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I was urged by two close friends to watch this movie, specifically in theaters. I normally don’t watch horror, but these two normally don’t recommend movies or shows—so I had to check it out. Below are some of my thoughts after watching. Immediate impression § This was a really good movie. Horror movies with inventive ways to sustain tension are really rare to come by. And this one was a brilliant…
Learning Guile has been on my wishlist for a while because of the power it affords users of Guix: you get to control its service manager, Shepherd [1] , configure other programs, manage containers [2] , all in the same powerful language in a consistent syntax. But Guile is also a power language all on its own, too. You can write standalone program with it happily (and integrate it with your Guix…
Recently Hilton Chain [1] put together emacs-guix-starter , a starter Emacs configuration that uses Guix and is set up to Guix. What it is: a regular Emacs init.el (with basic configuration) alongside a companion Guix packages manifest ( packages.scm ) to install those Emacs packages and all their system dependencies. The init.el even provides configuration to edit Guile! Beginner-oriented…
Earlier this week I watched Civil War (2024) , directed and written by Alex Garland. I wanted to watch this movie since I noticed it on Alex Garland’s resume, Alex Garland being the director, writer, or screenplay writer of movies and shows including: Ex Machina (2014), Devs (2020), Annihilation (2018), Sunshine (2007), 28 Days Later (2002), and 28 Years Later (2025). These are all motion pictures…
I recently read a great article for Emacs newbies: Emacs Teaches Emacs: The Missing README from Charlie Holland’s blog. In my opinion, a contender for the most important thing newbies should know when they start using Emacs (the step 0 to understanding the “value proposition” of Emacs, if you will) is its ability to introspect . That is, the commands and key sequences that let users learn about…
Recently added to this site are per-page emoji reactions. You can see them at the bottom of each post as well as some of my other pages. Per-page emoji reactions have been something I’ve somewhat wanted on my site ever since noticing them in the fantastic articles published at emacsredux.com . The reason emoji reactions are so appealing to me is this: I’ve wanted a low-effort means for readers to…
My first touch with actual web development has been the development of this site using Astro. Previously, I used Hugo to generate the predecessor to the current site’s design—but I don’t consider that “real” web development since much of the logic and hard work has already been done for me (by the static site generator). Overall, it has been quite pleasant, relative to how large of a meal Astro +…
I learned about The Harada Method today from a recent edition (June 20, 2026) of Liz Jung’s Flourished Hope newsletter. A quick Google [1] search later and I learned more about the method from this article: Crush your goals the Ohtani way, by the Harvard Gazette . The gist of it is basically this. You have a big, ambitious goal. One for years down the line. Imagine a 3x3 grid; place that goal in…
Today I stumbled upon a recently published (one month ago) blog post by the Guix team: Time travel without borders . It was a worthwhile read. guix time-machine is used to go back or forward in time (relative to the current Guix profile) and call other Guix subcommands. For instance, to run the yt-dlp binary from the latest Guix commit: Terminal window guix time-machine -q -- shell yt-dlp --…
Table of Contents The good and bad: what to expect on Android Installation Option 1 Option 2 (recommended) Configuring an Android-specific Emacs Necessary reading: the manual How to configure your init.el on a mobile device? First step: A Better UI for touchscreens Android-specific Commands and Options Use a Special virtual keyboard Fonts Tip: You can remap the volume buttons Conclusion Bonus: My…
Table of Contents The configuration Devices Folders Closing remarks Other resources Changelog Footnotes So I recently got around to trying out NixOS. Part of that experience was setting up Syncthing, which I’ve used on the past on my machines and mobile phone to sync files related to note-taking. [1] It was a bit confusing since I had to fill-in-the-blanks for a few steps. Here, I write about a…
No-littering.el keeps your .emacs.d clean. I’ve been using it for years—in fact it’s one of the only third-party packages I first installed several years ago when I started using Emacs that I still have in my config today. It establishes conventions for keeping files created from packages: The no-littering-etc-directory . The directory where packages place their configuration files. The…
Apr 7, 2025 With several commits made on April 6, 2025, vertico spun off its sorting functionality into an extension: vertico-sort . As explained in vertico-sort.el’s commentary section, it includes a new feature: when history-delete-duplicates is nil, all sorting functions defined in vertico-sort.el now rank recently selected candidates above frequently selected candidates. This approximates the…
Over the last month or two I’ve been trying out the relatively new jujutsu version control system (VCS) — and loving it. At first, I discovered it and read their GitHub README with curiosity but skepticism. Then I sought a few YouTube videos [1] demonstrating jj in action, and a tutorial for a text-based reference. I became very interested. I initialized a jj repo in one of my small git projects…
Table of Contents The Perceptual Faith and Its Obscurity Science Presupposes the Perceptual Faith and Does Not Elucidate It Perceptual Faith and Reflection Footnotes This post contains my writing on The Visible and the Invisible chapter one, “Reflection and Interrogation.” The headings here correspond to the subdivisions of chapter one. This writing was written without the intention for sharing.…
Vc.el is Emacs’s built-in interface for version control CLI tools. With respect to Git, magit has for several years now been the most favored (with respect to popularity) Git [1] interface. At least in the r/emacs subreddit, magit is frequently considered a killer-feature—an irreplaceable feature unique to Emacs. For the most part I am inclined to agree. However, in the last few months, I’ve been…
Having used Emacs for several years now, I somehow hadn’t come across the prefix argument and active region behavior for one of the most well-known commands: occur . Below is the docstring of occur reads, with the relevant portions preserved: occur is an interactive native-comp-function in replace.el. It is bound to M-s o. (occur REGEXP &optional NLINES REGION ) Inferred type: (function (t…
I found my room remarkably quiet. I returned passed sunset, yet my suitemates hadn’t arrive at our dorm yet. I swung my room’s door open and… nothing. Nothing grand, not that I was expecting anything. The emptiness was just what struck me. How empty the room felt. My pre-move cleaning is responsible—I was happy with that. But the room no longer wears the mantle it does when things are amiss and…
I first encountered a mention of Simon Blackburn’s 1999 Think: A compelling introduction to philosophy when I was looking for a good introductory book to philosophy. At the time, I was a Senior in high school not having read an once of philosophy. The hope was for something broad yet with an appreciation for nuance. It didn’t take long for me to discover Think , one of the few books r/philosophy…
Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction by Jennifer Nagel (2014) [1] is a phenomenal introduction to epistemology. Spanning a little over 100 pages, one would not expect an in-depth overview of the field. Indeed, Nagel does not bog down the reader with terms nor the intricacies epistemologists would be interested in—but the ideas often linger in the air for the reader to dwell on, and Nagel doesn’t…
Table of Contents Summary Helpful sources What are citation systems? Org-cite Understanding org-cite export processors Which processor should I use? Configuration Usage Citar Capturing (Outdated) Advising citar-org-update-pre-suffix (Outdated) Aesthetics Other interesting packages Zotero Embark Org-roam-bibtex Citar-capf Org-ref Changelog Footnotes Summary § Jul 20, 2023 Readers should be aware…
Transparency in Emacs isn’t that great. Every source I find regarding transparency of Emacs (as of writing this) points to setting the alpha frame parameter. For instance: EmacsWiki: Transparent Emacs How can transparency be toggled? - Emacs Stack Exchange How to set a key binding to make Emacs as transparent/opaque Any Advice On Getting Transparency To Work In Emacs Window Manager The issue with…
Table of Contents What is cape ? Basic usage: keybinds Adding backends to completion-at-point-functions Cape-company-to-capf and cape-super-capf pcomplete nicety My completion-at-point-functions Changelog Footnotes What is cape ? § I will be going over the basic usages of Cape , namely how to add completion functions to completion-at-point-functions and how to use cape's built-in completion…
Table of Contents Synopsis Corfu What is corfu ? How does it differ from company ? Basic Working with the recent changes to corfu Further configuration in minibuffers and with lsp End product Kind-icon Corfu-doc Changelog Footnotes Nov 28, 2022 As is noted in the corfu-doc repository , corfu-doc has been deprecated by the built-in corfu-popupinfo corfu extension. corfu-popupinfo ’s functionality…
Table of Contents Synopsis Marginalia All-the-icons-completion Vertico Basic Extensions Vertico extension commands Niceties End product Orderless Basic Style dispatchers End product Changelog Footnotes Synopsis § Apr 5, 2025 Readers should be aware that some of the package-specific information in this article, including configuration options and lines of code, may be outdated. Since publication,…
The origins of the “great books idea” § The Great Books of the Western World is a landmark event for the manifestation of the “great books idea,” a campaign whose ideal was a liberal education. Throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the great books idea went from “being an academic experiment in New York City to a national phenomenon based in Chicago” ( Lacy 2006, 86 ). The spearheads for the…
Beauty § Rarely do moments of clarity arrive: ephemeral gifts recognized only a beat too late. As an exercise in free association, my memory draws, once again, to that thunderstorm. It materialised slowly yet caused me little alarm, not unlike my relationship with my dear window. I think its gradual pace is the reason why I didn’t notice it. But what I did notice was a feeling. An intangible…
TL;DR § Don’t be distracted by the allure of backlinks; a good knowledge management practice provides more value. Luhmann’s Zettelkasten isn’t law; your needs should instruct the directives you follow. I disagree with ‘backlink exceptionalism’ § The commonly understood novelty of the Zettelkasten tool is its non-hierarchical organization composed of hyperlinks. Backlinks generate interconnected…
Table of Contents TL;DR Core concepts The Master List The Main View What good is Amazing Marvin’s system? The beauty of Strategies A list of must-look-at Strategies Author’s Note TL;DR § Read this if you are either 1) interested in and want to try out Amazing Marvin, 2) just started using Amazing Marvin but feel overwhelmed, or 3) don’t know what Amazing Marvin is but want to read about a few of…