• First time back on the Clarence Drive coastal route after the floods. As beautiful as ever.
• Derek Sivers’s walk and talk: 100km through Northern Thailand over 7 days with interesting folks. See https://sive.rs/wt
• According to my notes, it was 2023-09-23 when I had started giving evil-mode a solid bash again. Last time was… <checks notes>… 2017-09-18. Strange that it was also in September! (My previous vim-proper era probably around 2007, but I’m guessing). Anyways, it now feels like it was the right choice to try again now. My emacs agility is almost back to what it was before the switch, and with some of the vim interactions now trained into muscle-memory, there are many more places where that’s turning out to be useful, which was a large part of the motivation for this experiment.

My evil-mode config

As per special request by Keegan below, here is my mostly by-the-book evil-mode config, part of my vanilla-Emacs ball-of-config:

Read More

• Longer run brought my year target back in reach, at the cost of some hip niggle. 4km in, I decided that this was not the time and place for a fasted run and bought me a powerade. I bought another on the way back from the Vergelegen-to-Reservoir Road section of my route. I have no regrets.
• Before the run, thought about Values vs Vision vs Sinek’s Why. This was brought on by a twitter thread (which I did not bookmark argh) by a person who identified the root cause of a previously resolved mental health challenge to be the fact that at that point they had ill-defined personal values, and that addressing that was a large part of the resolution. I think my previously-mentioned “life systems” are indeed closely related, but it can’t do harm to spend some more mental cycles on listing my values, and then maybe to see how exactly these related to my life systems.
• Before and during the run, half-designed in my head a software tool for narrating books using OpenAI’s text-to-speech API.
• After the run, took care of some errands:
  • Had car battery replaced
  • Installed new diaphragm for the Zodiac pool cleaner, the current one has a hole in it and did not work at all
  • New brush for the pool pole
• After errands, built and then published the afore-thought-about prototype https://github.com/cpbotha/audio-my-book – warning, it’s still super rough, but it works nicely chopping up your book text into semantic chunks and then text-to-speeching each chunk into mp3 (the openai tts API has a 4096 character limit, hence the chunking)
• In the evening, worked on https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-similarity fixing bugs, and also showing similarity scores in the *org-roam* buffer.

Read More

• Pack up and drive back home
• Lovely lovely family lunch at The Drydock restaurant in Knysna
• During the last part of the drive my partner took over, and I could spend some time updating https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-similarity to support multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1, a much smaller and faster transformer-based similarity model. See https://www.sbert.net/docs/pretrained_models.html for more details.
• It seems I do always need to be building something. It is one of the building blocks of my well-being.
• That thought led to me spending some more time thinking about more clearly defining my personal values. You could take a look at the personal life systems I wrote up at the start of 2021. They are the backbone of everything, while my personal values are a list of more concrete priorities that cover different subsets of my life systems.

Read More

• I thought I was done, but no, I had to spend more time chasing corner cases and learning more tricks for https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-to-apple-notes
  • If you need to escape a single quote ' within a single-quoted string for bash, zsh and some friends, remember $'-quoting. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/16605140/532513 for more
  • Apple iCloud and Notes have great difficulty with folders suddenly containing 1800 notes. Not yet sure where exactly the comfort threshold is. Had to nuke the org-roam folder in Apple Notes and start over with a smaller subset of my notes. Due to this, implemented optional “export only org-roam notes modified within the last N days” feature.
• Lovely day conclusion braaiing with friends.

Read More

• Merry Christmas everyone!
• In spite of my hip niggle but because of great weather, decided to do a normal weekday run. Due to family’s beach plans, I ended up for the most part on a coastal hiking trail which was amazing!
• Family Christmas (buffet) lunch at Joe Fish. The food was so amazing that I might have eaten a a tad or three too much. I think this is what folks in the US feels like after Thanksgiving.
• Drove (relaly slowly) back home to recover…
• … and to continue with https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-to-apple-notes
  • After switching back to built-in HTML export with some hacks, results are looking much better. Rest of my 1800 notes are being exported as we speak.

Read More

• Christmas Eve everyone!
• Just realized that my trick of setting default-dir does work for the temporary org file and output html file that ox-pandoc creates, but of course all image links will break, as they are relative to the actual location of the source org files. 😭 (this means I will have to redo everything via the temporary buffer after all)
• A simply brilliant late afternoon at the beach with the whole family, and even squeezed in a short barefoot run on the beach.
• Car battery was so much on the edge that a phone forgotten on the USB charge cable managed to push it over said edge, and so car refused to start. A minute or two before a friend arrived with jumper leads, a random kind stranger with a truck and jumper leads offered to help and did!
• I do need to emphasise what a sublime day this was. So much joy!

Read More

• First thing, could not resist taking another quick peek at ox-pandoc and figured out that it honours default-directory, so instead of trying to find the last *pandoc <N>* buffer it created, I can just write to a file in a temporary directory
• difficult 12km run in St Francis. Wind, heat and that durn hip niggle. Year goal is starting to slip out of reach… I’ll deal.
• Made use of perplexity.ai offer of two months free: https://www.threads.net/@perplexity.ai/post/C1KquV6gyWd
• Spent a substantial amount of time struggling with AppleScript, Notes and Emacs, and I’m not sure yet how I feel about all of this. https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-to-apple-notes is out there for other people to learn about all the ways in which this can fail.

Read More

• Throughout the day, probably spent far too much time fighting with AppleScript to figure out attachments (learned stuff, also that Apple Notes AppleScript is quite broken), and then also some time on ox-pandoc export, as it can embed image attachments as base64, which is what should in theory work for Apple notes (haha…)
• I used a mix of perplexity (free), bing chat in gpt4 mode and even a bit of you.com to help me, but AppleScript and specifically its application in notes is pretty obscure, with ox-pandoc not very far behind.
• Did get https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el working in Emacs – this has turned out really useful for my most recent emacs-lisp adventures! My config is below in case you find it useful.

(use-package copilot
  :ensure t
  :vc (:fetcher "https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el.git")
  :config
  ;; only copilot in insert mode
  ;; https://www.irfanhabib.com/2022-04-26-setting-up-github-copilot-in-emacs/
  (customize-set-variable 'copilot-enable-predicates '(evil-insert-state-p))
  ;; binds inspired by https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/github-copilot
  (define-key copilot-completion-map (kbd "<tab>") 'copilot-accept-completion)
  (define-key copilot-completion-map (kbd "TAB") 'copilot-accept-completion)
  (define-key copilot-completion-map (kbd "M-]") 'copilot-next-completion)
  ;; command-right on macOS, windows-right on Linux / Windows
  (define-key copilot-completion-map (kbd "s-<right>") 'copilot-accept-completion-by-word))

Read More

• Morning run on the gravel road along the Serpentine river in Wilderness, probably one of my favourite routes ever.
• On a new wifi network with Apple TV, but forgot remote at home. Moved TV and Apple TV closer to AP to plug in via ethernet, which allowed the iPhone remote to connect, BUT Apple decided to be infuriating again: If your Apple TV has an Ethernet port, make sure your Apple TV isn’t connected to an Ethernet cable. If you’re using an Ethernet cable, you won’t see the option to connect to Wi-Fi. see https://support.apple.com/en-za/102346 – this is of course a great big catch 22 for us at the moment.
  • They do plenty of things right, but man, they make some really stupid mistakes.
  • On a related note, it seems that before iOS 17, the Remote app on the iPhone was able to control the Apple TV even when they weren’t on the same WiFi network, see https://www.reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/16mo99d/apple_tv_remote_app_requires_a_wifi_connection_as/
• On the other hand: Based on the following two recent publications, it really looks like Apple is cooking up something really interesting with large language models (LLMs):
  • Apple announces ProTIP: Progressive Tool Retrieval Improves Planning – so they are working on much improved ways of hooking up LLMs to tools, perhaps even on their devices? via https://twitter.com/_akhaliq/status/1736982938942677421
  • New Arxiv paper by Apple titled “LLM in a flash: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Limited Memory” – from the abstract: “These methods collectively enable running models up to twice the size of the available DRAM, with a 4-5x and 20-25x increase in inference speed compared to naive loading approaches in CPU and GPU, respectively. Our integration of sparsity awareness, context-adaptive loading, and a hardware-oriented design paves the way for effective inference of LLMs on devices with limited memory.” via https://www.threads.net/@sung.kim.mw/post/C1Dwx7Iypg4/
• Spent some time digging into AppleScript (again) and how I could make a better orgmode to apple notes workflow
  • Previous attempt is here: https://vxlabs.com/2018/10/29/importing-orgmode-notes-into-apple-notes/#bonus-round-convert-orgmode-buffer-to-apple-note-using-applescript
  • The new flow should merge more cleverly with an existing folder in Notes, instead of re-importing the whole database each time

Read More

• Made a Zapier Zap to send new cpbotha.net posts (picked up via RSS) to a Telegram bot called HeadVoices who lives on a Telegram (announce-only) channel named “cpbotha.net blog”.
  • I have not (yet) been able to pipe the post’s HTML to the telegram API so you can read more of the post there, because Telegram’s HTML mode is quite limited, and I would have to figure out to sanitise my post’s HTML. Don’t think it’s worth the effort.
  • My idea here was to show more ways in which folks can get cpbotha.net content, if they really want to, on the communication channel of their choice.
    • RSS and email remain first class citizens, but people do like their social apps!
    • It looks like RSS to Mastodon is also doable, although the Zapier way would not be as free as IFTTT or just running curl from cron. BTW, IFTTT seems to support only two active applets in the free version.
    • I’m getting serious rabbit hole feelings here, but do let me know if there are other channels where you would like to be notified of new posts.
• After a few hours of driving, we ended up in Wilderness, one of our favourite places in the world.
  • Braai with long time great friends.

Read More