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Short temporal updates. Antisocial.

Wednesday, 7 June 2023

I’m back on vim. Vanilla vim. vim9 vim.

This post is tagged with: vim
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Monday, 15 May 2023

After many years of slagging off VSCode and being a total vim snob (and oftentimes an Emacs snob - even worse), today I did a big switch to VSCode.

Reasons:


“Vim has been a faithful companion to me since I switched off Windows many years ago and found myself in Terminal.app, and then Linux, where it shone.

gvim. vi. vim. Neovim. A thousand vimrcs and editing text “at the speed of thought”. Thank you for that.

Fuck you, vim.”

This post is tagged with: vscode linux vim
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Friday, 12 May 2023

Not posted for a while.

Testing a new rsync command with this one.

This post is untagged.
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Friday, 28 April 2023

gnome-web is totally broken for me. Can’t seem to get to any site without it crashing. Shame, because I like the idea of having separate web applications segrated and integrated into gnome shell.

This post is tagged with: gnome
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Tuesday, 18 April 2023

I tried Github Pages with Jekyll and it didn’t go well. Couldn’t see the theme when it went live. Jekyll seems like last decade. Hugo ain’t no walk in the park either. What the fuck is the situation with static site generators, is this the best it can be?


Fuck Emacs. (😆)

This post is tagged with: emacs
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Monday, 27 March 2023

I am struggling with NixOS. Installing an old version of Pycharm Professional is the challenge and even ChatGPT doesn’t know how to do it. So called experts on the NixOS Discourse are providing answers to similar questions from people who just want to install something in their system outside of nixpkgs and even they are routinely getting it wrong.

How to install Pycharm 2021.3.3, when that is not the latest, packaged version? It’s very frustrating and forcing me to consider getting out of the Nix world.

This post is tagged with: nixos
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Sunday, 26 March 2023

Keeping the fires warm…

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Monday, 2 January 2023

HNY.


NixOS is computing nirvana.

This post is tagged with: nixos
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Tuesday, 20 December 2022

Happy to be a contributor to Denote which is a simple Emacs package for notetaking. I really like it. My contribution is just documentation, but there is more to come as I learn Emacs - possibly some code on protecting journal files from accidental duplication.

This post is tagged with: emacs
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Monday, 19 December 2022

We now have automated builds for this site on Sourcehut, which I have recently started using.


What if mindfulness is bullshit?

This post is tagged with: mindfulness
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Sunday, 11 December 2022

Hello! Still here.

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Thursday, 20 October 2022

Cold and wet today.

It is International Men’s Day soon.

This post is tagged with: art
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Tuesday, 11 October 2022

Been reconfiguring computers. Running a mixture of Pop_OS! and Arch Linux on two of them now. One of my machines running OpenBSD is dying and another had problems, so I wiped one of them.

I like so much about OpenBSD but I wanted to switch back to Linux for a while. Linux is more performant and has better tooling available for software development and that’s what I’m focusing on at the moment. This will change at some point, but for now…

This post is tagged with: openbsd linux
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Sunday, 25 September 2022

The purpose of a budget is to help thy purse to fatten. It is to assist thee to have thy necessities, and insofar as attainable, thy other desires. It is to enable thee to realise thy most cherished desires, by defending them from thy casual wishes. Like a bright light in a dark cave, thy budget shows up the leaks from thy purse, and enables thee to stop them and control thy expenditures for definite and gratifying purposes. – The Richest Man in Babylon

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Tuesday, 13 September 2022

Lovely bright day today.

A great day to release a hastily-written blog post on formatting USB sticks.

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Friday, 9 September 2022

Didn’t get on in time to mark it yesterday so marking it now. QE2 has died.

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Tuesday, 30 August 2022

Trying out some web quoting ideas with a new plugin for FF.


In April 2017, Microsoft announced that Wunderlist would eventually be discontinued in favor of Microsoft To Do, a new multi-platform app developed by the Wunderlist team that has direct integration with the company’s Office 365 service.[2][3]

Source: Wunderlist - Wikipedia


The web is still a very young medium, and it has been influenced more than anything else by print media design. There is so much more that can be done with text on a screen than is being done today. Citations, drawing, chat, speech-to-text. There are opportunities everywhere, and the bar is low! If we are serious about unlocking the value of knowledge we should consider how to improve every part of the knowledge production stack, and that includes reading. As Laurel Schwulst says: “Imaginative functionality is important, even if it’s only a trace of what was, as it’s still a sketch for a more ideal world.”

Source: Welcome to Quotebacks by Tom Critchlow and Toby Shorin

This post is tagged with: snippet
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Sunday, 28 August 2022

Tired.

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Wednesday, 24 August 2022

Ignore everything I said about Microsoft. They let me back in.


As someone once said, just go back to Taskwarrior.

This post is tagged with: taskwarrior plaintext microsoft
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Monday, 22 August 2022

Forget the moralising about freedoms, access to source code and the wielding of power over the innocent gen-pop computer user spouted by the likes of Richard Stallman and Co - MICROSOFT WOULDN’T LET ME LOG INTO MY OWN FUCKING MINECRAFT SERVER THIS AFTERNOON SO THAT I COULD ENJOY MINING DIAMONDS WITH MY SON and that makes them evil.

Because I reinstalled their shitty Microsoft Authenticator app on Android, I couldn’t use their shitty 2FA to log in and when I tried to use a backup method (emailed code instead), and they told me I’d “requested too many codes, please try again tomorrow” the first time I tried it. Really, Microsoft??

The beauty of it was, when you reinstall the Authenticator app, you of course have to log in to use it - and then they require you to use the Authenticator app to obtain the 2FA code to be able to log in.

Do I even need you, Microsoft?

This has led me to reconsider having a Microsoft account at all, but the rollcall of dependencies is long enough to fret about.

Although I barely use their shitty fucking software explicitly, thanks to their parasitic takeovers of previously morally and qualitatively good applications and services over the years (I’ll use Minecraft and Github as examples), I would have to pause to consider the consequences.

Yet the very fact that I’m scared off of walking away… The level of vendor lock-in - that should be the reason to go, right there.

I keep Windows 11 around on a partition but only really for Ableton Live. Shameful.

Their sinister “philanthropist”, media-bribing co-founder.

Their cringworthy appropriation of Linux.

Their placement of ads in their shitty file browser.

I could go on, and I could go on about how unfuriatingly hard it is to format numbered lists in MS Word. Just die, Microsoft. Right now?

And… They’re slowly ruining Minecraft. Everyone knows it. It’s only a matter of time before they kill the Java edition and eradicate the very last remnants of Notch. I’m sceptical about Github, where most of my code lives. Copilot is a repugnant idea. I hate VS Code [but God does everyone bang on about it]. The Xbox gathers dust beneath the telly so that’s easily killable…

I’d have to do a some careful dismantling but I am tempted. If I don’t get back on Minecraft by tomorrow night…

This post is tagged with: rant microsoft linux
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Thursday, 18 August 2022

I keep getting reminders at work telling me that I need to refresh my Diversity and Inclusion mandatory training. I had a quiet afternoon so thought I’d get it over and done with; turns out I still have a couple of months validity left - I last did it in October 2021. Can’t believe I’m being made to do that course once a year but that’s the reality when you work for a large organisation in these pitiful times. No one has the corporate bollocks to stand up to the D&I mob. Jacob Rees-Mogg is absolutely right.

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Wednesday, 17 August 2022

I keep having to look up the specifics of the markdown that works with Hugo and the search trail takes me to the goldmark Github page then onto to CommonMark and eventually to the actual spec, which is here. Bookmarked.

This post is tagged with: markdown
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Sunday, 14 August 2022

Grinning swimmer holding medal

I’ve had enough of BBC coverage of the European Championships (and latterly the Commonwealth Games). Too much positivity for my liking, it wears you down eventually.

The Commonwealth Games was rigged so that England did better than they should have done, cheating Scotland and the SNP out of medals and glory; and no one from the likes of Uganda, Kenya or Turks & Caicos was ever interviewed. Wrong type of minorities.

Athletics is fundamentally a boring activity and running 200 metres can never involve strategy or tactics no matter how much they pay Michael Johnson (who looked like a wino) to tell us it does.


Listening to: Carbon Based Lifeforms.


Went to Tesco today and filled a barrow two-thirds.

Tesco barrows

Exciting things happening parallel to the mundane, just not reportable.

This post is tagged with: berwick-upon-tweed music
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Thursday, 11 August 2022

Leaving Shetland today.

This is the coastline at the northwestern corner of the Shetland mainland at Eshaness. Couldn’t stay long as the children were scared of the cliffs!

Shetland coastline at Eshaness

Shetland coastline at Eashaness

This post is tagged with: excursions
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Thursday, 4 August 2022

Went to Lindisfarne today for a wander round. Did the nature trail circuit which was very much off the beaten track and a decent length walk. There’s this white pyramid thing there.

We ate lunch at The Barn at Beal.

Got home to find a bat in the sink, as detailed in the cat kill log.

Holy Island Pyramid

Holy Island pyramid thing

This post is tagged with: excursions photos
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Tuesday, 2 August 2022

Barrow-in-Furness in August.

Barrow-in-Furness Tesco Extra in the rain

This post is tagged with: photos
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Friday, 29 July 2022

Now I know about GrapheneOS.

Looking for a potential alternative to stock Android on my OnePlus 5 which ran out of updates some time ago. Not sure if these so called “privacy-focused” mobile OSs are any good. I’ve tried Lineage in the past and it was ok. Maybe I should look again.

Yawn.

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Thursday, 28 July 2022

Found myself watching Ted Hughes’ Crow at Fifty: a Seminar on YouTube. Crow is one collection of [many] by Hughes that I’ve yet to really dig into. It’s at the opposite end of the spectrum to Moortown Diaries which I love, in terms of theme and style. That fact it draws its own seminar says it all. After watching nearly all of it, I wonder about poetric interpretion and about what academics will do or say or think to perpetuate a theory.

This post is tagged with: poetry
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Wednesday, 27 July 2022

I got to grips with the problems I was having with Hugo last night. I now understand that most of my problems are solved by including an _index.md file in the foot of any section you want to branch deeper from, and including content in that file.


Added a Programming page - a high level summary of the languages I’ve dabbled with over the years. This might get fleshed out over time as I recall more of what I’ve done.

This post is tagged with: code hugo
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Tuesday, 26 July 2022

First time I tried Hugo a few years ago I binned it after a few days of banging my head against brick wall. It is not friendly to a non-programmer. The documentation can be terse, often blurring the line between web stuff and Go-specific terminology that has nothing whatsover to do with a web site (arrays and slices, for example), with very little hand-holding or context-setting. I’ve written lots of computer programs, including programs written in Go, and I struggle with Hugo.

Tonight I’ve been trying to add a new page about/programming and been getting into knots understanding the often subtle issues related to layouts, lookup order, page types, leaf bundles, branch bundles, sections, and so on. Think I need to sleep on it.


Went to see Minions: The Rise of Gru at The Maltings this morning. The autism-friendly screening, which was just loud enough to mask the crisp packet scrunching from the row behind.

Largely forgettable film, but it was nice to go the pictures with the family.


Edited the posts and stream templates to add tags to the bottom. If there are no tags, it will be say that.

This post is tagged with: hugo berwick-upon-tweed
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Monday, 25 July 2022

Been out and about in Fife today. At times, wet.


Added an email address to the About page, just in case anyone wishes to say hello.


Bob and Boris

Bob (at front: our cat) and Boris (neighbour’s cat). They look nonchalent but they’re wary of each other and don’t really get along.

Boris thinks it is his right to enter our house to eat Bob’s food. Boris lives with a tortoisehell cat called Maggie who often visits. She is similarly entitled.

Bob and Boris

This post is tagged with: cats hugo
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