People And Websites #6 - R.L. Dane
It's been a while since the last P&W, but today's the day! Our guest this time is R.L. Dane, a good friend of mine.
Hey! Can you introduce yourself to the readers?
Hey there! I'm R.L. Dane. When I'm not yelling at the Cloud, I'm "chewing the fat" with other nerds on the fediverse as @rl_dane@polymaths.social. I'm a big fan of UNIX as a concept, and Linux and the various BSDs as operating systems.
What's the story behind your blog? What made you want to start it? Run me through the whole history!
I wrote a little bit about it in my recent Blog Questions Challenge post, but in brief, I believe @amin@polymaths.social, @hyde@lazybear.social and @kev@fosstodon.org (and perhaps @joel@polymaths.social) goaded me (in the nicest way imaginable) into starting up a blog. I don't really remember the content of the conversation, but I found the original announcement over here, and some earlier discussion over here. Kev was nice enough to host my blog initially (using a WordPress VPS), but I soon after migrated to my own hosting.
What's your tech stack?
For the blog, I'm running in a FreeBSD jail hosted by Nearly Free Speech, and just using Pelican as the SSG (Static Site Generator). I tried one or two SSGs before I tried Pelican, but Pelican was just dead easy to use and very portable/available on every Linux distro and BSD I've tried it on.
In terms of my own computers, I'm livin' that 99% FOSS life, of course. My main OS is Debian, which I run on all of my laptops (both personal and work), with a little bit of Raspberry Pi OS and OpenBSD on the side. The only really non-FOSS things I run are various sundry non-FOSS firmware (which I honestly consider a non-issue), a few non-FOSS drivers (which, again, doesn't bother me so much), a non-FOSS scanning service/driver to support a scanner I use for work, a single non-FOSS game (Kerbal Space Program), and one headless windows PC I use via VNC for accounting, for now.
For a really basic UI, I'm a big fan of i3wm and Sway, but for a full desktop at work, I think KDE is the cat's meow. Other than some surface-level polish and prettiness factors, I never really got the appeal of Gnome, and I haven't tried very hard to hide my dislike of it from a usability standpoint.
I think a problem with a lot of developers (particularly in the Gnome world) is that the chefs (to use an analogy), of course, have to "eat" the "food" they produce to know whether or not it's good, they don't eat in the same way as most ordinary people. A dev may be happy with the stereotypical "unixporn" setup of a single browser and a couple of terminal windows open, but for the average office worker, the vaunted and idolized minimalism of stock Gnome is just a complete non-starter. The tasks are too many and too varied to be constrained to a system that becomes clumsy once the number of open windows is greater than a dozen or so.
For development, well, I'm an old hand at bash (and korn shell, a.k.a. ksh). I've been writing scripts for over 20 years, and I learned it partly by reading a good book on the subject (The Korn Shell by Anatole Olczak — there may very well be far better books out now; that's just what I read 20 years ago), and by getting thrown into the deep end, maintaining scripts at a job I had as a Unix Infosec Analyst years ago. I can't claim to be a great scripter, and there are some people that I can say are far better at it than me, but I do greatly enjoy it, and can more-or-less sit down and just think in shell, particularly the bash (and to a slightly lesser degree korn) flavor.
What got you into blogging in the first place?
I guess you can't escape a certain kind of egoism as a writer. At some level, you must believe you have something worthwhile to say.
Kierkegaard once said:
What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. ...their cries could not reach the tyrant’s ears so as to strike terror into his heart; when they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music. And men crowd about the poet and say to him: 'Sing for us soon again'; that is as much as to say: 'may new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be formed as before; for the cries would only frighten us, but the music is delicious.'
Gratefully, I am not quite as melancholy as he. To me, I blog/write not so much because I think my ideas must or should be promulgated, but because the process itself is enjoyable. It is a search for beauty in the inward parts, and once it is found, the poet desires to share it with the world. So, somewhat like Kierkegaard's view of poetry (and very much in contrast to it), the poet finds beauty within and desires to share it, but his song is only heard by others as a kind of arrogant crooning of his own ideas and poetic skills, lol!
What are some of your hobbies?
Ah, a sufferer (enjoyer?!?) of ADHD is often referred to as a "serial hobbyist." I doubt I could name them all, but I have in times past enjoyed amateur radio, various attempts at learning programming languages (shell, Perl, and Pascal were the most successful), constructing and flying radio control planes, 3d printing (and modeling/design), tabletop RPGs, and basic electronics (I managed to burn myself with the soldering iron only once!).
I think the only ones that persist to this day are the 3d printing-related ones, and the general computery hobbies. I'd like to get back to amateur radio some day, but it tends to be a rather expensive hobby if you want to really get into it. I also miss RC airplanes, as it gave a very visceral and freeing feeling when you are in control of a plane that has no on-board avionics (vs. a modern drone that you just point and fly).
Recommend me more people I should annoy with these questions!!
I would absolutely recommend @hyde@lazybear.social; he seems like a very fascinating person. Someone who has also often impressed me with his thoughtfulness is @pixx@merveilles.town. You should ask him as well! :)
Day 34 of #100DaysToOffload