I Travel

I travel to explore the world, I travel for the thrill of the unknown, to broaden my mind, to taste the unexpected, to learn and keep growing. I travel for chance encounters and randomly meeting again halfway across the globe. I travel because it's the easiest way to multpily my (remembered) life span. I travel to break the daily routine, to upset hardened molds, to escape boredom, to make new friends and meet old ones again.

I travel not to feel alone, to meet new people and fall in love for a brief romance, to share moments and explore together …

Censorship and the Great Firewall

I just arrived in China for my vacation and noticed one thing immediately: All kinds of useful sites are blocked. Google Search and Maps, Gmail and Facebook. This is a major pain in the ass for doing anything from looking up directions to uploading pictures for those back at home, not even to speak of any human rights aspects.

My initial approach was using OpenVPN on my phone, but that doesn't seem to work - Facebook is still blocked, etc. What does help is ssh -D <PORT> <HOST>, but even that seems to get slowed down after some use. It's enough …

Backups Simplified

I spent quite a bit of time today looking at different options for making sure my laptop was all backed up. Starting with [cached]rdiff-backup - which seems great if you are doing local backups and have LVM setup -, remembering I had been using [cached]rsnapshot previously and then wondering how to configure it for targets that are only available sometimes: [cached]push backups.

That was when it hit me: I already have all my data in [cached]Dropbox. Including most of my dotfiles, I just symlink them out of my Dropbox folder into the appropiate location, making it easy to …

Travel Visualizations

I've made a simple visualization of where I have and haven't been in the world:

So far, that's 24 countries. I'll keep the map up to date …

Lua Rocks

Inspired by reading [cached]Lua - an extensible extension language, specifically the section on using fallbacks to implement an expression parser, I wanted to see if I could do so in a safe manner. With safe meaning parsed expressions must not be able to execute arbitrary code.

Half an hour later, I have to say it is surprisingly easy! Less than 50 lines (including comments) is all it takes:

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Setting your day up for Productivity

I have this habit of saving interesting articles to read them later on, maybe when I'm commuting on the tube (using Pocket). Sometimes I keep them after reading, to peruse again at a later time, mull them over a little. Case in point, [cached]An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day And Finding Focus from Farnam Street.

After reading it for the third or fourth time, I realized that my days really need some structure. Or, more specifically, a game plan of the most important goals that I plan to achieve that day. Yes, I'm generally quite productive anyway - I've …

Reflections

Walking just forces me to think, requires me to take from all the reading and practicing I normally keep myself busy with. When I'm walking down the street there's no paper on Deep Learning I can read, no Feyman Lectures I can study, no Kanji I can practice, just me and my thoughts.

The same is not true for running, there the exercise and exertions distracts me, my competitive drive propels me to run as fast as I can, leaving no energy for idle thoughts. It's only in these slow walks - which ironically I used to regard as wasted time …

Beemind your Papers

If you've seen my post on motivation hacking then you know that I'm using Beeminder to track a wide variety of things. I try everything I can to automate the tracking - import learning data directly from Duolingo, have a custom script poll WaniKani for my current level, track how long I practice piano by reading midi output over USB, integrating with Runkeeper to track how often I run, etc.

Now I've also found a good way to track the papers I read: Every paper I'm interested in I add to [cached]Mendeley. Then once I've actually read it I can …

Immortality is already here, it's just unevenly distributed

Often we are told to "pursue what you really want, not just what pays the bills" by pithy blog posts, filled with thoughtful quotes from successful people. We are encouraged to follow our dreams, to stop doing things that don't bring us enjoyment. After all, we all only have a finite amount of time, 24 hours a day, a few paltry decades, maybe close to a century if we are lucky.

But what if this advice is terribly wrong? What if doing some more of that horribly boring work could get you disproportionately more time, if you could just buy …

Motivation Hacking

After [cached]Anna recommended that I read [cached]The Motivation Hacker, I went down the rabbit hole. I had already discovered [cached]Beeminder the day before, and now I was truly motivated to set myself up with some goals.

You can see them on my public [cached]goal page, but for now they are primarily about keeping up my language studies, spending a bit more time on piano and making sure I go for a run regularly. I'm not sure if I actually care about the money betting features, but just seeing the steady line of past effort is quite …