https://yulqen.org/blog/ Recent content in Yulqen - Blog on Yulqen Hugo en-gb Tue, 06 Jan 2026 10:12:12 +0000 https://yulqen.org/blog/eden_a_command_line_journaling_application/ Tue, 06 Jan 2026 10:12:12 +0000 https://yulqen.org/blog/eden_a_command_line_journaling_application/ I started writing eden—a CLI tool for logging and basic journaling—three years ago, when Go was at 1.17. I was learning Go, had written a few simple programs, and was hooked on the “notes for thinking” trend from tools like Roam Research and Obsidian. The idea: command-line only, entries saved to a database (not markdown files) for easy linking and search. I like databases and living in the terminal. Building it slowly with TDD was fun at first, but I got bored and moved on. https://yulqen.org/blog/decent-bread-recipe/ Sun, 06 Oct 2024 09:53:11 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/decent-bread-recipe/ This is a decent recipe if you like a rustic, hipster loaf like I do. Thanks to some chap on the X. Ingredients 475g bread flour 1 packet active dry yeast (7g) 1 tsp salt 365g filtered water Steps mix all ingredients in a bowl with a wooden spoon until it just comes together (2 min) let rise overnight (8-10h) move dough to a heavily floured surface, scrape from the edges of the bowl to avoid collapsing the air bubbles form into a one big rough oblong shape cut dough in half lengthwise transfer each half directly onto a baking rack, pull ends to stretch into a rough baguette shape bake at highest temp (500F) for 25 minutes on lowest rack in the oven with convection For big air pockets avoid pressing down on the dough at any stage. https://yulqen.org/blog/running_syncthing_on_openbsd/ Fri, 05 Apr 2024 05:36:24 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/running_syncthing_on_openbsd/ I am trying OpenBSD again. I momentarily went back to NixOS and then thought better of it. It’s great, it’s clever, it’s a tinkerer’s nightmare. So, on the old Thinkpad X201 upon which I throw operating systems to play around, I have installed OpenBSD again. The installation didn’t go particularly well this time and I had a few problems with doas. Anyway. And then it came to installing and setting up syncthing which I rely upon to keep all my machines in the same state. https://yulqen.org/blog/im_a_below_average_intelligence_progammer/ Thu, 07 Mar 2024 08:51:54 +0000 https://yulqen.org/blog/im_a_below_average_intelligence_progammer/ I have just read I’m a programmer and I’m stupid and have been inspired to say the same thing. I wrote some time ago about Being on the left of the bell curve and this blog post accounts for the programmer/coding aspect of that. I follow Hacker News and my RSS feed reader updates constantly from dozens of blogs about programming, programming languages and similar technologies. I find most of it fascinating and I’ve always suffered from over-curiosity to the expense of productivity. https://yulqen.org/blog/my_default_applications_2023/ Sun, 12 Nov 2023 14:02:56 +0000 https://yulqen.org/blog/my_default_applications_2023/ Inspired by https://hunden.linuxkompis.se/2023/11/09/my-default-applications-2023.html: Type Description Operating system: Arch Linux (on desktop and laptops); Debian on servers Window manager: i3 Web browser: Librewolf, Firefox Web feed client: Newsboat Source code: Source Hut Bookmark manager: quicknote - the source of many quicknotes Email client: aerc Email provider: Purelymail Calendar: Khal Contact book: Khard CalDAV/CardDAV provider: Radicale Instant messaging: Dendrite (Matrix) Audio and video calls: NA Cloud storage: NA (at present) Password manager: pass, Bitwarden Terminal emulator: xfce4-terminal Shell: Bash Text editor: vim - RIP Bram Moolenaar Word processing: vim, Pandoc Code editing/IDE: vim Notes: vim To-do application: taskwarrior Music player: mpd, ncmpcpp, mpv Video player: mpv Podcast client: Antennapod File manager: Bash Photo management: Darktable Budgeting/finances: hledger Shopping list: Microsoft To-do - to sync with my wife Meal planning: Trello https://yulqen.org/blog/golf_at_gullane/ Sat, 21 Oct 2023 12:29:36 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/golf_at_gullane/ Got a great game of golf in though - at Gullane No. 2. Here is the card (mine is the top line). Couple of big 8s ruined it. Don’t think I’ve ever scored so many 5s and don’t remember last time I went round without a 6, so quite a unique round. Gullane No.2 Scorecard No. 2 is quite a bit easier than No. 1 and the rough is lenient here. https://yulqen.org/blog/quietly_moving_on_from_nixos/ Sat, 22 Apr 2023 09:14:11 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/quietly_moving_on_from_nixos/ - TLDR: “I’m not clever enough and life is too short.”. The bald fact is that I spend a lot of time configuring stuff on computers. Far more time than getting anything productive done. I guess I am shooting for some kind of paradise state (free software, Unix-based, command-line focused, 100% configurable, reproducible, free from the pervasive tentacles of big tech, ads, spyware and anything that looks like Windows) which, as everyone knows, does not exist. https://yulqen.org/blog/run_your_life_with_taskwarrior/ Tue, 18 Apr 2023 19:57:42 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/run_your_life_with_taskwarrior/ Introduction Much of the material on the internet tells you how to use taskwarrior, but little of it explains why you should use it. Actually, this isn’t technically true. There are enough plaintext, privacy, command-line and free software advocates out there who eschew proprietary, subscription/cloud-based productivity web applications like Notion, Roam, Todoist, Trello and all the rest, and who praise taskwarrior’s power. But I’ve found that much of this material ends up reguritating the basics of taskwarrior’s functionality (projects, tags, reports, UDAs) which gets tiresome after a while. https://yulqen.org/blog/the_cats_have_started_killing/ Tue, 18 Apr 2023 15:05:58 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/the_cats_have_started_killing/ The cats have started killing again. Several mice, including one which was still alive in the morning. We tried to nurse it back to life wrapped in a tea towel in the salad spinner and gave it peanut butter on sesame Rivita, but it died. We slipped it in a nappy sack and put it in the back room bin where it eventually got covered in old cat meat. That was a few days ago and it’s still there. https://yulqen.org/blog/trouble_with_usb_drives_in_openbsd/ Tue, 13 Sep 2022 08:31:41 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/trouble_with_usb_drives_in_openbsd/ Coming from a Linux background, creating drives on OpenBSD is a little weird. You use fdisk to create a suitable “meta” partition on a drive - one of four available, and then inside that you use disklabel to create up to 16 paritions that are used for your files. Details are given, as ever, in the OpenBSD FAQ. I use git-annex to manage my file archive and I love git-annex! I use it completely manually (I don’t use git-annex assistant) and I’ve allowed a single repository to become far too big, spanning across multiple drives and servers, but that is an issue for another day. https://yulqen.org/blog/being_below_average/ Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:50:35 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/being_below_average/ Once I took a IQ test and I came out slightly to the left of the peak of the bell curve. Acordingly, I can claim that I am slightly below average intelligence. That’s a good thing. At first I was surprised because like everyone else I chanced that I was slightly more intelligent than the next guy. I had this thought when I was taking the test - I knew I was getting the majority of the questions right. https://yulqen.org/blog/vimdiff/ Wed, 17 Aug 2022 15:06:57 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/vimdiff/ git difftool You could just do: git difftool --tool=vimdiff --no-prompt This will open git diff in vim. To tell git to always use vimdiff: git-config --global diff.tool vimdiff git-config --global merge.tool vimdiff Omit --global to set these for the repo in the working directory. Once these settings are set, you can do git difftool to launch it. Another useful config is difftool.prompt - this will stop Vim prompting about launching vimdiff: https://yulqen.org/blog/hosed/ Sun, 24 Jul 2022 20:40:04 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/hosed/ A large person powerhosing a mobility scooter - July 2022 https://yulqen.org/blog/two_dualities/ Sat, 23 Jul 2022 20:54:20 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/two_dualities/ I’ve already mentioned that I spent the morning in Berwick today. I went to two (the only two) second-hand bookshops and each yielded a barely-notable event that I am going to make internet-famous regardless. In Slightly Foxed I found a copy of Research for Writers by Ann Hoffman. This was the bible on writing research back in the day and this was the edition that will never sell as it pre-dates the internet by several years. https://yulqen.org/blog/zettlekasten/ Sat, 23 Jul 2022 19:16:00 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/zettlekasten/ I’ve found it interesting to have found this Reddit community over the last couple of days. “Antinet” is apparently a reaction to the PKM fad currently prevalent in some parts of the internet. Antinet (which stands for Analogue, Numeric, Something, Something) is deemed by its creator (Scott P. Scheper) to be the purist’s Zettlekasten, untarnished by digital tools, which, he claims, notetaking-Nazi Niklas Luhmann himself would be using today as he did during his sociological heyday. https://yulqen.org/blog/saturday_in_berwick/ Sat, 23 Jul 2022 17:20:07 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/saturday_in_berwick/ We went to The Granary Gallery in Berwick today for a coffee and the weather was nice enough to take it outside. Unlike most of the rest of the town, the patio area wasn’t pasted with seagull excrement (Marygate is particularly enwhitened, adding to its delapidation). I’m not a Berwicker or have been in-tune enough during the five years I’ve lived here to have noticed whether this is an annual thing or arising from the weather, the economy, climate-change, or what. https://yulqen.org/blog/of_mere_being/ Thu, 21 Jul 2022 16:01:52 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/of_mere_being/ Go read Of Mere Being by Wallace Stevens. The palm at the end of the mind, Stevens’ poetry defies explanation and that is an enigmatic and wonderful first line. For me this poem has such a baking glow: the palm, the gold-feathered bird, the bronze. The palm brings the heat and the desert. And all of it at the “end” of the mind. At a boundary of space and time, when the mind and reason matters no longer, far from meaning. https://yulqen.org/blog/heatwave_2022/ Mon, 18 Jul 2022 13:31:13 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/heatwave_2022/ The country is in meltdown, for two whole days. Dire warnings are being made about the threat to life and many schools are closed. “Climate change in action” once again? It’s even hot in Berwick. 💓 Heat map of UK - 18 July 2022 However, it does seem to be significantly hotter elsewhere in Europe. And consider the likes of Iraq and Kuwait, based on another map on the Telegraph web site. https://yulqen.org/blog/create_new_partition_openbsd/ Sun, 17 Jul 2022 07:46:14 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/create_new_partition_openbsd/ When I installed OpenBSD, the autoinstaller created a partition table for me. Interestingly (and I only just discovered this), it left a percentage of the disk free. This is a brilliant strategy, because it saves you having to do a lot of annoying resizing when you want to change things. In my case, I wanted to add a new partition of about 10G or so, for a /jails thing - check out https://www. https://yulqen.org/blog/using_bash_in_vim/ Mon, 03 Jan 2022 09:05:00 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/using_bash_in_vim/ This is great if you like vim. https://yulqen.org/blog/facebook-clegg/ Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://yulqen.org/blog/facebook-clegg/ And so is the other guy, obviously… https://yulqen.org/blog/installing-perl/ Sat, 23 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://yulqen.org/blog/installing-perl/ (‘Wee break’ as in a short period of time (Scottish), not a ‘wee break’ like in televised snooker, tennis, etc). Context In October 2021 I was setting up the x220 with a new environment (KDE, Arch, etc) [UPDATE July 2022: KDE, honestly??]. I wanted Perl, so this is what I did. I also wanted to run my on-add_scheduled_work_task.pl script for adding lines to the remote REMIND instance in taskwarrior. Additional CPAN modules needed for this to work: https://yulqen.org/blog/cats/cat_kills/ Mon, 21 Jun 2021 18:30:49 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/cats/cat_kills/ Ah, springtime! A time of awakening, rebirth, burgeoning buds - and avian bloodshed. And a good deal of mammal death, too. This year we are taking account of the savagery, perhaps to try to atone for the guilt we suffer for allowing Sadie, Cinnamon and Bob to exact such terror on the local wildlife. Here then is a simple list of slaughtered fauna for 2021. UPDATE: 2022 I have decided to resume updating this. https://yulqen.org/blog/remind_me_to_read/ Thu, 20 May 2021 17:05:00 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/remind_me_to_read/ Articles on the web Anthony Campbell site - particularly the Links page A proper old school HTML blog with interesting content and no bullshit or Javascript. A Love Letter to Plain Text Another one. About plain text. Journalling on Linux And not filesystem journalling either. Building a Notetaking System with Vanilla Vim I fell out of love with vimwiki and Obsidian after a few days, but I have to use vim. https://yulqen.org/blog/resettings-the-cooker/ Wed, 19 May 2021 20:53:04 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/resettings-the-cooker/ In particular - a Howden’s cooker: To reset it, you have to switch off the power for 10 seconds, then turn it back on again. Use the down arrow to set the clock the right time, then switch the oven back on. Rest easy. https://yulqen.org/blog/how_to_connect_to_wifi_using_nmcli/ Tue, 18 May 2021 17:17:03 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/how_to_connect_to_wifi_using_nmcli/ Something I’ve been enjoying on OpenBSD is the relative simplicity of wifi networking compared to Linux. In OpenBSD, you put your SSID details inside /etc/hostname.iwm0 or similar (depends on driver name for your interface). Check out hostname.if(5). I forgot about this when revisiting my Debian laptops recently. I’ve used various means of connecting to wifi on Linux in the past, but currently I’m using NetworkManager, and I find it a pain to use. https://yulqen.org/blog/wasm_openbsd_chromium/ Mon, 17 May 2021 20:54:01 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/wasm_openbsd_chromium/ We all need to be able to use Zoom nowadays, as much as I hate it. OpenBSD’s has sensibly locked down a lot of shit, and one example is WASM in Chromium. Launch Chromium like this: ENABLE_WASM=1 chrome --enable-wasm. You don’t get a client obviously. You have to use the web client, so make sure you click the correct link. https://yulqen.org/blog/cats/treecreeper_killer/ Mon, 17 May 2021 19:42:59 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/cats/treecreeper_killer/ This cat kills treecreepers. He is a very naughty boy. Bob the cat https://yulqen.org/blog/intro/ Mon, 17 May 2021 19:39:13 +0100 https://yulqen.org/blog/intro/ Introduction Another new template, another new site, another new attempt. Bobbins.