Evgeny Kuznetsov

Sometimes I have an idea for a blogpost, and I think I should research the matter a little bit more.

I usually go and research. I read. Then I read more, tangentially related. Then I give it a good thought and decide it isn’t worth writing about, actually.

I ingest the knowledge I get through this research; I learn. I enjoy learning, I enjoy it more that writing, actually.

Is learning better for me — in the long run — than writing? Is it true that every non-written blog post increased my life quality — both by making me happier and by teaching me something new? I don’t know for sure, but I have reasons to believe so.

For quite some time now, my website — this one — has issues loading for those who browse it from Megafon¹ networks. Most probably, it’s just a side-effect of the “black boxes”² blocking Digital Ocean³.

I think I will do nothing about it. I could move to another hosting provider (and cut some costs), but fuck it, really. I will move this website to another hosting provider when I — personally — cease to be satisfied with Digital Ocean’s services. The Russian authorities being dissatisfied with these services is not a valid reason.

Twenty years ago in Russia, I could go to a train station and board a train without taking my keys out of my pocket. Life got better and more secure since then, so now you need to empty your pockets and present your backpack for screening.

It’s funnier on public transport. In Moscow, you can use the same ticket to travel by subway and city train. The train can be MCD (diameter, goes further to the suburbs) or MCC (ring road in Moscow). At the MCC, it is mandatory to turn out the pockets and present bags for screening. Most MCD stations don’t even have the equipment for that. In subway there is equipment, to the extent that the lobbies of old stations feel tight and crowded, and the ever-vigilant security guards selectively pull potential terrorists out of the stream of people for screening. They don’t check everyone, though. I ride to work every day with the same backpack, with the same laptop inside it. I undergo the humiliating screening procedure once or twice a week; why I get chosen (or not) on a given day is a mistery.

There are things that are nice and interesting to do, yet there are things you’d rather not spend your time and effort doing. People are different, and my categorization may not match yours, but on average, there are a lot of things in today’s life that one would like to delegate to some extent. Hiring a person or a team for this is something very few of us can afford, but technical progress gives some hope to wide audience, too.

Owning your own data is great. I’ve been using this website as the central IndieWeb point of my online life for over five years, and I love it. However, the joy of owning your own website comes bundled with great responsibility: as the website owner, I am responsible for what’s on my site and for what’s stored “under the hood” to make this website work.

It’s not a huge issue as long as I only post my own content on my site, but the cool thing about the IndieWeb — as opposed to “regular” Web — is its social aspect, the ability to interact with other people running other websites. To do that I usually need to put some of the data that belongs to other people onto my website. And that always makes me uncomfortable.

This post is about obvious things, but it looks like they aren’t that obvious to some people.

Many messengers allow to send voice messages instead of text. These messages are problematic: you can’t read them in a meeting, you can’t skim through them later to remember what the conversation was about, you can’t search the contents of these messages… The fact that the voice messages are possible to send doesn’t mean you should. You shouldn’t.

very much Russian.

I’ve been a DreamHost customer ever since I switched from hosted solutions to managing my own website. Back then, I was searching for a web hosting that would allow me to host a Known instance with as little hassle as possible, and DreamHost was one of the first options IndieWeb Wiki listed. I gave it a try and fell in love immediately.

DreamHost was great. Very easy to set up, with clean and comfortable to use administrative panel, seamless SSH access, and everything you’d need for a little private website available and easily accessible. PHP worked seamlessly, setting up a MySQL database was a piece of cake, and I could even set up a cron job to make regular backups (and have my home server fetch those via rsnapshot).