Beat Hagenlocher

GNOME Wayland Desktop Portal/Nautilus/Screen Sharing Issues

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:49:17 GMT

Over the last week, I learned that it's possible to have multiple desktop portals (implementations, I guess?) for Wayland active, and even specify which one to choose for which one. This is what this looks like: nix title="home.nix" # ... xdg.portal = { enable = true; extraPortals = [ pkgs.xdg-desktop-portal-gtk pkgs.xdg-desktop-portal-gnome ]; config.common = { # for files, mainly, since my nautilus takes ages to load default = "gtk"; # screen sharing doesn't work otherwise on GNOME "org.freedesktop.impl.portal.ScreenCast" = "gnome"; "org.freedesktop.impl.portal.RemoteDesktop" = "gnome"; }; }; # ... Link to the config

Details that make interfaces feel better

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:52:18 GMT

A pretty good article on small but meaningful design elements: Details that make interfaces feel better Sweet!

Nutrient Ranking Tool

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:00:58 GMT

I just found something pretty cool: A nutrient ranking tool which one can use to filter for basically any ingredient across lots of sources with lots of filters. Here it is: My Food Data | Nutrient Ranking Tool (I discovered this through reading this nice article on glycine on LessWrong) Hope it helps!

UnoCSS

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 17:55:12 GMT

Fluid (Type) Scales

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 17:52:18 GMT

Fluid Scales in Tailwind

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 17:48:53 GMT

Some time ago, I held a lightning talk at our functional programming meetup on [[Fluid Type Scales]] (Where you try and get rid of class="sm:... md:... lg:..." whenever it makes sense). This was, for a long time, a good reason for me to use [[UnoCSS]]. But today, I learned that someone built this for [[Tailwind]], too: - fluid.tw But since this doesn't support Tailwind 4, I'll be using the slightly uglier, but simpler (and maintained!) tailwind-clamp for now. May your utility classes always be simple :)

Size Textarea to Content

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 17:30:34 GMT

Today I learned that you can use field-sizing: content to make the It's not available everywhere as of today (field-sizing: content | Can I use), but that's up to you to decide. :)

Wasm

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:43:43 GMT

Lean and Wasm

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:40:48 GMT

Today I was thinking about how easy it is to include Lean into a website. Since it compiles via an intermediate [[C]] layer, it shouldn't be that hard to do this via [[Emscripten]], but apparently it's harder than that: Since there's #eval, every function of the language needs to be exported per default (only then it's really a full [[Lean]] compiler), and that apparently hit a limit for the number of imports and exports a WASM program(?, module?) allows. That has been increased since then, but now there's other issues. Wild. # Notes # Links - Lean 4 | wasm build | Zulip team chat - Lean 4 | lean.js | Zulip team chat - GitHub - T-Brick/lean2wasm: Tool for compiling Lean to WASM · GitHub (shouldn't work right now, if the lean.js thread is right)

Lean and WASM

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:06:42 GMT

Better Computer Use

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:56:52 GMT

Some time ago, I visited a friend who's fairly well versed in tech (e.g. [[NeoVim]], can code) and watches him struggle with editing a file in Word fast on someone else's Laptop. I asked him whether he knew about for wordwise movement (which he didn't), and was fairly surprised. But in hindsight, I didn't know that for the longest time either. I took this as an example to start writing on [[Better Computer Use]] (then only a collection of basically "Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Want To Know"). Today I revisited this, and something that started out as "You might want to know these shortcuts" ended in a discussion on how Software Developers and Product Designers should structure their UIs. Feel free to check it out, tell me what you think, and tell me where I'm wrong: [[Better Computer Use]] (Or just wait until it's more polished.) :)

Window Switching Made Simple | Part 2

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 09:21:19 GMT

Async Link Fetching in Emacs

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:16:25 GMT

Today I finally tackled something that has annoyed me for a while since switching most of my editing/digital gardening/second brain-writing over to Emacs. Whenever I took 30 minutes and tried to get title fetching of links to work, I couldn't get it to work in this self-allotted time. So I asked Opus to do the dumbest thing possible: Just fetch it via curl, and then apply stuff asynchronously. (Obviously the other, non-dumb way should work too, but I've spent way too much time on this now either way.) (And apparently there's also url-insert-file-contents, maybe I'm gonna try that some other time.) elisp (defun flt--url-at-point () "Get URL at point, or nil." (thing-at-point 'url)) (defun flt--url-from-kill-ring () "Get URL from kill ring if it looks like one, or nil." (let ((text (current-kill 0 t))) (when (and text (string-match-p "\\https?://" text)) (string-trim text)))) (defun flt--get-url () "Get URL from point first, then kill ring. Nil if neither has one." (or (flt--url-at-point) (flt--url-from-kill-ring))) (defun flt--extract-title (html) "Extract content from HTML string." (when (string-match "<title[^>]>\$[^<]\$" html) (string-trim (match-string 1 html)))) (defun flt--insert-markdown-link (url title marker) "Replace URL at MARKER with a markdown link, or insert at MARKER." (with-current-buffer (marker-buffer marker) (save-excursion (goto-char marker) ;; If there's a raw URL at point, replace it (let ((url-bounds (thing-at-point-bounds-of-url-at-point))) (if url-bounds (progn (delete-region (car url-bounds) (cdr url-bounds)) (insert (format "%s" title url))) (insert (format "%s" title url))))))) (defun flt-fetch-link-title () "Fetch the title of a URL (at point or kill ring) and insert a markdown link. If point is on a URL, replaces it. Otherwise inserts at point." (interactive) (let ((url (flt--get-url))) (if (not url) (message "No URL found at point or in kill ring.") (let ((marker (point-marker)) (buf (generate-new-buffer " flt-curl"))) (message "Fetching title for %s..." url) (make-process :name "flt-curl" :buffer buf :command (list "curl" "-sL" "-m" "10" "-H" "User-Agent: Emacs" "--" url) :sentinel (lambda (proc event) (when (eq (process-status proc) 'exit) (let ((title (with-current-buffer (process-buffer proc) (flt--extract-title (buffer-string))))) (if title (progn (flt--insert-markdown-link url title marker) (message "Inserted: %s" title url)) (message "Could not extract title from %s" url))) (kill-buffer (process-buffer proc)) (set-marker marker nil)))))))) (map! :leader :desc "->title" :nv "d f" #'flt-fetch-link-title) And in the meantime, I also learned that markers exist! So now, I can fetch link titles again, like I'm used to :)

SolidJS

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:46:13 GMT

Lean

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:31:17 GMT

Functional Programming Language, Proof Assistant? Pick two.

AI

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:22:10 GMT

New notes

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:39:46 GMT

I've been dragging quite a few notes around with me for the last one, two weeks. Here they are! :)

AI And Formal Methods

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 13:13:50 GMT

LLM Usage

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 13:10:09 GMT

Functional Programming

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:26:48 GMT

AI Agents

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:15:12 GMT

Oxide

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:05:33 GMT

Bryan Cantrill

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:03:20 GMT

Slidev QRCode Addon

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:42:12 GMT

For presentations, I'm using slidev, a pretty cool and versatile tool (Markdown slides with inline HTML/Vue, so you can do basically anything on your slides), which has lots of cool features. One minor annoyance: If you're using either of the QRCode addons and want to add more than one QR Code per slide deck, it breaks. Luckily, with the power of the web, this is pretty easy to fix: We can just define a component: vue And use it: vue Sweet!

package.json postinstall scripts

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:49:44 GMT

Today I learned that there's magic pre<> and post<> hooks inside npm (and everything npm-compatible): -> https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v8/using-npm/scripts I think I would've preferred less magic-side-effect-ness, but fair, I guess. So, to run something post install json { "scripts": { // ..., "postinstall": "echo 'hello postinstall'" } } Caveat: For npm, this only works when literally running npm install (or npm i), but not when running npm i . Well, that's what you get, I guess? I'm even less convinced by its usefulness now. For bun at least, both seem to work :) # Links - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73155672/npm-not-running-postinstall

TypeScript

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:40:13 GMT

Monitoring

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 21:52:31 GMT

(Fuzzy) Search on The Frontend

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 01:43:28 GMT

JavaScript Code Snippets

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:04:10 GMT

JS range()

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:03:06 GMT

JS doesn't have a range() function or anything, but you can do this: js [...Array(5).keys()]; => [0, 1, 2, 3, 4] ≺≻ [[JavaScript Code Snippets]]

Desktops in the browser

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:53:34 GMT

I did not know it's a thing that people are building desktop environments in the browser for fun: - https://webos.js.org/ - https://dustinbrett.com/ Wild.

Harness Engineering

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 23:11:43 GMT

Cognitive Debt

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:11:44 GMT

litecli

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:56:14 GMT

After getting annoyed by the default sqlite Command Line Interface (it doesn't even support arrow up ≙ last typed command), I found litecli nix title=flake.nix # ... packages = [ # ... pkgs.litecli # ... ]; # ... in every sqlite project from now on :)

Auth

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:46:35 GMT

Over the last few weeks, I've spent some time on and off researching a good way to do Authn and Authz, and struggled quite a bit with the number of options available. Not completely understanding what I'm doing/how to search for my requirements, I've first started trying Logto (but that was a UI clicking contest to set up), then going for [[kanidm]] without realizing this doesn't have support for a public sign in form, which is something I need. And just now when I'm relatively sure that [[Better Auth]] fits my needs quite well, I've discovered [[Stack Auth]] via this nice website: https://www.auth0alternatives.com/ Man, if I only would've found this 4 weeks earlier.

Trader/Non-trader in Chrome Web Store

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:14:54 GMT

Today, I thought about writing and publishing an extension to the Chrome Web Store. I researched, and found this funny bit: The EU apparently requires you to indicate whether you're a Trader or Non-Trader, when you want to publish extensions on the store. Which is fine, (I guess), but apparently literally no one has a definitive answer to what that means: - Am I a trader or non-trader | Stackoverflow - What constitutes a trader - trader/non-trader disclosure | Google Groups

Setting A DNS Record On A Domain

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:33:56 GMT

Setting Up A Server (with NixOS and Clan)

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:15:59 GMT

Diffing two directories

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:35:28 GMT

Today I learned that you can diff two directories just like you can diff two files: shell diff dir1/ dir2/ # or recursively diff --recursive dir1/ dir2/ Sweet! Comparing the contents of two directories | Stackoverflow

Setting Up Immich On NixOS with Clan

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:18:18 GMT

New stuff

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 12:05:39 GMT

Just now I learned - about Shannon, a pentesting agent - and that there's still an ongoing "Emacs in Rust" experiment people are actively working on! -> rune Looking forward to try Shannon out ^^ (rune isn't anything more than an Elisp interpreter right now)

OAuth Playground

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:09:12 GMT

Now that it's working again (I couldn't access it some days ago), OAuth playground is just a pretty nice way to understand code flows in [[Auth]].

in HTML

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:52:41 GMT

Today I learned there was a name attribute in HTML once.

Dynamic Scoping

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:14:20 GMT

The one unambiguously bad design choice in programming languages.

TypeScript Macros

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:07:15 GMT

Today I've been playing around with [[Immutable.js]] as a library that supplies immutable collections for [[JavaScript]] and [[TypeScript]]. Something that's relatively annoying at first sight (cause verbose) is how they handle typed Objects (Records). I'm not completely sure yet, but I think in [[TypeScript]] you want to declare sums of products using those records something like this: js import { Record } from 'immutable' type IdleT = { kind: 'Idle' } type Idle = Record const Idle = Record({ kind: 'Idle' }) type TrackT = { id: string; url: string; title: string } type Track = Record const Track = Record({ id: '', url: '', title: '' }) type LoadingT = { kind: 'Loading'; track: Track } type Loading = Record const Loading = Record({ kind: 'Loading', track: Track() }) // .. export type State = Idle | Loading // | .. This is, compared to js export type Track = { id: string; url: string; title: string } type Idle = { kind: 'Idle' } type Loading = { kind: 'Loading'; track: Track } // .. export type State = Idle | Loading // | .. quite the feat syntax-wise. It can be alleviated a bit by doing something like this: js export const makeRecord = (defaults: T) => Record(defaults) const Idle = makeRecord({ kind: 'Idle' as const }) type Idle = ReturnType But even that is still double the code and more mental workload paid as a price for immutability. So I wondered: > Are there people writing [[Macros]] in TypeScript? And as it turns out, there are: - ts-macros - macro-ts But nope, I'm not gonna use them.

selfhostblocks

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:24:45 GMT

Today, I lurked a bit around the on the clan gitea, which made me find this nice PR trying to nail down a better clan positioning in the future, which made me find selfhostblocks. Cool! (Though I'm pretty convinced by clan so far)

Bun

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:33:56 GMT

The all-in-one JS thingy

Bun ❤️ sqlite

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 11:41:10 GMT

Today I learned that [[Bun]] has a sqlite db driver built in. That's pretty cool. js import { Database } from 'bun:sqlite' const setup = () => { const db = new Database('mydb.sqlite', { create: true }) const createUsers = db.query( CREATE TABLE users ( id string PRIMARY KEY, name integer NOT NULL) ) createUsers.run() const addUser = db.query( INSERT INTO users (id, name) VALUES (?, ?) ) addUser.run('qwfparstoienarst', 'beat') db.close(false) } const main = () => { const db = new Database('mydb.sqlite') const selectUsers = db.query('select from users') console.log(selectUsers.all()) db.close(false) } // First: // setup() // Then: main() :)

Auth

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 10:49:36 GMT

Passwords, OAuth, OIDC, and whatever

Clan

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 10:04:48 GMT

A NixOS fleet management tool

How People Learn

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 11:16:36 GMT

A course I taught at Schülerakademie Roßleben 2022

Screen Freezes on Framework 16 with AMD and GNOME

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:09:45 GMT

Domain Name System

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 15:26:50 GMT

Using dig

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 15:23:23 GMT

Just had a small DNS dispute again, and remembered the post by Julia Evans on using dig. Pretty helpful! (She also wrote a website for simple DNS lookup: a simple DNS lookup tool)

Backing up my stuff from Github

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 22:15:01 GMT

Today, I thought about making myself less dependent on Github (once again). There are a few ways to do that (I still want to have an account on Github and be there, just be less dependent on them) – the easiest thing for this would be setting up a git mirror. I could do that by setting up my private git forge (forgejo or gitea), or by just going to one of the git hosters (Gitlab or Codeberg) Two promising tools for that seem to be: - https://github.com/ChappIO/git-backup - and https://github.com/cooperspencer/gickup But actually setting this up is for another day. ^^ (Small caveat: Codeberg doesn't want you to mirror your stuff there for resource reasons.)

Threading Macros And Pipes

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:03:05 GMT

Macros

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 17:41:59 GMT

Code that writes Code (so AI, basically)

dash.el for nice list operations

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 17:38:46 GMT

When programming in [[Elisp]] I've been using the -> and ->> threading [[Macros]] for quite some time. I learned to value them first in [[Racket]] ((require threading)), then in Elixir: (|>), and since then I use them wherever it makes sense (& in [[Haskell]], or the ->/->> Threading Macros in [[Clojure]], for example. And yesterday, I opened the in-Emacs docs of -> for the first time (since I actually needed -as-> in that situation, and wanted to see whether it exists, which it does) only to see it's part of a library called dash.el, which has lots of list functions with an intuitive api. Nice! In case you're more confused about Threading Macros now than you were before, take a look here: [[Threading Macros And Pipes]].

Emacs Unicode Input Doesn't Work Correctly: IBus Errors

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:55:20 GMT

Typing Emojis with :shortcodes: in Emacs

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:01:11 GMT

After I just properly learned/understood how completion in [[Emacs]] works, today I had my 'wait a moment' moment for knowing what to google to emoji input via :shortcodes: in [[Emacs]]. It's as easy as knowing that you need to google "emacs company emoji input" And then the thing that immediately worked was company-emoji. elisp ;; packages.el (package! company-emoji) elisp ;; config.el (require 'company-emoji) (after! markdown-mode (set-company-backend! 'markdown-mode 'company-emoji)) Nice to be able to easily type emojis again, finally! 🙌

22. Tü.λ-Meetup: Property Testing

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:46:52 GMT

The next edition of tu-lambda is up: https://www.meetup.com/tu-lambda/events/312848576/ If you're in the vicinity of Tübingen at the 28.01.26, come by :) (There's gonna be free pizza!)

Emacs Custom Completion

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:10:06 GMT

Today I learned how to create a custom completion for company-mode. I'm gradually moving my personal knowledge management away from Obsidian into Emacs, but I want to keep the giant heap of Markdown files I've already got (so that I can use my keybindings/custom commands from programming in my Personal Knowledge Base, too). Something [[Emacs]] already does way better out-of-the-box than Obsidian is full-text search (obviously) and templates work nicely, too. Really the only thing I've been missing are the wikilink behaviors: 1. File Creation on inside [[]] 2. Highlighting of files in [[]] when the file already exists 3. Completion for already existing files when typing inside [[]] The first two I've already completed some time ago (you can find them here: mycelium.el) And today, I finally read the doom docs (mid-helpful), company docs+blog post (helpful) and Emacs completion docs (not so helpful), and then went and implemented this: elisp (defun bah/mycelium-company-backend (command &optional arg &rest ignored) (interactive (list 'interactive)) (cl-case command (interactive (company-begin-backend 'bah/mycelium-company-backend)) (prefix (when (looking-back "\\[\\[\$[^]]\$" (line-beginning-position)) (match-string 1))) (candidates (cl-remove-if-not (lambda (candidate) (string-prefix-p arg candidate t)) (hash-table-keys (bah/get-project-markdown-file-names)))))) (after! markdown-mode (set-company-backend! 'markdown-mode #'bah/mycelium-company-backend)) -> mycelium-completion.el

curl Converter

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:40:32 GMT

Today I found curlconverter You give it a curl HTTP request, and it translates it into a corresponding request in many, many other languages. Sweet :)

elysia

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:29:58 GMT

TIL about [[Elysia]], a .. pretty nice-looking new-ish framework for writing strongly typed web services that has a strong emphasis on [[Bun]]. Their docs are pretty nice, they have cool tutorial/playground (and a very small thing: Their CORS plugin just works (that's not that high of a bar, I know)) I especially like how code example-heavy their comparison pages are: https://elysiajs.com/migrate/from-hono.html Sweet!

Kanidm

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 18:38:35 GMT

I've already thought for a few times about setting up an LDAP service for organizations I'm in, and always stopped doing it/thinking about it, because it didn't seem worth the effort. Now (thanks to being on the clan.lol Matrix Server) I learned about Kanidm, which sounds way easier to use. But especially valuable is Kanidm's Comparisons page where there's several other options listed. I probably just should've looked for a bit longer when I researched the LDAP stuff last time :)

Extism

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 18:24:01 GMT

I just found out about Extism, a framework that lets you write plugins in {Rust, JS, Python, Go, Haskell, .NET, C, C++, Zig} as of now, compiles them to WASM, and then lets you call the resulting WASM modules from even more programming languages, but with only limited capabilities. This looks like one of the frameworks finally fulfilling one of the promises of WASM (namely the one replacing docker, see Rust, WebAssembly and the future of Serverless). Interesting!

clan.lol Backups

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 10:09:58 GMT

Yesterday, I added a new service to my server (Actual), and then tried to get backups in clan to work. This is the (very simple) result: nix inventory.instances = { # https://docs.clan.lol/services/official/borgbackup/ borgbackup = { module = { name = "borgbackup"; input = "clan-core"; }; roles.client.machines."formenos".settings = { destinations."storagebox" = { repo = "u366465-sub5@u366465-sub5.your-storagebox.de:/./borgbackup"; rsh = ''ssh -p 23 -oStrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new -i /run/secrets/vars/borgbackup/borgbackup.ssh''; }; }; }; machines.formenos = { # https://docs.clan.lol/guides/backups/backup-intro/ clan.core.state.actual = { folders = [ "/var/lib/actual" ]; }; # https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=unstable&query=services.actual services.actual = { enable = true; settings = { port = 5006; }; }; };

Vimium NixOS

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 15:54:13 GMT

Today I learned that there's a home manager module for generating a Vimium config. You can find it here: https://github.com/uimataso/vimium-nixos Nothing crazy, but still pretty nice. This is what my config looks like now nix home.vimiumOptions = { enable = true; outputFilePath = ".cache/vimium-options.json"; keyMappings = { unmapAll = true; map = { j = "goBack"; y = "goForward"; l = "scrollPageDown"; u = "scrollPageUp"; f = "LinkHints.activateMode"; p = "LinkHints.activateModeToOpenInNewTab"; }; }; }; (You can find it here: https://github.com/haglobah/mynix/blob/f3277da86ff0834d5f1371ba5b5af1550e9da967/home/home.nix#L298)

Spritely's new stuff

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 16:09:35 GMT

I swear it's not been that long when I last looked at the news page of [[Spritely Institute]] (okay, it's been about one and a half years), but man did they work on stuff. They've started work on their [[Malleable Software]]/sandboxing foreign code equivalent, Oaken, created a prototype composing OCaps and CRDTs and that was already enough to go through. Pretty exciting stuff!

Finitary and Infinitary

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 15:38:46 GMT

Lol, I learned two new words: Finitary and Infinitary They mean the simplest thing you would expect: That something has a finite arity or an infinite arity. Apparently these words get said more often than I'd have expected ^^

Excluding Tailwind Classes From Being Generated

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 17:12:53 GMT

Today I learned to exclude tailwind classes from being generated. It works like this: css @import 'tailwindcss'; @source not inline("collapse"); / excludes the collapse class /

Unmap Return in company's completion menu

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:20:27 GMT

(Mostly just a note to my future self) Somehow I just had issues with [[Doom Emacs]]'s map! function and unmapping the key in company mode. This didn't work: elisp (map! :map company-active-mode "RET" nil "TAB" #'company-complete-selection) but this did: elisp (after! company (keymap-unset company-active-map "" t) (define-key company-active-map (kbd "") #'company-complete-selection)) Maybe I'm gonna investigate this later.

Design Your Code From The Output On

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:12:51 GMT

I just came upon this pretty interesting post by Jeremy Gibbons: How to design Co-Programs His point is that data structure determines program structure (or at least should), and there's an easy way to apply this principle (data structure => program structure) that's missing from How to Design Programs: htdp mostly concerns itself with deriving programs from the input data, but doesn't talk about deriving programs from the output data. (If that sentence doesn't produce a clear picture in your head, go now and read his article) And that's something that hasn't been clear to me until now.

The Four Document Model for Writing Documentation

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:51:54 GMT

Some time ago, I learned about Diataxis and found it pretty nice. I'm not sure whether I read its critiques then, but today I got reminded (or got to know, who knows) one of them: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/problems-with-the-4doc-model/ I think I mostly buy his conclusion (Whenever I tried applying diataxis, I without question first wrote a conceptual overview page) :)

nixpkgs: Number of Packages

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 11:04:00 GMT

Yesterday was Tü.λ again and the topic of the day was Guix (and with it, reproducible package management). There's also an [[Operating System]] based on Guix, Guix System (as there is with [[Nix]] and [[NixOS]]) with basically the same trade-offs. One of these trade-offs is that due to the nature of reproducible packages, you can't just run any linux binary directly on your system (cause they normally rely on dynamically linked libraries). (There are some pretty easy workarounds to that, though) That's why it's doubly important and useful to have as many packages packaged in Guix's and Nix's package repos Guix Packages and nixpkgs After coming to that point at Tü.λ, I showed people the package repo size/freshness graph from repology, and could rest assured that basically everything you'll need that's available on Linux is also in nixpkgs.

On the Effectiveness of FIXMEs

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 17:08:09 GMT

Today I learned about On the Effectiveness of FIXMEs. The TL;DR: Having a kind of code comment that's a immediate todo is helpful. That's because you can use it for lowering your mental workload while writing the code. Instead of just dropping the part of the modeling you don't want to concern yourself with right now, you place a crumb there to pick it up later. And that's pretty helpful.

Lix installer

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:48:34 GMT

Today I learned Lix has an installer that's based off the determinate systems one now. So now, you can install Lix with this command: shell curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.lix.systems/lix | sh -s -- install Nice!

Setting up a Win 11 VM on NixOS

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:11:17 GMT

Getting Win

nix-portable

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 22:41:27 GMT

I just found nix-portable, a way to run [[Nix]] as a static executable from any linux system. Cool!

kitty & tmux

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 19:41:18 GMT

Just got reminded (through a tmux bro) of this nice thread again: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/391#issuecomment-638320745 ([[kitty]]'s main dev on why [[Multiplexer]]s are a bad idea)

kitty

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 19:32:48 GMT

A pretty nice terminal emulator

evil mode

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:59:39 GMT

Emacs' Vim mode

magit/evil interaction weirdness

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:57:03 GMT

In [[magit]]'s diff view ([[evil mode]]), it happens semi-regularly to me that I want to extract some code out of there to apply to my current state. There's the option to apply a full hunk a But sometimes, I just want to select a piece of text from there. For that, I could view the buffer at the current state by clicking on the hunk, and then selecting it from the normal buffer, but even that gets annoying fast. Today I realized that I can just set a mark with , and then select the text normally. Nice!

Github: Public ssh keys

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 13:38:45 GMT

Github has a website where one can see all the public keys per user. It's at https://github.com/.keys. Sweet!

mu4e

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:36:05 GMT

An Email client for Emacs.

mu4e: Show the time in email list

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:34:36 GMT

Today I learned how to also show the time in [[mu4e]]'s email list. This is how you do it: elisp (setq mu4e-headers-date-format "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M") (setq mu4e-headers-fields '((:human-date . 18) ; this needs to be there (:flags . 6) (:from . 22) (:subject))) Sweet!

Nix

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 01:26:28 GMT

Package Manager, Package Repo, Programming Language, and Operating System

clan.lol

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 01:24:25 GMT

Today I learned about a new tool in the [[Nix]] space: Clan Really looking forward to trying this out.

Law as Coding

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 16:55:50 GMT

Today I finally watched A Language Server for your DSL for Fun and Profit, which was a pretty nice talk. In the talk, he mentions L4—it's a [[Specification Language]] for legal systems. Looks interesting!

Frontier Tower

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:17:43 GMT

Ooh, there's a new "different kind of society/state/governance/living" experiment I didn't know about yet: It's called the Frontier Tower. And looks pretty promising!

just parallel

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 17:09:37 GMT

Today I learned that [[Just]] can finally run recipes in parallel. This is what this looks like: just [parallel] dev: astro bsky astro: npm run dev bsky: cd bsky-post-server && bun run dev Sweet!

Today I learned

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 12:13:44 GMT

Today I learned - about bunster - about util.inspect() for longer console.log() printing in Node.js

Adjusting transient menus in Emacs

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:04:52 GMT

Today I learned how to adjust the keybindings in transient menus (those nice hover menus you may know from [[magit]]). This is how you can do it for aidermacs: elisp (with-eval-after-load 'aidermacs (transient-replace-suffix 'aidermacs-transient-menu "F" '("f" "Add Current File" aidermacs-add-current-file))) Code here: haglobah/doom | eval-after-load | aidermacs.el

git ssh command

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 12:59:52 GMT

TIL that git can pick up its ssh command from the environment: shell GITSSHCOMMAND="ssh -v" git pull Especially the -v option is pretty useful to see if something's not working right now.

NeoVim

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:44:04 GMT

Emacs

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:26:45 GMT

An editor | a lisp interpreter with an editor | an operating system scriptable with a lisp (interpreter) with an editor | a lisp machine that is an operating system (scriptable with an interpreter) with an editor

count-words

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:51:28 GMT

Today I learned that Emacs has a word and character-counting command baked in: M-x count-words But following the StackExchange thread on counting words, I discovered - M-|: (shell-command-on-region) That is pretty nice for doing anything fast you know how to do in the shell, but lack the knowledge to do with [[Emacs]] tools right now.

aider-chat-with-playwright

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:33:52 GMT

Lol. I spent 20 minutes researching/reading Github issues on how to correctly set up aider with playwright on [[NixOS]], only to realize then that someone's already done it the way it should've been done: In addition to the aider-chat package in nixpkgs, there's an aider-chat-with-playwright package that does the right thing. Sweet :)

git: naturally moving around the commit tree

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 23:22:26 GMT

is a tool where I regularly think "I wonder...", and then it just works. I had that already with discovering that—obviously—I can also commit --amend from the commit menu, and today I had it with navigating and manipulating the whole commit tree (l b). When in the commit tree view, you can just do whatever you normally did and see the result directly. Checkout a commit? -> Hover over it, then b c Rebase a branch? Check it out, then r b And so on. Sweet!

magit

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 22:55:21 GMT

The way to use git.

iframes

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 22:47:32 GMT

Apparently you can't open links from iframes in new tabs or windows. Sad. But searching for the question on StackOverflow brings you back to the olden days of the site at which at least one of the answers was completely ignoring the point of the question.

Just

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 22:25:39 GMT

Just is a simple and nice command runner

just open

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 22:10:19 GMT

I came up with a new and simple thing I really like (utilizing ): just # Justfile open cmd="": #!/usr/bin/env bash url="http://localhost:8080" if [[ -n "{{ cmd }}" ]]; then {{ cmd }} "$url" elif command -v xdg-open &> /dev/null; then xdg-open "$url" elif command -v open &> /dev/null; then open "$url" else echo "No suitable cmd found. Please install xdg-open or open." exit 1 fi This adds a canonical command for "opening" your projects. My preferred way of launching a project is now: shell just open chromium && just dev (which becomes )

Getting More Power by Limiting Your Options

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:32:57 GMT

Simplicity is Power

Lingua Franca

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:26:55 GMT

Oh wow: I've apparently never properly thought about the word lingua franca in its parts. It literally means "language of the francs", which makes total sense. That makes it harder for me now to point to the general principle behind it—german has it better there: It's not only the word lingua franca we can and need to use—there's also another one: Verkehrssprache (meaning "language you commonly use when interacting")

Letting haiku-4.5 fill in Architectural Decision Records

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:02:03 GMT

Today, I let haiku critique and write out bare drafts from my side into proper texts, and I think it worked pretty well. That is an interesting property about LLMs: I think that human-interaction-wise, the style in which they generate text could become a new lingua franca-like thing but for writing style. (-> [[Writing with LLMs is Googling in Reverse]])

Battery Warning

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 22:55:26 GMT

Lol. Just now I learned that GNOME doesn't give you a way of changing the battery percentage. You somehow got to know that there's another service, UPower, that does this. So for changing the battery warning percentage, you got to edit /etc/UPower/UPower.conf: toml # UPower.conf [UPower] AllowRiskyCriticalPowerAction=false CriticalPowerAction=HybridSleep EnableWattsUpPro=false IgnoreLid=false NoPollBatteries=false PercentageAction=2 PercentageCritical=5 PercentageLow=20 # set this to 30 or whatever TimeAction=120 TimeCritical=300 TimeLow=1200 UsePercentageForPolicy=true Or on [[NixOS]]: nix # configuration.nix { config = { services.upower.percentageLow = 30; }; }

Vite Cache

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 14:01:13 GMT

Just today I ran into a weird issue: shell The file does not exist at "/nodemodules/.vite/deps/chunk-3QUCSPQG.js?v=xxxxxxxx" which is in the optimize deps directory. The dependency might be incompatible with the dep optimizer. Try adding it to optimizeDeps.exclude Refreshing it via the browser cache solves it: https://github.com/vitejs/vite/discussions/17738#discussioncomment-13090665 Makes sense, but could use a better error message before everyone first nukes their nodemodules/ ^^

Solid Primitives

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 14:51:03 GMT

Yesterday, looking for how to properly do keyboard shortcuts in SolidJS, I found this website: Solid Primitives That's a pretty nice idea, actually—I especially like how clear they are on the Design Principles and the maturity indicators.

Is Elm dead?

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 16:08:26 GMT

Hihi: https://iselmdead.info/ Is Elm dead?

Valibot

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:20:59 GMT

Ooh, there is a new-ish Zod replacement that looks pretty cool! -> Valibot

Tools for Conviviality

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:02:46 GMT

Just properly read Jacky Zhao's note on Tools for Conviviality: https://jzhao.xyz/thoughts/Tools-for-Conviviality I've only read Deschooling from [[Ivan Illich]] so far, which I found great. And onto my book list it goes ^^

About Keybindings

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:22:21 GMT

Better Computer Use

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:57:50 GMT

Keyboard shortcuts & other stuff you probably want to know about

Ctrl-Arrow

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:30:18 GMT

Some time ago, a fairly computer savvy friend of mine looked at me confused/surprised when I sat down at his PC and skipped through the text word by word by holding down Ctrl and then clicking the arrow keys. And then I remembered I, too, found out about that only after my first few years of using computers. Probably time to start my version of this list: [[Better Computer Use]]

Learning Vim

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 09:51:55 GMT

What I used/found helpful for learning Vim keybindings

Small Improvements

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 03:44:39 GMT

I'm already a person that tends to do this enough/a lot, but today I got inspired to do it some more: Do One New Thing A Day To Solve Your Problems (I think I've got a loose contact on one of the nice!nanos on my keyboard–and today, I finally resolved to just buy a new one – not even really new, but nevertheless ^^)

Thinking in Systems

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 03:41:06 GMT

Ooh, there's a Video Series on Thinking in Systems!

fast-check

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 18:19:25 GMT

I just tried out fast-check for property testing in TypeScript, and my first impression is it's pretty sweet. With most of the things in JS, it's half pretty straightforward and half quite some steps you need to take if you're setting it up from scratch. shell # -1. Have vite # 0. Install a test runner npm install --save-dev vitest # 1. Install fast-check npm install --save-dev fast-check And then, for: ts // modulo.ts export const mod = (n: number, m: number): number => { return ((n % m) + m) % m } add this ts # modulo.test.ts import fc from 'fast-check' import { describe, it } from 'vitest' describe('mod', () => { it('result is always in range [0, m)', () => { fc.assert( fc.property(fc.integer(), fc.integer({ min: 1 }), (n, m) => { const result = mod(n, m) return result >= 0 && result < m }) ) }) })

Presenterm

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:18:53 GMT

I'm always on the lookout for 'the perfect' slides program (whatever that might be). I like: - full power of a programming language (runnable code snippets, for example, slides as code) - good interop with other stuff (web, mostly) - runnable code in slides - easy/fast to write slides (lol) Strong contenders are/have been Reveal JS, Slidev, impress.js and Racket Slideshow. Today, I found out about presenterm (slides that run from your terminal) Looks promising!

A Million Ways to Fold in JS

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:04:19 GMT

Just found this gem: A Million Ways to Fold in JS The speed at which this talk is progressing is insane. I can count myself lucky that I just listened to a presentation of Recursion Schemes at Tü.λ

LLM Poisoning

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 16:56:40 GMT

Uh oh: Apparently, you can poison LLMs pretty easily

Constraint Solving

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:38:59 GMT

In earlier grades in school, I've been time constrained in what I could do for most of the time. Later, I've read about that it's more helpful to manage your energy, not your time—and realized I'd been doing that inconsistently but pretty well already. But, during the last year, I've come close to the point at which almost all of the things I do in life give me energy. Now, the biggest thing that still takes my energy is everything I still need to think of: My mental workload. So does this make it > Manage Your Mental Workload, Not Your Time. for me? Good question.

Rich in Moonshots

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 02:49:49 GMT

As I'm slowly progressing through my read-review pile in Nirvana, I find Jade Bonacolta's Quiet Rich stuff better and better. Today, I had my first Moonshot slot scheduled. It is a pretty good calendar entry to have. Maybe you want that for yourself, too?

Contacting Me

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 01:48:25 GMT

Tell me something I don't know | Tell me where I'm wrong | Ask for help | Have a nice conversation

Working with an AI Pair: Outsource Your Mental Workload to Your Commit Messages

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 01:54:29 GMT

(Doom) Emacs Config Bits

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:13:59 GMT

Configuration parts you might want to know

Emacs language server speedup

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:06:59 GMT

Over the last few weeks, I found lsp-mode TypeScript suggestions to be slower than they should've been. The full-on solution is lsp-bridge (which makes the lsp stuff work asynchronously), but I first wanted to try what lsp-mode still has to offer. There's emacs-lsp-booster, and I'm using it now :) ≺≻ [[Doom Emacs Config Bits]]

Liberland

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 01:23:50 GMT

Some setup: I regularly think about why our civilization currently struggles the way it does, and I think a significant part of our struggles comes from not really having an alternative system available to which we can compare ourselves to. It feels like—viewed from an average western citizen—having competing socialist countries with high equality available for comparison gave governing bodies a really good incentive to not let e.g. inequality go out of hand. This easily-comparable-alternative died in 1990, and since then, we have a hard time to even imagine an alternative. So, even if it were just for the quality of our collective imagination—it would be pretty nice to have a different and competing society to ours available to compare ourselves to. And optimally, it wouldn't even only be one, but a diverse set of them: Something up to Scott Alexander's Archipelago of communities from Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism. --- And this is why it both makes me pretty happy to see that people are finally experimenting with this, and quite a bit sad that basically all of them sound like the same US-libertarian-web3-AI wet dream. The latest contender: Liberland Well, I wish them all the best :)

IPv6 Internet Issues

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 11:50:18 GMT

Jacky Zhao

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 01:11:57 GMT

Jacky Zhao

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:47:06 GMT

Would you look at that! [[Jacky Zhao]] (of Quartz and of Socratica) built a JSON CRDT from scratch to properly learn how they work. This is so cool.

Abusing Maths

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:13:17 GMT

I'm always having a hard time when people use a mathy notation in a context where it could make sense, but doesn't really. This is one of them: Big L Notation I don't even know what assigning 'learnings' with a big-O like complexity should mean. And this irritates me, which is pretty sad. Because normally articles like these have a point—they just fail to formulate the point in Maths. This article is like that: It has a point, but fails to formulate it in Maths :)

Digital Garden

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 23:34:29 GMT

A web of notes that grow

IP Network Ranges

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 16:12:08 GMT

I'm currently looking at a solution for the Internet issues when traveling via DB, and found this lovely Wikipedia page: IPv4 Address Blocks I've always wondered whom the local 10.0.0.0/8 range originally belonged to. Go and see for yourself :)

Deutsche Bahn | Issues and Solutions

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 21:53:29 GMT

Things that can go wrong in DB trains and how to (sometimes) resolve them

Thank You for Traveling with Deutsche Bahn

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 21:50:28 GMT

When traveling via DB in Germany, there are a few things that can go wrong. And as I just learned about a new solution for DB issues, I thought it's time to start a page collecting them: [[Deutsche Bahn | Issues and Solutions]]

Microlife Review

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 21:21:51 GMT

Weekly Review

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 21:16:10 GMT

My Review System

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 21:04:01 GMT

At some time in 2019, I started journaling to get a clearer head about thoughts and other open threads I accumulated during the day. Through it, I've come to appreciate [[Leslie Lamport]]s If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking, and I still do think it's pretty great. Writing about things that feel fuzzy in my head really clears the fog, and things get concrete. But I've always struggled with transferring that clarity to bigger thoughts ('bigger' in the time it takes to think it through, not necessarily in scope of the thought). And sometimes during last year, I've started with something new trying to tackle this: - Every week (or so, lol), I'm writing a [[Weekly Review]] - And every 12-week cycle, I'm doing a [[Microlife Review]] and outlook spanning the last and next 12 weeks I found that this works nicely for the bigger stuff in life. :)

Economics

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:54:00 GMT

Pretty recently, I saw the monthly newsletter by Global Development & Economic Advancement in my inbox. I couldn't remember that I subscribed to it, and was really pleasantly surprised. Of the pieces that sounded interesting and which I read, 100% were. Some gems: - How Asia Works - (On measuring) GDP: We don't really know how good we have it But take a look at the rest if you're interested: GDEA Substack \| October 2025

Needles eye

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:45:37 GMT

I'm currently reading The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson—and just now one of the protagonists came upon something called Needle's eye in an ancient city. It's a small stone arch that's used to keep camels out of spaces. Suddenly the bible quote with the camel and the needles eye makes a lot more sense. And this is not the first time Stephenson weaves a nice little fact into the overall story (though I can't remember the other occurrences right now). Pretty nice!

Bluesky

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 21:52:00 GMT

And now I can publish texts to Bluesky from Emacs! Code here: haglobah/doom: bluesky.el

Augmenting Human Intellect

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 11:21:04 GMT

Last night, I finished reading Augmenting Human Intellect, a summary report on Computer Use for [[Tools for Thought]] (also incredibly old: it's from 1962) written by Douglas Engelbart, the guy behind the The Mother of All Demos Content-wise, it's pretty good: We've got some way towards it, but we're still miles away from achieving the human augmentation he describes in the report. Regarding the Writing Style, I'm honestly surprised just how badly it's written. Every other sentence is a jumble of the words process, function, structure, substructure, and basically every verb is substantivized.

Automations

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 11:17:46 GMT

Ever got annoyed by having to do a lot of very simple and repetitive actions? For solving that, being able to control your whole editor programmatically is pretty neat. It's not much, but just now I added a small new capability to my Emacs, which is: Being able to create those small blog post files from wherever I am. This is what it looks like: elisp (defun bah/new-streamlet () (interactive) (let ((dg-root "/beathagenlocher.com") (stream-folder (doom-path dg-root "src" "content" "stream")) (next-number (->> (directory-files stream-folder nil (rx ".mdx")) (map 'list (lambda (filename) (string-to-number (file-name-sans-extension filename)))) (sort) (reverse) (first) (+ 1))) (next-streamlet-filename (concat (number-to-string next-number) ".mdx")) (next-streamlet-path (doom-path stream-folder next-streamlet-filename))) (with-temp-file next-streamlet-path (insert "stream")) (find-file next-streamlet-path) (move-end-of-line nil) (evil-append 0))) (map! :leader :prefix ("e" . "personal") :desc "Writing: Streamlet" :nv "s" #'bah/new-streamlet)

Comparing Bikes

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 21:03:23 GMT

I'm currently looking for a new bike, and found a pretty nice website for comparing them: https://99spokes.com/ I especially like the Gear Speed thing and the Price/Spec Level map :)

Recipes

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:52:16 GMT

Crocker's Rules

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:38:36 GMT

Signalling: 'Please be harsh with me—I'll value it tremendously.'

Good Incentive Systems

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:13:59 GMT

A few days ago, I read Explaining British Naval Dominance During the Age of Sail and have been thinking about it quite regularly since. You should go and read it—it's not that long—but the TL;DR is that when you have bad and/or long feedback loops, having good incentive systems in place makes you win wars.

Work Boundaries

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:10:26 GMT

Recently, I came upon The Quiet Rich, specifically the article on Work Boundaries. So I thought I'd try and write this down for me: [[My Work Boundaries]]

My Work Boundaries

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:09:00 GMT

A sheet on the logistics of working together (pretty barebones, but hopefully useful) | "How I'd like to work"

LessWrong Community Weekend 2025

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 22:50:12 GMT

emacs-monkeytype

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 22:49:01 GMT

For quite some time I've been a bit jealous of the [[NeoVim]] people for having something like Typr or DuckyType available to them. But I've never really translated that into actually searching for a Monkeytype package for [[Emacs]]. Today, I did—and found emacs-monkeytype. This combined with The touch typing test text editor | Drew's blogsite makes for a pretty nice workflow :) (commit that adds it: haglobah/doom#7bfe9a0)

Autosave in Editors

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 13:31:15 GMT

Saving by hand is just less simple

VS Code tips and tricks

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 13:23:22 GMT

How I'm using VS Code

Raising Aspirations

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 18:28:27 GMT

Just came upon this wonderful piece again: The high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations Already raised someone's aspirations today?

Real Time Giant Chess

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 15:23:29 GMT

Oh my god, this looks great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ioIkgPO14

The Goddess of Everything Else

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 20:30:55 GMT

Just got reminded (via the LessWrong Community Weekend) of this wonderful piece: The Goddess of Everything Else (Video Version)

A Streamlet

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 19:40:21 GMT

Nice talk about Deutsche Bahn. - Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQN9EQAu9HE - Website: https://bahnvorhersage.de/

Weaving Threads

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:53:44 GMT

At the DSA, I made a promise: > When the first attendant of one of my programming workshops would be finished with reading the first book for [[Learning to Program]] I proposed, I would start to draft the guide to Software Engineering I would've liked to have when I was younger. That happened nine days after the DSA finished. So now I find myself writing this guide (still for now)—and I'm really enjoying it so far.

Nix Flake

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 02:20:58 GMT

Learning to C

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:52:40 GMT

A mastery guide for the ugly side of programming

No more commit hashes

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 22:54:13 GMT

Lol. Today I learned that you can reference commits in git by searching through their messages: In this commit graph: shell 30997b5 (HEAD -> main, bugFix) Add lala ceeae15 Add hehe c4a2cd2 Add hoho b2627b3 Add a shell git show :/hoho does the thing you'd expect—it shows commit c4a2cd2. Nice!

Keyboard Shortcuts

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 02:31:45 GMT

TIL that holding Ctrl on https://chatgpt.com shows all available keyboard shortcuts. That's actually pretty nice UX :) Minus me not knowing that until now (which clearly is bad UX)—but hey, you can't have everything, I guess. It would have been nice of them to indicate that somewhere.

NAND to Tetris

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 23:24:35 GMT

We're currently thinking about which course to teach at a possible next SchülerAkademie next year. We thought a course that traverses a sizeable chunk of the abstraction stack of [[Computer Science]] could be pretty nice, and I had a website that did that in mind for starting my investigation into course materials. However, I didn't do that immediately, and found NAND to Tetris on one of [[Eli Tyre]]'s links first. This somehow felt familiar. And I'm still not sure where I saw it/read about it first, but just today I sorted some links about Supernuclear into my personal knowledge base, one of which was a guest post by one of the Fractal University (which I already knew) people, which taught NAND to Tetris before. I love it when I find out a graph is connected like that.

Mechanical Keyboards United

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 19:46:04 GMT

A collection of links we mentioned at our TDF mechanical keyboards workshop/meetup

Writing A Web Server in Elixir

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Navigating The Shell

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 17:41:49 GMT

cmdchallenge

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 17:37:03 GMT

TIL about a nice new thing: cmdchallenge - Twelve Days of Shell (easy) - Command Challenge (mid) - Without /bin version (hard) There are pretty cool ways to learn how to .

Setting Up A New Phone

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:31:54 GMT

In search for a small phone: Switching from a Pixel 4a to a iPhone 13 mini

Netscape

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 22:45:39 GMT

Just got reminded of a real gem by Joel Spolsky: Things You Should Never Do, Part I (You shouldn't rewrite your software from scratch.)

Techne

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:25:29 GMT

And oh my god, he's got a list of his Personal systems, protocols, workflows, policies, methods, and checklists he calls Techne (nice word, by the way!). So looking forward to studying them.

Capital

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 23:06:15 GMT

Joey Savoie

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:41:34 GMT

I mean, I knew him from him being mentioned in [[Moral Ambition]] for founding the Charity Entrepreneurship stuff, but: He's also got a website where he tries (or tried?) to outline his values. Unfortunately, it's only little content, but from what I can see it's pretty neat - Partners - Values - Sleep - Morning Routine

Books You Probably Want To Read

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 21:44:05 GMT

dsa-2025

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 20:23:25 GMT

A collection of things I mentioned to people at DSA Roßleben 2025

My Keyboard Setup

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 23:56:55 GMT

mechanical, split, 36 keys, standing desk

Software

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 01:07:25 GMT

We were promised bicycles for the mind, but we got aircraft carriers instead.

Choosing My Frontend Stack, Part II

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 22:41:49 GMT

The Hydrogen Sonata

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 22:39:15 GMT

I've just finished reading The Hydrogen Sonata, the now sixth (? I think) [[Culture]] book I've read. Pretty nice book, although I would sort it into the middle of all the culture books I've read so far. (Doesn't surpass [[Player of Games]] or [[Consider Phloebas]], for example) And I think I'm at the point where I find the [[Culture]] books all a bit too similar—but hey, what can you do when you still very much enjoy reading them.

A Streamlet

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 15:06:12 GMT

Oh, and the lean packaged in [[Doom Emacs]] appears to be the Lean 3 Mode. So you can't use that, and instead need to use the Doom Emacs section of lean4-mode.

Trying Lean

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 14:41:48 GMT

Day 2 of the Zurihac 2025, and I'm trying out Lean. As regularly is the case, since I'm on [[NixOS]], things don't work directly out of the box. This guide in particular doesn't work anymore since the official [[Nix Flake]] got deprecated. Luckily, there is a new one that just works™. Up to some [[Functional Programming]] with it.

A Streamlet

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 15:59:53 GMT

Currently at ZuriHac setting up a PureScript development environment with [[Nix]]—and of course, it's not issue-free. shell nix shell nixpkgs#purescript nixpkgs#spago spago init spago build errors. (Throws a pretty cryptic git error.) You need: shell nix shell nixpkgs#purescript nixpkgs#nodejs24 npm install spago@next npx spago init npx spago run npx spago test That works!

A Streamlet

Wed, 28 May 2025 00:02:25 GMT

Aand Super-Productivity's sync broke again. Aaah.

Local-first conf day #1

Tue, 27 May 2025 23:28:43 GMT

Aaand I've just had my first day at local-first conf! What a great crowd. My day started with talks about some pretty nice topics, followed by a lunch with an absolutely amazing range of topics. We went from [[Clojure]] to [[Emacs]] to Semantic Zooming to [[Simon Willison]] to llm to [[Bret Victor]] and [[Dynamicland]] (and a new talk of him being online!), to [[Stephen Wolfram]]'s personal setup, all interleaved with local-first stuff. And that was only until just after lunch. \<3

Local-first Unconf

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:07:30 GMT

I just came home from my first day of Local-first Conference—the less official [[Unconference]] part, and I had a pretty great day. I've worked a bit more with [[jazz.tools]], and had so many interesting conversations. Today, I: - read Project Cambria - thought a lot about bidirectional lenses - learned where the Software as Aircraft Carriers, not Bicycles quote is coming from - got reminded of Darklang - learned more properly about iroh - and got reminded of how weird/hard [[Schema Migration]] and [[Identity]] actually are. 10/10. Can recommend. 😁

Choosing My Frontend Stack

Mon, 26 May 2025 00:59:16 GMT

Things I Want In A Programming Language

Mon, 26 May 2025 00:43:22 GMT

Local-first Software

Mon, 26 May 2025 00:21:12 GMT

Productivity

Sun, 25 May 2025 23:59:19 GMT

Over the last few weeks, I've grown more and more uncomfortable with the amount of different tasks I've been keeping in my head right now. I played around with a bunch of todo apps, and none of them has been really satisfactory. All I want(ed) is an app with: - fast UI - nice search with filtering - nice search for scheduling - I can use as my inbox for everything, also things to read. It should integrate with the sharing menu of my phone. - I can use from anywhere I can access the internet - I can use without Internet - That never, ever produces any sync weirdness between devices. Shouldn't be that hard, right? So far, it sounds like I probably could make Amazing Marvin do what I want. But I'm definitely also using this as an example application to try out [[local-first software]] frameworks.

Work With The Garage Door Up

Thu, 22 May 2025 01:29:53 GMT

About this site: Thinking Out Loud

Thu, 22 May 2025 01:22:13 GMT

Setting Up git

Tue, 20 May 2025 17:32:08 GMT

Setting Up Home Manager

Sun, 18 May 2025 16:40:49 GMT

A tutorial

https://stopa.io

Thu, 15 May 2025 23:38:51 GMT

I've just reread some of Stepan Parunashvili's articles, and damn, he's good. He talks about [[local-first software]](here), [[Antifragility]] (here), and progress. Gotta love it.

Setting Up Email in Doom Emacs with mu4e on NixOS with Home Manager

Thu, 15 May 2025 10:58:37 GMT

RSS

Wed, 14 May 2025 23:35:54 GMT

Aand I've got an RSS Feed! :)

nix-tree

Sun, 11 May 2025 16:03:58 GMT

I just learned about nix-tree. What a nice tool! It shows you a searchable dependency tree of your flake(s) + their sizes: Super nice to analyze what's taking so long when you're rebuilding your home environment, for example. (It was my humongous nvf config) You can run it like this: shell nix run nixpkgs#nix-tree

Roaming the Web

Fri, 09 May 2025 00:16:13 GMT

I've just had my latest hour-long [[Roaming the Web]]-spree. It started off with reading this great article on relationships (How Relationships Actually Work), and went on with me reading half of her blog. Then I found out she's together with Eliezer, which made me go reading some nice [[LessWrong]] articles. Specifically those two from Duncan Sabien: - Lies, Damn Lies and Fabricated Options - You don't exist, Duncan It's probably fair to say I'm in the general vicinity of an Information Monster.

How I Use Git Worktrees

Wed, 07 May 2025 17:35:17 GMT

TL; DR: git worktree add ../

Mastering 42

Wed, 07 May 2025 01:59:52 GMT

When first encountering this whole [[Writing Online]] idea, I really didn't consider myself a writer in any capacity. I even thought something among the lines of "Wow, that would be crazy"/"Wow, that would be so not you." Well, turns out when I thought that I forgot I had already been writing courses for the Hacker School and walkthroughs/guides for 42 School for quite some time already. Brains are interesting.

Battling Muscle Pain

Wed, 07 May 2025 00:33:28 GMT

Battling Neck Pain

Tue, 06 May 2025 23:55:02 GMT

Pages

Tue, 06 May 2025 01:42:24 GMT

Aand there are separate pages for my collections now: l.

Progress Bars

Sun, 04 May 2025 22:46:37 GMT

One of the pretty nice things about writing my own [[Digital Garden]] is how much I'm able to just implement everything I would've liked to have on other websites. I've just implemented something I really would've liked to have on other websites: A reading progress bar that indicates both the progress and the total reading time of the note by highlighting the part of the bar that you can currently see. It's a relatively minor thing, I know—but what can I say: I really like those small and simple solutions.

Project Setup Made Simple

Fri, 02 May 2025 01:17:49 GMT

Cryptocurrencies

Fri, 02 May 2025 01:05:29 GMT

Aand he got me convinced to at least give Cryptocurrencies another chance: Why Cryptocurrencies is on my reading list now.

Jonas Hietala

Fri, 02 May 2025 00:42:52 GMT

A Streamlet

Thu, 01 May 2025 02:48:43 GMT

Just rediscovered because I got back to trying out properly.

Optimizing around

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 01:38:03 GMT

Lately, I had the impression that my workflows somehow stabilized. I've been relatively happy with my window manager combined with [[gnome-magic-window]], and haven't been tweaking my keybinds for applications much lately. I've been using [[Doom Emacs]] for quite some time now and spend less and less time customizing some behavior of it. Compared to this, my keyboard layout feels almost completely stable with only minor changes in the whole of 2024, for example. But lately, I've felt like I've hit a few ceilings at the same time—and now - I can type - and faster - vsplits are more natural in [[Emacs]] - Moving around [[S-Expression]]s is cleaner - And for the first time in ages, I now play around with pure, non-[[Home Row Mod]] Shift buttons on my keyboard. Well, what can I say? I do like being in a state of [[Flow]]—and am definitely willing to pay the price for it.

CSS Weirdness

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 02:25:29 GMT

I just corrected my component and it inexplicably blew out of its enclosing element. Nothing ordinary helped until I found this comment. [[CSS]] is, indeed, quite weird sometimes. (The problem is that grids try to accommodate to the size of their elements. The solution is to apply min-w-0 to all of the elements.)

A Streamlet

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 01:55:27 GMT

Oh, and it also has neither a [[REPL]] nor a typeof function by default, as far as I can see. Maybe this helps for now—but I'm not so sure. ocaml type theType = TheType let t = (thing: theType) => { thing } t("hoho") t(5) t(5.)

Pedantic Typers

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 01:27:02 GMT

I'm currently and finally getting my feet wet with ReScript. And I must say, I really do like what I see so far. The website is clear about what you get, the Docs look nice, and it's got good and readable error messages. But what on earth is this? ocaml @react.component let make = () => { let (count, setCount) = React.useState(() => 0)

{"What is this about?" -> React.string}

{React.string("This is a simple template for a Vite project using ReScript & Tailwind CSS.")}

} Yep, you see that right. One has to explicitly cast every string to a React.string. (Sounds like it's due to it not having the ability to form [[Union Types]] with [[Base Types]]. Hmm.)

A Streamlet

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 21:18:34 GMT

[[Ozempic]] is weird.

A Streamlet

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 21:18:00 GMT

Why can't a human body go to Mars? I'm glad you asked

The most favorite fable

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Really enjoying roaming around Derek Sivers' website.

Clojure

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

java with a lisp

Packing List

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

What I take with me when traveling

A Common Cause

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Building Communities

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Things I Regularly Recommend To People

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Which Functional Programming Language Should I Start With?

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Are You A Knowledge Worker? Establish This Habit To Become More Productive

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Does Your Repo's Getting Started Section Take More Than 10 Minutes? Just Use Nix.

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

How I Would Structure My First Physics Semesters If I Went To University Again

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

How Much Is Too Much? The One Thing You Should Know About Drinking Water

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

How Programming Changes Your Thinking—And You Can't Even Explain

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

It Took Me Years Until I Understood Web Servers—You Can Do It In 10 Minutes

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Less Headaches And Simpler Programs Using Pipes

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Setting Up A Repo In Under 5 Minutes As Software Engineers With Nix

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The 2 Ways Merino T-Shirts Help You To Be More Minimalist

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The 3 Strategies I Used To Remove Neck Pain From My Life

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This Is The Best Book I've Ever Read On Human Nature

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Want To Learn Programming? The 3 Pointers I Would Give To My 10-Years-Ago Self

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Want To Start With Functional Programming? This Is The Book You Should Read For A Smooth Entry, Clear Design, And Better Code In General

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Why Write, And Why In Public?

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Window Switching Made Simple

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Simple Development Environments with Nix

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Setting up development environments is more complex than it should be. Nix makes entering development environments as easy as running nix develop, making them simple and reproducible. This talk explores what an ideal workflow could look like and walks through a project setup with Nix, outlining its benefits and deficiencies.