Posts

Governments are collecting data on you, that’s a fairly accepted fact at this stage. Whether you’re being “social”, reading email, playing video games or even when you’re writing a book on the NSA. If you want more details The Guardian has a great explanation as to what Snowden’s files mean here. There’s one critical flaw to the NSA’s methods. Most of how the NSA collects data on you(via prism anyway) is through Google, Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook and Microsoft. These technologies are all just choices you’ve made. Thankfully, choices you can undo. ...

I’ve been reading E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and in it I came across a discussion on the French writer André Gide, specifically about his book Les faux-monnayeurs(The Counterfeiters). The book is a merge of reality and fiction, Gide himself keeps a journal of his life as he writes the book and appears to merge the two. The writer is celebrated in Aspects for hurling himself into the novel and for not being bound by the style at the time or “All that is prearranged”. There’s a good example of it in this passage. When brought into a discussion about the book Edouard(who is Gide’s representation in the book) responds on it’s subject. I suggest you read this passage but keep blogging in your mind. ...

A little while ago, I read a post on Sebastian Marshall’s blog about cutting caffeine, in which goes into the benefits and a method he uses for quitting coffee. He suggests cycling off it to reset your tolerance every so often. I figured that was a really good idea since I’d gotten to the point where in the morning I needed a coffee to feel normal, it was a good time to do something about it. Sebastian’s method of taking caffeine pills I found a little extreme. There’s a certain aesthetic to drinking coffee that I really enjoy and trying to replace it with green tea and pills wasn’t going to work. Sebastian may have a mental strength I simply don’t possess so I needed to offset the caffeine with altering the experience much. ...

Recently I decided to migrate my mail server and I took this as an opportunity to better get my head around setting the whole thing up. I’ve used iRedmail in the past but the whole process seemed a little like magic so I took a scouring around the internets for a decent tutorial and came across A Hacker’s Replacement for Gmail and figured it might be worth building up a salt-stack for people. ...

I love keeping up to date with all the latest tech news, but I find that when I follow numerous blogs there’s a heavy noise to signal ratio and eventually I get bogged down with all the blog posts coming at me. On top of that I don’t particularly like reading from a screen when I can avoid it, I spend so many hours a day reading/writing to computer screens, I always like to take a welcome break. As a result of these two needs I came up with a neat solution that allows me to retrieve all relevant tech news each day, that I can read offline whenever I want. It requires: ...

Last week I moved from Debian to Linux Mint and setup Thunderbird as my new mail client(replacing mutt). Sadly for some reason Thunderbird started tanking and wiped all the mails from my mailserver without actually downloading anything. I could’ve restored the mails from a backup but instead I figured I’d take my emails offline and use Thunderbird as my primary mail client. I had a backup of my mails from OfflineImap but the problem was that OfflineImap uses the MailDir format and Thunderbird didn’t support it. ...

Recently I moved jobs and the new company I work for was nice enough to give me a brand new, high-end, retina Macbook Pro. It’s a great machineand I’ve been reminded how great an operating system OSX actually is. Naturally, I’ve been looking at my own machine a little differently. It’s a Lenovo Thinkpad X230 with an SSD and 16GBs of RAM. Generally it’s faster than I’ll need for a long time and I’ve had no real issues with it, but after starting to use the Macbook and the terrific software built with it, I wanted it bad. One evening I started looking at pricing/portability and found one I wanted. I also started looking at software I could use I got excited, about to make a purchase. Then I stopped. I stopped and forced myself to make a list of all the reasons I wanted the Macbook that I couldn’t get on my currently machine. I made the list as specific as possible, not just “it’s pretty” or “all the apps are better”, here’s what I came up with. ...

I went through the precision nutrition trial fast last Sunday, here’s a low-down on how things went through each of the steps. I had trialled this while out and about in central London, but failed at around 5pm, I was disorganised and feeling incredibly dizzy from the crowds and noise, so this time I planned ahead and did this from home. 10 PM Saturday Had a late dinner at the wonderful Chaat on RedChurch Street in Shoreditch. May as well have an epic last meal, right? The advantage of the late final meal was that I actually managed to ramble in from the street and only waited a minute for a table. I didn’t over-do it in terms of food. I often get hungrier the next morning if I eat a huge meal the night before. ...

I’ll keep this one short, because there’s a million and one articles about people walking away from the social network. People are writing like they’re revolutionaries leading the mass exodus. I even poked fun at it in my internet predictions. Anyway, at the start of the year I figured I’d give a month away from facebook a try, partially inspired by Leo Babuta’s A Year of Living Without. Why I asked myself what value I was actually getting from the service. If I can’t be bothered ringing someone and catching up, then realistically why would I waste time liking their cat photos? I also questioned the value of these facebook friends. Am I actually friends with all these people or is the connection just convenient enough for me to keep them around? Do I actually want to share something with them or am I just boasting? Again, this topic has been discussed ad nauseam, but I’ll link this article and quote it’s final line, “Direct interactions with other human beings led people to feel better”. Again, the article is based on one study, but it adds evidence to a belief I’ve held for quite some time. ...

Last night I finished Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and I figured I’d write a quick review on it. It’s a book on the life of an Irish working-class woman named Paula who is struggling with an abusive husband and attempting to keep her family from the brink that her husband creates. The details in this book are what make it particularly excellent writing. The lead character recalls incredibly specific details that bring her tragic story to life. There’s a few mildly absurd elements to the book, but they’re grounded in the unrelenting reality the lead character describes. A chipped plate, the heat from a bag of chips on a cold day, an attempt to describe the burning sensation of being repeatedly kicked in the back. These elements are what kept me turning the pages. ...