// Patrick Louis

March 2017 Projects

Mar 6, 2017

Hello fellow readers,
This is the first post of 2017, let’s recap what I’ve been up to since the start of the year.

Show me how you spend your day and I’ll tell you what you care about

Newsletter & Podcast

nix

Language:Unix

Explanation: The newsletter and podcast have been going really well. I’ve received a lot of encouraging, positive, and constructive feedbacks.

As of today there have been 12 issues of the newsletter and 8 new episodes of the podcast in 2017.

Namely:

I’m particularly proud and fond of the “Less Ties” and “Fonts On Unix” ones. The first because it got me thinking about a subject that is not always discussed in the computing world and the second because I was able to clarify an ambiguous topic.

So if you haven’t already you can sign up to the newsletter and RSS feed of the podcast on those links:

The newsletter sign up
The newsletter feed updated one week after the newsletter is sent
The podcast list on the forums
The podcast feed

EP Cycles

scrot_dynep

Language:Psychology

Explanation: My side project on evolutionary psychology researches correlations continues. I’ve added two new cycles to the list.

Here they are:

As I keep saying and will soon publish in an article, those correlations are patterns in human life and the mappings I’m doing are to shed light on our nature so that we can take control of our lives and become more accepting.

Too many are the ones that misunderstand or even dare to throw erroneous ideas thinking they are justified by evolutionary psychology studies while in fact they aren’t. Those persons are just confirming what happens in their own bubble.

More on this soon…

Attention & Focus

focus

Language:Psychology

Explanation: I sometimes stumble over a question and can’t keep myself from digging deep into it.

This time I’m interested by scientifically proven ways to increase attention while computing.

I’m a skeptical person and not really into the “get more productive now in 5 steps” kind of articles. But I got intrigued by this question:

We say that blurred or tiled wallpapers help focus, but is it proven?

I’ve opened a brainstorm session for anyone to contribute on a public pad and started a thread for ampler discussion.

I’ve limited it to whatever is computer related, I’m not a fan of “super food that make you focus” and even more skeptical about it.

Though I’m open and currently running anecdotal tests on myself such as:

  • Monotasking, force myself to one window per workspace
  • Non distracting ambient music
  • Using the at for time management of tasks
  • Added a gap at the left and right of the window to allow to view the background color, which is a shade of blue (#5686AA)
  • xflux to avoid the bad effect of the blue shade at night and sleep well
  • Moving text to the top of the page as I read (we read in F shape focusing on the top)
  • Doing my most strenuous tasks between 9am-1pm as it’s when we have the most focus

This is a truly fascinating subject.

New Machine & Less Ties

scrot

Language:Unix

Explanation: I’ve recently switched my main work machine and during the process I’ve done a research on computing with less ties.

I’ve compiled all my research inside a podcast episode you can find here.

Be sure to check the thought inducing contributions people have made on the forums discussion.

Books

benedict

Language:Language

Explanation: Most books you read to learn, be it direct or indirect.

Here are the ones I’ve recently finished or almost finished:

Some of those books are programming books, others are informative and scientific, others are sci-fi, others are philosophical/logical, others are simply fun.

Ascii Art

notebook

Language:ASCII

Explanation: The ascii adventure continues.

Other than the usual stuffs I’ve recently built a mini ascii2svg converter so that I could get high quality versions of my ascii arts.

Here it is on Github

With this tool I was finally able to create products with my ascii arts on them. I’ve pushed my robot army on redbubble.

Horrible Website

Horrible

Language:ASCII

Explanation: We had a hackaton with the MENA devs group and during the night I developed a “horrible website”

It was so much fun, beer, pizza, and code.

You can find the page here and the code here. It’s simply an mashup of multiple horrible things.

Patreon

patreon

Language:Value

Explanation: I’ve wondered for a long time if people would pay for the things I value and give away. For that reason I’ve created a patreon page.

If this thing works out, it would be a sort of passive income which would allow me to push more of the stuffs I already do.

The drawback is that, unlike what I expected, the fee of transfer is higher. It amounts to ~$16 per transaction with payoneer as the gateway. But it’s not that much of an issue as long as I transfer once every few months.

It’s still something great that I’m looking forward to.

Thanks again to the people who support me, be it monetary or not.

Nixers

nixers

Language:Community

Explanation: The nixers community is going well.

We might have a lower post count and activities on the forums but the ones we have are excellent.

These days I’m trying to bring suprising topics that everyone can tackle. I want to make it more vibrant. This has arguable effects…

On a side note, I still don’t have access to the domain name and I am waiting for it to expire so that I can transfer it.

This poses certain issues such as the newsletter emails considered as spam by some providers. I hope to fix that as soon as we get the domain.

We would also be able to open a mail service.

On the topic of communities, I keep wondering about the balance between the number of dreamers and acters, when some are thrilled by changes and others aren’t, etc..

These are a couple of links that have helped me clear my mind:

Now

I’m happy with the direction my life is taking, I’ll keep going on the same track, iterating, polishing, incrementing.

However I remain open for changes.

Spring is coming and life is springing from everywhere.

Today I started cleaning up the garden, I’ll soon plant stuffs like last year.

As usual…
If you want something done, no one’s gonna do it for you, use your own hands.

And let’s go for a beer together sometime, or just chill.



If you want to have a more in depth discussion I'm always available by email or irc. We can discuss and argue about what you like and dislike, about new ideas to consider, opinions, etc..
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