The Art Of Not Asking Why

Getting back into journaling: my guide and triggers

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 09:12:37 -0500

I’ve talked about journaling and its importance many times in this blog, but after not journaling for a while I have even more justification for it. At its core, journaling is where my brain grows and gets nourished. Without it, I’m just a dot in time, floating between past and future.

I don’t mean to sound depressing, but think about it. Experiencing life is important, but if you don’t reflect on it, you can’t fully grasp its meaning to you. You can be happy or sad, you can even learn a thing or two, but without having these experiences in front of you for a second pass, where you sit and connect the dots, how much of it can you really retain? If you’re new to journaling or considering it, I suggest you also look into one of my posts explaining its importance.

But let’s drop the philosophical coffee rant for a minute. What I want to get to is my process, after I realized I hadn’t journaled for a while, and the guides I set for myself to help with it.

My tools and techniques may be different from yours, so treat those with the personal flexibility you need. OK, here we go:

Aim to create a journal entry every day. Even if it’s just a list of events in bullet points.
Expand on past events:
1. Reflect on each bullet point with a few comments of importance. If you feel you’re starting to ramble, be aware of the rest of the list — you can always come back later¹ and keep going.
2. As you go through those comments, try to add the times you did certain things. I use Emacs, so there’s a timestamp structure (a timestamp is a date, followed by a time). It’s a good habit to keep, and it will become useful later.
3. As your comments expand (or if you revisit later), create additional headings for them when you feel they are detailed enough to merit their own cognitive block.
Look back at your day and even your week, if you wrote it down. Your quick bullet points² should give you an idea of what you did each day. Is there something you remember now? Is there an additional meaning to something that happened a couple of days ago? Write it down. Reflecting on events like this is exactly what we’re doing here.

A bit of a ramble for Emacs folks (feel free to skip if you’re not one of those):

In Emacs, I also create past events I missed so they show up in my agenda. For example, let’s say I went grocery shopping and made a quick note about it in Journelly. In the evening, when I reflect and write my bullet points and pull my Journelly entries into the main journal (I might expand on this again), I also go to my events org file and write something like “grocery shopping @ Dan’s Fresh Market” along with an approximate time range I was there. The event file is included in the agenda (journal entries are not), and the timestamp shows me when I was there. That’s my quick reflection on what I did and where, when I want it in the future. Since I have the date in front of me, it’s also easy to find the journal entry for that day, since it’s reflected in the file name.

What should be included?

The above is a nice guide on how to write, but it doesn’t tell you what to write. Here is the other part of my quick self-guide. This is more a list of hints that should trigger the “hey, you might want to write about this” bulb in my head, so once again, change it so it fits your brain bulbs:

If it’s happening somewhere else (location-based)
If it’s happening with someone else (person-based)
If it’s something you want to remember (could be developed into a note or a blog post)

In general, this works well. If I leave home and go somewhere, it usually means I want to note it — the same goes when I do something with someone else, even if it’s a dinner at home. The idea to keep in mind is how unusual it is, or whether something different or important happened. As you can see, I left myself a comment that if it’s something I want to remember, I should note it (denote in my case) or turn it into a blog post, as I’m doing right now. Yep, this post is also a journal entry.

Emacs and org-mode are my essential tools when it comes to writing, and this blog is full of posts explaining how I write down things, but I wanted to make this post valuable for other folks as well. Still, I want to emphasize one final note: because Emacs is the best writing tool I have ever encountered, it also means I write more than I ever did before, which in turn means the benefits I mentioned at the start happen on a level that wouldn’t be possible with another tool (at least, not the way I see it). The point is, use something that works for you. Your baseline should be something you don’t think about much, like a reflex. Whether it’s a pocket notebook, quick self-recordings on your phone, or a text file saved somewhere, whatever it is: use it well. Use it often.

This is one of the benefits of journaling digitally: you can easily go back, press Enter a few times, and expand on something. With paper, this becomes harder to do. ↩︎
Expanding on digital vs. paper: on paper, you could write the bullet points first, then below, expand on each event. This will allow you to keep the bullet point list as a quick table of contents, or an index. If you like, you can add quick things to the bullet point itself: an underline below a topic you reflect on below (otherwise you just mentioned it), a star next to something you want to remember. I wrote more about my experience journalling in a pocket notebook, if you want to read more. ↩︎

On Not having Kids: the Choices we Make

Thu, 05 Nov 2026 08:22:00 -0500

With the days growing shorter and work being what it is, I find that once again I don’t even leave the apartment — and when I do, it’s usually for a short errand like grocery shopping or returning something to Amazon at the local Staples.

Work fills up my time, especially now with less daylight, but that’s only half the story. My energy is drained more regularly and thoroughly as I spend more of my spoons there.

Fortunately, I believe that at this point in time the downward spiral has slowed down. I am able to select points in my day where I take care of myself on a regular basis. I manage to sleep more overall. I exercise, though briefly, a couple of times a week (OK, twice, and it’s still a struggle, but hey, better than nothing). I go for short walks to get some sun while it’s still out. I see a therapist again to keep an eye on everything, and I managed to get a hold of ADHD meds (finally) if I need them.

And yet, or perhaps because of all of this, I find that I’m thirsty to be more creative. To do more with my own projects — be it this blog, Emacs geekery, or discovering and playing new video games (rather than playing the same old ones over and over). Hell, I’m even enjoying a new book I’m mostly done with at this point.

Many of my co-workers have kids. As a matter of fact, most of them have kids who have already left home. I find myself wondering how they did it. I can’t imagine the sacrifices that had to be made. For me, it would probably mean switching jobs or choosing which people I can’t spend time with. While I would never be monogamous, I wouldn’t be able to have as many close people to me as I do now. There’s simply not enough time in the day, and days in the week.

I realized that if I had kids, they would take priority, leaving me no time to be who I am today. I wouldn’t be me — and I like the person I am.

It’s not just me either. I find that my close friends, those in my polyamorous circles, are making the same choices. Only a few days ago, a third one made the choice to undergo a hysterectomy. It’s not just a pattern: it’s a commitment that goes beyond my simpler choice to remain childfree.

As we grow older, our choices become more of a one-way street. This sounds negative, but it’s not inherently bad. Going forward without looking back means no second-guessing, and moving forward at full speed toward what you believe is right for you. It lets you plan ahead on principles you believe in. It means you trust yourself.

Too Much to Say about Games and No Time to Say it

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 08:32:18 -0500

I want to write about several games I’ve been trying out for the last month, and once again I get stuck. Writing is just not the right medium for games. First, there’s too much to say about each game, and I feel like I have to rave about each one until my fingers fall off. Second, they are visual — they need to be seen.

The answer is the same as it’s always been: videos. But videos take time. Writing a long post takes a couple of hours, which can spread over a day or two. Making a video takes days, and it can stretch over weeks. It just doesn’t scale, not with the time I have.

It’s a dilemma I keep facing. I want to talk about these games because I enjoy them and I spend hours gaming each week, but I’m not sure I want to spend two weeks or so working on a single video.

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 14:51:44 -0500

Nice day for a walk and a vote 📷🇺🇸

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 13:36:44 -0500

Catching some needed sun. This is my favorite season. 📷

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 12:49:16 -0500

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi 📚 doesn’t disappoint. Already half through it! Record time for me.

RIP Patrick Stewart. Thank You

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 09:23:44 -0500

Like many others I was saddened to hear that Patrick Stewart had died. Star Trek: TNG was how I first came to know him in my teens, and I believe it’s not an exaggeration to say that I loved whatever characters he played or voiced.

As an adult, I grew to admire him further, especially after I learned he’d moved relatively close to me — to Park Slope in Brooklyn (at least when he was in New York). I used to work in that neighborhood, and I remember thinking that maybe I’d run into him one day. The house has since sold to an unknown buyer — probably a friend or a relative.

I didn’t know about his deep friendship with Ian McKellen until X-Men, when I suspected the two had a certain chemistry on the screen. I was excited and felt dumb at the same time when I learned that my hunch was a well-known fact to everyone other than me. I looked into it more and learned that the two played together in Waiting for Godot on Broadway, and I’ve been trying to get a copy of that production for a long time. A recording of it is available for viewing only at the New York Public Library, by appointment.

As a fan of the old TNG show (I almost finished a rewatch a couple of years ago), I am thinking of giving DS9 another try. It was a show I started watching but never got into. Maybe I’ll watch First Contact. And of course, there’s Picard, the show about the captain himself, and from what I gather it “requires” that I watch some of the Star Trek films again. I might end up going that route.

Come to think of it, it was also him who got me to “get serious” about my Earl Grey. I always liked the tea, but after I started re-watching TNG it became a permanent staple on my coffee cart at home, along with Dragon Well, my favorite green tea. By now I know it was never really Earl Grey anyway (he liked Yorkshire Gold), but the habit stuck. Maybe I’ll try some.

I miss him. I’m grateful for his influence.

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:07:24 -0500

Got Old Man’s War by John Scalzi 📚. I liked his villain book, and I like the guy from what I see online. One chapter in and I’m nodding and chuckling. I think I’m going to like this one.

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 08:46:29 -0400

I picked up a new “Mozzarella cheese” from a vegan brand I like. I understand the marketing, but calling vegan products cheese or meat is bullshit. They don’t taste like the real thing. People who look to replace the real thing with the “fake” version get disappointed anyway.

Isn’t “Cashew spread with herbs and spices” more appealing? Need to market it? How about “Cashew spread with a kick” or something similar? It would also skip the chemicals they add to make these taste, look, and smell like the real thing. I think the “fake milk” industry is catching on, though slowly.

How do you Read it Later?

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 09:18:53 -0400

Manton writes of Micro.blog’s Bookmarks:

The Bookmarks → Links tab in Micro.blog Premium is practically unknown, but so useful. It archives a copy of everything you link to! HTML, CSS, everything.

I didn’t know that’s what it did. The button for Links was there, but I never looked into it. All the links I ever linked to. Indexed, searchable, and apparently also archived as if I bookmarked them myself. I can see how this can be useful.

I’ve discussed Micro.blog’s Bookmarks, which is a read-it-later feature, before. It comes with similar features you’d expect from such a service, like tagging. For me, this is a simple but essential part of my workflow. In general, I save two kinds of texts: those that I want to read later (and potentially write about), and those I use as a quick syncing option between my phones.

As I was using the bathroom the other day, reading through some of those (maybe this should be another category?), I did some house cleaning and removed a bunch of these. The reason I bother is mostly to keep it fresh and inviting. As any person who ever used a to-do list would tell you, there’s nothing that drains your motivation as quickly as an endless to-do list — which these saved articles basically are. I was also wondering if there’s a better way to sort those somehow, which raised the question of how other people do it.

Tagging is an option, and I tried tagging at some point, but it turned out to be just noise in the end since everything I save is potentially a post waiting to be written (the other option, for syncing, means the articles get deleted as soon as I have them on my other device). Then I thought maybe I should just create blog drafts for whatever I want to write, but that would introduce friction with the app that I don’t want to have. It would also be useful to have an option to save these to the Internet Archive, but I can see why this would be an issue quickly.

So the question remains. How do other people use read-it-later services/apps, if they still do?

A Weekend Hike and Turning Off Work Mode

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 11:39:32 -0400

A few days after I returned from Maine, I made an impulsive choice to take another short vacation, or more of an extended weekend. The idea was to plan as little as possible: find a place to hike nearby, book a hotel or Airbnb, and just do it instead of thinking about it for months. It worked — I followed through this time. 📷

I was pretty much able to turn off my mental “work mode” without issues, which hasn’t been easy the last few vacations. The fact that I use my work phone when I’m out doesn’t help of course. I know it’s one of those “duh” things, but you’d be surprised how hard it is to disconnect. It’s like exercising a skill: you get better with time.

I took a picture of the sign at the entrance to the park, and as we were walking I matched the trails in the picture against Google Maps on my phone¹. I made navigation calls with RKWB this time. I realize, in hindsight, that I wasn’t as passive as I was in Maine. We spent over 5 hours hiking and throwing stupid “your face” jokes at each other at every opportunity, but overall we were quiet, pointing at water springs, leaves, and anything else that looked interesting. It was nice to have someone wait and look after me for a change as we climbed down high rocks and jumped across muddy puddles.

The hotel was nice. Nothing fancy, but for the price (especially compared to other Airbnbs in the area) you couldn’t beat it. A bedroom and a small living room/dining area, a small kitchen, and a full-size bathtub. It was nice and clean, with fresh towels every day, WiFi, phone chargers, a TV with movie channels, and anything else you need — light breakfast included.

As a person who used to live in NJ for years, it was an odd choice for a vacation and to stay two nights in a suburban town with strip malls and Starbucks. To me, a vacation needed traveling by airplane or at least a train, a suitcase, and a few dedicated days. This was nothing like it. We found a local coffee shop sandwiched between a dry cleaner and an ice cream shop, and an interesting thrift store with a couple of tchotchkes to take home, even though it was part of the local church right next to the quiet driveways of the houses around. It was a place people live in, and it made the whole transition feel more natural.

One of the benefits I got used to on the Android is OsmAnd, which allows downloading detailed trail maps as layers. I believe it’s also possible on an iPhone, but I’ll let this be another good reason to use my Android on the next hike. ↩︎

How do you Title your Posts?

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 22:39:25 -0400

During my college days, back when I had to come up with headlines for our newspaper, we used the AP Stylebook. I roughly remember that words that don’t have meaning of their own were lowercased and meaningful words got capitalized. This is more or less what I’ve done here, on my blog.

The title of this post, “How do you Title your Posts,” is an example: “How” is the first word, so it gets capitalized (beginning of sentence). “Do” and “you” are meaningless on their own; they just glue to other parts, so lowercase. “Title” and “Posts” are the main parts, so they do stand on their own. The connecting word between them, “your,” is what links them, so lowercase. Another way to look at this is that if I were to title this post “How Title Posts,” it still conveys a meaning — but “how do you your” is gibberish.

If you find this explanation confusing and think I make this up as I go, you’re right. That’s why my blog’s titles are messy. I want to do something about it, to come up with some guide to follow.

We had a conversation around the content of blog titles, but not syntax. From what I can tell, we bloggers capitalize titles in mostly three different ways. If I use my title here as an example again:

How do you title your posts
How Do You Title Your Posts
How Do you Title your Posts

I don’t like to capitalize just the first word (1: sentence case). It feels lazy to me. Not every post on my blog gets a title, so posts that do need to have presence, not look like they’re apologizing for being late to the party. You may disagree, and plenty of blogs choose this route.

The next one (2: title case) is slightly better, but not by much. It feels forced in a way, because some of the small words are used as connecting glue: they have no power on their own and shouldn’t be capitalized.

The advantage of the first two methods is that they’re consistent and easy to follow. When you start playing around with which words get capitalized and why, as we have in 3, things get complicated and inconsistent.

I went back to check the AP Stylebook says:¹

Capitalize only the first word and proper nouns in headlines that use AP style. Exception: The first word after a colon is always uppercase in headlines. Always capitalize the first letter of a headline, even if it starts with a proper name such as iPhone or eBay, though recasting may be the better choice.

Ugh!

First, it takes me back to grammar school. Fine, proper nouns are not that hard, they are basically names: Mount Everest is a proper noun, mountain is not. But then I also need to remember to capitalize the first letter after a colon, and what I especially don’t like is to capitalize iPhone as IPhone if it’s the first word in the title. It looks so off that they even suggest avoiding it and finding a workaround… So why bother?

Besides, these guides mean that most of my titles will end up having only the first word capitalized. Here are a few random titles from my blog: “My blog fails accessibility tests, and that’s okay” or “I don’t use soap for all my dishes.” This feels especially off with series titles, like my Emacs Config Gems. Writing those as “Emacs Config Gems - Part X” is good. “Emacs config gems - part x” is not (technically I could argue an em dash is like a colon, so the word “part” is capitalized, which is slightly better, but it feels like a hack to me).

At this point, I’m basically where I started. The words that seem important — for reasons I cannot justify with any official guides — get capitalized. Call it the unsupported title case… case.

Footnotes

¹ At least, the 55th edition. The current one is behind a paywall.

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 14:49:17 -0400

Afternoon Walks like these are one of my best life hacks. Boosts the mood and allows perspective that can narrow down to a tunnel vision during work. 📷

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 08:28:22 -0400

I love how one blog led me to another, which led me to a cool IndieWeb thing, which got me to write an email, which put me in a good mood to write a quick post like this. IndieWeb is live and well, and it’s good to have colorful blogs in the morning before I dive into the grind.

On Pages that Aren't Pages

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 09:35:48 -0400

Marisabel is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, and the theme is Pages.¹ I thought I’d add my version to this appealing topic.

The first thing I realized while thinking about pages is that it’s a concept, a dynamic idea, not paper pages, as I initially thought. To me, the word pages automatically connects with paper because much of my life has been tied to paper pages. I’ve tried carrying around a pocket notebook to write down my thoughts and capture ideas several times, but it never stuck. In these notebooks, the idea of a page was an important limitation: I wanted a page dedicated to each morning, no more, no less.

In digital format, my pages stop being physical. When I think of “pages” in my digital realm, I naturally gravitate toward my Denote info-notes, a collection of how-to guides I write for myself. It looks like this:

20261017T203856–glove80__equipment.org
20261015T100231–getting-and-cleaning-user-emails-from-listserv.org
20231012T205107–self-care-personal__health.org
20260219T235651–mpv-stuff__linux.org
20240922T160409–people-at-work.org
20260220T083149–taking-time-off-sme.org
0250910T104825–onboarding-todo-list.org

This list of items looks messy at first, but it is carefully organized by topic and tabs, some of which are not visible in this example. These pages have replaced my online wiki (or digital garden) for several reasons, and these are the last pages I write, at least conceptually.

This idea that I no longer write in pages didn’t sit well with me. I spend a big chunk of my day writing: I write posts, like the one you’re reading now; I write emails both for work and pleasure; I write some fiction on the side; and I often write in my journal. Isn’t writing measured in pages?

Apparently not for me.

Without pages, I don’t have the same limitation I had in my notebooks. There are others, sure, but they are not as clear and concise as pages in a notebook. Time is an obvious limitation, but I don’t always have the same amount of it when I start, and depending on how my day goes, I might have more or less of it. Word count is even more ambiguous, and I don’t care about it on a computer. My energy and writing “mood” is yet another ever-changing limitation. A new possible restriction is my new keyboard and my desk — I don’t like to write on a different keyboard or away from my desk for long².

If nothing limits my writing and I can almost always write, does it mean writing is underappreciated without pages?

I thought about it for a minute and decided that, for me, this isn’t the case. To me, writing is talking and thinking. It’s too much of a habit to be valued in such terms because it happens — and needs to happen — all the time. This is one of the reasons I stopped using a notebook: it was too limiting. It was also chaotic and disorganized (my horrible handwriting making it much worse) to the point that retrieval later was nearly impossible, another reason I often write: to remember.

Still, the pages from my journals that I wrote in my early 20s, some in my native language but mostly in English, are human and me in a way my journal entries (that’s how I call them in the digital realm, entries, just as my blog texts are posts, even if they are unpublished drafts) will never be. I thought about humanizing my entries in pages again — that of a book. But that’s one big mountain I’m not climbing right now.

And so, the time limit kicks in, and it’s time to move on with the day. I will think more about pages — those that I think about and those that others have.

Fran told me about it in her feed, and thanks to her, I discovered Marisabel, and through her, more folks who wrote about pages and are a part of the IndieWeb in general. I want to expand on those, but time is limited, so for now I wrote down this quick reminder. ↩︎
I used to write from coffee shops on my Chromebook and later on my Mac, but I do that less these days. First, I find that the noise that I used to enjoy can be distracting nowadays. Second, I am always afraid of spilling coffee or tea on my computer (if it ever happens to you, this phobia tends to stick). Third, many places in NYC are hostile toward laptops and their owners, blocking outlets, restricting WiFi, or posting a big signs saying “no laptops.” ↩︎

Glove80: One Month in

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:18:45 -0400

It’s been a month since I first plugged my Glove80 into Hedwig and started using it, so I thought it was time for a follow-up.

First things first: this keyboard is the most comfortable thing I’ve ever typed on, to the point that I cringe now when I place my fingers on a regular keyboard in the office. If I wasn’t a keyboard snob earlier with my Kinesis, I definitely am now.

It’s not just the ergonomics, which I will get to below. I didn’t realize how important the switches are. I thought I’d miss the clicky sound and feel of my old brown switches, and sometimes I do for a moment, but it’s only for a few seconds. A whole morning of typing in Emacs? Nah. The Cherry Blossom switches that come with this keyboard are a pleasure to work with. They’re not only silent, but also super easy to press. It’s like whispering to my keyboard instead of shouting at it.

The real reason I ended up with the Glove80 was my RSI, and I’m happy to say it’s gone. That’s probably why 90% of people buy a keyboard that looks “crazy” like this one in the first place. Having the two halves separate also makes my shoulders and arms feel better. The keyboard parts are very light, so rotating them a bit into a slight “V” to fit the natural angle of my arms and wrists is automatic as I move around a bit, especially when I stand at my desk. With the Kinesis, which is much heavier and bulkier, this was a whole thing, not to mention the cables that ended up tangling around my coffee cup in the morning. This is much better.

Another important factor is the keywells. My fingers fit into those as soon as I took the keyboard out of the box. I know the keywells aren’t specific to the Glove80, but it was the first time I experienced them, and it makes you wonder why they don’t exist on all keyboards. It also helps you find the right position instantly. The palm rests fit, the slight height differences in the wells tell your pinkies where they should go, the thumbs naturally extend to the thumb row… it all felt right the second I placed my hands on the Glove80, and a month later it’s jarring not to have this when I switch to another keyboard.

This brings me to the key positions and the columnar layout, which was (and still is, to an extent) the hardest part to get used to. For the most part, the regular keys for QWERTY typing work. The issue is more with the function keys in their factory settings and the conflict, in my case, with what Emacs wants me to use. I’m mostly used to the common shortcuts now, but my right hand still does most of the work with the left Ctrl, and I have to consciously force myself to use the right Ctrl key for keys on the left half (like x or s) and vice versa¹.

The main issue I have with the keyboard now is gaming. This keyboard isn’t meant for WASD (see the layout in the picture below), which is hard-coded into any gamer’s DNA. For now, I switch back to the Kinesis when I play any action games. I could probably just create another layer for gaming, shifting the keys to maybe RDFG, but that’s just weird. Besides, games are more in the keyboard shouting category than the whispering one.

Other small annoyances… let’s see.

The legs of this keyboard. They are essentially screws with pads (the “boot” of the leg), and even though I use the nuts and rubber rings that came with the keyboard — which do help — the screws still move a bit from time to time, which results in the keyboard being a bit wobbly. It doesn’t happen often, and it takes a few seconds to fix, but I feel like there needs to be a better solution. I like to use a high tented angle with my Glove80, which means that when I want to use the case to take the keyboard somewhere, I have to unscrew the two long legs — the ones under the thumb rows — so they fit in the case, and then screw them back in and tighten them, which means I’m avoiding taking it with me, which is a shame. Here’s what these look like up close:

Two more nitpicky things: switching back to the Kinesis is actually confusing now, which I didn’t expect. I now type worse on the Kinesis than I used to. Not exactly bad, when you think about it: the whole point was to move away from standard keyboards, but the world still runs on the old standard. I now expect to find common function keys under my thumbs (where they should be!), but they aren’t, and that leads to typos at work because I don’t take the keyboard with me as I mentioned above. I’m fine on my laptop keyboard though; I guess it’s different enough from the Glove80 that my hands register it as a whole different mode and don’t get confused.

The other tiny small thing is not the keyboard’s fault at all: hard drive password at boot on Linux. There’s no Bluetooth at boot (it’s locked behind the encryption if you encrypt your hard drive), so I need to physically plug it in with the USB. This is a tiny little thing, but I find that passwords in general are frozen in my finger memory, and I have to watch myself type them now to get them right. The solution here is probably using new passwords that will work with this keyboard — which in turn means I will have the reverse problem when I can’t use this keyboard.

All in all though, this keyboard is fantastic. A few more months, and I’m sure I’ll incorporate more tricks to help with some of the issues I described above. I’m glad I got it. It didn’t just resolve my RSI issues, but it’s also making me a better typist in general.

Xah’s fly keys for the Glove80 (he only has a Dvorak layout for it) inspire me to make some modifications. For example, Xah has a shift key that acts as shift when held down, but as tab when tapped. This works well because the shift key is meant to function when you hold it, and the tab key is for tapping. ↩︎

It's Not Enough, But it's Something

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 09:13:30 -0400

Girl on the Net (I will call her GOTN moving forward) wrote about the Cornell rape allegations. There’s plenty to read on her website and in the Wikipedia page if you want the details — it’s unfortunately a familiar story in American colleges.

What moved me to think was this part:

Far harder to start an awkward conversation. One-on-one or in the group chat with your guy friends. Somewhere there aren’t any women to show off to.

Yeah. I know exactly what she’s talking about. I’m an IT guy. I work with IT folks who are still about 90% men, and yes, I’ve heard some messed-up things. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Sexist jokes happen because sex happens, and some people are less mature than others. Some are just trying to break the ice, or be “one of the guys,” or god knows what. It doesn’t matter. Some of the things I’ve heard made me cringe, and I knew they were wrong the moment I heard them. I didn’t do anything and just moved on.

The why is easy to answer. The people who said the cringy things are people I work with day in and day out. These are people I rely on. Some are my friends at work. Standing up and saying something won’t just be awkward, it would be a showstopper. It would derail a whole meeting that is otherwise important, and it might scare these people off from talking to me openly again, because “I can’t take a joke” or whatever. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that it would damage my job.

The other part of rape culture GOTN talks about in this post is the hero flaw: men wait to be heroes and stop the evil villain who is about to do something “rapeful” to an innocent poor woman, and they will swoop in to save the day, just like in the movies. Obviously, this doesn’t usually happen, so if you’re waiting on this, you’re probably not going to do anything in the end.

Thing is, if something like this happened around me, I’m not sure I’d be able to act. I’m not a big guy; I’m a lifelong geek who was bullied in school growing up (worth mentioning here while we’re on the topic that one of the most persistent bullies was a girl). But reality is not a fantasy, and I know similar situations from my past when I had to do something, and I did. And it was probably as remote from being a hero as you could imagine.

It’s scary, and you need to fight against your instinct on both counts. Your instinct tells you to shut up, laugh along, or move to another car—There is no hero instinct¹.

GOTN and probably others who read this post would say it’s nothing and doesn’t really help, and they are probably right. I’d just like to say it doesn’t help enough. It’s something. I had her article saved for two weeks and it was something I wasn’t sure I wanted to write about. I could have just shrugged and move on, but I didn’t at the end. And even though I don’t think folks would believe me if I say it’s not about guilt, I’ll say it anyway. It’s not about guilt. It’s just something worth saying that needs to be said.

Maybe I can’t be as obnoxious as GOTN would like me to be. After all, my connections at work are very important to me (as a manager, that’s often what gets stuff done). But her post made me think, and I might be able to do something more next time. Maybe, if you read all the way to this point, you would also. And while it’s not enough — it’s something.

The AI assistant pointed me toward Bystander intervention, which is worth mentioning here. I heard of the concept, but didn’t read into it. Glad I did. ↩︎

It's Time to Wipe my Desktop

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 19:36:05 -0400

I said before it’s a good idea to wipe your personal computer, and I stand by it. Starting fresh is good, but the ability to do so when you need to, and having the confidence that you know what to do and where your important files and configurations are, is priceless.

Restoring from backup is an option and it’s good if something happens and you want to continue quickly where you left off, but I’m talking about virtual house cleaning. It’s not about restoring everything so it’s the same, it’s restoring the things you need while letting those you forgot about decay into dust of 1s and 0s, designated as empty space, until they are overwritten again with useful information.

There are also other reasons for the wipe. Kubuntu’s next LTS, 26.04 is out, making my current one obsolete. I now have a countdown notifying me how many days of supported security patches I have left. It comes with Wayland, which will give me more control over my new screen, and supposedly some gaming improvements. Another reason is to organize my program and configs (dot files) better with Emacs. I want to create documentation in Denote for GUI settings, or use tangle and write the config directly with explanations of what does what and why in a similar fashion to my Emacs configuration.

The biggest concern is the things I don’t know I need to save. My dad used to say this to me when we left home back in the day: “Good to go? Forgot all the things you’re supposed to remember and remember all the things you were supposed to forget?” It’s kind of fitting right now. I use all kinds of shortcuts scripts and programs that I forgot I installed at some point, and while reinstalling is an option, some configs are more complicated than others. Then of course there are chat logs, emails I saved locally… So what I think I will do is one final local backup of everything, and then wipe.

The last thing is time. Getting everything up and running will take a while, especially if I document everything I need to do. Emacs first, of course.

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:15:06 -0400

Finished Silo season 3, and I have questions. Of course I do. That’s why they’re making season 4.

The big one is still why. I was glad when Juliette started pushing people to ask that too, and I like that it was a good catalyst for what eventually led to the survival of Silo 18 at the end.

What I don’t like are all the clichés and the parallel storyline which, while important to the show and interesting in its own right, was too long and too involved. They should have kept it to one dedicated episode perhaps. I’m all about LGBTQ+ in shows of course, but having one here felt forced and artificial, you know, as if you can’t get the seal of approval if you don’t have one gay relationship taking place, and two women at that (two birds with one stone to get the marketing right). Meh.

There are a few plot holes, like the whole light bulbs thing (for what? And couldn’t they bring the plants upstairs, toward the roof, which does open to the sun every morning?), but overall I enjoyed it and will watch season 4 when it’s out.

Jack seems to like Small Prophets, and I think I’m going to check it out myself next.

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 08:01:59 -0400

One thing I’m enjoying over at Bubbles is the non-tech blogs. Every other blog list I visit is usually mostly tech-related stuff, and then it’s usually developers. I’m a techie myself, and I don’t have anything against developers, but it’s nice to see more blogs about humans just being humans.

Emacs Config Gems - Part 6

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:54:34 -0400

I came to realize that attempting to wrap up the “Wordcraft” section (as I call it) in Emacs is a fool’s errand. Emacs is Wordcraft. It’s what it’s all about. By the time I finish a draft, a new config or setting changes what I have. This here is an attempt to stay true to my conclusion in the last section.

Abbrevs

In my opinion, Abbrevs in Emacs is one of its fundamental features. It’s one of those things I’d show someone coming from other word-processing programs to show them the magic of Emacs. In essence, it’s a simple tool: you type two or more letters, and Emacs expands it to a phrase or even a whole paragraph. For example, when you type “hw” it will expand to “hello world” as soon as you hit space after the “w”.

Of course, you can achieve more with this useful function. We will get there. First, let’s discuss general usage:

To add a new abbrev, stand with the marker after the abbreviation, and then use: C-x a g for a global abbrev (which applies everywhere in Emacs), or C-x a i l for the specific major mode of the buffer you’re in (so, if you’re working in shell inside Emacs, it will add an abbrev there specifically.)
Once added, Emacs has a smart (and when you get it, helpful) way of remembering your lower-case/upper-case usage, depending on how you recorded the abbrev. Assume we’ve added “rnd” for “Research and Development”. This means:
1. “rnd” automatically expands to Research and Development
2. “Rnd” expands to Research and development (only the first word is capitalized!)
3. “RND” expands to RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
You can escape abbrevs with C-q after typing the abbrev. If “rnd” expands to “Research and Development” but you actually want to type “rnd” in the buffer, type rnd followed by C-q¹.
If you want to add a prefix to an abbrev, for example, you want the end result to be “non-Research and Development”, type: non- and then M-’ (this will result in a hyphen showing, which is good) and then rnd to produce the abbrev.
Finally, don’t forget about edit-abbrevs which lets you edit your abbrev file directly. This is good when you want to add a bulk of abbreviations (I did this when I wanted to add usernames: I copy-pasted a bunch of those from Outlook one day during lunch).

Alright, with the basics out of the way, let’s dig into the config itself.

First, we want to turn on Emacs’ abbrevs. In my case, I want to put the abbrev file in a folder I sync between my computers so these shortcuts are available on both of them. To do this, I need to set the path for the abbrev file:

(setq-default abbrev-mode t)
(setq abbrev-file-name "~/Sync/Personal/.abbrev_defs")

Now something a bit more advanced. I posted about this before, but I didn’t explain my use case, and I think its usefulness is a bit lost as a result. Here’s the general idea.

At work, we have user IDs (usernames) that I need to use with ServiceNow, our ticketing system. It’s also useful when I want to write an email, and there are five people named “John.” My brain solved this problem years ago with nicknames: the John who has tattoos and a beard looks like a motorcyclist, so I call him Harley (Davidson); the other John loves tea from Georgia, so I call him George, etc.

When I want to dig out Harley’s username, I prefix it with @, and Emacs spits out “jd1234” for his username. This way I don’t hijack the word “Harley” to always be associated with jd1234, only when I really want to use it².

The post I linked above explains how this works and gives proper credit to Prot, who helped me build this up using regex:

(abbrev-table-put global-abbrev-table :regexp "\\(?:^\\|[\t\s]+\\)\\(?1:[@].*\\|.*\\)")
(abbrev-table-put org-mode-abbrev-table :regexp "\\(?:^\\|[\t\s]+\\)\\(?1:[@].*\\|.*\\)")

Grammar Checkers

When it comes to grammar, I explored two options in Emacs. I first started with LanguageTool, then discovered Harper, which I use today. But as these Emacs posts go, I need to take a step back and talk about spelling and grammar checkers first.

With a spell-checking tool, we just need a dictionary: a list of words the program checks against what we typed and identifies the closest match in its list. The mechanism behind it is a mathematical principle of edit distance: it is a fuzzy search for words that are the closest to the misspelled one³. This can be complemented with a personal dictionary of additional unofficial words that we tend to use, and that’s mostly it; we’re good to go.

A grammar checker is a different animal, or actually, animals. And before we start talking about these, it’s worth mentioning that grammar, or what is generally considered “correct” language, is a moving target⁴. Language is a grey area, where what’s correct can be — at least to a degree — subjective.

The complex mix of tools used in what we cram together today under the term “grammar checkers” is a big underestimation of the history and development of the last 50 years or so of progress and the different tools that we use today. With modern-day LLMs, the confusion extends further, as these usually don’t use any of those tools, relying only on transformers and weights to predict what seems correct and what isn’t⁵.

Harper

Many Emacs folks, myself included, use Harper these days. It’s no wonder, given its speed and minimal install size, especially compared with LanguageTool, the other free alternative. But this lightness comes at a cost.

Harper provides:

a basic spelling checker (dictionary-based)
core grammar rule engine

… and that’s it. Indeed, in my first post about Harper, I noted a couple of basic errors it missed, and I still think it’s far from “the private alternative to Grammarly,” as it states on its homepage. I actually barely use it because it’s the competition that does a much better job, grammar-wise. If it were up to me, the tagline would be “a private, fast, customizable grammar checker for when you don’t want a grammar nanny looking over your shoulder.”

Harper is available on ~~homebrew~~ (it seems the folks behind Harper made a dedicated dmg since I last installed it), but for Ubuntu and its kin, it requires Cargo. This also means that if Harper is the only program you have from Cargo, you also need to remember to update it⁶. I’ve written and explained my Harper setup a few times, but it evolved over time to accommodate both my Mac and my Linux desktop, so I’m including the whole thing here. Note that Harper works through Eglot on Emacs, as I explained in the first post linked above.

(with-eval-after-load 'eglot
  (add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs
               '(org-mode . ("harper-ls" "--stdio")))) ; This is the eglot-related integration
(setq-default eglot-workspace-configuration
           '(:harper-ls (:dialect "American" :linters (:LongSentences :json-false :AvoidCurses :json-false))))
;; These are options for Harper. I chose American dialect as the language, I also want to ignore long sentence errors (the main issue is that it hides other errors nested in those) and I also want Harper not to tell me when it thinks something is offensive. The full list of these options is in https://writewithharper.com/docs/rules. It needs to be nested inside the :linters option.
(when (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
  (add-to-list 'exec-path (expand-file-name "~/.cargo/bin"))
 (add-to-list 'exec-path "/snap/bin"))
;; On Linux, harper-ls lives in ~/.cargo/bin (installed via Cargo/Rust).
;; /snap/bin is added for Vale (installed via snap - that's another program I might discuss, ignore it for now) and any future snap packages.
;; On Mac, Harper is installed via Homebrew which handles PATH automatically.

LanguageTool

LanguageTool provides:

A spelling checker
Core rule Grammar engine
n-gram data set (optional as local install for free)⁷
LLM (Paid, online only)

In addition, as I was researching more into LanguageTool, I found lesser-known layers and additions that are not fully documented. For example, there’s a neural network for confusing pairs included. I don’t know how important those other tools are, but if you use the full product online to get a taste, you will see the difference when comparing it to Harper immediately.

While it sounds like I’m favoring LanguageTool over Harper, I don’t have it installed anymore, and I haven’t used it in a while. The reason for this is that it requires Java and over 10GB (yep) if you want to get the n-gram running with the other additions. Below is my old config, based on version 6.1. You will need to install langtool.el to run it, without the full layers discussed above (by the time I found out about these options, I stopped using it):

(require 'langtool)
(setq langtool-language-tool-server-jar "~/Path/To/Current/LanguageTool-#.#/languagetool-server.jar")
(setq langtool-default-language "en-US")

All in all, I do not think Emacs is the best place for grammar checkers. YMMV, but since I have access to Grammarly Pro’s features, I prefer it. I also use AI to go through my posts, and it does a few very useful things, grammar being just one of them if I need it to. If I didn’t have Grammarly, I’d consider LanguageTool’s pro package, which comes with additional perks that are not available for a local install.

My logic here is simple: if I write a post for my blog, which is going to be public anyway, I don’t mind using online tools or LLMs. For more sensitive things, like my journal, I use Harper if I want to, but most of the time it’s an overkill for my own mind’s rambling anyway. This is why I said above that I barely use Harper, as I don’t really have a use case for it.

As I’m writing this, I realize another simpler trick is Emacs’ undo. Simply use C-/ (or whatever you have it bound to) and it will cancel the expansion. ↩︎
Now that I use corfu, which also contains my abbrevs, typing “george” will bring up a menu allowing me to choose george from a drop down instead of specifically typing @george. ↩︎
The mathematical concept behind this is called Levenshtein distance, after Vladimir Levenshtein, who came up with this in 1965. The basic idea in spelling programs is to measure how many “jumps” are required to correct a mistyped word. For example, “helo” to “help” is one jump, as well as “helo” to “hello”; “helo” to “hallow” though substitutes e with a, inserts an l, and then inserts the letter w — 3 jumps. This means that pure Levenshtein spell checkers will rank the first two corrections higher on the list (modern spell checkers introduce a few more tweaks). Wikipedia gives us an interesting history lesson here: Unix got Ispell, which is based on SPELL, and GNU built upon that with Aspell, which is what we have in Emacs today. The front end in Emacs, ispell.el, is named after the original program it once used. ↩︎
Brennan wrote a good post about this recently with plenty of links, which I’m stripping here because I want you to go read his whole thing, not just my footnote: “To ask someone to write properly is to assume there is a way to write proper. There isn’t. There is no universal, static version of English. Or any other language, for that matter. Every dialect of English, including regional accents and non-standard forms, follows complex, systematic grammatical rules.” ↩︎
While most popular LLMs today are generic and don’t rely on more traditional grammar tools, specific grammar products like Grammarly and Langtool do use specific traditional tools as well as an LLM on another layer, making the box of grammar checkers as a category even more vague. ↩︎
After realizing how often I forget to update Harper on Linux (I don’t get reminders as I do with other packages), I searched for a solution and discovered topgrade. It’s a Rust tool that probes your system, figures out which packages you use as well as your hardware, and offers you all the updates in one go: apt, flatpak, cargo, snap, and even updates for your boot, if you have a Linux machine from a brand that supports it, like System76. ↩︎
n-gram is a sequence of symbols, or in our case, words, where n is the number of words. So “a nice sunset” is a 3-gram sequence and “they are wearing hats” is a 4-gram one. Grammar checkers look at many of these sequences in a large body of text and evaluate whether what we type has errors. For example, if I write “they are wearing hat,” the checker will run this against several examples and will find that “they are wearing hats” (with an s at the end) is much more common than the first example, which means the first example is probably wrong and should be corrected to what is found in the text. As you can imagine, the checker needs to look at a lot of text to make good corrections, which is why that body of text is huge — hence the size of a few hefty gigabytes. LanguageTool explains n-grams and how they use them, which is helpful. If this sounds similar to LLMs and how they work, it’s because the connection exists: the basic idea of looking through a large body of text is the same, and in a way, LLMs today are built on a similar concept. However, LLMs take this a step further and compute what would make sense using weights and other settings in real time, while n-grams are essentially static lists of words the computer just compares against. There’s no “thinking” involved. It helped me to think about it this way: in terms of hardware, your hard drive reading speed is way more important for n-grams than your GPU. ↩︎

I Don't Miss the Good Old Days

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:57:40 -0400

Yesterday, Manton released yet another much-needed tweak to Micro.blog, and I realized something: I don’t really miss the old web. There are plenty of folks around me on the indie web who miss and even mourn the old web, and I get it — but actually going back? Nah. As I kept thinking about it, I realized that I don’t really miss how things were in general: I don’t really have a notion of “the good old days.” I know this is kind of a shock coming from a grumpy old man, and plenty would disagree with me.

My first website that I remember having was one of those HTML mutants on Angelfire. It had blood-dripping bars instead of <hr> separators, spinning skull animations, and a MIDI of Metallica’s Unforgiven playing in the background because I was an angsty teen (unlike other teens, I guess?). I’m also old enough to remember BBSes, for those of you walking around with long white beards. I remember playing Duke Nukem 3D (or maybe Doom?) with my friend and getting interrupted when my mom picked up the phone and disconnected our dial-up modem connection. No, I don’t miss those days.

My old website was a lot of work. I learned a lot, sure, but most of my time went into fixing annoyances I don’t need to deal with today, not to mention the lack of content and the awful poems I posted online. I remember going through Photoshop tutorials on other sites and learning how to create a metal ball effect with simple radial fills and shadow effects for some of my images. The BBSes were interesting, but there were few people online, and back then it cost money to make phone calls, not to mention it prevented anyone else from using the phone. Duke Nukem 3D was a fine game, and I learned how to create my own levels, but… actually. I don’t have a “but” here. It was fun to make levels.

But when I look at Micro.blog today, with what it offers, and when I use this magic box we call an iPhone to snap photos of flowers that I can edit and post to my blog within seconds, I don’t want to go back. And it’s not just the technology itself; it’s also the people. I write to people today and they write back. Part of it is because I matured and have stuff to say (or those I talk to are crazy and like my ramblings for some reason, take your pick), sure, but part of it is also because Google came up with Gmail and with it the whole concept of free and accessible email that just makes it possible. Micro.blog comes with built-in themes and features I used to spend hours getting right on Movable Type (remember that?) and later WordPress. When I started using Micro.blog it was because I was tired of self-publishing my website through Hugo each time.

Emacs was around for years, but I didn’t have the mindset to use it. And AI… look. All I can say is that I could deal with CSS before, and I could research things, but not like this. I wouldn’t even know what to ask, and I ask a lot of questions. I research better. I write better. I enjoy it all better.

As a kid, I remember I was told by my elders (parents, family members, teachers, etc.) that I had it easy and that being an adult isn’t fun and games. Baloney.

I can do what I want, to start with. I can see whoever I want, which led to finding friends and partners, which was not an option for me growing up. I hated school, and I got poor grades to prove it, until I got to college and could choose what to learn, which earned me scholarships and honors for a period, because I loved what I learned. It was a complete change from the angsty teen with the spinning skulls. I simply never fit into the mold, and as an adult I am free to find my own mold. And it works. I don’t miss being the bullied outsider at school. Even D&D, which I loved playing with the weirdos I was able to gather at some point, is something I could enjoy more today with other weirdos, better adult-oriented themes, and all the rules available whenever I want, mostly for free or close to free. Everything is potentially better. I can bring the old, reinforced by the new, and create these moments again, but this time with a choice of leaving the annoying angsty parts out.

And this is what I want to leave as a message. If you miss something and feel nostalgic, you can recreate it to an extent. The indie web is one such example, and D&D is another. Take what you remember, and celebrate it. Mix it up. Share with your friends. And what better time than scary season, my favorite time of the year with its cool hoodie-weather? As an adult, I get to enjoy it with a hot cider, too.

Thoughts about Silo

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:07:17 -0400

I’m deep into Season 3 (Silo S3E7, Radio) and I have thoughts. This post contains minor spoilers if you haven’t watched the show, which also means please don’t ruin this for me if you finished season 3.

One issue I have with Silo is the cliché they’re selling back to us. It’s not that the show does a poor job at it — quite the opposite. It’s still a great show and I enjoy each episode intensely, with each episode giving me more of the lore in a way Fallout didn’t. What bugs me is that it reflects what seems to be the popular opinion of AI in general: a faceless, cold, reasonable, and emotionless computer that gives orders to kill thousands of people without giving it a second thought. At times it even seems to freeze and think, as a reasoning LLM would, before giving an answer (the number of times I wished Camille could open that “thinking” tab while talking to the Algorithm: “the user appears emotional. I should provide a reasonable counterargument and combine it with a compliment to convince them…”)

It doesn’t make sense. If the point is to preserve the human race, it would help the residents of the Silo with knowledge of what happened instead of trying to kill anyone who would even think of the idea of leaving. There would be scientists, with equipment assigned from critical supply (this is where they store things they can’t make), who would venture to the surface to check the situation periodically.

If one of the other silos was compromised with its inhabitants dead, one of the first things a helpful AI would do is to inform other silos and have them use the supply remaining there — which, hey, if you’re visiting a place like this, it would be one of the first things I would think about myself, returning to my silo and organizing a team to grab essentials — instead of keeping everyone in the dark.

Speaking of that — and I read some of the books (I forget how far I read though) — what’s the deal? I get it from a story point of view, sure. But what is the point of keeping everyone in the dark? One thing the show does well, in my opinion, is describing humans as a bunch of nosy diggers who always want to learn the truth. Hiding it is usually more effort than it’s worth, especially to these extremes¹. Of course, knowledge is power, and humans love power, so… Anyway, it doesn’t add up.

The “Algorithm,” as it’s called in the show, is also this powerful being that must be obeyed because… why? What happens if you don’t? Apperently it would kill a whole silo to protect the truth, whatever that is, which again, doesn’t make sense. If the truth is more important than an entire silo population, and the show so far makes it so that it is, then just kill them off already. Why get so close to exposing the truth?

When I asked these annoying questions when I was a kid, my dad used to say “because otherwise there wouldn’t be a show, would it?” and yes, I get it. But that’s also why it’s unbelievable and fantastic, and why the way it presents AI back to us is too on-the-nose and makes me grumpy. Which is maybe the point.

It’s also a known fact that the mystery is more interesting than the solution to that mystery. I often like to use the example that since the NYTimes published an article about UFOs being real and that the government covered it up, people still look at you like crazy when you mention this fact. It’s fun. ↩︎

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:01:54 -0400

This wasn’t a fun night. My sleepy brain convinced me that removing it or taking out the batteries would set off the alarm, which was the last thing I wanted at 3 in the morning… So I tried to ignore the beeps until I couldn’t anymore and took the batteries out. Solved. I feel dumb. And tired.

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:15:23 -0400

A walk in the park. The neighborhood park. 📷🌼