No TV

Figure 1: ““Console Television Receiver”” by ellenm1 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Figure 1: ““Console Television Receiver”” by ellenm1 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When I got married I made the decision not to have a TV because I knew my personal tendency to let it suck up my attention and I did not want that as an additional distraction from the hard work of building and maintaining important relationships. My (now 23 year old) son and I are currently working through the first 3 seasons of Star Trek The Next Generation (TNG) on DVD.

Learn git and galthub without any marketing

OK, so a year or so later I’m back online with both a self-hosted git and blog presence. I had been using both github for code and github.io for my blog, but for various reasons I decided to stop putting content there. Walled gardens go away Walled gardens go way whenever it stops suiting the bottom line of the company. All the form posts from CompuServe (my first employer) are gone AOL Instant Messenger messages (another employer) are gone.

Selfhosting a Hugo blog with mysocket.io

…that time when you realize your blog is hosted on a web site who’s sole purpose is to support coding, and they plaster the motto

“Learn Git and Github without any code!”

all over their site, and you realize that its been taken over by marketing clones … and it’s time to do your geekly exit stage left and self host on a raspberry pi or something…

This is a HOWTO of the things I did to migrate my HUGO blog off github onto a self-hosted raspberry pi using mysocket.io.

The original setup is described here Publishing a blog on Github with Org and Hugo

The World Needs Visionaries

Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon Monday. I met him briefly at an internal company conference (the Amazon Machine Learning conference) when I worked there 2016. Figure 1: Jeff Bezos I admire him. He’s created things. He built a company that’s changing the world. He had vision. He (and his in-laws) took risks. He provided leadership (see the The Amazon Leadership Principals) and he knew when to get out of the way.

Of Typewriters, Scribe, LaTeX, Org mode, Hugo and Paper

1 What is this and why was it written?

This is my personal history of putting words-on-page-or-screen-or-blog-entry covering the period from the late 1970s to present (2020-12-05).

It was written (partially) at the request of JTR from whom I borrowed a Hugo blog theme. Thanks JTR.

I was writing a post where I wanted to include the \(\TeX\) symbol in the post, which is perfectly possible in emacs org mode where \(\TeX\) and \(\LaTeX\) are first class citizens, but it wasn’t working.

The blog exports to markdown via the ox-hugo Org exporter back end (lost yet?) which Hugo then translates to HTML which can then be previewed locally with Hugo’s own web server and then pushed to the live site, in my case, this site using git push.

I pinged JTR who, it turns out had little experience with \(\LaTeX\) and so was not able to help. Along the way, he asked me

Is there more you can tell me about use case for it? In other words, can I get you to vent some more about this, it’s interesting.

.bashrc as literate programming

1 Knuth gets annoyed at his publishers, \(\TeX\) is born.

Back in the late 70s Donald Knuth who was (and still is) publishing a seminal series of Computer Science text books got annoyed at the typesetting, layouts and font choices he was being presented by publishers. So he did what any self-respecting hacker who happened to be Donald Knuth would do: he created his own typesetting system called \(\TeX\) which (along with \(\LaTeX\) which borrowed heavily from SCRIBE) is something of a standard to this day in academic publishing.

Because, you know, why is it unreasonable to expect publishers to render simple equations, right?

\begin{multline*} \vec{E}_{\mathrm{tot}}= q\cdot k_{b}\cdot \dfrac{r}{r^3} \left\lgroup \frac{\hat{r}-\left(\dfrac{d}{2\cdot r}\right)\hat{d}} {\biggl(1+\left(\dfrac{d}{2\cdot r}\right)^2- \left(\dfrac{d}{r}\right)\hat{r}\cdot\hat{d}\cdot\cos(\theta) \biggr)^{3/2}} \right. \\ \left. {}- \frac{\hat{r}+\left(\dfrac{d}{2\cdot r}\right)\hat{d}} {\biggl(1+\left(\dfrac{d}{2\cdot r}\right)^2+ \left(\dfrac{d}{r}\right)\cdot\hat{r}\cdot\hat{d}\cdot\cos(\theta) \biggr)^{3/2}} \right\rgroup \end{multline*}

But wait, there’s more.

What a day for a daydream

“Ladies and Gentlemen, may I have your attention…” This piece began as some thoughts on “attention” and wound up as reflections on daydreams. I think I’m a fan of daydreaming. 1 Attention Attention is a finite commodity. You only have so much attention to give in your life, in your day. Parents want your attention. Brothers and sisters and friends want your attention. Teachers want your attention. Employers want your attention.

All we are saying, is give init.el a chance

On this Armistice Day, 2020, commemorating the end of “The war to end all wars” 119 years ago, I reflect that if the whole world were busy fiddling with their emacs configs there would be no more war. Well… so the treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations did not work out as planned…so maybe we look for community in the small instead. There is community that has grown out of research labs in Boston (a city notable for its contribution to the birth of other well known communities).