So far I’ve been keeping it lean, mostly because all of that storage was actually cold; I wasn’t accessing it at all.
But! I’ve also gotten into using very basic commands and applications to get my work done. And a lot of them I am not even running on this computer.
For instance! I horde RSS items! But I decided to pump the brakes, and separate them into speeds.
I’m looking for jobs, and have a few other automated type feeds, so those are checked as needed, and processed almost immediately.
For peeps I know, I pay attention to them, and check as often as I can, as long I can actually pay attention. These are my peeps, I am going to read what they say, and think about it.
And then the rest. Interesting, no doubt! But do I need to read it every day? Instead of focusing on keeping up on headlines, I rarely sync these feeds until I have the time to focus. If I can’t focus, I’ll do something else, like drink tea or take a nap. When I want to learn and update, pay attention, then I will read the news.
All together, it means I don’t update feeds very often, and when I do I am fully focused on the task.
What that means for computing is to set recurring tasks for different categories, and actually using the time intentionally. It also means I don’t actually need my feeds or anything here, on my computer!
So I installed newsboat on the media server at home, and when I am ready to focus I ssh in and read the news. That also means I can be super-horde-y and keep all the feeds! Why? Because it is actually a nice research tool to have a text only representation of a corpus to search locally.
But you know I didn’t stop the geek there! Because then I’m also syncthing the directory I use to “save” articles, which is just a nice tidy text file containing the article in question. That means if I need a page for some reason, I hit save and it syncs over to my other devices. Great for those long reads I want to take with me on my tricorder mobile device. 