## Zen thoughts & Autumn nights

It’s Autumn my favorite time of year, there is something serine something calm about Autumn. Crisp mornings and cool nights everything seems more peaceful. Unfortunately, this is somewhat a false sense of security as I watch my planet fall to power hungry rulers and ideological activists. just for a moment I can find peace here in the Autumn night sky as I gaze upwards to the letting my mind travel through time and space. Vast galaxies, beautiful nebula of young nesting, maybe one day to give life to a planet like my own.

Sometimes I want to leave my planet and never return but that would be turning my back on beautiful unique world. For all we know life is the rarest thing in the known universe, but treat our iPhones with more care than life. A mind shift is needed and this will only come when we learn as humanity to let go.

                                                                                                                                           Zen                                                                                                                                                                                 
R.            

## The death of skinny jeans

 ## The death of skinny jeans

For years I have kept my distance from skinny jeans, as with most fashion trends skinny jeans were pointless, impractical and sometimes outright dangerous! 

What is the point of jeans or pants that you can't sit down in or have great difficulty in sitting down?There is no point, it's pointless.

Your clothes need flow they need balance and room to move not to be uncomfortable restricted and a an unplanned vasectomy from sitting down the wrong way!

No I am not sorry to see this trend go the way of the Dodo, yes I know as fashion always does it will return and it will be just as pointless then as it is now.

Flow like water lite like a gentle breeze.

```

 ,-,-.

/ (_o \

\ o ) /

 `-'-'

 

```

r.

---

## Back on Ubuntu

Well, I was never really off Ubuntu or or more accurately Xubuntu, but recently I have a computer I had an accident of my own making. 

## Minimalist journeys

Back to minimalism and defining it. On my quest to a more minimal life virtual and analog I have been consuming more minimalist content, mainly Youtube. I have been watching an ultra minimalist or that's what she calls herself and she is right to do so as she is what I would describe as an ultra minimalist.

To proxy or not to proxy? That is the question

I have been looking into proxies more accurately a reverse proxy.

I run a Gemini capsule and it has really become my main site thee days, I am much happier crating content for Gemini than the web. I have a lot more to say on that subject but I will save that for a another article.

## Decluttering life with a cluttered brain

I'm still decluttering the house to ready it for sale, I have done quite a bit but there is still so much to do. 

I've read and watched tutorials, been given advice but all these are designed around linear thinking, not

Dyslexic Thoughts & Saturday morning coffee

Sunny but cold, winter is coming I guess. 

I'm in my favourite cafe once again drinking coffee listening to music (Ambient techno). I do love this time of year though, cool and fresh it seems, even though we are heading into winter. 

lately I have been thinking about my dyslexia and how I get around it so to speak, and how over the years it has hindered me from doing things I wanted to do because I coincided myself dumb!

The Digital Nomad

What is the concept of a Digital Nomad.

Well the common description of a Digital Nomad is someone is digitally mobile and who's work life is mobile too. this gives the freedom to work anywhere, using WIFI hotspots, mobile tethering for online connection, working out of shared spaces B&B hostels etc, basically anywhere.

My History With Debian

 Debian in the Linux world and the general tech world is considered to be one of the most stable mature distributions that exists in the world of Linux today. You find will it on servers, in the sciences, education and even NASA, Debian is the distribution of choice on the International space station and of course on the home desktop/laptop.

Cafe notes

It's been a busy week at work, yesterday I was working across three different buildings and will be doing the same again next week.

But it's the weekend and a long weekend too. Monday is a public holiday, so again I'm sitting in my usual cafe with my coffee and laptop with mousepad open writing this gemlog. I thought about writing on the current conflict between Israel and Palestine but I see there are plenty of people out there on the web expressing their opinions and some of them quite frightening. 

I did though comment on a question posted on Twitter, the post went something like; "Will humans ever be capable and loving enough to eradicate hatred and evil in this lifetime?"

The replies were sadly "No" and my reply to this was "This makes me sad because I feel it is true. I don't think humans have evolved enough to truly control emotion and I feel we would destroy ourselves before we got anywhere near it."

I often dream of a Utopian reality where we as the Human race could live like this.

But I can't see it happening. 

I have always tried to be a good person, acknowledge my faults and improve on them. 

I love Science, Physics, Genetics etc, but noway am I an authority on any of it. 

Through science I have learnt to see us as a race as equal. Skin colour, ethnicity, culture, religion etc are only skin deep, underneath we are all the same. 

Physics teaches us that all matter is just energy moving really fast through time and space. E=mc2. This is beautiful and something I constantly remind myself.

R.

Cafe notes

Its a cloudy Saturday and I'm sitting in my usual cafe drinking my morning coffee, writing this short post on my newly upgraded Ubuntu desktop! Ubuntu 23.10 codename 'Mantic Minotaur'.

I upgraded first thing this morning with out a hitch. I would have upgraded on release day, but sadly the Ubuntu installer was compromised by a community contributor with Ukrainian translations submitted to a public third party online service, that the Ubuntu installer uses. So the Ubuntu team removed the release from their site and disabled downloads for the new release. 

As of writing this the downloadable images are still disabled, but from this morning it seems you can upgrade from a previous version.

It's sad to see this happening to Ubuntu or any Open Source project for that matter, I'm glad it was picked up quickly, but I wonder as Open Source has exploded into the mainstream over the years this will become more frequent.

=> Read the Mantic Minotaur release notes here [HTML]

=>  Read more about the malicious translation incident here [HTML]

R.

Adults can be dicks!

 Adults can be dicks!

It's Sunday and I am sitting yet in another cafe watching people go about their daily tasks. There are families that have come out on this spring morning, watching their children play on the jungle gym while the parents sit and drink coffee. 

I don't have children, and really never wanted to. Not sure why but maybe there was a feeling that I would never be able to look after them, also close to home is divorce and/or separation. It is the children that suffer most, especially when parents use their children as weapons against the other half, something I am very familiar with.

It leaves a lasting scar unfortunately and a difficulty in trust.

To any parents about to go through a divorce/separation leave your kids out of it, they don't need the bullshit you are about to inflict on each other.

R.

Copied from my Gemini capsule, Proxied here: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/cratermouse.com/

Cafe notes

Another Saturday another post written from a cafe.

it's overcast here today but the temperature is mild. I had another meeting with the Lawyer yesterday going over the estate of my fathers house, all pretty straight forward but still something I just want wrapped up and finished. really the only thing to do now is sell the house, hopefully sooner than later. There is a bit of work to do, nothing structural but lots of little things. 

Physically it is file but mentally it's quiet daunting. Lot's of lots of items that contain lots of memories and hard to part with, but material items are just that, material items, they have no memory they are just things. it doesn't make it any easier though. 

It's hard to let go sometimes but I try tho think of the future, new beginnings and new adventures, this helps with cleaning out the old and parting with the past.

R.

Copied from my Gemini capsule: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/cratermouse.com/

A day off

I don't often take days off from work but recently there has been a few changes in my life and not for the better unfortunately. I have come to realise that you need to take a little time for yourself just to relax and move your mind away from work related issues. 

I am one for always being on call 7 days a week, this was very true during Covid. maybe at the time it was needed. but I, like allot of people forgot to switch off after the pandemic. Of course it doesn't help when every news media outfit finds a so called expert telling everyone that we are continuously on the verge a new Pandemic! More panic more boosters more masks and of course more money and power to a certain group of people.

Anyway I'm getting a bit of track here.

I have always known this but rarely practice it, 'You need to take time for yourself'. What ever that time may look like it should be yours to do what you want with and not dictated by anyone else. 

Today for me it's sitting in a cafe drinking coffee listening to music and writing this on my Ubuntu based laptop in a text editor called Mousepad. My day is unstructured and unplanned, this is my day for a little peace and enjoyment. 

R.

Copied from my Gemini capsule: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/cratermouse.com/

Back at work

Today was my first day back at work after my health issues and needed rest. I was slightly anxious about returning to work as I knew there would be a sea of emails to wade through, questions to be answered requests to be completed etc.

I would say that my level of health is around 90 percent, feeling okay but still taking things easy and not letting things run away on me.

Lunchtime I went out for a walk around town which felt good even though it is overcast today, it is warming up as we move into Spring down here in NZ.

I guess the motto of the week? is "Take it easy”.

Which I will.

R.

Copied from my Gemini capsule: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/cratermouse.com/

Cafes and downtime

In my effort to regularly add content to my Gemspace, today I am sitting at a cafe with my laptop writing this post. As in previous posts I like cafes, for me they are places of relaxation but with enough social noise and movement as not to be trapped in solace.

I'm still off work and have a few more days to myself, I was going to title this cafes and recovery but, recovery from what? I don't know, so I think downtime is more suitable. Having this time off from work has been great, I am one who reluctantly takes time off work though my advice to others is you must take time off for yourself and your health. I should listen to myself more.

It's a nice sunny spring day here which adds to the feeling of calm a perfect day for hanging out at a local cafe writing text and creating content on my Gemspace :)

R.

Copied from my Gemini capsule: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/cratermouse.com/

Health and Gemini

So I haven't really been around for a little while, or at leased posting on my here on my capsule. My health has not been the best unfortunately. Mostly my mental health. I lost my Father a few months ago which affected me more than I thought. I didn't really notice the slow degrading of my health until I basically came to a grinding halt! Work and personal life. 

On the mend now though, I did the right thing and reached out for help, took some time off work for myself and did absolutely nothing apart from rest and play around with Linux and of course started posting on my Gemini capsule again. I forgot how pleasant it is to hang out in the Gemini space and looking forward to adding allot more content to my capsule.

Adventures with FreeBSD Week Four

This is really a summary of my month in FreeBSD so will be a little shorter than my previous posts. 

Well its week four and I have been using FreeBSD as my daily driver on my laptop for four weeks. Installation, configuring, re-configuring, installing software and general use. 

I have had allot of fun with FreeBSD and learned allot in the process. I have been a Linux user since the 90's and Linux users from around that time, will remember that Linux, even the out of the box distros, were still 'some assembly required' 

I am a Ubuntu user and have been since 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog and have had the luxury of an out of the box 'no assembly required' workstation for a long time, which I am not complaining about at all but, when you use something like FreeBSD you do realise that over the years, you have become a bit rusty and forgotten how to get your hands dirty. 

So there are two question to be answered.

1. Will I keep FreeBSD on my laptop ?
2. Will I continue to use FreeBSD on the desktop ?

Will I keep FreeBSD on my laptop ?

No. The reason for this decision is, my laptop is an everything computer. Work, home, cafe etc, so I really need a true 'no assembly required' OS and for me that is Ubuntu. I am actually writing this on my laptop with the Ubuntu drive back in. I was planning on keeping FreeBSD a little longer, but a work issue arose, that I couldn't do with out allot of configuring of FreeBSD. So work took precedent and I had to swap out the drives a little early.

I probably could have configured it to do the job but, in my line of work which is Information Management and digital preservation you never know what you're going to get sometimes, so I need something I can either use instantly or very quickly install software/hardware to complete the job and Ubuntu hit's the spot. 

Will I continue to use FreeBSD on the desktop ?

Yes I will continue to use FreeBSD, I am planning on installing it on a secondary desktop machine and continue to work and learn more about it. I really enjoy running FreeBSD it puts the excitement back into computing I think.

Hopefully at some point, I will be advanced enough to build true out of the box experience. 

Well that about raps up my month with FreeBSD. 

I wholeheartedly recommend that everyone have a go and try out FreeBSD, if you can install it on hardware it's a much better experience than vertualisation. but if you can't VertualBox works just fine.

R.

Adventures with FreeBSD Week Three

So on to week three. 

previously I've discussed installation, setup and installing applications.

In this post I will cover some of the issues I encountered and what I did to fix them, or at leased workaround them.

1. Audio.

I noticed that audio playback was not the best, it would pop and stutter when playing audio locally and streaming. I tried a few different media players, audacious, Parole, VLC and also Chromium and Firefox web browsers, they all seem to have the same issue with audio. 

My first thought was the wifi was interfering with audio playback. I've experienced this on Linux, where you are connected to a wired network, but you wifi card is still active and every now and again it pings the network, causing a cpu spike that causes the audio to pop and stutter. 

The solution to this, was to either use wifi instead of wired, or turn wifi off when connected to a wired network.

Since I am running FreeBSD on a laptop I am almost always connected to wifi and rarely connected to a wired network, but I may as well test it, so I connected to a wired network and disabled the wifi. No difference, still the same audio issues.

After a bit of research on the net, I found a few discussions from people with similar audio issues running FreeBSD. 

I found a post on the FreeBSD forums discussing a similar audio issue I was having and the steps taken to fix it. 

These steps involved editing a pulseaudio config file called 'daemon.conf', this file is located in /usr/local/etc/pulse/ 

I needed to uncomment the three lines below and change their values.

* ; avoid-resampling = false 'Uncomment and change to yes'

* ; default-sample-rate = 44100 'Uncomment and change to 48000'

* ; deferred-volume-safety-margin-usec = 8000 'Uncomment this line and change to 1'

Afterwards these lines looked like this.

* avoid-resampling = yes

* default-sample-rate = 48000

* deferred-volume-safety-margin-usec = 1

This fixed my audio problems on FreeBSD apart from audio playback in the Chromium web browser. I still get a few pops and stutters, but definitely an improvement from before.

Note: I only have audio issues with Chromium not Firefox, so this seems to be a Chromium related problem, not so much a FreeBSD audio related problem.

2. Mount and access external devices.

Out of the box FreeBSD doesn't have auto-mounting of devices configured, on a server this is of course understandable, but on a desktop where you are using removable media regularly, it is expected that when you plug in a device, it will be readily available.

Note: I am an advocate for referring to the FreeBSD handbook for configuring your system but, for mounting removable media on an everyday desktop, I was advised not to follow the setup in the handbook, but follow the setup from the following website.
freebsd desktop part 17 automount removable media 

Following 𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚗,s guide, I was able to setup auto mounting removable media and it works perfectly.

3. Wine.

Hmmm, At the time of writing this, I have not been able to get wine to work on FreeBSD. 

Wine installs fine, you can run the wine config application but when trying to install anything using wine it will result in errors. These are programs that historically install perfectly under wine on Linux based systems.

In defence of FreeBSD here, we must remember some assembly required, and also remembering FreeBSD is predominantly a server orientated OS not an out of the box ready to go desktop.

From what I can see with the Wine on FreeBSD, it's more a configuration issue than a bug and I am sure I will get it to work once I have figured it out. 

At the end of the day these really are the only issues I have had using FreeBSD as an everyday desktop, I'm sure there will be others in the future and I'm sure all can be sorted with a bit of time and configuration.

Next week. will I stay with FreeBSD as a desktop.

R.

Adventures with FreeBSD Week Two

So, after the initial setup, and the installation of a few essential packages (plugins and applications) I have been busy customising and creating my perfect desktop for daily use. Anyone who has used FreeBSD knows, it comes with the caveat of 'some assembly required.' Now this is fine, as it contributes to the growing of new neurons in the brain. Seriously it does!

A note on the generation of new neurons in the brain. over recent years we have seen big tech move us from type and text to point and click and now, endless scrolling where more than two lines of text is considered too long and too hard for the populous to understand. as a lover of text this breaks my heart, but also concerns me deeply that we are being steered slowly but surely into yes and obey mode and not into question-and-answer mode.

A quest for knowledge is the mode I default to. The three R's 'Research Research Research' and then research some more. Eventually you complete your quest, and you will be a better person for it.

I will write more on this subject in the future.

Back to the desktop.

I am presented with fairly default XFCE desktop, the first thing I do is turn off display icons on the desktop and turn off show applications in the right click menu this makes things look a little tidier. I also installed themes, icon packs and backgrounds as you do with XFCE to make it your own.

I took the top panel down to 24 and added a skin to it to give it just a hint of shading. I removed the bottom panel altogether and replaced it with plank. Usually with XFCE I keep the bottom panel and use it as quick launch for applications, but this time I decided to replace it with plank so it would act as a dock and launcher similar to MacOS.

So far, I have found everything I need in the FreeBSD repository including those below and have found that they are either the latest versions or very recent, maybe one version behind. 

•  Audacious
•  Dosbox
•  Hexchat
•  VLC
•  Firefox
•  Chromium
•  Thunderbird
•  FileZilla
•  Gimp
•  Inkscape
•  Nextcloud client.

This is not a complete list but it's a base to get things started. as I said some assembly required.

Installing applications on FreeBSD.

A quick overview of Installing Applications and Packages and Ports from the FreeBSD handbook.

'FreeBSD is bundled with a rich collection of system tools as part of the base system. In addition, FreeBSD provides two complementary technologies for installing third-party software: the FreeBSD Ports Collection, for installing from source, and packages, for installing from pre-built binaries. Either method may be used to install software from local media or from the network.’

If you are coming from Linux, you are probably familiar with Apt from Debian, Pkg works work in a similar way.

--------------------

pkg install ‘software package’
pkg search “search for software, can use wild cards * as well”
pkg delete “remove software package”

--------------------

There are many other options for pkg which can be found in the man pages.

I wont cover ports here as I haven’t used any on this install of FreeBSD, as I have so far found everything I need as a pre-built package.

So far, I have a very clean workable desktop on a robust stable foundation, FreeBSD.

Note: one of the great things about XFCE is that it is so customisable, and you can make and set it up just the way you want.

That’s about for now, there is probably more I should add here and I know I haven’t gone into detail on how to do things in FreeBSD, but this is more about my experience and to answer the question Can FreeBSD be my daily driver?

Next week I will be discussing configuration and trouble shooting.

R.