I've been blogging since 2008 (but very inconsistently) about sustainability, software development, diet & exercise, entrepreneurship, travel, finance, and other stuff.
> So, less suburbs and more what?
Sprawling, automobile-centric development enforced by exclusionary zoning has been the prevailing land-use model in the US and Canada for so long (starting soon after the close of WWII) that few people alive today know anything different.
Streetcar suburbs (even with the streetcars now long gone) are a model of development that Strong Towns endorses.
For a recent personal project, I wanted to format the generated HTML. My first stab at it used Prettier. But, I was very underwhelmed with the processing speed. I then gave js-beautify[1] a try, which I found to be much, much faster.
I recently migrated from Evernote to Joplin. This was a concern for me, as well. However, I got past it. This isn't a case of "lock in". Even if Joplin loses mindshare and stops being actively maintained, I know that I'll always have a version available (even if only locally on my desktop, seeing as how I install it manually) that I can use to export to plain, raw Markdown files. And, with them, I can migrate to Obsidian or whatever comes into vogue.
I've been drinking raw milk for a little more than a year now. Before then, I had never had a lick of it. In fact, I hadn't drank any milk before that point for years. I haven't experienced any issues. I feel very fortunate that I'm close enough to the Pennsylvania (USA) state line to buy it. I use a lot of it to make fermented milk kefir, which I then add to store-bought heavy cream to make crème fraîche.
Prior to introducing raw milk (and the downstream products) into my diet, I was eating a lot of avocados. But, I wanted to move toward eating more seasonal, local, and ancestral foods. My ancestry is Polish/German. I think this may partly explain why it works well for my system.
When I told a buddy of mine about this change, he asked me why all milk isn't raw. I said "Well, according to the CDC, drinking it will kill you."
In my 20+ years of professional web-based software development, mostly in the commercial space, accessibility was never made a requirement. This spanned more than a half dozen clients/companies and more than a dozen projects/teams. Fast forward to last year when I re-platformed my personal blog [1]. During that effort, I decided to make it accessible. It was my first time every really delving into the a11y space.
Despite the time warranted, I found that effort to be interesting, challenging, and worthwhile. And I think it was/is the right thing to do. This despite my blog getting a low amount of traffic and nobody ever requesting that I make it accessible.
As an online creator, I have the ability and privilege to make my (small) online corner of the world a better place. For me to simply ignore the needs of those who are less able seems wrong.
> Paying for gifts... does not work.
When the context is friends/family exchanging gifts, I agree. But, given the context of the author's argument (open-source software), I disagree. When I pay for (sponsor) open-source software, I'm doing so because I want to encourage the relevant author(s) to continue applying their talents for the betterment of both myself and the world at large. I'm not paying for something I requested of them, nor am I telling them what to build going forward. If I knew a person who spent some of their free time helping relieve homelessness in some way, I'd be inclined to sponsor them in the same fashion.
I subscribe to a community solar installation in lieu of installing panels on my shaded roof. The local (to Maryland) company I use is Neighborhood Sun - https://neighborhoodsun.solar/
There are precedents for this. One that comes to mind are updated editions/versions of board/tabletop games, which https://boardgamegeek.com/ tries to handle.
The resource I've heard recommended most often is "The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting" by Fung and Moore. I just checked-out a copy from my library and will be reading it soon.
Google 100% removes viable entries from their index. I have a blog and I can see via the Google Search Console [1] that several of my posts are marked as "Crawled - currently not indexed". Meaning, Google was led to the page via my sitemap.xml or some other source, crawled it, and then chose not to include it in their search index. It's very discouraging, particularly when it happens to posts that, personally, I'm quite fond of [2]. If it matters, Google has recorded 1,085 clicks from their search results to my blog, in general, over the course of the past 3 months.
> I was also initially interested on trying to train myself to sleep on a flat floor...
I've been sleeping on the floor for over two years now. At this point, I prefer it to sleeping in a bed. I started out by creating a "mattress" made of several layers of blankets. Now, though, I just put a sheet on my low-pile carpet and that's all I sleep on. I also use a relatively flat/thin pillow.