User:C3/T2 assessment

Failures

"objects in mirror are closer than they appear"

A backup of my user on cerealbox.
I want to do it but I keep making copies of cerealbox as a whole, then manually deleting everything other than my user folder (I tried using curl, wget and httrack). I know this is beyond my current knowledge reach, so I'll do it wrong and then look into web scraping at some point.

Riviera challenged me to install archlinux
Riviera gave an old thinkpad and challenged me to install archlinux on an LVM, for the first 20 minutes after wiping the system with the USB stick I was typing commands in the void, I did not understand the fact that the usual commands we learned in class work only on a filesystem. Also after installing GNOME I was stuck for a week because I did not understand that I needed to manually enable it.

I tried wiping a microSD card
...with what I learned by wiping hard drives and installing linux. I tried different methods (shred, wipefs, dd if=/of=, recursive shred of all files in every folder, chmod on all files to make them rwx... but nothing) but it seems that the sd is stuck in read only mode, after multiple wipes and new makefs now it also is not readable at all times.

Tools

I have started using a lot of the things that we got introduced to during classes:

1. graphviz - fleshing out the outlines of something I want to make, I never though that after being introduced to flowcharts for so many years I would start using them at xpub.
2. python - scripts! I love scripts
3. bash - scripts!! I <3 scripts, I feel like they're small thoughts that also do something, they don't stop at being just text.
4. linux - I don't know how to sum this up but I have approached linux by doing all kind of things with it, the tools we use in class help a lot, I am also using it on multiple machines, and I use @cerealbox a lot.

There is definitely a pleasure in challenge aspect to it that appeals to me (Riviera gifted me a computer and then challenged me to install archlinux on a LVM the old way, took me two days, painful, but super interersting :) ). But I also think that it is a general space that is better than other things to have, especially in educational spaces.

1. imagemagick

What am I making, how am I making it and why am I making it?

I like to think that I am preparing to share the stuff I am collecting around. I hope that is the case because otherwise I'm screwed.

Observations

After 2 trimesters at xpub I noticed that:

- I am definitively a (selective) learning junkie. Thought it is not always clear to me why something create that brain itch. Anyways, I am generally more comfortable with taking more time on things. Reading a whole book on a topic, doing exercises step by step, making proposals and then trying to do them are some examples to some examples of how I am approaching code. Learning takes time and is all about iterations, so I am walking this journey peacefully for now.

- I like the idea of tools to be excuses to have people come together and do things

- I lurk a lot more. During the breaks we had, I took various dives into the wiki and zulip, at the beginning I was looking for interesting topics from the past, then it became something I usually do when I have some vague idea or when some interesting topics come up during class. It feels weird to say, but one example is the Cookbook, which I forgot of even though it was the first thing I looked at before being admitted into the course.

- As we are constantly exploring alternative tools, I am asking myself one question from time to time: what do I do, how much do I need? Scaling down is something that I am intrigued by, I am also actively trying it...

-Overall, approaching something I know I don't know all about has been an interesting opportunity to practice and learn. Coming back to the personal reader and glossary, I think that the wiki mediation is what makes the iteration less frequent, every time I approach the wiki I think a lot at the way information is displayed, which blocks me. I am writing a lot more on @cerealbox and on @lattina because the lack of interface elements just work for me.

Keywords

some keywords that I have noted down overtime.

1. distribution
2. sharing-practical-knowledge
3. trouble-shooting
4. trouble-making
5. processes
6. infrastructure
7. space
8. investigation
9. care
10. repair
11. maintainance
12. text
13. linux
14. scripting
15. resize
16. scale