This site has moved from pjg1.site to orgnizedmess.net!

I’ve been thinking of making this move from at least a year, and a recent price hike for the previous domain ($26.24 -> $28.84) finally made me switch. The new name comes from a username I’ve used previously and liked, and it costs me nearly half the price ($12.52), a win-win!

I have set up a permanent redirect from the old domain to the new one. I won’t be renewing the old domain any further, so the redirects will work till July. Those subscribed to the site via RSS can re-subscribe using the new URL by then to continue receiving posts.

I’ve tried quite a few systems and tools to manage my projects and ideas, and switching gets tiring. I don’t think I’ll stop switching anytime soon though, so here are some guidelines to help me choose which tools to use whenever I feel the urge to try something new.

Stick to plaintext - preferably Markdown

Plaintext files are easy to write in, maintain and switch formats when needed. When I am looking at a new tool to try, my main decision to use it would be on the basis of whether it supports plaintext or not. If I really feel the urge to try a tool that is backed by cloud storage and/or databases, I export the notes back to plaintext eventually.

After having tried custom formats, Markdown and org mode, I keep coming back to Markdown as my format of choice. It’s well supported by most editors and I’m used to the syntax, so it makes sense to stick to it.

It’s boring, but it works.

Keep short-term context extremely brief when overwhelmed

Combining notes and actionable items is tempting, acting as a single source of truth to refer to. However, seeing everything together (even when structured) gets overwhelming for me on some days, so I would like the option to have a focused view of what I have to work on in that moment.

This could look like creating a file or post-it note for each day or each work session, with only relevant tasks and information in that document. I could then process the document when I feel less overwhelmed.

Have multiple places for capturing notes

I like to write things in different places depending on my mood (see point above) and what I have access to in that moment - it could be a laptop, a notebook, sticky notes or my phone. In that case, having multiple capture systems is essential, without caring about their format or organization.

One place would be ideal, but in a system that combines digital and analog tools, having multiple places is realistic, reduces friction to writing and scratches the novelty itch.

Add useful context to a captured note

I’ve saved links to read or watch or written an idea, and then forgot why I captured them when revisiting them weeks or months later. Adding the reason behind why I saved something makes it easier to process a note, especially if I reference it way after I wrote it. It could bring back the spark in the idea or I can delete if the idea no longer interests me.

Have a strict review process

Capture systems have to be supported with a strong review process, otherwise finding stuff is going to be a struggle, something that happens often. I have made time for reviewing in the past, but I either get overwhelmed or choose to leave notes thinking they’ll be useful sometime in the future. That sometime rarely comes, and I’m left with a pile of semi-processed and unprocessed notes.

Create strong indications of which notes have been processed and which haven’t. This could look like adding a symbol next to a note or deleting the note all together. If I cannot decide what to do with a note, revisit it for a maximum of three times. If I still don’t know what to do with the note or if the note has lost its relevance till then, delete.

Schedule regular reviews - weekly and whenever I reach a checkpoint in my projects. Despite my best efforts, there will be times where regular reviews may not happen and I end up with a huge backlog. In those cases, it would be best to leave the backlog as is, rely on search and filtering to get the relevant information, and process the rest when I have the time and energy.

I would also like to extend this process to long-form notes. Rather than letting them collect in a folder, I would like to consider publishing more of them to this site.

I read a few posts around personal websites and how to make it easier to make one, and a common theme emerged: the existing tools to create one’s own site (mainly referring to static site generators and self-hosting) are too developer-focused. Things that developers can do may be too much of a barrier for non-developers who just want to write.

There were two solutions that resonated with me. One is encouraging developers to create simpler tools, which Giles mentions in Let’s make the indie web easier:

We need more self-hosted platforms for personal publishing that aren’t Wordpress. And don’t point me to Hugo or Netlify or Eleventy or all those things - all of them are great, but none of them are simple enough. We need web publishing tools that do not require users to open the Terminal at all. And we need lots of them.

We need a whole galaxy of options.

So that next time we say to someone: “You should own your own domain, and publish on your own website,” and they answer with “How?”, we can give an answer that’s more than just: “Install Wordpress.”

Versions of this approach exist with tools like Bearblog and Pika. Manuel has a list of blogging platforms on his website which lists more.

The other solution is encouraging developers to form groups that help people host sites using existing tools. Leon mentions this in Better tech won’t make joining the indieweb easier, but collectives could:

So, a starting point for collective blogging is a pool of folk with a range of skills to set up websites. […]

Perhaps this is one area where tech will help. We could use simple, cheap tech stacks with a few options – LAMP, WordPress and a set of robust themes seems an appropriate approach. But having established this foundation, we might be able to make the indieweb a more diverse place, where non-tech folk find it easier to publish their work.

This idea appeals to me a lot more, as I am more interested in hosting an existing tool rather than building a blogging platform from scratch in addition to figuring out hosting. The Fediverse does this well with Mastodon, and I think there is scope for a Mastodon equivalent for long-form blogging.

I haven’t used Wordpress personally¹, but a quick search brought up Wordpress Multisite, the ability to host multiple sites on the same instance. So there might be some potential there. The ideal, however, would be a tool that is open-source. Think a hybrid of Wordpress and Bearblog with multiple instances alongside the hosted instance, with built-in support for IndieWeb protocols so that they can interact with each other.

If someone is interested in building on this idea further or if you have other thoughts, please reach out. I’d like to hear from you.

I briefly mentioned the network setup in a post about starting my homelab, but wanted to describe the steps I took to get connectivity to the machine and the VMs within it.

Proxmox creates a basic network configuration during installation. It provides connectivity to the VM via a bridge interface—a virtual switch. The configuration assumes that the machine has a static IP, and is connected via an Ethernet interface.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface wlp3s0 inet manual

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
    address 192.168.0.101/24
    gateway 192.168.0.1
    dns-nameserver 192.168.0.1
    bridge-ports wlp3s0
    bridge-stp off
    bridge-fd 0

source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*

This assumption works well for servers (the intended place to setup a hypervisor), but not for a laptop with only a WiFi interface. Running the default configuration with a WiFi interface returns an error, as the interface could not be bridged directly.

# systemctl restart networking.service
# journalctl -u networking.service -n 2
Nov 14 23:47:32 pve /usr/sbin/ifup[7397]: warning: vmbr0: apply bridge ports settings: cmd '/bin/ip -force -batch - [link set dev wlp3s0 master vmbr0]' failed: returned 1 (Error: Device does not allow enslaving to a bridge.
                                          Command failed -:1
                                          )
Nov 14 23:47:32 pve systemd[1]: Finished networking.service - Network initialization.

Searching for workarounds brought up this guide from Vivek Kaushik, which worked for me!

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto wlp3s0
iface wlp3s0 inet dhcp
    wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
    address 10.10.0.1/24
    bridge-ports none
    bridge-stp off
    bridge-fd 0

    post-up sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
    post-up iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s '10.10.0.0/24' -o wlp3s0 -j MASQUERADE
    post-down iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -s '10.10.0.0/24' -o wlp3s0 -j MASQUERADE

source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*

The bridge interface acts as the gateway of a private network, and NAT rules are set to rewrite the packets with the correct address before sending and after receiving them. With this setup, you can either set an IP address for each VM manually, or setup a DHCP server on the physical machine to assign addresses automatically. The latter option is covered in the guide, which I implemented.

This setup worked just fine, however I was curious if I could separate the routing configuration into a VM of its own. I’d seen posts and videos configuring routers using open-source router distributions like pfSense and OpenWRT, and I wanted to try them out too.

Another option I found was to pass-through the network card to a VM and configure that VM into a router, inspired by this guide from Ryjelsum. It didn’t work for my network card though, and I also had problems with troubleshooting as I would lose internet access each time I attempted the passthrough.

Having an Ethernet interface on the machine would make things easier, so I purchased a USB-to-Ethernet adapter. Figuring out how to get an Ethernet connection to my room from the main home router was quite the learning experience—figuring out how my home router is setup, knowing which Ethernet cables to buy and where to connect them. I also assigned a static IP to my homelab machine, making it easier to access and simplifying the network configuration.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface wlp3s0 inet manual

auto enx00e04c461997
iface enx00e04c461997 inet manual

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
    address 192.168.0.101/24
    gateway 192.168.0.1
    dns-nameservers 192.168.0.1
    bridge-ports enx00e04c461997
    bridge-stp off
    bridge-fd 0

source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*

Each VM now receives an IP address from my main home router via DHCP, so all VMs + the physical machine itself are on the same network. I have also been using the Ethernet adapter for a few months, and it seems to be working reliably so far!

The next step would be to create the router VM, and expand on that further. Also, now that the WiFi interface is unused and I have a working ethernet interface, I might try to make the passthrough work again.

Joel Dueck in Publishing Nerds:

[…] Publishing nerds end up as inveterate yak shavers and one-man bands performing in their own driveways. Our ingrained preference to control all levels of design, and the facility which computers give us for doing so, tend to preclude us from cross-pollinating and collaborating, which for most of us is a big developmental hazard.

I feel called out by this post. I think a lot about how my posts look visually, maybe too much. The hours I’ve spent designing this website has been time spent away from writing and collaborating with people.

I still enjoy working on the designing and don’t want to stop completely. so I’ll have to think of ways to balance writing and designing better.

via vhbelvadi.com