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A Canadian who is passionate about the free and open web.
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Walk with me: Struggling to say on target

2024-12-16 08:00:00

Struggling to stay on target.

Just over a month ago I pointed out that I was still on track to being 100lbs down by 2025. Unfortunately, december has been quite the slow month when it comes to weight loss. I’m still down, but it’s nowhere near as fast as I would like. The good news is that I absolutely understand where I need to dial things in more and I’m hoping I can return to rapid results as I get more used to Winter.

Of course, even while missing this ambitious target, I’ve still done remarkably over the last while. Finishing December under 500lbs will be it’s own victory. I’m not sure where I’ll end up by Spring, but I’m ready to keep throwing everything I can at it. I will say what this Winter is giving me more appreciation for how much easier it is to make progress during the warmer months. My plan is to keep my Winter struggles close at heart to motivate me further during the Spring, Summer & Fall.

I’m beginning to recognize how many of the challenges I’ve faced turning this around are composed more of mental barriers than physical ones. It’s now more clear to me that while I do have many physical limitations, my own estimation of them vastly outshines them. This means that your own negative self-perception can act as a force multiplier for real but manageable problems.

More Kindness

I got another very kind email from a listener. These simple acts of kindness have always been the highlight of my day when they happen.

just wanted to say that I like that you put your new year’s resolution on your website and you actually managed to stick with it! Keep it up! And it’s really inspiring. If you can solve your problem bit by bit, maybe other people like myself can solve their relatively minor problems, too.

And walking definitely matters. Getting some daylight every day was crucial for me to beat sleeplessness and depression-like states years ago, and I still do it because I don’t want these to come back. Also, I enjoyed your “Walk with me” audios, although I usually hate podcasts.

I really have to share the hearty laugh I let out when I read “maybe other people like myself can solve their relatively minor problems, too.” I truly had not considered that publicly tackling such a big problem would help others resolve other troubles. I am overjoyed to hear it, and wish everyone the best of luck.

I owe this particular person a blog post about matrix, which is coming!

Thank you for reading and/or listening! As always you can see my motivational memes collection here.

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Walk with me: Sleep & Swings

2024-12-09 08:00:00

Walk with me: Sleep & Swings

Sleep Progress

It’s almost two weeks of having successfully switched from being mostly nocturnal to being awake (and productive!) during the day. I’m not sure how big a factor sleep timing is to sleep quality, but I’m convinced it’s a huge factor. Which is pretty important for the overall health and weight loss journey.

Despite experiencing a bit of a slowdown as Winter has started, I’m very grateful to have made significant progress improving sleep. The sum total of the following strategies have made a huge difference:

I took the following steps to gradually shift my waking hours.

  • Night light settings

    On both my phone and computer, I turned on the night light setting that turns the screen orange-ish to mimic sunset. I’ve set both to be sufficiently intense that it’s fairly uncomfortable to focus on for a long period of time. This has helped reduce night screen time.

  • Sleep Cover

    Purchasing a cover for my eyes definitely helped me reduce night time light. Instead of worrying about eliminating every light source, this works fairly well to block out basically all light. It’s a good tool to resist the temptation to doomscroll all night.

  • Natural Lighting

    Instead of keeping the blinds closed to regain some sleep in the mornings, I’ve opened them entirely to get what little sunlight there is in these Winter mornings. I can definitely say this seems to have been the single change that made the biggest difference. It made me wake up a couple of days with less sleep than I would like, but that really helps keep me tired at night time.

  • Putting the time in

    Shifting the sleep schedule took time. Spending a couple of hours a day immersed in darkness at night time really did pay off. It was a frustrating time-sink but it absolutely made a serious difference. In the moment it felt pointless but in hindsight I think it really did have a massive impact on my ability to turn things around quickly.

  • Electrolytes

    One of my biggest challenges in the morning was being able to get things done during the early mornings. It has come to my attention that I was merely dehydrated in the mornings. I noticed a radical shift when I tried having just a normal sports electrolyte mix before I go to sleep.

Kettlebell Swings

I’ve decided I’m going to try to take on lower weight kettlebell swings as a daily exercise. This is partially motivated my goal target of 100lbs down by 2025. I’m 20lbs away and have 20 days to go. It’s achievable, but I need to figure out how to be more active during these cold winter days. So the solution is to use a 15lb kettlebell to do a decent amount of swings.

I’m excited, because I believe this might be the thing that keeps me on track during this month. I’ve also purchased an exercise mat to do basic body-weight exercises that I can do from home. The more progress I can make without leaving the house, the better. I’m quite close to being able to do unmodified lunges, and bodyweight squats are something I’ve been able to do for some time.

Last night I did 65 kettlebell swings right before sleeping (maybe not the best idea) and this morning I did 100 (4 sets of 25). I’m hoping to continue to improve. In the short term I want to make sure I’m getting really comfortable with the form before I push much further. Of course, my impatience will absolutely see me pushing 150, 200 swings a day once I feel comfortable with the form.

More improvement

I still need to get better at documenting the hard times. Despite my positive updates, there are absolutely challenges in this process. It is incredibly difficult emotionally at times and I want to document it better if for no other reason to remind myself in the future. It’s incredibly hard to bear being in huge amounts of pain that’s inevitable when really making progress. In attempting a new body-weight exercise, I’ve definitely pushed the limits of my body as it is. Some of my back muscles were in extreme pain for a couple of days and unfortunately I tend to take pain and discomfort personally.

It’s very challenging to be in so much pain and still frustrated with the reality of being severely obese. It’s very difficult to sustain so much effort for what feels like so little at times. While I logically recognize that being 80lbs down is a huge accomplishment and a major improvement, having a lot left to do really dulls the feeling. I’m trying to get better at appreciating the milestones.

Thanks for tuning in!

Despite many people congratulating me for the courage in talking about my journey publicly, I’ve found it one of the few purely gratifying parts of this. I regularly get a great deal of encouragement from people finding me sharing this informative or helpful. I can definitely say that the kindness of others throughout this process has made much of what I’ve been doing a great deal easier. Not every day is fun or a new milestole, but I’m incredibly appreciative of those who take the time to share some thoughts.

  • @[email protected] wrote:

    Slowly reading through whole blog of Gabe, and it gives me joy. So much dedication, keep it up Gabriel!

    Post in question: https://gabe.rocks/health/progression/

  • I got a kind message from another fellow techie who is beginning to lose weight himself. He’s at a much lower starting point, but it’s encouraging to see others make progress as well.

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Taking a look at Ghost

2024-12-09 08:00:00

Going Ghost

I’ve taken another look at Ghost. Ghost is a modern CMS (Content Management System) that supports a wide variety of interesting features. It has built-in analytics, payments & newsletter support. Not only that but apparently Fediverse support is coming soon. (I believe you can test it already, but it’s not enabled by default) I wanted to know if I could rebuild the Libre Solutions Network website with ghost by building my own theme.

My primary motivation was that if I could build a theme that is to my liking I could satisfy the criteria that I had built it with. The Site is a statically generated site using Hugo but I’ve build it’s theme from the ground up to support a variety of features I find important.

  • Decent social media previews
  • Shortcodes for multimedia
  • As Tor & I2P friendly as possible
  • Very little javascript
  • First-class RSS feeds with multimedia

The documentation for building themes in ghost is quite excellent. I also appreciate the ability to just zip a couple of files and upload them to the site to test the theme. I would say that the developer experience for theme development is pretty good right now. Unfortunately I hit a couple of frustrations trying to accomplish some of the things I wanted to do. I’m realizing that the ultimate freedom of static site generators is very hard to compete with.

  1. For multimedia in your RSS feeds recommends you use a hack/workaround to actually embed the media. The lack of first-class support for multi-media RSS feeds feels like a huge oversight.
  2. By default the javascript for your membership features and search is served from a remote CDN. It is a shame that this isn’t something at least served by the site itself when one is self-hosting. Changing this requires either going without the pre-filled head partial, or modifying your ghost installation directly.
  3. It seems that supporting other url schemes (such as Tor & I2P) would require running multiple redundant front-ends. This seems like a huge pain, but has advantages when one would want to have different themes for each. In that case you could remove all javascript on the darknet front-ends but keep it on the http site.

This is disappointing because I had hoped that by switching to ghost I could ditch Substack and have a better website at the end of it. These issues are not really that big a deal for anyone building an ordinary site, but for what I want out of the Libre Solutions Network site it’s effectively a non-starter. In my opinion, Ghost is probably excellent for anyone who requires it’s features and wants to build a beautiful looking site. I’ve seen comments to the effect that it lacks the performance one would want which is a huge loss over the speed of static sites.

Is Ghost Good?

If I was building a site for ordinary people and not tech purists, I would say it’s a great option and you can get a lot out of building your own theme for it. I really would like to see Ghost gain more prominence considering how far it goes to lower the barrier of entry for people to have a first-class experience publishing on the web. I’d really like to see them resolve the issues I’ve mentioned, but it’s not likely to be a deal-breaker for many people.

You get a lot “out of the box” with ghost, so for an individual or small organization I think it’s very hard to go wrong with starting with ghost. The membership tier features are pretty nice and the composer works great. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into building a powerful CMS, I just wish it was a bit more flexible. They’re also working on supporting other payment providers so hopefully it will be more than just Stripe in the future.

But what about Static+?

I’ve previously written that there’s probably room for a lightweight CMS that leverages a database and simple API to create a “hybrid” static site with additional features. This would allow a website to support advanced modern features, but degrade gracefully in situations where users disable scripts. In addition to that, you could likely have all the power of a CMS and the speed of a static site all in one. I believe that when supporting Tor & I2P traffic, this is effectively the best you can do. There will always be a need to run server-side operations

I think Static+ is going to be the future of flexible CMSs because it makes no sense to store the entire structure and content of a mostly public website in memory. Instead of having to regenerate every page on each visit you can save a great deal of resources on sites that aren’t focused on constant real-time updates. You could still move fast enough to support the Fediverse and other neat APIs too.

I’m convinced that to actually bring more people into the free and open web requires giving them access to tools that they can reasonably deploy and use. I love static sites, but I understand that the majority of people would prefer posting to their website to feel just like posting on social media. That seems to create challenges because this is impossible to deliver without some service running as a CMS, but for small personal sites I think Static+ strikes the balance well.

I would love to see a new CMS designed from the ground up with many of these concerns in mind. Wordpress can do everything it seems, but it’s so modular that it has it’s own problems. The perfect CMS should be as flexible as using a static site generator, but provide a wide variety of useful features to save you time and headaches. It would be incredible to have a CMS that had the following built-in from the ground up:

  • Powerful RSS Features (Like Podcasting 2.0 support, and properly styled feeds)

  • Custom themes support (Configurable, like they are with Ghost)

  • Configurable taxonomies (like post series’, courses, etc)

  • Passkey support (Just to make life easy)

  • Rich media embeds

  • Webtorrent for large static media

    This requires the site itself to run a whitelisted tracker for it’s own content.

  • Built-in analytics

  • Multi-user

  • Fediverse Support (Not because it’s that important, but because it’s much harder to just add on and not consider from the start)

    • This has other advantages like potentially being able to side-roll it’s own form of federation for comments / interactions. By modeling the concept of a “remote user” you can build powerful integrations and moderation tools.
  • …this list could go on and on forever

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🎉 Major Milestone: Below 500!

2024-11-30 08:00:00

🎉 Finally Below 500!

I took longer than I wanted, but I’ve finally accomplished a major step in this year’s New Years Resolutions. I only wish I knew what my actual highest point was. The problem with going a long time without a scale, it becomes harder to identify the highest points.

But, I am incredibly grateful to have gotten to this point. Signing up for personal training has absolutely helped me fill many gaps in my understanding and begin making serious progress. My trainer has helped me a great deal in building up my mobility from the ground up, and has also helped me with strategies to get food under control. The last few months have been a wild success far beyond what I believed to be possible.

I hope you’ll enjoy today’s “Walk with Gabriel” audio, and are having an excellent day yourself.

What’s next?

The big goal for 2024, is to be down 100lbs! I’m ~30lbs away and have ~30 days to go! It’s certainly possible, but I have to really ramp up the cardio, so I’m going to push as hard as I can. Walking is helping, but I’m also planning to focus on sprints while swimming. Excited to see how close I get to the goal for 2025, which will be an excellent birthday gift to myself. Then the real push is on as I go through 2025 doing everything I can do keep this pace up for the entire year.

References

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Walk with me: Keeping at it

2024-11-27 08:00:00

Walk with me: 🚶🏻Keeping at it

I’m continuing the “walk with me” series, this time with my thoughts on what’s helping me stick to my difficult weight loss journey. Starting out talking about my current status, where I’m getting over a fairly brutal cold. To spoil the major theme, I think the three things that have helped me really keep at it have been:

  1. Keeping in mind what I’m looking forward to get out of this process
  2. Having the gratitude to really feel the kindness and encouragement received along the way
  3. Embracing progression: eagerly pushing towards within-reach goals then celebrating and appreciating them

Kindness Received

I received a very kind e-mail from a reader.

just found your blog as it was mentioned on Hacker news some months ago (don’t remember which specific blog post was talking about).

Since then i was periodically look for updates on your “journey”, i wish you the best and i find really cool that you are pushing your updates in a very sincere way and be “accountable to the world” about your weight loss also by showing your troubles.

I would say i root for you and that i hope you’ll reach your goal, but i’m pretty sure that if you continue this way you’ll surely reach it.

I really appreciate it. I wanted to share this because it’s great to highlight that there are many kind strangers out there on the open web who take the time to drop words of encouragement. It absolutely helps me a great deal!

Discussed items:

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Walk with me: Threats to Digital Freedom

2024-11-24 08:00:00

Join me on a walk

Update: I think attempting to remove the background noise did more harm than good. The audio has been switched with a much less edited version, which I think is easier on the ears.

In trying to find the motivation to go for more walks. I decided to record an off-the-cuff monologue about my thoughts on the major social/societal challenges to the future of digital liberty. I’m hoping to do more walks, and get better at recording / cleaning audio from outdoors.

Related Links:

⚠️ Warning: Terrible Audio ⚠️

I apologize in advance, if you’re used to listening to clean audio you’ll probably consider this unbearable. This was an experiment in recording on the go. For starters, I’m very obese and still in the process of getting in shape. You’ll hear many breaths and the pacing isn’t quite natural because of it. I’m also just ad-libbing so this is all just a stream-of-consciousness. On top of this it was pretty windy, and there’s a fair bit of outside noise. I’ve made a small attempt to clean up the worst of it, but it’s still very hard to listen to. I’m also a bit stuffed up, so I didn’t expect to sound 100% to begin with. If you struggle through it, I hope you got something out of it.

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