23 december 2020
Too many things floating about in my braiiiiin...
Been thinking a lot about walled gardens and computers. Kiddo got one of the new iPads for Yule with the Apple Pencil, and the Apple Pencil doesn't work properly. There's no user-facing way of doing any sort of meaningful diagnosis of it, there's only making sure that it pairs properly through bluetooth. "Fixing" it means taking both devices to an Apple Store so that they can dink around with it and figure out what's going on.
There's some new device envy that I've been having about this, but also the recognition that I'm probably better off fixing and improving my existing devices that I dearly love. I have an old HP EliteBook 2760p that's been an absolute tank that needs a replacement keyboard and could benefit from upgrading to an SSD... and is that "better" than something else that's new and shiny...? I mean, I tend to think so, but then again this disposable technology culture is pretty disgusting to me.
Then there's some human-computer interface stuff. I got a new keyboard for my birthday, and it's been going really well, but I'm also fascinated by some of the stuff coming out of G Heavy Industries (gboards.ca). If I have some extra holiday cash, it might be going that direction for either the Butterstick (a 20% keyboard that's only two rows) or a Ginny (10% keyboard - 12 total keys). It's a bit user-hostile, but there's something in going to a more minimal typing arrangement. I'm also the kind of person that's into styluses and touchscreens (see the 2760 above), as well as trackballs, trackpads, etc.
I wish there was a more robust solution to having the same environment across multiple devices. I can get that in my text/terminal world from having a tmux session running on a raspberry pi that keeps my chat, feels, and mastadon sessions up and running, but it would be really nice to have that kind of persistent session available across multiple other devices as a GUI thing. Google does a sort of tab sharing that gets me part of the way there, but I think a kind of "ubiquitous computing" model is still a ways off. It's also not terribly profitable, as you wouldn't need to consume quite as many devices in order for things to work well for you. A while ago I played around with LTSP under Ubuntu, which allowed for things like that, but it's been a while and I'm not even sure what's out there anymore.
I've also been re-reading Donnna Haraway's _Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_MeetsOncoMouse(tm), which I have failed to read quite a few times, but might have enough context now as a transgender person in my 40s to tackle. In my 20s I picked this up after my Women's Studies professor suggested that Haraway's new book was exceedingly difficult to parse, and I of course took that as a challenge, ordered the book, and then proceeded to figure out that yes, Haraway's writing is super dense and beyond my grasp. It's still super dense to me, and I struggle with some of the concepts, but there's the wonderfully delicious merging of techological, sociological, gender studies, cultural studies, the arts, and a whole slew of other contextual discourses. I also took this kind of writing and work very very seriously when I was younger, and can afford now to take this bit of reading as fun (and give myself the right to skip about or ignore things that are either too much of a struggle, or just plain not interesting to me).
I'm also intentionally rebalancing things at work for 2021 to more align with what's going on with me as a person. There's going to be more D+I work next year, as I'm part of the LGBTQ+ subcommittee there, and feel that I want to bring my more radical activist attittude into that particular space. There's also a need for me to do more teaching, training, mentoring, and managing as we continue to grow and move forward. It's a pivot away from things that I was doing as more of an individual contributor, and more of a leader-type role.
That's a lot of feels going on all at once, not to mention the holidays and this sort of sense that with the pandemic going on, all the celebratory type stuff is feeling fairly muted. I'm hoping that it will get better soon, but without massive social changes that I think are really really needed, it's going to be a hollow victory over Covid, with not a lot of real progress or change coming because of it.