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This blog is two things in one. The first is to share posts on coding, in particular about Syntə, a new(ish) live coding platform and language. The second is to be a personal page about me, Daniel.
I’m an open source software developer (among other things) based in London, UK. My main project is Syntə, which I’m also using to perform with on a regular basis.
As a recording artist I have a bandcamp page.
The other things I do include: organising live coding and sometimes emom events; building gardens and parts of gardens for domestic customers; independent research in social philosophy.
Other interests include: sustainable housing and living, history and heterodox economics. I take photos with a DSLR sometimes - portraiture, landscapes, events.
I used to do a lot of analog and digital electronics but for some reason hardly do any nowadays. I also seem to be developing an interest in sailing (nebulous).
As a personal site, the purpose - alongside being my frontend to the world [wide web] - is to share thoughts, ideas and generally attempt to explain myself. This does entail that I may unwittingly repeat what others have said better, but as Stigler’s law of eponymy evidences - there is barely an original thought under the sun ☀
Like everyone else on the internet I’m an expert in a field of one, but my bigger fault is intermittency so do give a nudge if you have something interesting to say :)
There is something else too. It relates to a journey of mine: In pursuit of a zen state of mind and much more free time to get on with my many personal projects, I have pretty much abandoned social media. The only things clinging on are the occasional messaging group and putting my feet up in front of nerdTube, which I should probably do less of too! I should add that I recently joined social.toplap.org and found the community very welcoming :)
Overall though, this change has been a success and has barely put a dent in my social life - a surprising amount of things are still conducted via good old email. What’s more, I have been able to really focus and get things done, which has of course been very satisfying.
I’ve also been able to focus more cleanly on real-world connexions, again with obvious rewards. I recommend a data-diet to anyone - I started by going down to 250mb per day in 2017 - and have not looked back since. This site will hopefully be a good way to have my own manicured web presence, without any distracting feed algorithms or entrenched data collection.
Miscellaneous
I’m a big fan of Unix style computing and use the FreeBSD operating system on my main laptop.
Very against fast-fashion so you will probably see me wearing the same clothes over and over again ha. Sometimes it costs a lot to buy clothes made in countries with reasonable labour protections, sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, they usually last for a long time.
I’m a massive hipster so it goes without saying that I eat as much organic food as possible and rarely eat meat. Again, this doesn’t need to cost more and can actually save a lot (including the planet itself).
Namaste 🙏
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hyperlink and footnotes policy
We all love writing a good footnote, but I’m not sure how much I love reading them - in the sense of - it’s disruptive to the normal flow. So I try to keep them to a minimum and it’s mainly for fun.
Likewise, so many blogs are filled with hyperlinks, but I find these disruptive too. So my general rule is - if it is something that can readily be found using a search engine then I leave that as an exercise to the reader. If its some specific/arcane corner of the web then a hyperlink is worthwhile :)
updated on: 1 / 11 / 2025