Matt Marshall's Personal Site (en)

A relatively quiet half of the year.

We entered the winter period after the Autumn Equinox by getting stuck down with an awful illness.

I know that at least two human beings read my blog via RSS, so I’m writing this post to issue an apology if I’ve just pumped your feed reader full of my old blog posts.

Well, another half-year!

In November last year I popped my SIM card out of my smartphone, into a nano-to-micro SIM adaptor, and then slotted that into a Nokia 8110 4G.

I’ve made the source code — such that it is — for this website licensed under a Free Software license, the GPL v3.

What a long half-year!

Update 2025-11-09: It appears that the gerda.tech domain has lapsed and is now owned by some spammers/scammers.

I’ve moved all of my software and related projects from my Gitlab.com account to SourceHut, the hacker’s forge.

I’ve had to block Keychron, the mechanical keyboard company, from sending me emails via my hosting provider’s SPAM filter.

So I’m a father now.

This post came about because I’ve spotted some places in my life where I want to be able to use alternative software that better meets my values and how I like to work, and I wanted to get these thoughts out in the wild to force myself to organise them.

Jack Baty and Derek Sivers each posted about how they handle backups and it prompted me to write down where I’m at with backups.

I am very keyboard-driven as a computer user, and 2023 was the year where I properly started using a Tiling Window Manager for my computing.

This has been a weird half of the year.

It’s a pleasure to report that I am writing this update from a much better place than I did the last one. 2023 has not only been mostly quiet, but it’s also been mostly positive with a few notable exceptions.

I’ve just upgraded my smartphone.

I started generating this site via a static site generator in 2021.

I’ve had an on-and-off relationship with tablets for a little while now.

I’m writing this on a machine with no wifi, because my broadband connection fell down about an hour ago and my service providers are not picking up the phone.

This was a bad Solstice, sadly.

Recently, I felt a compulsion to write a section on my About Page regarding how I go about doing my computing.

Wow.

I read the vast majority of my books, especially fiction, on my e-reader.

Note: This post marked the first time I wrote something in Esperanto first, and then translated directly back to English.

I love plain text and markdown.

Note: this post is being finished a little later than usual, in January 2022.

Hey, another short post to update on the site itself as there’s been a few changes to the site that I want to document, if only for myself!

I was hiking round the Indieweb recently and stumbled upon this post on Ruben Schade’s site.

Hello there.

I once tried to establish a “Weekly Review” type of blog post, inspired by my love of reflective writing as well as seeing how Rhiaro has managed to keep it up and keep it interesting for so long.

I’ve made the decision to migrate this site temporarily away from Brimstone and into a static site.

Hi folks, if you’re reading this then either you’re a close friend/colleague, or one of the few random strangers on the web who read my blog occasionally.

As of last night I’ve been journaling every day for a solid year.

Just had a really nice experience where a loved one asked me to facilitate the conversion of an ebook from epub format to PDF for reading on her computer.

Dear…, This year has been extremely difficult because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In my dark and murky past as a full time PhD Student and in my current alter-ego as someone writing up a PhD Thesis on the evenings and weekends I have spent a lot of time writing things.

I’ve just discovered via r/swoletariat this absolutely fucking unreal 2018 Guardian editorial from Zoe Williams Do you boast about your fitness?

My phone intersects on various aspects of my life such as minimalism, de-googling, FLOSS, etc.

I seem to have given off the impression that my routine is the most important thing in the world to me and while this is partially true on the surface; it is for wholly different reasons than most people think.

This was posted as a review to Coworker.com as part of the nomination for the 2019 Coworker members’ choice awards.

I was staying in Lisbon for work and chose the VIP Inn Berna for my accommodation because it was reasonably priced, located very near where I was working, and looked comfortable enough.

Today is 2019-05-01; May the 1st.

I last wrote something longform in this blog in February, about how 2018 was a long and brutal year for me.

2018 was a long year.

Back in May I posted a list of stuff that I own in reflection of what I found the most useful.

“When it comes to the overwhelm; the easiest way to solve that is to turn it off.

Every three months or so I do a gratitude list in order to try and cultivate gratitude, stem my desire for novelty, and seek tranquility by training myself to want what I already have.

Minimalism is one of the inspirations I draw from when hacking at Brimstone.

After years of performing hard labour, my poor laptop finally deteriorated to the point of becoming almost unusable.