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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I purchased a Microsoft Surface Go recently. The other day, it blue-screened and refused to start up again (cycling through the “Automatic Repair” screen and failing repeatedly). I write this as a reference for myself for how to fix this if it happens again, and also to explain some of the dead ends I encountered along the way.
I’ve read and enjoyed parts of Michael O. Church’s take on Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle, but he took his blog offline before I was able to read them all. I decided to snag copies of all of the posts from the Wayback Machine and turn them into an ebook for convenient reading. This appears to be a solved problem thanks to this handy little Python library, pypub, but just in case it winds up being useful to someone here is what I did.
(originally from https://web.archive.org/web/20220521094735/http://ajcsystems.com/blog/blog/2015/06/07/progresstwitch/)
In the immortal words of Samuel L. Jackson, hold on to your butts. I’m going to explain, in painful detail, just exactly what it took to get ProgressTwitch off the ground.