have the same level of structure, and even if you try to make structure, it's hard to take such a variety of task types and make a specific system that can capture all of that in a structured manner.
Ultimately, for me, it turns out that managing flexible tasks requires a flexible system. Using an app like Tot gives me a defined, visible location for flexibly structured information.
How I Use Tot</h2>
Just to give one idea of how this app can be used, here are what my dots contain. The contents of these notes generally contain what's mentioned below, but exact organization constantly shifts around to adapt to what I need:
Yellow</h3>
Contains information I want the quickest access to. I generally plan my day's tasks at the top, and then have a list of ideas and topics I think of within the day that I need to revisit.
Orange</h3>
This one is sparse at the moment, but currently contains a running list of calls I need to make when I have the time.
Red</h3>
This note's contains transcripts of voice memos. Whenever I press the Action Button on my iPhone, it pops up a dictation window for me to dictate a message, which then gets appended to this note with a timestamp.
Purple</h3>
This one contains various shopping lists and wishlists.
Blue</h3>
This one contains a longer-term running list of ideas, as well as "asks" from my girlfriend, parents, friends, etc.
Cyan</h3>
This one contains longer term tasks for different projects, like my homelab, handling finances, healthcare, etc.
Green</h3>
Self-documentation for the system (see why I do this</a>).

End Notes
Ultimately, this is not an article to say that everyone should use Tot to manage their tasks. One could likely get a similar workflow out of other apps, though maybe not with the exact UX of Tot.1</a> What I'm really out to say is that in the productivity communities, so many tools, systems, and creators are pushing the idea that more structure is always better, and that if that doesn't work for a person, that they need to just spend more time learning how to work in that system. But tools should ultimately meet us where we're at, not the other way around, and for some people, that might mean a blank canvas, for others a structured set of kanban boards, and for others, like myself, it's somewhere in the middle. I always love to hear about the unique ways that everyone manages their tasks, lives, and ideas, so if you want to share it, I'd love to hear it</a>! </blockquote>
^{1
I wonder if the experience could be somewhat replicated using a heavily customized Obsidian vault, though without the native speed and nice widgets that Tot offers. I might try tinkering with it and sharing my findings at a later date
</div>}

“What Got You In Trouble In School Will Get You Ahead In Life, And What Got You Ahead In School Will Get You In Trouble In Life”

2025-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Recently, I've seen a few variations of this sentiment floating around, and as I get closer to the end of formal schooling (for now), I've realized just how much this one little phrase explains. Fair warning that this is maybe more of a personal post than usual.
In elementary school, I was a child who got in trouble in school. A lot of trouble. And there was certainly a lot of horsing around, and things that were just unequivocally lessons I needed to learn from, but there were a lot of others that are more ambiguous.

I was an impulsive kid, but more specifically, an impulsive and confident kid. This drove me to do a lot of stupid things and generally be very boisterous, but it also helped me stand up for myself, to be the way I wanted to be, even if that might have been "weird". I still look back at the photos of 3-foot-tall me running around with a buzzcut in an oversized track jacket in horror, but ultimately that's what I wanted, and that confidence and willingness to speak my mind (or more accurately, a complete lack of filter) helped me stand up for that.
As the social pressure of school built, however, to attempt to conform, I gradually felt that I had to suppress my confidence. To go in with the attitude that I needed to blend in with everyone else, to put my head down and pursue a nonexistent ideal that everybody else was closer to than I was. To be someone that wasn't me, but more importantly, to not be confident in my own intuition.
Even now, that pressure to conform, to be quieter, less assertive, and less confident in what I believe to be right, has been something I've needed to fight against. Some of the best practices I have in my life have come from overcoming that, standing up for the way I want to live my life, even if it seems nonsensical to someone else. Habits like my insistence to use Sunday mornings to reflect, wearing a monochrome color palette, the diet I keep, my re-syncing routine</a>, or having 6 sets of the same well-fitting shirt and pant get me flack sometimes, but being able to stand up for myself, after reversing years of programming to "conform", has helped me flourish in a new way.

Another thing that got me in trouble was never showing my work in math class. This was in the 6th grade, meaning the math being done was rather simple arithmetic, stuff I could easily do in my head by that age. My brain didnt'd even really go through the steps, I would just see the question and immediately reach the answer. My elementary school had a system where if a child didn't do their homework, they had to stay in during recess and do the assignment. The teacher counted my lack of work shown as not doing the assignment, and I kept not really understanding what work there even was to be shown (since my brain would skip straight to the answer), resulting in me not having recess for most of the year.
I'm not saying that showing your work is not important. As I got to higher levels of math, I naturally learned why showing work is important, and developed an appreciation for properly written solutions.
But the thing I was getting in trouble for here was not necessarily an ignorance of the importance of showing work, but rather my ability to intuit or quickly compute a large amount of simpler problems in my studies, work, and everyday life (at the cost of having a lot of difficulty with complex, specific problems). This quality helps me naturally be a good generalist, at the cost of it being harder for me to specialize, and identifying that pattern has given me a lot of clarity on my strengths, and the best roles I fit into within a team.

One quality that helped me get ahead in school, later in high school and through early college, was actually the flipside of the previous anecdote, an intense perfectionism I developed. I had, and still have, a tendency to go above and beyond sometimes, to have perfectly-formatted papers, obsess over and rewrite small assignments, to accidentally put way more time towards assignments than needed. To always attend class, do every assignment with 110% effort. This has gotten me fairly good grades in college, and the occasional remark of exceptional praise from an instuctor here and there, but has also had a number of costs.
Attention to detail can be a great thing. As someone who's beginning a career in cybersecurity, there's certainly so many issues caused by programmers and executives that glossed over details they thought were irrelevant. Applying methodical approaches in the workplace has helped me produce high-quality solutions that have measurably cut down days of manual work for my team. However, in school and in my personal life, this perfectionism has ended up being a hindrance as much as a boon, with two main downsides. First of all, perfectionism works when there's also the pressure of something being a school assignment to still ensure that you get it done. With more self-motivated things, however, such as this site, perfectionism is an easy way to ensure nothing ever gets written, built, or done. This article is being written as a stream-of consciousness in one sitting to ensure that I have something I can push up before the perfectionist side of my brain finds a reason to leave it on the cutting room floor. The other downside is that being a perfectionist about school makes school take a lot more time than it needs to. Reflecting on my freshman year, I probably could have spent half as much time on school and still gotten the same grades and same level of conceptual learning, while having so much more time to socialize, relax, sleep, and explore my surroundings. It's taken acknowledging and working against my own perfectionism to be able to go from spending every waking hour on school with a 14-credit schedule, to being able to take 16 credits and still have time to work part time, do a lot more adulting, and touch grass.

So why does this quote ring so true?</h2>
This is just conjecture, and based mostly on my own experiences and the experiences of those closest to me. This is also coming from an American perspective on school.
I think it boils down to the fact that we are all different people. I (weakly) hold a philosophy that nobody is any less capable than anybody else (in an abstract sense), and that ultimately success (excluding the role of luck) largely stems from a person's recognition of their individual strengths, and then leveraging those advantages towards a goal. A good friend of mine, for example, has had an insane ability, since he was a kid, to deep-dive into the theory of specific subjects. This ability to hyperspecialize made school a struggle sometimes, but as he's been able to leverage that more it's brought him some amazing things, such being able to go from a student who struggled in high school calculus to capable of understanding more complex math than I can even describe within just this past year and a half.
Ultimately, the American school system, even in a larger, wealthier, higher-opportunity school district like the one I grew up in, tries to bring everyone towards a certain conformity through what is taught, how it's taught, what's expected of students, and the unavoidable social dynamics of children and teenagers. This, on it's own, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's important that we all confront our own weaknesses, understand them, and learn how to rise above them. The problem, I believe, comes from the counterpart to that, the idea that we are expected to work on our weaknesses, but not taught to embrace the corresponding strengths. For a portion of people, I think that results in overcompensating in a manner opposite to the traits that will help them succeed (hence "what got you ahead in school will get you in trouble in life").

End Notes
Everyone has deviations from the baseline, traits, thought patterns, and experiences that form our greatest weaknesses and simultaneously our greatest strengths. I'm not at the advice-giving phase of my life, but if there's one overarching theme of my own self-growth over the past few years, it's been identifying and embracing my individuality, using those deviations from the baseline to shape how I achieve what I want to achieve. We're so often told that we should be remarkable, but very rarely are we taught that we are all remarkable already, and just need to embrace that in order to do remarkable things in our lives. I'd love to hear from you</a> on whether this rings true in your life as much as it does in mine. </blockquote>

The Effectiveness of a Re-Syncing Routine

2025-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

As social, community-dependent animals, we rely on being in sync with our surroundings and obligations. Knowing when appointments, meetings, and gatherings are, which people need to be called/messaged back, and managing things that need to be planned. There's also a dependence on sync within oneself, ensuring that our own plans for the next day, week, and month line up with our internal goals, reflect our priorities, and aren't exceeding our finite time and capabilities. Many people have tools and systems to aid us in these endeavours, such as calendars, to-do lists, project trackers, personal notes, and so on, but these too rely on us to keep them in sync, from ensuring appointments are in our calendar, tasks are in our todo lists, important details from conversations are noted down, and so-on.
TL;DR: Our lives are surrounded by a constant influx of information, and we as humans rely on being in sync with what's going on around us, being asked of us, and what we want for ourselves.
However, I semi-frequently find myself in situations where I've "drifted" from that sync. I begin to feel a slight unease, like I'm perpetually forgetting something. It's harder to mentally plan my time. My inbox piles up, and I find things that haven't been put in my todo list or calendar. I start finding it hard to start tasks, agree to go to social events, or get myself to move from one thing to the next. I find myself less predictable, in the same way that a computer that's starting to get a little low on memory might be. I'm a systems-oriented person, a creature of habits and procedures, so my version of this "drift" might be much more drastic than it is for most, but I do feel that I'm not alone in this experience.
There are typically two scenarios where I predictably find myself drifting. The first, and by far most common one is travel. Whether it's traveling with my partner and focusing on spending quality time with her, going to an academic event and focusing on that, or embarking on a solo trip and focusing on being present and in the moment, I'll typically drift pretty far out of sync in multiple ways whenever I travel. This is particularly an issue during the semester, when there's always a good few weeks where I'm out of town during the weekend and then only returning late Sunday night or early Monday morning. The other common time is when I'm ill or have some other health issue. Between the lack of mental energy during the illness, unexpected nature of these things, and the extra chaos of needing to reschedule or take a break from major commitments, it can become a tough hurdle to handle being out of sync while also still experiencing the physical effects of being on the tail end of a health issue. There are also other times when I find myself "drifting", often when I'm mentally focused on or stressed about something for more than a few days.
Ultimately, being out of sync makes it hard to return to normal routines and activities, and as such I've begun to realize the importance and effectiveness of having a routine to, in essence, forcibly re-sync myself.
My Re-Syncing Routine</h2>
What approach works for each individual might be different, but for me, these re-syncing sessions have a set location, set vibe, some set goals, but no prescribed method or order.
As soon as I possibly can after something like travel or illness, I try to get myself to a specific coffee shop a couple minutes away from home, where I'm a regular. It's a familiar place, where I'm at peace, and has good coffee and good hours. I bring my laptop, and often some scratch paper. The goal is to sit down and just have unstructured time to do whatever I need to do until my mental slate is clear, and a few specific objectives are achieved.
The biggest objectives are:

Handle my personal inbox. This does not mean inbox zero, but it does mean that every important email has been read, and has had important information from it logged in my todo list, calendar, and/or notes.</li>
Ensure my calendar is a source of truth. My calendar should accurately reflect all of my commitments in the near term. I also will often adjust recurring events to match with my current schedule, or create new recurring events.</li>
Ensure my todo list is up to date. If there's anything where I know somewhere in my mind I need to find a piece of information out and make a relevant reminder, now's the time to do it.</li>
Do some reading. I don't tend to keep up with my rss feeds while travelling, so I like to catch up on blog posts and such as an injection of inspiration into my brain.</li>
Ensure I have a plan to return to normal adulting. Any routines that have been interrupted, like groceries or laundry, should have a plan made to get back on track.</li> </ul>
Beyond that, I try to keep it free-form, just scratching whichever mental itches I need to until I feel ready to take on the rest of the week. I find myself coming out of these sessions feeling far more at peace, and logistically it makes a huge difference in the amount of time it takes for resettlement into routines, obligations, and a normal mental state.
Having this routine also helps me even before I'm able to sit down and carry it out. If I'm landing early morning Monday, but need to head to class for the afternoon, it helps a lot to know that I just need to push through the classes and then I'll go to the coffee shop and get everything sorted out, as opposed to spending the classes worrying about all the disparate things that need to be done. It offloads the pressure of returning to normalcy onto a dedicated, planned time.

End Notes
I find that having a set practice of intervening before post-travel, post-illness, or post-whatever-else chaos snowballs into medium-term impact on my life is supremely useful. Do you have your own post-travel or post-something re-syncing routine? I'd love to hear about it</a>! </blockquote>

Mind The Gap, Please

2025-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Photo by Matthew Bornhorst</a> on Unsplash</a></figcaption> </figure>
It has somehow been nearly two years since I've written anything on this page. I haven't stopped having thoughts, tinkering with things, building new stuff, or writing ideas down. After some thinking, and a lot of learning about myself over this time, I can firmly attribute this to friction.
We, as humans, will just about always take the path of least resistance. This can manifest in very straightforward ways, such as skipping a morning run because we're tired, or even in less straightforward ways, like going on that morning run rather than tackling deep feelings. Now, taking the path of least resistance isn't necessarily always a bad thing. However, it can draw us away from actually meeting our goals, or from doing so in a sustainable way.
As such, a lot of my self-evaluation cycle (inspecting my own habits and making changes to get closer to the way I want to live) ends up involving reducing the friction around something, and making the path of least resistance a path that is created by me, actually moves me towards my goals, and is sustainable. To that end, this post is a summary of how I've massively reduced the friction involved in information synthesis as well as publishing.
Part I: Information Synthesis</h2> I've already mentioned different note-taking and information management tools in past posts (1</a>, 2</a>), and it's continued to be a thorn in my side, with every good solution around having at least one key downside, such as pricing, lack of data sovereignty, strict adherence to a Zettelkasten approach, lack of good mobile support, UI/UX that I dislike, or something else.
This is a topic that I plan to cover in the future, but I found inspiration for the solution in my physical notebooks. I don't keep many physical notebooks due to my awful penmanship, but each one I do keep is differentiated in multiple ways. Each is used for a different subject or type of information and only used for that, is of a different form factor best suited for the information, and has a certain epistemic effort associated with it. See the below examples:
Notebook</th> Content</th> Form Factor</th> Epistemic Effort</th></tr></thead>

Pocket Notebook</td> Unstructured information from conversations, back-of-the-napkin calculations</td> Slim, passport-size dot grid notebook</td> Extremely low, just whip out the book and scribble in it</td></tr>
Spring 2024 Linear Algebra</td> Crystallized, heavily refined topic notes, complete with heavy formatting and diagram</td> Thick, hardcover dot grid notebook</td> Very high, this is meant to document my understanding of concepts such that I can "load" that information back into my brain, notes are written in dedicated day-long sessions</td></tr>
Summer Internship Daily Journal</td> Daily notes about accomplished tasks, meeting notes, and reminders</td> Medium-size lined journal</td> Medium, they're working notes but I should be able to get a good picture of what I wrote about later</td></tr> </tbody></table>
Mashing these all together into one notebook would never make sense. I can't just keep a giant tome of knowledge in my pocket for quick notes, and the organizational overhead of such a solution would be insanity. Furthermore, having notebooks be compartmentalized offers many benefits. Accidentally putting my pocket notebook in the wash and ruining it doesn't affect my ability to pass my math test. I can leave my internship journal in my cubicle so that I don't need to carry it around after work. To put it simply, separate notebooks for different use cases means each can be tailored for that specific case.
This is pretty intuitive to most. Even in grade school, it's common to have different books for math and art class, and to use a lined book for math and a sketchbook for drawing. But when it comes to digital notetaking, the focus is instead on having a one-size-fits-all solution, a single Roam/Notion/Obsidian Graph/Workspace/Vault that fits every piece of information of every type from every area of life into it.
So after spinning my wheels on finally dealing with my lack of a note-taking solution, I finally thought to apply the same logic as my physical notebooks. I started off by setting up a Notion workspace for university. This use-case takes advantage of Notion's strengths, such as the block editor allowing for more free-form structure and the web-based nature making it so that I can access my workspace from shared computers, while making the caveats a non-issue, as what I need for school falls squarely within free-tier, and data sovereignty doesn't matter as much for me since this doesn't hold very important information and what is stored in there for the most part is only relevant for a 3-month semester. I then started using Logseq for work notes. This use-case needs certain capabilities that Logseq has, such as full data sovereignty and easy installation, and benefits from what would otherwise be a caveat for me, the fact that Logseq is based on a Zettelkasten approach, with use of tags and search. The Zettelkasten approach would not at all be feasible for most areas of my life, but is perfect for work, allowing me to quickly jot down information with minimal setup or organization overhead.
Finally, for personal notes I'll be (partially) using Obsidian. I include the "partially" because while my Obsidian vault is meant to serve as a hub for information gathering and synthesis, it is not meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution, even within the areas of my life not covered by school and work. This vault, as with every other knowledge system I have, has an intent statement</a>, and is restricted to specific use cases. As I find myself in need of more places to store knowledge, I plan on using the tools that make the most sense for that use-case, in an effort to keep each digital "notebook" focused, intentional, and maintainable.
Part II: Publishing</h2>
Over the past year or so, I've made substantial changes to the workflow for publishing to this site.
This site is a static site, generated by a bash script I've named bliss</code>(see the colophon</a> for more details). After an article was added, I'd run the script locally to generate the site files in a subdirectory of the GitHub repository, then commit and push everything, then point GitHub Pages to that subdirectory and serve it. This had a number of friction points:
I needed to be on a machine that had the script's assorted dependencies installed, and just hope there were no breaking changes or platform differences with any of them</li> It was a multi-step process, with steps that needed to be run in order</li> It was a sit-down process Ultimately, this wasn't ideal, but it felt like the best workflow at the time, since GitHub Actions/Workflows felt strange and impossible.</li> </ul> Since that time, I've "seen the light" of CI through heavy use of Gitlab CI at work. It turned out that CI itself is not strange and impossible, just GitHub's implementation. I've been able to understand how to work with GitHub Workflows better as I've become more proficient with CI systems as a whole, but I'll maintain that it's a really obtuse and difficult-to-use system, and they could do way better. I finally bit the bullet and started migrating all of my personal sites and little projects over to Gitlab</a>, meaning that it's now seamless to use Gitlab's excellent CI to deploy projects. This site is now finally deployed via CI, as it should have been all along, meaning that publishing is now as simple as copying my Markdown draft from Obsidian into a file, committing and pushing it to Gitlab, and sitting back. Epilogue</h2> With these new "friction-reductions", I hope to start writing (and especially publishing it) much more consistently. One of the best parts of my day is opening my RSS reader and seeing new unread blog posts, the ideas and musings of all sorts of people who take the time to share what's in their head for no motive other than the desire to spread information and the joy of writing it down. I too hope that I'm able to put things out there that inform, inspire, or hell, that are at least an interesting read. Write An Intent Statement For Your Knowledge Infrastructure 2023-08-01T00:00:00+00:00 Nerds (like me) love trying out new tools. At least in the circles I follow, there's been this new Renaissance of information management and sharing. Using personal knowledge management (PKM) software is gradually becoming more common among knowledge workers, a good few people are starting digital gardens</a>, and there seems to be more and more tools billing themselves as a new way to write or think. However, this can quickly become a trap. I found myself in this situation with a tool I've been recently trying called Anytype</a>. For those who are unfamiliar, Anytype is a pretty new contender in the PKM space, and it's got a lot going from it, from open-sourced code, to encrypted sync, and a pretty nice UI to boot. However, it's main draw is the type system. As the name suggests, users can make any type, with it's own attributes and templates, and structure information in whatever way makes sense in their head. And by god, it's addictive. It's a really powerful feeling being able to structure information in the exact intuitive manner that makes sense to you. But all of this ended up backfiring on me a little bit.** I was so caught up in the fact that I could map out a lot of my mind in this tool that I didn't stop and ask myself whether I should.** I've been helping my partner build up her own knowledge infrastructure recently, and after explaining the virtues of organization and intent to her I went to add some notes into Anytype and I realized that I had a bit of a mess on my hands. My knowledge infrastructure was a total mess, littered with types I came up with on a whim, and a ton of essentially boilerplate information. I don't need an entire object for a youtuber just because they publish a single course that I plan on taking one day. That information isn't actionable or meaningful for me in any way, and not every piece of knowledge needs every attribute represented in my personal knowledgebase. Ultimately, I realized that I was missing intent. I was creating notes and trying to offload knowledge, but I didn't have an end goal, a specific idea of what I wanted out of my private knowledgebase. This has been further complicated by the fact that I'm slowly building up a public knowledgebase</a>, and not having a clear intent means that it's hard to navigate what should be private and what should be public. The simple solution for this problem is an intent statement, a document that outlines the intent of a given system. I've already been doing this in smaller ways, for example whenever I spin up an OS on one of my computers, and enter that information into my notes, I write a small intent statement indicating what the machine is for (Is it my primary machine for some time? Does it have a specific purpose that it's set up for? Am I just spinning it up to try out a particular piece of software?). Having my intentions thought through, written out, and in a place where I'm reminded of it results in a more organized way of thinking about my systems. **Having an intent statement grounds me into thinking about what I need to do with the system to meet my goals for it, rather than what I could do with the system. ** My intent statement for my Anytype knowledgebase ended up being structured like this: Intent Broadly speaking, my Anytype knowledgebase is going to focus on working documents, contrasting with my public knowledgebase that serves to hold more crystallized notes and knowledge, notes that are more divorced from their immediate context in my life. For example, the public knowledgebase would have the information on how to install Tailscale on Fedora Silverblue, while the private knowledgebase would tell me whether I've installed Tailscale on a given Silverblue installation using those instructions. Use Cases System Documents Notes on hardware and software will likely be moved into my public knowledgebase, but the details of how my systems are set up will be in my private knowledgebase, for operational security reasons and because they're rapidly changing working documents. Implementation The "Computing Hardware" type and set. Drafting Box A private place for me to synthesize knowledge together into thought-out writing, like the posts on this very site. Implementation The "Drafting Box Draft" type and set. Project, Course, and Book Tracking A place for me to keep track of my progress on courses I'm taking, projects I'm working on, and books I'm reading. Essentially state management</a> for these categories. Implementation The Project, Book, and Online Course types and sets. Idea Formation and Iteration A private place for me to outline and form ideas for projects, as well as iterate slowly on them until I decide to implement them Implementation The Idea type and set. Miscellaneous Notes A place for me to put minor personal notes that don't really warrant a dedicated area, like grocery lists or what my brother wants from Chipotle. Essentially a replacement for Apple Notes on my phone. Implementation The Note type and set </blockquote> I plan on adding intent statements to all of my public and private knowledge systems, as part of a broader initiative for all of my information systems to have "batteries included</a>". For example, you can now read the intent statement for this site here</a></del> [EDIT 2024-02-25: This page has since been removed, and is now located within the colophon</a>]. Joplin 7-Month Retrospective 2023-07-04T00:00:00+00:00 My existing note management solution hasn't been cutting it for a while now. My current approach to notes and knowledge management has been to keep things in Joplin</a> (with my 5TB university OneDrive as the backend), as well as use Simplenote</a> as a "drafting box" for things like blog post articles and some small temporary notes. However, Joplin hasn't really lived up to what I hoped it would enable for me when I first set it up around 7 months ago. While there are many gripes I've had with it, below are the biggest three I had, and the ones I really hope the platform can sort out in the future. Gripe #1: Plugins Aren't What They're Chalked Up To Be</h2> Starting with a (somewhat) small one, the plugin system is very rudimentary, and doesn't actually deliver the customizability advertised on the rool's website. First of all, plugins are desktop only, meaning that if there's a plugin that plays a significant role in how you use your notes, you don't get to use it on the go. Contrast this with Obsidian</a>, where there's mobile plugin support, and a significant amount of supported plugins</a>. Furthermore, plugins don't sync between devices. This means that for every device I set up, which is a lot given the amount of laptops I rotate through, I'd need to manually install and configure a whole host of plugins. Combine that with a relatively poor plugin ecosystem compared to other applications, and I opted to just not bother with plugins. Gripe #2: Poor Desktop UI</h2> This was a much bigger deal-breaker for me. The desktop application flat-out sucks. It already gets significant points taken off for being an Electron application, which switching to a HiDPI laptop has made me absolutely despise. However, it's also not even a well-executed Electron application, with a frustratingly laid out UI, very little customization, and odd visual glitches like this one that constantly popped up</a>: The desktop client feels like it gets very little love compared to the mobile one, which is frustrating for an application like a note-taking application where a lot of work will be done at a computer with a keyboard. It's bad enough that a lot of people who do use Joplin, like Chris from Linux Unplugged</a> interact with it exclusively using a VSCode plugin. However, I want to keep my code editor and my notes application separate, and the VSCode plugin has also proven to be unreliable, which was the impetus for Chris finally ditching Joplin. Gripe #3: Sync Issues</h2> I haven't even dared try to install Joplin on my newest laptop, lest it erases my existing notes and I have to fix it again. While I appreciate the effort Joplin goes to in order to support a variety of backends, unfortunately I've been faced with a number of sync issues from the beginning. It's become routine to export my Joplin notes, because sync will often break out of nowhere right in the middle of syncing some changes, and the only way I can get it to complete is to take an export, delete all of my notes locally so that they get erased remotely, then restore all of my notes from the export. I shouln't need to do that regularly in any piece of software, let alone with something as irreplaceable as my notes. A lack of trust in the sync solution has really dissuaded me from continuing to use Joplin recently, and until I can get my notes somewhere else, it'll likely continue to be that way. Takeaways</h2> I don't mean to completely rag on Joplin. There's a lot that's done right on the backend, especially when it comes to the freedom to sync your notes the way you want. However, I can't help but feel that Joplin has a long way to go to be the Evernote replacement it purports to be, and a lot of users are probably better served looking at other solutions for managing their information. The Best Windows XP System Is... A Dell Latitude From 2013? 2023-07-02T00:00:00+00:00 Important Note:</summary> In this article, I describe running Windows XP in 2023. When running older Windows, particularly XP, remember to be very careful about connecting the machine to the internet, as these unsupported mainstream operating systems are vulnerable to a whole host of malware. I personally kept this install of Windows XP offline as a precaution. </details> I've wanted to have a reliable machine running an older version of Windows for a while now, so that I can run older software and period-correct games that I have sitting around. However, I haven't had a great solution to this so far. Desktops are mostly out of the question for me, as I move around a ton being a college student, and they're big and clunky and just a hassle. However, laptops from when XP was in it's heyday require a lot of babying, often have faulty batteries, and rely on flimsy IDE laptop drives. A potential option I was leaning towards is to use a netbook, as they have more modern hardware but were still built to run Windows XP, however gaming would be out of the question, and using disc-based software (or even installing Windows XP in the first place) is much more of a chore without a built in disc drive. When thinking about this recently, however, I remembered an interesting detail. When downloading Windows drivers for my Dell Latitude E6530, I noticed an odd entry in the list of platforms that had drivers for the laptop: Windows XP. This was initially quite shocking for a machine that was made in 2013, with a third generation i5 and other modern specs, but it makes reasonable sense given that these laptops were enterprise and education machines, and there are still enterprise users today, like the US government, that make significant use of Windows XP. Digging around a bit more, I found that, at least in this Latitude E6xxx line, this laptop and it's sister models in the E6x30 generation were the last laptops to have Windows XP support, with 2014's E6x40 Latitudes dropping support. With this discovery, I decided to see just what the experience was like installing XP on this laptop. The Laptop</h2> The Dell Latitude E6530 is a 15-inch business laptop released in 2013. My particular laptop has an i5-3320M CPU, paired with an Nvidia NVS 5200M GPU (1GB VRAM), 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 128GB SSD. It also has a pretty nice keyboard, and a great selection of I/O. This may not be a brand-new gaming laptop, but it's certainly not the type of hardware you'd expect to have support for XP! Getting it Ready</h2> With the relatively young age of this laptop, I first had to change some BIOS settings to ensure that everything would work well with XP. This included: Setting the system to Legacy Boot rather than UEFI</li> Disabling Secure Boot</li> Setting the SATA mode to ATA</code> rather than the default AHCI</code> or RAID</code></li> Disabling Nvidia Optimus</li> </ul> None of these newer technologies were around back when XP was around, so it's important that we disable them to prevent any installation errors. I believe Dell does ship a driver for Intel RST (the RAID</code> SATA mode in the BIOS), but as I'm just using an unmodified installation disc I decided to keep things simple. Installing XP</h2> As this laptop has an optical drive, the actual process of installing Windows XP was pretty smooth. I installed a bog-standard copy of Windows XP Professional SP3, just went through it as a normal user would, and the whole process took just under 15 minutes. The rough part was installing the drivers that started this whole saga in the first place. After downloading all of the relevant drivers for my model from Dell's website and copying them over to the laptop, I was greeted by this error: Eventually, after poking around at Dell's website for a while, I found that each driver offered an alternate download of what seemed like an older driver format, and these packages worked correctly on Windows XP. After getting all the drivers installed, and modifying some settings to taste, I was left with a pretty clean Windows XP desktop: Thoughts</h2> The machine performs extraordinarily well on Windows XP, pretty unsurprisingly. While XP can only see 4GB of the system's RAM, it barely even sips at the RAM, and the CPU usually idles at 1% usage. Software runs snappily, and some games, like Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, play pretty well. I think this generation of Dell Latitude makes for a great XP machine to have around, and offers significantly more utility and reliability than something like a netbook, period-correct laptop, or a desktop. Building up an RSS Feed 2023-06-16T00:00:00+00:00 I had put off building up a personal RSS feed until just about 2 months ago. I don't entirely know why it took so long, but a lot of it was certainly choice paralysis. There's so many reader and sync services that it takes a minute to figure out which one to use, and it took me needing to download some variety of RSS reader to test the RSS generation of this site to finally start building my feed. I currently use NetNewsWire</a> on iOS as my primary method of consuming RSS content, as I personally find that smaller screens allow me to focus on reading more than the large, distracting canvas of a laptop screen. With the ongoing Reddit API fiasco</a> resulting in me not using the site</a>, RSS has served as a much healthier way for me to consume interesting, independent content. These few days have really shown me the merits of consuming and curating content on my own terms. The biggest barrier with RSS, however, is actually building up a feed of people to subscribe to. Without the algorithms that drive sites like Twitter and Reddit, you as the user need to put in that effort to seek out content. To get my RSS feed list, I started with the dozen or so blogs that I had in my "Blogs" bookmark folder at the time, serving as a nice base of content I already know I like. After that, the amount of effort to find more content went up a good bit. The types of sites I follow tend to be individual people writing medium to long form content somewhat infrequently, so it would take a pretty large feed to have around 5-7 pieces of interesting, high quality content to read every day. As a result, I had to start "feed speed dating". This consisted of finding aggregated lists of links like blogrolls, webrings, and ".clubs", and going through each link. When I'm visiting a person's page, I first check whether they've posted in 2023. I then, as a general rule, go through the first page of their posts, and see if I can find two pieces of content that catch my interest, and if so I'll add them to my RSS feed. I'll often read some of their posts too, since this has become a nice free-time activity of mine. Pages I've used to find content, in no particular order:</summary> The Forest</a></li> tmo's blogroll</a></li> Luke's Wild Website blogroll</a></li> Kev Quirk's blogroll</a></li> Ru Singh's blogroll</a></li> Manuel Moreale's blog list</a></li> Manuel Moreale's "I'll Read It"</a></li> Riccardo Mori's "Reading List" posts</a></li> Ye Olde Blogroll</a></li> This list of developer sites with "/uses" pages</a></li> List of engineering blogs</a></li> XXIIVV Webring</a></li> Tin Cans on a String Webring</a></li> geekring</a></li> 1MB Club</a></li> 512KB Club</a></li> 1kB Club</a></li> XHTML Club</a></li> </ul> I'll unfortunately not be tossing my own hat into the ring today, as I plan on adding my blogroll to a wiki section of this site that I have yet to build. </details> Using RSS to entertain myself rather than just scrolling something like Reddit has tremendously increased the value I get per period of "reading time". When I open NetNewsWire (which has a great UI by the way, I strongly recommend it), I'm greeted by content I know I like, and that has had thought and effort put into it, rather than having to scroll endlessly to dig up the bits of content that I'm there for. I hope this small resurgence of independent websites, RSS feeds, webrings, and all of these goodies I missed out on by not being alive in the 90s continues. Trimming Down The Nerd's Cookbook 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00 I've finally had a chance to do a little cooking again! After being cooped up in a dorm room for two semesters with a shabby excuse of a kitchen shared by the entire floor, I'm back home, with decent burners, a good spice rack, and even an actual fridge. Now that I'm doing some more cooking, and hopefully will continue to do so for the forseeable future, I want to have a home for some homegrown recipes. This is even more pertinent now than before college, as I'm a recently-minted vegetarian and as a result often adapt recipes I've loved making in the past to work with my diet. Thus, I took a look at a project I've used once in the past, nyum</a>. It's a shell-script-based static site generator that takes in Markdown and spits out a full recipe site</a>, with search, a nice layout, and more. Overall a pretty neat little way to spin up a personal cookbook. However, ever since starting to really work with simple, shell-script-based static site generators, like the one used for this site, I don't like settling with someone else's way of generating a site, I want to hack on it and adapt it to my tastes. And the amazing thing about these simple static site generators is that it's incredibly easy to do so! As such, I forked nyum</a>, and made a number of changes. I first tackled deployment, modifying the script to build to docs/</code> rather than _site</code>. This allows me to simply deploy the site onto GitHub pages without any additional hassle, as Pages lets you deploy from docs/</code> (but not any other directory for some absurd reason). I also removed the rsync deployment script, GitHub Action, and supporting code inside build.sh</code>. Next up was design and load times. My design language on I Need More Coffee (and other tangential pages in the works) is based around basic HTML, using system fonts, and dithered images, which results in simple, inherently responsive design, as well as blazing fast load times. As such, nyum's use of webfonts and a header icon wasn't going to work for me, and I stripped them out. I did keep the other UI icons, as they serve a purpose and I couldn't be bothered to adapt the layouts to work without icons. Honestly, in my opinion, my "trimmed down" version looks better than the original, but that's just my taste so your mileage may vary. I also dithered the images in the demo site to be able to compare resource usage between the original nyum and my planned usage. And boy do they compare. I ran 4 gtmetrix</a> reports between the two sites: Original Homepage</a></li> Fork's Homepage</a></li> Original Cheese Buldak Recipe</a></li> Fork's Cheese Buldak Recipe</a></li> </ul> The fork's homepage loaded 3x as fast (301ms vs. 958ms) and transmitted less than a tenth of the data (13.6KB vs. 186KB). The recipe page similarly loaded 3x as fast, but there wasn't as much of a delta in the amount of data transmitted as a vast majority was image data, and the particularly heavy image of the Cheese Buldak didn't want to reduce in filesize tremendously even when dithered to 4 colors and reduced to 1024px wide. On the whole, a few simple changes resulted in a substantial and noticeable decrease in load times and resource usage of this simple site. I hope you'll check out the demo site</a>, or my actual cookbook</a> (it only has the sample Strawberry Smoothie recipe for now, but will have more recipes soon, I promise). Update (2025-07-22): I've since taken down this deployment, as I've found that I don't use the cookbook all that much. The code for the trimmed version is still available on my Gitlab at ineedmorecoffee/cookbook</a>. </blockquote> Learning How to E-Mail Pt. 1 - Primary Mailbox 2023-06-02T00:00:00+00:00 Note: This post is the first part of a planned multi-part series on learning how to manage my e-mail. Check back soon for part 2! It feels like my generation never really learned how to use e-mail correctly. I had a school provided e-mail since I was in 4th grade, and have had my own personal e-mail, the one I still used up until recently, for over a decade. Because e-mail, and other aspects of digital life, were something pushed at us from childhood rather than being a conscious choice to set up and use as an adult, it seems like I, and all of my peers, just kind of use e-mail, creating accounts, getting signed up for newsletters, racking up unread e-mails in the thousands, without any sense of order and organization. It becomes this chore and burden, wading through all sorts of automated annoyances just to dig out that one important e-mail from an employer or classmate. For the longest time, my solution to this was simply to ignore it. To not use e-mail on my phone, or to just ignore the unread count on my mail app when I eventually needed to use it on my phone. I then switched to a series of e-mail apps that employ their own filtering to make a “focused inbox”. But ultimately, these are just bandaid solutions, trying to deliver a “quick fix”. When I found myself missing important college application e-mails because one of these mail apps was filtering them out erroneously, I decided that enough was enough and that I would fix my e-mail situation. For this first phase of sorting out this messy, disjointed cluster of accounts that comprises my e-mail infrastructure, I decided to focus in first on my primary e-mail address, the one I ask people to contact me at and that handles the important accounts in my life. Stopping the Flow</h2> The first step I took was to stop the flow of junk e-mails that was flowing into my primary inbox. Despite having a separate e-mail address designated for extraneous accounts and anything that was likely to get me a lot of e-mails, I still had a daily flow of newsletters, CollegeBoard Student Search Service</a> e-mails, and other noise that I just didn't want cluttering up my inbox. Inspired by this Reddit post</a>, I took this dead simple approach to stopping the flow of unnecessary e-mails for good: Mark all e-mails as read</li> Every day, open my e-mail and look at the dozen or so new e-mails I receive</li> For all of the unwanted messages, unsubscribe from the mailing list or block the sender</li> Repeat steps 2 and 3 for around a week or two until the flow of e-mails slows to a crawl</li> </ol> This is seriously all it took. To speed up the process for myself, I also retroactively went through the previous two weeks of e-mails and unsubscribed from all senders I didn't want to receive e-mails from. This simple step solved the initial problem that spurred me to take on this project, and allowed me to start using my primary e-mail in a good old fashioned mail application like Apple Mail, without missing a single important message amidst noise. Taking Control</h2> Another thing that has irked me about my e-mail situation thus far has been how it's kept me tied to Google. I have worked on slowly (but not completely) de-googling my life for some time now, largely tackling low hanging fruit like switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox years ago, as well as ending my Google Drive and Google Photos usage, switching off of Google Maps, and overall minimizing my personal Google product usage to just YouTube and GMail. Having so much importance resting on a Google account bugged me though, with recent stories showing just how easily Google is ready to lock you out and never respond to you again</a>, leaves me somewhat uneasy. Furthermore, Google is an advertising company, and between adding features I don't need, and serving ads in my inbox, I'm sure my e-mails are being scanned and analyzed in 10 different ways. Thus, I decided to finally make the somewhat scary jump off the GMail address I've used for a majority of my life, and switch to a Proton</a> account, with an address on a domain that I own. Proton gives me secure and encrypted e-mail that I'm paying for with my wallet rather than my data, and using my own domain means that if Protonmail goes under for some reason, or simply if I find a better offering elsewhere, switching providers is a matter of changing a few DNS records rather than painstakingly migrating dozens of accounts like I'm having to do for this transition (it's certainly an ongoing process that I'm only in the beginning of). Protonmail's Easy Switch</a> feature made the first few steps of the switch pretty easy, as with one button I had my 12 or so years of e-mail history in my Protonmail account (meaning to find an important e-mail in the future I'll only have to search one account), as well as setting up a forwarding rule to forward all mail from my GMail to my Proton address. From there, most of the work really revolved around cleaning up my inbox, as well as dealing with accounts, as mentioned above. Cleaning Up the Mess</h2> Note: The mail organization in this section should have been performed before moving my inbox history over to Proton. I didn't, however, so I resolved to instead keep my Proton mailbox as my organized and pruned copy, and simply mass archive all messages in my Google account. Nobody ever told me that you're supposed to move e-mails out of your inbox. As a result, a lot of talk about organizing e-mails, with folders and labels, has felt like alienspeak to me. It wasn't until I thought about it recently that it made sense, that an e-mail inbox is an intermediate place for mail prior to it's final destination, rather than being the final destination itself. Yet another aspect of e-mail that I had never learned about due to e-mail being pushed at us from too young of an age. With this new insight, another goal was added to my e-mail extravaganza: getting to 0 messages in my primary inbox, while purging all unnecessary mail from the past decade. I started with ~18,000 messages in my inbox, and it ended up taking around a week of intermittent cleanup sessions to get that down to 0. I first started by searching for e-mails that I knew I wanted kept, and archiving them so that they didn't accidentally get deleted. This included filtering for senders like family members, partners, my university, and past employers. I then used creative search terms to try and capture large amounts of e-mails I knew I wanted gone, such as: " sale" (the leading space was important in not picking up unrelated messages)</li> ".edu" (to get rid of spammy e-mails from colleges)</li> "newsletter" (to get rid of various company newsletters)</li> "notification" (for various services that I didn't disable e-mail notifications for)</li> "verify" (for all of those e-mail verification or two-factor messages)</li> </ul> I then systematically filtered through my inbox, finding different senders and either trashing or archiving all of their messages, and finished it off with a manual review of a couple hundred messages that didn't get categorized through any of the above actions. At long last, I was faced with a completely empty inbox. Conclusion</h2> With admittedly some work, yet not an impossible amount of effort, my personal mailbox has gone from being that drawer full of junk that I try to open as little as possible to being an organized space that I feel ownership of and have control over. It's a pride point of my digital life rather than an annoyance. I hope that my journey to make this step off Google, and take control of my inbox, my e-mail address, and my e-mail management, inspires others to do the same and make e-mail work as it's supposed to. The next step in this process, beyond migrating accounts to my new e-mail address, is going to be to apply some of these insights to my other inboxes, as well as deleting and consolidating e-mail accounts where possible to create a comprehensive e-mail handling strategy that extends beyond just this personal address, and I plan to outline that journey in a second part to this series. Resources</h2> r/degoogle</a> - This subreddit has some good resources and links about degoogling in a broad sense, and has others going through a similar transition away from GMail. r/privacy</a> is also a great resource, but more general.</li> The Inbox Zero Series</a> - A really useful collection of insights about e-mail management and how to handle it effectively. The series includes a post on processing an inbox down to 0</a>, and this may be a good starting point if you have more e-mails to work through than I did.</li> </ul> Appendix A: Choosing an e-mail provider</h2> There's a good few options for paid e-mail providers out there that fit some of my requirements, and while I chose Proton, that may not be the best choice for everyone. This appendix goes over some of the providers I considered, and why I did or did not go for them. I primarily looked for providers that I pay for with money, rather than data, that were at least somewhat privacy-respecting, and that would let me use my own domain name. Another important factor for me was longevity, for my primary address I'm not interested in buying into a specific provider and workflow unless I know it will be around in the long run, and doubly so for encrypted mail providers that often require users to only use their applications to access e-mail rather than being able to use any IMAP/SMTP client. Proton</a></h3> This is the provider I went with, as it was reasonably priced, fit all of my requirements, and had the additional bonus of being encrypted and secure, as well as providing other services alongside e-mail such as cloud storage and calendar management (I have yet to significantly make use of either, but they're not bad perks to have). I also believe in Proton's longevity, and feel confident that they'll continue to be around for a bit. For $4.99/mo ($47.88/yr) on their "Mail Plus" tier, you get 15GB of storage (more than enough for me at the moment), 10 e-mail addresses, and the ability to use 1 custom domain for e-mail. The 15gb of storage can also be shared with Proton Drive, their cloud storage service, and the plan also gives you the ability to create 25 calendars on Proton Calendar. It's not all sunshine and roses however, as there are some drawbacks. The first is that their web client isn't perfect. It's good enough, but doesn't have any "select all" feature, and can be slow at times. They do let you search the contents of e-mails now, which is a pain point that some have mentioned in the past, but it's not perfect. The biggest drawback, however, is not being able to use third-party clients on mobile. On desktop, you can use a third-party mail app like Thunderbird with their Proton Bridge</a> application, but this isn't available for mobile, forcing users onto the official Protonmail app. This is understandable, given that IMAP and SMTP were never designed with encrypted e-mail platforms in mind, but is nonetheless unfortunate. The iOS app isn't too bad though, so this is a compromise I'm willing to make for the promise of additional security. Fastmail</a></h3> Fastmail came in second place for me, as it's a lot of the good of Proton, but without any encryption, meaning that it doesn't suffer from a lot of the drawbacks that Proton has. It advertises privacy-first e-mail, and doesn't have any ads. It also offers a bit more for a similar price to Proton. For $5.00/mo ($50.00/yr) on their "Standard" tier, you get 30GB of storage, 600 e-mail addresses, either on your own domain or on one of their many domains</a>, access to their calendar service, as well as the ability to use any IMAP/SMTP client. Honestly, Fastmail has a very compelling offering, and I've seen others on the internet using it, so it was a very tough decision between this and Proton, but ultimately I settled on Proton due to Proton Drive, as well as simply having a bit more experience with the platform (I've used their free tier for a few accounts here and there over the years and have watched it grow). The encryption is also a solid "nice to have", even if I'm not entirely sure how much I care about it due to pretty much all of my e-mail correspondence being with GMail or Outlook addresses, meaning my messages end up passing through Google or Microsoft's servers anyways. There is still a chance I may move to Fastmail later, and I'm considering giving their free trial a shot, but am somewhat unclear how I would actually go about testing their services. Tutanota</a></h3> Tutanota was also in contention, being Proton's primary competition in the private and encrypted e-mail business. Their pricing is certainly pretty good if you just want e-mail and calendars, and they have similar promises as Proton of encrypted e-mail storage and end-to-end encryption of messages between Tutanota users. For €1.20/mo (€12/yr), on their "Premium" tier, you get 1GB storage (but this can be upgraded à la carte for a reasonable price), 6 e-mail addresses, custom domain support, and unlimited calendars. The big downside with Tutanota is that they don't an equivalent to Proton's "Proton Bridge", meaning that IMAP/SMTP clients can't be used, even on desktop. They do have native desktop applications in addition to mobile, but I would prefer the freedom to choose which client I use for mail on the desktop. Additionally, as stated with Fastmail, I'm just more familiar with Proton's offering, hence why I opted for them over Tutanota. Honorable Mentions</h3> Posteo</a> - Great price, but seems like more of a barebones offering compared to the others. I may consider this service if I need a cheap secondary address under another domain.</li> iCloud</a> - $0.99/mo for 50GB or $2.99/mo for 200GB, as well as custom domain support and a whole host of other features is a great deal, and I already pay for the 200GB storage tier for iCloud Photos anyways, but I want to reduce my reliance on Apple services rather than increase it. If you use a number of Apple devices and are fine with getting bought into the ecosystem, however, this is arguably the most compelling offering out there.</li> </ul> Resources for a Resource-Saving Internet 2023-05-18T00:00:00+00:00 A while back, I stumbled upon korayer</a>'s RE;FERI</a>. This site outlines a number of resources about creating lightweight websites, and most notably includes the template for a CSS grid system, allowing one to create websites with layouts more complex than just a linear text document, but without any bloated JavaScript. I was intrigued by the possibilities, but didn't want to continue having to view the site in Google Translate, so I created my own fork</a>. Translation</h2> I don't know German (the language the original version is written in). As a result, I relied on a combination of Google Translate, as well as my own intuition on the message being conveyed. This has resulted in what I feel is a reasonable interpretation, but please do open an issue</a> if there's anything I've grossly misinterpreted. Dark Mode</h2> One aspect of the original RE;FERI that bugged me was the lack of a dark mode. In 2023, every website has a dark version, and I knew from my work on this site</a> that it's incredibly easy to add a dark mode to a simple HTML site</a>. As such, my version of RE;FERI supports a dark mode. This is achieved using just the <meta name="color-scheme" content="dark light"></code> tag to indicate to the browser that a dark mode is available, and then some mode-specific CSS styling for links, highlights, and some other custom elements to ensure consistent readability across modes. Next Steps</h2> I think this system, and having a version in English with a dark mode, will allow me to easily create more pages for I Need More Coffee, as well as other personal projects, that preserve the simple, lightweight, and quick-to-load nature of this site. For starters, I plan on using it for the verification page</a> I discussed in a previous post</a>. I'm excited to see what I, and others, can create with this. View the example site here!</a> Update (2025-07-22): I've since taken down this translation, as there's a number of things that make the template less than ideal for use as a starter. Rasmus Andersson's raster system</a> is likely a better starting point for anyone who wants to make similar grid layouts </blockquote> Doing Some Admin 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00 It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted to this site, which is quite unfortunate. In that time, I’ve finished off another semester of college, shoved all my possessions into my trusty 4Runner, and hopped on a flight to Isla Verde, Puerto Rico, where I’m writing this post from. I’ve also taken a renewed interest in making this place my home on the internet, inspired by the numerous other folks on the internet I’ve added to my RSS feed over the past few days (I definitely want to add a blogroll</a> to this site at some point, maybe even a blogroll-roll of other blogrolls and webrings I’ve used to find numerous sites for my RSS list). With that, I’ve decided to do some admin and refactor, as well as better define, all of the subdomains and repositories that comprise (or will comprise) I Need More Coffee. Many of these changes haven't happened yet, but will in the coming days or weeks, and may be accompanied by their own posts. Subdomains</h2> I want to use I Need More Coffee as a home for a larger portion of my online presence, and as such I've decided to start using some subdomains to add other types of pages beyond just this blog. Here are a few subdomains I may add in the future (or may have already added). | Subdomain | Purpose | | @</code> and www</code> | Will continue to point to this site, with the amount of pages kept to posts and other hyperrelevant pages. | | pages</code> | Will serve as a central location for one-off and auxiliary pages that don’t need to hold to the same design language and purpose as pages on the main site, from full-size assets for posts to small project-specific sites. | | verify</code> | A single verification page</a> outlining my entire online presence, verifying that these accounts are mine and that others may not be. | | wiki</code> | Will be the future home of a wiki or “digital garden” of sorts. Could either take the form of a published Logseq</a> graph, or maybe something more minimal. | GitHub and Repositories</h2> I'm also making some changes to this site's presence on GitHub</a>. The organization has been renamed from I-Need-More-Coffee</code> to ineedmore-coffee</code>, as it looks more elegant and is less effort to type. The repository that houses this site</a> has been renamed from i-need-more-coffee.github.io</code> to main</code>, which does technically mean that it's being served as a "project site" and as a subfolder of my main GitHub pages site, but this doesn't matter much as I'm pointing my apex domain to this repository, and will be manually specifying subdomains for any other repository I enable GitHub Pages for. | Repository | Purpose | | main</code> | Contains this site. | | pages</code> | Contains the files for pages.ineedmore.coffee</code>, will consist a simple directory of HTML files. | | verify</code> | Contains the HTML for verify.ineedmore.coffee</code> | | meta</code> | Contains meta-information about how the various sites, repositories, and subdomains are organized and managed | The "Future Link"</h2> This is a new addition to the site that I intend to use in the future, a placeholder page that I can link to, and then later replace with a link to a new post that did not exist at the time of the original post. I've written a little bit more about it on the page itself</a>. Edit (2023-07-20): A lot of this stuff is no longer relevant, between abandoned projects and a move to Gitlab for hosting and code. See this post</a> for much more recent updates. Unleashing the Potential of an AOSP Flip Phone 2023-04-12T00:00:00+00:00 Note: I go into a bit of background on this phone during the first portion of this article. If you want to skip straight to the setup guide, scroll down to "Unlocking the Potential". Around a week ago, I noticed a flip phone being auctioned off on my city's surplus website. I've been looking around for interesting phones as part of a separate project, so I jumped on it and bought it, not entirely knowing the rabbit hole I'd go down in my attempts to push the capabilities of this device. The device in question is a Kyocera DuraXV LTE</a>, a rugged flip phone from 2017: Device Profile: Kyocera DuraXV LTE Key</th> Value</th></tr></thead> Release Date</td> September 2017</td></tr> Release Price</td> $264</td></tr> Device Type</td> Flip Phone</td></tr> Primary Display</td> 2.6 inch 320x240</td></tr> Processor</td> Snapdragon 210</td></tr> Memory</td> 2GB</td></tr> Storage</td> 16GB + microSD</td></tr> Battery</td> 1530 mAh</td></tr> Camera</td> 5MP Rear</td></tr> Operating System</td> AOSP 7</td></tr> </tbody></table> This phone's hardware is definitely unique. It appears to be a slightly upgraded and heavily ruggedized cousin to the Kyocera Cadence</a> (this becomes relevant later), and has this interesting "rounded hexagon" motif going on. The buttons arent too bad, the D-Pad feels nice, and overall it generally feels much higher end than the usual budget KaiOS feature phones. What's really interesting about this phone is the operating system it's running. With modern flip/feature phones, outside of generic ones that use an RTOS, the two most prominent options are the veritable battalion of KaiOS phones</a> on the low end, with their basic apps and limited functionality, and full on Android feature phones, like the AGM M7</a> and Xiaomi F21 Pro</a> where the only differentiating factor from a low-end smartphone is the form factor. However, somewhere in the middle, there is a category of stealth Android phones, phones that use a locked down version of AOSP but don't make it clear to the user. This Kyocera phone is just that, a flip phone that on the surface appears to be a boring, basic interface, but is secretly hiding Android goodies underneath. These phones at an initial glance seem to be even less capable than KaiOS phones, typically not even letting users install applications. However, with just a bit of tweaking, we can unlock all sorts of functionality. The First Attempt</h2> When I first began investigating this phone, and slowly realized it had Android guts, as well as it's similarity to the Kyocera Cadence, I stumbled upon Apps4Flip</a>, a website that offers custom applications for Android feature phones similar to this one. They offer utilities such as a custom application menu that can be launched from the notification screen, a cursor that can be invoked to simulate touchscreen input, and a couple utilities like a file manager, office suite, weather app, and a variety of applications relevant to those of Jewish faith. The purpose of this site seems to be to enable certain sects of Orthodox Jews to add more functionality to make these phones viable for daily use, which is essential to them as devices that can access the unfiltered internet are considered terefah (not kosher)</a>. However, after spending a couple of days figuring out the basics of what this device can do using their software, doing some experimentation, and reading up on places like r/dumbphones</a>, I decided that I wanted something different, and I wanted more. Apps4Flip's solutions feel like the only options when trying to search around for information on extending the capabilities of devices like these, but there are also some drawbacks to using their software, namely: The code to the versions of the applications they distribute is not open source, which makes it hard to trust these apps, especially when they're from an unknown party.</li> They've allegedly repackaged and redistributed an open source application, while claiming it as their own</a> (they've since walked this back and credited the original developer on their Apps page, but doesn't it doesn't inspire the most trust).</li> Their launcher doesn't display all installed applications. I noticed this when I attempted to install F-Droid. I thought that the install had failed as there was nothing in the launcher, but then I noticed a notification from F-Droid. Judging by the fact that the launcher does display MATVT Cursor</a>, they are likely filtering for com.android.cts.*</code> package names.</li> </ul> Overall, I felt like there was the potential for so much more, so I opted to wipe the phone and start fresh, this time with the challenge of not using any of Apps4Flip's software. Unlocking the Potential</h2> From the aforementioned couple days of experimentation, there were a few key insights gained: APKs can be sideloaded by Bluetooth transferring them from another device, then selecting the file transfer notification to run the app installer (This also works with the built-in browser, as I found out later, but Bluetooth transfer is much more convenient).</li> Any compatible APK can be installed, not just ones with com.android.cts.*</code> packagenames, which apparently is the case for some phones.</li> Applications that register as launchers can be installed, and the phone will give you a prompt to choose a launcher app to use every time you unlock, but while in any other launcher there is no consistent access to the all-important notification menu.</li> </ul> Armed with these insights, I reset the phone and went through the following setup: DISCLAIMER: This phone is a spare/test device for me, and as such I had very few qualms with removing core system applications (primarily the default launcher). While the phone seems to be functioning fine, you won' be able to get any system apps you uninstall back without resetting the phone! Step 1: Enable Developer Mode</h3> Enabling developer mode on this phone is very similar to any other Android phone. Simply navigate to Settings -> About phone -> Software information</code>, select Build number</code>, then press the OK</code> button 7 times or until a prompt at the bottom of the screen says that you are now in Developer Mode. Now, when we navigate back out to the main Settings</code> menu, there should be an additional option labeled Developer options</code>. Select that and scroll down to USB debugging</code> and turn that on. This will allow us to connect to the phone with adb</code> later to grant applications special permissions. Step 2: Transfer over Some Apps</h3> Download these 4 APKs to a computer or another Android device: Keikai Launcher</a>: The launcher we will be using to replace the default. It's pretty ugly on this phone due to some icon issues, but it's the one I've found that works best with the D-Pad</li> MATVT Cursor</a>: A cursor application that we can use to simulate touch input. Essential for interacting with apps at times</li> F-Droid</a>: A marketplace for free and open source Android apps, and a great place to find simple apps that work well with this device</li> Aurora Store</a>: Allows us to download applications from the Google Play Store</li> </ul> First, transfer over Keikai Launcher. We'll need to do this twice, as when we attempt to select the notification the first time, the phone will prompt us to open Settings to enable "installing apps from unknown sources". Follow the prompts and toggle the setting on, then transfer the file again and install it. Now, every time we unlock the phone (if it's locked with a PIN code), the phone will prompt you to choose between "Idle Launcher" (the default homescreen) and Keikai launcher. Having access to the default homescreen is crucial at this stage, because it gives us consistent access to the Notifications menu. Next, transfer over MATVT Cursor. Once the application is installed, we will need to use adb</code> to grant it certain permissions, as I wasn't able to successfully do so from within the application. WebADB</a> is a great tool to run adb</code> commands from the browser if you aren't interested in installing the tool locally. After connecting to the phone with adb</code> (or WebADB), run these commands (if using WebADB, remove the adb shell</code> portion from each command): adb shell appops set com.android.cts.io.github.virresh.matvt SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW allow adb shell settings put secure accessibility_enabled 1 adb shell settings put secure enabled_accessibility_services com.android.cts.io.github.virresh.matvt/com.android.cts.io.github.virresh.matvt.services.MouseEventService adb shell am startservice com.android.cts.io.github.virresh.matvt/com.android.cts.io.github.virresh.matvt.services.MouseEventService </code></pre> Note: The last command may fail or error out (it did for me). I've still been able to use the cursor perfectly fine, so I can only assume that the last command either is still doing what it needs to do, or isn't entirely necessary. Lastly, go into the MATVT application and override the activation key. I overrode it to key 17, but feel free to remap it to whichever keycode</a> works best for you. Once these commands have been run, we should now be able to invoke a virtual mouse by holding the *</code> key (if you overrode the activation key with key 17). Holding the key for a short time while in mouse mode will also allow us to scroll using the virtual mouse, but this can be hit-or-miss at times. Now, transfer over and install F-Droid and Aurora Store, and set them up. With just that simple step, we now have a phone that can download applications off both the F-Droid and Google Play stores! Step 3: Polishing Things Up</h3> Right now, our phone still pesters about which launcher to use whenever we unlock, which is good because right now, we need the consistent access to the notification menu that the default launcher gives us. However, this is still annoying, and can result in some inconsistent behavior especially when using the back key. To give us access to the notification menu without relying on the default launcher, we can use the Button Mapper</a> application from the Play Store. This neat tool allows us to bind actions to any key on our device, including launching the notification menu. After installing the application and granting it the appropriate accessibility permissions, add one of your buttons as a "Custom Button" and bind it to launch your notification menu. I also took the chance to add a few more key bindings to get back some more normal Android interaction. This specific phone has dedicated hardware buttons for PTT</a>, including a big red side button, so I decided to bind multiple actions to it and make it a "home button": Big Red PTT Button: Single Tap: Home </li> Double Tap: Recents </li> Long Press: Notifications </li> </ul> </li> Top Right "Stop" Button: Long Press: Screenshot</li> </ul> </li> </ul> Now we can get rid of all that inconsistent launcher behavior by simply removing Kyocera's default launcher. To do this, first open adb</code> (or WebADB) back up, and list the applications with adb shell pm list packages</code>. Then, look for one with a package name that looks something like jp.kyocera.home</code> (I'm really annoyed at myself for not writing the exact package name down). Remove the application with adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.example.changethis</code>. At your own risk, feel free to "debloat" and remove carrier apps while you're here. I've chosen to keep everything as-is and just disable these extra apps for now, but I may experiment with how much of these I can remove in the future. Once the default launcher is removed, Keikai launcher should now act seamlessly as your primary homescreen! Conclusions</h2> Overall, with this setup I think this phone feels far more liberated than with the Apps4Flip suite of apps, as we now have access to a full launcher, multiple app stores on-device, and much more granular controls with remapped buttons. The biggest barrier with this phone now is D-Pad support in applications. Some apps, like the official F-Droid client</a>, and games, like Crossy Road</a>, treat the D-Pad as a first-class citizen and work exceptionally well. Others, like Spotify, don't work at all with the D-Pad and require fully using mouse mode, which can be cumbersome. Many fall into a middle category, where some UI elements can be selected and used with the D-Pad, but other parts need mouse mode. I think there is potential for a part two of this post as I explore more of which apps give the humble D-Pad the love that it deserves. This phone is a super intriguing device, and now that I have a solid base setup I'm excited to try and see what further capabilities can be added! ex librīs 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00 During some internet exploration a few days ago, I stumbled upon a blog post</a> where the author details making a bookplate for their personal library. Sufficiently intrigued, I began doing a little research on this historic practice, and ended up creating my own. What is a bookplate?</h2> A bookplate (or ex librīs) is a label affixed to the inside of a book, often on the front endpaper</a>, indicating the ownership of the book. These get quite creative, with a wide variety of designs, subject matter, and techniques used</a>. The actual medium varies widely as well, with traditional bookplates having their designs hand engraved into copper</a>, being printed onto paper with an intaglio press</a>, and then glued into a book. When looking at modern day bookplates, I saw two main categories. Many bookplates use self-adhesive paper, such as ones offered by commercial sites</a>. Others, including the author of the post that initially inspired this, use stamps, as besides the initial cost of the stamp, they are exceptionally cheap and easy. However, there is controversy around stamped bookplates as bibliopholes argue that they degrade a book, and decrease it's value rather than increasing it. Why bookplates?</h2> An equally interesting topic is the reason for even using bookplates in the first place. Bookplates originally stem from other methods to indicate ownership and dissuade theft of a book, such as book rhymes</a> or book curses</a> printed within a book. They're also surprisingly old, with the first "modern bookplate" being from 15th century Germany. Over the following centuries, it became very common for affluent people with personal libraries to have their own bookplates, and have been extremely helpful in helping modern historians trace the ownership of old books</a>. Around the late 19th to early 20th centuries, bookplates became more common among middle class American households, as they gained wealth and sought to emulate the customs of "old money" families. They also started varying more in design, branching out from the traditional crests and coats of arms to have more unique art (I was particularly struck by Albert Einstein's</a>). Unfortunately, bookplates fell in popularity by around the 50s, likely due to cultural changes after World War II and the switch to primarily paperback books. Creating my own bookplate</h2> Armed with more knowledge and a newfound appreciation for the ex librīs, I decided to create my own. I enjoy customizing the objects I own, and this seemed like a fun way to add a personal touch to my own books. I haven't been a super prolific reader since I was a little kid, so my bookplate is more for my arsenal of journals and notebooks, but I do hope that having a bookplate encourages me to purchase and read more books as I build up a humble personal library. Design</h3> The first portion to tackle was the design. I opted to design mine digitally, as it would give me the most flexibility. I downloaded Inkscape</a>, and started messing around with some text to come up with this very minimal design with the Inter</a> typeface: Note: The images on this site are dithered</a>. The SVGs are located here</a> This one was pretty easy, and looked pretty clean and modern, but I decided I wanted something with a little more character, so I pulled out my legal pad and sketched up this concept: After an afternoon learning the basics of Inkscape, I then had this design, featuring the EB Garamond typeface</a>: The motto, ad īnfīnīta mystēria, means "to infinite mysteries" in Latin, and reflects my disposition to always learning more. I then chose the coffee/tea mug as it's simple, and something warm and caffeinated is always a great companion to a good book. Medium</h3> With a design in hand, the next decision to make was whether to print the bookplate out or turn it into a stamp. Looking at the prices to get a custom stamp made, I decided that it would be simpler and quicker to simply get some self-adhesive paper and print the bookplate on that. I found these letter-sized shipping labels</a> for cheap enough at my local Wal-Mart, and they seemed decent enough for the job. As my design was 2 inches by 2 inches, I determined I'd be able to fit 20 of them on my page, and used the montage</code> command that imagemagick</code> ships to create a printable page with the bookplate tiled 20 times (I'm sure there was a more elegant way to do this): montage -geometry 1024x1024 -tile 4x5 exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris.png exlibris_print.pdf </code></pre> I then printed this out, cut them using a paper guillotine (this ended up being way harder than I thought), and had my bookplates! With bookplates in hand, I promptly went and stuck one in the center of the front inside cover of the each of the journals I'm currently using. Conclusion</h2> This was a really fun little delve, and I really liked the end result. If this intrigues you as well, why not make your own? I think seeing someone's bookplate in a book I buy secondhand would give me a little extra appreciation for it and make me cherish it that much more. Bookplates are very individual, so there's no need to stick with conventions or try to fit any one style. Make one in whichever style and medium makes you happy! I'll likely stick with this design for a while, but may update it eventually as my own tastes change. Who knows, it could be fun to be able to look at my books later, and be able to determine when I got them just by the bookplate design. To check out the SVG files for the two bookplates I made, check out the repository</a>. Resources</h2> History</h3> Wikipedia</a> Book Riot Article</a> Atlas Obscura Article</a> Inspiration</h3> Original Ray Patrick Article</a> Ukrainian Bookplate Collection</a> Bookplates of Influential Men</a> Other</h3> Bookplate Ink - Commercial Bookplate Seller</a> Printable Shipping Labels</a> A First Post 2023-04-03T00:00:00+00:00 A first post is always very difficult to write. This one is definitely more of a placeholder than a grand occasion, and may get deleted later, but a first post it is nonetheless. I've been putting off getting this blog/"brain dump"/"digital garden" set up for weeks now, so I'm very excited to finally have a place to put some of the article ideas I've had saved in my notes for a long time. I'd also like to start the #100DaysToOffload</a> challenge, and I suppose that makes this post the first out of 100. I hope you enjoy reading as I populate this site over the coming months :) - Sohal

Yellow</h3>
Contains information I want the quickest access to. I generally plan my day's tasks at the top, and then have a list of ideas and topics I think of within the day that I need to revisit.</p>

Orange</h3>
This one is sparse at the moment, but currently contains a running list of calls I need to make when I have the time.</p>

Red</h3>
This note's contains transcripts of voice memos. Whenever I press the Action Button on my iPhone, it pops up a dictation window for me to dictate a message, which then gets appended to this note with a timestamp.</p>

Purple</h3>
This one contains various shopping lists and wishlists.</p>

Blue</h3>
This one contains a longer-term running list of ideas, as well as "asks" from my girlfriend, parents, friends, etc.</p>

Cyan</h3>
This one contains longer term tasks for different projects, like my homelab, handling finances, healthcare, etc.</p>

Write An Intent Statement For Your Knowledge Infrastructure

Joplin 7-Month Retrospective

The Best Windows XP System Is... A Dell Latitude From 2013?

Building up an RSS Feed

Trimming Down The Nerd's Cookbook

Learning How to E-Mail Pt. 1 - Primary Mailbox

Resources for a Resource-Saving Internet

Doing Some Admin

Unleashing the Potential of an AOSP Flip Phone

ex librīs

History</h3>
Wikipedia</a></p>
Book Riot Article</a></p>
Atlas Obscura Article</a></p>

Inspiration</h3>
Original Ray Patrick Article</a></p>
Ukrainian Bookplate Collection</a></p>
Bookplates of Influential Men</a></p>

Other</h3>
Bookplate Ink - Commercial Bookplate Seller</a></p>
Printable Shipping Labels</a></p>

A First Post

How I Read Books

Why I Always Need A Minimap

Sometimes Form Matters More Than Function

“What Got You In Trouble In School Will Get You Ahead In Life, And What Got You Ahead In School Will Get You In Trouble In Life”

The Effectiveness of a Re-Syncing Routine

Mind The Gap, Please

How I Read Books

Why I Always Need A Minimap

Sometimes Form Matters More Than Function

Yellow</h3> Contains information I want the quickest access to. I generally plan my day's tasks at the top, and then have a list of ideas and topics I think of within the day that I need to revisit.</p>

Orange</h3> This one is sparse at the moment, but currently contains a running list of calls I need to make when I have the time.</p>

Red</h3> This note's contains transcripts of voice memos. Whenever I press the Action Button on my iPhone, it pops up a dictation window for me to dictate a message, which then gets appended to this note with a timestamp.</p>

Purple</h3> This one contains various shopping lists and wishlists.</p>

Blue</h3> This one contains a longer-term running list of ideas, as well as "asks" from my girlfriend, parents, friends, etc.</p>

Cyan</h3> This one contains longer term tasks for different projects, like my homelab, handling finances, healthcare, etc.</p>

“What Got You In Trouble In School Will Get You Ahead In Life, And What Got You Ahead In School Will Get You In Trouble In Life”

The Effectiveness of a Re-Syncing Routine

Mind The Gap, Please

Write An Intent Statement For Your Knowledge Infrastructure

Joplin 7-Month Retrospective

The Best Windows XP System Is... A Dell Latitude From 2013?

Building up an RSS Feed

Trimming Down The Nerd's Cookbook

Learning How to E-Mail Pt. 1 - Primary Mailbox

Resources for a Resource-Saving Internet

Doing Some Admin

Unleashing the Potential of an AOSP Flip Phone

ex librīs

A First Post

Yellow</h3>
Contains information I want the quickest access to. I generally plan my day's tasks at the top, and then have a list of ideas and topics I think of within the day that I need to revisit.</p>

Orange</h3>
This one is sparse at the moment, but currently contains a running list of calls I need to make when I have the time.</p>

Red</h3>
This note's contains transcripts of voice memos. Whenever I press the Action Button on my iPhone, it pops up a dictation window for me to dictate a message, which then gets appended to this note with a timestamp.</p>

Purple</h3>
This one contains various shopping lists and wishlists.</p>

Blue</h3>
This one contains a longer-term running list of ideas, as well as "asks" from my girlfriend, parents, friends, etc.</p>

Cyan</h3>
This one contains longer term tasks for different projects, like my homelab, handling finances, healthcare, etc.</p>