A Labyrinth of Code, Creativity and Culture.
The Orchid Manor is the output of an analog entity navigating digital mediums.
Perhaps, here I find my digital ‘forever plot’, having been a nomad in name and location for quite some time. I’ve left traces of myself all over the internet, everywhere, and perhaps will finally attain content collation here.
While most of us are different from the average individual, I am different from most of us, given my path into programming, prior hobbies, and context from life experience. Truth is, I feel like a outcast among the misfits, but recent intrapersonal perspectival shifts have helped me begin to see that as an edge, rather than a disadvantage.
So, The Orchid Manor is also, in a way, about exploring myself and my relationship to cultures, and how that’s been defined by life circumstances, yet remains malleable by way of personal agency, and the interplay therein; finding one’s self, and home, later in life than most.
I was not very much allowed to be for the majority of my life, due to the religious, cultural and social environment I grew up in, and there was not much, if any, room or toleration of things that fell outside the norm (read my entire being, and almost everything I’m interested in), so in order to survive, I had to construct a facsimile of myself, that was acceptable. While it served me then, it hinders me now, and must be shed, in order for me to continue making progress (or start, really), in life.
That, of course, makes this very personal, and a vector for vulnerability, a view into the torpid and convoluted architecture of my psycho-emotional landscape.
I wish you the safest of travels.
Head In The Clouds
As of late, I’ve been venturing into the cloud & security- mainly on a lark, but with an endgoal of some certification or another, and somehow, while expecting it to be convoluted, I really didn’t appreciate just how nebulous, blurry, and interwoven the internals of this sector were.
The fundamentals, as I perceive them so far, are the CIA triad (an existential technological Freudian slip if ever such a thin existed), the primary deployment models, the primary service models, and the distribution of responsibilities between the cloud service provider, and the customer.
Cuban Links.
The innanetz are vast mayne: throughout my exercursions I come across many digital knick-knacks, trinkets, storehouses, ruins, and ecosystems that are worth keeping track of, for later analysis, exploration or sheer entertainment.
Those will live here.
Implements of Intrigue.
A kinological curation.
Tooling
Arbtt
tldr; Use this tool for non-manual time tracking.
Arbtt is a tool created by Joachim Breitner , that runs as a daemon, recording open windows, focus windows, and their titles, and time spend inactive.
The additional functionality comes from arbtt-stats, which, according to rules defined by you in your categorize.cfg file, which uses a DSL (written in Haskell, I assume), that will describe the rules by which arbtt-stats will filter your log data, stored in ~/.arbtt/capture.log, and provide you time-tracking/productivity statistics on your day to day endeavors.
While I haven’t completely configured arbtt, here’s an example of my config (largely based on the example in the documentation), to give you an idea of how it might work on your machine.
In short, every snapshot of your system is a sample that can can have associated tags, such as time of day, or inactive, after a certain amount of idle time. A tag can be preprended with text, followed by a colon, which is a tag category, which of course is also assigned to a sample.
Time tracking is something that, for me, sounds incredibly interesting, but is incredibly droll to engage with, an this is the first tool that’s made that pain point soluble for me, so I hold it in high regard for that.
aliases (
"chromium" -> "Web Browser",
"firefox" -> "Web Browser",
"code" -> "VS Code",
"gnome-terminal" -> "Terminal",
"ghostty" -> "Terminal",
"xfce4-terminal" -> "Terminal",
"nvim" -> "Neovim",
"floorp" -> "Web Browser",
"zen-browser" -> "Web Browser",
"zen" -> "Web Browser",
)
{
$idle > 60 ==> tag inactive,
tag CurrentProgram:$current.program,
tag CurrentTitle:$current.title,
current window $program == ["ghostty", "xfce4-terminal"] ==> tag Category:Terminal,
current window $program == ["floorp", "zen-browser", "zen"] ==> tag Category:Browsing,
current window $title =~ m/n?vim/ ==> tag Activity:Coding,
current window $title =~ m/\.([^.]+)\s/ ==> tag FileType:$1,
$time >= 8:00 && $time < 12:00 ==> tag time-of-day:morning,
$time >= 12:00 && $time < 17:00 ==> tag time-of-day:afternoon,
$time >= 17:00 && $time < 22:00 ==> tag time-of-day:evening,
$time >= 22:00 || $time < 8:00 ==> tag time-of-dat:night
}A very rich resource that provides perspectives from researchers, on manipulating multi-media data, and the storage systems, operating systems, network protocols etc, that support these processes.
Check out other works from Morgan Kaufmann, they’ve got some other texts that are equally in depth.
Trust me on this one.
I may elaborate further at some point, but, I mean, it speaks for itself.
Just look at that cover.
(Admit it, you think you could fix her.)