April 9 2019 technology progress update
A couple years I laid out these technology goals. Let's see how I did:
- Email address on own domain ([email protected])
- Personal computer with free software operating system
- Phone running free software operating system
- seamless phone/laptop interoperability, such as working on projects from phone and making calls from computer
- ability to bend time in space, insofar as sending texts with delay is bending time and space
- activity log, such as “I did set this alarm”
- Domain name registration that is more intuitive and cheaper than namecheap
- Editable personal wiki
- Less addictive twitter by not autoloading. wow it’s easy to get sucked in
- Personal cloud services, though right now I trust keybase and github for cloud storage
- Email address on own domain ([email protected])
I have this, but it's not everything I hoped it would be. I signed up for a paid plan on protonmail.com, and it turns out gmail has quite a few niceties, and behaviors that my protonmail lacks.
The keyboard shortcuts are different, the keyboard navigation is lacking in general. j and k do not work, and it's too much of a hassle to navigate through email without them. I kept my gmail address and it's still chugging; not I have 2 email inboxes to check, and a vague notion of what I expect to find in one inbox versus the other.
Also space selects the current message, rather than scrolling down.
The ui loads slowly with an animation that I thought was cool but now I'm tired of seeing.
I'm actually going to see if I can get the frontend running locally, right now, timeboxed to 25 minutes.
- Personal computer with free software operating system
Running ubuntu here and now, though for work I continue to use macos. ah well
- Phone running free software operating system
This is still a pie in the sky
- seamless phone/laptop interoperability, such as working on projects from phone and making calls from computer
Similar to not having a free operating system, this is very much a pie in the sky as well. It's an exciting prospect though!
- ability to bend time in space, insofar as sending texts with delay is bending time and space
Still a long ways off. Need a free operating system on my phone. Now I'm thinking about how to make reusable code a reality for non-programmers. Some combination of visual programming and "app" registration.
- activity log, such as “I did set this alarm”
Nice to have, but yeah not there yet
- Domain name registration that is more intuitive and cheaper than namecheap
Some thoughts on handshake but that seems exorbitant and user unfriendly and all that. Maybe something new will come along that will solve this better. Finally looked into becoming a registrar, and the prices are quite high... much more than using an existing registrar. I can see why facebook.com/mypage took off...
- Editable personal wiki
On it :) need to set up backups still. I should make a wiki-git sync
- less addictive twitter
Twitter is as addictive as ever, though I'm not as engrossed by it as I once was; the political season seems to really hype up those platforms
- personal cloud services
still want to implement this! Using linode to host this wiki, and I'm happy with it. Imagining some sort of decentralized cloud that can move servers around between people generous enough to donate space.
Overall, decent going! New year new list tbd!