Pursuant to my theme of fun I am having a great time mucking about with my wiki!
@twelvety Regarding your Plex server on Raspberry Pi, does yours connect to a NAS for the media? I’ve got a 3B+, but all my media is on an old QNAP NAS. I can’t figure out how to connect the Pi to the media drive over the network, so I have to keep Plex running on my MacBook.
2019 - Looking Ahead
I enjoy listening to the podcast, Cortex. CGP Grey approaches topics in a thoughtful way and Myke Hurley is a wonderful conversationalist. One of their tropes I enjoy is listening to them talk about their yearly ‘themes’. The two eschew New Year’s resolutions in favour of establishing a thematic target for their year ahead.
Over the last few years I have played along, although historically I have tended to arrive at a handful of areas of focus, as opposed to a single theme.
For 2019 I wanted to simplify and be guided by a a single theme myself — no excuses.
After some thought, I have determined that 2019 will be my “Year of Fun”.
In practical terms, this means that I want to find fun and enjoyment in everyday life. It doesn’t mean I’m going to engage party central each day of the week, but it does mean that I want to take a positive mindset into the day and find ways to maximise my enjoyment.
I will concentrate on doing things I enjoy. I will carve out time for hobbies and recreation. I will sneak turns with my son’s new Nintendo Switch. I will enjoy conversations with both my boys. Even the boring things, I will try to embrace with a positive approach. It might be difficult to make ironing fun, but at least I can try not get depressed about having to do it.
There’s no doubt that this year will be defined by what happens in my wife’s life. This will create familial stress. It will make the kids anxious. What’s the best defence against stress? Laughter. Find the fun! I can take a positive mindset into this adventure and realise that it’s a unique and interesting journey, that few people have the opportunity to experience. So I shall live it to the fullest.
Bonus Round
A further challenge I want to set myself, which is related to my year of fun, is to learn. I want to challenge my brain in new ways this year. I want to keep my grey matter in good order by pushing it to work through learning. I’m still thinking through some ideas as to what I want to set as my learning goals. I have a few ideas — nothing incredibly earth-shattering — that I think will be interesting to pursue.
How does learning relate to fun? It does because I think learning is fun. I like the feeling of having my mind enter a flow state, where it is engaged and concentrating on absorbing and synthesising new information.
It has been interesting to experiment with a constructing a personal wiki but I am sure that as a single user I am better served putting this information into DEVONthink. It is less fiddly and better able to bubble-up related information - but I can’t share the information. 🤔
After earlier discussion here on micro.blog I can report that I have paid for and switched to Castro for podcasts. I like its queue, but I don’t think its EQ is quite as good and I miss iPad support and multi-device sync. It looks great and operates well though.
Listening to @jack talk on the Micro Monday podcast about avoiding snow to date, while I sit by the resort pool. 😝
I got a couple of levels into Mario & Rabbids on the switch, before my son decided he needed to play.
Jack Baty's Wiki
Jack Baty is a great member of the Indieweb community. He continually tinkers with online tools and services. His latest experiment is in publishing a wiki - specifically a TiddlyWiki instance he has set up at Rudimentary Lathe.
Jack’s enthusiasm has inspired me to throw up my own wiki to play around with — even though I have a local installation of DEVONthink that does a perfectly fine job of capturing and managing my knowledge and notes.
I didn’t have a super quick and easy way to install TiddlyWiki on my web host, but I did have the option to one-click create a DokuWiki. So I’ve done that and published it at my domain.
Federated Wiki Is a Strange Beast ➜
After seeing a micro.blog post by Frank McPherson about the Federated Wiki, I took a look at it.
Created by Ward Cunningham, who happens to be the inventor of the original wiki, the Federated Wiki system appears designed with a more fluid, attractive front-end, supported by the concept that each author should host their own content, rather than relying on a central ‘owner’ of the content - who could go away and take your content with them.
I get the ideal, but I find the implementation confusing. Despite its allure, I don’t think this system is for me.
Summer sunshine. Out with @hannahbeazley4swan. Thanks for the hat, @yasmin_ivie
A quick test to ensure that in-line micro.blog names are working, thanks to @smokey.
I’m on a bit of a spirit quest to find my ideal Markdown editor on Mac. I’ve tried BBEdit, Typora, Multimarkdown Composer and Atom with plugins. What do others use?
I had a WordPress plugin or some other customisation that parsed micro.blog usernames. It now appears not to be working, but I can’t remember what it was in order to fix it!
My thanks to @amit for helping me get @blot webmentions sorted.
I keep forgetting to appropriately time stamp my Blot posts so they play nice in the micro.blog timeline. My 2018 Review - canion.me
My 2018 Review
In recognition of the end of another year — 2018 being my 41st on our good planet Earth — this is a short retrospective on the major events that have impacted my life this year.
The year seemed to go by quickly. Off the top of my head, it’s hard to think of anything monumental that occurred. Reflecting upon my list below, it can be described as a year of optimisation. Nothing much new or novel; just me making what was already out there work a little better.
🤒 Health
- Retired from basketball: I started playing when I was 9, now at 41 my body told me it was time to stop. Bad knees and ankles combined with a stiffening back all played their part, but it was the diagnosis of developmental hip dysplasia that ended it for me.
- Diagnosed with hip dysplasia: What started as a pulled hip muscle from a crazy effort to climb into the driver’s seat of a car from the passenger side escalated into diagnosed hip dysplasia that apparently I’ve had from birth. The medicos were incredulous that with the severity of my dysplasia, that I’ve never noticed it before now, nor had any major serious injuries. At least I now know why even as a kid I found it uncomfortable to sit cross-legged on the floor.
- Got semi-serious about gym — but not serious enough: With no basketball to fall back on for exercise, and the need to rehabilitate my hips I got serious about gym work for the first time in more than a decade. I still don’t love it, and I’ve lost some momentum in the back-end of this year. I need to establish a better structure for committing to it in 2019.
🛠 Work
- Improved methods and systems: I reviewed and improved a large range of my work processes, which has made me more efficient, and it has freed up time to spend on the more creative elements of my work. This benefits me and my clients
- Improved automation: I don’t have a personal assistant, so I leverage the ability to create automations to make my work life easier.
- Director and Treasurer of a not-for-profit: There were some interesting challenges, and I grew in my ability to respond with confidence and self-assurance.
👨👩👦👦 Family
- Made strides in autism management: My 7-year old has diagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder. I have learnt much about coping with the challenges this brings.
- Politics: my wife is running to become a Member of Parliament in the 2019 Federal Election. This effort takes up a considerable amount of shared family time.
🤹🏻♂️ Hobbies
- Assessment of hobbies: I took the time to take stock of my hobbies. I’m not sure it delivered clear tangible results, but it grew my level of awareness about how I was spending my time.
- Elimination of social media: I deleted my Twitter account. I disengaged from Facebook. I won back a bunch of time, lost background anxiety, and have not missed them at all.
- A return to indieweb ideals: I’ve always been a fan of the traditional web. I have never given up on following individual sites through RSS. This year I engaged with micro.blog, started this blot site, and continued to maintain my homepage and blog regularly.
- Hearthstone: I became slightly addicted to this game despite being lazy about the deck-building element. I’m happy enough to play with random sets. I’m close to being over this game now, which I’m sure will please my wife.
- Audible books: After realising I wasn’t feeding my brain enough nutritional content, I took up an Audible subscription and have successfully worked through a range of fiction and non-fiction books. I never seem to have time to sit and read, but I can find time to listen to somebody read to me.
- Meditation: I continue to undertake mindfulness meditation on a semi-regular basis.
- Explosive Pro Wrestling: Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved wrestling. I watched WWF through the Hulk Hogan era, then WWE through its Attitude era. This year I discovered Perth’s own wrestling show, EPW. I took my boy to their end of year event, where we had ringside seats. I loved every second of it, as did he. It was so much fun to reconnect with a sport that I’ve always loved to watch.
👨🏼💻 Personal
- Indoor skydiving: Skydiving is not something I’ve wanted to do, but I did have an opportunity this year to participate in indoor skydiving. It was fun, but it lacked the heart-stopping exhilaration that I’m sure jumping out from a plane would deliver.
- Vacations:
- Yallingup — a rainy pre-winter break in WA’s beautiful south-west.
- Bridgetown — a great chance to stay with my best mate at his farm.
- Bali — champagne taste on a beer budget.
- Jurien Bay — creating sand and sun summer holiday memories for our kids.
- Grew a beard: I’ve grown a beard once before in my life. The one I have now is longer than that the previous one. This is unchartered territory.
I just overheard my 7 year old boy explaining how a payday loan company that is advertising on TV is a bad thing. He said they give you money but then you have to give them thousands more back later. Parenting win!
The boy received a Nintendo Switch for Christmas. Dad approves of Super Mario Odyssey.
Boxing Day in Western Australia and it’s overcast and not hot. What an outrage. I want my money back.