The need to win

When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets
He is out of his mind!

His skill has not changed. But the prize
Divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting-
And the need to win
Drains him of power.

from “The Way of Chuang Tzu” by Thomas Merton

https://youtu.be/lXwJbj9UpMg

Let’s migrate all from my self-build custom Android ROMs to the available official builds at the moment, trying to save some by avoiding servers for now. No Google Apps (GApps) and even microG for my main daily driver.

It takes a large appetite to bet on your one wild, precious life and decide what is best for you, to get offline, even when the whole world is shouting at you to better get yourself on LinkedIn, create Instagram to not miss out on the whole entire world having fun, to be well suited for life in the 21st century.

Man, I was just so tired of losing my time, attention, energy, humanity to Big Data.

There is no reward for losing all your life, so decide.

Take your freedom.

It’s free to be free.

You decide.

- Mehret Biruk

mehretbiruk.com

Just switched after a long while from Debian Stable with XFCE to Debian Testing with GNOME. GNOME does feel smoother now even on old hardware. ^_^

Hell yeah! \m/

youtube.com

Few things I’ve been playing around these days:

  1. I just recently found out that Netlify CMS, which I have been using to generate posts easily on this site has been rebranded to Decap CMS. I went ahead and changed the necessary moving pieces, which is not a lot, and I have been using it now typing this.
  2. Updated Hugo (which statically generates this site) to v0.127.0, thankfully nothing breaks so far.
  3. I am now signing my Android custom ROM builds with my own private keys. This is for the new requirement of Play Integrity that checks now if the ROM is signed or not.
  4. Ditching again Google Apps on my phone for microG, hopefully I won’t revert back due to some apps that requires it.
  5. Changing the site colors to light mode.

I’m now inspired to add the tech I’m using here, as well as updating my site again, credits to Derek Sivers for the motivation for all of this.

Listen also to Choi Yuree here. :)

Stillness……

After a month of trials, I finally built a stable custom Android rom for my old device. I now even tried applying backported security patches. All is good.

Frequent evening bike rides while stargazing with clear skies on a remote area has been the highlight of these past few days together with my listening parties.

Some xkcd strips while I’m at it: