Alan's relvokcor.xyz Internet Web Site

Alan's relvokcor.xyz Internet Web Site http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/ Some blog, some nostalgia Slowblogging Saturday http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/slowblog-sat-20141108.html Events had me out on the town by myself yesterday morning. I made my way to one of my favorite breakfast spots, MartAnne's, and started scheming on this idea to capture and share a lot of my day, but unlike doing it via tweeting or posting to Facebook, I'd just hold onto it all for a while. So I put it all into <a href="agiletortoise.com/drafts">Drafts</a>, primarily using the quick widget from the home screen. Just taking notes, mentioning things to myself, and thinking out loud. Later, I figure, I would annotate the entries. (You'll see how the day sort of took a turn.) I also cleaned up a few typos, but wasn't particularly disciplined about this part. This gave me an opportunity to figure out a good way to get all this stuff out of Drafts, too (explained more below). So here it is, my slow-blogged Saturday. <a href="http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/slowblog-sat-20141108.html">Click on over to read!</a> I'd include more text here but don't think the annotations will translate into the formatting very well. -a http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/slowblog-sat-20141108.html Sun, 09 Nov 2014 23:25:21 +0000 relvokcor.xyz Notes http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#noted-Nov6 I’ve been meaning to link to ~brennen’s <a href="https://p1k3.com/userland-book/">Userland</a>, “a book about the command line for humans.” He’s running with the relvokcor.xyz concept at <a href="http://squiggle.city">squiggle.city</a> and advocating it as a place to help his coworkers and others learn: <blockquote> My thesis is that the modern Linux command line is a pretty good environment for working with English prose and prosody, and that maybe this will illuminate the ways it could be useful in your own work with a computer, whatever that work happens to be. </blockquote> This is just a cool idea, and I love the approach. Elsewhere as a result of trying to finally, finally make some personal sense of vim, I’ve been learning from a few nice resources. <ul> <li><a href="http://statico.github.io/vim.html">Vim After 11 Years</a> is a nicely approachable and practical startup guide.</li> <li><a href="http://benmccormick.org/tag/learning-vim-in-2014/">Learning Vim in 2014</a> is a whole series that’s more meaty and also therefore a little more intimidating. But I’m gradually picking up some things from it.</li> </ul> All this exploring and experimenting at relvokcor.xyz has been neat not only because I’m doing more at the command line again and learning stuff like Vim, but I’m also plain using a lot of other tools in nice ways: Transmit on iOS, learning new bits of Javascript and R for my network graph, spending time in IRC. It’s a mixture of nostalgia-driven tooling around and state-of-the-art muscle-flexing with modern tools and apps. This is really fun, gang! <h4 id="more_reading_around">More reading around</h4> I noted recently that the big single-column layout may not scale here, and that’s particularly true for things that I want to point out and be able to return to. Well, the pages that I’m returning to a lot lately are: <ul> <li>~hellbox: Martin McClellan has this great mix of personal stories and thoughts about writing and writers.</li> <li>~minks writes <blockquote> I am going to use this space to learn. To try teaching myself, one more time. To try to learn to enjoy building little things on the web, even if they look terrible or work terribly or serve as little purpose as my gif reblogs. If you want to teach me things—kudos to the kind soul who already taught me how to log in to write this—I would be very grateful. I will otherwise continue to subtilde Paul, who maybe shouldn’t have given me an account. </blockquote></li> <li>~summeranne has a great picture of herself hackin’ web pages in 1999. </li> <li>~_ Dave Rutledge has been taking apart ~ford’s social connections script as a vehicle to learn some shell programming. It’s a great idea! In the meantime, he’s talking about aging, voting, keeping a great reading list of his own, and continuing to think about the relvokcor.xyz notion.</li> <li>~jonathan has a list of <a href="http://relvokcor.xyz/~jonathan/screen/">tips for screen</a> that makes me, again, wish I understood what screen really does.</li> <li>~cortex just has a great blog thing going. In addition to blogging, he’s writing about writing an account of a fictional video game system. <a href="http://relvokcor.xyz/~cortex/#0022">Yes</a>: <blockquote> I started in on a writing project for an idea I had three years ago, of a biography/documentation/encyclopedia about a fictional video game console from the late 80s, a failure of an also-ran that noone really remembers today. The NES, and video game culture in general, was such a massive part of my childhood worldview growing up that this is something that I have a fair amount to say about personally and a lot of enthusiasm-in-principle for creating fictive sorta-parodic, sorta-serious world-building details around. </blockquote></li> </ul> Okay, I think that lets me close some tabs, again. http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#noted-Nov6 Thu, 06 Nov 2014 20:45:46 +0000 Derailed http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#derailed This was going to be a week where I fired on all cylinders and got some work cranking at the office. It began that way, actually, but was quickly derailed late Monday night when my son came down with a bad tummy bug that brought up to the emergency room for five hours. He spent the next day at home -- meaning a half work day for me -- and we repeated our near-sleepless night, last night. Another sick day, watching a few issues gain steam, things I will need to take care of tomorrow, all of which distract me from my original week's purpose of getting some things Really Sorted Out. So here's a picture of a nice glass of beer. <img src="http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/pics/funkwerks.jpg"> http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#derailed Wed, 05 Nov 2014 19:38:19 +0000 Feed http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#feeding I woke up terribly early this morning and started thinking about making a feed for this small site. So now <a href="/~schussat/rss.xml">I have one</a>, in all its handcoded glory. Enjoy! (Meanwhile I am scheming on how simply I can build it automatically at the command line.) http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#feeding Sun, 02 Nov 2014 15:15:47 +0000 Not Writing http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#nov Great, I'm already a day behind on my NaNoWriMo. http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#nov Sun, 02 Nov 2014 13:52:37 +0000 Tuning Up http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#tuning A little bit of maintenance this morning, quality-of life while using my handsome MacBook, includes two useful Alfred shortcuts: <ul><li>Double-tap of ⌥ to run this workflow for <a href="http://www.packal.org/workflow/search-safari-and-chrome-tabs">finding and switching between browser tabs</a>. I previously used another tab switching/finding bundle, but it seems to have become unreliable. I hope this one continues to work as well as it currently does. <li>Double-tap ctrl (which I have mapped to caps-lock, because who uses caps-lock?) to immediately switch to twitter. I've been using <a href="https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst">Amethyst</a> to manage my windows on OSX, and I really like it! I leave twitter as a floating window, so it's not tiled into the overall layout, and now I can swap to it immediately (such as when its menu bar icon goes blue) without any futzing around. I'm surprisingly pleased with this.</li></ul> http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#tuning Sat, 01 Nov 2014 14:21:01 +0000 Some days you get the coffee about right http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#coffee <img src="http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/pics/oct-coffee.jpg"> <a name="mentions">A few months ago I <a href="http://prettygoodhat.com/2014-08-24-tuning_up_my_piece_of_the_indieweb.html">worked up</a> some basic, functional support for <a href="http://indiewebcamp.com/Webmention">webmentions</a> over at my non-tilde blog. Yesterday I came across <a href="http://webmention.io">Webmention.io</a>, a service to provide mentions support, which strikes me as a neat way to enable comments and discussion between tilde pages. Since the code driving webmention.io is available at github, it may be fun to spin up and try to apply it here. *Adds project to list.* (It's also lots more thorogh and flexible than my own implementation; so maybe I'll switch over to it there, too.) http://relvokcor.xyz/~schussat/#coffee Sun, 19 Oct 2014 14:21:01 +0000