Minimalism - Not for Me
I don't consider myself materialistic. I drive 2005 Toyota Camry. I've lived in the same house for 30 years. I wear one kind of pants and just about all my shirts are the same color. In the past six months I've upgraded all my tech except my Apple Watch, but before that I had an iPhone 11, an Intel MacBook and a five-year old iPad. Having said all that, I am not a minimalist anywhere in my life except in my backpacking setup because carrying heavy shit up and down mountains gets real old real fast.
My current software girlfriend is Obsidian, a note taking app with 2,000+ available plugins. I'm active on Reddit in the sub pertaining to the app where there is an ongoing war between two factions. There is the crowd I'm with who are very much about seeing what they can configure the program to do using scripts and plugins and ingenuity. Then there is the other side who eschew anything more than the vanilla version and accuse the rest of us of not being productive enough because we spend too much time fiddling with things. What? That's where the fun is. It's a note taking app, perhaps the least sexy kind of software this side of scientific calculators. To just install it and start taking notes without trying to automate or quantify things is just weird to me.
The same goes with phones. I buy the biggest amount of storage space I can afford and I do my level best to use it all. I install all the apps and download all the videos, Kindle books, Audible books, PDFs . I think I have six Mastodon clients installed right now and that's OK. It's my phone. I enjoy software evaluation a lot and I manage to have a busy ass phone as well as a wife, a job and good relations with my offspring. I know that a lot of the default apps people are just normies who get zero enjoyment out of seeing what cool things third party apps can do and don't want to spend the money anyway. That's cool. It's just not me.
When I was at the height of my cycling passion, unlike some more well off folks, I only had one bike because those damn things are crazy expensive. But, I had dozens of water bottles, an entire closet of cycling clothes, multiple pumps, bottles of chain lube, extra helmets and so forth until I finally had to dedicate an entire room of the house to my cycling hobby. To be fair, by that point I'd married another cyclist and we put her bike stuff in that room too. Not a minimalist. Like I said.
Other things I probably have too much of include books, coffee cups, clothes that I'm sure will fit again one day and computer cables because I think there is a law that says nerds like me are obligated to have Firewire 400 connectors at the ready in case Apple brings back the standard. I just want to be prepared.
Things you won't find at my house include jewelry, extra watches, a boat, a fancy riding lawn mower dishes I don't eat off of regularly and televisions scattered around everywhere.
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Trail Town Oddities
I saw numerous odd things while passing through trail towns on my AT thru-hike. This live bait vending machine was beside a gas station in Delaware Water Gap, PA, right on the river at the New Jersey State line. The people there were very hospitable, and we stayed in a church-run hostel that has free showers and laundry.#hiking
Crucial Track for May 23, 2025
"We Are Family" by Sister Sledge
What song best matches the energy of today? We Are Family by Sister Sledge - Just to prove I'm not a music snob, I'll readily admit to having a few disco favorites and this is one of them. It captures today's mood because my son, who lives 1,000 miles away, is coming for a visit. Even though Wonder Woman and I weren't married until he was an adult, we're still family and they adore each other, which makes me happy.
Goldfinch
Every spring, I buy thistle seeds to attract the goldfinches to my yard. I think they are one of the loveliest birds around. #birds
Pelicans in Flight
Good morning from Carolina Beach, NC. The pelicans are out early looking for breakfast. #birds.
Crucial Track for May 20, 2025
"You Never Even Called Me By My Name (The Perfect Country and Western Song)" by David Allan Coe
What’s a remix or cover you like more than the original? "You Never Even Called Me By My Name by David Allen Coe" is one of my all-time favorites. While I have it on pretty good authority that Coe is a bit of a rough character, his rendition of Steve Goodman's original is classic. I was lucky enough to hear Hootie and the Blowfish perform this live at a free convert my hometown sponsored. Darius Ruck explained that being from the south, the band like to play the song for souther audiences.
Another Knife's Edge
This is one of many stretches of the Appalachian Trail known as The Knife’s Edge. It’s in eastern Pennsylvania, a day south of the Lehigh Gap. For about a mile, you have to put your hiking poles away and maintain three points of contact to traverse it. #hiking
The Appalachian Trail Near Allentown, PA
I remember this day for one spectacular disappointment - we’d planned to visit a privately owned shelter near the trail that had an actual flush toilet instead of a privy, but we couldn’t find it for some reason. I was so sad. We stopped at this primeval looking spot to eat lunch.
Crucial Track for May 19, 2025
"Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" by Bob Dylan
What’s a song that grew on you over time? **Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts by Bob Dylan" - It pains me to think this song is 50-years-old now. I was 10 when it was released and to me, it's always been one of the songs of "The New Dylan" which I roughly define as anything not from the 1960s. The music and lyrics to the tune are just a master class in how to win the Nobel Prize. Along with Hurricane, I think this is some of his best work of the 1970s.
Bald Pate Mountain
Southern Maine has some of the best hiking in the US. Bald Pate Mountain is fun on a dry day, but if it is raining, take the day off. This is the south side. The northern side is just a steep granite sliding board with the occasional bush to grab. The view from the top is magnificent. #hiking #AppalachianTrail
Moravian Church
The cupola atop the Moravian Church in Old Salem Village (which later combined with another nearby community to form the modern city of Winston-Salem, NC).
The Colorado River
If you descend to the floor of the Grand Canton, this is what awaits you. Wonder Woman sent me this photo on the day she completed the Rim to Rim challenge. She also remembers it as the day I watched two TV shows without her, something I will never live down, I guess.
Huumingbird at rest
This is the only photo I have ever taken of a hummingbird while perched. #birds
Rim to Rim
A couple of years back, Wonder Woman made a weekend trip to Arizona to cross this off her bucket list - running the Grand Canyon from rim to rim, which she did the day after taking this photo.
Guilt Free Digital Media Pipeline Automation
After a nearly twenty year break from using peer-to-peer
technology (torrents) to download movies and TV shows, I have decided
that it's more ethically pure in 2025 to once again fly the skull and
crossbones than it is to put money in the hands of the fascist
billionaires who monopolize the entertainment industry. To be clear, I'm
not advocating doing this to software from independent developers. It's
the collaborating big tech companies that don't deserve your money any
more.
Don't do this without a VPN. Just to show you how easy it is for your ISP or anyone who has your router's IP address to see what you download, you can use I Know What You Download
With minimal effort, using mostly free or freemium software. you can cobble together a secure, integrated system capable of importing my watchlist from Trakt into a an app that will search torrent web sites for the media that you want, download it and add it to a Plex media server.
The tools needed for creating this system are:
- Trakt - an online database of movies and television shows (Freemium)
- Nord VPN - a privacy protecting virtual private network to shield my Internet traffic from my ISP and others. Other VPNs using the OpenVPN or Wireguard standard with P2P capabilities can also be used. (paid)
- Prowlarr - an app that facilitates public and private torrent sites and adds them to other apps from the same developer to search for media (FOSS)
- Radarr - imports my movie watchlist from Trakt, searched the Internet for movies in English, that are at least 1080p and that do not exceed 10GB . It adds those movies to my BitTorrent client. It renames them using the Plex naming standard and adds them to the folder where my media library is located. (FOSS)
- Sonarr- imports my television watchlist from Trakt, searched the Internet for shows in English, that are at least 1080p and that do not exceed 10GB . It adds those movies to my BitTorrent client. It renames them using the Plex naming standard and adds them to the folder where my media library is located. (FOSS)
- Deluge - a BitTorrent download client with built in VPN integration and a highly configurable interface (FOSS)
- Plex - a media server that lets you watch movies and TV shows stored on your computers hard drive on your television through your Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Firestick or other streaming mechanisms
Jeff Bezos owns Amazon Prime Video, The Washington Post , and a hobby space exploration company among many other things. When the de facto head of Saudi Arabia's government ordered the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Bezos protested loudly and had a PR photo taken at the man's grave. Yesterday, Bezos proudly announced a new business partnership with the same government that committed the murder.
Apple has been in active collaboration with MAGA since the CEO, Tom Cook, donated $1 million to the president's inauguration. The company was just found to have committed perjury and ignoring a court order to end abusive business practices that unfairly rob developers of revenue and inflate the price of software and services.
A New Generation
Having lived in the same house for 30 years now, I’ve watched generations of tree rats make their home in my backyard. Every year, a new crop of babies starts the process of getting to know us through the bribery process. I’ve probably distributed a ton of peanuts to them since 1995.
South Carolina Low Country
A spring afternoon in a kayak on a waterway like this is not a bad place to be. In the South Carolina Low Country, you can find places like this all over.
Pilot Mountain
If you ever heard Andy and Barney talking about Mount Pilot on the Andy Griffith Show, that was a reference to the real place, Pilot Mountain, NC, which is about 20 minutes away from Mount Airy, Griffith’s real hometown and the basis for the fictional Mayberry from the show.
