Uses

Pages like this one usually list software. Mine has to start with a pen, because everything else in the house is machinery for dealing with what the pen produces.

Paper

Almost everything I write begins as handwriting: a uni-ball Micro 207 on a legal pad that lives in a leather case, with a spare Rhodia pad in the bag for when the first runs out. There is a callus on my right middle finger from how I hold the pen. I once got off the highway, realized I’d left the bag at home, and felt real panic. I would have been fine (it’s just paper) but apparently thinking without it is no longer something I know how to do.

The machines

The computers are a Linux desktop, a Chromebook, and an iPhone, named orbis-tertius, zahir, and aleph. Every machine in this house is named for something in Borges: the desktop is the imagined world that slowly becomes real, the laptop is the object that occupies the mind completely, the phone is the single point that contains everything else. The scanner and the backup drive (tsui-pen and funes) are explained elsewhere. Two machines I don’t own yet already have names: the someday-server will be babel, and the someday-e-reader will be cervantes. The Kindle I actually read on has no name. It is, in this house, a temp.

What runs on them

The desktop runs Linux Mint and a stack of self-hosted services in Docker: an RSS reader, a bookmark archive, budget software, a git server, and a service that keeps a record of every song I listen to. My calendar and contacts live on my own domain rather than Google’s. Files move between the machines over Syncthing, through no one’s cloud. I pay for search. The principle underneath all of it: I would rather own a worse version of a thing than rent a better one.

When I highlight a passage on the Kindle, a script files it into notes I can search later. The AI that reads my handwriting and remembers things for me has its own page, because it raises questions that the rest of this hardware doesn’t.

The ledger

Every night while I sleep, three small scripts run. At 11:30 one counts the day’s git commits, at 11:45 one counts the words I wrote, at 11:50 one counts the books in my library. The weather gets logged every hour. All of it lands in a time-series database that nobody will ever look at but me, and mostly not even me.

I was trained as a historian. I know what survives of a life and what doesn’t, and the difference is mostly whether anyone wrote it down. Whether that justifies measuring my own life this way is a question I’ve decided not to examine too closely.

What breaks

Most of it, eventually. The morning briefing once went silent for two days because two configuration files drifted apart and nothing told me. The scanner chokes on thin paper. A time tracker I liked locked itself behind a subscription halfway through the year, and that was the end of time tracking. Self-hosting means that when something breaks at six in the morning, the person on call is me.

So the whole apparatus runs under two rules. The first: if I’ve spent more than two hours on infrastructure without producing something that serves the actual life, stop. The second is written into the system’s founding document, and it overrides everything else on this page: if all of it runs perfectly and I haven’t read a book in a month, the system has failed.