Jackson Kerr's Site

It's hard to turn off the water. Picking out a shirt and lacing my boots. A chilly wander down to the farmers market. The homeless collect around the entrance, people here are more likely to have cash. "A $2 bond for the bottle. Please give my bottles back to me". Asking to play a song in the train station. The tiles sing back to me. Waiting to meet a friend. Tomorrow will be Sunday and I think I'll go for a swim.

I didn't make it out for the swim. Last night I was out late. In the afternoon I went to a friend's place to watch the rugby. We had freshly baked bread with cheese and more than a few beers. Finally, we ended up in the cocktail bar.

So, Sunday. I spent too much time on the internet, folded my laundry, and got an early night. I have work tomorrow.

If I could send this back, would I have found this an interesting read as a child? Will I look back on this fondly when (and if) I'm old? It's possible I'll get the answer to one of these questions. Either way, I've found it satisfying scrawling this down in my notebook while I wait for my lunch to be served. Today I chose a spot slightly further from the office.

Recently I started making things out of leather. The first thing I made was a simple card wallet. Basically just three rectangles of leather stacked and stitched together. The leather in question was from my old pair of boots that had too many holes in them to be salvaged by a resole.

I’m proud to say that in the process I managed to avoid falling victim to the affliction that affects many of us when we're starting a new hobby or just doing something for the first time. I'm of course talking about the dreaded Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

In my experience, G.A.S is most common in amatuer musicians and photographers. Unfortunately for me, I'm both. Sit down, and let me tell you a tale by the fireside of the boy who blew all his pocket money trying to sound like his favourite indie pop rockers and shoot film like a super cool hipster or something and where he is now.

Cut to semi-rural central otago, 2016. I've just entered year 12. I'm broke (I mean, obviously. I was 16 at the time).

After some pleading, I managed to convince my parents to buy me a guitar. It was an Ovation with a curved plastic back. It looked nothing like what I had seen Ragnar playing. It wasn't a "cool" guitar but I played that thing every day. I'd be dying to get home from school so I could open ultimate guitar and start jamming. I didn't know how much a good guitar could cost, I'd never set foot in a music store, and thankfully I'd never heard someone mention "tonewood". I was a terrible player and I knew it. When we're true beginners we know the tools aren't the thing keeping us from excelling.

The trouble comes a little further down the track. When we begin to have the first inkling of knowing what we're doing. Imagine how much better this would sound on a "real" guitar! Imagine the beautiful photos I could take if I had a Cannon 5d mk3!

This is the point in starting something new where I tend to start googling. Spending many late nights watching gear reviews. Once I learned what a guitar pedal was, it was all over. I went from rushing home to practice to rushing home to watch some fool talk about his favourite looper. It's not that I wasn't playing. It's just that if the time I wasted watching edutainment was instead spent enjoying creating with the tool I already had, I would be a much better player today.

You can guess what happened when I started working. I saved up and bought these things I had seen on the internet. I got an amp, and an electric guitar, eventually pedals. But none of them made me a better player. Sure, new gear is fun to tinker around with, but I'd rather go back to being home from school with nothing but time to burn and a cheap guitar in hand.

Ok, that was a bit dramatic.

The point is that at many points in my life, not having the perfect gear for the job has stopped me from creating. In some ways the same is true of this site. I've wanted to have my own website for a long time, but I didn't start this until I had already completed a bachelors degree in computer science and had been working as a Software Developer for a few years. I'm "qualified" for this now so to speak.

I'm proud to say that I'm starting to kick this habit. But, I'm a little ashamed that it's taken me this long.

Last month I again tried something new. I built a table. It was the first piece of non-kitset furniture I’d ever made. To my surprise (and the relief of the missus) I ended up with a relatively presentable, if a bit rustic final result. Armed with a friends garage, borrowed drill, tin of wood stain, and the cheapest kiln-dried timber that money can buy[1]. I got it done, and I bet if I did it again with the same tools, it wouldn't even take me an entire week of spare time. My point is. Just do the stuff you want do do. You don't need to be good at something to enjoy it, and watch out for gear heads trying to distract you from improving.

Not sure how to end this one so I'm signing out with a bababoey.

Bai

[1] Ok! So I did buy an orbital sander... But it's definately different because I didn't know anyone who owns one and I would have been afraid of breaking it if I did ok!?

It is my goal that everything on my site (except the links section but duh) should be made by me. I don't really want to respond directly to other media. I want to create new things. Recently I came to the horrible realisation that every time this page is loaded, it's using a font made by someone else. Even worse, that font can be different depending on what browser/device you use which sometimes caused things to be slightly out of alignment.

The simple solution was to make my own font. As you probably guessed, this is it. Here's all the characters:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789
!@#$%^&*()-=_+[]{};:'"<>,./?`~

I went for a minimal, blocky look. It's fine. The file size is small, but it's no work of art.

Do you care about this? Is this interesting to anyone except for me? Should I care if it isn't?

In making this font, I thought this might be a good thing to write about until I considered; Are most of the entries on this site just going to be about making the site? And if so, is that interesting?

No, I don't think it is...

A blog about making a blog is only interesting to someone learning how to make a blog, and even then maybe just as a means to an end. Sculptors don't spend all day making statues of chisels, and the best books aren't about publishing or overcoming writer's block. These examples seem silly, but for some reason, on the internet (and especially the blog space) people seem to constantly write about writing on the internet.

I aim to avoid this from now on.

Oh, and by the way. I'm not happy enough with this font to go on using it for the whole site. I may get around to making another one.

Peace out

Update: Added the new font to this page on 2025-05-05 :)

I've been using a "dumbphone" for I think about a year now. It can only use SMS and make/receive calls. It has no internet connection. I hold this as one of the best decisions I ever made.

Although I had already taken steps to limit my social media; I had deleted Instagram and Facebook off of my smartphone a year prior. Here in New Zealand most people I know use Facebook Messenger as their main avenue for communication. I was worried about losing contact with friends and family. Ah, the dreaded FOMO. Eventually I decided to try it "just for a couple of days". I grabbed an $80 candy barphone on my way home from work and all my apprehensions melted away.

Well, what about that FOMO?

It turns out that for the most part people who care about you are willing to send you a text message instead of a Facebook DM. And I started treating the group chat more like an email chain. I could check it on my computer at work an hour before leaving work to see if there were any invites to events and that pretty much solved my problem.

What about banking? I set up my debit card so that CHQ/Paywave accesses my weekly budget and SAV accesses my short term savings. This means that if I will never be somewhere and not have access to money. Maps? I look up the directions before I leave, if it's complicated I'll write them down in a notebook I carry. Email? Why do you need to see emails at the pub??? Do it when you get home!

Ok, here's the part where I admit that I've been lying to you. It turned out that I actually couldn't live my normal life without a smartphone. My work, my bank, steam, and a lot of other things require an authenticator app for login. My gym requires an app FFS. Also, what if I want to listen to music? Well... For this I still use a smartphone and a Digital Audio Player (effectively a tiny android tablet). The smartphone stays in my drawer at work and the DAP stays at home.

So far I've only talked about the issues with using a dumbphone. If you're a full time smartphone user this whole thing probably sounds silly to you. It did to me the first time I heard about someone using a candybar phone in the 2020s. Modern smartphones are arguably the most effective tool that humanity has ever created. Why would anyone want to give that up? Put simply, there are hidden costs to owning a smartphone.

Although I was already vigilant about managing notifications and unsubscribing from bullshit emails, there are always things that slip through the cracks. Do I really need that group chat notification in middle of fixing an issue at work? Or when enjoying time with friends? The benefit of the dumbphone is that I know that when it beeps, someone is actively trying to get in contact with me specifically. Not just someone sending me a meme or sharing a post.

I've found that since switching, my time out of the house has had a completely different vibe to it. There are few objects in out lives that spend the same amount of time with us as our phones so a change affects a lot more of your life than you may think. I no longer have a 24/7 entertainment machine on me at all times. Whenever I am out of the house, I am present. The lack of a phone changes sitting in a waiting room, being on the bus, or otherwise waiting somewhere. When I'm bored I'm compelled to talk to the people around me, take in my surroundings, or just go into my own mind. When I wake up in the morning I get straight out of bed. No more wasted time scrolling. I've also noticed that I sleep much better. Something else I did not expect is how much more I notice the people around me being on their phones.

Using a dumbphone is one of those things where the drawbacks are clear, but the benefits are indirect. You really need to give it a go to know what you will gain and whether the drawbacks will actually apply to you. I implore you to give it a go, even just to try it out for a couple of days. The only piece of advice I will give to you is that there is no such thing as the perfect dumbphone. So don't get hung up on finding it. Just walk into the store and buy the cheapest one available. If you must have a specific recommendation; the TCL Onetouch 4042 is very simple to use and I have had no issues with it.

Most phones have a screen time feature, check it and see if that would convince you. Do you think you are going to look back in 5 years and wish you spent more time staring at a screen or less. The quote "The only people that will remember you worked late are your kids" has always stuck with me and I think applies here.

Go on, see if those T9 typing skills are still in the mind palace somewhere.

Assorted videos from a cheap camera I bought on TradeMe in early 2024 overlaid with me singing a cover of Like a brother by hey, nothing.

Watch the video on YouTube or DailyMotion.

In the last year or so I have made an effort to change the type of content I have been consuming. My goal was to switch to content that was slower and focused on the real world. This was inspired by being suggested one of Evan Monsma's videos I Dropped Out and Moved Into a 100 Year Old Cellar.

The video and audio quality are not great but the vibe is relaxing and he tells a story.

I think his videos do the best job of expressing the vibe I want to capture in this website.

I want to present my hobbies here in a low-effort and casual way. In the past I have held high standards for what constitutes as being "worth sharing" and this has lead to not releasing anything I make. Perfectionism is the enemy of just getting something out there. Evan uses the end-tag "Made for the sake of making" which speaks to me.

I was inspired to create this site by The Melonking Manifesto but there's not much to see here yet... In the meantime, have a cool link to explore.

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