Leaving GitHub is of course a huge to-do. Today I did clean up some forgotten forked repositories where I just made a simple pull request, but I also took the opportunity to move one codebase I would like to work more on, a Wikipedia image quiz, to Codeberg.
Writing a letter by hand is a very different process than sending a quick message on an app. The time to think about what you write, putting the ink to the paper and getting it right feels more personal. I like doing it, and this one felt extra special to me.
Motion to leave
The annual general assembly for a non-profit I am member in is coming up. The association is still on X, so I wrote a motion arguing for leaving that platform.
The sun was shining this morning, so I quickly brewed some coffee for the thermos and took the train to Zuid-Kennemerland. It's a national park just 40 minutes away and thanks to the closeness it's the nature I am most likely to get out in. I walked for about two hours and had some cozy coffee breaks even if the clouds came halfway in. A lot of bird song and I also snapped a few shots of lichen and fungi for iNaturalist.
Spoons. A5. Notepad. Faber-Castell Art & Graphic Poloychromos Pastel. Black roller tip pen.
This is my reminder sheet, now on my kitchen wall, for the various spices recommended in the Daily dozen app. Made with the template created yesterday.
This article popped up in my feed and it is a long-read, well-written and with good arguments. In particular, I did enjoy the analogy with ecological rewilding and feel that what I am doing with this is a small part of the solution.
I am preparing a small reminder image for myself to put in the kitchen which will have many spoons on it. Today I prepared it by creating a template to draw the spoons.
Evening walk
A walk through the city in dusk. Some shopping and scouting minibiebs along the way.
Drawing exercises
A video about drawing popped up in my feed, and that led to some more and several fun drawing exercises. The results are pretty boring, but I'll link to the videos.
It took me almost a month since I started removing apps from Facebook. But now I am done and not relying on it to login on any other sites anymore. This is a huge step to get off the platform. All that I feel that I need to do now is to handover adminship for a few groups and pages I help manage.
Sequence diagram
Sequence diagram. A4. Paper: Canson Sketchpad. 0.7 mm pencil.
When visualizing a flow for work, I started sketching it out on paper. Two tries and then I was ready to move it to the digital world (where it is still iterating).
This was mostly a test to see if the crayons from my youth, they are probably at least 40 years old, still hold up. And they seem to do so.
Sketching graphs
Bar chart. A5. Notebook. Pilot V Liquid Light highlighter. Black roller tip pen.
I'm starting thinking about some graphs to create for the Swedish Wikipedia 25th birthday in May. This was a test with partial data (because the notebook had too few lines) of the number of articles over time. It shows the rapid increase, but also unusually for a Wikipedia, the large deletions as well.
The book release of the book Public Data Cultures was at Internet Archive Europe, so I got a good excuse to visit their office and also hear about an interesting book.
Circles. A4. Paper: Canson Sketchpad. Copic Marker, Faber-Castell Art & Graphic Poloychromos Pastel. Black roller tip pen.
Doodling with circle templates and colors.
Mending zipper
An old jacket of mine had the zipper slightly broken. Tonight after some fiddling I managed to replace a small part and now it is working again.
Cleaning and sorting
Some old boxes that I needed to sort, and it turned into some clean out and cleaning as well.
CfgMgmtCamp
I went to Ghent and the CfgMgmtCamp conference giving a talk about why one should use free and open source software when building free and open source software. Yes, the talk was technically in front of a screen, but I was standing up, gesturing wildly and mostly looking at the people in the room. The talk was also followed by some good hallway conversations afterwards.
A full day of talks, panels, listening and thinking. While the conference is about something digital, the focus here is meeting each other and thinking together in small and large groups.
With a couple of hours between trains in Stockholm, I had a good fika, with a vegan semmelsnäcka, a variant of the classic semla. Then I walked around for some shopping and even found some gifts.
LinkedIn is one of the services I don't know of any good replacement for yet. But after reading a good blog post today, I realized that the app is a good first step. It is also a place where I still lose some time on mindless scrolling. So today I uninstalled the app from my phone. I already have my CV online as well, so another step of that blog post is done too.
Today we took a drive around the neighboring villages and looked at them in a snowy shroud.
Swedish fika
I went to visit my uncle and had some lovely fika in a cozy cabin in a very wintry landscape.
Poker evening
Another game night, this time with poker.
Friday coziness
Apparently, 13% of Swedes eats tacos on Fridays, in what is called 'Fredagsmys', literally Friday coziness in a longer unstressed dinner. So did we.
Winter walk
A walk on snowy winter roads in the forest near my mother.
Memorial Garden
21 January, my stepdad would have turned 79. My mother and I went to a memorial garden and lit a candle.
Game night
This evening was all screen free, with games of Uno and Scrabble with family.
Collision
A day spent traveling in train, bus and car and for the long bus ride i enjoyed reading the book Collision - Stories from the Science of CERN. I am just on the third short story, but the two first ones captivated me.
Train doodling. 2xA5. Notebook. Black roller tip pen.
On the train today I took some time to just do some doodling. A lot of repetition to practice basic drawing skills (which is so much needed).
Sketching treefolk
Treefolk. A5. Notebook. 0.7 mm pencil.
I have been watching a few Magic the Gathering videos recently about the upcoming set and was inspired by the treefolk (and perhaps a bit by elementals too).
Discontinue Discord
Discord has not been one of my liked chat platforms either. I used it for one course and a hackathon and then stayed on since there is a Wikipedia server. But I never enjoyed it and does not use it much either. So as with the Whatsapp I already have plenty of replacements and tonight I deleted the account, perhaps a little earlier than I planned due to the rumors of an upcoming IPO that may speed on enshitification.
Doodles. A4. Paper: Canson Sketchpad. Copic markers and black roller tip pen.
Too tired to get into something real, but today I at least sat down with paper again. The backside shining trhrough was an experiment of a tree with markers, but it didn't turn out the way I wanted. Instead I just doodled...
Public Domain Day
An early morning and train to Brussels for the Public Domain Day. A lot of listening to talks, mingling and also taking part in giving a workshop.
Not sure if this should be counted as a miss, but today also did not have a very creative activity in a very busy day, but a non-digital rather unusual activity was to pack for a two day work trip.
Facebook decoupling
I realized when doing the mindmap earlier this year, that some platforms also functions as logins for other platforms. So today I have started looking at the connected Facebook apps and disconnect them after changing to a "local" password. At least those I want to continue to use. Some I will not care about, they may have been sites I only checked out once. I was surprised by the amount of apps, but at least now I have started this work.
Storage rearrangement
Not a very creative activity, but very non-digital for the mind (and the body!), today I have rearranged some things I have stored.Boxes, moving around, optimizing.
Sketching 25, part 2
Rough draft. 18x16cm. Paper: Canson Sketchpad. Stamps: Avec Wooden Stamps.
Not done yet, this is one experiment in the line for Wikipedia's 25th birthday.
In my continued exodus from Facebook, today I deleted the Facebook page for my consultancy Open By Default. I felt ready to delete it as I do run a Fediverse instance for the company, and am still on LinkedIn (but I am looking for alternatives for that too). I still have a few pages to hand over adminship for in an orderly fashion, and then I can close my personal account on Facebook and be all out from Meta products.
My idea with the other emails (see previous post) was to get a local client for my laptop and phone and then run it like in the old days with IMAP directly from my provider. I was dreading this as the last time I did this, which admittely was at least a decade ago, it was rather tedious to geet all the settings right. But I got started with Thunderbird, an email client I know since before, and it turned out it could detect the settings from my provider (One.com). So it was not much more complicated than logging in and I was up and running. And after installing the app on the phone, it asked if I already had a desktop setup to import. So that was just scanning a QR code and then I was done. Now I only have a few more email addresses to decouple from Gmail.
Over the years, I have aquired a bunch of domains. Often, there has been a need to setup some email for them too. To avoid too many mail boxes to check, most of them have been forwarding the emails to some of my more primary accounts. Today I went through (almost) all of these accounts and made sure no one is forwarding to Gmail any longer. This is part one, because there are a few accounts that I would like to not forward at all, but keep as separate accounts, but that will come soon (after I figure out what mail clients to use and how to set them up).
City walk
I had an appointment at the dentist today, and while that is not so much of an activity in itself, I took a long walk home from it. About an hour through the city and I tried to be observant what had changed in the city since I last took this route.
A few days ago I started looking in my password manager to check if i had any accounts signed up on Gmail. Now I am all through it and for the handful I did I have changed the email and login for the account. This makes me feel less reliant on that service to function. I still have a few email aliases forwarding to it, but that will be the next step.
Borrel
Today's non-digital activity was participating in the neighbordhood 'borrel'. In this setting, it was kind of a snacks pot-luck around a table with no chairs, outdoors. It was the first time I met all my neighbors at once, so that was quite nice.
WhatsApp was never one of my preferred platforms. I got it for one work group, years ago, and then had a small group of friends there. Tonight, I finally deleted the account. Instead, I primarily prefer Signal, but I am also on Matrix (using Element) and Telegram (the latter is still very much in use in the Wikimedia movement).
USA is leaving over 60 international collaborations and organizations. It's not surprising, but still shocking. And it feels so dark.
Keyboard change
Swiftkey has been my keyboard on my phone by habit for many years. Them being bought by Microsoft some years ago passed me by, but yesterday I saw the Copilot logo in the app so now this is uninstalled. For now, I am trying out AnySoftKeyboard.
I finalized my migration from Google Keep by moving all notes I still want to keep to my self-hosted Joplin or local text files and uninstalled the app from my phone.
The Facebook account has been a sourdough for me. This evening I gave up admin rights on a bunch of pages and published a post on my companys page there that I am about to close it. There are some other pages where I will want to download the archive, and some where I probably should transfer ownership, so it will take some time before I finally close the account. But I do feel like I have started the process.
Snow flake days
Snow flake days. A5. Notebook. Penol Calligraphy pen 2.0 (running out of ink).
I have a library nearby but living here over a year, I never went in. So this morning I went there, had a good look around, a cup of coffee and stared out on the snow and wrote this haiku. I am pretty sure I will be back soon.
I already had a Proton account, but today I set up the apps on my phone and also started to add new events in the Proton Calendar instead of in Google Calendar.
I started out with some drafts on paper for a flyer I am designing for CommonsDB. It was rather short work before I went to work in Inkscape instead as it would have so much text.
#DIDAY. License: CC0. 10x20 cm. Paper: Canson Sketchpad. Copic Marker, Faber-Castell Art & Graphic Poloychromos Pastel.
This morning I saw several posts talking about Digital Independence Day. As this is so aligned, I wanted to do something around this. It's just a simple text with a marker and blue and yellow pastel crayons. White balanced and cropped in Gimp.
Open By Default. 7x4 cm. Paper: Canson Sketchpad. Stamps: Avec Wooden Stamps.
Yesterday, I picked up some stamps a person was giving away on the clever app Olio, where people share what they don't need. And today I started experimenting with it. And what better to start with than my company name whose logo is looking like something stamped?.
Mindmap. 39x44 cm. Paper: ? Mix of pencils, sharpies and markers.
I was trying to figure out what big services I still do have and while doing that realized that having a sketch next to my desk with them would be a good reminder. My plan is not to do a big sweep, but gently move away to good alternatives. I started with some color coding for urgency, ease and dependencies and such so that it will do things in a good order.
Following leaders
I stumbled upon DeGoogleYourLife on Mastodon. That quickly led to Reclaim Control and The Opt Out Project. I am sure all will be good resources for the coming year. I also found the hashtag #ReclaimControl that I will use when sharing what I do.
Selfie in Zuid-Kennemerland.
Bar chart. A5. Notebook. Pilot V Liquid Light highlighter. Black roller tip pen.
Doodles. A4. Paper: Canson Sketchpad. Copic markers and black roller tip pen.
Snow flake days. A5. Notebook. Penol Calligraphy pen 2.0 (running out of ink).
#DIDAY. License: CC0. 10x20 cm. Paper: Canson Sketchpad. Copic Marker, Faber-Castell Art & Graphic Poloychromos Pastel.
Open By Default. 7x4 cm. Paper: Canson Sketchpad. Stamps: Avec Wooden Stamps.
Mindmap. 39x44 cm. Paper: ? Mix of pencils, sharpies and markers.
