What Do I Actually Do?

What do I actually do? Not as much as I'd like to. Let's face it - I'm on the far side of my 60s, on a diso pension, and finding that the things I always wanted to do when I stopped working - are just as much work as work ever was, and then some more... 

It's true. When I was working, it was one of those salaried jobs that meant I was working 50 and 60 hour weeks and getting paid a salary for about 40. Then I left there and went freelance for a year, which was enough to convince me that I should have been a freelancer for a lot longer... Same income, half the hours. Still high-pressure but I liked it. Then my third or fourth health issue struck and I ended up on a disability pension. 

But once I started doing the things I'd always put off for when I "had more time" I discovered the thing that a lot of retirees find - hobbies and favourite things expand to fill a lot more time than a job ever did. I found some reasonably sane advice for old farts online about having a plan - and gloriously ignored almost everything in it except that bit about being kind to myself and not letting any of my hobbies become an obsession. 

But it started me on this trip of a time. I'd been blogging sporadically for a bit longer than thirty years before that, first on BBS's then by hand-writing HTML in Notepad, etc. I also started writing about renewables, AI and the ethics of automating and cyborging, and recycling, and becoming a very clumsy Maker of all-sorts-of-punked jewellery and small sculptures, and machines and recycling gear, and learning the arcane art of programming Arduinos and their endless family of cousins.

https://www.ryrob.com/history-of-blogging/

From The Top Down, From The Depths Of History

Ready for some history? I have some history to impart. Here's a bit of Bulletin Board System history. Skip to "Blogs And Me" if you know all about the online communications software that the Hackers and Wargames kids used. Read the next few paragraphs to find out where the Internet took some form and direction from... 

Blogging. As I said, blogging. 

Only it wasn't, at first. In 1990 I became a member of a BBS ("Bulletin Board System") called Wizard - or something like that. I think. It's kind of a long way back to remember. Sysop's ("SYStem OPerator") name was GAry. I think. Helped me set up the modem and client on my IBM AT clone computer - and I was in this new territory of computing. I worked out how to use Netmail and Echomail (Netmail was close to what we now call email, Echomail was more like an email group) and Filebone. 

Echoes were set up by sysops and were like chatrooms accessed by sending echomails to the echo. Filebone was the collection of folders full of files that people shared. There was ASCII art, there were text files, there were images (no prizes for guessing what many images were of) and there were the program files, all the way from "demos" that specific groups put up to show off their skills with images and music to the more suss things like "hacking tools" that BBSs were famous for. 

Each BBS accepted your files locally, and then at one specific time every day, it relayed all new echomail, Netmail, and Filebone files to an upstream hub, which sent it to a major hub, which sent it to relevant major hubs in different countries/areas which sent the relevant ones to their relevant local BBS at the other end, and there the user you were sending to would receive what you'd sent, usually taking between one and four days to get there by the nightly hops. Your correspondent would send a reply which took the same amount of time to relay-hop back to you. 

This stuff opened my eyes. I was chatting to interns and engineers at NASA. Had conversations in echoes that had participants all over the world. And one day I made a file directory with my name and sent up a file with a recipe. I can't even recall what the recipe was but I also started adding files about life down under. That was the start of oversharing online.

When I got back home (I was interstate before that, hence the reaching out online to a community I could partake in) I set up my own BBS, called "TEdLIVISION" (- don't touch that dial!!!) that the previously mentioned sysop (who might actually have been called Steve, perhaps? It's another name from the era that's scratching away in a corner of my memories) helped me set up. And kept posting textfiles with snippets of how-to, recipes, whatever else came to mind. It wasn't a blog per se but it was online content. 

Then the hard drive of the machine I used as my Windows PC and which TEdLIVISION ran on in the background crashed after four years. I'd bought a secondhand drive because it had a whole 40Mb of space and my original drive was barely big enough to run my pride and joy, Windows for Workgroups. WfW had a thing called "Winsock" that let one access a LAN - or a network connection over a modem. But the stack of floppy disks fitted on the original drive I had but there was no room for the BBS software and all the files that the mail and filebone would put on my PC once I was running the BBS software. And after a few years, it spun its last spin. It took me a while to save for a new hard drive, which came with a newer late model PC, TEdLIVISION was reinstated, and ran another two years until 1997. 

So that's stuff I did. I got Internet-connected in 1995 or 1996 but kept TEdLIVISION going until there weren't even 2 dial-ins a month. 

Blogs And Me

And that brings me back to blogging.

It led to a veritable stable of blogs, the oldest of which (that are still going) are sixteen years and counting old, but have their roots in some of the old BBS files I'd managed to hang onto and some old hand-coded HTML. (All written in Notepad so: "<body><h3>The cat was being cute yesterday</h3><p>He worked the electric can-opener all by himself last night. There wasn't a tin of cat food in it, he was just gently reminding me that the food bowl was empty by making that noise he associated with food.</p>" etc etc etc.  And yes it's true, the cat really did that. The can opener was on the kitchen counter and my desk was on the dining room side of it, he jumped up and nudged the lever because he felt his bowl was too empty. . . )

And so my first hand-coded Internet blog was called "TEdALOG Lite." It included some of my few surviving BBS texts, and pretty soon I found some software that let me edit files on my PC and link them in a blog structure with an index and all the good things right there on your own hard drive - and then uploaded the whole blog by FTP to your webserver. EVERY TIME you wanted to add or edit a post... It was still better than hand coding. So TEdALOG Lite moved to this software, losing quite a lot of data in the process. 

It was joined in quick succession by "TEdAMENU Tuckertime" and "TEdADYNE Systems" but these two were on a new site called Blogger.com, aka Blogspot.com, and as blogger started in 1999, I guess that dates the first edition. (*sigh* yep there were losses. Again.)

I started "The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook" on blogger.com a few years after it was acquired by Google which was also during my second health crisis, and most of those hand-coded and reposted online ("Surely this'll be a more stable provider. . .") files went away around the same time that the service provider that had been hosting the files - went away. It kind of put a damper on me and I was as said dealing with a health issue - and a personal issue - and still working long hours. Anyhow - by 2007 I was ready to start with blogs again so I found as many of the files as I could, and reconstituted them. Not long afterwards I retired with my disabilities and had more time to start doing things - but that didn't include much blogging. 

I knew I'd have a limited useful life. Wanted to do the Grey Nomad thing - and didn't, because of health. And also because of a new life halfway across Australia, with a woman who became my favourite ever lovely wife. So everything sort of took a pause there, except growing fresh food. I'm going into way too many details aren't I? Yeah, I think I am. 

So anyhow. Jump cut.

You can find my blogs' output at Ted's News Stand - it has the twenty most recent blog posts across all of my blogs and a sporadically updated list of what those blogs are and what their main themes are. I figured if I posted everything on one blog, it would get confusing and chaotic really quickly, so I tend to *try* and stick to themes for each one. 

I know my readership is tiny compared to real blogs but I'd like that to change. On the News Stand there's a link to subscribe to my newsletter. It's not a high intrusion thing, once a week (currently Friday Eastern Australian time) it gets sent out and has the updated list of blog posts. That's it. Sharing the link to the  News Stand would help me. Sharing my articles would help me, help more people get to read them.

Also, I pay for everything related - domain name fees, server fees, subscriptions to the news services I ferret out my stories from, the hardware for the projects I share online - out of my pension. Sometimes I get a donation, and when I do, I put that into the next set of fees and that lets us keep a bit more of my pension for our use. Any help here is appreciated.

The Next Things I Do.

I grow as much of our fresh food as I can. The job has gotten harder and harder due to circumstances beyond our control but I document all the tips and techniques and constructions I use to make our increasingly smaller and smaller patch as productive as I can. I've made mini aquaponics systems, raised garden beds, in-ground worm farms, and systems to support and grow the plants. I've shared all that online. There are reasons other than age and infirmity that I won't go into, let's just say that sometimes, life just hands you lemons and keeps right on pelting you with them. But also some great crops and stories. You can find most of them on the Zen Cookbook or PTEC3D Blog.  

I'm also the unofficial carer for my wife, I do the cooking and most of the laundry. The laundry isn't something that I feel I need to air in public, so to speak (hehehe see what I did there?) but the cooking is. Whenever I develop a new recipe or food health tip or cooking technique tip, it goes up on TEdAMENU Tuckertime recipe blog. 

I also splashed out almost $250 for a 3D printer a few years ago. I have models online at Printables for the most useful and universal of them, and they're also on my Ko-Fi.com pages, mostly for free there but unlike Printables you can tip me for them at Ko-Fi. Most of my prints are designed to solve problems or be tools to solve problems with. 

Designs and so forth for electronics and programming end up on PTEC3D Blog, and my forays into sustainable and renewable on the Grumpy Old Guy blog or Zen Cookbook. Depends on what angles the stories have. 

I also get shitty with supermarket and corporation food crimes on those blogs because I think there should be a special place in Hell for people that adulterate foods or knowingly take the nutrition out so that you'll instead get hooked on excessive sugars salts and fats or other additives and then play into their medical arms. Preferably that place would be a place where people like me get to fry the bastards over and over in very hot palm or corn oil in a teflon pan... Stuff I've turned up on food corporate crimes would turn your stomach, trust me on this. Sometimes the foodie outrage also gets into the recipe blog. Sorry - I wasn't too focused on themes and topics for a long while and it's difficult sometimes to know what to file some stories under. 

I've also made and still occasionally make (when I have spare time or get bored, ha ha HA!) all-kinds-of-punked jewellery and small sculptures, and while lifelong poor eye-hand coordination have limited me to wishing I could make drawing art, a cool new thing (pssst! It's AI...) has allowed me to tell a computer somewhere to make a starting point image for me that I can then edit to my heart's content and that I put on my blogs to fill up white space when pics aren't available or applicable. Some of those images make their way to Ko-Fi.com where again, some are for sale and many you can figure out what you'd like to tip me. 

I may put some of those things online at Ko-Fi sometime - not sure. Is anyone interested in a steampunked Nerf Maverick or a completely fabricated "raygun?" Leather and wire sculptures and jewellery? "Robot assistants?" For an example, a desk lamp I made (out of an old hard disk drive and QH lamp) for a friend in the mid 1990s is still working and she still uses it most evenings. Also I have the originals of my digital/AI art and can supply it in original quality. 
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Let me know - the image below has a contact link ("Mastodon") where you can reach me if any of these kinds of things interest you. 

Also please subscribe to my newsletter using the newspaper in the image above, it's a once-a-week email that'll keep you informed on all the latest blog posts. If you'd like to help me keep the blogs going, the recipes flowing, please use either 

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I may dig through the boxes of old bits'n'bobs and take a few pictures - I have a half-completed working Nerf Maverick being steam-punked into a lovely old steampunk prop, several other devices being turned into steampunk props, a lot of jewellery made from brass and springs and stuff. I have one "robot assistant" similar to Gyro Gearloose's Little Helper (does anyone remember Disney comics? And Gyro? He was my hero when I was very young, age five and upwards - and still is a hero of mine . . .) and a few other robot and general sculptures (all small/tiny) made of metals and plastics and so forth that I need to complete, and now also recycled plastics will start making an appearance. 

A Small Proviso

Over the last five years or so, disruption has been a feature of life. First there was setting up a fence to keep our cats safe from a highway just outside our front door, then setting up raised garden beds, then the back fence blew down in a storm and we put it back up and made a gate to the back alley, then putting in a 3m x 3m shed and a gazebo and outdoor kitchen area. And then taking all those things down again... You see, we rent. Our old landlord had told us we were here for as long as we needed a place and to make it what we wanted for long term lease. 

Then across the road from us an old caravan park, motel, and pub/club were demolished to make way for a new - something, vague rumors of something - and our landlord's life changed and he sold the house... 

The new landlord (and a local business owner and secret philanthropist) has turned out to be the most generous and kind person but as he was capitalising on the huge block by splitting it and putting another house on the now rear block, it meant the fence and gate went the way of the dodo, the garden beds (well, some of the garden beds) had to be uplifted and moved into the newly-fenced front yard, the shed had to be moved, and the cat fence and bazebo etc all had to come down. I reckon I aged a decade in those few years. 

But it's still ongoing. The local Shire dragged out proceedings by a year - during which I/we consolidated into the smaller garden space, hacked the shed to fit into a new space, got the gardens producing veges again, - and now that the new garage has been erected - just finished as of yesterday (16 Aug 2023) in fact - I have to move all the shed and old garage tools and materials into the back of it. It's a HUGE garage, will be more than enough - but it's all been taking inordinate amounts of our time. Once I've moved everything into it, I'll have the right space to do more recycling, build more projects and equipment for making new projects, and may even have a better space for electronics and 3D printing. 

That's a 5m or 6m front on that garage. Woo-ee!

Oh and of course COVID-19 and all that panic also happened, and a load of health issues for us both, under stress and ageing as we both are. It gets to the point where all the small cuts add up to a big painful gaping bite out of us. And it's definitely all added up to delays, delays that are now ever more important to us because they're taking away from a steadily-shrinking pool we call "the years we have left..." For example, my self-designed desktop CNC I've been working away on has been in abeyance for almost two years, a planned seed raising hothouse that I wanted to build and put into use right about now, will have to wait another year. And so will more than a dozen other projects. Blogging is about the only thing I can do anytime and anyplace and even that has had to pause for the occasional issue. 

Today is also the eleventh anniversary of our wedding, my lovely wife and I, one day I'll post that lovely tale on TEdALOG Lite II, for now let's just say this has been the happiest twelve (almost thriteen) years of my life. Why? Because tomorrow is the twelfth anniversary of our Facebook marriage. Seems a twee thing to do but it led to us actually meeting in Western Australia, being pretty much smacked over the head with the fact that we were more compatible than any other two people either of us had ever experienced, and so I finished up in Victoria Australia just before 2012 rolled around.

But anyway - an article "What I Did and Do and  Will Actually Do" may be on the cards with a lot more info on the stuff my wife and I have Made and will keep on Making. It's something in our blood I think so projects will keep happening. You can help - there's a little graphic a few paragraphs before the picture of the garage where you can subscribe to my once-a-week newsletter which will keep you up to date with all the ins and outs of doings and catatonic states, or you can arrange to help by making a one-time or monthly donation to help with creative costs, or chat with me on mastodon. Or just share the link to any or all of my articles, the newsletter / News Stand site. It all does help us.