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      1 ---
      2 title: "Weeknote for 2025-W02"
      3 description: "Things I learned or read in the last week"
      4 date: 2025-01-06T07:59:00-08:00
      5 draft: false
      6 categories:
      7 - Weeknotes
      8 ---
      9 
     10 [Happy Public Domain Day!](https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/)
     11 
     12 January 1 marked the introduction of many significant works into the Public
     13 Domain. This is only the fifth year to see meaningful copyright expirations
     14 following the 20-year freeze legislated by Congress, so I still get excited
     15 about these. PDD pairs well with the resource [Standard
     16 Ebooks](https://standardebooks.org/), which is driven by a group of
     17 volunteers who clean up, beautify, and republish public domain works that
     18 have been digitized by other volunteers at organizations such as [Project
     19 Gutenberg](https://gutenberg.org/).
     20 
     21 [Twelve Days of
     22 Deletey](https://stevesberg.com/2023/12/the_annual_tradition_of_deletey/)
     23 
     24 The first day of the year also coincides with the first day of “Deletey”, an
     25 informal effort to tidy one’s digital life, first proposed by Steven Hoefer.
     26 I’ve deleted a couple unused online accounts this week, but I’m primarily
     27 focusing on cleaning up the files in my `Downloads` and `Documents`
     28 directories (which have become catch-all dumping grounds with little
     29 distinction between them). My goal is to keep the former empty[^tmp] and
     30 have some rational organizational scheme for the latter[^adhd].
     31 
     32 [YunoHost: Garden your own piece of the Internet!](https://yunohost.org/)
     33 
     34 Deletey’s commencement reminded me that a number of my accounts with online
     35 services should probably be replaced by “self-hosted” services. I had an old
     36 RaspberryPi sitting around to press into service[^rpi], and I was up and
     37 running with YunoHost in less than an hour. I appreciate how the project’s
     38 developers are trying to make this stuff accessible to people who _aren’t_
     39 Unix geeks---if they make headway into getting less-technically inclined
     40 people hosting their own services, this becomes the kind of project that
     41 [can make the Internet weird
     42 again](https://www.anildash.com/2024/10/15/its-2004-again/).
     43 
     44 [^tmp]: One idea (which I’ll credit to [Amin
     45     Hollon](https://benjaminhollon.com/)) is to mount a `tmpfs` at
     46     `~/Downloads`, which would result in the directory be automatically
     47     cleared on each reboot. I’m more likely to set up a job that will clear
     48     files over a certain age.
     49 
     50 [^adhd]: Readers with ADHD will recognize the impulse to replace an untended
     51     mess with a carefully thought-out scheme, but I promised myself
     52     I wouldn’t lose too much time to _how_ I organize things; I just want to
     53     put the few things worth keeping somewhere I’ll have a chance of finding
     54     them again.
     55 
     56 [^rpi]: I originally bought it to run [RetroPie](https://retropie.org.uk/),
     57     but quickly learned that I like the _idea_ of playing emulated games
     58     from my childhood more than I actually like doing it. Those games were
     59     **hard**! I figured the Pi would see its second act in a robotics
     60     project or 3D printer, but those particular nerd hobbies haven’t come
     61     for me yet.