Personal

I started with a very simple init.el when I started using Emacs. Rather than learning it in a structured manner, I just decided to jump in at whatever end of the pool and figure it out as I go. I may not know Emacs, but I do know what I want out of a general purpose text editor. And bending Emacs to do my will, to do what I want it to do or behave in the manner I want it to behave. And Emacs to my eternal gratitude, is flexible to do all I want, thanks to the last forty six years worth of hard work and ideas of people from all over. ...

Alternate Subtitle: The Best Advice I Could Give You About Reading Lots of Books. via a Tom Gauld Book1 Ever so often, after one of my reading updates on social media, some of my young friends ask me how I get so much reading done. ...

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. ...