Weekly Head Voices #85: Gone south.

From now on I’m going to try a more fluid weekly blogging schedule. My approach up to now was to try and write up the weekly right after the weekend, at which time,however, I’m usually caught up in the usual start-of-the-week storm of, uhm, possibilities, and hence let the blog writing slip, and once you start slipping it’s a challenge to stop. So now, instead of focusing on the when (the failed after the weekend) I’m going to focus on the how often. Maybe this works better.

This past weekend, we visited Cape Point, the almost-southernmost tip of Africa, and the spot where the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean crash together for a part of the year. It’s quite beautiful, and always great to have visitors that we can take there. I took this photo of the Cape of Good Hope from the Cape Point side:

Emacs nerdery.

My first significant Emacs Lisp hacking was first blogged by Sacha Chua (Emacs goddess!) and then accepted into the org2blog upstream repository. Nerd-adrenaline-rush!

On this topic, I also published deft-turbo, my fork of the original Deft to support recursive directory searching and now also multiple file types. If you’re into Notational Velocity style note-taking and into Emacs you’ll love this.

I now use Emacs Org mode for my daily note-taking, for blogging (this post is being written in Org mode in Emacs) and since yesterday also for generating beautiful presentation slides using the fantastic org-reveal. (As you might recall, I also use Emacs with mu4e as my email client.)

It’s crazy to think that GNU Emacs was first released in March of 1985, which makes it almost 30 years old, which is practically immortal in software terms, and yet it’s still the most powerful text editor in the world today.

Finally: The cracked phone screen.

After a great number of years using smartphones without covers of any kind (they’re so beautifully designed, why cover that up?) I finally dropped my Nexus 4 from about a metre height because a WhatsApp message arrived and I thought that I could easily fumble my digital friend out of my pocket whilst typing with my other hand.

Apparently I couldn’t.

The screen acquired an impressive new crack, and the digitizer is completely dead. I’m having it repaired, because it’s still a great phone, and Android 5.0 (Lollipop) is being pushed to Nexi 4 worldwide as we speak! (Fortunately I could factory reset the phone using only the hardware buttons.)

In the meantime, I’m using a backup Motorola Atrix 4G. Thanks to Android and much open source hackage, I was able to install Android 4.4.4 (KitKat) on it, in spite of it being a 2011 phone that was practically abandoned by Motorola at the Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) stage.

The end.

If you run into me in CYBERSPACE, and I’m late with a blog post, I give you permission to badger me about it.

Have a great half-week and weekend kids!

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