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....
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! Background I found Huginn, and am using it as my man friday.1 The “Problem” I run Hugo on two three machines. I’m tired of updating to the latest release manually....
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....
Don’t know if it’s the gym or the regular work beat, but I seem to be waking up later and later everyday. I don’t know what to do about this. I feel a little anxious about not having enough hours in the day. Python Why use comprehensions? Because it reads better. Like I advice the young ones in DPGLUG on writing. Write short, choppy sentences. They read better. With my problem sets … I should stop trying to generalise in advance and solve the specific problem first....