Knowledge is power
A post by Ricardo Amorim on LinkedIn caught my attention this week. It features a picture of a statue in which a child and an adult are on a seesaw, with the adult being much larger in weight and height than the girl. However, it is the child, with a pile of books beside her, who is lifting the adult — who, by the way, appears to be holding a cellphone in his hands — up.
The statue, whose image in the post claims to be located in Japan, but in reality is located in Heine, Heilongjiang, China, bears the inscription “知識就是力量,” which translates to “knowledge is power.”
Regarding the fact that the man is holding a cellphone, although it seems too large to be a cellphone, there is the old reflection that “cellphones are great servants, but terrible masters,” meaning that we can use them to gain knowledge, but we need to use them with moderation.
But the real reason the image caught my attention was the message that the statue and its inscription convey. It is our knowledge that is primarily responsible for determining our importance — which, to me, is completely aligned with the premises of lifelong learning, since I believe that the continuous pursuit of learning results in an increasingly higher level of knowledge. And, as the inscription on the statue reproduces almost literally the famous quote by Francis Bacon in his work “Meditationes Sacrae” from 1597, “knowledge itself is power,” the idea of continually obtaining and, more importantly, sharing knowledge is the basis for building not only our importance but also our reputation and influence.
Week 26, 2023
✱ It's very difficult for me to find good cardiologists. Being the kind of person who likes everything explained to me in details, some doctors I've had appointments with in the past proved very dry and unwilling to talk to me beyond the strictly necessary. Others were just plain boring. The thing is, after looking for a nice doctor for a long time, I found myself a very nice cardiologist, Dr. Paulo was his name. He took care of me and my hereditary blood pressure affairs. He even corrected my medication after some exams. I really liked him, so it made me very sad when I learned that he had passed away February last year. And ever since, I was reluctant to look for another professional. Until, talking to some friends, I learned about another nice doctor. Dr. Carlos is his name. Had an appointment with him last Monday and really, really liked him. He seemed to be very patient with me, explaining me lots of things and making me feel nice. I'm really glad I was able to find him, and fill the gap left by Dr. Paulo.
✱ I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I had been invited to moderate the presentation of a proof-of-concept virtual reality project applied to a training solution. This week it finally happened, and I moderated the session, which took place during a technology and innovation seminar which happens every year, organized by the Engineering department of the company I work for. It was a very interesting experience — considering I had never before moderated any session or presentation made by anyone. Being a lifelong learner, that's something different I could taste, and I really liked it. People were very interested in the subject presented by my colleague, and he really aced his presentation. It made me feel very nice for me and for him, by the end of the day. 😊
✱ My older son and me went to São Paulo this week. There, he took a series of tests as part of an effort to try to be granted one of the many scholarships offered to international students at Japanese universities, under the Japanese Government Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Scholarship Program. When he first took interest in Japanese culture a couple of years ago, by reading mangas and watching anime as many children his age did, I could never have imagined it would get him that far. He's been dedicated to Japanese studies, finding his own means to study, self-learning hiragana, katakana, kanji and everything else supported by Anki and hours and hours of reading, watching and listening to raw Japanese media. Regardless of what happens now, I'm very proud of him and his personal achievements, as it's certainly no piece of cake to master Japanese as a western, Brazilian citizen.
✱ As I've been able to witness my son's effort to self-teach himself Japanese for years, I know it's no easy task at all, but a desire to also learn it, maybe at a slower pace, dawned on me too, maybe because I love language learning. So, after some advice from my son, I started learning hiragana, the first and more basic of the three Japanese syllabaries, also made up of katakana and kanji, the latter derived from Chinese. I hope to be able to keep up with my learning.
✱ Still regarding our trip to São Paulo, the only bad news I had relates to my back and its pain. I don't know for sure, but I'd say the bed I slept into has something to do with "The Return of Low Back Pain", a personal movie — a B-movie, I'd say — that insists on rerunning in my daily life… this means two things, as I'll need to get back to São Paulo next Sunday: getting by on palliative medicine for the weekend and an appointment first thing next Monday, with my osteopath doctor. 😫😫😫
Week 25, 2023
✱ Our fridge, with the family for almost 15 years now, started this week decided not to work. On Monday morning we all woke up to noticing it had completely de-iced everything. And worse, as we were about to schedule the visit of a technician to look into what was happening, it suddenly came alive again — and is now on life-support. We’d been already planning to change it for a newer model and everything, but it seems we’ll need to speed things up a little bit.
✱ On the PKM side of my life, this week I came across two very interesting YouTube playlists: Mastering Obsidian and Daily Notes First. The first gave me many insights on YAML — which I currently underuse with my Obsidian setup —, the Dataview plug-in usage and inline fields, which I completely ignored existed for Obsidian, thinking it was a Logseq only thing; the second playlist gave me ideas on the Daily Note: I’ve never doubted it was an important thing, and I use it a lot, but this playlist gave me some really nice ideas on how to better structure what I have, and making it even more useful by combining what I register daily with the data view powers.
✱ I attended an in-company training about decision making on project management issues, that is, those mostly common and unexpected deviations everyone has already experienced at least once during the course of a project’s endeavor. The instructor, a workmate with whom I’ve already had the chance to learn a lot in the past, gave us many insights on decision making, but what really caught my attention was the great deal cognitive biases play on us as project managers and the way we respond to what is right in front of us. On the biases and decision making fields, I even discovered two additional reading references besides Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman — the reference literature in the area — that I didn’t know about: the first is The Art of Thinking Clearly, by Rolf Dobelli, whereas the second is You Are Not So Smart, by David McRaney, this one with the interesting subtitle of “Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself”. Both now already added to my anti-library.
✱ Nintendo Direct 2023 happened last Wednesday, airing live from YouTube. Now, while I couldn’t exactly watch it because I was working at the time, my son did, and from what he told me, this years reserves some nice things for Mario fans like we all are here, including a new Luigi’s Mansion and a game starring Princess Peach. But particularly, my interests lay on a remake of Super Mario RPG, originally released in 1996 for the SNES, scheduled for November, and on Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the much expected new 2D platform game of the franchise, where Mario even turns into an elephant, scheduled for a release in October — just in perfect timing to become my birthday gift!
✱ This week I needed to step into a bank agency for the first time again, after I don't even know how many years. The reason is that I needed to close an account I had opened more than 25 years ago, and that I had not been using. And not satisfied with a single visit, to finish the account cancellation process, I needed to go there again — so after years, two times in a row in the same week! Fortunately, the account is now officially closed, and I hope not to need to go to a bank again in many years to come… 😊
Week 24, 2023
✱ After two weeks in a row, I've finished reading Dragon Wing, the first of the seven books that form the Death Gate Cycle, an adult fantasy fiction series created by authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman still in the 1990's. I wrote about the book, which I found very appealing, and considered it to be unputdownable. Thus, I read it on every opportunity I found myself with some spare time in my hands. I was also helped by the fact that we had a long, four day long, weekend last week.
✱ Denver Nuggets became the 2023 NBA Season Champions. As someone supporting Miami, that’s not exactly the result I was expecting — I would have loved to see at least one additional, sixth game. On the one hand, I feel sad for Heat not winning another title. On the other, though, I kind of liked to see Denver getting to its first title after 47 years playing without ever being able to lift the trophy. So congratulations to Jokić and all the team. As for me, there’s always the next season to be played, isn’t it? 🙌🏀
✱ This week I took a couple of hours to play Hill Climb Racing again — a mobile game first introduced to me by one of my former bosses many years ago —, after I subscribed (again) to Apple Arcade. It was really fun remembering the game and spending time with it (although according to my younger son, I may have crossed some kind of invisible limit of hours played 😅).
✱ I went to the dentist this week, also, after some persisting pain in one of my upper teeth. Fortunately it wasn’t anything complicated to treat — and now I’m free from the pain I was undergoing.
✱ My older son turned 18 this week! We’re so happy for him, and celebrated the occasion with cake and pizza, exactly how he had asked it to be. My parents, sister and brother-in-law all came in to join us in the celebration. As for his future, he’s currently hard at work pursuing a Japanese college scholarship which I believe, intelligent as he is, he’ll have plenty of conditions to achieve. May God always speed your journey, son. I love you very much.
Dragon Wing
Yesterday, I finished reading Dragon Wing, the first of the seven books that are part of the Death Gate Cycle, an adult fiction series created by authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman during the 1990’s.
The whole series is set in a fantasy world where magic and technology are divided into five separate realms. The story depicts several fantasy races and cultures, including humans, elves and dwarves, but centers on races created by the authors, namely the Sartan, an ancient race of powerful wizards, skilled in the use of both magic and technology, who possess the ability to shape reality according to their will, who created the Death Gate, a portal that separates — and connects — the world into five realms; and the Patryn, a race of outcasts and rebels, skilled in the use of runes which allow them to manipulate reality through language and symbols, all of them banished to the Labyrinth by the Sartan.
Dragon Wing introduces us to Haplo, an assassin from one of the five realms, as he travels through the Death Gate towards the world of Arianus, to prepare for the arrival of his master, the Lord of the Nexus. Meanwhile, Hugh the Hand, an infamous assassin raised by Kir Monks after his mother died, is hired by Stephen, king of the human realm, to have his child, Prince Bane, murdered. Hugh then sets on a journey with Bane, with the excuse of fleeing the prince from its home because he’s being persecuted by people meaning to do him harm, during which they come across Alfred, the Prince’s chamberlain, who followed them in order to protect the child, but who has secrets of his own.
After leaving behind 433 very well-written pages and the first book, I have some thoughts I want to share.
First, considering that I came across this book entirely by accident, after I saw it mentioned in Mastodon, it beats me how come the Death Gate Cycle be seldom mentioned beside other fantasy series such as the LOTR by Tolkien, ASOIAF by George R. R. Martin, or The Wheel of Time, started by Robert Jordan and finished by Brandon Sanderson after the author’s death. After all, all these series share the greatness in storytelling and world building. From the ones I cited, only ASOIAF started to be written after the Death Gate Cycle, so I couldn’t find any explanations on its lack of mention. And it is a shame, I have to say, not seeing it mentioned more often.
Second, as I said before, this first book, at least for me is completely unputdownable. Now, I’m saying this being a non-native English speaker. As such, despite the fact of having been an English teacher in Brazil in the past, a good and well-written book with a fluent story considered, it takes me much longer to read books in English than it would in Portuguese, for obvious reasons. As the Death Gate Cycle has never been translated to Portuguese, my only option was to read it in English. Still, it took me only 13 consecutive days to finish reading (mind that I had to stop to do other things, as most everybody, meaning I wasn’t dedicated to reading the book). The story is very fine, so it was converted into a page-turner for me, automatically. And I guess I owe that to the authors, who have been able to wrap their intended plot in such a way that it is rich to the right point (yes, Tolkien, I’m looking at you and your veeeery long scenario and mostly everything else descriptions 😈) besides being filled with plot twists, so I came to the concluding chapters with so many open questions yet, and I loved that everything concluded in a way that seemed only proper.
Third, the Death Gate Cycleshares a characteristic with both LOTR and The Wheel of Time. The fact that these series have all been finished already (yes, George R. R. Martin, I’m looking at you and your unfinished business 😡). As such, it’s much more pleasing to me to have all the books already launched, so I can properly take my reading to an end. Now, I’ve read series while they hadn’t been finished yet (such as the Harry Potter books), but because I saw the commitment the author had to finish it. And I can’t see the same dedication, I’m sorry to say, coming from the author of ASOIAF. But this is not the main topic here.
So, in conclusion, as Limbeck Bolttightener, another of the marvelous characters in Dragon Wing, a dwarf from Drevlin, would say, I felt so compelled to write about my feelings for this book that I needed to do it as soon as possible. And I’d like to totally recommend it to anyone out there, interested in adult fantasy fiction books, as I know you won’t regret it. From my part, as I write these closing words, I’ve already started reading the next installment in the series, Elven Star, hoping that the story keeps the pace. I guess I won’t be disappointed.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
I was browsing my Mastodon feed tonight when I came across this picture, posted by user Henri:
I liked it instantly, but as soon as I gave it a second look, the image looked very familiar to me, and I started to think why. The first thing I noticed was some Japanese kanji on its side. Having my older son studying Japanese, my first reaction was to show him the image, so I could be certain it was really Japanese.
His answer not only confirmed my suspicion, but also revealed why I found the image so familiar. That’s the same one — or nearly — which’s stamped on my Kindle cover:
I talked to Henri on Mastodon trying to figure out who created the original image, but he didn’t know. What I did find out talking to him, though, was that the image he posted was generated by someone who used AI to accomplish the feat.
As I wouldn’t be satisfied until finding out who authored the original, I started to look for answers, and fortunately it wasn’t a difficult search. The image happens to be featured in Wikipedia, and is named The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Created in 1831 by Japanese painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, the image is the artist’s most famous piece, and also possibly the most reproduced image in the history of all art, having been featured in t-shirts, shoes, videogame controllers… and Kindle covers like mine. Now, learning that was certainly unexpected to me — but going down that rabbit hole from a Mastodon post was really cool.
Week 23, 2023
✱ One never knows when Murphy’s Law is going to strike. We have this Epson printer home, seldomly used nowadays as mostly everything became electronic, either emailed to us or easily obtainable via PDF files. We generally only use it when we need to print something for my son’s school assignments or when I sell something used and have to send it via mail to someone, when I have to print labels. This week I did it but when I tried to print the corresponding labels, my printer’s control software didn’t allow me past a warning saying I was out of magenta and yellow ink cartridges. No big deal — except until I went to the store where I regularly buy them, and found just the magenta one. With the yellow cartridge not available there, any not at any other retailer in my city, I needed to order it online and wait for 5 days for it to get home. Quite a wait for having something printed out, if you ask me. But what really stuck in my mind was where did all yellow Epson cartridges go?
✱ No matter how much technology advances, certain things remain done only when you go about attending places in person. This week I had to go see a notary, as my oldest son was in need of authenticating a couple of school documents in order to pursue a college scholarship. He had never been to a notary in his whole life, and I guess it was interesting for him to see such procedures being executed.
✱ I’m not a tennis person, meaning I seldom follow anything related to the sport. But Brazilian media had been talking about Bia Haddad all week long and how she came to play the semifinals against Polish female tennis player Iga Swiatek, current number one in the ranking — so I felt that was a game I needed to watch. Bia had very good moments, and led the second set for some time, but in the end she fell 2 x 0 against the world’s current best player, partials 6/2 and 7/6. But even falling, she was a giant and made history, becoming the first woman semifinalist of a Grand Slam in singles for Brazil in more than 50 years. She also entered the top 10 of the world rankings for the first time, both reasons for us, Brazilians, to be proud of her.
✱ William Poor, a video producer, story editor, and reporter from The Verge premiered a short documentary on YouTube last Sunday, telling the story of the Apple Lisa, released in 1983 as Apple’s first GUI desktop computer: its operating system had many user-friendly features, such as icons, windows and menus, all of them made interactive with the help of a mouse. It was also way expensive at $10,000 — equivalent to approximately $30,500 in June, 2023, making it instantly doomed and discontinued in 1985, so only two years after its release. A September 24, 1989 news article mentioned the burial of the remaining inventory of 2,700 Lisas in a garbage deposit in Logan, Utah, and the documentary dives into this story that I watched the day it came out, a really interesting video.
✱ After almost 3 months without watching almost no episodes of any of the series I follow, I’ve finally finished Spy x Family. The show’s second season is still to start airing in October this year, so I still had some time to watch the four episodes I hadn’t watched — and now that I’m done with them, I can reaffirm that overall, it’s quite a nice story and narrative. I’m looking forwards season 2 (and the upcoming feature movie, to be released in December).
✱ I’ve been watching every NBA Finals game as a Miami Heat supporter. They were East Conference champions but, the way things are going, unfortunately, favor Denver Nuggets much more, as they won last Friday’s fourth game 108-95. While I’m waiting for next Monday’s fifth game and for an almost — and likely — impossible victory away from Miami, though, I have to say that this last game gave us all the most interesting and unexpected moment of all: with 2:07 left in the third quarter and Denver already leading the score 76-68, Bam Adebayo missed a two-hand dunk attempt and hung onto the rim for a moment, making it seemingly torn. This caused the game to be interrupted for about 9 minutes, while a ladder was brought onto the court for an investigation, after which the basket was declared ok. From my part, I don’t recall having ever seen anything like that, and it was as amusing as unexpected to me… 😂v
The sad reality of notification fatigue
I don’t know about you, but I have never been one who loves push notifications. If you look around in the web, you’ll see some saying it was invented by Apple in June 2009, while others will say Blackberry came up with it in 2003.
No matter who created them, the thing is push notifications are everywhere for smartphone users, that is, for mostly everyone nowadays. And the problem is although some of them can be genuinely useful, I guess I wouldn’t be alone when saying most of them are not, and having to deal with them, even if only for the slightest moment it takes us to dismiss them, is a waste of time.
I guess some different things can be pointed out as explanations for so many push notifications in our lives. First, the sole existence of so many apps: messaging apps, social media apps, shopping apps, streaming apps, games and so many other apps, all trying to send us their own messages, as to friendly remind us of whatever, or to say they miss us, only actually trying to engage us with whatever. For every new app we install, 100% of them want us to enable notifications.
Second, a train of thought some app devs have, making them think that we, app users, want to be notified of all and every app information, when that’s rarely the case. Let me illustrate by saying that if I schedule an appointment or set up a reminder so I don’t forget to pay the electricity bill or don’t forget to buy groceries, I want to be remembered about it, ok. But it is not always that I want an online seller to throw random product discounts on my screen, or to say that there are 15 users who have the same interests as me, following that new, obscure, web influencer.
Third, as Tom Fishburne put it last week, “Push notifications often reflect the marketing myopia that drive a lot of customer experience. Marketers often inflate the role that their brands actually play in people’s lives”. This is so well said, because it does reflect some apps and their needy and totally inappropriate behavior. After all, it’s not because I bought something in a supermarket, drugstore, shoe store or any retailer that I’m going to immediately want to buy something else. To the extreme, it might be that I won’t buy anything at that specific place ever again. In any case, I don’t need extra push notifications, and even less, a notification fatigue.
Now, I know all the push notifications hell is avoidable, to a point. We can always completely turn them off, or select which notifications we want to see or not, and it’s nice to see that there are so many serious devs who implement the ability for us, users, to choose what we want to be notified about. These are serious people. But the thing is there are apps which ask us to enable notifications for genuine reasons, like informing me of when my ride will arrive, or when my product is coming towards home, but, in doing so, also start to shoot a lot of other push notifications, with offerings, discounts, so on and so forth.
And these are the apps that, behaving in such a way, are bad players. When I notice such behavior, I usually mercilessly uninstall them. But I’m obliged to live with a couple of them, as I depend on their services for a reason or another, and these apps don’t allow me to choose what to receive. Sad.
Week 22, 2023
✱ If someone asked me, I’d say the most amazing play I’ve ever watched happen in NBA was featured by Derrick White last Saturday, a couple of hours after my weekly notes: at the last second — actually, the last 0.1 second —, the Boston Celtics guard scored the basket that kept his team alive in the East Conference Finals for the seventh and decisive match, when the score turned 104-103. His feat was amazing, and even though, to my personal pleasing, Celtics were later eliminated 103-84 in the final game, I needed to note it here. Amazing how he jumped before the final buzz and, while in the air, got the rebound from Marcus Smart’s failed 3-point shoot and made magic. That’s just what I love about basketball. This unpredictability.
✱ Geffrey van der Bos organized an open PKM discussion using Obsidian as a basis last Saturday, and I was able to take part live. Besides Geffrey, Alex Qwxlea was also there, and the talk was very nice and informative. Two learnings for me: Geffrey’s custom highlights CSS snippet for Obsidian callouts (implemented and loved it), and the File Chucker plug-in, which can move my notes from my inbox to any folder I say, doing so very quickly. I hope Geffrey repeats discussions like this often…
✱ This week, while mentoring a colleague at work about storytelling and presentations, I presented her with a very nice TED Talk: the one Richard Turere presented back in 2013, when he was only 13 years-old. Two years before, Richard, who was born in Kenya and as a child shepherded his father’s cows near the south parts of the Nairobi National Park, faced lion attacks to the cattle, and seeing people around him killing the lions to avoid more cow deaths, started thinking about a way to trick the wild animals into not attacking the cows. Shortly, when he came up with the Lion Lights, an electronic device used at night, that really worked. Most impressive, though, is the fact that even being so young at 13 years-old and having never talked in public before, he got to deliver a killer presentation, which I assure it’s worth watching.
✱ It’s been some time now that I’ve come back to using RSS feeds to help me consume content. And, in order to do so more properly, last year I subscribed to BazQux reader on a yearly basis, as I found it to be both simple and full-featured to my needs. The thing is this week I came to the conclusion that I’m not being able to follow so many subscriptions, and did some autumn cleaning, being more picky in relation to what I really want to keep following. This made my unread articles count decrease from 500+ to 300. It’s nice to have the sensation to be in control again. Besides, I’ve used the mark all read button more often, as a means to combat FOMO, something I don’t need at all in my life.
✱ Years ago, my brother-in-law had a cat named Haplo. Back then I absorbed that information not to care about it at all in the years to come. Until by the end of last month, I stumbled upon Dragon Wing, the first of seven volumes that form the Death Gate Cycle series, from which Haplo, a Patryn, is the main character. It amazed me that my memory recalled that name after almost two decades… and yet, it didn’t amaze me quite as much as the reading in itself. This book is unputdownable, and, from my brother-in-law’s impressions, it looks like so is the whole seven-part series.
✱ I walked past 12,000 steps this Saturday, my personal record since having started to monitor my steps via my mobile and Apple Watch. That’s over 9 kilometers far! I have to admit that counting steps adds some gamification to the experience of exercising, making it less boring. I hope to keep the pace… 👟
Dish-o-therapy
Sarah Andersen recently nailed it when she draw the above comic. Without knowing it, she reminded me of a 2015 Instagram post by Brazilian artist and blogger Ida Feldman, where she prophetically stated that “while you’re alive, there will be dishwashing”, probably the truest statement I’ve ever seen.
I have this love and hate relationship with dishwashing. Although it’s probably more of a hate and hate relationship. As new dirty dishes, forks, knifes, cups and spoons are certain to doom our lives as soon as we finish washing their siblings, I try to put up with this sad reality by using the time the best I can.
Because it’s normally when I’m doing the dishes that I listen to music, watch the news, watch another episode of one of my favorite series or listen to a podcast. As there’s no escape from the dishes to be washed, I only see fit to use my other senses to better serve me.
Years ago there was this TV advertisement here in Brazil where a woman cheerfully danced to something she was listening to on her headphones while doing the dishes. At a certain point the term dish-o-therapy showed up on screen, because, as there’s no use in complaining about dishwashing, turning this moment into a therapy is totally fine.
Hiding YouTube playback controls in a browser
So, I was looking for a practical answer to a simple problem this morning. I needed to hide the YouTube playback controls bar in a certain video I was interested in using a screenshot from. Just didn’t want them to show up in the picture. I knew there’s at least one Google Chrome extension that gets the job done, but a secondary drawback to this is that I needed the screenshot to be used in my work computer, and the company’s security policies block the installing and usage of browser extensions. I also tried a piece of javascript code many had sworn to work, to no avail. And it was then, that after some more web exploring, I came across this Reddit post, where user /u/Rofang offered yet other two javascript code pieces, this time to be type straight into the browser’s javascript console:
document.querySelector('.ytp-chrome-bottom').style.display = 'none'And it worked! Thus, I got my screenshot. The same post also has the reverse code, to make the playback controls reappear once you’ve finished your business. Again at the javascript console, all you need to do is type:
document.querySelector('.ytp-chrome-bottom').style.display = ''The first video game
Stuart Brown, a.k.a. Ahoy is a British YouTuber from Manchester who makes insightful videos about videogames’ history. Recently, I came across “The first video game”, a video he produced 3 years ago as a means to answer what was the first video game to ever appear in history.
Now, this question had always seemed simple to answer in my understanding. After all, I believe I’m not the only one who knew the answer was, of course, Atari’s Pong, which came out in 1972, five years before I was even born. But Stuart’s video proved me (and everyone going by the same answer) wrong, and the culprit for everyone’s mistake seems to take root in the fact that Pong was the first game to break through into popular culture, and so, many magazines at the time cited it as “the first videogame“.
Stuart goes on to add that, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, there were no such things as Google or the internet, and a trip down to the library wouldn’t reveal much of anything regarding the history of videogames. So, people in general just accepted Pong as the first ever videogame to exist, and it was all right. But the video shows there are contenders to being the first video game dating back to 1953!
The thing is, I needed to share this video. It’s just a so-well documented story of videogames that I couldn’t miss the opportunity. For about 60 minutes, the duration of a documentary, which is undoubtedly another way to call this piece, we take a deep dive into history: the first-ever videogame candidate is revealed, but not only that. We also learn about computers, transistors, famous people like Nolan Bushnell and when did video games become video games, that is, who in the world first used the term and how it came to be. Not to mention the many references to articles, magazines and books.
That’s a complete meal if you, like me, are into videogames, history and lifelong learning.
Week 21, 2023
✱ I’ve always been a big fan of Michael J. Fox, specially because of the Back to The Future trilogy he starred. So it was only natural for me to want to watch Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie this week, a documentary released on Apple TV+, where he gets in front of the cameras to tell his story, show how his career was inevitably affected by Parkinson’s and how, despite of everything that’s happened to him, he’s kept incurably optimistic. “The trembling was a message.. from the future”, as he says during the movie, but it never kept him from keeping on moving. He was never still. If you’re also a fan and have the chance to watch it, just do it.
✱ I know this will sound pretty volatile, but I’ve decided to carry out some experiments with the free Obsidian Live Sync plug-in in order to substitute for Obsidian Sync, which I just cannot afford now. So far, so good: using a free IBM Cloudant database I’m being able to sync between my iPhone and my Windows desktop computer flawlessly. If everything turns out well for some more time, I’ll try to also integrate Amethyst to the workflow. Amethyst is an Obsidian-compatible Hugo theme that can be used to replace Obsidian Publish. Should all of this work together, I might Soon™ ditch my Dokuwiki in favor of this crazy bundle. Stay tuned.
✱ As I usually work from home, it’s not every day that I get to meet my colleagues and my friends. This week, though, many of us met in a place that was new to me — a mix of bar and sports practicing place, where one can practice beach tennis, not that I personally did it 😅. The thing is it was very nice to be able to spend a couple of hours chatting and doing small talk, unrelated to anything about work. I hope we repeat this more often.
✱ This week’s been really busy. Lots of things to do, and learning. Thus I didn’t have all the energy I’d like to and, besides two new quotes and an image about reading, I wasn’t able to finish and publish any of the drafted texts I have saved. But I hope to publish more as soon as I finish a couple more activities. After all, writing and publishing has been a real therapy for me.
✱ I was invited to moderate the presentation of a proof-of-concept involving virtual reality applied in a training solution, during a seminar on technology and innovation organized by the company I work for, next month. I was flattered for being considered, and, of course, accepted it. And yesterday I could watch an explanation about the project — and, yet more interesting, I was able to try the solution out, by using very cool AR/VR glasses, and it was awesome.
✱ Hours before publishing my weekly notes, that is, this very same Saturday morning, I had the chance to participate live in a very interesting PKM discussion hosted by Geffrey van der Bos, where he, Alex Qwxlea and me talked about Omnivore as a replacement for Readwise, as the latter can be very pricey depending on the region of the world where you live, Amethyst as a replacement for Obsidian Publish and many other things. I got Geffrey’s custom CSS callout style for highlights up and running and also got acquainted with the Obsidian File Chucker plug-in. In the end it was all very fun and productive.
Obvious facts
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery – a Sherlock Holmes Short Story
Late night reading
Tom Gauld sent this message yesterday in The Guardian. The only thing people like me, who love reading, can say is that we totally identify with this situation. I feel 100% represented.
▣ via Robert McNess on Mastodon.
Week 20, 2023
✱ According to my pedometer app, I’ve walked 29.5km this week. It’s probably not much for people who are used to walking and running as a means of exercising, but it is a lot to me. Actually, I’ve gone above the 10,000 steps a day threshold twice and got so cheered up by it that decided to try it thrice. I shouldn’t have. Last Monday I ended up visiting my osteopath, so she could put my bones into their right place. It felt nice to stop feeling pain, but in exchange I’ve been properly scolded by her, who reminded me that I should go easier when exercising, specially because I’m not actually used to do it very often. But I’ll try again, this time only in a easier pace.
✱ After considering to purchase Obsidian Publish for some time this week, I’ve decided not to. It is probably cheap in American dollars at 8 bucks a month charged annually, but when converted to Brazilian Reais it becomes very expensive, in my opinion, at over 450 bucks. Too much to keep a digital garden — although I still think Obsidian is a wonderful tool and will keep using it locally and offline.
✱ Giving up on Obsidian Publish made me consider a “B plan”. Years ago I fiddled a little bit with DokuWiki trying to create a personal wiki. And now, by using notes I’ve created locally, I went back to the idea and published my personal wiki and digital garden. It is in Portuguese only and filled with gaps that I need to address, but at least it’s gaining shape. I hope to keep on working in it.
✱ I had the opportunity of going out and have lunch with a couple of good friends from work this week. It was very nice to spend a couple of hours talking to them and making only small talk. The food was very nice also. And in the end I was gifted with a very hard to find — at least in the region where I live — chocolate bar. It was a mixture of white chocolate and cashew nuts, pretty yummy 😋.
On technical obsolescence
I may be the only person in the world who’s seen this SMBC comic strip and, from the thousands of thoughts I could have had, I thought about… technical obsolescence. And I laughed because of both the comic and the thought.
The therapy of blogging
I came across this text from Christopher Butler today, where he mentions some notes about the act of blogging that he took back in 2010. Parts of his text ringed with me, specially because he mentions the act of writing in a blog as “this experience of being able to express ourselves without any restriction” and the accompanying “awe and excitement of publishing on the web“.
It took me a long time to get back to blogging. In spite of having started to blog somewhere in 2007 or 2008 — that is, fifteen-ish years ago — I later completely walked out on it for many years, first trying to convince myself that it was because of lack of time, but then acknowledging it was because I had lost interest in it for many reasons, depression and anxiety included in the package. I had maintained a website with a blog and some other random stuff and cancelled my hosting plan (although I never cancelled the domain name, and that was good).
Sometime last year it occurred to me that something was missing in my life.
I’ve always liked to write and it’s been sometime now that I’ve been feeling better with myself. This something missing was it, it was to write. Maybe in a blog, maybe not. The thing is, during this same period I came to know about note taking and figured out that was something I’ve always done, just without knowing it had a name. So I came across very fine apps like Obsidian, Logseq and Tangent Notes, all of which I still use on a daily basis to register my thinking. As I wrote my notes locally, I started to consider the idea of writing in a digital garden, publishing some thoughts, but unorderly. I liked this idea. Then came omg.lol, a wonderful service that, among many features, offers image hosting and weblogs: that was enough to awake that feeling of wanting to blog again, so I created a blog there and it was just a matter of time until this blog here was reactivated.
Christopher Butler’s text reminded me of the therapeutic effects that a blog can bring. As he says, with a blog “I can share the part of me that is afraid of dying, the part of me that is ashamed by my own thoughts, jealous of someone else’s success, that loathes myself, that is afraid of being misunderstood; all of the fears and anxieties and little things that twist around in your gut; that if you’re sensitive and smart and insightful enough, you’re managing to deal with; you can exercise these in a different way“. That is, I can share mostly anything, and I guess the secret to keep such blogging therapy a success is to write, first and foremost, to myself, for the fun of it, for the joy of it.
Sitting and writing what’s on my mind, figuring out what thoughts I want to express and shaping such thoughts in a way that makes them readable and understandable to someone else in a blog post format is very nice. And if and when I feel there might be anything else, not suitable in a blog, there’s always the possibility of falling back on streams of thought, private journals and digital gardens. Anything counts, because all of these things, as blogging, are therapeutic as well.