I bought Minecraft back in 2012, and since then I've bought many other games, but I always come back to minecraft, and it's what I end up playing most of the time, it's just a special game that has really won it's way into my heart. The base game is already a lot of fun and I've had countless hours mining, exploring and building bases that probably are only good looking in my eyes, but hey, I made it, so for me it's beautiful. There is just something very serene and nice about spending time doing some mechanical tasks, and then getting rewarded with the things that you can make with it. Some of the things that people have made with just the base game is already amazing. And that's not the only thing

Modding scene

The modding scene for minecraft is still alive and healthy, and by installing a modpack you can turn the game into something quite different. Modded minecraft is much about building up infrastructure, and automating things, and trying to not make it an eyesore. There are everythign from magic themed packs to building big factories, to fighting dangerous mobs or just chill out and build.

Modpacks That I've really enjoyed (and still do)

Regrowth

Regrowth is a world where all good life, and all ores have disappeared, and all that is left is a sandy desert wasteland with mobs, so you start out building out your little oasis, and slowly you're building up a green little piece of land that is not as empty and lifeless as the rest of the world around you, this is a really fun pack that does rely a lot on automation and farming and it's just a lot of fun.

GregBlock

GregBlock is a skyblock map, which means you start out in the void with one block of dirt, and a tree, and from that you build out a platform, and a big factory of machines that create every little thing that you need to make more machines to make more machines and so on, I really enjoy this one, and there is always something you can tinker with and make better, things to do, and it's fun seeing your whole “empire” grow out in the end. And greg tech has some of the most satisfying build chains in the whole modded scene.

Age of Engineering

Age of engineering Age of Engineering is a progression pack that makes you go through each mod, learning it's ins and outs, and when you have gotten through one you can then contiue on with the next one, it opens up slowly, and I really enjoyed it.

Farming Valley

Farming Valley is interesting, it's a modpack that makes minecraft turn into almost a 3d star dew valley, it's a very calm and quite slow pack, but it's really enjoyable, you get to slowly build up your farm, and the city along with it where you can sell and buy things, it's really a lot of fun

GregTech New Horizons

Greg Tech New Horizons is a monster of a modpack it's configured and made to make it something you can play for a loooong period of time, and still have goals to work towards, it's probably a prime example of complex and fun, and definitely shouldn't be the first one that you aim for, but it's very well made, and really something you should try out if you're a veteran of modded minecraft.

Little conclusion

This is just a small snapshot of the 24220(!) modpacks that you can find over at curseforge there is already more game than you'd be able to play for years, and every week/month there is something new or interesting to find and play around with, which is why minecraft still is my “forever game”

First a disclaimer, I'm not a doctor, neither do I suggest anyone to don't drink coffee if they don't have any bad side effects from it, just so that is clear, everything in this post are just anecdotes and my feelings around it, I just felt like I'm in a good point to share it now :)

With that out of the way.

I've been on a steady diet of 5-6 coffees a day for the last 16 years or so, and about a month ago I started to have strange anxiety that wouldn't want to let go, and for no normal reason. It was driving me crazy, and someone from fosstodon gave me a tip that it might be because of the caffeine, so I was thinking why not give it a chance.

Cutting out coffee

So for a couple of days I just cut out drinking any coffee, and it calmed me down a lot, it's not completely gone but so much more comfortable, I don't feel like I'm constantly on the edge anymore. I also quit drinking caffinated softdrinks such as cola or energy drinks.

I was awaiting the normal coffee withdrawal headaches that I usually get after 2 days of not drinking coffee, but for some reason they never came, I don't know why, maybe it was a hint from my body that I should lay off that stuff for a while.

Replacements

For now at least I've been drinking Earl Grey Tea as a replacement for the coffee, I know it still has caffeine, but way less than before, and some green tea now and then, so I have found out that I do actually enjoy tea quite a lot, having something warm to drink I think is one of the main things that I really am after with my coffe drinking, just something comforting while thinking. For now at least I've been happy with drinking tea, and I think I will keep at it for a while.

Other effects on me.

I've been sleeping better the last weeks, it feels like I get more rest out of my sleeping, I'm not sure if it has something to do with the coffee, since I've also been experimenting with keeping low lighting at home after 19:00, but it's for sure something that I've been enjoying. At the same time I've also tried to spend more time walking as well, which is very enjoyable.

I have felt a bit more sleepy over the morning, kind of like a brain fog, but it's becoming less and less for each day, which I think is a good thing as well.

Where to from here?

I'm not sure, I think I'll keep on this experiment for a while, but I'm planning to drink a cup of coffee in the morning again some time in the future, but I will keep on my tea for a while, as long as I'm enjoying that as much as I am now. But I don't plan to get back to the amount that I've been drinking as I'm starting to think it might not be my healthiest habit :p

But I guess a cup now and then can't hurt :)

This has been one of my big experiment the last couple of weeks, I've always kind of thought it would be a big hassle to deny javascript as a default, but on the other hand at least for my feeling it's starting to go really out of hand. Just loading some sites loads a huge dependency tree of javascript totalling space usage more than some games that I spent hours upon hours playing when I was small.

Starting out with uBlock origin

My first try was to go with uBlock origin since I already had the plugin installed, and it works, but it has one big minus, and that is that (at least from what I found) can only block a site, or allow everything from it, so you are either all out or all in. It does work though.

Moving over to noscript

After having gotten used to browsing with javascript mostly disabled @Wesly over at fosstodon reminded me that noscript has the ability to whitelist single scripts on a sites, and using it has been even better, and it's working well together with uBlock, so now I'm pretty happy with it.

Results

I've been very happy with how nice and fast the internet actually works when you don't have scripts running for each and every site, also the resource usage for my firefox has gone down quite a bit, the downside of unblocking a site now and then to get it to work is very much worth it. I'd say try it out, you might be surprised about how nice the internet is without scripting everywhere.

I'm a happy member of fosstodon but one thing tends to get on my nerves, so I was thinking I'll write a tiny bit about it. Why do people keep on telling others what to do?

What do you want to achieve with it?

What are you really wanting to achieve with telling people not to use something or to use something? If you want them to actually use what you are suggesting, instead of telling them that they should use this or that, or demanding what to do, rather tell them that you've had success with it and why you do it. Not only does this come over as a lot more pleasant, but it's also more likely to bring you where you want.

Telling people what they should or should not do is a good way of alienating people, since it really gets across a feeling of people thinking they are superiour to others based on what they do, and that usually makes people feel talked down to. I don't really see what is to be gained by that approach.

Talking bad about something tend to just make people dig their heels in, and look into ways to refute you, and there are so many “apologetics” for most things that if you're trying to talk someone out of using something it might just make people dig their heels in even more, and ending up deeper into what they already doing.

So what's the alternative?

I don't claim to have any solutions, I'm just tired of this one approach, and it's really getting on my nerves, but one solution to talking bad about one thing may be to talk good about something you'd rather have people use instead, so instead of focusing on negatives of one thing you try and focus on the positives of the alternative instead, all in all this is something that at least for me makes me more likely to want to try something out, and all in all it tends to foster a more positive conversation all in all.

Usually starting a conversation out with telling people what you feel they are doing wrong is going to make it a negative conversation all in all, and I tend to believe that it's better to follow “the campfire rule”, try to make all people taking part in a conversation end up a bit better off than what they were when they started the conversation, and telling people what to do or what not to are going straight against this.

You're probably right

Yeah, I know mostly people saying this are actually right, but it doesn't mean that following the approach is going to be the right way of doing it, even working as IT-Support, mostly knowing better than most of my coworkers what is the more sane approach, framing it as “I know better so do as I say” never was something that actually brought results, rather coaxing them into making the descicion themselves based on positivity has been way more successful.

So I'll try to end this rather negative thing on a positive note, the newest thing that I've been trying to do is to just smile to a random person each day :) You never know who might have a bad day and need just one friendly person to make it a bit of a better day. Personally I hope that it makes someone else's day a bit better :)

Note: I rewrote the end there as Chrono made me aware that I was kind of doing exactly what I adviced against in the end there, and he was right, see, I'm just as guilty of it as everyone else :)

@kqzx@fosstodon.org was suggesting an opensource reimplementation of civilization 5 and it made me think of some open source games that I have been really enjoying, that are based on games I used to play when I was a younger person, I'm probably giving out my age by doing this :p yes I'm getting old.

OPEN-TTD

I used to play Transport Tychoon Deluxe for hours together with my brother when we were small, and it was so much fun, there is just something really satisfying with building up big transport networks and seeing cities and businesses grow, and it's just really nostalgic to me. This is a must play if you're into business managers or train sets and so on.

open-ttd homepage

Widelands

Widelands is a game that is built to be like Settlers II another one of our favourites from when we were small, this is more a game of logistics than a normal strategy games, and the feeling of having your little tribe running around dealing with all of the resources, how busy it is when they move things from one place to another is something that I never really get enough of.

widelands homepage

Rrotage

Rrotage is a fantastic bullet hell shooter, which has playstyles from other games, one mode is like ikaruga, and others from shooting games that I don't know, but it's really fun to play, and they all have their charms, it can be really difficult, but also so much fun if you want to really shut your brain off and get into the zone.

rrotage-homepage

Conclusion

Of course this is only 3 games, I might come back to revisit this at some other time, but these are just games that I have enjoyed a lot, so I wanted to share, and I hope you can enjoy them a bit too :)

What?

Yeah, this sounds weird, maybe even prepper-like, but it's not as crazy as it sounds. But I don't think it's so weird if you get a bit of an idea, bascially I have taught myself to use as few applications as possible that unneccesarily connects to the internet, maybe it's me being an old fart, and being used to “the good old days” and maybe it's my situation of having lived in 3 different countries the last 10 years. Not being used to having always on connections, means kind of a freedom for me, I don't need it to get things done, or to keep entertained. This one mostly will be about phone usage, but the same broadly applies to my PC usage as well.

I don't have a data-plan with my phone, which means when I'm out of wifi-range I'm offline, and strangely I've found it to be a good thing for me generally.

Entertainment, podcasts

So through the years podcasts has shown themselves to be something that I really enjoy, I started listening to them in 2006 and still listen to them to this day, and another good thing about them is that they are very timed offline doable, I have set my podcatcher to download my favourite ones as soon as I'm in a wlan, and with the files being on my phone I can enjoy them no matter where I am, and I don't need a connection to be happy and entertained.

Games

I never was a big multiplayer gaming fan, and I still don't am, so I usually keep to my single player games, and emulation, and if a game needs a connection to even start it's a sure goner, It's not that I went out doing this as a start, but exactly that is something that just chrystalized out of how I'm using things.

Reading

For offline reading I mostly keep things on my ebook-reader, which I mostly have with me anywhere I go, but just to be safe I also keep some books on my phone, just so that I can have something to read when I'm not online as well.

Consequences

So the biggest consequences from this is that I tend to keep at least copies of everything that I do offline, even if it's something that I do mainly online, I don't like having to rely on and deal with missing stuff just because I'm unable to connect to the internet at the time being. Now with smartphones this offline online nomad thing is so much easier than before, I used to bring my PSP around with me to listen to podcasts, just because I could use it to connect to free wifi and download some more listening material on the go, and I still fondly remember having a dedicated mp3player with all of my podcasts in it. But since storage and batterylife is usable on phones now a days that's usually all I need to carry along,

Also I'm one of those weirdos going around with a backpack, and there are some things that I usually keep along with me.

• A sudoku book, and a pencil
• A notebook with quite a lot of shorthand notes and scribbles
• My kindle, for reading
• Laptop
• Other knickknack

So I don't know, maybe I'm stuck back in the older times, or maybe I'm just weird, that's just how I am.

My dog has been on a month long vacation over at the in-laws, and while it was good in some ways there are things that I didn't notice happening to me, I slid into less healthy habits that was so much easier to keep to when I have my little friend with me.

I really missed the walks

Yesterday he came back, and we went out on our evening hour walk, and it felt so good, having that hour after work with no screens, walking outside and just listening to podcasts and move, it's not really something I like doing when I'm alone, but I didn't notice how much I've missed that little time that we always had completely for ourselves.

Keeping up with a better sleep routine is way easier

When I have the normal walks and the extra routines that I have, keeping up with a more healthy sleep routine is a lot easier for me, I know I will have to go out with him a short round before going to sleep, and it makes it a lot easier not to end up watching youtube until way over the time that I should go to bed.

Getting up in the morning and home in the afternoon

Getting up in the morning is a lot easier again now that first of all I have someone that depends on me getting up more than 5 minutes before I leave in the morning, and getting back home is a lot nicer when I know there is someone waiting for me that is going to be happy when I get back.

Conclusion

I'm not really sure what I meant to say with this, but basically it's so easy to slip out of routines that you usually have, and into less good ones without really noticing, and you don't really see it before you get back into what you did. I guess it's something that is easier to keep track of if you have a better self evaluation that what I do, but it was a small wakeup call for me, and something I have to keep in mind.

What is this about

I've been working in IT for 5 years now, having no formal education in the field, now I have a Bachelors degree but in Japanese/Linguistics, so it's kind of by coincidence and that I have used Linux as a hobby that I got into this.

Short story about how I got into IT

So I moved to a country where I know nobody, and where my education really didn't help me much. And by pure coincidence I was taken in to an interview by the company where I've now been working for 5 years. Being pretty fresh knowing basically no SQL nor much other of what I actually now do every day.

So nervous and sweating I get in to it, and start working through installing an ubuntu system from a system image through a chroot (Thank you arch-linux for preparing me for something like that), also working through other tests they had set up for me, basically most of the things I figured out through being curious and just trying things out. And miraculously they took me in instead of a guy with actual experience in the field since I was flexible and willing to learn.

1. Learn how to read error messages/logs.

This is actually the thing that I almost do the most at work, faced with a problem it seems like people don't know how to read error-messages, they get scared when the box with a warning pops up, and it seems like they just shut down, 80% of cases I have the error says clearly what to do, but people see the box and get scared. Or in other cases it's just an error message that is vague, knowing how to read error messages and get to the kernel of what is wrong is one important part of being able to fix things.

2. Know how to search for a solution to your problem.

The next step after kind of having figured out what is wrong is to figure out how to solve it, and more often than not it's going to be something you have seen before so that you can solve it. But often you'll have to search, and having skills in knowing how to search, evaluating if the site you're finding actually have the thing you're looking for, and getting adept at reading pages finding the information you're after are very important skills to have

3. Try stuff out.

Scary stuff I know, but usually you have a vague idea about what can be dangerous or not, most things you do can be undone, and trying out stuff often leads to something that works, well on the other side, if you don't try something out you have no idea if it is the right solution, so trying out even something silly often helps, you can't know that it doesn't work before you have tried it.

4. Be willing to learn.

It's important to know what you don't know, so that you know when to search for help, and it's also important to be willing to learn new things, I don't think there is a single day at work where I don't learn something new.

5. Keep (mental) note about what you have seen.

Often things you have done before will be the solution to your current problem, or at least be something close to it, something that you did half a year ago might be the solution (or the cause) of the problem you have today, and having either a note of what you have done, or at least having a vague memory of how you did it the last time, will help you in the future.

6. When in doubt turn it off and on again.

As silly as it is, this so often helps, it's stupid that this still is the solution to so many things, but it does. Or at least it buys you some minutes of time to let your subconcious work on coming up with some bright, or silly idea.

7. Never throw stuff away.

I have 100s of pages of different SQL queries I've written saved away to be used as reference, or to be bent into solving this next question I've gotten, it lets me do stuff faster, and struggle less, I always forget how this or the other thing works, and having something I've done myself previously and that I know works is so helpful.

yeah.. I use a kindle

It was a gift, so don't shoot me. I know the kobo readers are freer, but it's what I have, so it's what I'll use, I don't believe in making more electronic trash, and it still works after 3 years or so of use, so I'll use it until it's no longer working, and then the next time I'll look into getting something a bit less unfree :)

Reading experience

An e-ink book reader has been such a great addition to my life, I used to love reading, but then fell off it for a long time, but then I got this thing, and it has gotten be back into the groove again, and I've read about 100 books again over the last couple of years.

The analog e-ink screen really feels very different from an O?L[CE]D screen, my eyes tend to tire out from looking at them, but the completely different technology is really not comparable to those screens, it feels close to reading on paper, and the screen is front-lit rather than back-lit, so you don't have your eyeballs blasted with light every time you look at the thing, which is great for reading before going to sleep for example.

Also I like to read sci-fi books, and they have a tendency to be quite physically big, one of my favourite authours Peter F. Hamilton seldomly writes books with less than 1000 pages, and having them on this smaller thing instead of carrying a big bastard of a paper book around is a lot more comfortable.

The downside of it is that it has to be charged now and then, but the e-ink display, and the really slow processor hardware in it results in me having to recharge mine only once a month or so, and I'm using it usually for a couple of hours a day.

Book management.

For getting books onto my device, and to handle my library I'm using calibre and it's a really great program to deal with books, it deals with converting the books into a format that the e-reader can understand, and it does its work very well, and is simple to use. You can also get some plugins in it to rip drm off books, which can be helpful as well if you want to back up stuff you might have bought in a store that puts drm on books.

Would I reccommend an e-reader for others.

Yeah, I would, of course if you are a person that prefers reading books on paper it wouldn't be optimal, and if you're an audiobook kind of person, then it doesn't make sense, but if you enjoy reading it's absolutely something worth giving a try.

Reading on this thing has made me read more, it's so easy to just chuck into a backpack or bag, and it's always with me, and I have the choice to read one of the ~800 books I have on my device rather than playing around on my phone or something else, and the convenience of always having it there actually makes me more likely to do just that.

Another good thing for me is availability of books, I'm an expat, so here in austria getting books in german is easy, getting english or even worse norwegian books, well it's not going to be such a nice experience, and your choice of books is going to be a lot thinner. Having the option to buy books on the net (or aquiring them by other means) have really made it a lot less stressful on me to get something interesting to read.

Getting an e-reader really rekindled my joy of reading, and it has become one of the favourite electronic devices that I have.

So it seems for now my windowmanager hopping is put onto ice, I'm sure I'll probably resume it some time, but after having spent time setting up my bspwm so that it has all the functions that I want and need most of the time when I log into another one I get frustrated that they don't work like I want them to.

Which leads me to the first thing that I've found that I really find valueable, and that is the unrigid setup, at first communicating with bspwm through the bspc client program felt like a very strange descision that just made writing configurations more cumbersome, but the nice thing about it is that you have more freedom as to how you can configure the thing to work, I was wanting to set up window-navigation to work like in dwm, since I really liked how it worked, and with some work and reading the manpage I saw this is possible, and I now have this little thing in my sxhkd:

super + {n,e} bspc node -f {next.local.window, prev.local.window}

super + shift + {n,e} bspc node -s {next.local.window, prev.local.window}

Where bspc is the client program that tells bspwm what we want it to do, node tells it that we want it to deal with nodes on it's tree representation of windows, -f, and -s respectiviely is focus and swap respectively, and the prev.local.window, for example moves focus or swaps with a window on the current desktop, window means a node that contains a window/ eg program. This is in addition to having shortcuts for moving directly in a direction, which is the standard for bspwm, those I mapped to the arrow-keys since I don't use them as often, and I wanted something that is easy to remember.

Possibility for automatic tiling

Bspwm in itself can't do automatic/dynamic tiling, but there is this quite cool script that someone made: bsp-tile that basically can turn one single desktop/workspace into an automatically tiled deal, I thought I'd be using it a lot, but I've come to the realisation that I mostly only use about 3 windows on every page anyway, and the way that bspwm works out it just doesn't really turn out to be something that I need very often, I guess it would come in handy for a bigger screen setup though.

Terminal-swallowing

I watched some youtube videos and came across this cool thing about terminal swallowing, basically if you open a program from a terminal and it becomes inactive, the window you open will replace the terminal, and it will pop back into existence when you close this program again, it's a really nice feature and someone made a small script that supports this in bspwm as well bspswallow and I kind of forget that it's there, but it kind of makes me happy every time it triggers, since it helps keeping the desktop tidy

Scriptability

I haven't really used this that much, but something that has come in handy quite often is this little snippet that I made that exchanges the focused window with the biggest one on the current desktop

super + space bspc node -s $(bspc query -N -n biggest.local)

It's very nice for when I'm programming or something and I want to give the window that I mostly have small on the side to gain some more space, and it's basically just a combination of two small commands to the window manager bspc query -N -n biggest.local which gives me the id of the largest window on the current desktop and bspc node -s $id which switches the current window with a window given it's id. You could do a lot more interesting things with this, but mostly I don't need stuff like that but it's nice to know they are there in case I need it some time :)

Not coupled configuration file.

I thought I wouldn't like the fact that bspwm doesn't handle keyboard shortcuts for you at all, but using shxkd has come in handy, and it made it really easy to do things like binding media keys on my keyboard and show a notification as well, some times having a notification is nice in case you hit the button without really meaning to

XF86AudioMute sh -c “pactl set-sink-mute 0 toggle”;notify-send “Toggled mute”

Small thoughts on just the things I need.

Also since the configuration files are small, and contains only the few things that I actually use in a windowmanager, it's very easy to keep in my head what is, and I feel that configuring bspwm it's just uncluttered, as I've only added things as I need them, so things that I never use just aren't bound.

All in all, a window manager that let's me do what I want to, and skip what I don't, and it has spoiled me, I'm just more in love with this thing the more I use it. So until this infatuation dies at least it's what I'm using.