I’ve been learning French, on my own at a snail’s pace over the past year or so. All because I want to read Émilie du Châtelet, Dumas, Verne, and Montaigne in their native tongue. Since I cannot do immersion nor give regular practice the time it wants, it’s … slow going But I do, do it. Regularly and deliberately. I’ve built up a vocabulary of about 500-700 words by now and I know if I keep this up, I’ll be able to do read well in time. ...
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. Ergo, I have a strong connection to it and I began saving every episode, at around episode 10 or so. ...
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! ...
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. IBM has a similar open source alternative, with all the new fangled hotness called Node-RED ...
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. Or Go. ...
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. For now, I am happy using my dinky little box in the cloud. ...