Although I have’t read it, I’ve started this week with the first episode of Libre Lounge, a podcast by Christopher Lemmer Webber and Serge Wroclawski. I liked it very much and got inspired to refresh my GNU Emacs setup to adjust it to use features I wasn’t aware Org-Mode had. That led me to Org-Mode’s manual’s section on clock table. Then, I’ve read GNU Emacs manual section about text display as I’ve been interested in making octal sequences (used to denote non-alpha-numeric characters) more standing out / highlighted. (Hint: adjusting escape-glyph face did the trick.)
I’ve also read vermaden’s The Power to Serve - FreeBSD Power Management. Vermaden’s texts are always very informative and good to read.
This week I’ve started using FunkWhale instance open.audio and learned about Luka Prinčič. It turned out he’s also available on fediverse as @luka@mastodon.art.
Now back to strictly reading items: I’ve read Design Patterns for Micro-Service Architecture but haven’t found it particularly well-written. I’ve also finished reading AOSA chapter about Bash. It’s interesting how GNU Readline design (also covered in this chapter) is similar to how Emacs does some of the stuff internally (esp. keymaps and the philosophy of redisplay).
From time to time I read stuff about monads and this week it’s been about the Reader Monad.
And the creative part of me, finding a link to Lisp generative art I have saved a long time ago, started wondering if I could play around with extempore, but I had no time to make it compile on FreeBSD (which it doesn’t out of the box), so I’ve given up for now. Unfortunately SuperCollider doesn’t support FreeBSD either and don’t know any other such software so… I’ll have to get back to it later.
Information mapping and structured writing, a topic I’ve found out about when learning about knowledge sharing and representation, got me very interested but I’m still reading a summary of its methods. So far I’ve decided I’d like to write a simple Clojure PDF genenrator to format text according to structured writing guidelines. I’ve already done some first experiments and they look nice, but I’ll need to read more before I continue.
And finally there’ve been two texts about philosophy: Emptying Your Boat, which gives a hint how we can improve our lives by caring less about the self and focusing more on living our lives (at least that’s how I’ve interpreted it); and an excerpt from Enchiridion of Epictetus which opens with a very nice idea:
Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, movement toward a thing, desire, aversion (turning from a thing); and in a word, whatever are our own acts: not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices (magisterial power), and in a word, whatever are not our own acts.
This is an incredibly important thing to keep in mind when we are angry because anger usually means we don’t accept something. Thinking about what we can and cannot do about our situation might turn liberating – I’ve tried it myself and it worked like a charm!