being a nerd 15 and 30 years ago
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Considering I haven’t learned or come across anything of value to share to you guys, let’s indulge my imagination for a moment. 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.
2008 - A lot would surprisingly be the same.
- I’d have a thiqq secondhand laptop as my daily driver, and I’d probably still be into free and open source software. Coincidentally, it wasn’t much later that a student teacher would walk in with the most chuunibyou smirk on his face and pull out his laptop boasting, “Guys, it happened! Stand in awe at the power of Ubuntu,” as the rest of the class collectively yawned.
my first laptop - Gateway MT6705 (2007)
ode to radio
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Earlier this week, I completely overlooked time zones when I set out to record online radio using my remote server. My Debian server is set in UTC and I put all of the times in my crontab (scheduler) in local time, therefore missing everything I wanted to hear. I feel like a donut for taking so long to notice, but I might as well take this teaching opportunity to detail a use for computer scheduling that I haven’t seen documented anywhere else and that you could benefit from.
[...]backup
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I need to get my backup situation in order to avoid wasting time.
I ended up nuking my installation of pacman about halfway through the month trying to free up space on my paltry 64 GB drive, and I spent about a week on and off trying to fix it only to give up and nuke my otherwise perfect Arch Linux installation. Luckily, I had my home partition separate from the root partition, so I didn’t have to pointlessly migrate my files to a scratch disk (that I didn’t even have) and back. Thankfully, the problem was fixed, and getting back to a workable environment took only an afternoon.
dumbsmart phone
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When I wasn’t off doing real life stuff, how have I filled my time this past month?
For one, I’ve eased off the monke, innawoods mantra and changed back to my 2017 smartphone as my daily driver. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a strange glitch with the Nokia 225 that cut off predictive text halfway through a word if a text was received during typing. As much as I enjoyed flexing on people’s iPhone 47Smax2+funkymode and its tumor growth of cameras, the threshold for this lifestyle meme was always functionality, and I don’t see anyone coping with such a major oversight.
[...]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.
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