I have been meaning to attend EuroBSDCon for quite some time now,
but wanted to do so in an environmentally conscious way.
Practically this boils down to not flying.
In 2019 this meant I could not attend EuroBSDcon in Lillehammer, Norway;
I was just not naive enough
to travel 24 hours by train
with 7 transits
and an equal number of possibilities to miss a connecting train.
In 2020 and 2021 COVID-19 simplified any travel deliberations
by putting a full stop to most in-person conferences,
including EuroBSDcon.
Though at the end of 2021
the EuroBSDcon Foundation announced
that EuroBSDcon 2022 would be held in Vienna, Austria.
And as it turns out, ÖBB,
the Austrian Federal Railways,
operates a night train from Amsterdam, The Netherlands to Vienna, Austria.
With a 75% lower carbon footprint compared to flying the night train would be my ticket to EuroBSDcon 2022
[…] a continuous file synchronization program.
It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time,
safely protected from prying eyes.
Your data is your data alone
and you deserve to choose where it is stored,
whether it is shared with some third party,
and how it’s transmitted over the internet.
In a way it does what Dropbox does,
but without the central hub that Dropbox provides;
Syncthing syncs directly between computers!
And just as important,
It works directly on FreeBSD
Recently I took delivery of a new multi-functional laser printer. Contrary to
my old laser printer, that was connected to my aging 2009 Mac Pro via USB, this
new printer has WiFi. This has been a great convenience; everyone in our
household can now easily print from their MacBook or Chromebook without having
to turn on the Mac Pro.
On my FreeBSD laptop - my primary development machine - I had to do a bit more
work. Nothing really complicated, but there are one or two steps that you need
to be aware of.
Living a climate consciously aware life feels inadequate; being aware of the
environmental impact of the things I do and eat feels insufficient. As an
admirer of the Stoic philosophy of life I’m aware of the Stoic Dichotomy of
Control.
It is the distinction between things within our power and not within our power.
William Irvine, in his excellent book A Guide to the Good Life. The Ancient
Art of Stoic Joy, redefines this sharp division into a more practical
Trichotomy of Control by adding “existence of things over which we have some
but not complete control”.
Although I do like conferences I have not been to many of them for various
reasons. EuroPython 2014 (Berlin), Code Mesh 2015 (London), Erlang User
Conference 2016 (Stockholm) were the last three international ones. I enjoyed
them enormously. Learned new things, met friendly people and got a good feel
for what’s happening in their respective communities.
Last year I contemplated registering for BSDCan 2019 (Ottawa) and EuroBSD 2019
(Lillehammer). But in the end I did not. It would have been great to attend
these two BSD focussed conferences especially as I’ve started working more with
FreeBSD lately. But I just couldn’t stomach the idea of taking an airplane. See,
I’ve got a bad case of flight shame. And from the signs of it, it seems
permanent.
Google has been favoring websites behind HTTPS over those behind HTTP in their
search ranking for quite a while now. Somewhat more
recent
they started to mark interactive websites behind HTTP as insecure in their
Chrome web browser. According to Google: “Eventually, we plan to label all HTTP
pages as non-secure”. One could argue about the value of marking
non-interactive websites, such as blogs, as insecure. However given how easy it
is to enable TLS by
using Let’s Encrypt our time is better spend on
simply enabling it.
Back in 1994 I started studying Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam. One of the courses I took was the
Operating Systems one by prof. Andy S. Tanenbaum. During one of his lectures
he recommended trying a BSD Unix such as FreeBSD if
we were interested in running a more production level grade Unix on our
Personal Computers. I happened to have just bought a Pentium 133Mhz system and
decided to follow Tanenbaum’s recommendation, installed FreeBSD
2.0, and was hooked onto
FreeBSD for approximately 10 years.
As a (freelance) software developer I have the ability to easily carry my
working environment with me. All it takes is a properly configured laptop.
This opens up a lot of possibilities. One of these I’d like to emphasize:
working while commuting.
Ideally I work close to where I live. It allows me to cycle to work. In
addition to being fun, quick and convenient, cycling also provides some
physical effort, albeit light. When your job requires you to sit behind a
computer for extended periods of time, any physical effort, even light, is
highly welcome. However most of the time my work requires me to commute a
lot farther than is practical by bicycle. Thus far I have managed to avoid
commuting by car. The time driving a car is completely wasted, especially
during rush hour. Hence I select my clients on the feasibility of getting
to them by means of public transport, specifically by train. The trains in
The Netherlands – especially the ‘Intercity’ ones – are very comfortable
and provide ample space to work on a laptop. Hence working while commuting
is easy.