Life Changelog

2026-01-05

Edited Denpa Webring

Pruned the Denpa webring of dead links, updated some links where the website has changed address.

If I removed your site and you're mad about this, firstly you're the one that let the link rot and never told me, second, get in contact with a working link and I'll reinstate it.

Changed Primary Laptop

My x220 has served me well for 6 years or so, and it's still perfectly functional. That being said it's starting to show ware, having been my daily driver for that whole time, and also given that it was second hand when I bought it. I've known for some time that I never wanted to be left thinkpadless, so I've always kept an eye out for good deals on ebay for a backup, and about 6 months ago I picked up an x230 for a very reasonable price. Well the battery in my x220 gave out (I have spares so it's not actually a big problem), I decided to give my workhorse a well deserved break and move over to the new x230

Hopped Distros

Switching laptops presented me with an opportunity to rethink my computing environment. The first and most obvious opportunity for change was linux distro. I've used Artix Linux for years. I didn't understand why systemd was bad when I first started using it, I had just been told to believe that by nerds and believed them. These days I have learned enough to understand (at least to some extent) why runit is a superior init system, so I have learned the lesson, "believe nerds".

So I knew whatever I switched to I would also want to be systemdless. I've previously had very positive experiences with OpenBSD, which is the only significant "distro hop" (not technically a distro hop) I've done over the past 5 or so years, but I switched back to Artix since I need to be able to run japanese visual novels through wine which is not available on OpenBSD. So linux it was. I ended up going with void, since it's another popular systemdless distro and it also supports musl, which I wanted to try out. I figured if it gave me any problems I would switch back, but roughly a month in and I've had nothing but good times.

New Setup

Beyond just changing distros, I'm taking this clean slate as a chance to be more mindful of the software I use, and am making a concerted effort to keep my system reasonably minimal. The biggest change other than the distro is probably changing window managers. Again I've been using tiling window managers for an extremely long time, I used i3 for about 4 months before switching to bspwm, and have stuck diligently with bspwm the whole time. That is, aside from my brief stint with OpenBSD, where I had used cwm. I found that I quite liked cwm back then, so I had originally intended to go with that, but I thought while I'm setting this up, let me just try something out. I remembered stumbling across sowm, which as far as I can tell is the most minimoool window manager yet created. I thought "let me try this out" assuming I would end up switching to something more reasonable when it turned out to be unusable, but to my surprise, sowm has turned out to be perfectly sufficient. It literally just werks, let me guess you "need more" yadda yadda. Along with this switch has come the realisation that I don't actually need a status bar. Previously my status bar showed me the time and date, battery percentage, cpu and ram usage, the title of the currently focussed window, and which workspace I was on. I don't need to know which workspace I'm on since I just went there so I already know. I also don't need to know the which window is currently focused since 90% of the time I only have one fullscreen window open anyway, and the rest of the time I can just tell. I was never looking down to check that anyway, since I had window borders which changed colour depending on whether a window was focussed or unfocussed, but again, I don't really need that. For the other utilities, I've replaced them with terminal commands. I don't have this information constantly clogging the screen, if I want to know the time and date I can just open a terminal and type "date". For battery percentage and status, and CPU temp, I do the same thing, but with a simple shell scripts which just check the relevant files and print the information I need. It's actually very nice not having bar, it's like when you turn the HUD off in a video game and suddenly it feels like the graphics have improved. It's not like I couldn't have a bar, there is a patch for sowm which allows it to leave a gap for a bar, I just chose not to have one.

Alongside that change I've also switched from urxvt to st, from newsboat to newsraft, and from brightnessctl, which is 740~ lines of c, to an 8 line shell script, from qbittorrent to ar.

Failed Post

I wanted to write a post complaining about the lack of quality theory relating to concepts like FOSS, minimal software, and permacomputing. I ended up reading 4 books and writing about 5000 words before deciding to scrap the post. It was becoming clear that I was suffering from scope creep, what had begun with the intention of briefly criticising both the "free software" approach and the "open source software approach" (by way of critiquing Free Software Free Society by Richard Stallman, and The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Homesteading the Noosphere by Eric S Raymond) ended up ballooning into a more comprehensive critique of those books, which I realised was quite a significant task. I also assume that such things have already been done better than I could do them. In the end I went from trying to say one thing to trying to put all my thoughts on all of this stuff in one giant place, and I realised this sort of thing is a book that takes a year to write, not a blog post. I also realised another thing, that my solutions, my answers, my conclusions, they were half-baked. They need more time in the oven before I'm ready to post them publicly. Because critiquing those books was just the first part of the post, the bulk of the post was supposed to be going over my "critical software theory", trying to understand the role software plays in society, how and why that differs from the role it ought to play, and how we might better design software and society in service of this role. Well I do think I'm vaguely onto something here, I also think I'm underqualified for this job. Yes I've cobbled together a video game or two in godot, and yes I've written some oversized shell scripts that should probably be ported to a real programming language at that point, but I'm not much of a programmer really. I think it's a bit presumptuous to claim that I have any special knowledge. I have the advantage over most programmers of having a humanities background, of knowing what "rigorous theory" looks like to some extent. But I think it would take someone who is better than me in both skillsets to actually produce the book I want to exist. Because it would have to be a book to cover the ground I want it to cover. I'm not (yet) the right person for the job. But maybe some day I'll come back to it, maybe I'll release it in chunks on here. But basically I was overly ambitious. I'm not too disappointed with this or anything, I feel like I learned plenty of stuff in the process which is all I really wanted to do anyway.