This month, I experimented with doing my daily
drawings on a calendar grid. Since that meant I
had a nice neat one-page summary of the month
right there, I figured I might as well resume
writing these monthly reviews.
We still had plenty of time to get outside to the
playground, go for walks and bike adventures, go
skating, and make wontons. On indoor days, we
mostly played Minecraft, Ni No Kuni, and
Supermarket Together. Now that her usual
playgroup's shifting mostly indoors (and tend to
be pretty cough-y when they're outdoors), we've
been going to the ice rink instead, and have even
had a couple of playdates with new friends.
A+ definitely craves more stimulation during
virtual school. The teacher suggested micro:bit
programming, and we've been having fun making
simple programs to run on actual hardware. A+ has
also been learning turtle graphics via Python
programming, and she's quite proud of programming
by typing instead of using blocks. She passed the
first stage of the gifted identifaction process in
the public school board, so we had a couple of
meetings and I scrambled to do some research. I
don't think it'll change much. The Toronto
District School Board doesn't offer virtual
placements for gifted students even if they do
identify an exceptionality, and there probably
isn't anything in their budget for extra resources
for the self-contained virtual school they're
setting up next year. Ah well. We're planning to
take a very chill, non-tiger-parenting approach to
the whole thing, and we'll just have to see how
things work out.
We set up a new desk for A+ near the window, which
let her enjoy more sunlight during the day. In
return, I got to have her old desk setup, so now I
can sometimes get computer time with an extra
monitor (at least when I'm not helping her stave
off boredom).
It was the last month before W- retired, so we
squeezed in a few dental and medical appointments
to take advantage of the remaining coverage. Now
we get to figure out what our days could be like!
This post covers the week ending Dec 4 and the week ending Dec 11, since it was a bit of a rush leading up to EmacsConf.
EmacsConf 2024 went well, hooray! Here are some of my journal entries over the past two weeks:
I worked on the BigBlueButton server some more. I used Spookfox to automate Firefox from Emacs Lisp so that I could add moderator codes to all the BBB rooms. That way, speakers can let themselves in if needed, since we might be understaffed. (Might need to ask the mailing list if anyone wants to volunteer to host, which is mostly reading out questions and making conversation.) I also updated the Tampermonkey script so that the user in the VNC session will be able to join the web conference automatically.
I added shell scripts to copy the BBB redirect files so that I can easily do that by hand in case I don't get the automation sorted out again over the next week.
Livestreaming to Toobnix seems to be iffy at the moment, so I'll just focus on 480p and YouTube. I'll probably end up manually copying and pasting the stream keys for each event, so I've added them to the shift checklists to make that easier for myself.
I confirmed crontab and publishing still worked, and I processed some last-minute submissions. I also sent the check-in emails and fixed my email delivery verification.
#emacsconf day 1 wasn't
100% smooth, but it was 100% fun, and people rerouted around all of the
tech hiccups. I think we've figured out the color issue (needed to
update mpv from 0.35 to 0.38), I updated my scripts to take the video
files from the cache directory instead of other directories that I
forgot to update, updated the checklist to have the right URLs, enabled
case-fold-search on the other Emacs, and added random package mentions
to the countdown screen. I forgot to let zaeph know I edited one of the
videos, so next time I should flag that somehow. I'm not 100% sure about
our BBB setup; a couple of people's computers crashed. On the plus side,
this year, sooo many people helped out with captions and quality checks.
Improving little by little! :D The important stuff got done: people got
to see things and chat with other people!
The second day of EmacsConf went pretty well! We managed to handle a couple of last-minute uploads.
I processed the EmacsConf Q&As to add chapter indices and correct a number of misrecognized words. I also copied comments from of IRC and YouTube.
I had a lot of fun watching Leo Vivier, Corwin Brust, and FlowyCoder
fluidly swap roles as needed during
#emacsconf . It was
like professional jugglers dancing, one tossing a ball up in the air,
the other shifting into place to catch it, the third getting the next
ones lined up so things keep moving smoothly.
I dropped by Lispy Gopher Show again to chat about Emacs, Emacs Lisp, and EmacsConf with screwtape.
@screwtape I imagine it could
be useful to have a smart radio object that could tell someone how many
minutes until your next show and where to listen to it (saves us from
UTC conversions); do the same for other anonradio shows; search for a
keyword in your archives (even just the descriptions); and maybe even
allow other people to contribute a note that can be reviewed and
included in the archive description for an episode
Yay, I've copied the rest of the comments from IRC and YouTube to the
#EmacsConf talk pages,
so speakers will be able to review them in one go. I've also copied some
sections out of the transcripts for quick answers. I might send the
speakers the thanks email with the discussion and main talk video links,
but without links to the Q&A videos yet.
BigBlueButton audio mixing was as usual a bit of a challenge, with some
participants quiet and some participants louder. BBB saves only mixed
audio. It would be nice to see if I can get separate audio recordings
next year by configuring
https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/issues/12302 , but
that sounds a little complicated. Instead of taking over the task of
messing with the audio in the current recordings (which I tend to flub
because I don't have the patience for it :) ), I can leave space for
other people to do things. Instead, I can focus on the other tasks I've
been procrastinating. :)
Life:
A- felt that the Outschool club was worth keeping because she likes the people.
We all practised shinny at High Park. Nice! A- and I worked on our stops once it was time to move over to the leisure skate area. We've also skated even though there was a light drizzle.
W- enjoyed helping out with the Bike Brigade.
A+'s CCAT scores qualified her for the next step in the TDSB gifted identification process. I've been trying to figure out what this could look like for us. There's probably no gifted program for virtual school, so it might look much like what we've already got. We've been talking about how to adapt to systems that are designed for other people. At the moment, it seems to work better for her if I sit with her during boring parts of class and help her explore things like coding with Python (or help her get her homework out of the way), so I don't have much focused time myself. It's important to us that she feels good about learning and that she learns how to work with/around systems, so spending that time is worthwhile. It just means that I have to be strategic about what I do.
I notice that I have a lot more fun writing tiny workflow tweaks (mostly
#Emacs ) and sharing them
on my blog versus, say, insightful reflections developed over a longer
period of time. I think it's the payoff of being able to enjoy those
tweaks. Sometimes abstract thoughts help me come to realizations that I
can then try to use to change my concrete behaviours, but it's a lot
less straightforward.
Also, I notice that I prefer to write with a curious, exploratory tone
instead of an authoritative one, which is probably also related to my
focus on "I" rather than "you". Kinda like: here's what I'm
experimenting with, sharing in case it's helpful (and also because I
want to be able to find it again), everyone's different and that's
awesome, curious about what works for you. :) I'm glad other people can
pull off being authoritative/persuasive, though.
I'm surprised by how few active blogs I could find about
#sketchnotes (or had
a category feed for sketchnotes). It's mostly rohdesign and Verbal to
Visual, I think. Sketchnote Army still comes out with episodes, but the
posts themselves don't seem to be very visual, so people have to click
through to the person's website. I guess a lot of people are on
Instagram, but that doesn't seem to support RSS any more, and I'm not
really keen on scrolling through that. Ah well!
One of the books that has just arrived from the library is "A Field
Guide to Getting Lost" (Rebecca Solnit, 2006), which was recommended to
me by @janoli .
Here are some snippets that have resonated with me so far:
p5. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration–how do you go about finding these
things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self
into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
p10. and there's another art of being at home in the unknown, so that
being in its midst isn't cause for panic or suffering, of being at home
with being lost.
p14. The historian Aaron Sachs, about explorers: "In my opinion, their
most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and
finding their way."
p80. Even in the everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive
manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than
those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of
things and of readiness to face them. But the real difficulties, the
real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's
called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal
with what comes next.
p99. Probably it had its origins in protective urges, but it had gone
sour long ago.
This section particularly resonated with me: "Creating a life that
reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a
culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life,
a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if
not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top
of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding
job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and
activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in
order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up
to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of
human worth."
I also appreciated his resistance to commercializing Calvin & Hobbes:
"Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're
really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.
The so-called 'opportunity' I faced would have meant giving up my
individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have
meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride
in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and
the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision.
Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In
short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.
What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip
into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old
job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt
sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own
thoughts."
Other links
I was thinking about making a treemap visualization of my Org subtrees to help with noticing topic clusters.
I 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.
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+.
Ooh, it looks like `consult-org-heading` already lets me use embark-act
with the shortcut `j` to call `embark-org-insert-link-to`. It doesn't
feel like a "j" shortcut, though, so I'll just bind it to `L` for "link"
instead: `(keymap-set embark-org-heading-map "L"
#'embark-org-insert-link-to)`
#emacsconf progress:
I've recorded intros for all the talks so that speakers can review them,
and some of the talk videos have started coming in. I'll ask the
speakers for feedback after the video upload target date. Still slightly
stressed about the prospect of replacing or re-setting-up BigBlueButton;
corwin has taken over the stressing out about it at the moment.
More tweaks to https://planet.emacslife.com: now using flex layout,
so it should be a bit more responsive to screen size; sticky headers on
large screens so that you can see which post it is when you scroll down.
Does it make sense to do sticky headers on small screens? I don't want
long titles taking up too much screen space on phones…
How do people feel about automatically including
#Emacs commits affecting
etc/NEWS and Org Mode's ORG-NEWS in https://planet.emacslife.com ?
Handy for staying up to date? Too much, since it's easy to subscribe
separately?
I use the 11ty static site generator to publish my blog as plain HTML
pages. I have a lot of posts in some categories, like Emacs. I want to
generate some of the pages for easier browsing, but I'm not sure it
makes sense to generate all of them. Right now I generate 5 pages of
posts and then a page that links to all of them. (Ex:
https://sachachua.com/blog/category/emacs). It occurred to me that
it might not be obvious that there are more than 5 pages of posts (since
we're more used to dynamic systems that paginate as much as needed). I
wonder how I can make that clearer - oh, maybe I can add the number of
posts.
There's probably stuff I can do to make the All Posts easier to explore,
too. I've started making topic pages. I'm also curious about
implementing the stacked-cards navigation you see in digital gardens
like https://notes.andymatuschak.org/ .
Ideas? Pointers to other statically generated blogs with large
categories who've figured some of this out?
Juxtaposing "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains"
(Nicholas Carr), "Deep Work" (Cal Newport), and "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" (Oliver Burkeman), I find myself leaning
more towards Burkeman's acceptance of limits and lack of control. I'd
rather figure out how to embrace these shallows than to write off large
portions of my life: parenting a young child with all the attendant
interruptions (which I am learning to welcome) and preparing for
eventual old age.
One of the things I've learned while doing Emacs News is that even
things I can do in the shallows can be useful. Organizing information
and passing it along does not require deep reflection or a quiet mind.
I can read in short bursts here and there, take notes, and share them.
Most of my Emacs tweaks are short, but they accumulate.
Now I am learning to write small thoughts. They are not amazing
insights, but they are enough for me, and sometimes they resonate with
other people.
Besides, even when I had full autonomy during my experiment with
semi-retirement, it's not like I did amazingly deep stuff either. So
that's all cool and I don't have to kid myself or feel like I'm missing
out. Instead, I can enjoy this time in the shallows, when doing the
dishes or tidying up is pretty much on the same level as many other
things on my list of things I could do (probably more useful than most
things, even). I can let myself be interruptible, and I can play with
the fragments of my attention.
Summary: Life with a cargo bike has been working out really well for our family.
I used to walk for an hour to get to some of A+'s
playdates, pushing her in the Thule bike trailer /
stroller that she still fit into. I liked bringing
popsicles during the summer so that A+ could share
them with her friends, so I often balanced a small
cooler on top of the stroller and walked as
briskly as I could. The popsicles were usually
still reasonably cold by the time I got to the
park. We'd spend a few hours playing there, and
then there would be another hour's walk back. A+
usually napped on the way, so it was a chance for
me to listen to podcasts.
Sometimes we biked to the playdate instead. That
was much faster in terms of getting there, even
with a popsicle break halfway through. Those
popsicles were only for us, since I couldn't bring
a cooler on my bike. Also, A+ was usually too
tired to bike back, or it was too dark for her to
be safe biking on the busy streets between the
park and our house, so we often waited in the mall
parking lot for W- to pick up A+ and her bike in
his car. Then I biked back by myself.
We'd been considering cargo bikes for a while, and
eventually things lined up to make it possible. It
was a carefully-considered decision. I did a bunch
of test rides using different models of cargo
bikes. My height (or lack of it) ruled out many of
the models designed for taller people. A+ was
quite vocal about her preference for the
suspension on the R&M Load cargo bikes, and she
liked the view from the front-loaders more than
the longtails. I rented the Load 75 and the Load
60 to try them out, accidentally tipping over onto
the side an embarrassing number of times; A+ was
safely buckled in but very grumpy about it.
When we confirmed that a cargo bike fit into our
life, I bought a Riese & MĂĽller Load 75
from Curbside Cycle. We picked the Load 75 over
the Load 60 because the rain cover was nicer and
the extra room could give us more years of use as
A+ grows.
I love it. Biking is my favourite way to get around.
There's just something so cheerful about
it. A+ and I sing as we go around town. We smile
at dogs in sweaters. She takes pictures of trees.
Sometimes there are cargo bikes in front of us as
we wait at the traffic light, and we wave and nod.
We got the Bakkie bag, too. It's designed to tow a
kid's bike. That way, A+ can bike wherever she
wants. When she gets tired, she can hop into the
cargo bike and I can buckle her bike into the
Bakkie bag, towing it all the way home. We've been
able to go on more bike adventures by ourselves
and together with W- because we don't have to
worry about exceeding A+'s range.
Since we could get to the playground in 15 minutes
instead of 60, it was a lot easier to bring snacks
to share. We pretty much kept the playground kids
well-supplied with free popsicles (and the
occasional much-coveted ice cream treat) all
summer, and the ice packs came in handy for
treating the occasional bumps too. We even brought
disposable cups and insulated bottles of hot water
for making hot chocolate and instant apple cider
in the colder months.
Aside from taking A+ to a wider range of places,
we've also used it to bring several bags of
potting mix or a propane tank home from the
hardware store, carry other bulky items, and take
lots of stuff to the community environment days
for recycling/donation.
We are very lucky to have cargo biking as an
option. When people ask me how much it is, I
ruefully tell them, "Well, it's less than a second
car." We weren't actually choosing between this
and a second car; even though W- rarely uses his
car these days, I'm too anxious to drive. My brain
gets a little squirrelly and is prone to
attentional hiccups. I don't want a moment of
distraction to result in someone's death or
serious injury. I'm still on alert when I bike,
but it feels a lot more like something I can
handle. And biking is so fast and convenient. I
don't have to nudge A+ out of a playdate so that
we can make it out before the subway gets packed
like sardines, or shepherd A+ back home from the
subway station ("I'm tiiiired.").
I got the bike in November 2023. Here's how much I
biked over the past year:
Month
KM
Nov
208
Dec
157
Jan
69
Feb
78
Mar
176
Apr
82
May
106
Jun
143
Jul
135
Aug
96
Sep
212
Oct
120
Figure 1: Graph of kilometres by month
I was pleasantly surprised that even during the
cold months (and A+'s reluctance to go outside if
it was very cold or slushy), and even during the
schoolweek, we still managed to get out on the
bike.
Figure 2: Kilometres by date
I got data from the ebike-connect site using Spookfox using the code below.
Javascript code for extracting distances and times
%20--%20VisualBookNotes%20habits.png){kind=link}
