# rant on techno problems

Sometimes I feel people are too obsessed with technology. I am on a
technology fast. 

## devices

- a dumb phone: just calls and sms; don't need anything more from it
- computer w/ OpenBSD: trying to use it in the most minimal way
    - I still use X, mainly because PDF, cut and paste and the `dvtm` window
      manager (prints non std character on the console)
        - if you have a way to get around those, please tell me
    - no social media, but:
        - email 
        - anonymous twitter: use the search function in a bot to scrape content
          of people you are interested in and do it from TOR 
            - my bot is not ready yeat, but I see there are many in the
              beautiful suckless/bitreich[1] community
            - i do not know if i'll keep it anyway: feel to much pressure anyway
        - anonymous youtube: use RSS feed to check content, mpv (behind TOR) to
          see videos and an awsome youtube site[2]
    - gopher of course
- an ebook reader  (Kobo) 
- pen and paper: after years of tablets and tech pens, the 'pen and paper'
  method is the most creativity-friendly way of thinking


## software

- I am wondering if I can use vi instead vim. Even if ed is the standard text
  editor!
- I already use lynx for 99% of my browsing and firefox for that 1% I have to do
  from it for my work. 
    - Lynx's working good, thanks to externals and the socks5 proxy (to TOR).

## communication

### email vs chat and calls
We worked to increase the wrong things. For example: why we prefer calls to
emails? Written communication force you to _think_ about what you have to say.
Calls and chat are more immediate and you always seem dumb. I can not understand
why people like to appear dumber than they are.

### technical writing vs videos
Nowadays everybody _presents_ his paper. I do not understand that. A 10-20 min
presentation is equivalent to the abstract of your paper. And if you are more
technical than that, then I do not follow you: either you are too slow or too
fast. So if I am interested I'll need to read the paper anyway. This brings us
to my next point.

### PDF
There was once a common device where you read things: paper. We standardized it,
generally we printed on lettersize or A4 papers and we diffused knowledge and
reports on it. It was _understandable_ (not needed) that we came up with a fixed
image to represent the knowledge. Generally it was the PDF. But is it still
useful?

Fast forward to 2020. You generally use many kind of devices, from ultra
portatile computers with a 6inches screen to 24inches and more. How can a fixed
vectorial image represent knowledge on this variety of screens? We need a way to
represent knowledge in a _flexible_ way. HTML (and derivatives such as epubs) is
the widely known method to accomplish that, and it is used in ebooks but _not_
in technical papers. Why?  Mainly because there is no way to convert (in a
stable  and predictable way) a latex paper to html and people at IEEE and
Springer still want to print those papers and therefore they want us to send the
PDF to them.

### LCD screens
yeah, i understand you need to play 96fps games on you pc, but I do not. Why
there is not an eink screen on my pc?

[1] gopher://bitreich.org
[2] https://codemadness.org/idiotbox/
*Created on  2020-03-29*
disnocen@sdf.org