Week ending 6/6/2021

Chrome Tabs : 80 → 80

Gmail Inbox : 74 → 61 Unread, 77 → 64 Total

I had my first post-pandemic indoor dining experience at one of my favorite new places, Viridian Bar in Oakland. They opened shortly before the shelter in place order in California, and they only had a few months to build a following for their take-out so they could pay the rent, etc. over the past year+. I was honestly afraid they wouldn’t survive, but here they are! I had some great to-go cocktails during the pandemic, but there’s nothing like the in-person experience (despite the bizarre “new normal” of big plastic dividers between bartenders and patrons). They’ve also expanded their menu of savory dishes (they were mostly dessert and cocktail-oriented pre-pandemic), and it’s a great balance now. Everything was pretty much excellent! Highly recommended for some unique Asian-leaning small plates (both sweet and savory) and great cocktails, if you’re in the area. (the lighting is crazy in there, so forgive the odd photo)

I probably shouldn’t say much yet, but I’ve been having some private discussions with the Anytype team about some possible collaboration! I’ve taken a pretty active role in their community, both public and private (alpha test group), since joining their alpha test back in October of last year (one of the first cohorts, I got lucky!), and apparently my enthusiasm didn’t escape notice. :grin: Curious to see if this leads anywhere…

In search of a phone that can avoid overheating while filming long videos in warm conditions, I ended up buy a gaming-oriented Android-based Nubia “Red Magic 6 Pro”. This was something I decided to test on behalf of Big Rig Travels, because I’m a little insane. :yum: It has a built-in fan, which seemed to work well, but the other feature I was interested in, “charge bybpass” (to prevent the battery heating up when running full-time off of a charger), was only available in their dedicated game mode, an annoying oversight. More importantly it didn’t seem to work with my carrier Verizon (whose tech support informed me that no Nubia or Red Magic devices are apparently supported at present). I’m still in touch with Nubia support to see if they can resolve it; according to Verizon they actually need to request support for their devices, even though they already have support for the correct radio bands in hardware.

After raising a bunch of caterpillars to their penultimate stage, I ended up with some 15+ pupae. For some reason they seemed to stop emerging as butterflies for a while, and I don’t know why. Could just be a coincidence. Anyway, after a few weeks a couple finally did so, and I managed to catch on video something that had so far eluded me: the actual emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis! They move around a lot, so it’s tough to catch them after they emerge, but the actual moment that it comes out I captured fairly well. I’ll share that soon. Unedited video below, pardon the raw audio of me making breakfast or whatever. :laughing: Skip to 1m30s for the good stuff, and be sure to watch in 4k!
https://photos.app.goo.gl/zCmodTHjuhji4rji6

This coming week I’m headed off on a 10 day road trip, so I’ll be taking a vacation from journaling, but will also hopefully have some good photos on my return!

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yeay for dining again!

look forward to hearing about your road trip.

I am still very open to launching a Discourse instance and before doing that, discussing how to best structure our conversations in such a way that our instances can interact with each other :slight_smile:

I have on my backburner to address our private incubator thread.

Seeing updates from you will clearly nudge me to get caught up as I have to switch contexts!

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Thanks, good to see you here!

I think for now the best we could do would be to just use regular quote formatting, like so:

look forward to hearing about your road trip.
https://discoursetest.oshyan.com/t/week-ending-6-6-2021/101/2

Which is not as sophisticated as Discourse’s built-in function, but that only works within a given instance. I am however hopeful I can find a way to extend that capability to the entire web, either by convincing the Discourse team that it’s worth investing time into, or by working with a plugin dev to make it possible. It seems like a genuinely interesting and useful capability to have!

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I’m so onboard on this! How can I help build this case? anything to clarify the artifact we are working towards, who we need to share with and the steps we need to take is helpful.

Given we’re in a digital garden, I get the impression planting a seedling somewhere makes sense :slight_smile: I am very curious to what capacity we can co-edit a case here in Discourse and manage discussion threads around it.

I am also very interested to see a proof-of-concept in regards to how this public thread we are in transforms into a call for action that starts with you & I collaborating and, using what we envision in a recursive way, somehow ends up in the general Discourse (literally) for discussion - yet - co-exists here in this Discourse for “internal” development (as I think it is important to have a semi-private realm for our “team” to sort out new thoughts) - I am wondering if this makes sense and if you are following? I am also questioning why my gut says having the infrastructure to manage complexity in this way is necessary (hey - I have the curse of being an engineer - it’s all I deal with! lol) - but in a nutshell, I think it is human nature to share and want to take time and have space to process thoughts and do independent thinking (this occurs at the individual, dyad, and group level!)

as long as whatever sprouts here in this garden organically invites the greater community to participate and results in the implementation of ideas for iterative development, I imagine this would be a success on our part.

Now I feel I have a lot to learn in regards to how open source development works esp here in Discourse-land (and in general) and I am definitely counting on you to guide us along this path with the klout you have as an administrator and someone who is actively experimenting with progressive ideas with the sheer breadth of experience with a myriad of platforms out there!

Ok let me know how I can help transform our chats into our call for action!

ps. and if I’ve lost you, let me know - i can respond with what I originally wrote before my mind decided to explode in a zillion directions :smiley:

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So I think I’ve discussed the limitations we’re dealing with elsewhere recently. But basically, as it is now configured here in this Discourse instance, you are able to create replies to any public topic (like the ones above) or you can create new topics in the “Lounge”. You can create as many topics as you like there and we could freely discuss, etc. But again that is only what we have as I have configured things so far.

There are some other possible options. I could, for example, create a dedicated category, open to anyone to post to (who is registered, anyway), something like “Community Garden”. The design would be fixed (by me), but anyone could add a topic and freely quote from/intermix from other people’s topics. This doesn’t allow for individual hierarchy, but I could allow a set of user-created tags which could create some further structure within that category. :thinking:

The fully collaborative end of the spectrum as far a Discourse is concerned is what I touched on in a recent message, which is just giving anyone I trust Admin access (like you as an example), and then you could do whatever you want. But I’m not ready for that yet. :smiley:

If I do understand you correctly, I think this is where we run into Discourse’s current limitations. I am strongly in favor of Discourse as a platform being able to 1: openly “quote” from anywhere on the Internet, and 2: Discourse instances being able to optionally interconnect in some way, so that you could have replies on a single “topic” happening in multiple instances, share users, etc. These two things together would open things up for collaboration quite a lot. Such use would still, I think, be beyond the scope of what the Discourse platform is intended for, but the features I describe are, I think, in keeping with the core intent, and yet could still be repurposed to facilitate the kind of more open, collaborative, “next-web” type of thing we’re talking about and conceptualizing.

That said, there may well be other purpose-built tools that have a better chance of achieving this. I do feel a bit as though I’m tilting at windmills trying to get the “open source but still also somehow kind of corporate” Discourse organization to lean in the direction of my desires. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying! :smiley:

So where does that leave us? Well, first of all, let us not - as you have said a couple times - treat all problems as nails and Discourse as the hammer. You brought up Tiddlyspace in a direct message recently, and I think it’s interesting, and more broadly that a general inquiry into “tools that could enable collaborative digital gardening” is in order. That’s not necessarily something that should happen here (though I am not opposed), mainly because there isn’t that much momentum here yet. I think finding the right platform(s) for the goals you (and I) have in mind will probably benefit greatly from as many like-minds as possible in the conversation. We can try to invite them here to have it, but since it is first and foremost a personal space (much as I invite dialog and contribution!), that may seem odd. At the same time I’m not specifically aware of what would be the better place to find and discuss such tools, etc. But I am sure there must be places…

So I would say the first task then becomes: find the place(s) where people are already talking about this stuff! I have already found some lists of other digital gardens, but those so far seem to have largely focused on the individual experience and expression of thought (which is what I’ve been doing here too). I have certainly seen mention of interest in “multi-player” digital gardening, yet I’ve seen nothing concrete! I imagine it’s out there, I just haven’t found it yet. So let’s find it. We can discuss and report progress in a new topic:
https://discoursetest.oshyan.com/t/collaborative-digital-gardening/111

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