Category: 00 – TOASTERBOTNET BLOG

Can you have too much checklists? My Vacation is around the corner and I noticed, that I have dozens of checklists. I even have checklists and reminders to check other checklists. It’s kinda getting out of hand. On the other hand, externalizing your brain like this, has so much advantages. I’m way more chill than ever and it’s not that I have much freetime. My ToDo Lists are exploding. But I have the feeling I can manage it all and I’m pretty calm and relaxed despite of it all. Once you start getting top-notch organized, it gets a little addictive. This morning I spend hours just organizing and braindumping tasks and notes. Could I be more productive, if I wouldn’t waste hours curating notes, checklists and reminders ? That’s a yes. But who cares? at least it works.

Man, I just went through my old backups. I almost forgot all the old websites I made. Everything was pictures and gifs and tables. today everyting looks so clean and boring. I kinda miss the old internet, when everybody had their own personal website. I remember how I started out. I had basically no clue and made everything with Dreamweaver and later in plain HTML. There weren’t any cool web frameworks or content manegement system. Everything was so simple and yet… so diverse and fancy.. just look:

Man… that shit had style. I didn’t even know how to properly host my own stuff back then. It was some weird web space your ISP gave you for having an account with them. The noise of whirling fans and the quiet humming of linux servers in my appartment all came later. I was a total noob back then and yet my websites looked better than everything I have today. It’s not even a skill problem. I know how to code, I know django, I know bootstrap, I know phostoshop, I know how to configure apache servers. But what do I do with it? I lost my mojo. All I have is boring endless scrolling wordpress site. What happened? Is it because I’m old? because I’m lazy? Have I lost my creativity? Is this here just more convenient? We need to bring some aspects of the old web back, when everyone had a myspace page or a geocities page. You know? The weird stuff. The quirky unprofessional amateur sites. Now every website is the same. They are basically just endlesss feeds. They all work the same. Just scrolling down. I think it’s all because this works good on a phone. Have phones ruined the net? Where are the under construction signs and the dancing cat gifs?

Latley I’ve noticed that I got a lot of data accumulated. In lots of formats and apps. Like documentation, tasks, ToDo, notes, documents and everything I’ve ever saved or written down. But I don’t have exit strategies for all of the various apps I use for all this stuff.

What the hell am I gonna do if one of these apps no longer gets developed or a vendor or product goes out of business. If I can’t get the data out, I’m screwed. I need to develop exit strategies for each of these cases and I need to know how to move on and migrate if I need to.

I’ve never thought about this. Do you have exit stragies for your stuff?

The approach of doing really tiny things everday works really well. If you do this over a longer period of time, you really start to feel and see how your small actions compound over the time. I started to implement these methods a couple of years ago and haven’t looked back. I can’t exactly tell if I have less to do now or if I just formed consistent habits, which don’t feel that stressful anymore. Either way it feels like I’m having my shit together all year long. What I noticed is that I really put systems in place for everything I do. Wether I do this consciously or if it’s just something that happens naturally, this quote from James Clear always comes to mind:

You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems

James Clear

Here’s how you make a bootable USB Stick, in case you want to learn something on this nice saturday. First let’s look at how to do a Windows Flash Drive and then we look how to do a Linux one.

HOW TO DO A BOOTABLE WINDOWS USB FLASH DRIVE

• Fdisk the thing
• set the bootflag
• install ntfs driver
• format the flash drive with ntfs
• realize you forgot the fast option
• cancel
• run again with fast option
• write the boot sector
• mount the flash drive
• have a hanging mount process
• pull out flash drive
• process still there
• can’t even kill -9
• reboot workstation
• can’t mount flash drive
• use ntfsfix to repair it
• mount flash drive again
• mount ISO file
• copy everything over
• have input output errors
• trying to remount the flash drive
• mount command hanging again
• pull out flash drive
• format again
• repeat as above
• Finally finished
• Doesn’t boot
• Decide to use unetbootin
• realize you have to specifiy the ntfs formatted drive directly from the CLI command
• Unebootin takes forever
• finally finished
• Booting still doesn’t work
• GIVE UP
• GRAB COFFEE

HOW TO DO A BOOTABLE LINUX USB FLASH DRIVE

• dd if=ISOFile.iso of=/dev/sdX
• Grab Coffee

Stay tuned for more tutorials.

I want to write more. And I always wanted to write book. But I’m just too lazy and not disciplined enough. I don’t even know where to begin. Do Ya’ll think I could write a book, if I start writing one sentence at a time? Like One sentence every two days or so. This would actually be manageable. It would probably be a total mess in terms of structure and coherence, but once I have enough material, I could just restructure it and re-write it. I mean typing something again and just re-aligning words in the end is easier than having a blank page right? … hmmm… guess I should try this idiotic idea… I’ll let you know how it goes.

Okay so here’s the thing. Everyone is entitled to have their own opinion, whatever it might be. But If you are propagating your private political agenda through official channels under the disguise and name of a public entity, you are purposefully misleading people and possibly cast innocent people in a negative light. That’s a dick move. I don’t like that. Especially if you are using my servers and my websites to do it. Maybe I’m partly to blame, because I don’t have the time to read everything that goes online, but I though that that was common sense. And in my defense … I’m very busy and extremely lazy. Why not just get your own website or blog ? To those people who know what I’m talking about: sorry for the weird articles.

I’m kinda feeling like writing a blog post.

Well that rarely happens…

About 2 years ago I decided to simplify and optimze my life
and thought about how to get rid of my giant pile of unsorted documents.
I took my phone, scanned every piece of paper and destroyed nearly everything.
It took me about 6 months to get rid of all the paperwork and documents.
The only thing remaining was very thin pile of paper with important documents.
I didn’t have to think much about storage and backup since I already got a Synology.
So I just access all my Documents through Synology Drive.
My Plan is to reduce Paperwork and get rid of Paper in general entirely and
as much as possible. I’m aware there are various tools out there that would be better suited
for a paperless office but I’m quite happy with the native Synology Apps,
like Notes, Drive and Calendar. It does everything I want and I have everything
in one place.
Additionally I opened an account with Caya, which is a Scan-Service for your physical Mail.
So basically I made sure that no paper would enter my appartment, while I was getting rid
of what was left.
If you have verything in the cloud and can sift through things on your phone,
you can do your Paperwork on the train or on the couch.
This has the positive effect that you can check off things as soon they arise.
I’m always on top of my todo-list.
In my opinion a scan service is worth the few extra bucks.
The only downside ist that, if you need the originals of somnething, it costs
you an extra 5 bucks to send it to your address. But that happens very rarely.
Seriously going full digital is so worth it.
10/10 would do again.