For this month’s newsletter, I’m going to try something slightly different. I am still not planning to use LLM assistance to author anything but this time, because of time constraints, I am using a LM (not large) to transcribe from my voice. This means that my style is going to be different because it is reflecting my spoken dialect instead of my usual written language.

Incidentally, this was the first time I found a language model that does voice approximately properly, with auto inference for punctuation. For reference, the model is Whisper and the harness for it is Voxtype and I’m using it with eager mode to reduce transcription latency.

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To start, let’s do a quick recap of the things that happened this month.

At the very beginning of April I went to visit my mom. I’m realizing I did not write much about this in the last few months. There were a couple of transitions in her situation through this period that were very difficult for her, and for me to write about. And the last one that motivated my travel at the start of April was one that was particularly difficult. I gained some additional experience with panic attacks.

Thankfully, the place that is now handling her is doing a slightly better job and, if I’m to believe the pictures that I received after my visit, she seems to be doing gradually better—at least regarding her physiology. Obviously, with limited blood circulation in her brain, certain things are never going to become better. But that is something I had accepted already last year.

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I came back home when everything started blooming. In particular, I was very happy to see that the tulips that the previous owner of my house had planted on the front porch finally opened.

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I was also invited to an introduction day organized by the government of my province. The purpose was to help people who are part of city councils, or attached to city councils, network with each other and learn more about the functioning of this provincial government. I did learn a few things and that might actually come handy later.

Additionally, the provincial government gathers weekly in a meeting room in a palace. The palace was originally built for the provincial government, then turned into a museum, but the government can still use it for business outside of museum hours. This is a weird arrangement. The palace looks fantastic though.

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Another thing I did was to go on a forest hike in the neighboring province. It was a strange experience. I’ve never been walking so much in the forest in the Netherlands before. I didn’t have the right shoes, it burned a little bit, but the nature was very beautiful.

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I also took a minute to reflect on the fact that April is really the month when I take a lot of pictures of flowers. I think I just like thinking about flowers and taking pictures of them. There were a lot of pictures taken this month.

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Separately, I also traveled to New York City in April. The main purpose of my travel was to gather inputs from folk I know regarding my project. I will explain this a bit more below, but we also took time to visit the Brooklyn Botanic Garden which at this time was absolutely amazing.

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Again, I enjoyed visiting my friends in Saugerties in the north of New York City. They live in the countryside and the break from the buzzing city was very welcome. One thing that happened there, that I still think about, is what I was given when I ordered “a side of pickle” with my sandwich.

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A fun thing that happened with my NYC friends was our organizing of a cheesecake contest of sorts. For context, two months ago, our group was arguing about which kind of cheese should be best used in a cheesecake, and so we put this to the test through a bake-off.

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Coming back home from New York City was a little bit of a bittersweet experience. Once again, through this travel I had a very happy time with my friends. I have missed them very dearly on my journey home and spent again a significant number of hours reflecting on the difficulties that come from living far from friends and family.

As I landed back home however spring was still happening.

I also felt a little bit of a spring cleaning energy. I allocated it to errands that had been postponed for quite a while, but also to think a little bit more about decorating my home further this year. The first action that I took was to frame a gorgeous pixel art image that I found last month.

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The last thing that happened before I started writing the newsletter happened actually after I opened the file in my text editor: two days ago, we celebrated remembrance of the people lost to World War II. The ceremony was organized by my city hall. It was beautiful & very well organized. We had children from local schools reciting poems and a local orchestra performing parade music. The flowers were amazing, and, for the very first time, I heard the city bell! An actual, huge non-church bell. It was hanging there and I had never noticed it before.

I felt it was important to me to witness an example of a non-religious yet symbolically laden ritual, as this happens to be relevant to my other work. It was also heartwarming to see it shared by a very diverse set of people across all classes of society.

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One of the two nerdy topics I want to share today is that I have started playing Beat Saber, as way to enhance my upper body fitness.

In case you’re not familiar, Beat Saber is a movement game that you play with a visual reality headset. You are presented with blocks that come at you in rhythm with some music tunes and you have to cut through the blocks with two sabers that you manipulate through your hands.

I already had good prior experience with rythm games, thanks to my expertise with Dance Dance Revolution. However, I had underestimated how much more complex the movements we can make through our hands are, and the game takes full advantage of that. Needless say, I am making very slow progress. And my shoulders are really taking a beating. Which I need to be very careful about, given that I’m still not fully recovered from my frozen shoulder situation from last year.

The part about playing the game is the fun part of this story. The less fun part is my profound disappointment at the state of technology around VR headsets and the integration with video game technology stacks. For example, what is considered to be state of the art is using some device from the Facebook company that makes it mandatory to report to Facebook all the things you do inside your VR headset. I find this completely unacceptable.

The device I chose does not mandate you report to their company; however, it is a system that is derived from Android and the state of software for the Android platform is also kind of disappointing. For example, the game streaming software that I needed to use to run games from my desktop computer does not really work over a USB cable, and the Wifi mode was jittery. Just disappointing in so many ways.

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The frustration I experienced above made me reconsider my gaming technology.

For context, I use a desktop computer for gaming that is situated in my living room. This is a gaming computer I bought secondhand, something like 12 or 13 years ago. Back then, it was not even new: the components are from 2011. That said, this gaming computer has helped me throughout the years, has been a great experience, and I’m still able to run quite a few recent games from the last couple of years (thanks to a GPU upgrade 6 years ago). So, by the standards of my own use of video games, it was very much sufficient.

Until the VR story started, of course. Driving two small screens each at 4k pixels is quite an endeavor for a 15 years old computer. Even though I feel comfortable with big pixels and slow frame rates, I do have to admit that making progress in a rythm game with fast music does actually benefit from a higher frame rate and a higher resolution.

So the next chapter in this nerdy story was to decide what to do if I wanted to upgrade the hardware. In particular, I was not keen to create space in my home for an upgrade to Windows 11. Throughout the last two years, I have been horrified by all the misery that Windows 11 users go through every day; I was already convinced many times over that that software would never pass the threshold to my home.

The tension that come from that decision pertains to its consequences with regards to compatibility with the VR headset that I just recently acquired. What were my alternatives and how good were they?

This is where the story gets a happy ending. Together with a friend, we ran an experiment with something called PikaOS which apparently has been well optimized to serve for gaming computers. We were very surprised that it took us less than an hour to set it up, and that most of our game library could work on it straight away. I cobbled up a new computer from pieces I had laying around, then with PikaOS, WiVRN and WayVR, I am now fully set up with capabilities that far exceed what the paid software that I was using previously could provide.

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The other nerdy story that I would like to share is actually a personal milestone.

For context, I like to use audio notifications to signal various steps in long automated tasks in my work so that I can focus on something else and use the audio notification to bring my attention back only when needed. This way, I don’t need to switch back and forth all the time. Given that most of my development is happening on FreeBSD, for many years—probably 10 by now—I have been using the speaker(4) driver as a mechanism to generate small chirping noises through the integrated speaker inside the development computer.

Sadly, in the last two versions of FreeBSD, that driver was slated for removal because it was using deprecated APIs and nobody had stepped up to fix it. So last December I prepared a patch to upgrade that driver to the modern interfaces and I also submitted it to the FreeBSD team. Initially, in January and February I became a little bit disenchanted because I was not able to receive good reviews and there seemed to be no interest to adopt my patch, but then I met someone in New York City who was able to help. It went in!

So even though I did this merely to safeguard my chirping noises, as of two weeks ago, I have become officially a FreeBSD contributor. This is something I had dreamed of ever since I started using FreeBSD, back when I was 21.

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Another life-important thing that happened in April is that I started attending so-called “men’s circles.”

For context, I had known for a couple of years now that this is something that I felt drawn to. But there had been little motive and opportunity to attend one. (A “men’s circle” is a discussion group for men that is organized to be both emotionally safe and confidential.)

I chose to make the step and join the first one the week before I traveled to visit my mom because I perceived, accurately, that I would need help from other people to deal with this at an emotional level. The experience was very good. So I chose to continue to explore this area of my social life and I went to multiple similar events throughout the month.

With the experience of several meetups, three points stick out so far.

The first one is that it works—it’s not just hippy fluff, as I might have believed several years ago—and induces a good dose of purpose for all participants.

The second point is that I saw something tragic. I met people, not just men, who attend these type of events because they feel isolated, because they need help with emotional regulation, or because they need to be surrounded by people when making hard decisions or dealing with difficult situations. There are so few events available for this! And some of them even cost money to attend: I see people attending the paid events and relying on those events while having to pay to attend. This is what makes me feel sad: seeing people having to pay for a social life. I find it scandalous; an abdication of what a society should really be.

The last point is that I don’t know yet how long I want to participate in these events as a attendee. The events I have attended so far are kinda far. I’m thinking that organizing my own recurring event might help me and folk in my local community better. Without charging for it, of course.

I’ll be attending a few more events while I noodle on this topic further. Stay tuned.

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The last personal topic I have in mind for today is something that came up when I started thinking about writing as a mechanism to transform and settle emotions. In truth, most of my long-form writing has taken place in this newsletter. But at the same time, I am making an editorial choice to restrict the topics I cover.

For example, I don’t cover the identities of the people I spent time with. I don’t cover the nature and texture of our relationships, conversations and shared activities. I don’t usually cover the ambitions or hopes that I have from week to week, or month to month: I usually only focus on the outcomes after they have been reached already. I also do not comment on projects to travel or to meet people before they happen. I do not write about the music I listen to, the games I play, the food I eat, most places I visit through a week, the movies I watch, and all the thoughts and feelings I experience in connection to the people I have seen recently or want to see again soon.

Meanwhile, another part of the truth is that all these topics that I do not cover do occupy 80% or more of my time, my thoughts, my emotional life, and my priorities.

I chose to transcribe the crusty and intellectual topics of my life into a newsletter partly because I thought that they might be of interest to you and partly (a bigger part) as a way to limit their hold on my time. By writing those things down, they “exit my system” and I do not feel compelled to think about them any more. This creates a lot of time and availability for the other topics listed above.

Conversely, if I did not write, or rather, when I’m thinking about my life before I started writing, the crusty topics would invate my mind and I would feel much less available to experience a balanced and dignified life.

But then the question arises of whether I could (should?) be writing about the other topics that actually take most of time and my energy.

I think about this a lot. There are some people privacy issues that I could want/need to deal with, but I consider that a detail. Instead, I feel that if I were to write about these things, then they would also “exit my system” and become less important. And I don’t want that.

Of course I’m not entirely sure that it would work like that; maybe a more comprehensive journaling could help in ways I don’t understand yet. But I find the risk too costly.

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