2024-05-23 from the editor of ~insom
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My wife and I are sort-of "auditing" our hobbies and our
stuff. Recent travel made us aware we spend too much time
maintaining our things (organizing, cleaning, sorting, etc.)
and not enough time using things: especially when they are
hobby tools.
As part of this we're selling off a bunch: I've already
gotten rid of my welder, laser cutter, a bunch of power
tools, sheet metal brake etc. Things which haven't really
seen use in a year. Moving further down the list, some more
recent things will also be going (probably my milling
machine and much of the associated tooling).
I'm starting to feel like I can let some of these hobbies go
and I've already spent more time reading, drawing and making
music since I got back.
Anyway, that's not quite what I wanted to write about -- I
wanted to write about energy-wasting habits. I made a bit of
list of these things: things that I put time and energy into
and which almost always make me feel disappointed or
frustrated.
One of the main ones is making things harder than I need to.
I will be a purist about doing things "from scratch" or with
basic tools that I don't actually know how to do well. I
would be much happier all around by doing some things on
"easy" more often.
One example is my refusal to use Visual Studio Code when
learning Rust, insisting on writing in Vim, like I would
with C. But I know C! It's reasonable for me to go without
assistance when it's a language I've used for 20+ years --
not when it's something I'm learning. (Reader: I recently
gave in to using VSCode and I am happier and productive).
Another is staying away from loops when creating music,
because they are "cheating". First all: "cheating" is just
fucking made up when you're making music for yourself as a
hobby -- but also it's probably reasonable to get
comfortable making music that I like with "help" like loops
(and auto-quantize and whatever else music tech can throw at
me) and _then_ decide to use less and less help over time.
(If that even makes sense to do; I could also do with being
more accepting of plateauing and always doing things the
easy way: as long as it's enjoyable).
Now that I've noticed the pattern, I see it all over my
habits. Using extremely underpowered computers to get my
work done; using several generation old microcontrollers.
It's okay to use a laptop that was made within the last 10
years. It's okay to "waste" a Cortex M0 on a simple task (I
think they cost about the same as an ATmega328 anyway?!).
So much of my time has gone into doing things the hard way.
Building on Solaris instead of Linux despite how much easier
the path is on Linux. Fighting Go and Rust dependencies that
forget non-Linux/non-Windows environments exist. I wonder if
it's a technique of avoiding the actual problem that I'm
working on -- by creating new sidequests like "get sqlite3
to compile on this cursed environment"
