Daily Head Voices on Monday 2023-12-18

  • First day back after two day hike in the Cape of Good Hope Nature reserve (the park containing Cape Point). Day 1 was about 14km, and day two was about 20km. Group of 11 people, so was interesting balancing hiking styles. The double peak crossing at the end of day 2 in the summer heat was challenging! Was really great seeing these particular old friends. We did our previous multi-day hike together, before life and family, in the late 90s at Magoebaskloof!
  • Unpaired and re-paired various Apple Watch units as they waterfall (aka hand-me-down) through my family. We’ll soon do a similar action with the new MacBook that has entered the family. You can say many things about Apple, but they do make hardware that is eminently hand-downable.
  • I’ve been having more fun than I expected publishing a low-pressure daily #lifelog over on the emacs.ch Mastodon instance emacs.ch. I have just over 30 days covered – that tag will give you more interesting folks who are also worth checking out.
    • However, more recently I was quite disappointed by my fellow instance users voting to defederate (block) threads.net’s attempt to interoperate with the mastodon universe via ActivityPub (the sort of thing ActivityPub was designed for…) before even giving it a chance. In the end, I am truly happy with whatever the instance admin decides, because him getting overloaded is an entirely valid reason to block pre-emptively, but I am disappointed in the super vocal armchair activist folks who feel that this is their day to exact justice on Meta. You can read my contribution to that discussion if you want (So sorry: Friends stefanv and k0b13 have pointed out that that is not visible to the public, it’s an instance-local discussion. I’ll copy the contents of only my posts to the subsection below.).
    • This is not my hill to die on by any stretch of the imagination, but it has served as a reminder that even your favourite social media platform (emacs.ch in my case) can go in directions that you don’t agree with.
    • And so, I think this is as good a moment as any to move this #lifelog back to where it belongs, namely my blog, 23 years under my control and counting.
      • threads.net users are more than welcome! 😀
    • Another advantage is that the path that content has to take from my private Emacs notes to Hugo is much more efficient thanks to the amazing Kaushal Modi’s ox-hugo.
    • OTOH, I have a bit more setup work to do for each day’s post, vs just pasting the plaintext into the mastodon app or website. Hopefully I’ll be able to streamline the ox-hugo-lifelog workflow some more after this first edition.
    • Who knows, maybe this is what the Weekly Head Voices wanted to be when it grew up.
    • Whatever the case may be, please do note that #lifelog is an experiment. It could stop or morph or even move back to emacs.ch at any time!
      • During the Christmas break, posting will be more erratic than usual.
  • It’s Monday… have a great week everyone!
Figure 1: Panorama of Cape Point, made from one of the last peaks we had to cross at the end of day 2

Figure 1: Panorama of Cape Point, made from one of the last peaks we had to cross at the end of day 2

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Weekly Head Voices #253: Weekend Warrior

Welcome back everyone!

It’s clear to me that I have to get back in the WHV saddle, but preaching sure is easier than practising, and so I thought it might be a good idea to try and bullet-list myself back into it.

(When I say “bullet-list” I mean “helpfully named hierarchical sections”, because Emacs tends to frown quite disapprovingly at mere bullet lists. Here I am after the intention of the bullet-list, namely to just get on with it.)

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Weekly Head Voices #250: Durable, blissful contentment

This, the quarter-thousandth edition of the Weekly Head Voices, covers two weeks from Monday November 21 to Sunday December 4, 2022.

Figure 1: The sunset colours in Betty’s were beautiful that day.

Figure 1: The sunset colours in Betty’s were beautiful that day.

I am happy that my ever-evolving life philosophy (as well as my approach to health and wellness) includes a growing section on the importance of hard and challenging work with great colleagues, because these past few weeks have really been delivering in that respect.

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Weekly Head Voices #248: Oh snap

Welcome back everyone to this completely normal and of course utterly on-time edition of the WHV which spans (checks notes…) the one (1) week from Monday October 31 to Sunday November 6, 2022.

Figure 1: Watsonia posing in front of mountain. Photo by partner.

Figure 1: Watsonia posing in front of mountain. Photo by partner.

(Yes, I am a little bit excited that for once this post is technically on time enough to cover only that one week. Of course what’s in the post does not necessarily have to do anything with the events that transpired in that week, but we won’t let that keep us from this little punctuality celebration.)

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