7:54am on a quiet Monday morning. Quiet because it’s New Year’s Eve. I have just put £15 into a hire car prior to returning the vehicle. There’s just one gentleman is in front of me paying. He has a fuel card so he’s asked for his registration. He can’t remember this so looks out to the forecourt to check. Maybe this is a hire car too although that seems unlikely as it’s an ancient, brown, battered Volvo estate. No problem. Then he’s asked for his mileage which he doesn’t know. This is optional so no problem. ...

I tend to switch Linux distributions quite often. Consequently, I tend to have this process down to a fine art and it doesn’t take me that long. The most time consuming element is ensuring the necessary backups are in place. However, you normally find some package or configuration option you forgot about and my recent switch from Arch Linux to Fedora 29 and back again unearthed a strange problem with the Dovecot IMAP server I hadn’t encountered before. ...

Occasionally, I have to search lots of files for a pattern. It was only recently I discovered the wonderful silver searcher utility which saves me a lot of time. To install ‘ag’ on Fedora, use the following (which isn’t entirely obvious or intuitive if you’re used to typing ‘ag’). # sudo dnf install the_silver_searcher I believe there is an Emacs interface which would save me even more time. $ time ag 'sql statement execute time' ~ real 0m0.125s user 0m0.128s sys 0m0.257s $ time find ~ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i 'sql statement execute time' real 0m23.725s user 0m7.965s sys 0m1.618s

It all started innocuously enough with this post from Alex Shroeder https://octodon.social/@kensanata/101052266709264418 Writing tools. Emacs Wiki What about you? I spontaneously replied. Emacs Orgmode Nikola This reminded me that since, I had recently migrated my desktop from Arch Linux to Fedora 29, I needed to reinstall Nikola and check that the blog I never use still could be built successfully. Oh - how exciting. Nikola has recently released version [8.0.1] Nikola-8 and I was on the previous version - 7.8.15. I quickly created a Python 3 virtual environment and installed Nikola. ...

I was in a fog, I didn’t notice everything Was coming all apart inside of me There wasn’t anyway for anyone to settle in You made a slow disaster out of me There’s a radiant darkness upon us I don’t want you to worry I was careful but nothing is harmless Baby, you better hurry You were a kindness when I was a stranger But I wouldn’t ask for what I didn’t need Everything’s weird and we’re always in danger Why would you shatter somebody like me? ...