2023-02-24

Offloading

This has been posted without my usual proofreading and editing.

So, I started blogging because of the "100 Days To Offload" thing. Basically, it's a challenge to publish 100 blog posts in one year. I have now managed eleven (twelve counting this one) entries since January 22, which was pretty much one month ago. Since more or less half of them were all in the first week it's pretty clear that I will not make 100 posts before 365 days are up.

But you know what? I don't really care. The "challenge" still pushed me to actually start a blog again, and even just doing one post was kind of a win for me.

That said, I'm not sure I'm doing it right. I'm supposed to be "offloading", am I not? Yet, the things I am writing are not really doing that. Or are they? They tend to be way too long, and I spend way to much time editing and spellchecking. Like, hours. It's just not possible to fit this into any kind of regular daily schedule, as it's not really a "take 10 minutes to offload what is happening and get on with the day" kind of thing.

I guess one reason for that is that my life is just too boring. Yes, you heard it right, on an average day, nothing interesting happens here. And the things I do that might be remotely interesting to others are things that I would always (subconsciously?) try to describe in quite a bit of depth.

Draw two circles. Draw the rest of the damn Owl.

Maybe it's just me that feel like I want to make sure I explain everything in detail. I could of course just write "Hey, I made this cool thing. Ok bye!", but that doesn't feel right. I am currently in the middle of writing a thing about the new Game and Watch—my recent obsession—about how to install Retro Go on it and replace the flash memory chip. But it just balloons out to basically a step by step tutorial.

I'm not sure that actually belongs in a "daily blog", but should rather go in some "tutorials and guides" thing. But if I do that I would probably feel bad if people try to follow them and I missed something that makes it impossible to do properly by just following the guide. That's always a problem writing guides. How detailed should it be? What background knowledge requirements should there be to follow it? Do I need to explain how to open the "terminal" and enter commands? Do I need to tell people how Git works? Do I need to tell them how to install Home-brew on their mac? How do I avoid getting too detailed and making the reader think that I think they are stupid? And am I responsible for errors caused by me not explaining things well enough? Instructions unclear … kind of thing.

So it's not actually very offloading.

Many years ago I wrote a very detailed step by step guide for how to build a specific patched version of OpenWRT for an old very tiny single board computer with an x86 compatible SOC and a tiny amount of RAM and Flash. It was relatively well received on the forum where people tinkering with this board were hanging out, but it didn't take very long until changes in packages and whatnots outside of my control made my instructions completely fail to build properly, and people who tried to use my guide got very disappointed. I had to take it down.

That is the kind of things that will happen when you rely on things on the internet. And to avoid people being disappointed a lot of time then needs to be spent trying to update the instructions. But what if you have moved on and no longer use that thing or have any interest in it?

So maybe I shouldn't write those things. But I still kind of enjoy—in a way—that somewhere, just maybe, there is someone who will read it and get what they need to try it and maybe learn something new, without having to do all the research that I did.

Anyway. Not sure where I am going with this. I'm just dumping some random thoughts. Offloading?

But it's Friday evening and there is a bag of cheap—although still 50% more expansive than they were a year ago—crisp here, so I think it's time to call it a night.

Right after I go "offload" the contents of the tumble dryer. Which is, in itself, not something that is really worth blogging about.

Now, if I made that dryer connect to the Wifi with an ESP32 and send data over MQTT to NodeRed running on a Raspberry Pi to send me messages to my phone about the progress of the drying, there would be something to blog about. And it would take me at least a week write it.