Welcome to my blog
So I've managed to avoid working on this project for a long time, mostly in recognition that living with ADHD is not a good bed-fellow for participating in long-term projects and that maintaining a blog is both a long term commitment and a tough gig!
Having typed that, I find typing out my thoughts to be quite therapeutic, I certainly want to document my life in Fiji and I think there is some value in sharing some of my other projects as well. On the first of those goals, I originally settled for posting content on the Facebook. On the face of it, I could type my words and accompany them with some images but honestly, the user experience has been less than desirable.
In particular, typing content into the Facebook directly has been laborious, with no guarantees that the system will still be functioning by the time I've finished (I don't mean to brag but in this case, it takes me way longer than two minutes!). In the very likely case I didn't finish before bed time, it was impossible to save drafts – resulting in the production process being facilitated through the use of one inappropriate application, followed by an awkward transfer of text to another equally inappropriate application. If that wasn't enough, I then had to start on the laborious task of image wrangling and captioning.
In short, it took the joy out of something I was rather beginning to enjoy!
Recognising this, I've had a bit of a break from writing while I sorted things out. Since you are now reading this post, I seem to have made some progress! I have (for now) settled on hosting my own instance of writefreely.
I chose this product for several reasons:
- it's small and efficient, so I can host it on my home server,
- it uses markdown for formatting text, which is easy to use and flexible enough for my needs, and
- it doesn't allow folks to comment on my posts.
Now although that last point might seem mean, this was a rather practical decision because I didn't want to end up having to either moderate comments or clean up endless quantities of spam! The only other alternative that came to mind was having everyone who wanted to comment to sign up... which would have added a deal of overhead to my little server and to me – more time administering and less writing!
Now I have the blog, I intend on writing about several things – using appropriate hashtags where appropriate and inappropriate hashtags wherever I can! That's because writefreely can automatically create indices of posts that all contain the same hashtag, meaning that folks who are positively bored of my descriptions of life in Fiji, can peruse my riveting content on something else.
Maybe.
I type that because before I left Australia, I had already devised some goals that I wanted to work toward while I am in Fiji and as it turns out, I am anticipating a lot of words on just two topics:
- #Fiji – discussing anything related to my life and times in Fiji. I will generally avoid mentioning things like work, politics or the program because I really don't want to be sent home!
- #Ultim8 – represents something that's been on the boil for a while now. Many of you will know I love retro computing and have been inspired by Ben Eater to build my own 8-bit computer based on the Western Digital 65C02 microprocessor. As I have been working on the computer hardware and software, I've found it convenient to refer to my design as the Ultim8 computer – not because I believe it is superior to other offerings but because I like the connection to “8-bit” computing (and because masterb8 didn't work well as a hashtag). Additionally, I have been in need of tools that either don't run under Linux, don't have the exact features I need or don't exist at all! So after trying to modify existing code to meet my requirements, I've started writing some tools that I hope will not only operate on Windows, macOS and Linux but will have some features not yet seen on the scene, if ya know what I mean. As these projects have the potential to be useful for many different 8-bit computers, I figured these applications could fall under the Ultim8 “banner”. On top of this, I have thrown myself into some hardware projects, like a mechanical keyboard for the Commodore 64 – which has been done, but I have allowed for some useful hardware upgrades, a RS232 serial card for the C64 (which has also been done but is related to the serial interface of the Ultim8 computer) and I am developing a prototyping tool for “single board computer” designs. Once again, “Ultim8” works well for me.
In the next couple of days, I will also make an effort to catch up on #Fiji. I will transfer the first three episodes from the Facebook to the blog, and publish the fourth – which is written, at least. I may even have some time to write some more... but I will likely need to work some more on refining the stylesheet for the blog to weed out any inconsistencies in the formatting...