Writing

One of my favorite places in Morocco, among many others, is Essaouira. It is a coastal town in the south of Morocco, a few hours west of Marrakech. It once functioned as a major trading port to connect Morocco with Europe. I have had a significant number of volunteers and someone from home ask me about what to do in Essaouira. I keep a list on my computer and just copy and paste it to whoever wants it. ...

This is my first ever time taking part in an IndieWeb carnival and this is my submission for February, hosted by Manuel Moreale. The topic this month is Digital Relationships. Obviously, technology has greatly improved and enabled how we interact with other people in digital spaces. Instead, I wanted to write about my direct relationship with the digital world. Specifically, my laptop is my main tool and entry point to digital worlds, both public and private. ...

One of the most important and valuable activities that I do consistently in my life is a weekly review. It allows me to regularly refocus and recenter all aspects of my life from the day-to-day all the way up to life trajectory. Having this review system/structure in place forces me to collect everything that accumulates during the week, reorganize, clear my plate, check-in with myself, and make sure I am headed in the direction I want to be. ...

Among the myriad of career advice out there, one that I have adopted as a Peace Corps Volunteer is to keep a brag document. This is a single document that contains all of the projects, accomplishments, and impact you have done in a specific role. I have seen many spins on this in the software engineering/developer community but the definitive guide comes from Julia Evans’ blog post. Usually, these brag documents focus on the business value that you create: What accomplishments did you achieve that helped grow the business? ...

I spent my free time this last month to learn some personal finance and, specifically, how to do personal bookkeeping. I did this so that I can have a more complete view of all of my accounts and how I am spending money. I developed a good system that I think will work for me nicely now and is durable and robust enough to serve me for a long time. ...

Overview My most used tool that I use on my computer is called Obsidian. It is a free note-taking app that can be as simple or as powerful as you like. It makes writing notes for just about anything super easy and friction-less. I use it to organize my thinking for almost everything in my life. I can go down so many rabbit holes into the inner workings of Obsidian and personal knowledge management in general but I will save that for another day. ...

How I setup and use a physical notebook for task management and to make sure nothing gets forgotten Overview This is my personal workflow that I use for my task and date management. It is super boring (in a good way!). It means that it is no-nonsense, simple, sustainable, and reliable method for tracking things that you need to do. It works great for me but please adapt it to your own needs to create your own perfect system. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. Back in my college days, I had the good fortune of taking a course from the newly developed Humanitarian Engineering department called “Innovation for Social Impact.” It was co-created with a Mechanical Engineering professor and an Anthropology professor. The course was about designing solutions to support low-income or other vulnerable populations using a mix of tools from engineering, entrepreneurship, and social sciences. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. I’ve been dabbling with web development for a while now and was looking for the best tools for the job. For basic websites, you need two things: HTML and CSS. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) describes the content of the website and looks like this: <h1>This is a heading!</h1> <p>This is some content!</p> <a href="somewebsite.com">This is a link!</a> <a href="specialwebsite.com" class="specialLink">This is a special link</a> <img src="someimage. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. After much prep, I finally decided to actually start freelancing this week. I noticed in my hometown that the majority of small businesses there don’t have any online presence. They do advertising in the local newspaper, word of mouth, and some use only Facebook. In 2022, there is a whole population of people that these small businesses are missing by not being online. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. This Tuesday, Jacob and I found ourselves with a pile of hundreds of football and baseball cards searching each one on an app to get a rough estimate of their value. We started off by just searching the name of each player one by one but that quickly grew boring and would have taken us months. Our next workflow was to sort all of them into their individual teams (33 for the NFL and 30 for the MLB) and then look at the most popular in the app and see if we had that player. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. Right now is one of the most interesting times in my life in many ways. One of those is that I can finally understand macroeconomic trends and see them play out right in front of me. My economics teacher from high school told me that the Federal Reserve raises interest rates (among other things) which has a cascading effect to reduce the money supply in the United States all in an effort to reduce inflation to a manageable rate. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. Last week, I talked about how the internet works. Clients make requests to servers and servers respond to those requests. Today, let’s go deeper into how programs and computers can talk to each other: APIs. Back when computers were just starting out, the companies producing them built everything for that computer (the hardware, the chips, the software) and that one company put all of these together to make it work. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. The internet. We all know it. We all love it. But what actually is it? At the most basic physical level, the internet is a bunch of wires connecting all of the computers around the world. That’s it! The “World Wide Web” is literally a web of wires that connect our devices together and allow them to talk to one another. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. I have been using Proton Mail for a few months now instead of using GMail. Proton offers secure, encrypted email that gets locked up in a such a way that only you and the recipient see the message. What does this mean? When you send an email from your GMail account, it gets stored on Google’s servers as plain text. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. Much like my discovery of IRC, I recently found a technology called RSS … and have since been wondering why nobody is talking about it and why I even had to discover it in the first place. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a way for anyone that makes content on the internet to broadcast out “Hey I just made a new post and here it is! ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. Humans write a lot and most of it is done on computers these days. If someone asked you to write them a letter, where would you start? Most would open up Word or Google Docs. We all know the headaches that these word processors can cause: formatting not doing what you want it to, files getting lost, the person you are sending files to doesn’t use the same processor, et cetera. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. My friends Patrick and Sasha are coming over this weekend! I met them when I was going to college at Oregon State and they lived right above me on the second floor. The day Patrick and I first saw each other, we were both wearing shirts that had cactuses on them. Patrick and Sasha invited me over for food and beers and we played games and really got to know one another. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. In January 2022, I built my first Discord bot. It was very crudely put together and completely unreliable. Jacob wanted a bot in the server that would randomly insult our friends during the day. Put simply, he wanted a bot that was mildly an asshole. On that weekday in Powell Butte, Complibot was born. I threw together Complibot v0 in a few hours using Python and a couple tutorials. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. nano content/posts/2022-04-22/index.md As I am writing this, I am patiently awaiting the release of Jammy Jellyfish – Ubuntu’s 22.04 LTS release. The Ubuntu subreddit and IRC channels are ablaze with newcomers and veterans to Linux alike. Why is everyone so excited? Well first, what is Ubuntu? Ubuntu is a fork (aka a distribution or distro if you really want to sound cool) of the Linux operating system. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. /join #untilitsnotfun /nick dadofapollo (12:04:08) Westley is now known as dadofapollo (12:05:16 PM) dadofapollo: IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a beautiful relic of the internet that helped set the stage for how we communicate on the internet today. IRC was one of the first internet based chat systems. Users can enter different chat rooms called channels and can start communicating with anyone else that is in the same channel. ...

This piece first appeared on the Until It’s Not Fun newsletter. It has been a couple of weeks now with my Ergodox EZ keyboard. Not only is the split design strange, I also moved every single key from the QWERTY layout. Since QWERTY was designed in the 1800’s to keep typewriter components from hitting each other (also to help telegraph operators translating Morse code and also because Remington and Sons bought the rights to a popular typewriter design) and I don’t use a typewriter, why not change it to something more ergonomic? ...