I’ve been a bit lax in terms of blogging lately. I’ve been meaning to write more, especially with the 100 Days To Offload challenge, but life has thrown a few obstacles in my way. With how 2020 and 2021 have gone, that is actually a blessing of sorts.
If you’ve been living in South Africa for any length of time, you’ll know that one of the downsides of living here is that we have frequent load-shedding due to our national electricity company being unable to provide us with enough power due to mismanagement and inadequate resources. But I’m not going to type out a post filled with complaints about the situation. Rather, I want to look at the positive aspects of being forced to live without electricity for several hours a day.
A few days ago I read the news that the television series Frasier would be returning to screens along with Rugrats. My first reaction wasn’t excitement, but rather resignation.
This week, the South African government announced that the names of several towns and public infrastructure. One city in particular, Port Elizabeth, got many South Africans talking, as its new name, Gqeberha, proved to be difficult for many people to pronounce.
I’ve always viewed myself as something of a good writer over the years. It’s up for debate whether that is objectively true, though! One of my favourite pastimes is to actively embrace new writing tools in the hopes that they will help elevate my writing, whether it be through embracing the use of Markdown syntax or just providing a smooth publishing platform for my writing pieces. I’ve played around with Blogger, WordPress, Ghost, Hugo, Jekyll and Octopress, among many others, and most recently I decided to give WriteFreely a try.
This is just a quick post to give some brief thoughts on my experience using Mastodon and Pleroma. Hopefully, anyone who stumbles on this and is a Twitter user might learn something new and move over to one of these federated platforms.
With 2021 slowly going by, I’ve tried to keep myself busy by experimenting with new things. And one of those experiments has been with the fediverse. This meant that I’d need to try my hand at self-hosting on a VPS, something I’m not proficient in at all.
2020 has made me realize that I have a book hoarding problem. My shelves are groaning under the weight of accumulated books and pages and words of literature. And no matter how much I dedicate myself to reading, the pile never seems to get any smaller.
It’s been a while since I last managed to get out a video and podcast as part of our Miskatonic Alumni Association side-project, but your patience is rewarded as today sees the release of the latest video discussion.
Recently, on Mastodon someone posted a link to a blog post by Aaron Parecki that dealt with how he left Facebook. Taken into consideration along with the recent WhatsApp privacy debacle, I thought that 2021 was the perfect time for me to finally make the break from Facebook and its services. In this post, I want to go through the why and the how of my exodus from Facebook and the services it owns.