Wednesday weblog: Week ending 2024-11-06
| review, weblog, weeklyI used to write weekly reviews. Nudged by Doing weeknotes, I want to get back to doing them. I'm still figuring out how I'd like to put these notes together as part of a weekly review process picking up some stuff from my blog posts, toots, Org inbox, and journal entries. That way, I can revisit fleeting notes and flesh them out a little more, notice and celebrate progress, and radiate intent.
Do I want to leave it on Wednesdays (chosen for its alliteration with weblog, with no particular deep thought about it) or go back to Fridays like before? Wednesdays might be a good idea, actually, since I might still be able to schedule some tasks for Thursday and Friday.
Anyway, over the last seven days:
- EmacsConf:
- Improved the Makefile we use in EmacsConf so that it detects the prefixes from the original files in the directory and builds various intermediate files (reencoded.webm, opus, vtt, normalized opus, main.webm).
- While the kiddo was at an extracurricular activity, I listened to talks for the upcoming EmacsConf and annotated transcript PDFs so that I can edit the captions later. It was very enjoyable and something I could do with gloves on, which was great because the weather's getting pretty cool. I'm looking forward to using pdf view to flip through the exported annotations in Emacs. Yay! (toot)
- Processed lots of talks and captions.
- Wrote some code to skim the starts of subtitles to check the timing.
- Got Icecast, OBS, and Emacs set up for the upcoming conference, and I disabled screenlock in our i3 config.
- Still haven't been able to fix bbb.emacsverse.org. I've asked Corwin to look into Galene. I think meet.jit.si might not be solid enough for us (potentially throttling issues like several years ago).
- Other Emacs stuff:
- Wrote a function for storing a link to a blog post from the Org subtree for it. (my-org-store-blog-post-link in Linking to blog posts).
- Experimented with moving lines around for fixing the text conversion of sketches, but I think it feels like more work than just retyping.
- Figured out that I needed to set
:comments no
on the Org source block that had;; lexical-binding: t
on it. (toot) - Used
org-html-htmlize-generate-css
to export CSS from Modus Vivendi to use as my dark-mode colours
- Other tech:
- Tweaked my blockquote speech bubble to let me have left-pointing or bottom-pointing ones depending on CSS class. Tweaked dark-mode colours, too.
- Ordered two micro:bit boards. Also tried turtle programming with Python.
- Shared the coloured dot grid template I use on my Supernote A5X.
- Thought about webpage margins and sticky navigation.
- Life:
- Read Tiny Habits and made sketchnotes. I also listened to a podcast on The Feel-Good Method of Productivity, which touched on some of the same points about joy and celebration. (toot)
- A thought as things become more tangled: Here are some of the things I am working on learning as I grow up: how to navigate uncertainty with curiosity, how to use conflicts to figure out priorities, how to face regrets with acceptance, and how to transform grief into an even fiercer love.
- Parent-teacher interview and progress report: A+ is doing well. No exemption from synchronous learning this year. Oh well. We'll just have to figure out how to work with the system for now, or decide when it's not working well enough for A+.
Links
- Design:
- Thinking about sketchnote colour schemes:
- Sketchplanations: uses Javascript to generate SVGs for slightly-randomly-drawn underlines on headings, adding to the handwritten feel
- Jim Nielsen’s Notes: sticky menu, can select a site theme; 724 notes on one page, has a shuffle icon to jump to a random one
- Metallic brushes for Krita (HN)
- Working on multiple threads:
- Podcast #1,027: The Imagination Muscle — Where Good Ideas Come From (And How to Have More of Them) | The Art of Manliness: reading many books at the same time, connecting commonplace books
- Are you a busybody, a hunter or a dancer? A new book about curiosity reveals all | Psychology | The Guardian: dancer curiosity
- Upcoming talk by Blaine Mooers at EmacsConf 2024 about using project logs
- How to write an article from your notes - an example | Writing Slowly: make buckets
- Writing and reading:
- LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively - YouTube: on my to-watch list; writing for moving the community conversation forward; writing to think vs writing to change a reader's ideas
- you can look it up - @visakanv's blog: I don't have to try to fit everything in one post because I can expand with hyperlinks
- Aby Warburg's Zettelkasten and the search for interconnection | Writing Slowly - Reminds me of dancer curiosity, putting things together; rich Zettelkasten/library was useful to other people after his death, but he struggled with writing and completing things himself
- I refuse to be a slave to The Algorithm
- Text to diagrams:
- Life:
- Stay in the gap | everything changes: cultivate the gap, embrace how your ideas outpace your ability
- Binary vector embeddings are so cool: oooh, can I use this to improve performance for CPU-only approximate search?
- PDF annotations - maybe I can identify PDF annotations so I can jump to the next annotation from pdf-viewer?
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