This is the first post of what I'm calling a Lazy
River of Curious Content.
This is a way to review stuff that I've been doing, dealing with, or find
interesting during the week recently (This was
originally written two weeks ago, May 3rd, my shoddy internet connectivity kept
me from posting it.). I'm loosely following the format that Justin Sherrill
uses with great effect over at
https://dragonflydigest.com
Learn NixOS by turning a Raspberry Pi into a Wireless Router Friend of the show, Anthony Scopatz, tried NixOS for the first time and provides a detailed report:
"While I had read the NixOS pamphlets, and listened politely when the faithful came knocking on my door at inconvenient times, I had never walked the path of functional Linux enlightenment myself"
Reading through that made me file away a todo of writing up how I use propellor (and why). But those todo sometimes just pile up for a while...
An interview of one of my long time nerd-crushes, Rob Pike. The questions focus on the Go programming language, but read carefully, specifically the tone and considerate nature of intent.
Owning up to still getting it wrong sometimes. Over on The Unix Historical Society list, there was a thread about the origin and meaning of Plan 9 from Bell Labs. Venerable computing deity Ken Thompson sends a private message to aforementioned computing demi-god Rob Pike, Rob forwards the admonishment back to the list.
I started playing with Krita a few weeks ago, using a tablet input device. I found out about Krita and felt empowered to try it thanks to this excellent explanatory video tutorial by David Revoy. Again, recurring theme of humility and gentle nature of creative high-output individuals. Thank you, David!
Fellow San Francisco Randonneurs cyclist Roy Ross passed away unexpectedly. A gentle soul. This thread on SFR gives a some sense of a quiet Deborah Ford put up some great photos of Roy, and the Metin Uz shared an album, with others pitching in
I set up a mumble server and have been mumbling with some old friends and family.
After Matthew and I chatted, I re-read his post about the XFree / X.Org fork and open source governance project death, then went hoping around some links and came across Rick Moen's fear of forking essay, and he followed up with this bit of Emacs / XEmacs history
I showed Matthias and Camille my first tracing using Krita, and Matthias made me aware of Grease Pencil - a way to do animations in Blender, and Camille sent me an awesome and sweet comic book she made about their cat.
Matthias showed me that there's a way in Git now to have git blame ignore
stylistic commit changes - see ipython
PR#12091 for how to set it
up, and #12277 where we start
using it. This was a pet-peeve of mine back when Nelle started to apply
semi-automated PEP-8 formatting to parts of the matplotlib
codebase - that it was making it more difficult to use git blame to track down
when lines were changed functionally, and why.
And then, while we were chatting about a custom LaTeX completer PR that he has open, he arrived at "wouldn't it be cool to throw and exception with the table-flip emoji in your code?" ... and a short while later, he made that work:
You can also see it in it's original tweet form and send Matthias some love. And by the way, Matthias has a new gig at Quansight.
I've also tried out Mupen64Plus - a Nintendo 64 emulator (which I found out about via OpenBSD ports list). I found some ROMs that fell off the back of a truck, but without a proper controller, it's kind of difficult to play (I tried with an SNES-like USB controller, no dice). So now I've ordered a USB N64-like controller.