Post vacation brain dump

Nota: this post is a brain dump of multiple subjects making no sense at all, read at your own risks :D.

Unfortunately, my 2 weeks vacations are ending today. It was (of course), way too short as usual, but I believe that no matter how long vacations are, they are always too short… But it was good to be able to relax and not do too much during that time. We drove to Spain and went ±30min north of Alicante the first week and ±1h north of Barcelona the 2nd.

I read 4 and half books, as reading in the shadow by the pool or sea is one of my favorite things (I love hot weather). I usually don’t talk about my readings on this blog but I strongly advice reading « Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence » by Dr. Anna Lembke. It was a great book and could be helpful to anyone. It isn’t just about the usual addictions you may think like usual soft or hard drugs, but for anything really (eg: food, social media / phones and even reading). It was the best book I read during that period, even though others were interesting too. As I said on the Fediverse, I read the 2nd book from the discworld from Terry Pratchett and was a bit disappointed (by the first 2 books). I did bought the 3rd and 4th anyway as some friendly people responded that the first 2 were the “less good”. I guess time will tell :).

I opened my laptop only once during this break, which is good… But used my phone and browsed the Fediverse way too much to compensate. Using my phone to access read RSS feeds (via miniflux) was a “good” usage of my phone though (in my own definition of good at least). I took my laptop thinking that I may want to write but in the end took a full blogging break as well. I could have simply finish a couple of post already written but didn’t want to. That will be for this week I guess.

Weirdly, I noticed that since I moved to Readeck (a read it later app), I’ve been using it a lot less than my Wallabag instance (using the wallabag.it service to support the team). But now I’m confused… Wallabag is, IMHO, better with a better browser extension and a mobile app. I love that it can fetch content for some site without me logging in to the site (eg: I’m not logged in to news website on my phone, so it is very cool to just push them to wallabag and find them complete there). But at the same time, the Wallabag UI is very old and it seems the software doesn’t get much work done anymore. Maybe I need to try one other opensource read it later app available? But After a couple of month of Readeck, I simply don’t use it enough to call it a “success”, whereas I was daily using Wallabag before.

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I’ve also thought about some changes for this site. This blog, historically, has been a tech blog only (or almost). But lately I wrote sporadically non technical posts and I may want to write more. I that started an internal brain fight: should I create a dedicated non technical blog? Or create a dedicated section on this blog so people not interested about tech articles (or only interested with those) can more easily filter out content they don’t care about? Or maybe simply don’t care and keep writing what I want when I want and have a big mess. I like the “big mess” solution not only because it is the easiest but because it may feel more like me :D.

For example, I’m thinking about writing a response to this month indieweb carnival. This month Matthew is inviting people to talk about « Power underneath despair: in your darkest hour, where did you find the strength to save yourself? ». A subject that some may consider too dark but I believe this is a great topic and experiences from people may help others… That may be a too personal topic for me considering the usual articles I write, but the topic is appealing… We will see, because such a post will take a lot of time and energy to write, and I’m afraid that work will be crazy this month… But we never know!

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Last subject for this non sense blog post: Do people that use GPG to encrypt email have their key on their phone? I’ve received a few encrypted emails during my vacation. Partly due to email provider like protonmail that encrypt email by default when they automatically find my GPG key via WKD (Web Key Directory). Some email I knew could wait but I wanted to read one from a close friend, so I read it when I opened my laptop during the break. But if I hadn’t my laptop with me, I couldn’t have read it because I don’t have my private key on my phone and thus can not decrypt those email from my phone.

I would love to hear about how others do it and if they just copy their private key to their phone or use other more advanced solutions… Feel free to email me about that (or other subjects).