I Am #AliveAndThriving Today! || #IAmAliveChallenge || Daily Off-Grid Jungle Journal Entry: Day #415 - Experiments with IPFS - GaiaYoga Gardens, Lower Puna, Far East Big Island, Hawai'i - Friday, September 15, 2023

I live barefooted and naked, very close to Earth and Nature, in an 18-acre, off-grid, clothing-optional, food-forest intentional community (GaiaYoga Gardens), way out in the jungles of Lower Puna, far East Big Island, Hawai'i. I love my life, and I'm immensely grateful to live where and how I do, on my own terms! I would not want to live any other way! 😁🙏💚⚡💥🔥✴️✳️❇️👣🌱✨🤙

Warm greetings all! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

In my post yesterday I said that I would look more deeply into using the distributed IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) network to host my image files for this post. I did actually find a way for it to work, though it took a fair amount of experimentation.

One of the main issues was getting the photos from my phone to the IPFS network. I tried out various IPFS Android apps on my phone, without much success. I finally had the idea to upload them from my phone using my encrypted, zero-knowledge cloud storage, MEGA, which I have installed on both my phone and computer. Once they appeared in the specially designated Hive Images folder in the MEGA directory on my computer, I uploaded them to the IPFS network using the IPFS desktop app on my computer. The last step was copying the gateway link (using ipfs.io) for each photo, and adding it as an image link in PeakD.

So this is a completely experimental post, with a pair of each photo, one hosted on IPFS, and same image below it hosted in the usual way on PeakD. I included both just in case the IPFS images didn't load, as happened a few times as I was experimenting. They would appear, be visible for a while, dissappear, then reappear once again. So I just decided to include both for the moment. I think as of now they're just hosted on my IPFS node on my laptop, so with my jungle Internet connection, it's no wonder that they are a little inconsistent in their global availability. They would have to be distributed across multiple nodes to be reliably available I believe. If the IPFS versions don't show up, try refreshing the page. That worked for me a few times.

The present expression of IPFS, while quite amazing, still has a few notable limitations, that make it necessary to jump through a few hoops to use it in the way I'd like. I'll keep exploring and experimenting with it to see what's possible.

Given just how challenging this particular round of experiments was in terms of working with IPFS, I probably won't use it every day just yet, as it defintely takes more time to implement, and the results are a tad hit or miss in terms of the consistent reliability of the image availability. I'll see if I can improve that.

I'm happy that I was able to get it to work, but I'm a little disappointed that the image availbilty is rather unstable presently. I'll see what I can discover, either with IPFS, or perhaps some other distributed media-sharing framework. Let me know if the top IPFS versions of the images were visible for you when you read this post. I'm so curious.

My afternoon round of Hive catch-up and tasks got a bit derailed yesterday, as Iolanthe, Ano and Mekekai's 11-year old daughter, came looking for me to enlist my help in making a witch's broom for her Halloween costume. I at least got Hive to a reasonably OK spot to pause for a bit, so that I could help her. We harvested a thinner strawberry guava trunk, and Io peeled the bark off, sanded it, did some wood etching, and then stained it, with me assisting at various points. Aura, a woman who recently came to stay here at GaiaYoga, took over for me after about an hour and a half, in helping Io with her broom, so I was able to return to my Hive catch-up and tasks.

Between helping Io and what I had to do on Hive, I was not able to get any land work done yesterday, much to my chagrin. I'll do my best to make up for that today, as my plants need attention. I made food for myself, and got food for my kitten friend, just before sunset, then devoted the rest of my evening to finshing up everything that I wanted to get done in Hive. I was also building/compiling updated custom kernels on Arch Linux as I worked on Hive. There were two kernels that were giving me problems, one in building successfully, and the other in booting successfully, that I finally got to work correctly, which made me very happy indeed.

I stayed up fairly late last night, until almost 1AM, exploring, reading, and researching assorted things, until I finally just had go fall into bed from tiredness. Thankfully I slept well, and I woke up just before 5AM. I did a short round of tasks on Hive before getting out of bed to go make my superfood fire coffee.

It's now getting close to my 2PM posting cutoff time, so it's a great time to end this post for now. Scott, a fellow who used to live here, just asked me if I could help him with some connectivity issue on his phone. I'm the tech guy here, so I get a lot of requests like that. I actually just installed and set up Solus Linux on another fellow's (Brian's) Chromebook a couple days ago, for which he was very grateful. After helping Scott, I have go get back to my Hive catch-up and tasks, so that I can wrap things up a bit before going to work on the land. I deeply appreciate you all! Until tomorrow! Onward and upward, joyfully together! 😁🙏💚✨🤙

All photos were taken with my Motorola G Power Android Phone.

Thank you all so much who have helped me get to where I am today, and allowing me to share more of the beauty and magic from my life and my world with you, and for your continuous appreciation and support! I am truly deeply grateful! 😁🙏💚

If you'd like to find me on other alternative platforms where I have accounts (I spend most of my time here on Hive), click on this signature image below to go to my LinkTree page.

If you'd like to send me a BTC Lighting Tip (made possible by the fantastic work of brianoflondon on @v4vapp), just scan the QR image below. 👇

Signature image created by @doze, and the dividers made by @thepeakstudio, with all tweaked to their present form by me.