http://aberminimal.tumblr.com/
I'm currently importing my best pictures and quotes from my soup (which is a large cornucopia of things I like) so bear with the initial deluge.
I haven't decided if I'll use it instead of blogspot, so it's a supplement for now.
It's Gone
Two things happened yesterday.
One, I lost my iPod shuffle.
Two, my roommate's mother splashed my Sansa Clip with a water bucket accidentally. She compensated me for the error.
Now this means that I only have one MP3 player, the iPod nano. And I'm okay with that.
You don't realize how little things mean to you until you separate from them. I automatically assumed: I don't have a small MP3 player now, time to shop. But then I shopped and found I didn't really want one in the first place.
I consider this profound because we assume we need something in our lives and it isn't until we really separate ourselves and look at our possessions, levels removed, that we see what matters.
---
Other notes:
-We went without internet for about ten days at the apartment which was an interesting, and dare I say, pleasant experience. The internet is a vast and powerful entertainment tool, but it's nice to disconnect from that world occasionally. If I was living alone I might have cancelled it entirely just to get some clarity.
What on earth did I do during these dark times? I read. I can safely recommend The Divine Comedy to pretty much everyone. I went for more bike rides, as they became recreational as opposed to fitness orientated. I also played a few video games. I found that among the few games I own, I can pretty much play Metroid Prime for the Gamecube almost exclusively and be perfectly happy, if not happier than buying a new game every month.
That's the sort of self-exploration I'm looking for!
One, I lost my iPod shuffle.
Two, my roommate's mother splashed my Sansa Clip with a water bucket accidentally. She compensated me for the error.
Now this means that I only have one MP3 player, the iPod nano. And I'm okay with that.
You don't realize how little things mean to you until you separate from them. I automatically assumed: I don't have a small MP3 player now, time to shop. But then I shopped and found I didn't really want one in the first place.
I consider this profound because we assume we need something in our lives and it isn't until we really separate ourselves and look at our possessions, levels removed, that we see what matters.
---
Other notes:
-We went without internet for about ten days at the apartment which was an interesting, and dare I say, pleasant experience. The internet is a vast and powerful entertainment tool, but it's nice to disconnect from that world occasionally. If I was living alone I might have cancelled it entirely just to get some clarity.
What on earth did I do during these dark times? I read. I can safely recommend The Divine Comedy to pretty much everyone. I went for more bike rides, as they became recreational as opposed to fitness orientated. I also played a few video games. I found that among the few games I own, I can pretty much play Metroid Prime for the Gamecube almost exclusively and be perfectly happy, if not happier than buying a new game every month.
That's the sort of self-exploration I'm looking for!
Lowering Levels of Folders
Folders are great because they hide hidden clutter or complexity.
Try sorting your current files so that you only use one level of folders. This requires you to be:
-More specific
-Less eager to make more folders
-Less apt to shove something in a "misc" folder when that misc folder would get cluttered very, very quickly
It's not a steadfast rule and not everything works with it (music collections for example) but it's a fun exercise that helps reorganize and delete the unwanted.
Try sorting your current files so that you only use one level of folders. This requires you to be:
-More specific
-Less eager to make more folders
-Less apt to shove something in a "misc" folder when that misc folder would get cluttered very, very quickly
It's not a steadfast rule and not everything works with it (music collections for example) but it's a fun exercise that helps reorganize and delete the unwanted.
Five Filters
I found this website interesting. It is a group of digital independent news reading tools.
I found the site through their "Kindle It" tool, which takes a source webpage and turns it into a Kindle-ready document. It works wonderfully. Kindle It works with other formats too.
The other tools:
"Explore Independent Media" - Takes in keywords about current events and outputs alternative sources of information about it
"PDF Newspaper" - Takes in a blog or website and turns it or alternative sources into a PDF formatted page for easy printing. Another format shift tool.
"Full Page RSS" - Takes a blog or website and creates an RSS feed that will take the full text from articles.
"Term Extraction" - Scans text and finds the relevant terms.
The tools are all free software and work in most of the browsers I tried. Some of them are finishing up and have local binaries to run on your own hardware.
---
Mildly related, a tool for Kindles: Delivereads. A man named Dave Pell finds things he likes on the internet and sends them to your Kindle weekly as a single file. The first issue was of a fairly high quality - check out his sample stories.
I want to see simple tools like this for e-readers more often.
I found the site through their "Kindle It" tool, which takes a source webpage and turns it into a Kindle-ready document. It works wonderfully. Kindle It works with other formats too.
The other tools:
"Explore Independent Media" - Takes in keywords about current events and outputs alternative sources of information about it
"PDF Newspaper" - Takes in a blog or website and turns it or alternative sources into a PDF formatted page for easy printing. Another format shift tool.
"Full Page RSS" - Takes a blog or website and creates an RSS feed that will take the full text from articles.
"Term Extraction" - Scans text and finds the relevant terms.
The tools are all free software and work in most of the browsers I tried. Some of them are finishing up and have local binaries to run on your own hardware.
---
Mildly related, a tool for Kindles: Delivereads. A man named Dave Pell finds things he likes on the internet and sends them to your Kindle weekly as a single file. The first issue was of a fairly high quality - check out his sample stories.
I want to see simple tools like this for e-readers more often.
Bacon's Four Idols
Francis Bacon was a man who discussed, among many subjects, the idols that we keep in our mind that hold us back from thinking rationally and with reason.
Idol of the tribe: being "othered" and disliking someone or something because it's not like us (outside of the tribe)
Idols of the cave: the limitations of personal perspective, Plato's Cave
Idols of the marketplace: communication, peer pressure and sociology in general (inside of the tribe)
Idols of the theatre: the negative effects of the -ism and ideology
The two main topical ones are the cave and the theatre, though I could definitely come up with examples of the other two.
The cave deals with how our own perspectives warp the mind into thinking irrationally. For example, liking something only because it's new, not because it's better. Conversely, liking something only because it's old is also irrational.
I admit to conservatism in technology - I'm predisposed to liking something more when it's older. I have rational examples: Older things are cheaper, often more reliable, and time tested. But I would be foolish to say this is a blanket rule for all things, and liking something merely because it hits these bullet points would be irrational.
The theatre deals with rigid ideology, and in a way it is very close to the cave. Any end all be all ideologies end up here. Communism and capitalism are the two easiest to pinpoint.
BUT MINIMALISM?
You see why I brought the subject up. The reason why I'm discussing the subject is because I don't think minimalism is an ideology, but a bundle of verbs - word that each person fills in themselves. For minimalism, there's a general idea that it requires something minimal (it's right there in the word!) but where and why that threshold stops is entirely loose and as such it's hard to call minimalism an ideology.
But does this idea that Bacon expresses have any bearing on minimalism as we live it today? Are we too ridged in our following of our self-made principle? Is it making us irrational? Or are we more noble in our strength to follow what makes us happy?
I want comments. This is a discourse.
Idol of the tribe: being "othered" and disliking someone or something because it's not like us (outside of the tribe)
Idols of the cave: the limitations of personal perspective, Plato's Cave
Idols of the marketplace: communication, peer pressure and sociology in general (inside of the tribe)
Idols of the theatre: the negative effects of the -ism and ideology
The two main topical ones are the cave and the theatre, though I could definitely come up with examples of the other two.
The cave deals with how our own perspectives warp the mind into thinking irrationally. For example, liking something only because it's new, not because it's better. Conversely, liking something only because it's old is also irrational.
I admit to conservatism in technology - I'm predisposed to liking something more when it's older. I have rational examples: Older things are cheaper, often more reliable, and time tested. But I would be foolish to say this is a blanket rule for all things, and liking something merely because it hits these bullet points would be irrational.
The theatre deals with rigid ideology, and in a way it is very close to the cave. Any end all be all ideologies end up here. Communism and capitalism are the two easiest to pinpoint.
BUT MINIMALISM?
You see why I brought the subject up. The reason why I'm discussing the subject is because I don't think minimalism is an ideology, but a bundle of verbs - word that each person fills in themselves. For minimalism, there's a general idea that it requires something minimal (it's right there in the word!) but where and why that threshold stops is entirely loose and as such it's hard to call minimalism an ideology.
But does this idea that Bacon expresses have any bearing on minimalism as we live it today? Are we too ridged in our following of our self-made principle? Is it making us irrational? Or are we more noble in our strength to follow what makes us happy?
I want comments. This is a discourse.
CD Ripping: abcde is the best
Here I thought I was going to be stuck using Exact Audio Copy on Windows, which never stood up to my odd needs for CD ripping along with poor stability.
What I wanted was a program that would look at the disc and tag accordingly with CDDB, then rip the files securely once with cdparanoia or some other secure ripping tool, and then encode the files to multiple formats as I dictated. Little did I know that the tool existed for Linux as a command line program called abcde.
Thanks to a website known as Andrew's Corner, configuring the program was a small matter of copying and modifying the syntax to my needs into a .abcde.conf file in the home directory.
Now when I want to rip a CD, I pop it in, run the command "abcde," make sure the CD it found was correct, and then walk away. (Quick tip: if the program brings up a list of multiple album options, press q to go back to abcde)
This is amazing. It's like someone went into my brain, found what CD ripper I wanted to exist, and then said, "I made it for you, there it is in Debian." Well, to be fair, I did configure the thing, but still.
Also, having never used CDParanoia before, I was pleasantly surprised to find it has real time smiley faces to tell you the status of the rip, which is the best thing I've ever seen and is far more useful than Exact Audio Copy's red bars indicating something I initially assumed was "how much fun you're not having right now."
Here is my modified version of the code if anyone's interested.
My changes:
-It doesn't eject the CD
-The program is not extra verbose
-It only rips FLAC, OGG and MP3
-I left FLAC at high quality
-MP3 is at V2 (about 256kbps)
-OGG is at Q3 (about 112kbps)
The program needs more programs than is required by apt-get, so snap those up. I ended up having to install id3v2, but abcde was rather nice about telling me I needed it. Also, the program supports more codecs than this, and even can do Speex for audiobooks (though for optimal Speex you need to downsample to 8 or 16 mHz).
One more thing I don't need Windows for. Heck, this is far and above so much better than what I used before. When I came up with that great nugget quote "Minimalism is finding our tools and stripping them down in our own way to meet our own needs," this was exactly what I was talking about.
What I wanted was a program that would look at the disc and tag accordingly with CDDB, then rip the files securely once with cdparanoia or some other secure ripping tool, and then encode the files to multiple formats as I dictated. Little did I know that the tool existed for Linux as a command line program called abcde.
Thanks to a website known as Andrew's Corner, configuring the program was a small matter of copying and modifying the syntax to my needs into a .abcde.conf file in the home directory.
Now when I want to rip a CD, I pop it in, run the command "abcde," make sure the CD it found was correct, and then walk away. (Quick tip: if the program brings up a list of multiple album options, press q to go back to abcde)
This is amazing. It's like someone went into my brain, found what CD ripper I wanted to exist, and then said, "I made it for you, there it is in Debian." Well, to be fair, I did configure the thing, but still.
Also, having never used CDParanoia before, I was pleasantly surprised to find it has real time smiley faces to tell you the status of the rip, which is the best thing I've ever seen and is far more useful than Exact Audio Copy's red bars indicating something I initially assumed was "how much fun you're not having right now."
Here is my modified version of the code if anyone's interested.
# -----------------$HOME/.abcde.conf----------------- #
#
# A sample configuration file to convert music cds to
# MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC
# using abcde version 2.4.2
#
# http://andrews-corner.org/abcde.html
# minor mods by http://minimalinux.blogspot.com
# -------------------------------------------------- #
OGGENCODERSYNTAX=oggenc # Specify encoder for Ogg Vorbis
MP3ENCODERSYNTAX=lame # Specify encoder for MP3
FLACENCODERSYNTAX=flac # Specify encoder for FLAC
OGGENC=oggenc # Path to Ogg Vorbis encoder
LAME=lame # Path to MP3 encoder
FLAC=flac # Path to FLAC encoder
OGGENCOPTS='-q 3' # Options for Ogg Vorbis
LAMEOPTS='--preset standard' # Options for MP3
FLACOPTS='--verify --best' # Options for FLAC
OUTPUTTYPE="ogg,mp3,flac" # Encode to all 3 formats!
CDROMREADERSYNTAX=cdparanoia
CDPARANOIA=cdparanoia
CDPARANOIAOPTS="--never-skip=40"
# Give the location of the CD identification program:
CDDISCID=cd-discid
OUTPUTDIR="$HOME/Music/abcde/"
ACTIONS=cddb,playlist,read,encode,tag,move,clean
OUTPUTFORMAT='${OUTPUT}/${ARTISTFILE}-${ALBUMFILE}/${TRACKNUM}.${TRACKFILE}'
VAOUTPUTFORMAT='${OUTPUT}/Various-${ALBUMFILE}/${TRACKNUM}.${ARTISTFILE}-${TRACKFILE}'
ONETRACKOUTPUTFORMAT='${OUTPUT}/${ARTISTFILE}-${ALBUMFILE}/${ALBUMFILE}'
VAONETRACKOUTPUTFORMAT='${OUTPUT}/Various-${ALBUMFILE}/${ALBUMFILE}'
# Create playlists for single and various-artist encodes. I would suggest
# commenting these out for single-track encoding.
PLAYLISTFORMAT='${OUTPUT}/${ARTISTFILE}-${ALBUMFILE}/${ALBUMFILE}.m3u'
VAPLAYLISTFORMAT='${OUTPUT}/Various-${ALBUMFILE}/${ALBUMFILE}.m3u'
mungefilename ()
{
echo "$@" | sed s,:,-,g | tr / _ | tr -d \'\"\?\[:cntrl:\]
}
MAXPROCS=1 # Run a few encoders simultaneously
PADTRACKS=y # Makes tracks 01 02 not 1 2
EXTRAVERBOSE=n # Useful for debugging
EJECTCD=n # Please eject cd when finished :-)
My changes:
-It doesn't eject the CD
-The program is not extra verbose
-It only rips FLAC, OGG and MP3
-I left FLAC at high quality
-MP3 is at V2 (about 256kbps)
-OGG is at Q3 (about 112kbps)
The program needs more programs than is required by apt-get, so snap those up. I ended up having to install id3v2, but abcde was rather nice about telling me I needed it. Also, the program supports more codecs than this, and even can do Speex for audiobooks (though for optimal Speex you need to downsample to 8 or 16 mHz).
One more thing I don't need Windows for. Heck, this is far and above so much better than what I used before. When I came up with that great nugget quote "Minimalism is finding our tools and stripping them down in our own way to meet our own needs," this was exactly what I was talking about.
Stabilized
I knew it would happen eventually.
For those of you who don't read Distrowatch religiously (not me, of course! what are we talking about?) you probably still heard that Debian 6.0 became stable a couple of weeks ago. If you enjoyed using the testing version of it at all you would know it's incredibly stable.
Of the bad things I can say about Debian, the worst be that my wi-fi driver is more sensitive to drops than in Ubuntu or Fedora. That's it. This is mainly because in Debian, fixing any issues I have are pretty much my burden, and I did that already a weekend ago. You set it up once and it's done. So, now I have my GNOME desktop that is what I want. And that's it.
Now that my distro-hopping days have finally ended, my habits have changed as well. I've noticed this in my past few installations. I take less risks and try less cool things. I'm boring, and I like it that way!
I'm still minimalist though. Very clean desktop we have here. But your actions really do change once you decide to never install your OS again. Sure, that's hyperbole, but it's also the mentality I'm inside of right now, and it's a fantastic change.
It sure does make for a lack of stuff to post on this blog, though. Sorry 'bout that.
For those of you who don't read Distrowatch religiously (not me, of course! what are we talking about?) you probably still heard that Debian 6.0 became stable a couple of weeks ago. If you enjoyed using the testing version of it at all you would know it's incredibly stable.
Of the bad things I can say about Debian, the worst be that my wi-fi driver is more sensitive to drops than in Ubuntu or Fedora. That's it. This is mainly because in Debian, fixing any issues I have are pretty much my burden, and I did that already a weekend ago. You set it up once and it's done. So, now I have my GNOME desktop that is what I want. And that's it.
Now that my distro-hopping days have finally ended, my habits have changed as well. I've noticed this in my past few installations. I take less risks and try less cool things. I'm boring, and I like it that way!
I'm still minimalist though. Very clean desktop we have here. But your actions really do change once you decide to never install your OS again. Sure, that's hyperbole, but it's also the mentality I'm inside of right now, and it's a fantastic change.
It sure does make for a lack of stuff to post on this blog, though. Sorry 'bout that.
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