This past year has been one of significant change. By this I don’t mean Ai or shaky geo-political situations, or the cost of eggs and gas (more worried about the eggs; I eat a couple every day).
The change has been personal: mental and physical. For the first time ever thoughts and feelings I’ve had around movement and how it can be used as a tool for self-creation/realization have finally started to coalesce into something that actual works.
How I do all of this (this type of work is never done) is a story for another place and another time. However, I bring it up here because those changes have taken me out of place of constant self-doubt, struggle defined by bouncing between one crisis and another and delivered me to a place of growth.
In short, I have a little breathing room to consider and act on things I’ve thought about for a long time. One of those writing of course, which I’m doing right now. The other is what I think will be long hard road of separating the idea of content creation from platforms and on homespun sites like the one you are reading here. You know, like we did in the olden days, before twitter, if you can remember that.
I wouldn’t say that I love Instagram, but I do spend a lot of time there and while I follow a few creative people there, the incentives are to mold your content to everyone else’s and creativity gets flattened, content homogenized. So I built this space (and by build I mean told Claude what to do, I’ll come back through here are spice things up a bit later. Ai is really good at removing friction and as someone who bounces between ideas at what feels like 1000 miles an hour, removing that friction is a blessing).
Taking this idea a step further I’m attempting to open the a small crack in the wall of Apple’s walled garden I’ve been living in for the past seven years of Mac use and the last fourteen years of iPhone use.
I’ve always been drawn to Linux, and I’ve had linux box here and there, but mostly lacked the chops to set it up well and was always fell prey to the coolness of Apple, which to be fair, was actually cool for a long time. And while it’s always been a hype-machine money grab the company did “Think Different” to use their own words. Now the half eaten apple is ubiquitous and well, thinks like a lot of other mature companies do.
To finally wrap that last graph up I’ll say I’m writing this on new Dell XPS 13, which I got on DHH’s recommendation. I’ve also followed his lead and installed Omarchy (there’s the bow!) which is his (and others) opinionated version of arch linux. Aside from a short bit of confusion with the github cli install and getting used to moving about in a different way I’m liking this set-up, but there’s still a lot to learn. We’ll see how it goes, and how my set-up changes over time. The point is that I can make this machine whatever I want, which you can’t do with a PC or Mac.
That’s it for now. As for updates, they maybe frequent, they maybe few and far between. The tone will be casual and sometimes I’ll be serious, and I’ll probably yell at a few clouds too.
I can promise that the words here will never be generated by an LLM (the code, that’s a different story).
Later.
Robert