Today is one of those days that make it hard to write even a single line. I had several attempts during the morning but found my mind to be too preoccupied with other things, from work to all kinds of nonsense, to even think of something I could attempt.

This is however exactly why I try to keep the habit, no matter what. Getting over the threshold and putting out these few words will lower the hurdle in the long run. At least that is the hope and I have to remind myself because today it does not feel like it works. Oh well.

Apropos preoccupations, observing how little control one generally has over what the own mind occupies itself with, is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, noticing and admitting this fact must certainly be the first step towards changing something, or even decide if change is desirable. On the other hand, even after a small amount of practice in meta-awareness, it is laughable how easy it is for certain thoughts to take over awareness and jerk it around. I blame the default mode network.

I almost just went to bed for some reading* when I caught it just in time that I had not blogged yet today. A catastrophe it would certainly not have been, but I like to keep the streak alive for now, however trivial the post turns out to be.

It is funny to observe the own mind in caring about such trivial things like streaks, points or badges, in whatever gamified context they appear. Will it rebel eventually, when one part of the brain gets tricked by another part, in this case me trying to consciously exploit some built-in mechanism for motivational gains? Probably not, the automatic "primitive" bits are not aware of context.

Viewing one's own mind not as a single unified entity, but a mess of different motivations, feelings and thoughts, often conflicting ones, can be helpful and generally rings true to me. You can make up a theory of willpower this way, or call out the "internal press sectretary" that tries to weave a flattering story out of the underlying mess, as Simler & Hanson describe in The Elephant in the Brain.

Not very pretty to look at up close, what these brains of ours are up to.

(* still the LessWrong books and a new one on the Viking age, called River Kings.)

This blog holds no world-shattering insights. I don't have something interesting to say every day (ever?), but the point is to write it down anyway. Just in case a good thought comes by eventually, then the routines are in place to capture it.

But the blog spammers have rediscovered the comment fields, so there's that.

In my fresh attempt to blog daily, today is the first time that I don't know what to write about. I am sure this will happen frequently and getting over it is part of the point. Behaviours only become habits when you follow the rule.

I could tell you about that great podcast I just discovered, or the crappy film I watched last night, or I could show you a picture of where in the forest I put up the slaguggleholk this morning. But I won't do that today. Instead I'll just ramble on for a while. Stream-of-consciousness writing they call it, I think. This term might be something my brain just made up on its own but I won't look it up right now. If it isn't a real thing, it should be. James Joyce's Ulysses comes to mind in this context, but I might be wrong about that; I have never read it.

Damn, now I looked it up anyway: James Joyce's name had slipped my mind and of course Wikipedia tells you immediately that he is famous for stream of consciousness, so there's that.

Talking about consciousness, I used to roll my eyes when someone tried to tell that there is a point to "subjective first-person experience" as compared to the "objective third-person" perspective. I'm not so sure about that anymore, not because I've gotten into new-agey woo-woo kinds of things, but because it makes rational sense to me that there are things to learn about one's own mind by paying closer attention to what it does minute-to-minute.

More about that at a later time. For today this will suffice for me to feel good about having blogged something. Not setting goals too high at the outset of a new adventure is a good thing, they say. Whoever "they" are.

How difficult it is to consistently post on a blog! One easily gets awe-stricken by people like Tyler or Scott who put out large amounts of interesting material, without having this as their main gig.

I won't pretend I'll be able to get to their level anytime soon, but starting small and from scratch again should make it easier to form new habits. And practice matters in writing, they say.

To put it in different words: I have outsourced my babble to podcasts and books too much, and need to flex my own text generator again. Re-phrasing thoughts fosters their synthesis.

I didn't post this picture because it is in any way interesting in itself, but because I can! From my phone, that is!

Let me back up and tell you why I find that exciting. This site is statically generated and a new blog post is added via a markdown file, re-compiling and uploading. This means firing up the text editor and some quick command-line actions after finishing the writing. This fits me perfectly fine, most of the time.

But when it comes to images, I found always it cumbersome to first download them to my laptop for processing and inclusion in a post. Which is why I finally got around to figuring out how to post them directly from the phone that takes the image.

The centerpice for making this work is Termux which gives you a full Linux-environment on Android devices; it's really really good and can do much more than I describe here. Termux supports the "Share with..." mechanism and allows me to execute a script with the shared file as argument. So I adapted my script that prepares the markdown file and resizes the image for this purpose.

Now when I share an image from my phone with Termux, the following steps happen:

• The image is saved in Termux.
• My script is called with the image location.
• It asks me to enter a title which is used as the post title, the URL-slug and the filenames.
• The Markdown template with this information, the image link and date/time is prepared, and saved.
• A text editor is fired up to verify and/or write an extra line in the mardown-file.
• The image gets resized and renamed accordingly.
• The files get added and committed to the repository, and pushed to GitHub.
• Finally, Pelican is told to re-compile the site into HTML, make the smaller inline-version of the image, and upload everything with rsync to my RaspberryPi-server.

Done.

The possibility to leave comments on blog posts is back! Thanks to Isso which provides a stand-alone solution for self-hosted comments. Please let me know if there are technical hiccups...

I might even import the old comments from the Wordpress-site at some point, they are not lost.