damonism.net
It’s time to reclaim the em-dash. A common refrain is that the use of an em-dash in writing is a clear sign sign that it was written by an AI (or an LLM). This kills me. Up until really very recently, the use of an em-dash in writing was a clear sign that someone knew how to use punctuation (as was the use of a semi-colon). I have always been a big user of em-dashes, mostly for parenthetical…
What’s the most used thing in your house? It’s probably your phone, but that’s not very interesting. Let’s restrict it to things that are actually useful. (It hasn’t escaped me that I’m asking these questions on a blog that has no comment facility – consider them rhetorical, if it helps.) How do we define “used” here, to be the most of? If it’s in terms of time used, it’s probably going to be your…
As much as EDC (Everyday Carry) is basically a pastiche of performative masculinity, it remains true that some things are genuinely useful to have on you. One of these things is a pen. Just as the pen is mightier than the sword, so is it more useful. Despite what the EDC bros might believe, I almost never, going about my normal life, have the need to stab, slash, or otherwise cut things. I do…
I’m a long-time fountain pen nerd. I have a couple of dozen fountain pens from across the price spectrum, and maybe twice as many inks. Sadly, however, I can’t use them at work. My job requires lots of writing, which would be an ideal way to use my fancy fountain pens, but for reasons too boring to elaborate on, most of my writing is in work-supplied notebooks. These notebooks use crappy paper…
The Gang-gang Cockatoo is the fauna emblem of the Australian Capital Territory, which suggests that it’s particularly characteristic of this area, however it’s pretty rare to see them in my backyard. It was quite a treat when a family of them decided to stop by. I first noticed them due to the hungry calls the juvenile was making 1 , and spotted the juvenile being fed by one of the parents in a…
There are a bunch of reasons you can get into, or stay into, keyboards as a hobby. You can chase the hype train with the latest hot boards, or you can search for the perfect aesthetic combination of board and keycaps. For me, it’s the search for the perfect keyboard to actually type on – finding out what I like and iterating on that until I have something that’s just right for me. In…
Nick’s post on moving to Navidrone inspired me to write briefly about how I solved a similar problem in a somewhat different way. Like Nick, I was over the application formerly known as iTunes. I’ve posted here before about the issues that I had with iTunes wrecking my music files . After ditching Apple Music, I landed up in largely the place Nick started – with a hard drive full of…
Despite my lack of posts, my Year Of Linux on the Desktop project isn’t dead, it’s just mutated a bit. But it’s also taken a somewhat unexpected turn. One of the ideas I’d explored for a Linux desktop was a small form factor PC, and once I started looking at small form factor PCs I started wondering how practical/expensive it would be to get one I could use for a bit of light gaming. And once I’d…
Welcome to the March list of stuff I’ve found around the Internet and enjoyed reading (maybe not enjoyed , as such, but you know what I mean). The plan is to do occasional similar posts as I stumble across worthy reads, but how many links per post, and how often, are yet to be determined. Driving an EV restomod that costs as much as a house—the JIA Chieftain - Ars Technica My perfect car would be…
Checking back, it’s almost exactly a year since I last posted my desk setup , and it has actually changed quite a lot in the last year. The computer has changed, the monitor has changed, the keyboard has changed – pretty much everything except the desk itself, and the desk mat, have changed. The current overall objective here is to keep the desk as clean as possible, whilst still being usable, and…
In my previous job I spent a lot of time analysing political donations for Australian federal elections (don’t ask). To make my life easier I create an R package that scraped all of the data from the Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC) Transparency Register . For the last couple of years this package has been sitting dormant in a private git repo, but I was sufficiently motivated this year to…
As part of my project of moving away from Apple services I’ve been setting up my own music server, using Jellyfin . I’ve been collecting music since before CDs were a thing. 1 I had an enormous CD collection but at some point in the last decade or two I decided that I didn’t have any room for storing physical media any more and ripped all of my CDs and DVDs and got rid of them.…
I’ve been living the Linux desktop lifestyle for a couple of months now. Not full time, and not exclusively, but what desktop computing I do I’ve tried to do under Linux (still the ARM Ubuntu desktop running as a virtual machine under UTM on the M2 Pro Mac Mini). And it’s mostly been… fine? So rather than just complaining, I figured I’d document some solutions I’ve…
Nobody buys a computer; they buy into an ecosystem. This has been true for (basically) forever. A computer has only ever been as useful as the software you could run on it, and as only a small fraction of the people who have ever owned computers can program them, this mostly means the software you can buy (or otherwise obtain) for it. 1 Computer ecosystems have always evolved. Defender of the…
In our previous episode I described how I undertook a new adventure in Linux to see whether it was workable for me these days as a desktop operating system. But if you’ve ever played around with Linux you’ll know that there isn’t one Linux. Linux comes as distributions and different distributions have their own philosophies and included software and desktop environments and…
In or around 2002 I got my first Mac, a white G3 iBook. Ever since, my main computer has been a Mac. I’ve certainly not only used Macs since then. My day job has mostly had me using Windows (except for a brief and unsuccessful diversion into academia for a couple of years where I was able to use a Mac), but the computers I have bought myself and have control over have been Macs. 1 In recent…
Build details: Lulu (V1 PCB) in space grey with clear encoders; Boba UT4 62g tactile switches; KAT Cyberspace keycaps. The Boardsource Lulu was the board that runied everything for me. Up until the Lulu I was perfectly happy with normal keyboards. I tended toward the smaller side – my ideal keyboard was probably a nice 60 per cent – but definitely within the realms of the mainstream,…
I find in order to learn anything new I need to attempt to do something with it. For reasons I can’t easily articulate I decided that I should get into emacs (the file editor, not the discontinued education-focused Apple all-in-one) and figured that using emacs to write this blog would be a good project. Emacs is famed for its modularity, and of course there was an emacs package specifically…
The Boardsource Unicorne is a fancier version of the Corne keyboard , a small 3x6 column staggered split keyboard. Here are the quick details: Boardsource Unicorne MX Keyboard; Matcha Latte linear switches (60g, with long pole POM stems, PC top housing and Nylon bottom housing); KAM SuperUser keycaps with the 40s ortho terminal kit; No stabs, because it doesn’t have any keys big enough.…
With the recent descent into AI madness of the Wordpress folks there have been a few people on Mastodon looking for other hosting options, so I figured I’d do a quick “here is how I set up my blog” post. The short version is that it’s a static site generated with Hugo , hosted on the file sharing space provided by Fastmail to its email customers. This is pretty easy and…
I’m pretty happy with my current desk setup at home as far as ergonomics go. I have a small house and there is a small part of that small house where a small computer desk lives. I’m not a great photographer at the best of times, but this particular corner of the house is particularly difficult to take good photographs of; the light is all wrong. If you can look past how ordinary the…
Build details: Command 65 by Play Keyboard Ice Kachang Tactile Switches TX Stabilisers (PCB mount) Hammerworks CRP C64 Round 2 keycaps This is the first in my series of posts about my keyboard collection; not because it’s my favourite, or because it’s the most expensive or the best, but because it’s really easy to photograph. Depending on how you define ‘first’, my…
Possibly the best new feature Apple has added to its iPhone for a long time is StandBy Mode , where if you put your phone horizontally on a charger (it works best with a MagSafe/Qi, but as long as the phone is charging and horizontal it will work), it shows a special horizontal display. There are various things it will display, but the only one I ever use shows the time in big numbers, like an old…
A traditional first (and often only) blog post is “here is how I set up my blog”. You could call this a negative first blog post, because I haven’t actually set one up yet, but this will be posted to it when I have. On Mastodon recently someone said they had opinions they wanted to write but didn’t want the whole rigamarole of a blog, and I joking suggesting finding a Unix…
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