Work

Whenever I post a link to one of my posts on the fediverse or share it with my friends on Signal, I just get a plain vanilla link box I wanted those rich embeds, other folk seemed to have, on the same mediums, that I would share my links on. Looking around for how to go about doing this, led me to ogp.me, which taught me the whys and wherefores. Looking around, a bit more for how to do this with Hugo, led me to this thread, which had this helpful comment by Kaushal Modi, which made be search the Hugo documentation which finally led me here. ...

I want to write better. And the best way to do that, is to write more. Thinking about which, immediately kills the urge to write, because I take really long to write anything. And the actual writing, is very arduous to me. So what to do? I guess I need to just lower the bar. Do less. More consistently. And then serendipitiously, as they say, when the student is ready, the master appears. David Kadavy’s conducting a 100 Word Writing Habit Online Course, this month. He seemed to be in the same rut as I am now. ...

I’ve been living a little dangerously when posting stuff on the blog. While it’s true that I compose my posts locally on my desktop, with a locally installed Hugo, I always catch a ton of things that I miss, after I publish a post. Nearly every single time. So the process then becomes … Open the post on the server in Emacs (after logging in, via ssh) Make an edit. Build and publish. Reload the page and re-read the post. Find a typo. Fix it. Repeat steps 3 & 4. Keep the Emacs pane to keep editing and open another terminal pane, just to build and deploy. Twenty three edits later … Be ok with what I have. (with a build and deploy, and reload and reread every couple of edits) Do a final build and deploy Having done this, for God knows how long now, I’m used to this workflow and decided to just lean into it. But while I loved my edit, build, deploy, reload, reread, workflow, I felt like I was tempting the fates, everytime I did it. Besides I did not like messing with the live website like that. ...

I kept wondering why Syncthing releases on one of my Pis would lag behind my other one.1 The big difference between the two is that one runs Raspbian and the other, Manjaro23. This wouldn’t happen earlier when they ran Arch and Manjaro. And today, I head-slappingly remembered, that it did lag and I had to do stuff to get at the latest software stuff. What I had to do, was to switch Manjaro’s software branch to unstable (as opposed to the default stable. Read more here.) The only reason I use Manjaro, instead of Arch4, is that the Arch kernel does not boot on this Pi and I want the latest Arch stuff, which is what the unstable Manjaro software branch offers. ...

I must admit to stealing … quite a lot … from a bot at that! Zoetrope’s, “random color contrasts” gets colours from Adam Morse and John Otander’s Randoma11ly and posts them a few times a day. I’ve been writing down the ones I love and find interesting, in an Org note, in the hopes I’ll use them someday. (I know I’m just hoarding colours 😂. But hey, I used one1 out of the thirty-odd colours, I’ve jotted down so far) ...

Updated to Emacs 29.2, just now. Took me and my four core workhorse about fifteen minutes tops, from start to finish. Emacs 29.0 was the first version I compiled from source, because I wanted the latest release as soon as it was out and I no longer had the patience for the kindly distribution folk (or third party packagers) to give me a binary. The first time was a nightmare. I didn’t have various bits and bobs that were needed. Stuff that the guides say should work a certain way wouldn’t. But it did happen eventually and I learnt a lot along the way about what I wanted compiled in, in my Emacs. I also appreciated just how much easier it is now to compile stuff and recover from errors. I tried this last in the late 90s1 and it scared me off. ...