Dgplug

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 2nd, 2020. You really ought to subscribe :) Nothing really exciting this month. I had lots of work and could not quite focus on reading hard books or non fiction. I needed to escape from the humdrum of life So, I read a lot of Jack Reacher. I decided to read all of the Lee Child novels featuring the character. And all of that, started because I read a book, that followed Lee Child around for a year, describing his writing process and the work that goes into a Reacher novel. It’s been fun, reading. Like meeting an old friend. Considering that he writes about one a year, I find it slightly alarming that I have now read seventeen years of Child’s work in a month. ...

Whenever Emacs saves a file, it makes a backup of the original. So if I had a file.txt and I make changes and save it, Emacs firsts backs up the original to file.txt~. While I love this functionality, and it has saved me from a pickle more than once, I don’t love the way my folders get polluted with ~ files all over the place. My blog’s drafts folder had hundreds of these. ...

Could not focus much on programming today. So decided on doing things with Python programs. Nikola Upgrade I use Nikola to generate both my websites. It is an extremely easy to use, no fuss static site generator, which is easy on my server’s resources. Version 8.1.2 was released a few hours ago and I hopped on and installed it. I follow a slightly unconventional upgrade path, because I was terrified of breaking my server in the early days, when I was still learning about how to go about installing things on servers. ...

This post was sent to my newsletter on October 25th, 2020. You really ought to subscribe :) What I Learnt from Antifragile (III) What Does Not Kill Me … Antifragility for the Collective What does not kill me makes me stronger. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Maxims and Arrows The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms ...

I started playing with a way to control Git via Python. Kushal had asked me to write a program, that would show me the local git branches. So here it is! I call it Git the Branch. (painfully, punny, I know :)) And now I realise why he asked me to do this. The program itself is trivial. Here’s the code on my code repo, Gitlab, and Github. It just consists of me using GitPython to access the current folder via a GitPython Repo object. And then querying it for its branches. ...

Update, 2020/11/13: This has been working beautifully! I love the poems as they show up in my feed. This is a tiny little niche thing, I built all for my ownsome. It all started, when I got hooked on reading the daily poem, on the Poetry Foundation page. Learning Python as I am, I wondered if there was a way to have it come to my RSS reader. And so Poemfeed is a tiny little utility that does just that for me. ...