March 9, 2020 @ NRG Stadium — Houston, TX 📷 Sony Alpha 6000
Michael Lopp (aka “Rands”), hits on some great points about setting up your Slack channels thoughtfully: randsinrepose.com/archives/…
A wonderful reminder from Shawn Blanc that all those little in-the-moment annoyances we experience with our kids, will one day be cherished memories. shawnblanc.net/2019/11/a…
I stumbled across some gameplay footage of one my favorite childhood games I had since forgotten about: Glover (N64/1998)
The visuals didn’t really bring back any memories for me, but the sounds were eerily familiar (in an almost-but-not-quite having flashbacks kind of way).
I’ve been following the WWDC coverage at wwdcbysundell.com, and it’s top-notch! There’s a great post on SwiftUI, if you’re curious what that’s all about.
Update on Freddy: after lots of rest and medication, he’s feeling much better! We were able to take him with us to the lake yesterday for some fun in the water.
It’s been a rough few days.
On Sunday we noticed Freddy (our lovable 100lb goldendoodle) wasn’t acting like himself. He had stopped eating and playing, and slept most of the day.
Later that evening we noticed his abdomen was swollen, and took him to the vet first thing on Monday.
The vet took a few x-rays, and told us his spleen was very large (beyond normal) and that he needed an emergency ultrasound at a specialized animal hospital.
Once the ultrasound ruled out a twisted or ruptured spleen, they performed a needle aspiration and told us they’d need to send the sample off to pathology for analysis, and we’d get the results the next day. They told us lymphoma was the most likely candidate.
The 24 hour wait for the results to come in was awful.
We got the call on Tuesday, and the test was negative for lymphoma (the good news!) but they suspect an aggressive immune-related condition (less-good news).
He’s on several medications now to try and reverse the swelling and bring his energy levels back up.
We’re not sure if the medication will help yet. For now we’re taking it “one day at a time” as the doctors recommended, and keeping our hopes up.
Happy to see MacStories created a list of all of their Shortcuts. Great resource with tons of handy shortcuts.
Pretty cool set of updates to micro.blog today, including custom themes. Thanks @manton!
I updated my micro.blog theme to use @ka’s excellent “Kiko: System Theme”, with a couple tweaks.
(thanks @ka for sharing!)
I recently started using Day One and think it’ll be a keeper for me. I use it like a “family blog”, posting pictures of the kids and things we’ve doing.
Back in August, I wrote about how I was starting to learn Emacs. I had planned to post weekly updates as I was learning, but life happened and I didn’t end up doing that. So from now on, I’ll just be numbering these posts with #1
, #2
, etc.
On the bright side, I’ve still been learning! Since the last post, I’ve:
~/.emacs
file with some packages.I’ve been a vim user (occasionaly full time) for a several years, but I intentionally avoided evil-mode when I was getting started with Emacs. I wanted to learn the standard Emacs shortcuts first, before trying anything else.
Once I felt pretty confident with vanilla-emacs though, I was ready to get back some of that vim-awesomeness.
A quick google search turned up this talk and post by Aaron Bieber, both of which were great to help me get going.
Once I got everything setup, I instantly felt at home with evil-mode. I still had access to M-x function
and all the Emacs modes I had learned, but now there was a nice layer of vim on top. Like icing on a cake! 🍰
I also setup evil-leader, and bound it to ,
, to emulate my vim leader key.
Aquamacs had been serving me really while I was learning the ropes, but it was time to switch to something more standard. I’m on macOS, so I went with the homebrew cask version of emacs:
brew cask install emacs
Now that I needed to install and configure plugins, I figured it was time to setup my ~/.emacs
file.
In Aaron Bieber’s post he recommends use-package for auto-installing packages. It sounded similar to how I was using Vundle in vim, so I went with that.
Once I had use-package installed, I added in a couple of packages like powerline and markdown-mode to try it out.
I also added my ~/.emacs
file to my dotfiles on GitHub, because open-source! 🎉
Now that I can install fancy packages, I added Dracula theme for some pretty colors. I also really like having powerline in the bottom.
I’m late writing my next emacs post, but I’ve been trying out lots of new things! I starting using the homebrew version of emacs and evil-mode, and it’s been great! Hoping to write it up soon.
I started learning Emacs last week!
I’m not using it full-time just yet, for now I’m studying it own its own, and using it for small tasks while I learn the basics.
I decided to keep weekly notes (using Emacs of course!) of the things I learn along the way.
caps-lock
and return
to left and right ctrl
using this modifier.C-h t
).C-h
are really helpful when I forget a shortcut.C-n
and
C-p
to navigate up/down menu items! Nifty! 🎉⌘+s
and ⌘+w
, which comes in handy (though I try not to use them).Nothing fancy yet. Pretty much just the out-of-box Aquamacs.
🎙️ A couple of podcasts I’ve recently discovered and been enjoying a lot:
Fellow micro.blog-er @kaa, on writing for yourself:
While it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you’re writing on your website for the ‘internet’, the truth of the matter is that you’re actually writing these things and obsessing about it’s design primarily and sometimes exclusively for yourself.
I fall into this trap a lot. I’ll get a new idea for something I want to write about, then come the little voices.
No one cares about this.
Surely someone out there has already written about this.
You’re probably going to get something wrong anyways.
Somehow knowing that people might read what I write, and that it might not be very good, keeps me from writing altogether.
Getting into micro.blog has actually helped me a lot with this. I’ve found small, title-less posts, are somehow easier for me to write than regular posts. Maybe because they are less “official” feeling, and therefore less likely to be judged like a piece of writing.
I hope I can put Khaled’s words into practice and focus on writing more for myself.
Been working on some updates to the blog!
📚 Finished reading Ben Horowitz’s “The Hard Thing About Hard Things.” Great book! Putting it on my top things list too.