Been a long time

It's been an awfully long time since I've written anything of substance here, possibly even the longest time in my phlogging history, I've not checked. To some extent, this cannot be considered a surprise and in fact ought to be classified as "exactly according to plan", as per my resolutions for 2021. But it certainly doesn't *feel* exactly as planned.

Gemlog post "2021 resolutions" (2020-01-02)

After making just a few small lifestyle changes (mostly uninstalling clients from my phone and leaving my laptop out of the living room), to my surprise I dropped off of / out of both the Fediverse and the Small Internet much faster and to a much greater extent than I ever expected to or consciously wanted to. I think this really underscores the degree to which the things we do on computers are driven more out of simple habit, routine and convenience than anything else.

I have been surprised at just how much I don't really miss being as closely connected to or involved in my various online communities as I used to. And yet, somehow, I also feel a vague sense of unhappiness or disatisfaction about how this experiment has turned out. I haven't figured out yet to what extent this feeling is because I've genuinely over-corrected and am missing out on stuff that's important to me, or just because I feel some sense of guilt/obligation around certain of those communities and can't manage to relax if I know I am ignoring them.

I haven't been doing an awful lot of offline computing in this time that I've been away. To be honest, with few exceptions, almost nothing to do with computing feels terribly interesting, exciting or important to me anymore these days. I have very little motivation to, e.g. follow through with my goal of learning about PostmarketOS. Computing for its own sake feels hollow. Regularly communicating with others about what/how I'm computing feels like a strange and artificial thing to do. I don't know how long this attitude will last. I kind of doubt it is permanent, but who knows.

I *have* started doing hobby electronics again (and hence just a little attendent computing, namely writing microcontroller firmware - which I am starting to think might be my ideal kind of programming: there is no room for bloat, little need for third party dependencies and when there is such a need the dependencies are usually extremely stable and slow moving so code doesn't spontaneously break, and every project has a clear and obvious point of completion after which it requires no maintenance). I stopped doing this in the first place largely out of my now well-documented concerns about the sustainability of electronics manufacturing, and also out of anxiety about starting projects and then either not completing them or completing them but not using them much after the initial novelty wears off. Unlike abandoned software projects which can simply be forgotten about or even deleted, abandoned hardware stubbornly continues to physically exist and take up space. It's very hard to re-home obscure, home-made, undocumented electronic hardware. I almost always use sockets for integrated circuits, so at least those can in principle be slavaged, but unsocketed components which have had their leads trimmed are basically "used up", which feels wasteful.

Anyway, I've decided to allow myself to work on projects where the majority of the needed parts can already be found in the large stash of parts I have still been carrying around with me for years, purchased for earlier projects. They have already been manufactured, I have already paid for them, the harm I am worried about has been done, and they are serving no useful purpose bagged up, so they might as well be put to use. I have decided that it's worth a shot trying to build mostly things like environmental sensors or instruments for measuring various natural phenomena, especially things which change slowly over very long timescales: slow electronics, or the nearest thing to it I can imagine, with a liberal helping of amateur science.

I also spent quite a bit of time and mental energy earlier in the year assembling a nice vintage component sound system. This is something I've been interested in for many years but never did because I was moving around so often that it seemed futile. Now that I am finally settled somewhere for the foreseeable future I have finally indulged, and have an amplifier, tape deck, CD player and receiver, all made in Japan pieces by Technics from the years between 1987 and 1991. I am particularly amused that the tape deck is the newest component and the CD player is the oldest! The amplifier required a lot of contact cleaner on various pots and input selector switches before it would play cleanly most of the time, but it's working quite nicely now. Everything else has worked just fine, and I love it. I make no claims whatsoever about the objective sound quality of any of these devices or media. I am simply very happy to be able to play music with zero involvement from my phone or my computer, and I love the way the things look all stacked up. Black equipment tends to be sneered at in the serious vintage audio enthusiast world (which I have no aspirations whatsoever to joining), where it's silver and wood or bust, but to my eye this era of black Technics gear is gorgeous, particularly the font and colour with which all the controls are labelled, it's design brilliance. I did not realise just how much I appreciate and miss the aesthetics of consumer electronics from this era in general, and just how much it has vanished from modern life. When I was young, the idea of a high tech device *not* having a single 7-segment numeric display on it anywhere was pretty well inconceivable. Now the only other things in my house which have them are a kitchen timer and the washing machine. The beautiful cyan glow of VFD technology is completely gone.

That's it, I guess. I'm not very happy with how all-over-the-place this entry is, but it seems better to post something than nothing. I do think I want to write more often than this, so tring to flush out the blockage seems like a good idea.