gemini://idiomdrottning.org/re-offmini

> In my workflow, I identified three different stages of work: 1) exploring for new things to know and collecting stuff to read later (aka serendipity), 2) reading, studying stuff and 3) building (aka writing or coding).

> The online world made that first stage so good, so fun, so infinite that I spend my day stuck in it. It’s like a cigarette ritual: each excuse is good to say “let’s take a break and explore”. Each minute spent reading or building is the justification for ten minutes of exploration.

That’s just an excerpt, there’s more, it’s gold. Very insightful about why online is such a time sink. I learned things I am looking forward to address in my own life.

The second half, the proposed solution with markdown files and folder dumps and new protocols and peer-to-peer SSB-like pods, I don’t agree with, but I’ve written more about that here:

Markdown is just really difficult to parse.

Again with the more specs, more protocols, more homework, endless NIH to solve the problem of the web’s complexity by piling on more complexity! I can’t!

Make a script that calls a gem fetcher (like gmni) and put that in a cron job and call it a day. For the HTTPS world, Calibre has a lot of this functionality already.

We want more time so we… sink a lot of time into implementing all of this new stuff?! When are we gonna have time to actually live?♥︎

I already have an offline-centric approach to this stuff but still I got sucked into almost three hours of writing today. At the expense of breakfast, resting (still sick), or getting in some early work hours (to enable me to quit earlier). It’s gonna be a stressful day.

And this is after me downloading Teletext news, Fedi replies, and some picks from the Gemini world. It still ate up a bunch of hours. It’s more thoughtful and long-form and essayist and quiet and hopefully useful to someone, but it’s still the same old weird focus managing issues that led me to pursue offline-ness in the first place. Which didn’t work. Instead, I need to cut down on quantity, not timing.

I remembered that I’ve found that notifications can actually help me more than they hinder me. If I know that I’ll be notified for the important or more personal stuff, I can check out the more general community more seldomly and less.

I just now had to re-learn that lesson. Since my cron jobs got lost when I nuked my desktop setting up Bullseye last week (they live in /var/spool, for future reference; or just backup the output of crontab -l), so did my gemrefinder notifications, and so I started neurotically checking Antenna every day and with that came getting sucked into more topics.

Having notifications can keep my mind off of the “checking checking checking” mentality.

Re: Offmini, My Dream of Making Gemini Offline and Distributed

Update, a few minutes later

A little bit later