Dgplug

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 7th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) A few days late, but Happy Diwali, folks! :) A small ask of you, to begin with. Like I wrote in the past, I don’t have any sort of tracking in these mails. There are no ads, nothing to push. Just a labour of love. So I have no idea whether these posts resonate or I’m just howling into the storm that is your inbox. If you like it, hate it, agree/disagree, write me :) All I get to see are a couple of folk leaving, every once in a while, and my list, my tribe in fact is really tiny and it feels a bit discouraging.1 ...

Am using my rickety old laptop as my daily driver these days, because … reasons. And now, that I run PyCharm alongside Emacs, alongside Chrome in its various incarnations, the poor old thing crashes, freezes and stutters a lot. A cursory inspection told me that while I had plenty of CPU firepower, I was constantly running out of ram (8gb) and swap (1 gb partition). Too broke to add more ram to the system right now (don’t even know if this thing will support 8 gb modules to push it up to 16). So the only way to go, was to somehow increase the swap on my system. This is the checklist for curious / researching Jason in the future. ...

Did I not just write about this, the other day with Emacs? I did, but Pycharm seems to have the same affliction. Pycharm, just like Emacs, stubbornly refuses to accept my Compose key combinations. Which means … you guessed it, no ‘,”,“ or ’ punctuation and all the other affordances, Compose gives me. Considering that I need both, Pycharm as well as Emacs in my life, it behooved me, that I go solve this too. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on October 22nd, 2021 You really ought to subscribe :) via NASA Johnson on Flickr Welcome to the October work letter! :) As usual, click the headers to wander off to the orginal articles. Over at Ars Technica, Researchers think a planet lost its original atmosphere, and built a new one In general, we don’t currently have the technology to image exoplanets unless they’re very large, very young, and a considerable distance from the star they orbit. Yet we can still get some sense of what’s in their atmosphere. To do that, we need to observe a planet that transits across the line of sight between Earth and its star. During a transit, a small percentage of the star’s light will travel through the planet’s atmosphere on its way to Earth, interacting with the molecules present there. ...

I want to leave VS Code behind me and move to using Emacs for mostly everything I write in the long haul. Emacs is the editor I use to putter around for any text editing I need to do, but most of my long form writing and coding were done in VS Code. And the more I use it (VS Code, not Emacs), the more uncomfortable I get, no matter how nice and shiny it is. ...

Shoutouts of Gratitude to the teachers who I learnt programming from over the past couple of years … Kushal Das, for bringing me in, teaching me the ropes and assuring me there was a place for me here Reuven Lerner, who unravelled Python for me and made me realise that languages were small, and the reason I was struggling was not Python, but because I wanted to understand all of computer science in too short a time frame.1 ...