being a nerd 15 and 30 years ago
- What would my current life look like in previous generations? Hopefully, doing so puts the sheer exponential speed of technological growth into perspective and makes us grateful for the amenities of today. [...]
ode to radio
- I've been going out of my way recently to find new music, especially in lieu of social media and the mysterious Algorithm. One avenue I chose to take was local radio. The idea is simple: use my computer as a VCR of sorts to record local music programs that air at odd hours for later dissection. [...]
backup
- I ended up nuking my installation of pacman trying to free up space on my hard drive, and I spent about a week trying to fix it - only to give up and nuke my otherwise perfect Arch Linux installation. [...]
dumbsmart phone
- I got to work setting up my workflow for as little dependence of the internet as possible. I don't even have a web browser or a YouTube client installed. However, there is a surprising amount of things you can do offline, including: [...]
off grid return to monke - progress
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What does a lifestyle of not having home internet and using a feature (read: dumb) phone as a daily driver look like?
Pros:
- I’m encouraged to go to bed at a reasonable time more often.
- I’ve been running more consistently due to having nothing better to do.
- I’m encouraged to hang out at school more to mooch off of free Wi-Fi, and with that comes social reinforcement to study and mindfulness about what websites I choose to browse in public.
- I find myself practicing music more without really trying due to easy access to practice rooms and not having to worry about bothering my neighbors and roommates.
- I’ve had less anxiety about being alone without YouTube videos to fill up that empty space. There’d be times I didn’t remotely care for anything in my feed, but still put on a video at random in hopes of getting in the mood, akin to opening the fridge 1000 times. Nowadays, I flip through the radio for a bit when I’m bored at my desk or put on my Japanese passive immersion when I’m bored doing menial chores.
- Social media and YouTube would have to be consoomed deliberately. I found myself giving up feed scrolling entirely instead of going through the trouble to stay up to date on content creators and influencers, and I usually don’t think too much of this until a bugman starts talking to me about pop culture.
Annoyances followed by solutions/adaptations:
[...]ham radio 2 - real life edition
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Now that I’m back in school and with less time to dedicate to hobbies, what do I take away from having gotten my radio license?
Why did I get the license in the first place? The global pandemic had done away with about 6 months up to that point and I saw no point in signing up for online music classes. Therefore, I had all of this free time to myself that I had determined from the start would be dedicated to getting extra money and pursuing personal projects - the biggest one of course being the acquisition of Japanese. The Dunning-Kruger effect was rearing its ugly head and I hadn’t the patience nor the discipline to spend hours of my day on something I was guaranteed not to use for the foreseeable future (lock down).
[...]ham radio
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I struggle to find a place in my life for HAM radio and my fascination with all things radio. Every job or niche that I can conjure for a radio can be done much cheaper and more conveniently with the internet. Let’s list some:
- visual content, which before would have been supplemented with OTA TV, can now be laser focused for the individual via YouTube in a way no broadcasting medium could ever do. Even in the apparent strengths of TV, namely the lack of effort in picking out content and getting a quick dopamine fix, the expense in getting a tuner and decent antenna and the added inconvenience of ads deter me from getting this fix I can frankly do without to begin with.
- all non-commercial radio streams worth anything can be tuned into online and in much better quality than what the portable radio in my phone or mp3 player can provide. Why would I pay $50 for a decent HD radio when I can get every single HD exclusive channel and thousands more a .pls click away?
- talking to cool people. All of the people in my life worth keeping around are not radio fanatics, and the idea of making new friends just to have a reason to use a $600 toy you bought has always felt backwards to me, no matter how much I tried to hype myself up to push the talk button and make a contact. Not to mention, there are no easy ways to actively make friends in this quarantine climate. It has only recently dawned upon me that I am very demanding of the people I choose to reach out to by nature, and every person I’ve heard or seen in this radio sphere are very one-dimensional (focused on one or two things), hard to relate to, or just plain vapid.
I’m left with a basic knowledge of morse code, and I almost feel guilty for not having any outlet for the hours I have spent studying the letters. I tested myself two nights ago, and quite predictably, I had retained enough to get by and spring back up, but not enough to be able to show off to other people even as a proof of concept (the same can be said for my japanese and music study oof). At best, I can sneak in an easter egg into some content that 0.01% of any audience will have the tenacity or drive to interpret.
[...]