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First things first, you should be listening to Cal Newport and reading his books too! His recent episode on books and reading was lovely!1 If I remember right, he started doing the podcast, a couple of months after the pandemic broke out and the world shut down. And it felt very much at the time, like one of those friendly voices across the waves in some post apocalyptic movie. It felt warm, personal and gave me something to do in those dark days....

Click the pic to embiggen. Rube Goldberg illustration via James Vaughan Ended up too sick to even tinker, since I last wrote. Well enough now, to scratch out some prose to get my brains in gear. Let’s start with Huginn adventure #1. Buckle up! Background I found Huginn, and am using it as my man friday.1 The “Problem” I run Hugo on two three machines. I’m tired of updating to the latest release manually....

Let’s get the, “What the heck is Huginn?” out of the way. If you’ve heard of Zapier or IFTTT, that’s what this is. Only better. You host it. You control it. You program it. And everything’s in your control. If you’ve used Yahoo Pipes, then I tip my hat to you my dear friend and tell the rest of you folk, that I believe all of these new fangled pieces of zaps and agents are the spiritual successor to that pioneering web app....

I keep writing these tiny utilities for myself in Python and while I love writing in Python, I definitely don’t enjoy the little war dance I have to do everytime I want to run it on a new machine. Keeping track of virtual environments, and then installing packages in them, quickly gets tiresome. I want to just run the program once I’m done with it. Like a C program. Or Rust....

I am fortunate enough, to run most of my life between my local computer and another VM in a cloud. In this day and age of cloud native and serverless, why would anyone choose to run their life off a virtual server aka VM? This post is me, thinking this through. I’ll return to this every now and then, and see if things have changed enough out there, for me to evaluate and make a change....

I’ve been struggling to get org-caldav working on the desktop. Nothing to do with the program itself. It’s excellent, fairly intuitive and really well documented. There just seems to be some gremlin in the works, that does not let the darned calendar see my org files.1 Will keep at it. What this note is for however, was the pleasant realisation that Emacs can transparently work with gpg encrypted files.2 I wanted to keep my calendar user/password credentials in a file, because the to and fro between my Baikal caldav server was generating too many requests for my password....

Finally done with learning the Urdu alphabet. Inordinately proud of myself :) Now to go begin, reading slowly and building up my vocabulary. Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

When I wrote about, ticking off checkboxes in Org Mode, I’d linked to line 101 of org-mouse.el. While I’d read the main summary, I somehow missed line 30 … ;; * subtree expansion/collapse (org-cycle) with the left mouse button Which I accidentally triggered today … After an (accidental) click opens up to … Org Mode continues to delight! Hurrah! Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!...

Happy Valentine’s all you lovely people! :) Hugo Upgraded to the latest Papermod theme on the website Devops Installed Fedora in a VM on my machine in order to do Devopsy work Python Learnt about the object() function. If I want an native something to use later, I can always cast to an basic object (x = object()) and use it. Best to use it, when using None would cause ambiguities....

Nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing! I didn’t feel well today. So I went to bed. Did log my usual weekly, books and fitness entries though.1 Urdu Did the “ain” / “gain” group. Had fun, trying to pronounce the fricative gh (/ɣ/) sound. Emacs Just a little note of gratitude to the community over at Emacslife Me, thinking out aloud in the last part of this section, led to several folks emailing me with kind and encouraging words....