Old computer challenge
You may have heard of the old computer challenge. It is an experiment to limit yourself to (severely) restricted computer resources for one week.
Because I don’t have an old computer at my disposal, I decided to limit myself at home to a Raspberry Pi 4 for one week. Normally I use a mid-end gaming PC even for webbrowing or listening to music, which feels like a waste of resources/energy. The raspberry pi is running 24/7 anyway because it does DNS and NFS, therefore it felt like a good opportunity.
After two days, I noticed:
- “Normal” webbrowsing is almost impossible; modern websites are way too heavy.
- The temptation to play Games etc. is much less, because the PC is not turned on (yet).
- The raspberry pi is already there, I just need to turn on the monitor.
- The limited performance “forces” me to do other things, e.g. sorting my book notes.
- It seems more quiet. There is less noise coming from applications like the Signal messenger.
- There is no official Signal build available for ARM.
However, at the end of day 2 I noticed that I could not use my usual Emacs workflow, because the Raspberry was actually still running Debian Buster. After I upgraded it, the graphical desktop stopped working - for whatever reason.
I guess I will spend day 3 figuring out what is going on.
tags: keep-this-tag-format, tags-are-optional, beware-with-underscores-in-markdown, example
Meditation (2024-02-05)
In this blog post, I would like to write about meditation.
I have been trying meditation on and off since ca. 2011, when I first read a book by Thich Nhat Than. However, despite having a few meditation experiences, I never stuck with it – also because I had trouble with headaches, which were due to bad technique.
Only last year, in 2023, I finally made the effort to start meditating daily on a consistent basis. It was not easy finding time for it, because I can practice only when my girlfriend is asleep or away. I started with 5 minutes per day and increased the duration up to about 20 minutes.
When I reached that timeframe, suddenly some old repressed memories surfaced, causing a very strong emotional response. It was not even something very traumatic, just a situation where I misbeheaved as a teenager in front of the parents of one of my youth female friends, and felt sorry and ashamed after that. Somehow, during meditation this memory came back and caused an emotional experience as if I were there back then, right at this moment.
The incident is so minor that I am sure everyone else has already forgotton about it, but then so did I until now. This experience caused me to stop meditating entirely, fearing of what else might turn up.
However, I now had time to read about this and it seems that this is a more-or-less normal phenomenon; apparently (to my amateurish understanding) meditation tends to bring up memories of old situations that we did not have dealt with properly; things we forgot or repressed. According to online information, the best way to deal with this is to “go through with it”, i.e. be prepared that this might happen, let the memories arise and then try to accept it and distance oneself from it, like one is doing anyway during meditation.
On a sidenote: This is one thing that I feel is conveyed incorrectly about meditating. Many people seem to be under the impression that you should “think about nothing”, but this is not the case. The point is to “distance yourself from your own thoughts”, that is, observe what random thoughts come into your head, and then, instead of following them (like we all usually do), just acknowledge them and go back to your focus point, which is usually your breath.
So after thinking about this for several months, I decided to go back to meditation, again starting at 5 minutes per day. This time I will be prepared for old memories resurfacing and I will try to acknowledges my mistakes from the past, learning from the experiences and move on.
tags: mediation, self-improvement, example
First post
This is a first post, to see how it works and what it does.
tags: keep-this-tag-format, tags-are-optional, beware-with-underscores-in-markdown, example