Bystroushaak's blog / English section / Weekly updates / Biweekly update 2019-11-24; Mental refactorings and wiki gardening

Biweekly update 2019-11-24; Mental refactorings and wiki gardening

I think I can say that last two weeks were motivated by attempts to organize myself better. I've done a lot of wiki gardening, created new kanban boards and groomed old ones.

Oh, and I've been on the top of the nuclear reactor, peeking right at the fuel rods. Here is a standalone blogpost about that experience: LVR-15 research reactor near Prague.

tinySelf progress

This is relevant:

I know exactly what I need to do, but I find myself unable to actually sit and do it. Like there is some kind of blind spot in the focus of my mind. Fuck that.

I could really, really use some kind of .. assistance / couching. So many times I get to the state of mind where I don't even recognize that I am in. I would really love some lowlevel AI / machine learning that would just say to me "hey, stop doing this, you are in state X". Personal assistant would be superb for this kind of stuff.

Historically, I can see that I have blocks of time of crazy programming productivity, and blocks of time when I do all other kinds of stuff. I have no idea why, or what really changes, and I suspect that I am unable to diagnose this. Maybe some kind of psychologist could help.

Writing

I've published a Moldable tools; a book and a movement blog. Responses were mostly positive, and it created nice bump in traffic:

The translation cost me something like 30€. At the moment, I still write most of my blogs in Czech language and sometimes I translate them myself, sometimes, especially when I want that quickly done, I'll pay someone else to translate it.

I'll have to do a bunch of improvements to this blog. Specifically:

And I really do hate writing CMS, specifically I really do hate building web UI and all the technologies that are necessary. I've done it several times in the past and I always hated the experience.

Object wiki update

All of above led me to idea to write dynamic blog as backend-only application, and then write custom PyQT GUI which will provide some kind of control panel and will allow to control the blog remotely. This lead me to re-evaluation of my object wiki approach, which is dictated by the tinySelf, as that should be used as backend for object storage.

I've considered this and I've spent huge amount of time thinking about various pros and cons. This has led me to pick up my older wiki-prototype written in PyQT and push some attention and will into it. I think that I'll try to expand this idea and see where can I get with the prototype.

This doesn't mean that my original idea with tinySelf is discontinued, I'll work on both approaches at the same time and I'll try to merge these two approaches together later.

So current approach should be:

Progress:

Book report

I have to confess, that I've accidentally wandered into the bookstore and bought four books. Borne, book about software architecture, book about machine learning in py and small and thin book about mind maps.

I've finished Borne by VanderMeer and I didn't like it much. Other than that, I've made good progress through von Neumann and Organized mind. At the moment, I am also at the end of Orbus by Neal Asher. I am reading this book for the third time and I just love it.

I've put together list of all books that I have at home:

It contains mostly physical books, not counting the ebooks in my reader or in iPad.

Self improvements

I've been on shooting range twice this month, this time with yet another colleague:

He is a member of a schooting club and does some kind of tactical shooting competetions, so we borrowed CZ Scorpion Evo 3 and he showed me how to use it and gave me a lot of tips. How to hold my hands, how to shoot properly and so on.

I have to say, that it was fun, but almost too easy. You just point it in the right direction and hit anything you want. That little gun (Ruger LC9) on the other hand, that was really, really hard. I wasn't able to hit the target reliably. When we went to shooting-range for second time a week later, I've scored only ~50% of the shots to the target (and I mean whole target). I have a lot to learn. And I am! I've decided that I'll probably apply for a license next year. Everyone around me was very supportive and offered help.

Attempts to create personal schedule

I am also trying to create personal schedule with dedicated blocks for different activities, that I will follow every day, but I've failed so far. I think that maybe I'll try to create some kind of device/software for this.

Random stuff

I've ordered full DNA sequencing (by Dante labs, there will be a blog about it when it is done), and I am seriously considering publishing the resulting DNA, to become opensource :]


This knife by Tefal is absurdly sharp, cheap and generally good knife:

I've never had anything so sharp in a kitchen. And it cost me something like 5€. Now I think about throwing away all my other kitchen knives and replacing them by this Tefal series of one-piece knifes.


This building ignores the invention of zero. I wonder why.


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Yes, my English is probably horrible, but this kind of blog post doesn't qualify for (paid) grammar corrections yet (there is stuff with higher precedence in queue). If you want to change this, subscribe to my patreon. Even with a $1 / month, you can make a difference.

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