Random Geekery
Collecting my attempts to improve at tech, art, and life
Tools
Stuff I found out there on the Internet, or some sort of new aspect of stuff I found out there on the Internet, focused on getting things done. The choice between this and Programming can be a little arbitrary.
Goto Address Mode Opens Links in Emacs
Feb 4, 2020
Use goto-address-mode to make links in Emacs buffers clickable.
Choosing a static site generator
Jan 31, 2020
tl;dr: If you're making a site for fun, use something you'll have fun with.
Jan 26, 2020
Tools [Taskwarrior Babysteps] · taskwarrior ·
tl;dr: Set up an account at Freecinc or inthe.AM to synchronize Taskwarrior tasks across all the machines!
Jan 25, 2020
I adjusted the default Nikola theme to show cover images!
Jan 1, 2020
TL;DR: Use C-x C-=, C-x C--, and C-x C-0 to scale text on the fly in your Emacs buffer.
Installing Emacs Documentation on POP!_os
Dec 1, 2019 (Updated Dec 1, 2019)
Tools · emacs · linux · info ·
Apt spells “emacs core docs” as “emacs-common-non-dfsg”.Nov 9, 2019 (Updated Nov 17, 2019)
Just declared
.emacsbankruptcy. Starting over withuse-package.
Colorized my go output with grc
Sep 8, 2019
Enjoying myself as I go through Learn Go with Tests by Chris James. I didn’t enjoy myself on the official tour, or with whatever LinkedIn course it was that I took. The structure and flow of the learn-by-testing piece gives me a familiar context and the pace seems just about right. It’s giving me ideas where I might enjoy Go for my own projects. So yeah I like it. Still having some tiny issues with the output of go test.
Taskwarrior Editing Refinements
Sep 5, 2019
Tools [Taskwarrior babysteps] · taskwarrior ·
tl;dr: edit and append give additional ways to update your Taskwarrior tasks. undo is there for the errors you catch quickly.
Jul 30, 2019
tl;dr: Use
xkcdpassto generate more secure passwords, like “correcthorsebatterystaple”.
May 27, 2019 (Updated May 27, 2019)
I installed the kitty terminal emulator for font ligatures on Linux, but it does other stuff too.
Pretty Print Terminal Files With Bat
May 24, 2019
batis like a fanciercatfor displaying file contents.Chronological Taxonomy Listings in Hugo
May 20, 2019
The archive pages now list tags and categories such that the ones with most recent posts come first!
Turning Taskwarrior Posts Into a Series
May 12, 2019
Tools · taskwarrior · hugo · site ·
There’s a new taxonomy for posts that are written in a particular order!
Feb 16, 2019
Tools [Taskwarrior Babysteps] · taskwarrior ·
Use Taskwarrior projects to organize closely related tasks!
Dec 1, 2018
Tools [Taskwarrior Babysteps] · taskwarrior ·
tl;dr: Use the
start,stop, andactiveTaskwarrior commands to manage what you’re doing right now.Nov 10, 2018
I put my frequently used links in a Hugo data template to cut down on copying and pasting between posts.
Aug 30, 2018
A short post noting Windows 10 keyboard shortcuts for virtual desktops
Setting Task Dependencies in Taskwarrior
Feb 19, 2018
Tools [Taskwarrior Babysteps] · taskwarrior ·
I’m not done reading a book until I finish the exercises. Taskwarrior can help me remember.
Feb 4, 2018
Tools [Taskwarrior Babysteps] · taskwarrior ·
I manually applied tag filters to keep task listings relevent in my previous Taskwarrior posts, but Taskwarrior provides contexts to apply filters automatically. Let’s use those instead.
Jan 2, 2018
Tools [Taskwarrior Babysteps] · taskwarrior ·
I checked out some library books again. Time to correctly record their due date in Taskwarrior.
Dec 25, 2017
Tools [Taskwarrior Babysteps] · taskwarrior ·
Merry Christmas! Time to organize my Taskwarrior tasks.
Dec 16, 2017 (Updated Dec 22, 2017)
Tools [Taskwarrior Babysteps] · taskwarrior ·
I ended up with a mess after half a year trying to use every feature of Taskwarrior. It’s time to focus on building solid knowledge one step at a time.
Oct 31, 2017
I found Wellington, a Sass compiler written in Go.
Oct 1, 2017 (Updated Oct 2, 2017)
Tools · music · macOS · beets · python ·
My macOS iTunes music library includes over 21,000 songs. Some of those tracks contain the wrong information. Wrong title, wrong album, wrong artist, wrong year.
beets and AppleScript helped me fix my incorrect track information.
Aug 6, 2017
I rushed through that post about logging money with org mode, and didn’t take much time to edit it. This bothers me. Today I went into
writegood-modeto catch my sloppiest writing mistakes.
Jul 31, 2017 (Updated Aug 5, 2017)
I am setting up Emacs org mode to track how I use my money. This is a healthy habit, which I applied in the past with a little paper notebook. This needs to be as easy as that little notebook, or I will never use it.
I only want to see how I use my money. This can eventually become part of a budget, but all I want today is the ability to make quick money notes.
- My friend paid me back some money they borrowed
- One of the housemates chipped in for groceries
- I treated myself to coffee.
Stuff like that. Let’s see what I come up with.
Jul 1, 2017
I try out archetype templates from the Hugo static site generator, smoothing the whole thing into my workflow with a bash script.
May 26, 2017
Notes on saving screenshots in OS X, so I don’t have to look it up again.
Jan 1, 2017
TL;DR: Cinnamon screenshot and recording shortcuts are in Settings -> Hardware -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> System.
Apr 17, 2016
I spent a little time this weekend creating yearly post archives for my Hugo site.
Nov 29, 2015
Note to self: use the [Bob Ross CSS][] that [Thomas Park][] conveniently worked out. [Bob Ross CSS]: https://gist.github.com/thomaspark/41f381048adcceb6d261 [Thomas Park]: http://thomaspark.co/2015/11/bob-ross-color-palette-in-css/
Sep 27, 2015
Hey it has been a while since I shuffled the site around completely. I’ll just redo the whole thing in Hugo.
Sep 14, 2015
I started writing about PNWPHP but got distracted and added “Suggested Reading” to my posts instead.
Sep 8, 2015
I can write Jekyll posts with reStructuredText now.
Jul 27, 2015
Tools · itunes · ruby · music ·
I nearly wrote a script that transfers my iTunes ratings to Rhythmbox. Instead I used Edgar Salgado’s version of iTunesToRhythm.
Draft Mode in Jekyll Templates
Jul 20, 2015
Use
site.show_draftsin templates if the local and live versions of your Jekyll site need to be different.Jul 19, 2015 (Updated Aug 7, 2015)
Jekyll currently generates the HTML for my site. I am curious about the experimental collections feature, and whether it could be useful for me.
Jul 16, 2015
Tools · atom-editor ·
I am slowly learning more about how to use Atom for real work. First requirement: my “real work” almost exclusively takes place on a virtual machine. Atom alone cannot handle editing those files. remote-atom to the rescue!
Jul 13, 2015
Tools · suse · atom-editor ·
Thought I’d try the Atom Editor on my openSUSE Tumbleweed install. RPMs and DEB files are available from the Atom site, and the RPM works just fine for me. There’s the markdown for my iTunes ratings graph post, a live preview, and some sort of Git integration showing up in the sidebar.
Jul 12, 2015
Octopress is “an obsessively designed toolkit for writing and deploying Jekyll blogs.” A blog post earlier this year by author Brandon Mathis described frustrations with Octopress 2, along with plans for Octopress 3. I didn’t use Octopress before, so I can’t tell you anything about how much better or worse the newest Octopress is. This release feels like a straightforward and useful extension to Jekyll. Apparently the older releases did not.
Jul 9, 2015
Thought I’d share TOKUHIROM‘s cpan-outdated tool, which simplifies the task of keeping your installed Perl 5 modules up to date. It simply lists available updates to Perl modules you have installed. That functionality is available in the CPAN shell with the
rcommand, but it is hard to beat the convenience of the cpan-outdated command line tool.Oct 4, 2014
I don’t know about you, but I had a pleasant Saturday. It started with an hour or so of the Coursera Programming Languages videos. I learned a little bit about SML, and have been trying to remember the instructor’s caution about comparing what’s learned in class to other languages. It’s supposed to be a fresh perspective on programming.
Sep 17, 2014
I installed Ubuntu 14.04 on a partition of my laptop today. This is not a novelty. What is unusual is the fact that today I decided to track what I installed before I felt like I had a “Minimum Viable Linux.” Turns out there was quite a bit.
Aug 14, 2014 (Updated Apr 10, 2017)
Tools [The Reply Perl REPL] · perl · reply · mojolicious ·
Time for a quick post about Reply, a new Perl toy from Jesse Luers. There will not be much for me to say, because I have only been playing with it for about twenty minutes.
Connect To MongoDB on a Vagrant box from the host
Aug 6, 2014
Yesterday I finished a little project to set up a reusable Vagrant box for MongoDB and Perl Mojolicious experiments. That project is okay as it is right now, but I would like to get at MongoDB from the host system.
Aug 5, 2014
Tools · virtualization · vagrant · perl · mongodb · mojolicious ·
TL;DR Install Vagrant & VirtualBox.
mkdir my-box && cd my-box && vagrant init brianwisti/trusty-mongo-mojo. Be aware that this is my first packaged Vagrant box, and it is probably not great.Jul 4, 2014
I have been spending much of my coding time in Python recently. This site is built in Pelican. Many lines of Python have been written for work. I have even been poking at Google App Engine in what spare time is available. The only disappointment is that all of these have been in Python 2. I would prefer to be using Python 3. There is a little free time today, so I will set up a nice Python 3 workspace.
Jun 18, 2014
TL;DR Set
GREP_OPTIONS='-RI --color=auto'. Or install ack.Jun 2, 2014 (Updated Jul 6, 2017)
I have been curious about the Emacs Client for a long time. Because Emacs can have a long startup time, it can be made to run in a persistent mode. All buffers are handled by a central process. Your editor interface connects to that central process rather than managing its own buffers. Thinking about the Emacs client is what started me down the path of studying Emacs as a client/server Lisp environment. Anyways, I looked up some blog posts to tell me what to do.
Pulling a Remote Branch In Git
May 31, 2014
TL;DR?
git branch -rto list remote branches.git checkout --track -b <local-branch> <remote>/<branch>to check your branch out.I Learned GitHub Has Interesting Links
May 30, 2014
Today I got to take part in a User Experience Research interview with some fine folks from GitHub. It was straightforward. We chatted for about half an hour, mostly discussing GitHub. Makes sense. They learned how I used it. Since there is so little of GitHub that I use, they got to show me some nifty things.
Elisp Functions Described in the Emacs Tutorial
May 27, 2014
Tools · emacs · elisp · tutorial ·
The other day I talked some sort of nonsense about organizing my notes into some sort of coherent blog post. Heck with that. Life is too short. Instead I will just dump them here and hope somebody finds them useful. Maybe later I can do something with it. For now it’s just supplemental material for the official Emacs tutorial
The Emacs Tutorial as ELisp Tour
May 24, 2014
Tools · emacs · elisp · tutorial ·
I am trying to really learn how to use GNU Emacs. One thing that strikes me is how the Emacs user interface can be thought of as a client application to an Emacs Lisp API. This is not a revolutionary thought, but it really stuck in my head. I reread the official tutorial, focusing on the functions rather than the keybindings that invoke them.
Exporting From Org to Markdown
May 16, 2014
Tools · emacs · org · markdown ·
TL;DR?
C-h v org-export-backendsto ensure that Markdown export is available.C-c C-e m minvokesorg-md-export-to-markdown. You may need to update Org Mode, which could be a fussy process.Mar 26, 2014
Tools · coffeescript · javascript ·
Ember.js is an impressive piece of work. It can also be painfully verbose. A little syntactic sugar would make that go down easier. EmberScript is CoffeeScript with fine-tuning specifically for Ember.js. Fine-tuning includes bits like replacing
classandextendswithEmber.classandEmber.extends.