2024-12-06 00:29
Bluesky Comments
As of this post, posts on this blog will each be associated with a Bluesky post and display that post and its responses inline.
2024-11-21 00:36
Creating a Bluesky Bot
I've been experiencing some burnout recently, and one of the best ways for me to fix that is to build something. Couple that with my opinions about the recent US election1, and I wanted to do something to learn about Bluesky and spark a little discussion if I could.
So I built a bot that posts once an hour about which countries various billionaires could buy.
2024-10-06 23:27
Magic Address Book
I have young children, and keeping track of their friends' contact information is hard for me. Every year I get a list from each kid's teacher of their classmates and the classmates' parents' names and contact information, but translating that into contacts on my phone so I can text another parent to organize a playdate is a gigantic hassle. What I really wanted was something magical, a spreadsheet where I could copy those class rosters and have the contacts just appear on my phone. I looked around a lot, and nothing of the sort exists.
So I built one.
2024-07-11 10:30
Making a Blog Logo
To commemorate the new blog, I wanted to have a cool logo up in the corner. Since one of my current interests is generative AI, I thought I'd try using it to generate myself a logo. This post explains the process.
2024-07-06 22:17
New Blog (and thoughts on seizing the moment)
Well, hello there! I've once again schlepped my writing to a new blog platform. After getting tired of trying to write in Medium's web editor, I wanted to go with something based on text files. I looked into setting up something hosted (like https://write.as), but digging into the feature set and pricing left my head spinning. What really got me going though was this post about using Bluesky replies as blog comments. Incorporating something like that basically required a self-hosted system (so I could tweak the template enough to incorporate it).
This reminds me of a broader point that I have to remind myself of all the time. It can be hard and scary to start something new; there's a thousand reasons not to do something, a thousand obstacles and rationales why this is the wrong thing at the wrong time, etc. The antidote to that inertia is, when the muse strikes, grab on with both hands and follow it as far as it can possibly take you. Those instances where the stars align and you have the time and energy and ambition all falling into place together are so rare and precious, I think it's imperative to use them, even if you haven't planned everything out or don't know exactly where you're going to wind up. There's a saying about "the tyranny of the blank page", which refers to how the hardest part of a creative endavor is going from nothing to something. Once you're over that hump, you have some forward momentum, and it's a lot easier to refine something that already exists (even in a crappy, raw form).
Kairos and praxis, taking the correct action at the exact right moment, can deliver wildly disproportionate results. But you have to set yourself up for success by giving yourself a place to start from, whenever you can.
Agent Smith's speech about 1999 being the peak of human civilization gets more and more uncomfortable as time goes by
— Adam Compton ( @comptona.bsky.social ) Jul 6, 2024 at 8:19 PM
2023-06-22 12:00
How to Restore Terminal Contents on Linux (Yes, Like iTerm2)
I recently switched to using a Linux desktop from a Mac as my primary work computer. I had grown quite accustomed to iTerm2’s session restoration feature, and I wanted something similar for Linux. Here is how I made it happen.
2023-03-16 12:00
Use Emacs for GTD Universal Capture in Linux
I like having a system-wide keyboard shortcut that activates some form of text editor. That allows me to press the shortcut, type whatever I have in mind, navigate away from the editor, and get back to what I was doing. (This is sometimes called “universal capture” or “ubiquitous capture” in GTD-land.)
I’ve used lots of different programs to accomplish this over the years: NotationalVelocity/nvALT, SimpleNote, Obsidian, just to name a few. However, I wanted to combine the quick access of universal capture with the editing power of Emacs. I spent some time recently setting up my Linux laptop to accomplish this.
2023-02-08 12:00
How to get a count of Github PRs, by author
Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash
I was curious about who was creating the highest number of PRs in a specific git repo, and I couldn’t find a good way to figure it out. So here’s what I did.
2021-01-15 12:00
Linkpost: Command-line date utilities
http://www.fresse.org/dateutils
These look incredibly useful, but I am most excited that the project website includes comprehensive examples for each tool! I can’t count the number of times I found something that looked useful but which gave me basically no idea of how to use it or what it could really do (I’m looking at you, q).
2021-01-15 12:00
The “Baked Data” architecture pattern
I learned about this recently from this blog post, and it seems like a really robust tool to have in my tool belt: