A few weekends ago (on the 19th of July, to be precise) an anniversary celebration of the first traction engine in Tasmania was held. As part of this, five traction engines drove from the Bellerive Oval to the Tasmanian Transport Museum. On the way, they passed by Montagu Bay Primary School, where they stopped to take on fuel and water. I was lucky enough to be there, and to have a camera with me.
Enjoy (I certainly did)!
I spend a large amount of time on the Internet. With that comes the opportunity to observe various phenomena in action. Recently, it occurred to me that all thought on the Internet has a value, but that value is not always the same. After a little thought of my own, I came up with a theory of what certain kinds of thought are worth – and how often you see them.
On the bottom of the hierarchy is an idea. As discussed by entrepreneurial bloggers the world over, ideas are worthless (at least without brilliant execution). On the Internet, ideas are everywhere. They are cheap and nasty and you can’t give them away, since own ideas are better than everybody elses.
A well-crafted opinion is worth slightly more, since basic literacy is required to get your point across. Notice however that I said well-crafted. Generally, a well-crafted opinion will be found in it’s own post. They are very rarely found in comments. They are almost never found in YouTube comments.
If you have a very well-crafted opinion, and a famous name (at least Internet famous, if not real-world famous), you might be able to obtain some ad revenue from your opinion. But it’s not going to be a lot, because like ideas, opinions are everywhere.
Analysis of news, events, products and services is a rarer commodity than an opinion. Because it brings in facts, and tones down the emotions, they are harder for people on the Internet to produce. You may even need to be a good writer. Whilst opinions might be found on sites like WordPress.com, Medium or Tumblr, analysis will most likely be found on it’s own domain – this generally indicates a slightly higher level of effort, and thus a slightly higher worth.
Facts are what the Internet loves, hence the higher value of analysis than opinion. What if you could introduce more facts to the Internet? That’s where information comes in.
What do people go on the Internet to do? Many things (usually involving amusing images or naked women) but primarily to find out how to do something. If you have the answer to somebody’s question, you can get them to pay for that. This is why there are so many eBooks available these days. Because telling people how to do something is valuable, since it will save time, and time is money.
In conclusion? The Internet loves facts.
Recently I’ve made a heap of changes in my life, one of which has been the car I own and drive. I’ve sold the 2007 Subaru Impreza I bought eighteen months ago with my ex-girlfriend, and bought a 1997 BMW 318iS (an Avus Blue E36 sedan with M44 engine, for the BMW aficionado). This achieved three purposes.
Firstly, I was able to save a bit of money by buying a car a decade older, which I used to pay off some debts. One lesson I’ve learned working for myself is that debt is something to be avoided at all costs, as it crushes the feeling of freedom you would otherwise have.
I also got a more interesting car to drive. Despite having less power (103kW compared to 110kW) and less torque, the BMW is a much better car to drive. Due to the flat cylinder alignment in the Subaru’s engine, it doesn’t produce much of that power lower in the rev ranges, where it is most useful. The BMW’s engine produces more power when you actually need it.
Finally, I have a new hobby. Because the car is a decade older, it has a lot of defects that need repairing. It needs a new roof lining, several body panels need repainting, bits of trim need replacing and the audio system needs an upgrade (I’ve developed an Onslowian response of hitting the head unit to make it pick up channels clearly).
Longer term, I’m also toying with the idea of building a carputer. Given the power and features I want to pack into such a device I’m leaving this until I’m flush with cash. My dream feature list includes such absurdities as shortwave and citizen band radio, GPS navigation, GSM back-to-base alarm system, and management and monitoring of the engine via OBD-II (and BMW’s proprietary extensions to said system). It’s a project that will never be finished, so I’ve decided it’s safer not to start.
Recently I had cause to build a new cross-compiler (used for operating system development). I recorded the entire process, thinking it might be useful to others who’ve never gone through the process of compiling a compiler before. Here it is.
The canonical reference for a GCC cross-compiler build, including all the instructions for this video, can be found on the OSDev.org Wiki.
As a community, we have too much stuff. We have so much stuff, we don’t even notice that it’s there. I became acutely aware of this recently after I broke up with my now ex-girlfriend, and moved house twice (first in with my parents, then out into my own place again).
I had boxes of stuff. Books. Computer equipment. Clothes. Paper (notebooks, filing drawers, and so on). Gifts that I was hanging onto out of a sense of guilt if I threw them away. Stuff that doesn’t even have a category.
So I got rid of most of it. The process took months (and I’ve never even considered myself a pack-rat), but I’m finally making headway. I never want to go back to the world of stuff again.
There are a lot of benefits to having less stuff. I’ve noticed three main ones:
I used to have a huge collection of books. I had ten “In A Nutshell” books from O’Reilly. I had dozens of Penguin Classics. I had hundreds of books. Now I have twenty.
When you buy a book, it can become one of four possible things. Some you’ll never finish reading because they’re awful. Some you’ll read, but you know you’ll never read again. Others you might refer to once in a while, such as a cookbook. Finally, there are those books you’ve read to death. You know every word, and yet you go back to read them again.
Any book in the first two categories should go immediately. You do not want these books wasting space in your house. Books in the fourth category should definitely stay. Books in the third? Well, it’s up to you. I got rid of them if I could find the same information online, and kept them if I couldn’t.
Now, how to get rid of books. If you live in Australia, this is actually incredibly simple. You put them in a box, and ship them off (with free postage) to a service that sells them online for you. It’s amazing. I love it. It’s called FishPond SmartSell.
Getting rid of computer and other electronic equipment is depressing, for one simple reason: the depreciation on these purchases is incredible. A motherboard you bought for $350 a couple of years ago is now worthless. You cannot even sell optical drives. This stuff is junk.
I had a lot of computer junk. I knew it was junk, but I kept it around anyway. Patch panels. Dozens of SATA cables. A $50 printer with no ink. Sticks of RAM. All of it taking up space in my life (and in my study no less, where space is most precious). By getting rid of it, I’ve made a lot of space, and a bit of money.
In Australia, the best place to sell computer equipment (and most other assorted items) is Gumtree (Americans could use Craigslist). It’s relatively easy (especially compared to the minefield that is now eBay) and has a very large user base. Unfortunately eBay is full of cheap Hong Kong sellers who sell new items for less than you can post your old items for. Don’t even bother. You’ll want to spend a bit of time getting a feel for how much items are worth, so as not to sell things for too cheap.
I now basically have just a laptop, a printer, a mouse, and some external monitors. It’s all I need, and it takes up very little space.
I used to have stacks of spiral-bound notebooks with ideas and grand plans in them. I had filing cabinets full of tax receipts and superannuation reports. I now have very little of that. Here’s how I went about the process:
The next step is organising these PDFs into a useful form. The stuff kept just for tax purposes can just be filed away and forgotten about in the depths of your hard drive, but anything that needs to be looked at again should be organised.
Clothing went through a simple three-step test:
Unless I got a yes to all three questions, it went into the charity bin. Simple as that.
I disposed of a lot of other items too. A lot of things I sold on Gumtree, as they had some resale value. Unfortunately, others went into the garbage. This made me sad, but it’s important to realise they didn’t become garbage when they went into the bin; they became garbage when they were no longer useful. I just hadn’t thrown them out yet.
While my process of elimination and simplification is still ongoing, starting to clear out my house on a physical level has cleared out my mind too. I can see (both literally and metaphorically) the things that are important to me. I hope to never look at stuff the same way again.