musicmatzes blog

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“Thoughts” is (will be) a weekly roll-up of my mastodon feed with some notable thoughts collected into a long-form blog post. “Long form” is relative here, as I will only expand a little on some selected subjects, not write screens and screens of text on each of these subjects.

If you think I toot too much to follow, this is an alternative to follow some of my thoughts.

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This week (2021-07-24 – 2021-07-30) I experienced, once again, how awesome git is. Plus, how awesome is git-annex!
Besides that, nothing interesting happened this week.

git bisect ftw

I had to merge a bunch of branches this week and although the merge itself worked, it resulted in a failing build. This was almost a no-brainer, though, because of the awesome git-bisect.

I nothing more to do than

git bisect start
git bisect bad HEAD
git bisect good old-master
git bisect run cargo check

and then go back to do something else. After a few minutes, the commit that introduced the issue was found and I was able to fix it within a few minutes.

That's how awesome git is.

git-annex is awesome, too!

Did I tell you that git is awesome? Yes. But git-annex is awesome, too!

Though, I had the issue that I wanted to diff a pdf file against its own version. Turns out, that's easily possible with some git configuration, too!

“Suicide Squad” is a 2016 American action hero movie based on DC comics.

Plot

As always, just a short teaser from wikipedia here:

In the film, a secret government agency [...] recruits imprisoned supervillains to execute dangerous black ops missions and save the world from a powerful threat in exchange for reduced sentences.

So it is basically the default super-hero installment one already knows from Marvel or DC. Nothing special.

Reception

On rottentomatoes, the movie scored only 4.9/10. I rather like these kind of action hero movies where one does not have too much to think. The movie was not dumb, with some nice action-scenes and a few funny dialogues. So I would rate it with a 6/10.

“War of the Worlds” from 2005 is a Science-Fiction action movie directed by Steven Spielberg. It features, most prominently, Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning. The movie is based on the 1897 novel by H. G. Wells and some might know about the radio show that most dramatically broadcasted live in 1938

causing panic among its listening audience, though the scale of panic is disputed

(wikipedia)

Plot

Well, the general plot is nothing new. Aliens invade the earth and want to kill all humans. That's about it, without giving too much away. Though the plot is rather trivial, the execution of it is really good.

The movie is really exciting, featuring some really nice and thrilling scenes where one could really chew fingernails! At the end it shifts a bit towards a war-movie.

Reception

rottentomatoes ranks the movie with a solid 7/10. Tom Cruise is a really good actor and I would even say a 8/10 would be legit for this movie.

I watched it three or four times now and I will most certainly rewatch it again!

It is a bit gory though, so maybe not the best fit for an evening with your children around! Definitively not with small children.

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“Thoughts” is (will be) a weekly roll-up of my mastodon feed with some notable thoughts collected into a long-form blog post. “Long form” is relative here, as I will only expand a little on some selected subjects, not write screens and screens of text on each of these subjects.

If you think I toot too much to follow, this is an alternative to follow some of my thoughts.

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This week (2021-07-17– 2021-07-23) I executed more steps toward minimalism and created a profile on a website I do not like.

More minimalism

This week I donated some clothes I don't need anymore (and haven't used for ... a rather long time). I also removed some boxes from my apartment as well, which was also a good feeling.

I also experienced, and I guess that's the same feeling as with the minimalism by removing stuff you don't need, a nice feeling about my removal of github from my everyday websites.

LinkedIn

This week, I also created a linkedIn profile.

I was always against these kind of data-silo services, but I have to admit that LinkedIn can provide value for ones life and I am now trying it out. Lets see where the journey goes.

Building a backup solution

I am building a simple (“off-shore”) backup solution with a RaspberryPi 4B and some external drives. This week I ordered all the parts, and managed to order the wrong SD card. But besides that, everything is going as planned. Of course I ordered a new one right away.

“The old Guard” is a 2020 superhero action movie that really got me.

Plot

The plot is rather simple overall: four secret super heros that are immortal are being hunted for something (I'm not telling because that'd be a spoiler already). Suddenly, something strange happens.

Reception

According to wikipedia, the movie has only a weak 6.5/10 on rottentomatoes. That's really bad, because I would rate it with at least 8.5 or more.

The movie features great action scenes, is not themed with the clean and sleek (marvelesque) Super-Hero style and has some tension to it. I really liked it and can recommend it!

“The Blackout” (not the movie, but the series!) is a Russian science-fiction action thriller series (6 episodes in one season so far) that aired in 2020.

Wikipedia does not have an article on it, yet.

Plot

As always, I don't want to give away too much about the plot of the series.

The series is about an event that suddenly plunges the entire world into darkness, rapidly destroying life on Earth except for a small area in Eastern Europe.

This is the same as the plot of the aforementioned movie, but again: I'm not talking about the movie, but the series!

Reception

The general reception of the movie according to wikipedia is rather bad.

It seems that the series has nothing to do with the series, because the series was really good! I can say that I watched the whole 6 episodes (each about 40 minutes) in one sitting, because it was so exciting. It is, of course, a rather brutal series with a lot of blood and violence, but that's exactly the theme of the series and thus necessary.

I did not find a rating for the series on rottentomatoes, neither did I find a Wikipedia article on it (not even in Russian Wikipedia), so I can only give you my own rating! And I would give this series a solid 8/10 – I really enjoyed watching it and would definitively watch it again!

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“Thoughts” is (will be) a weekly roll-up of my mastodon feed with some notable thoughts collected into a long-form blog post. “Long form” is relative here, as I will only expand a little on some selected subjects, not write screens and screens of text on each of these subjects.

If you think I toot too much to follow, this is an alternative to follow some of my thoughts.

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This week (2021-07-10– 2021-07-16), given my vacation, I thought more about minimalism and the ideal life (yes I was hiking again and was able to let my thoughts just flow), plus I had some thoughts on FLOSS licenses and GitHub copilot.

Minimalism and the ideal life

I again thought about minimalism and what the perfect life would look like for me. I am actually working on an article for the latter part, dreaming about the future with some more thoughts on minimalism, digital nomadism and just being able to be where I want to be.

I am thinking a lot about these more philosophical things lately. Maybe too much? But after all, the world around me is changing with rapid speed, so why not thinking about changing my lifestyle as well?

Liberapay

I made a liberapay account last week. Not because I am now the biggest content creator on earth, but because maybe someone would like to show their appreciation for the FLOSS work I've been doing in the past years and continue to do.

FLOSS Licenses

I also thought about the idea of a FLOSS license that forbids automatic analysis of the code.

I think such a thing might be useful against the GitHub copilot things of our time (which will most certainly get more). I think it won't be easy to develop such a license, but it might be necessary at some point.

“Ragnarok” is a Norwegian fantasy drama series from Netflix. It takes place in the present time in a fictional village in Norway, and apparently the original audio is Norwegian, which is really nice.

A friend of mine watched it in the original language with subtitles and said that it was a really nice flair and gave the series even more a touch of “mysticalness” (if that's a word).

So far, two seasons are released and the story is not finished yet. Keep that in mind if you don't like cliff-hangers!

Plot

As always, I don't want to give away too much here. That's why I removed some parts of the following quote:

[The series] takes place in [...] the fictional Norwegian town of Edda in Hordaland, Western Norway, which is plagued by climate change and the industrial pollution. [...] Magne, a teenage boy [...] begins the fight against those who are destroying the planet.

(wikipedia)

Reception

The series was, according to wikipedia not very well received in Norway. I can understand that one's rather critical if a series takes place in the own country, rather than in some far far away America!

That said, rottentomatoes lists an average of 70% for that series.

I must say that I love that series and cannot wait for the third season (I hope they don't mess it up). I'd rate this with a straight 9/10!

I first heard of minimalism because of some documentary on YouTube. I think it was from “The Minimalists” although I'm not quite sure.

Minimalism online really is a rabbit hole. You can quickly end up spending a whole night discovering different minimalists online, each giving some insight on how they execute their minimalism. Some are more “extremist” than others, but they do have one thing in common: The definition of minimalism is vague enough so everyone could potentially define it for themselves, and still everyone can agree on each others definition.

Sounds vague? Let me try to explain. Minimalism in one sentence, for me is

the idea that material things are not a measurement of value in ones life.

A bit longer explanation would be that the concept of filling ones life with material things, also sometimes deprecatingly called “stuff”, does not improve your life at all. Some material things do provide value, but only for a short amount of time. And people tend to replace the emptiness that expands after that value runs out with more material things, ending up in a loop of buying things to get value in life.

I one manages to see through that loop and manages to actually break it, real value in life can be established by owning only things that matter.

Finding more definitions, examples, opinions and so on online is left as value to the reader. There's a lot. Don't get caught up in a night of research, you've been warned!

Starting minimalism

I started not only thinking about how these concepts but actually trying to implement them in my life a few weeks, maybe a few months now. I started really slowly by opening one cupboard/wardrobe a week and going through things. Every time I found something where I reacted like “Ah, I didn't remember I have this”, I put the thing into a dedicated “give-away-box”. After the box was full, I put things online to give them away.

I gave a handful of clothes to friends and family already and I am giving away more things slowly. Not at a very fast pace, but still noticeable.

Things improve!

I really love how my life changes for the better right now, I feel the improvement every single time I get rid (selling or giving away for free, not trashing of course) of something that I do not need. And by “improvement” I mean not that my life, objectively, improves. But every time I give something away I feel, for a few days, lighter. It might seem strange, but that's what I feel.

And albeit my progress is rather slow and small, it is noticeable for me. If you would come to my home and you'd know me, you'd not see any difference (yet?), though!

Concerns

One thing that concerns me with the topic of minimalism, is that if you try to get some information about the community and individual minimalists online, you quickly end up irritated because all the minimalists out there are like “I have one bag full of things, nothing more” or something like that.

The impression that minimalism is only minimalism if executed extremely is a false feeling and I hope I can save myself from that. I am clearly threatened by it!

I don't know whether this impression is only a result of “American minimalism”, which is clearly the majority you'd find online. For example, I can not think of a way where a person from Europe can only have 100 things. At least my documents (bank account documents, tax documents, insurance stuff and other things you have to have in Europe) would qualify as 100 things, if not more. I'm not sure how the “extremist minimalists” do this, or whether one even needs these things printed out in america.

Either way, I hope that some day I might be able to pack all my belongings (or almost all, I really don't want to give away my 32 inch screen or my 7.1 sound system!) into a camper and just tour Europe as a digital nomad. The idea of minimalism combined with digital nomadism (is that a word?) is really interesting to me, although I'd like to have a “home-base” where I can come back to and stay for several weeks or even months – sometimes one just needs to cuddle into the same bed every night for several consecutive nights!

What I really don't want, though, is dropping out. Neither from society nor from my work/industry. My approach towards minimalism is only of philosophical nature – not needing things to define my living standard.

I deleted the repositories I own(ed) on #github.

After it became clear that Microsoft GitHub Copilot was trained using open source and GPLed work, keeping my (both public and private) github repositories is just wrong. So I deleted all of them, except for the forks I contribute to and maintain (for example config-rs and shiplift).

I hope that others will follow suit and delete their repositories as well. I can understand if people don't mind the vendor lock that “discussions”, “actions” and other features have created for them. But this (copilot) is pure abuse of free software codebases.

The “extend” phase is over, we're in the “extinguish” phase!

(me, on mastodon)

It might be legal for github to do this (IANAL), but nonetheless it is more than just a bad move. If their ToS allows this and we, as a community, can not act upon this because we agreed to these terms, the only sensible thing to do is to move our development away from github to some more open and less abusive services. I'm a big fan of sourcehut, of course, but there are others, most prominently codeberg and of course, self-hosting.

Self-hosting and email patches

I am self-hosting all my sources on git.beyermatthi.as plus I host some of these projects on my sourcehut account for more visibility. I take patches via mail for all my repositories.

If you plan on moving away from github, learning how to send patches via mail and of course also how to accept patches via mail is a viable skill that you will benefit from! Just make sure to use plain text email instead of html emails.

There are tons and tons of tutorials out there how to work with email patches. Just go and read them, it will make you a better developer, even if you then go to one of the other code forges and don't need the skill, you will start to understand why git works the way it works!

I am using git for over a decade now, over eight years in opensource and over two years professionally (so my whole professional career so far), and it is the one tool I cannot exist without! It amplifies the speed I develop code with by a magnitude!

If you don't want email...

If you don't want an email-based workflow for your git repositories, which I can understand (although not approve), and you want a shiny web-interface with all the bells and whistles, you can still go to codeberg (or gitlab.com, fwiw) or self-host one of the great tools that are already out there.

For example, you can self-host gitlab or gitea as a bit more lightweight alternative. Both of them feature issues/discussions and a nice web-UI.

If you don't want to collaborate but just put your code out there, you can use cgit (which is really not hard to host) plus, optionally, some gitolite if you want to host repositories for others as well.

With nginx as reverse-proxy and some mild rate-limiting because web-crawlers are still a thing, you can even host this on a $1-VPS instance somewhere (I'm not recommending any service here because this would be advertisement). I'd even say that a Raspberry Pi can handle hundreds of repositories with cgit and nginx as reverse proxy. I did not test this, though I'm fairly sure because git is very well optimized and cgit is written in C (hence the name), so there's only a very minimal footprint!