Serenity is my compass
After months of cooking, I am happy to announce that the mobile app is now available for download at https://vakana.mg . Some highlights Fully offline . No ads, no data held hostage. Your data, your rules. Flexible exports : Export your threads and beads to HTML (from templates), Markdown format (e.g., Obsidian), or rich Org files for Emacs users. Built-in inspiration : Includes a list of use…
Back in May, I told you the idea: that my ancestors’ beads and a Lisp program are the same shape . I made it sound like it arrived in a single evening. The idea did. Getting to the point where an evening like that was even possible took most of my life, and it went the long way around — through woven straw, a programmable calculator, a private alphabet, and a pen I’ll tell you about in a minute.…
As I am using the Vakana.mg app heavily in recent days, my mind can’t stop thinking about vakana and beads in general — there’s
I’ve been hard on Lisp lately. Last time I wrote here, I called it a curse — a language so powerful that everyone who touches it ends up building their own private dialect, until no one can quite understand anyone else. A small Tower of Babel, assembled out of parentheses. I still think that’s true. But I left something out of that post, because it didn’t fit the argument I was making. The same…
Long ago, while hiking far from the big cities, we passed through a small village. Something happened that caught me completely off guard. People we had never met before invited us into their home to eat with them. Just like that. No suspicion, no hesitation, no awkwardness. It felt so natural to them that they didn’t even think twice about it. And I was… in awe. Which is honestly a bit…
A few years ago, I went looking for a good app for budgeting and tracking expenses. I wanted something simple enough that I would actually use it. Then I discovered the Plain Text Accounting approach and eventually hledger , and it immediately clicked for me. If you are a terminal lover or you like your data in plain text, hledger is a great fit. Your records live in ordinary text files: no…
I think about note-taking more than I probably should. I’m thinking about it right now, actually. 😅 It started as a way to understand myself better — to track how my mind worked, what I cared about, where I was going. Somewhere along the way, it became a time machine. I can look back six months, a year, and see myself thinking. Sometimes I cringe at what I wrote. Sometimes I surprise myself with…
Building on my previous posts about meta-understanding and on my relationship with AI tools, today I’m sharing a bit of a conflicting interest. In recent months, every noise you hear seems to carry AI with it. It is everywhere, and it won’t stop or go away anytime soon. We can’t really deny what’s in front of us. The capabilities of AI tools in the last few months are completely insane. I’m not…
“I cannot understand every leaf of a tree. There is just too much. But if I understand the essence of the tree, I will intuitively know what will come out and when.” By understanding the root, the understanding of the branches arises naturally. And understanding the rest follows. What is the root but the planted seed? The one source of truth where everything else came from. Studying all the…
I had a little time to actually set up a mail server during the weekend. Something I wanted to do for long already but I keep postponing because I knew it will be a little challenging. But now that it’s done, I can finally update my info page to add a mail o novan r e i n.m . If you’ve got thoughts on anything here, I’d genuinely love to…
It’s been a while since my last post about AI and writing. Back then, I was worried about how AI would dissolve the real person behind the words. I wasn’t entirely wrong to worry about that. But I think it’s fair to explore different perspectives and update my understanding more often. Things have changed fast. The AI tools are evolving at a pace that’s honestly a bit frightening. It’s Decembre…
We are like dice thrown onto the ground. Each lands in a different place, showing a different face. Humans are the same. We are cast
We often think that precision defines progress. Numbers, clocks, and calendars give us control — or at least the illusion of it. But lately, I’ve started to see how our ancestors’ way of measuring time might have been far wiser than I first imagined. In Malagasy culture, time dances with imagery rather than digits. Each phrase paints a moment that you can see and feel. For example: mangiran-dratsy…
I try to keep my Emacs setup as minimal as possible so I don’t repeat the mistakes I made when I first started. That means avoiding unnecessary packages and complex workflows that are easy to forget. Still, from time to time, I enjoy experimenting with new features just for the adventure, even if I don’t necessarily want to integrate them into my workflow. The discovery of lesser-known,…
There is this word, “Fanabeazana” in my mother tongue that people often translate as “education.” It is often misused and confused with other words like schooling or teaching . But if we translate its original definition it carries a very deep and heavy meaning. It means: Raising the child to give him/her good character so that he/she will grow up to be a better person. The concept of…
Today, let’s talk a bit about text selection. One of the greatest decisions I’ve ever made in my digital life a few years ago was to invest more time in Vim . Editing, especially when working with code, just becomes so much smoother—almost addictive. The VIM-COMBO really does feel like some divine superpower bestowed upon the worthy! And now, with Emacs and its arsenal of tools, my digital life…
Life is like a game—a serious one, but a game nonetheless. If you ever played any game, you know there are exceptional players out there who’ve somehow figured things out. They move differently and play like magicians. These are the elite players , the GOATs . In real life, we have an equivalent: the gurus . They come in many forms, from the spiritual to the material, and everything in the…
What if you want an agenda to keep track of TODOs and scheduled tasks, but you only have Emacs at your disposal? You might find yourself in a situation where you don’t have access to the internet, Outlook, a smartphone or a physical planner. Or, like me, you might simply prefer to keep your agenda in a straightforward plain text file . It’s not a common problem, but I found it intriguing enough to…
Since we had a bit of free time on Saturday, we decided to visit my mum and sister in the countryside. We also planned to check on the trees we’ve been planting a few miles away during the summer. For context, we planted around 200 trees along with some fruit trees, back in February. We’ve also been growing sweet potatoes. It had been a long time since I last visit the fields, and I was so excited…
Taking digital notes is something I do a lot. Not because I particularly enjoy writing all the time or because I’m especially good at it, but because I want to understand myself better and gain a little more control over my life. Taking notes is like building a time machine that tracks how my mind works . I do it also because it’s fun to rediscover my old self through my notes. Sometimes I made…