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This year has been fairly eventful so far, though some of the global events are probably best left to a separate post. In this one, I'll be talking about my goings-on.

New Hobby!

I acquired a 3D printer in January, and I've been digging into that realm quite a bit. I've learned all about slicing with OrcaSlicer, gotten a start on learning FreeCAD, and had plenty of successes and failures with my Creality Ender 3 V2.

If you get a chance to pick up one of these 3D printers, I can't fully recommend it. It requires a lot of tinkering to get the tolerances and other aspects of it working smoothly, and even then it can result in a degree of anxiety around prints that is a bit silly.

You would be better-served by a newer solution. There's been a lot of talk lately about Bambu's legal attacks on the 3D printing community, so you might want to steer clear of them for philosophical reasons. Prusa, I've heard, is a bit less antagonistic in this regard.

My favourite print so far has been a print-in-place cover for my housekey. There's a special step in the "gcode" file that makes the printer beep, letting me know I can press the key into the in-progress print and the rest of the print will finish overtop. This seals the keycover in place.

Best part? I'm using glow-in-the-dark filament, so if I'm fumbling for my garage keys and my eyes have not yet adjusted to the dark, it's much easier to spot the proper key.

E-Bike!

I'm continuing to ride my e-bike for fitness. Since purchasing it a few years ago, I've put 2,950km on it. I never thought I'd ride that much. Previous bikes were always too uncomfortable.

As a hobbyist developer on a tight budget, my servers generally run on inexpensive VPSes (Referral Link). They're not configured to autoscale. Floods of unexpected traffic cause them to fall over. This fragility is by design, so that my hosting costs won't cause a budget overflow.

On the modern web, however, this presents a problem.

We Begin Our Story ...

On the World Wide Web of ages long past, otherwise known as the 2000s and 2010s, a bargain was struck with the search engines. They would be allowed to scrape websites, so long as they behaved responsibly and obeyed the rules outlined in each site's robots.txt file.

The robots.txt file declared what was to be considered "private property, no trespassing" – and, in some technical cases, "abandon all hope ye who enter here".

This arrangement was beneficial to the websites because it boosted their visibility in search results, bringing in more views. And it benefitted the search engines by giving them better and more accurate results.

The search engines entrenched themselves as the foundational way to find anything on the internet.

And with so many eyes on them, it was inevitable that they would embrace advertising as their revenue centre. But this blog post isn't about ads. This is about something more recent, and much worse for the Web.

We've all heard the complaints that TV adaptations of books have somehow "ruined the book". Balderdash!

A while back, two of the complaints I heard were about the shows "Silo" and "Foundation". Two shows that I have been enjoying immensely - and for which I have not read the source material. At least not yet.

I'm not saying that the people who are saying this are wrong. They are describing their feelings, and their feelings are completely valid.

There was another show that I had heard a similar complaint about. It's called "The Peripheral". In the show, multiple timelines play out, with subordinate timelines being referred to as "stubs".

Going into this New Year, I'd like to share how I'm working to counteract the negative influences I see in the world today.

A lot of people look at society & government and apply their ideals and life experience to thinking of how they would replace it with something they see as better. Historically, this usually takes the form of revolution and turmoil.

For a brief period of time in human history, the concept of democracy has allowed a slight reduction in the ferocity of that churn. In many cases, long traditions of violent and unpleasant regime change have been replaced by peaceful elections.

But what if I told you that democracy could work in areas outside of government, too?

Enter: The Co-Op.

To quote the International Cooperative Alliance, a cooperative is:

"an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise."

A democratic Enterprise. Not even Star Trek has envisioned that. (sorry, disregard that, moving on ...)