Switching to self-hosted WordPress
For various reasons, I decided to ditch wordpress.com and self-host this blog.
It might turn out to be a terrible idea, but I’ll stick with it for a year.
Some motivations:
- better control through plugins, more flexibility over time
- the .blog domain is more expensive, I don’t care for it
New posts (after this one) will appear at abacusnoir.com, older ones will continue to be available at abacusnoir.blog (and be redirected to the new site for some time).
Generally interesting links – Mar 2021
Books
- Damn, Douglas Adams didn’t enjoy writing either 😟 (pic above)
- Math in Moby-Dick
- Pynchon’s piece in the NYT Books section
Tools and practices
- In which I develop an unhealthy obsession with small mechanical keyboards: The Planck
- They can be ergonomic too
- On bringing back the old git email flow
- VSCode is really, really big
- Why Mastodon isn’t the full solution to the problems of Twitter
- Keeping my eye on the development of the Lem editor
Misc
- Unlike the 90s and before, the government is trying hard to report UFO sightings, but no one cares
- The fascinating account of Walter Pitts (never knew about the connection with Norbert Weiner and the earlier beginnings of what came to be known as Cybernetics)
- A counterpoint tale from academia, on certain ideological forms
- David Suchet on how he speaks like Poirot
- Chris Hedges sounds the alarm
- Some Tom ‘n Jerry for you: Cat Concierto
- Meeting the “soul guards” of Gengis Khan
Systems
- Un-intuitive performance trade-offs
- Sussman on flexible systems
- On biologically-inspired computing
- Another fun Gilad Bracha talk
- On Smalltalk
- On Unison
- On Tuple Spaces
- Looking at some good ideas that were forgotten with Joe Armstrong, a short while before he passed away
- A manifesto on Protocols, not Platforms
Programming
- A take on Async programming in Rust
- Apparently, Python includes Tcl
- The continuing relevance of the Solid principle
- The Linux kernel is nothing like what it was 15 years ago when I last mucked around in it … here’s a look at the intersection of
bpfandio_uring
The Hobbit
Mid-way through a reading of the illustrated version1 of The Hobbit.
- Well, there are many today, this is the one by Jemima Catlin)
Old soundtracks and new ones
I just discovered the music of Eduard Artemyev, and … it’s something I like now.
I came across the soundtrack for Stalker, then realized the same person had composed the soundtracks for other Tarkovsky movies.
He was born in 1937 (for perspective, that’s from before World War 2 started !), and … is not only alive, but still working until very recently!
He was experimenting with electronic music in the 60s, way before synthesizers were commonly used or available.
The Solaris soundtrack is from 1972, and he composed a new soundtrack as recently as 2016.
That’s a long, long time to be doing something.
Roam isn’t there yet
I’ve observed Roam periodically slowing down to a crawl, with individual keystrokes (yes) taking a second to be played out, filters taking several seconds to process “selections”, and … I haven’t even started using queries yet.
Part of the trouble might have been my own over-enthusiasm a few months ago, when I went all-in with it, getting into a “mind-meld” with it.
This was really great for a while, too, but that meant that when it abruptly became unusable, it was really painful.
Meanwhile, a few other things have been evolving.
Obsidian largely “just works”. I’ve been trying out Obsidian Publish, and it’s headed in a direction I like, and am willing to pay for.
DevonThink, my “bucket store” for a few years now, has begun to add first-class support for Markdown, explicitly keeping compatibility with Obsidian and Roam.
Tinderbox has always really had what I needed (super-flexible notes, and programmability, albeit in a “perl-ish” syntax), and every release improves support for markdown, zip links (those [[...]] references that are nice to use within markdown for making quick links (and backlinks) between notes).
OmniOutliner is … not evolving features, but it’s a robust cross-platform native outliner app, supporting rich embedding and at least theoretically allowing arbitrary levels of scriptability in JS.
Now I’m still a “Believer” in Roam, but not all use cases need “multi-player” (and for the ones that do, there really isn’t any other good alternative).
For now though, most of my use case are very much “single-player”, and for that it’s very hard to beat native apps (especially the non-electron ones).
I do have to get over the hurdle of using un-popular apps, non-mainstream apps, apps that aren’t “in the news”, etc. but … it turns out they’re just as solid, and there are enough users to get assistance and share and discuss concerns, and so on .
So, I’m not giving up on this “mind-meld” level of personal interactivity with apps that help me think, or break down things, or just keep stuff around for me to look at later — I’m just planning to do more of that with some of the local, native apps mentioned above.
Crystal growing
Got one of these and it pretty much worked as advertised.
This is after about three weeks of leaving it unattended.
I was pleasantly surprised by how it turned out, because we didn’t stir it too well, and didn’t really “arrange” the stones at all, and we were expecting it to be just a bed of crystals at the bottom.
In the beginning nothing happened for the first week, but then it ended up “growing upwards”, a bit more every day, which was fun to watch!
I think we’re going to check out more adventurous versions of this now, maybe combining colors?
Monthly recap (Mar 2021)
Major updates
- Weekend trip to Carmel
Minor updates
- Got a haircut after a long time, lol
- Trying out Fastmail as an email provider
Watched/read/played/made
- Re-started reading Against the Day (on and off over a few years now …)
- Started reading The Hobbit with Tara
- Experimented with a “Crystal growing kit“
- Watched a bit of How to train your dragon with Tara
- Watched Can’t get you outta my head (Adam Curtis’ new docuseries)
- Invented “Scooter Polo” where she kicks a ball while on the scooter (good, dumb, fun)
The little wallet that could …
Recently became _aware_, for a few moments, of the wallet in my pocket.
I used to have a big, thick one I carried around everywhere.
One day, I got sick of it and looked into card wallet instead.
I ended up getting this Alpine Swiss wallet — when I initially got it, I was worried it would fall apart, but it has lasted for nearly a decade now
Abacus Noir 