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:
Neovim - I was pulled in by the most recent hype, mainly on YouTube, and the promise of a Lua-saturated nirvana. Lua does look pretty cool and Neovim is clearly a good editor once you trick it out, but tricking it out was the problem… Too much work. VSCode does most of it anyway.
The terminal. Managing two main work computers, on two different operating systems (Arch and Debian, having ditched NixOS recently, as promised), I’ve spent quite a lot of time recently getting my terminal in good shape. I’ve come to realise that life is a little too short to be back-and-forthing it between st, xterm (both of which have esoteric configuration requirements to say the least), gnome and alacritty. I just want to be able to Ctrl+V to paste into a buffer/file/window.
VSCode is pretty good. I don’t like Electron, but I’ll live with it. It’s just snappy enough. Plus, with some minimal configuration, I can translate most of my primciple vim bindings over.
“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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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…
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
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]
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.”
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
