This, the 257th edition of the WHV, covers the period of time from Monday November 25 to Sunday December 8, 2024.
The view right from our lunch table at Stellenbosch Reserve, Haskell Vineyard
Haskell vineyard has made previous appearances on this blog in WHV #99 in 2015, in WHV #181 in 2019 and perhaps in other posts. I strongly suspect that some of the good friends mentioned there were the same good friends we were so fortunate to spend this Sunday lunch with!
The title of this post is another nerd-dad joke I probably should not have made, but which I simply could not resist.
Whatever the case may be, I’m happy that it’s out, just like this, the otherwise extremely modest 256th edition of the Weekly Head Voices!
A scene from our Saturday family and friends hike in Jonkershoek.
Figure 1: Het Stadhuis, Delft, taken in August from a quick bicycle trip with my good friend the TPN. Mood: Enchanted. Part of me still lives there.
There is a nerd joke I could make about using a single byte to store the WHV post number, which would explain the long stretch of time between this edition and the previous one in March, itself also lamenting the growing interval between posts, but I’m not going to.
At AfrikaBurn 2018, the South African / Dutch theme camp Burniversity (that’s us!) was again present and active with a range of workshops and other learning experiences.
(Strangely, although I wrote vaguely about our AB 2018 experience on this blog shortly after the event, I did not even mention this electronics project, and now it’s only taken 6 years to get around to the nerdy bits.)
That year, we had perhaps a bit too much energy and decided to design an electronic artwork, inspired by the fun we had in 2017 with a giant bottle of helium, a bag of CR2032 button cell batteries and leds, and another bag full of helium-grade balloons. (In short: On the less windy nights, we would inflate clusters of 4 to 5 balloons with helium, each with a burning led inside, and attach the cluster to a theme camp member. Picture little clouds of illuminated helium balloons floating above their humans as they were roaming over the Binnekring.)
Hello there WHV enjoyers, and welcome back! …ish.
The last official WHV, by name, was WHV #253, published on September 2, 2023, although the 2023 to 2024 transition post certainly deserves its honorary WHV title.
In the meantime, I have been experimenting with the Daily Head Voices / lifelogs, which was fun, but ultimately not sufficiently meaty to fill the WHV vacuum.
We are clearly going through a pretty significant WHV-hiatus.
Although I’m still not sure what the new stable state is going to be, I have some extremely modest plans, and in addition to those I’ve decided to dust off and revive the draft of WHV #254 which was just lying there on my disc since September of last year, all languishing.
org-roam-node-find-similar to surface similar notes from the past. I did find the correct historic note which I would not have otherwise, but then I got sucked into emacs config…
org-roam-node-find-* never done live preview like other consult commands? – solved by installing https://github.com/jgru/consult-org-roam/tree/main and then tooting about it: https://emacs.ch/@cpbotha/112008312753264000
org-roam-node-find-similar did not sort the similar nodes by similarity, so fixed that: https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-similarity/commit/d940c12e70468adfbc1e41ef997c5f797540ebf7sonar-online internet-capable models.
<article> or the parent <section>, and also gathering all of the applicable styles, I would be golden
Most people in high-stress, decision-making industries are always operating at this kind of simmering six, as opposed to the undulation between just deep relaxation and being at a 10. Being at a 10 is millions of times better than being at a 6. It’s just in a different universe. – Josh Waitzkin (see Sunday below)
brew upgrade if you must now, and there it went building emacs along with installing all the other smaller dependencies, the ones I actually had in mind)pnpm, but a big challenge at this moment is the developer experience: There is very little coding assistance of any kind as you work on the javascript code blocks in the markdown pages. Hopefully they will be able to improve this with a vscode extension and/or a web-based editing experience, like marimo.Semi-controversial opinion: There’s no such thing as working too hard. There’s just being under rested.
1. Winston Churchill used to work 16 hours per day in his old age during the war — but he also worked in bed every day until 11am. He had a nap after lunch, and a 2 hour nap… pic.twitter.com/kyiAuTEwjA
One of the reasons to publish these lifelogs is to make available a peek into the minutiae of another life (mine) that could help someone else get out of a rut, or just supply some alternative input that’s not form their own mind.
Put differently, I think that when I see what other people are doing and thinking day to day, it feels like a small, external disturbance (i.e. new information) that will help to nudge me in interesting and new directions.
Figure 1: Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash
In this recent Mojo community blog post, I came across the term “two-world problem”, describing the disconnect in bio-informatics between the high-performance, low-level (often C++) and the more expressive, high-level (often Python) software layers.
As someone who has experienced this first-hand in scientific visualization and image processing, also between C++ and Python (quite acutely with VTK and ITK, less so but still relevant with SciPy), I really like this term.