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This year our apple tree had a good year. The summer was a good mix of sun and rain, and we didn’t have as many wasps, snails or birds taking the apples for themselves as in some previous years.
We gave neighbours and the parents of Y’s best friend each 1-2kgs of apples, ate some, and filled the fridge. There’s still some on the tree to be picked too.
Y standing on a small ladder, disappearing into the apple tree with only her legs visible
Part of the harvest laid out on the garden table.
When I was at university and my electronic engineering student association got an internet connection at the very end of the 80s, we named our servers. In the early 90s we had Utelscin (a mix of the (sub)domain names for the uni, faculty and association), and Bettie. Bettie was the mail server, short for Bettie Serveert, ‘Bettie serves’, after a Dutch alternative rock band (the band in turn was named after the title of a book on tennis by Dutch tennis player Betty Stöve).
Just now I was going through some papers on language and thinking by Dr. Evelina Fedorenko at MIT’s EvLab, where I came across a statement they name the lab’s hardware after scientists and engineers in history who did not get sufficient credit for their contributions. I like that.
Maybe we should do something like that in our company too, for undercredited people in the fields we are active in.
I finally got around to, and succeeded in updating my and E’s VPS-hosted Mastodon instances.
For about half a year I wasn’t able to update Mastodon, because the automatically generated back-ups before the update were too big for the allocated disk space on the VPS. My VPS runs Yunohost, but the options in the web interface for admins are somewhat limited. One way to get around the lack of storage was mounting another disk, but that required command line access but I couldn’t ssh into my VPS because of a missing password. Making the back-ups smaller by deleting stuff from the database(s) also required the command line. I didn’t see a route out of that and in my burned out state these past 4 months I left it at that.
Today E mentioned she thought that her Mastodon instance was slow. Logging into my Hetzner account, where the VPS is hosted, I noticed that the type of server I have was being deprecated. I was invited to rescale the server. This was an easy option to add a bit of computing power, and extend the disk space. That done, I could update the Mastodon instances. So my need to find a way to the command line of my VPS no longer existed. That of course was the moment I noticed an option in the Hetzner interface to directly access the console of the VPS.
The Mastodon instances are up to date, I have enough disk space, and now know where to find the command line interface.
Since yesterday evening I am residing at the top floor of our home. This as I fell ill with Covid. Sleeping away from E and Y hopefully reduces the risk of them also getting infected. I had opened the door to our small roof terrace for ventilation (helped by it finally not raining and being sunny). Already earlier today two magpies were making noise out on the terrace. I woke up from a nap because of similar noises, and assumed the same source. Somehow it sounded nearer though. Turns out one of the magpies had decided to explore inside, and then didn’t find the way back. I sort of chased and guided it to the door opening, and then it settled in the tree across the watercourse yelling at me.
How could I not buy these small notebooks? Made by my friend Peter from paper cut-offs from boxes he made and printed in Tuscany, they are made from Magnani 1404 paper. Magnani started making paper in Pescia in 1404 (they ceased operation in recent years, but another Magnani is still making paper, since 1481), right at the moment in time that the literate population of Tuscany started using paper notebooks to make everyday notes, and lots of them. Paper had become affordable and available enough roughly a century earlier, with Tuscany being at the heart of that, and Florentine merchants used their book keeping system and the paper notebooks needed for it to build a continent spanning trade network. After the Black Death personal note taking took off too, and from 1400 onwards it had become commonplace:
At the end of the Middle Ages, urban Tuscans seemed stricken with a writing fever, a desire to note down everything they saw.’ But they remained a peculiarly local phenomenon: there was something uniquely Florentine (or more accurately ‘Tuscan’ as examples also survive from Siena and Lucca) about them,…
Allen, Roland. The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (p. 61).”
Around the turn of the year I gave The Notebook as a present to Peter thinking it would be something to his liking. My own notes have helped me learn and work for decades. E and I when we lived in Lucca for a month, passed through Pescia by train en route to Firenze.
Tuscany, paper from a company that was there from the start of everyday note taking, The Notebook, personal knowledge management, and friendship, all coming together in this piece of craftsmanship. How could I not buy them? So I did.
A gift from my colleagues. ‘Tegeltjeswijsheid’ means ’tile-wisdom’ or the often somewhat cliché phrases that are printed on tiles as an old fashioned type of decoration. We moved into new offices this January (in the same building), and since then everyone of us is getting their own tile with some characteristic phrase etc. about them. Yesterday I received mine. It reads “In my notes of 20 years ago I see that…”. A (exaggerated! really!) reference to my personal knowledge management (pkm) system. I indeed regularly inject things into conversations, when some question or topic is discussed along the lines of “last time we discussed this in 201x, we thought this or that, and concluded somesuch”.