2022 update

my blog's been inactive but I am not dead. this year I have mostly been keeping up with my job, it's going as well as you would expect; visiting online friends in person; getting stoned; reading a lot.... I will keep the blog updated as I feel the need, but for the most part I have been quiet except around my friends and the few communities in which I remain active.

for me, this year has mostly been one for self-discovery, and although much has happened and it feels like a really long year, it's set a good precedent for me as I finish the year and plan ahead for 2023.

I have plans for my website specifically. I want to add more content, make it easier to update relatively structured data (OMEMO and PGP keys seem like an easy first step to tackle), and start linking to other websites more. I'd also like to expand the git page since right now the 404 isn't very much to look at. my repositories are still directly accessible via git-daemon using the bare git:// protocol, but that isn't fancy enough, of course.

also, I plan to move really soon, once I've finished some things up where I currently live. other than making sure my finances are straight, I'm going forward with my name change, because here I'd have to wait 90 days after moving out-of-county to apply through the courts. once I do that, I'll be more comfortable opening accounts; I want to leave my bank, find a good financial credit union, and actually connect my LiberaPay and OpenCollective accounts so that I can take in funding that will go entirely toward Volatile { .onion .i2p .ano }.

once I move, I'll get some colocation quotes from several datacentres around the area and make a plan to finally move off my dedis and VPSes. a few others are interested as well, so this should help with initial setup and any recurring costs. I have actually E-mailed one DC for a quote, but their mailserver refuses mail from my main address. they wanted me to just call them, but I'd rather have everything written out to refer to it later.

other things of interest: I have gotten tired enough of UNIX and UNIX-like systems (BSD, Linux, anything) that I am making baby steps into operating system development. as well, I've been studying programming languages in an effort to design a language I'd be happy with using—one that is portable and influenced heavily by functional-paradigm programming. nothing's set in stone, this has mostly been an experimental side project of mine. I do not want to follow the bad design practices that UNIX inspired, but I do want to keep a POSIX compatibility layer so that I can say my OS runs useful stuff. :)

while I study a lot of OS and PL design and try to learn how to do things correctly, I want to incorporate more-immediate fixes to my workflow, things that should not take as much time. I've been inspired by projects such as river to take a stab at writing my own wayland compositor, after running bspwm on all my headed devices for well over a year now. I've run into some accessibility issues common between most (all?) major X window managers, and it's hard to hack on bspwm, or in fact, anything that builds on top of xorg to provide graphics. it's nasty, I've been looking at wayland, and the only issues I see so far with wayland, are issues I can totally avoid. I don't like hard dependencies on shit such as udev either. I'll work on that because nobody else seems to be.

I will probably be less active on fedi, since I am sick of the buggy software ecosystem, and I do not yet wish to spend time learning the ActivityPub protocol in order to write replacements for software. I'll be experimenting with secure scuttlebutt which seems like a much simpler protocol to write a simple client and pub against. not in node.js, this time.

I'm still active as ever on XMPP, Volatile still has a MUC, it's still idle but I believe it will pick up once we set our plans into motion for the project. I'm still ready to invest time and money into it, because I believe in it.

aside from that, I've been more mindful and more flexible about how I approach life. I have considered publicising a calendar so that others can plan their time around me, but that requires adhering to a schedule first, which I tend to be bad at doing.

I have also decided I want to set up a wishlist page, perhaps under donations (that page still exists but so far I have been unprepared to take donations). I buy most of my products used anyway, my computers are built from equal parts new and used parts, and I like toying around with a lot of stuff that I want but don't strictly need. I figure this would be a good way for people to send stuff they don't use to my P.O. box so I can put it to use. I'll provide more details as I'm ready to do this. a studio apartment is not enough space to store more than what I already have, for sure.