Yulqen

Happy Guy Faulkes Day.

Been very busy with Linux this last week or so. VERY busy.

Have implemented pagination on this stream. See the really modern looking navigation links at the foot of the page. It’s functional and does the job.

It all got very confusing when trying to ensure that the relative links worked - I got confused by each post being a page or not; it transpires of course that the stream does not descend into each individual page (in Hugo terms) - it’s just a list.

This got me into quite a lot of trouble with .Scratch which I never got to work on the list content type and writing my own shortcode, which I eventually did to implement stream images.

Fell back to using absolute links in the shortcode, which is fine, but I was trying to get fancy, detecting whether the page we were on was paginated or not and setting a relative link accordingly.

Reassuringly, very few people will have any inkling about what I’m talking about - neither will I in a few days.

A ginger cat beneath a stool, sheltering from the rain:

Storm Babet has been and gone. Been pissing down for days.

Played golf at Gullane this week

A new quicknotes release today - done a lot this week.

Started to use rclone recently to back up my files to a remote server.

Very impressed so far and is simple to use for what I need, which is command-line-based, fully encrypted backups. Very much like rsync which is no surprise.

Bright, sunny day in Berwick. Looking forward to Wales v Argentina and Ireland v New Zealand later. Predicting big wins for Wales and NZ - let’s see.

If you’re a Scotland rugby fan, you can’t help but be embarrassed by their performance against Ireland on Saturday (a sorry 36-14 loss), for the following reasons.

• The pre-match arrogance (“we will end their winning run” - Blair Kinghorn)
• The failure to take points on offer in the first ten minutes
• The absolute and total acceptance of defeat within twenty minutes (whenever Ireland scored their second try)
• The players in tears on the bench (Kinghorn again)
• The trip on Jonny Sexton by Ollie Smith and the smirking when given the yellow card
• The pathetic handbags following the trip and little push by Sexton
• The total lack of creativity and ideas in the face of an admittedly great defence
• The Finn Russell being a bit of an arse once given the captain’s armband

There are probably many more reasons. I get the difficulty of the task, but as ever, Scotland made it far more difficult for themselves thanks to what seem to be endemic shortcomings.

I think it will take years to rebuild. Scotland have probably hit their ceiling and the only way is statis for a few years. Perhaps a decade, given the lack of kids coming through.

Ref:

• We understand Scotland fans’ disappointment
• A total slating by Tom English
• BBC Match Report

Absolutely pissing with rain here in Berwick since about 7pm last night, and forecast to continue all day today.

This is how it looks to Open AI - considerably brighter than reality but quite a nice little scene:

Fuck Emacs.

Updated the Programming page with an update on my latest venturing around the world’s programming language.

Scotland are playing Ireland in the World Cup tonight. Barely able to contain the dread.

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

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.

Fuck you, vim.”

Not posted for a while.

Testing a new rsync command with this one.