David Eisinger

My family popped down for an unplanned visit, just in time for another big snow – felt like Christmas in February. Claire headed to Mexico with some friends, and it was great to have help with the kids, but it was also pretty special to be Nico’s guy for three days. A lot of the primary parenting duties fall to Claire, and he’s not going to be a baby much longer, so I’m glad we got that time.

After publishing last month’s dispatch, I exported the first two years of posts as a PDF and used Lulu to turn it into a physical book. Here’s the result:

I’m pretty chuffed about this (though I wish I’d heeded their warnings about the margins). And it was cheap! Like fifteen bucks! I went ahead and ordered two, and gave one to my sister. This was a cool project and definitely worth a standalone blog post.

On a whim, I made this site accessible over the Gemini protocol, sort of an alternate, text-only version of the web. Two posts from Wouter Groeneveld and Sylvain Durand provided the inspiration and technical starting point, then it was a lot of regular expression wrangling with the help of ChatGPT. You can find me in your favorite Gemini client (I like Lagrange and Amfora) at gemini://gemini.davideisinger.com.

I mentioned last month that, in an attempt to gain more control over my attention, I’ve blocked the websites I find most addictive, and that includes my feed reader, Feedbin. I still believe RSS is the right way to engage with the social web, but even without algorithmic content, checking my feed reader still gives that little dopamine burst I seem to find irresistible. Tracy Durnell says it better than I can:

I’ve corralled most of my media exposure into my feed reader, which helps because I must choose to open it, and have removed access from my phone. But while I generally feel RSS is a healthy way to follow writers, it’s still a feed. And feeds, whether self-curated or assembled by a corporate algorithm, are designed to be an efficient information delivery mechanism. Their function is to provide easy, immediate access to new information.

In order to keep up with the sites I like without exposing myself to an infinite content well, I set up rss2email on a schedule so that every morning at 5am, it checks the 20 or so sites I’ve added and emails me any new posts in a nice digest format. This way, I have a few interesting things to look at in the morning, but no temptation to check it throughout the day – my monkey brain knows there won’t be anything new to distract myself with.

A few miscellaneous tech things: I switched to zoxide, a smart cd replacement (inspiration). I’m using direnv to manage a Python virtual environment – it’s slick. And I’m trying out LocalSend as an AirDrop replacement. Finally, Claire and I binged Slow Horses season 4 this month – so, so good.

This Month

• Adventure: Vegas for March Madness
• Project: crochet fox
• Skill: finger drumming, for real this time; I’ve also got some hardware on the way to connect my synths to my laptop, so time to start playing around with some DAWs

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: Sunbringer, Hannah Kaner
• Non-fiction: Co-Intelligence, Ethan Mollick (recommended here)
• Music: Black Sands, Bonobo

Links

• A Taste of Vanlife

  Camping has always been one of my favorite hobbies, but I’ve always wondered what life might be like on four wheels. It’s difficult to think about living on the road indefinitely—and understandably so. I’m not really into the idea of getting rid of all of my possessions and living out of a van, constantly on the move. But surely, there’s a way to try out that lifestyle without making such a drastic commitment?

• I’m a feminist and I think it’s harder to be a man than a woman.

  Very earnestly I believe that despite greater access to power and resources, the box labeled “socially acceptable ways to be a man” is much smaller than the box labeled “socially acceptable ways to be a woman.”

• Moving on from 18F. — Ethan Marcotte

  During that time, a friend suggested that while things were calm at work, I should write down some lines I wouldn’t want to cross: things I’d want to watch out for that, if they materialized, might be a reason to leave. This was wonderful advice, and I’m grateful to them for it. Equipped with a plan, even a small one, I started thinking through what my lines would be.

• The Tiny Book of Great Joys · Muffin Man

  If you are interested in how I over-engineered the process of making a tiny book for my wife, using AI, a pen plotter, a 3D printer, and a lot of time, you are in the right place. The book is titled The Tiny Book of Great Joys, and here is how it turned out.

• Ollama - NSHipster

  If you wait for Apple to deliver on its promises, you’re going to miss out on the most important technological shift in a generation. The future is here today. You don’t have to wait. With Ollama, you can start building the next generation of AI-powered apps right now.

• Is it okay?

  How do you make a language model? Goes like this: erect a trellis of code, then allow the real program to grow, its development guided by a grueling training process, fueled by reams of text, mostly scraped from the internet. Now. I want to take a moment to think together about a question with no remaining practical importance, but persistent moral urgency: Is that okay?

• I missed the memo for the outside space at this coffee shop… – Manton Reece

  The bittersweet irony with parenting is not knowing until years later what you had.

• You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism

  We don’t need any more irony-poisoned hot takes or cathartic, irreverent snark. We need to collectively decide what kind of world we actually do want, and what we’re willing to do to achieve it.