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Originally published 2021/10/27. Updated to include the .xssessionsrc point I run pretty often into this issue, so this is a checklist for me. Issue being, that I cannot use Compose key sequences to type out the characters I need. Case in point being, the apostrophe ’ and the quote marks “” , ‘’ that I use, all the live long day. Make sure that emacs is running as a service. It runs in your user, so check status with systemctl --user status emacs.service Do the normal computer user thing. Restart the service.systemctl --user restart emacs.service.1 Make sure the system is UTF-8 everywhere. (en_IN.UTF-8 does not work for me. Make sure it’s en_US.UTF-8) One place that Emacs looks is the .xsessionrc file in the home folder. These are the contents of mine. My Emacs refuses to let the compose key sequences work, unless it’s present LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8 LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8 LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 PAPERSIZE=a4 LANGUAGE=en_US LANG=en_US.UTF-8 if [ $DISPLAY != ":0" ] then export XAUTHORITY=${HOME}/.Xauthority fi This should do the trick 99% of the time. ...

Let’s get the important bits out of the way first. I have been both, busy and lazy. Mea culpa. But the new FOSS.training’s aka DGPLUG Summer Training cohort begins tomorrow, the 25th of July, 2022 (6.30pm IST). Come, join! Join the mailing list, here. Come join the #dgplug irc channel on Libera, because that’s where the training will be conducted. So, what is it? The summer training is short-ish, couple of months-ish long, series of meetups on irc.1 Mentors come. Students gather. A cohort forms. And we learn all about the free and open source world. If you’re a young person, looking to learn the culture and the tacit knowledge of how the free and open source or someone older or if you feel like someone who is on the outside looking in, all are welcome. ...

I steal quite a bit from other folk, to put on my blog.1 Case in point, is my last post where I stole the image from Tom Gauld. Or a few Seth Godin posts, somewhere on the blog, that I have posted in their entirety. While I do credit them in the post, I wished there was a way, I could programmatically tell the search engines and the bots of the world that I did in fact, steal from someplace and that they should actually be looking over there and leading people there. A little bit of searching, reavealed that there is in fact, such a way to do it. It’s called the Canonical URL. In a nutshell, it tells the machines to guide folk there, because that is the source of truth. ...

Stolen from Tom Gauld’s Tumblr. click pic to embiggen …

GRRM in his latest not-a-blog-post, references this video on the two types of authors, he lumps writer-folk into. Just like him, I try to structure and outline what I write, I really do, and just like him, I can do it fairly ok, and still never really enjoy the process. ...

Just a little note to mark the beginning of my Zettelkasten journey. While I’ve always had a commonplace book of sorts, all my life, and I’ve always taken tons of notes on books I pay attention to, I’ve never really been able to come up with a way of writing what I think syntopically. Or I can, but its like pulling teeth. Writing what I learnt in Antifragile, took months, and a lot of cursing through gritted teeth. But I want to. I really do. I so want to write about what I learn and read and then intermingle them all together and put my bundle of thoughts down. ...