Lifestack

A lifestack is a list of things that help manage my life. These things can range from consumption items to tools, from digital projects to foundational principles of how to operate in private and public spheres. Jack Baty has an excellent model here. I’m not sure if he originated the name, but I can’t seem to find earlier references. Ron Guest has an interesting lifestack on his website, one that Jack Baty also inspired. Obviously a public-facing lifestack must omit a lot, but I like sharing my server setup and outdoorsing self.

Computing

All of my computing machines have hostnames based on various literary and mythological owls. My main production machine is named after a Welsh strigiformean goddess, my Mactop after a witching owl of the Hispanic Southwest, one node of my home server after Ascalaphus (who was buried under a rock by Demeter but freed by Heracles, only to be changed into an owl by Demeter again), and another node after Blodeuwedd, turned into a gwdihŵ by Gwydion.

Main production machine: Arianrhod

Laptop 1: Cailleach

Laptop 2: Lechuza

I have an updated Macbook Air for my teaching income stream, and while IT is generous with giving us admin privileges (mostly), I keep it completely separate from my other work areas. I call it waterfowl, gesturing to my workplace and the general avian theme across my machines. It is connected to my other machines with a Syncthing instance to syncronize my ~/org directory and is included on my tailscale.

E-Reader

I use the Beta browser to connect to my Calibre server. I find the 10.3 inches on the Kobo Elipsa sufficient for most PDFs. I prefer Kobo given its native support of ePubs.

Apple iPhone 13

Home server

Inevitably, the home server cluster is called Parliament.

Ascalaphus

Blodeuwedd

Glimfeather

Local backup

I back up the ZFS pool zfslager to a 4TB disk using proxmox-backup-client and a script set to --change-detection-mode=metadata, which speeds up the process. The deduplication offered by PBS is fantastic. I back up the ZFS pool zfskeller to a 12TB disk using the same method. Both have onsite and offsite backups, some encrypted and air-gapped, so that I don’t lose the data in a zealous moment of bad scripting or let the blackhats do their thing.

General computing services

Chastity Belt · Black Sail

General software

Emacs

My digital life revolves around Org Mode. I keep things “simpler” these days by using Doom Emacs. I used to tinker a lot instead of doing linguistic research.

I do most of my programming in Emacs, too. Mostly Python, C, several scripting languages, and the occasional Common Lisp or Emacs Lisp.

I publish my private Zettelkasten-esque/Evergreen notes using Hugo. I used to use Org Mode’s publishing system, but its image handling is just too poor for my taste, and I got tired of screwing around with absolute and relative links.

My public website is static and built with Hugo. Tailwind CSS facilitates the fun stuff, but most of the content files are written in Org syntax (and some, like this one, in Markdown). Almost all of the pushing, pulling, and gnashing of Git teeth happens in Emacs. It’s Magit.

Configuration tools

Security tools

Server services & software

Other stuff

Website

Fitness

Hiking & backpacking

I favor a semi-light approach to backpacking: influenced by ultralight principles but not beholden to them. Leave no trace and stay off the wildflowers.

Bags

Shelter and sleep

Water and food

Clothing and footwear

Ditty bag

Knives

Saftety and navigation

Home

Social media presence

An admonition for myself from someone I admire, Jaron Lanier:

To free yourself, to be more authentic, to be less addicted, to be less manipulated, to be less paranoid … for all these marvelous reasons, delete your accounts.

― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Edification

Knowledge management

Digitally, I use Denote, Journelly, Org Journal, Citar, Calibre, and Zotero to take notes, insert references, and organize sources.

I use a Moleskin to take analog notes, daily. These are considered fleeting but many get integrated into my monthly Org Journal file.

I take longer fleeting notes within Org Journal and Journelly. Some become seedlings, which can eventually grow into “evergreens” (using Andy Matuschak’s terminology and method). Not all of these become public, but some are edited and placed on the Articles section of Phantisocracy.

Daily short-form entries are called “Facta diei,” and I have been consistently taking these since early 2022. It’s a short diary format that lists out my daily actions. It was actually inspired by George Harrison’s diary style in the late 1960s, with this humorous and curious entry the stand-out inspiration (“left the Beatles”):

George Harrison’s Diary Entry on 10 January 1969

When I was 12 or so, I began learning an alphabetic shorthand called Speedwriting (though I think I may have dabbled in Stenoscript, too, at some point). I use a bastardized version of this in my Moleskin and on other analog sources, though I’m very rusty and only use a subset of the possibilities.1

YouTube channels

I subscribe promiscuously under a pseudonymic account. Some interesting ones that I’m comfortable sharing publicly:

Podcasts

Not a huge fan of podcast culture, but these are ones I’ve had acquaintance with in the past. I listen to Deutschlandfunk quite a bit, but my experience with it feels more like listening to the radio from another era.

Everyday carry (EDC)

  1. I’m aware that actual psychophysical experiments have been run on various shorthand systems and that the results are highly mixed with regard to which system is best in terms of speed, comfort, coverage, capacity for re-transcription, etc. My interest at the time was simply to learn something new, and the way Speedwriting resembled longhand appealed to me, as opposed to, say, Gregg. The nerds on the /r/shorthand subreddit have some interesting discussions on the issue of speed, complexity, and recall. One of the commenters asserts that “The slow-motion film experiments that were done with Gregg proved that shorthand writing speed is governed by how quickly you recall the rules and construct the outline in your brain,” contesting a more simplistic view that a 50% reduction in word length correlates with a 50% in writing time. ↩︎