I am luck that I keep everything in Dropbox and Github, but it is still annoying setup a new machine. I am for now using a MacBook Air that was with my father in law, but he haven’t been using it so I will be using it until I figure out what I am going to do.

Because it is a 2018 machine, Apple doesn’t have parts for it anymore so there is no way to fix it. I think this is a very bad way (from the consumer point of view) of building motherboards that you can’t easily replace only the defective part.

If wasn’t for the iOS development that I do I would probably build a Linux machine for me.

This is only the second post for this year on my blog and the year is ending with only a few hours left. So I basically neglect the blog in 2025. I have two main reasons for this, first I’ve had a busy mind with work and personal life that I didn’t have the head space to blog, secondly I joined a book club (in Portuguese) I’ve read 13 books in the past 12 months, so part of my free time was filled with the books I was reading in the club.

I also started a small project this year with my friend Ale Gruer back in October that as added a good distraction from blogging. We have a Rock and Roll radio show that you can check it out on Mixcloud(https://mixcloud.com/rocknarede/) (in Portuguese).

Now back to the topic of this post. I love the work Sara did with the gift post, not only basing it on Sara’s opinions but also bringing other people’s opinions on the topic of Small Communities Online.

I’m going to say, in this post I will be agreeing a lot with Sara’s post. But I will try to wrap it up with my conclusion and recent personal experience.

I’m envious of Sara since they have no presence whatsoever in any of the big social networks that we know, not even LinkedIn. I, on the other hand, have kept all my accounts even the ones I don’t use anymore. Part because I am lazy but part because, in case I want to check something there. Either way I will confess that this is silly of me.

Sara shares an article from Cal Newport on The New Yorker from the early days of Threads where we concluded that we don’t need a new Twitter/X. One of his arguments is that there are small communities that are focused on a topic that are much smaller than big general purpose social networks. I agree with that, like Cal Newport says in the article these are communities that look a lot like the communities we had prior to the Web 2.0 era, and yes they still work and they still fulfill its purpose of get people together to discuss things they are passionate about.

James G, per Sara’s requests, shared his opinion and talked about the small communities being safer places where one can experience new things, knowing that the communities will thrive when all are trying what interests them. This is actually beautiful and made me realize that this is the most important thing about small communities online.

I couldn’t agree more when Sara brings up blog posts series like Manu’s People and Blogs, these are excellent opportunities to nurture small communities and provide discoverability.

Another great point is the community’s events, the Indieweb has been organizing a few carnivals. I’ve in the past participated in some of them and it is a nice way to feel as part of a community.

One thing that Sara brought up really well was the safety, smaller communities can potentially be more manageable and moderation can act quickly on members that potentially offended someone else in the community. Joe Crawford puts it really well when he says: “Moderation can’t wait. When someone has hurt someone else’s feelings, or is confused, or lost – the intervention needs to be as soon as possible. Someone needs help. ”

There is also a very nice thing Jo said about inspiring people to create their own home on the internet. If you think of the Indieweb as a small community of people that create their own website on the web, this is a great inspiration for others to do the same and participate. There isn’t a shortage of people willing to help, look for example things like the Front End Study Hall. This is along the same lines when Zachary Kai said he found “community and technical education” in the Indieweb.

Another aspect that Sara pointed out that others in the community are saying and Al Abut has brought up too is that the small community give a sense of being a quieter place, in Al’s words “One feels like I’m catching up, the other feels like falling behind”.

My conclusion

The idea that large social networks are the digital version of the town square, is wrong. But small communities can in fact bring that sense back. I find that participating in blog carnivals and monthly challenges together with other bloggers is really fun and gives me that sense of belonging to a group.

As a recent personal experience, like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I’ve joined a book club and it has been really good for me. We are a tiny community when for our twice a month meetings we have about six people, but the conversations are really enriching the experience of reading the books. Every two weeks I really look forward to these meetings. I feel like I found a small community online and that is something that I can possibly think I would find in a large social network.

Thanks again to Sara for such a nice gift. I know it took me a while to post this. I would love to hear back from others so please email me or send me a webmention if you find yourself wanting to add to this conversation. And thank you for reading this. I appreciate it.

So two weeks ago Sara posted my gift. I was thrilled how thoughtful it was and thankful not only for Sara but for all the people that Sara gathered replies from to answer the question I put on as a suggestion for my gift: How Small Online Communities can be a Better Place than Large Social Network Websites? I am preparing a reply for that post but today I want to post my gift to Sara.

My original idea for Sara’s gift was something different, but the idea evolved and I created a zine. The inspiration for the content came from one of Sara’s post I read not too long ago: In Reply to Tracy’s Guiding Principles for my website.

The inspiration for the zine itself came coincidently from two distinct individuals Austin Kleon and Doc Pop. Both use this format, and Doc Pop even have a cool zine teaching how to make your own zine.

You can check out and download Sara’s Website Guiding Principles zine here. Sara, I hope you like it.

A special thanks to my wife whom I bounced ideas from for some of the drawings that I’ve added to the zine.

I made a quick video showing how to fold the zine, you can watch it below.

As the movie started and the story start to take shape I must confess I got a bit ansiosos about thinking what would happen with him that he would try to end his life.

George Bayle (the main character in the movie) is the kind of man that everyone would be happy to have around. He is always whiling to help and uses his intelligence and means for the good of his community.

George is a man full of dreams that wants to wonder the world and enjoy life but life keeps him on his hometown. We watch him getting married Mary, whom truly loves him and how the both of them participate in the community through George’s business that helps people fulfill their dream of owning a home.

George has Uncle Billy that is his partner in the business and is a bit forgetful and ended up misplacing the money they needed to keep the business afloat. He we have to mention Mr Potter, the richest man in town. He is always trying to get George’s business to fail and the money mistakenly ended up on his hands, which he sees has an opportunity to not return the money and put George and his uncle out of business. Like Mark said on his introduction to the movie Mr. Potter is the equivalent of todays tech billionaires.

Then we meet Clarence the Angel, which the voice we have heard a couple of times through the movie. He is what he calls a Second Class Angel, he is still trying to win his wings and he is hoping that helping George will grant him the wings.

And with Clarence is when the two best moments, in my opinion, happens in the movie. Until this point it is a story of misfortunes, hope and resilience. I had a good laugh when George calls Clarence, Gabriel. And when George was been stubborn and Clarence starts wonder if there isn’t an easier way to get his wings.

It’s a Wonderful Life is a movie where the story is the most important piece of the movie. The story makes us root for George, we see his journey through a difficult life but a joyful one. And when Clarence magically changes things has if George was never born, is George himself that sees that his had a life that he should be grateful for.

When things are back to normal the movie teaches us another lesson about community and friendship as we see George returning home and that his friends had chip in for him to help him out has he have done to many of them.

Another great movie that I wouldn’t have seen it if wasn’t for the Indieweb Movie Club. I look forward to read everyone’s reviews.

Thanks Mark for hosting this month’s Indieweb Movie Club, it was a great pick. For next month we will be watching Ghost In The Shell from 1995. I haven’t watched this movie yet but I have seen the trailer and I think it will be different from anything we have watch together at the movie club but I think I will enjoy it.

Now after watching it I am glad to say that my first thoughts about the movie were right. At the beginning of the movie I thought the plot was a bit confusing, but has the movie progress things start to get more interesting as the characters starts to be developed more.

Since I believe this is a relative unknown movie I will keep this spoiler free and encourage anyone reading this to go and watch it if you like political thrillers with a surprising twist at the end. (Saying that there is a twist is not a spoiler, is it?)

Thanks Sara for hosting this month’s Indieweb Movie Club and thank you for introducing us to such a nice Slovenian movie. For next month we will be watching It’s a Wonderful Life from 1946. I haven’t watched this movie yet but I have heard multiple times about it so I’m looking forward to watching it.

I personally experience the web happens in two languages, Brazilian Portuguese my home tongue and English the language I’ve chosen for most of the writing and reading I do online.

When I started this blog, over 20 years ago now, I was writing in Portuguese but later I decide to write in English and never looked back. However more recently I started a new blog to share in Portuguese things that interests me that are not always easy to find information about in Portuguese such as the IndieWeb and Open Web standards. I am doing this in the hopes to share the knowledge with those whom speak Portuguese but don’t have proficiency in a foreign language like English.

And that brings me to what I want to talk about on this theme of multilingualism. Since the web is most written in English, a lot of the knowledge only exists in English. So for people that speaks English and another language they have the change to help others by transferring what they learned in the English written and spoken world to the other languages and help those who doesn’t speak English.

On a similar matter, but the other way around is also something a polyglot can help. I just recently watched this video from a live event organized by the Internet Archive and around the 56 minutes mark a woman named Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight came into stage and shared with the audience almond other things the work she does translating Wikipedia pages from other languages into English. She is able to do that because she is a polyglot and she is very diligent with the work that she does, verifying references to fact check the contents on Wikipedia. This is pure knowledge sharing using a medium like Wikipedia that can have a huge impact in our society.

I remember something I heard once about making the web more accessible for vision and hearing impairing people that I believe is also applicable in this context on multilingualism on the web. By not including those who rely on accessibility content you are depriving society of the contribution they can make. In a similar vein withholding the knowledge from those who don’t speak English we are depriving ourselves of their contributions.

Definitely something to think about.

Thank you Riccardo for hosting such a interesting topic.

When you force yourself to do something sometimes can be less fun. There were moments during the last month that all that I wanted was going to bad but I had to work on my collage so I could keep the streak and publish on my blog a new collage for the day.

But the fun part was sitting down and look for inspiration and start with an idea and building into it, sometimes changing things. It isn’t always that an idea ends up working out well during the execution. Stopping or changing courses is sometimes necessary as well as being creative to get a better result.

One thing that this challenging shown me was that your mind starts going to places and practicing being creative is something achievable.

I was have been having so many different ideas for other challenges but I think I will stop calling them challenges and just call it projects. Unless something goes for an entire month or a week, otherwise they will be projects which a post updates once in a while.

I was surprised about how much I remembered of this movie, so I probably have seen it multiple times throughout my life, but I am sure I haven’t seen it in many years. Also the movie is so iconic and the originator’s of popular references like the man behind the curtain and yellow brick road, plus other movies and tv shows have also made references to the Wizard Of Oz.

What I like most about the move is how well many messages are given to the viewers that are important in life. like don’t runaway from your problems, be confident on yourself, together we can accomplish more and of course, the big, there is not place like home. And here for me “home” has a broader meaning of feeling comfortable on your own skin and accepting yourself.

Thanks James for hosting this month’s movie club and has always I look forward to reading everyone’s posts as well as next month’s pick.

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

I am a sucker for romcoms so I was glad to see that When Harry Met Sally, a classic, was the pick for the month. Rewatching the movie was both interesting and fun. Interesting because I thing that some of the sexist jokes haven’t aged well in today’s moral norms. And fun because some of the stereotype in both Harry and Sally are just too easy to laugh at.

One of the aspect that I like in the movie is the interspersed interviews with couples sharing their love stories and how they met. I though I should look up to see if those interviews were real stories or just set for the movie but decided not to. I like to believe they are authentic and they most likely are. In the end of the movie we see Harry and Sally recounting their story in the same set. Very clever.

Like I mentioned when I rewatched Matrix the script for the movie is well written and in the case of When Harry Met Sally it’s so well done that for a moment onwards in the movie you can’t stop but root for the main characters’ relationship to succeed.

The movie portrays the loneliness that living in a big city like New York can sometimes be. The New Years’ scenes are very emblematic in the movie and my favorite scene is when Harry declares his love to Sally in such party. His words summarizes in my opinion what love really is, knowing the loved one and accepting for what he or she really is.

The movie is a true classic in the romantic comedy genre. The IndieWeb Movie Club was once again really fun to participate and talking about classics, next month we will be watching Wizard of Oz from 1939 and I am looking forward to it.

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Here are the original photos and credits:

Around the time The Matrix Resurrections was released in 2021 my wife and I got together with friends online and watched the Matrix trilogy and it was fun. So it hasn’t been that long since I watched The Matrix from 1999. Since I knew that I would be writing about it, my mind kept racing and thinking: “I should write about this.”, “I can’t possibly not mention this.”. I didn’t want to spoil the fun by stopping the movie to take notes, but maybe I should have because now I won’t remember all the things that I thought would be cool to write here.

As I think about it, one thing keeps coming back to me. The movie was made in 1999 and the cell phones were are quite unique back then, something that I look today with a certain nostalgia. The movie uses an interesting dynamic between cells phones and landlines. They use the cell phones to make contact with the operator, but the operator connects them back to the real world by calling a landline. I don’t think this has gotten my attention before and also outdates the movie quite a bit because today you can’t find many public telephones out there.

Neo and Trinity had their “meet cute” at a club and rewatching it after knowing their entire story made me think that it was a perfect place for a couple to meet, specially a couple like Trinity and Neo who are known for their cool outfits.

Two things that I have been noticing in bad movies: one is that the story doesn’t flow well, the other is that things happen and are revealed too quickly. Matrix is very different than this, even when things happen fast they are still very well executed. One example is the scene that precedes their first meeting. Neo is in his apartment, he is half a sleep and listening to Dissolved Girl by Massive Attack (which by the way is a great song) when he wakes up to words been typed on his computer, someone is telling him to follow the rabbit. Then a knock on his door, it is someone Neo knows getting some sort of electronic drug? Well, the guy has a girlfriend and other friends with him, gets what he wants and asks Neo if he is ok while inviting him to go out with them. Neo refuses saying he has to work on the next day but when the girl turns sideways he notices her tattoo of a white rabbit and decides to go with them.

This scene is perfect, it is short, so there is a lot happening in there but it flows well and it doesn’t feel like things are happening fast, which is one of the things that for me makes The Matrix a great movie.

Sorry for all these spoilers, specially if you haven’t seen the movie. This was really fun to watch and to write about. I look forward to the next movie for the IndieWeb Movie Club, which will be When Harry Met Sally… (1989). Until then.

When you run Daisy Disk it will scan your disk and create a breakdown, like the one below and you can navigate in order to find data you want to delete, most of the times you don’t even know it was there.

My personal laptop is an Intel MacBook Pro from 2018, here is a graph image with the spacing breakdown:

I decided to delete the simulator device data that is used when developing iOS apps. It is safe to remove because Xcode, the tool we use to run the Simulator, creates fresh instances when you run the code again. It was 99 GB of data freed up.

Daisy Disk is a fantastic tool. It is well worth the US$10 and if you need to free up space I recommend.

Since I don’t own an iPad and used one that I had access to, but that won’t be always the case, I want to try to use Pixelmator Pro for the collages I will be doing during the challenge.

Working on the collage was really fun and I like that it helps me to explore my creative side. I’ve try drawing before but I don’t like the results I get and I don’t have what it takes to work on my drawing skills until I can make it look better. But with collage I liked the result and I think it is still a good creative exercise.

Like I said before about challenges, they are not easy but if you stick to it, once you get to the end, it is very rewarding. I am sure the collage challenge will be the same. Stay tuned.

Challenges are hard but they push you through, so when I first post about this idea of the 30 day challenge, Sven mentioned on Mastodon and told me about the 100 days to off load so this is something that I am considering doing.

I did a quick math and if I want to complete 100 posts by the end of the year I will need to post 4 times a week from now to the end of the year.

It is doable! We will see.

Below are the credits for the images I used:

• Punkrock History @historyofpunkrock@sfba.social: publishes fun fact and photos of the good old punk rock.

• Long Live Rock N Roll @Long_live_rock_n_roll@mastodon.world: Publishes stuff from the history of rock and roll.

• NANCY COMICS BY BUSHMILLER @nancycomics@mastodon.social: Publishes comic strips from Bushmiller’s Nancy comics.

• Matrix Bot @zion@beep.town: publishes gifs from Matrix movies scenes.

• Back to the Future Bot @greatscott@beep.town: publishes gifs from the Back to the Future movie scenes.

So this is a post to remind me of this steps:

1. Create a new .md file under the /content/ folder.
2. Change the config.toml file
   • Create a new menu.main section adding the new page
   • Change name, url and identifier
   • Change the weight to match the position desired in the nav bar menu.

That is it. I bet now I won’t forgot it anymore.

It would be also a great page to have in case one day my nav bar runs out of space I can simply have the link there for the /slashes page.

If you haven’t already figure out, the /slashes page is a list to all the other pages.

But I want to list someone that I found interesting:

misskey - Built with typescript has a really cool Reactions feature.

Pleroma - Supports both ActivityPub and OStatus. It is developed in Elixir.

Firefish - This is a fork of Misskey.

Go to social - Very lightweight. I’ve tested it and it is very easy to setup and getting it going. It is developed in Go lang.

Takahē - Very interesting project. With one installation of Takahē you can run host multiple domains, so you can have @paul@yourdomain.com but also can host your friend John @john@yourfriend.com. It is built using Python and the Django framework.

That is a short list of what I’ve seen so far. There are many more alternatives for a federated social network.

I’ve connected my free account from Spotify and my Tidal account. Once someone shares a playlist from Spotify I open it and add it to my playlists, then I open SongShift load that playlist and start converting it to Tidal. When is done the playlist shows up in my Tidal account. There were a few occasions where it could find a song or two because they were not in Tidal.

Here are the services they support: Apple Music, Amazon Music, Discogs, HypeMachine, LastFM, Napster, Pandora, Qobuz, Spotify, Tidal and YouTube.

After that I went ahead and read the Wikipedia page for the song Alive, to my surprise that information was in the wikipedia and not only that it also mentioned that the solo from She was copied from the solo in the The Doors song Five to One. Again time to listen to both song side by side.

I love these stories behind the music and I’ve been watching some YouTube videos that tells stories of songs, bands and even music genres. Some are really well done.

Then I thought this would be a nice podcast to create, I think I would enjoy work on them. The only problem is that with work and life I don’t think I will have time to create a podcast like that, but would would certain enjoy it.

When you think about this is only possible because these platforms are open so developers can create apps for it. The open characteristic is fundamental in an ecosystem helping create innovation.

If you use any or all of these social networks you should give Openvibe a try.

I’ve been listening to a lot of the RFF Comfy that plays great music to chill or have in the background while working, or writing this blog post for that matter. They have other channels like the Main channel where you will find a diverse variety of sounds, the the Speciality channel which will play themed block where different styles of music are played but on a scheduled time. And the Word channel where they don’t play music but instead play fiction, documentary, radio drama, another way to promote voices from the community. I haven’t tried the Word channel yet.

One cool think is that they linked to the artist page, album, etc and also to their account in the fediverse. It is a great way to find new music or just enjoy music that is not mainstream commercial.

If you like music go and check out Radio Free Fedi out.

You can download the final project here. But I will try to guide you first through the changes you will need to make a new post and them explain what each piece of this simple-blog has.

How to make a new blog post

1. Look for the /posts/ folder.

On the /posts/ folder you will find a folder called /my-first-post/, copy that folder and rename it to the new title you want for your blog post. Use this format the-new-title.

2. In the new folder open index.html.

On the index.html you will notice that you still have the content for My first post, just replace that with the content for your new post.

3. Go back to the /posts/ and open the index.html from there.

On this index.html look for where there is a link to the /my-first-post/ and copy that line and paste just below it. Now change that line to point to your new post. (Always change the line at the top)

4. Open the index.html file from the root of the /simple-blog folder.

On this index.html there is a list of the recent posts under the title My posts, look for the line with /my-first-post/ and copy that line and paste just below it. Now change that line to point to your new post. I suggest you keep the 5 or 10 most recently posts in your home page.

5. Look for the rss folder and open index.xml.

On the index.xml you will notice that there is a different structure, that structure is what makes a RSS to be consumed by a Feed reader software. For each new post a new <item> structure needs to be created. So you need to duplicate the content that you can find starting from a <item> until when it is finished like this </item>. Once you copy and paste that, alter the one at the top with the contents of your new post. I like to have the entire post in my RSS feed, so if you want to do that just copy the content from your new post into the feed, replace]ing the original post that I left there as an example.

Deploying your new blog

Ok, those five steps above it is all you need every time you want to create a new post to your blog. Simple like that, that is why I’m calling this simple-blog.

Now let’s deploy this. The easy way to get this up and running that I know of in your own domain is to use Netlify they have a Drop page at app.netlify.com/drop. Once the page is loaded just get the simple-blog folder and drag and drop to where it says Drag and drop your site output folder here. Netlify will give you the URL of your life blog. You can then create a Netlify account and follow the steps here to setup a your new blog under your own domain.

I have gone through these steps myself and deployed it, under my own domain for you to see in here.

Understanding the structure of simple-blog

simple-blog
 |
 +-- index.html
 |    
 +-- about
 |  |  
 |  +-- index.html
 |    
 +-- css
 |  |  
 |  +-- style.css
 |    
 +-- posts
 |  |  
 +  |-- my-first-post
 |  |
 |  +-- index.html
 |  |
 +  |-- my-second-post
 |  |
 |  +-- index.html
 |  |
 +  |-- my-third-post
 |  |
 |  +-- index.html
 |
 +-- rss
 |  |  
 |  +-- index.xml

Has you can see the whole structure it is really simple (again it is simple-blog after all) and the secret thing to understand here is the way webservers work, when you visit a folder with a index.html file in it, the webserver will serve that file. Knowing that gave us the ability to create this structure based on folders names to represent your blog posts.

One thing that we haven’t mentioned yet it is the /css/ folder. That folder will keep the css file that it is referenced in all pages we created, at a line in the top, that looks like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://antonio.is/css/style.css"/>

This particular css file I copied from a nice project called CSS Bed, if you visit this website you will be able to find other options of simple css file that can give your website a nice look by just adding the forementioned line above. I’ve used the bahunya css stylesheet listed on the website. Go ahead and browse those styles and if you find something that you like more, download the css file, rename it to style.css and place it on the css folder replacing the existing file there and your website will have the new look.

Where to go from here

Well the sky is the limit as they say. But you should definitely play with it and have fun. You should learn how to add an image to your posts, for that just search for “how to add an image in html”. One thing that you will notice as you start growing your list of blog posts is that you may want to add a date structure to your folders. For example, either have a 2024 folder with 01, 02, etc folders inside that folder to represent the months, or create a 2024-01 folder and so on and so forth for the following months. That way it will be easy to find and grow your posts.

Advantages and Disadvantages

1. Advantages

• Fun (the biggest one)
• Easy to understand and have it under your control`
• Designed to last

2. Disadvantages

• It may grow out of control
• Requires you to sit on a computer to post (as opposed to use an app)
• Prone to error (there are 5 steps that you always need to get right)
• Very repetitive and not automated (yes, requires you to open files, change files and upload files)
• It’s more work to add other IndieWeb stuff like Webmentions (versus using a plugin)

In conclusion

This is a fun way to do your blog. Is this what I recommend? Probably not, but you should at least try and understand how these things work and what it takes to create a simple blog from scratch.

This has streamline discoverability of new blogs for me. When I new post shows up that I find interesting I visit the blog, learn about it’s author, read other posts and if I like what I read I added that blog to my feed reader.

A tool like Feedle is great to find blogs to read. I’ve also seeing people setting up a different open source tool called OpenOrb, different from Feedle, each instance of OpenOrb is curated by the instance owner and you can search by terms on those blogs and website added to OpenOrb. This is similar to a Blogroll but the difference is that you are searching blogs.

Now back to Feedle, you can fill up their form to be added to their database and start showing up on their search results. I have added my blog there and I already found myself in the results. Tools like this are great and essencial to find great content in the IndieWeb.

My work colleagues introduced me to this amazing Bird Id app (iOS/Android). I have been having lots of fun identifying birds around me. The screenshot above is what I see as the birds are been identified while the sound it’s been recorded by the app.

Even though sometimes is hard to know which bird is singing the fact that the app shows you a picture of the bird it makes it easier and most of the times I can recognize the bird’s image in the picture.

This is the type of application that you wouldn’t imagine before the smartphone, now we can carry in our pockets a device that helps us identify things around us, like birds sounds.

I recommend this app, if you are luck like me that even in the city I can hear birds sounds you will have fun with this app.

Last year I have made a blog post listing my defaults apps and now this page is a copy of that post but I am planning to keep it updated as I change what I am using. It makes more sense to be a page than a post if I am planning to update it often.

Someone in the fediverse posted about this simple old school puzzle game called Zeek the Geek, originally developed in 1995, but recently some made a open source version using HTML5.

This is the type of casual game that you can simply pick up and relax, it could be a five minutes or a hour. For me it helps me to turn off and relax before finish my day.

ps.: I am sorry I don’t remember who posted this, if was you, please let me know.

This has become a ritual that is quite joyful as I start my day in a relaxing way giving myself time to appreciate the coffee and as well reading something interesting from the feed.

I often go to the couch but not always as sometimes I stay at the breakfast table reading on my phone.

Rituals are part of everyone’s life and I was happy to learn that this month IndieWeb Carnival, organized by Steve Ledlow was on the topic of rituals. I look forward to read everybody entries.

First if you don’t know ActivityPub is a protocol for decentralized social networks and it is an oficial W3C open standard.

Second, there is Mastodon which is the most popular ActivityPub project today but I won’t talk about it because I am assuming everyone knows what it is.

But perhaps you haven’t heard about PeerTube which is a video sharing platform that supports ActivityPub, which means that there are many instances of PeerTube around and one instance can list videos published in another instance therefore if you visit one instance you will be able to watch videos that have been publish in others instances.

Two other interesting projects are lemmy and kbin that are social news type of platforms. You can post news and links and up vote them.

If you like share book review or read them, then you can join Bookwyrm. I’ve been looking into it was a way to track my reading but it is also great to discover new books to read.

Now one very interesting project is the WriteFreely, it is basically blogging with ActivityPub support, but what also makes it interesting is that one instance can have multi-users, so if you want run an instance for a community or a group of friends, everyone who joins it will get their on blog that can be followed by any other ActivityPub platform such as Mastodon.

Last but not least I want to talk about Pixelfed which is a ActivityPub based photo sharing platform. As any other ActivityPub project anyone in one instance can follow someone on another. This is what makes all this project worth check it out, they places where you can find your own community or start one.

In the future I will write about a range of other projects that like Mastodon are microblogging platforms, there are many of them and they are different for each other even though they are all about microblogging.

As I consider starting tracking things I read and watch I have been thinking what would be the best format for doing this. Should I just make a normal blog post, should I have a separated session on my website just for this or should I include it on my garden.

I feel that if I add to my garden it would be the right thing for a garden, since it would be something that would be cultivated overtime and grow as I read and watch more. The only thing that I am not too sure is the chronological aspect of this type of publication. I think they are important at least for reference in the future and since a garden isn’t supposed to be chronological, it might not be the best place for this.

I will think a bit more about it and I will keep looking around to see how others are doing. I may even try a couple of things to see how it feels.

Everyone have its own point of view and when you are exposed to it you will learn new ideas, new way of thinking and new cultures.

So my whole point here is that your opinion is important because it will enrich others life. And if you are in doubt if you should or not start a blog to share your opinions, I can guarantee you that you too can improve someone’s life.

• eat a fruit salad for breakfast
• drink a cup of coffee in the mornings
• walk around in nature
• watch a good movie or tv show
• read anything that teach me something new
• get together with friends
• spend time with family
• talk on the phone with a friend for a long time (when distance keep us apart)
• get a message from a friend (when we haven’t been in touch for a while)

I think that is it. I am sure there is more things that make me happy but this list itself makes me happy too. It is short and sweet and shows that we don’t need much to be happy.

He talks about how websites eventually die of because the maintainer gets tired of migrating services (as the services shutdown), updating libraries, and technology stacks. So he proposes to use plain HTML and CSS.

I have been looking into some simple blogging tools like Bear Blog and Mataroa and more recently Pika.page. So I started thinking how one could write plain html and use some css to build a simple blog like these tools offer.

Observing how Jeff Huang have built his website I came up with a simple structure to build a blog. It is not easy but it is really simple, perhaps requires attention so errors are not made. Basically for each blog post you will need to create a page and edit another three files, the home page, the blog posts page and the RSS feed file.

I will try to put together until the end of this month a zip file with this sample structure and some example files as well as instructions to make changes and get a simple blog going. Stay tuned.

I’ve added blogs that a follow whenever possible on a daily bases. Like with the now page I will try to keep this updated as much as possible.

My goal is to keep this updated as much as possible to reflect things like, where I work, what I am reading, what I am watching, and a feel other things as they come to my mind.

I like the idea and I think it is a good place to posts about this things that don’t necessary need to be a blog post.

My favourite is #musiquinta where the organizer together with the community comes up with a theme for the week’s posts. So musiquinta is about music and happens every quinta-feira which mens Thursday in Portuguese. Last Thursday was female voices in music and my pick was Royals from Lorde.

But there is a hashtag for each day of the week, for Monday is for games, Tuesday is for cinema/movies, Wednesday is for books, Friday is for TV Shows. On Saturday I believe everyone just does what the rest of Mastodon is doing which is #Caturday but on Sunday is about the Sunday lunch, so everyone posts a dish.

As I said it’s been really fun to participate and if you speak Portuguese come and join us, you can follow me here.

If you want to join too, all that you have to do is to watch the movie of the month, for this month is The Matrix (1999), and write about it. Also send Mark a note, via webmentions or email, let him know you wrote about and he will be putting together a list of all participants. Most people have probably seen this movie before but watching it 25 years after been made it will probably give you a different perspective and that should shape what you will write about it.

This will be fun to do and read what others in the community thing about the movies that are selected for the Movie Club each month. I’m looking forward to it.

The project is gathering the common used pages in indie websites, some are well known pages such as the /about and the /contact page. But adds new ones like the /now a page to list things you are doing at this moment related to work and also leisure, the /blogroll to list blogs you visit, the /defaults to list your apps you use like I’ve done in this post and many other slash pages.

So my plan for this month is to put up some of these pages up and write about my thought process creating each of the pages in a blog post.

There is a specific set of albums that a really enjoyed to listen to back in the day that until today I always find myself going back to over and over again.

So when I discovered this service called Album Whale I thought I would create a list of these albums and share with everyone. If you don’t know Album Whale it is a very cool free service that let you create list of albums share it with others and also explore what others are creating. It will like direct to the albums in several music streaming services. The service was created by the folks at Good Enough the same people behind Pika.Page and Yay.Boo.

Back in May, lots of people participated in the WeblogPoMo2024 challenge and blogged everyday for that month. I missed that but I am making my own challenge in August.

Last year, I did the same in the month of June. It was challenging sometimes but that is what challenges are about if it is not challenging is not a challenge.

So stay tuned to see if I can make it.

A few things happened in the last 12 months but the most exciting one is that Gabi and I purchased land and we will be building our home. The construction should start in a few months. If we are luck, my next birthday post will be from our new home.

This will be the first time we will live in a place we own. About time for someone that is 47 year old.

Here are my previous birthday’s post: 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 46.

I’ve have started blogging (Portuguese) in a moment of change in my life, I was moving to Australia (Portuguese) to study and wanted to share that experience to my friends and family. Little I knew that I would spend 10 years in Australia, get married, meet new friends and later moved to San Francisco.

When I started my posts had English titles but were written in Portuguese, overtime I ended up writing only in English. The blog also had many domains since its beginnings in 2004 but I landed on antonio.is in 2015 I have kept the blog here since them.

But I had a big hiatus from blogging from 2013 to 2020. I think I was like everybody else, deeply trenched in social media and neglecting my own space of the web.

My main goal with this blog is to be a trip to memory lane. Something I write for myself to look again many years from now and bring back feelings from a past life. Like a public journal.

I am hoping to keep writing here for many year to come and I’ve been following the recently moment of the web and I am excited to be part of it.

Now it is fixed and if you subscribed to my RSS feed you will get the full posts in your reader of choice.

One thing that I loved about Eleventy is the global data files. They are a easy way to add any data to your pages. You can simply create a JSON files and place in the _data folder and then access in your templates.

Let’s say you have a json files that looks like this:

[
  {
    "blog": "Blog Name 1",
    "author": "Author Name 1",
    "url": "https://www.example1.com"
  },
  {
    "blog": "Blog Name 2",
    "author": "Author Name 2",
    "url": "https://www.example2.com"
  },
  {
    "blog": "Blog Name 3",
    "author": "Author Name 3",
    "url": "https://www.example3.com"
  }
]

All you have to do is to save it for example as blogs.json and place it in the _data folder and now access it in your template you access it like this:

    <ul>
      {%- for blog in blogs %}
      <li>
        <h3>{{ blog.blog }}</h3>
        <p><b>Author:</b> {{ blog.author }}</p>
        <p><a href="{{ blog.url }}</a></p>
      </li>
      {% endfor%}
    </ul>

It is super simple like that and people is using it around the web, one places that I’ve seen it recently was the Default’s list and this really nice modern CSS website StyleStage.

To my surprise the search result shown a place 181 miles away (Yes I am still using miles on my phone). Quickly I realized that I had the wrong name.

Finding myself in this situation I had only one alternative, ask around. So I tried use the name as I remembered (the wrong name) to see if was a search glitch, then I got the confirmation. The person I’ve asked straight away corrected my mistake, giving me the correct store name and the directions to get there.

This made me remember the time when you would ask people where places were instead of searching online. There wasn’t anything wrong about that time and I think next time I need to find a place I will just ask a stranger.

If you are looking to self-host your own newsletter solution, check out listmonk, it has a nice interface and it is relatively easy to install and use.

When it comes to delivery the emails to your subscribers a nice mail server is Maddy. Email delivery isn’t very straight forward so you will need to do some custom setup and more security stuff to help get your email delivery.

This combination could be a great alternative to manage your newsletter, you will definitely need some expertise to navigate all the setup up necessary but it could be a cheap way to sending your newsletter and also be independent of a service platform.

But for now let’s put together a list of things I would like to get in 2024. I would start with this blog, back in June 2023 I did a 30 day challenge where I wrote a post a day. It was really rewarding to me. So in 2024 I would like to write more ehere and perhaps have a few challenges along the way. Like, one photo a day, 10 links day, a post a day, a long article a day, or a series style post.

Secondly, I would like to collaborate to open source. Back in May 2023, I’ve talked to Mark Sutherland about collaborate with the IndiePass iOS app. Mark was really kind and gave me access to the repo and I have done some code clean up and made it compile again with the latest Xcode. But I was sort of fixing a few critical bugs and push it to the App Store. I hope I can do this in 2024.

Another open source project that I would like to start would be a publishing platform. I want to build something simple with the main objective is to learn some web developement. Ever since I stop working on server-side Java I haven’t touch any web developement. Perhaps I could develop something using PHP which is simple and run everywhere.

One other project that I want to dedicate more time to it is the three blog project. Which I think it will ended up been only two blogs. One would be this blog and the other my portuguese blog with tips to have your onw space on the web that I started under another domain I own with my name on it.

Last but not least I would like to start a exercise rotine. I want to think how I am going to achive this. Perhaps join a gym or using an app. I still need to decide.

Well, I hope I can archive all this and more along the way of 2024.

• 📨 Mail Client

  • Mail.app (iOS) / Proton Webmail (Desktop)

• 📮 Mail Server

  • Protonmail / Migadu for custom domains

• 📝 Notes

  • Notes.app

• ✅ To-Do

  • Reminders

• 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting

  • iOS Camera

• 🟦 Photo Management

  • Photos.app

• 📆 Calendar

  • Calendar.app (Desktop) / Google Calendar (iOS)

• 📁 Cloud File Storage

  • Dropbox

• 📖 RSS

  • NetNewsWire (Desktop) / Reeder (iOS)

• 🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts

  • Contacts.app

• 🌐 Browser

  • Safari (iOS) / Chrome (Desktop work) / Vivaldi (Desktop personal)

• 💬 Chat

  • Whatsapp

• 🔖 Bookmarks

  • Linkding / Raindrop

• 📑 Read It Later

  • n/a

• 📜 Word Processing

  • Atom

• 📈 Spreadsheets

  • Google Sheets

• 📊 Presentations

  • n/a

• 🛒 Shopping Lists

  • Notes.app

• 🍴 Meal Planning

  • n/a

• 💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance

  • Google Sheets

• 📰 News

  • Mastodon, NYT

• 🎵 Music

  • Tidal

• 🎤 Podcasts

  • Pocketcast

• 🔐 Password Management

  • Dashlanne

• 🖥️ My own category: Self-hosting manager

  • Yunohost

What are your go to apps? #defaults

So when I saw Mark Sutherland’s call for the August’s carnival challenge on the topic of Gardening I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to create one.

Making that decision was the easy part. Then I started to research and looking around for examples. In the IndieWeb wiki there is a page with a few resources on Digital Garden with links for other peoples creations. In one of these creations I found inspiration to create my own.

With that, I’ve decided that I want to have a tiled style layout and came out with a few topic or things to put or plant on my garden. I want something simple that I could put up in a few hours so I decided to write all in html, via text editor. For the layout a did a quick search and found this CodePen snippet of code that only with a few tweaks it was ready to be used. Then for pages that each tile would link too I’ve have used the same CSS as my blog and copied parts of the html that I would need and adapted for the page entries.

In only three hours I had the entire project ready to be deployed. I’ve deployed it to Uberspace under the subdomain garden.antonio.is. And I must say I am very happy with the results.

I look forward to the next challenge. I know that micro.blog will be running a photography challenge for the month of September which I will be taking part on. Ever since I did my own challenge in June I’ve learned that challenges are a create way to keep myself creating on my blog.

Perhaps one day I can host my own IndieWeb carnival month challenge. #indienews

A lot of my posts were for myself in the future. I think I will appreciate look how I was thinking and what interested me in say 10 or 20 years from now.

And what now? Apart from a few ideas I think on this space I will be writing less frequent but I will be posting here every time I find something interesting.

One other thing that I want to do with this blog is to get a better integration with the indieweb specs specially micropub and webmentions. Ideally I want to be able to use the current microsub setup and comment and like other people contents and have this been publish here so others can see what I am reading and commenting. And that webmentions could be sent automatically to other people’s website when I link to them.

It will be a slow process but I will get there. Until next time.

Many times I have done such activities while watching a video or listening to a podcast. They facilitate multitasking aspect since they don’t require a huge effort to be done. It is also a nice way to get more done at the same time since you have to do the dishes for example and you want to listen to a podcast. You can have both done at once.

The website has a few good coursed and they had compiled a list of open source projects that can help individuals to take back the internet and avoid using software from big companies. There is also a compiled interviews with 20 founders of decentralized projects.

I plan to go through this content which I find interesting and enriching.

Such topics would be the IndieWeb and the open web as well as decentralized software and open source software. The frequency would be once a month and I think this could be a nice way to share what I have been reading and also grow my knowledge in such subjects.

Another idea is to write in Portuguese too as a way to share with the Portuguese audience this knowledge that I haven’t seen much written in Portuguese.

Likely writing once a moth is doable and would be a good exercise for me.

I find that if I write something it brings clarity to myself about the topic. Another point is when I write I confirm that this is important and that I’m now accountable to that idea since I wrote and gave it more importance.

Like I sais around the beggining of this month’s writing challenge, I write these posts to myself in the future because I have been enoying reading what I wrote here since 2004.

When you don’t have an exact time to wake up in the morning you end up getting out of bed at different times each day. You have a lack of routine so you end up not doing anything productive in the first moments of the day. You get ready and eat breakfast but if you don’t have anything else you end up doing different things each day and you miss a lot of the things that you want to do but don’t “have time” to do it just because you haven’t planned it properly.

There is definitely a feel good aspect of not having an alarm clock every morning, you feel like you don’t have something controlling you, you feel you are free.

When you don’t have time to wake up in the morning you end up not having time to go to bed. You can always stretch a bit more in the evening and go to bed later since you know you can stay in bed longer in the morning if you still need more sleep.

So setting up a routine and a time to go to bed and a time to wake up can be beneficial and you can gain a lot by adding back an alarm clock to your life. I am definitely warming up to that idea.

I think anything from read a book to watch tv is content consumption. But I think you can consume entertainment or educational content or a mix of the two, edutainment.

When you have a short form of content like the Instagram reels or the Youtube shorts, you can’t really learn anything, but when you watch a course on Youtube or any other platform you are then consumig content that will enrich you. I think the short form content is the new zapping on the TV set that we used to do when we were just looking for something to spend the time on without really be interested in anything. Short form content is really bad, it doesn’t bring anything, you are spending time and getting nothing back. When you look I had spend hours and you are felling guilty.

I feel that I am more and more aware of this bad behaviour this days and I am trying to avoid it.

A few examples are: read ten pages of a book everyday and in a year will be over 3000 pages or a video course with 30 hours so you study one hour a day and the course will be finished in a month, or even clean a room of your house per day and in a week your home will be cleaned.

Now let’s apply this for software development and in particular open source software where you have a limit time to work on. (Assuming you have a full time job) You can approach the software development with the same idea. Fix a bug per day. Breal down feature into small peaces, need to build a entire user profile screen, separate the user profile, the content fields, the parsing logic, the network request. You got the idea. Once you have these tasks breakingdown and you tackle one per day, you will see how much you can accomplish has the weeks pass by.

Decentralization itself is a extensive topic so what I will talk about here is the federation aspect of a decentralized network. Think email.

I’m giving Instagram a break. I’ve stopped posting there many years ago but I’ve been consuming content there for a while and at some points, it was to an amount that I ended up finding unhealth. So just recently I don’t go there anymore and I don’t miss it.

Where did I moved my consumption too?

Well, part of it to the fediverse (the other part to blogs), I’ve been using Mastodon since 2020 but with the exudus from Twitter to Mastodon last year I ended up following more people there since then.

Both of these places, Instagram and Mastodon are social networks and I don’t find there is a lot of differences if you remove a few bells and whistles. In there essence they are similar. But there is a big difference, Instagram is centralized, there is a central place the all users are connected to and they can only talk to others that are there too. No external connections.

On the other hand, Mastodon is decentralized (federated) meaning there are multiple servers that users can setup their accounts and one user in one server can talk to a user in another server. Like email, if you have a Gmail account you can send an email to someone on Hotmail.

There is one other difference I have been experiencing on Mastodon. It feels more interesting, people there seems to care and share more interesting things. I think that has to do with the fact that at this point if someone has an account on Mastodon it is because they are looking for something different, so those people think different.

I left Instagram because I was following people of topics that I am interested one but I felt that the people I was following didn’t have anything new to share. At the beginning I engaged and learn something but as the time went by the knownledge they shared didn’t get any deeeper and I wasn’t learning anymore and lost interest.

I think my expirience is not unique and other people have also left Instagram and many more will get to the same point where they will leave. I just hope they find the fediverse and that it’s federated aspect of many small instances that talk with each other have the power to keep itself different and interesting to everyone.

The solstice is when the sun is either in the northerly or the southerly in it’s relative to earth. I find this is super cool. Our ancesters were more connected with the seasons that we are, modern life made it easy for for and there isn’t much planning need (specially in places there doesn’t snow in the winter, like here) to go through the winter.

I am here writing this and I have some music playing in the background, a small heater near by and I am still wearing warm clothes and even though is the winter and I complain about it, I am very comfortable. I will stop complaining and enjoy the season and the things I like about it, like soup. We should always see the bright side of the things.

Stay warm, if you like me, will be going through winter in the following months.

The tree is there one day and the other day is gone. Years and years growing and exchanges with the environment around it and now it is not there anymore.

Now the trees will be used to make new fences and fix old ones. So it is sad that the tree are gone but not everything will go to waist. One lesson is to always consider what will be planted and where because cutting down trees doesn’t feels good and we are responsable for our acts.

They are all privacy focused, some offer email, others offer blog hosting, chat and conference servers and some offer almost everything one would need to not only have an online presence but also to work and produce online. Some of the working tools include Nextcloud (cloud storage) and Only Office (office suite) that allow folks to create documents and store files.

Most of them take donations or offer a little more for a small fee, like more space or even VPS services.

Everything that requires a server needs hosting and these community organized groups are mostly volunteer run by mainly open source enthusiasts. If you are in the fediverse you would probably have seen these communities since the Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Lemmy and other fediverse based applications are also ran on the same principles of community and camaraderie.

Don’t to agree that if these communities were more wildspread the internet would be a better place.

The hard bit in my mind is how to promote it. Our first thought was Instagram, and we believe as Instagram users ourselves we know how this could possibly be done. Now, where else or how to promote the paintings in other places online?

One way is to create a blog as a companion for the website where the art would be available for sale. However that would require some research and time for creating the articles. Another idea would be to participate in online forums where other artists hang out.

A third idea would be to create YouTube videos show casing the processes used to create the digital art. A simpler way would be to show before and after photos, since the art is created from original photos taken by my father in law. The same idea could be applied for Instagram.

Ideally we would create the content on the website owned by us but it seems much easier just to leverage the audience from Instagram and YouTube.

There are other websites that sell commission based art and that could be another way to reach an audience. Perhaps if we decide to go down this route, we could find a website that would help you to connect with the buyers, and that way we could sign them up for a newsletter which would help spread the word and generate recurring sales.

One way or another, this is a good exercise to think how one can promote their own art.

The service is really interesting for various reason. First there are three pricing tiers and you selected the price, starting from 5 euros per month, if you can pay more they have the 10 euros and 15 euros per month tier. I’ve decided yet what I will pay but since this is just so I can test a few things I might pay the 5 euros per month, I won’t be a heavy user.

The second interesting aspect of Uberspace is that it is totally command line based. They have setup a feel scripts that help you all to do some quick things like add a domain or create your Wordpress blog, but they want you to learn the shell. I find this super cool, command line is not hard. It’s just a mere of learning it. And once you learn it you kind of feel smarter. ;-)

I’ve setup a Wordpress blog in Uberspace, so I can run some testing for a side project, and it was really simple. On Uberspace’s website there is a guide for it and bunch more docs that teach you go navigate around the things you need for hosting your stuff. There is also the labs which are more specific for certain tools.

Ah! I almost forgot there are only 12 people working in this hosting platform, they all works remotely from Germany and Austria. I always love when I find companies that are doing cool stuff like this and are not afraid of being different.

For that school project I had to build an entire website, and we had to show our skill writing a CRUD application that used a database. If those who don’t know, CRUD stands for create, retrieve, update and delete, basically all the operations one would need to create a website that keep data in a database.

I remember that I wouldn’t have time to write the CSS so I copied it from the internet, I guess since it was I school project I wasn’t supposed to do that. But all the rest I wrote myself and took me one night, yes I did the project in one full night, going to bed at 6am as the sun was coming up.

I got a good mark for that project. I guess the CSS was good (just kidding). The website I created was a classified that would allow you to save anything you want to sell, it would get a title, a description and the area you live (and probably something else that I don’t remember). Very similar with Craigslist. It worked well but I probably haven’t done any error handling properly, it’s been a while but probably I’m right.

I will see if I can find that project just to fulfill my nostalgia. It was a fun time!

On this birthday I feel blessed that I have Gabi with me and that we are here in Brazil living our lives and finding our path, that we are both working and healthy. I am also happy that we are close to my mom and Gabi’s parents and we are able to help them when they need us.

Gabi and Elizabeth made pão de queijo and queijadinha for me today and everything was delicious. They are planning to make vegetarian Yakisoba this Saturday and I am very much looking forward to it.

Here are my previous birthday’s post: 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36.

If you are not familiar with Gemini is a protocol that was created not long ago to be a simpler web. It basically focus on text content. And because is simpler it doesn’t have tracking and other annoying things that the web does.

If you want to check it out you will need a Gemini browser, I use Lagrange but there are other ones. So download and install Lagrange and try it out visiting my capsule (capsule are the website equivalent in Gemini) by typing in the browser gemini://gmi.antonio.is, you can also visit gemini://flounder.online for a list of the most updated capsules hosted by Flounder. Most important, have fun, Gemini is a special places, people are trying different things there and collaborating together to create a great community.

I will be posting all my most recently posts from this blog to Gemini, so if you want you can move to Gemini and follow my updates there.

But what I find most interesting about HPR is who it is a community organized podcast, meaning that each episode is submitted by a community member. Anyone can submit a podcast and there is a review process for new participants. The only rule around the topic is that need to be something that interest hackers.

The project has been going for over 17 years and there are more than 3000 episodes. Episodes are daily. When I first found out about HPR I thought it was a very cool idea. I think this could be applied for many groups that have similar interests, and even a group of friends that want to create a podcast and share the host seat.

Another nice thing about a community like that is that when you start producing podcast for the project you will have already a audience, since the project have been going for many years, you can be certain that a feel people will be listening to your episode once it gets published to the feed.

Anyway I hope you find this interesting as much as I did. Go and check it out.

When I don’t sleep enough I feel I am agitated during the day and is harder to focus. Plus you start to feel tired earlier in the day, as if your batteries were not recharged fully and you haven’t got through the day yet and you are running out of energy already.

There is another aspect that I’ve started observing and that is related to food and time to eat. If I don’t sleep well and I’m tired if I start to get hungry it is one more thing that interrupt my day. If I am not tired I can finish what I am doing when I start to get hungry but if I am tired I need to stop and eat otherwise I can’t function anymore. It is as if I can only handle one thing, either tired or hungry.

If you are reading this and thinking that you don’t need to sleep much I challenge you to start observing your day and relate it to night of sleep. Are you having a good day? Are you getting things done? And if the answers to those questions is no, then think how you slept the past night. You may find out, as I did, that there is real power on a good night of sleep.