2026-08-01: Join Hands by Siouxsie and the Banshees after Meds by Placebo. I supposethis is okay, isn’t it?
2026-08-01: wander.md: the markdown editor that is yours. I already like this native macOS app. It supports tags and it works with folder (like Obsidian) or single file (like Typora). I’m waiting for $\LaTeX$ and Pandoc exporting backend support. For more information, see this discussion on Reddit.#apple
2026-08-02:

2026-08-02: There are as many YT donwloaders than Markdown editors on the market right now. LLMs surely help in developping native UI apps, but I would say than some good old (LLM-free) core components, yt-dlp and pandoc, are what make them really shine.
2026-08-04: /me is listening to “What You Were” by The Cranberries
2026-08-04:

I fear the software industry is taking on a large amount of cognitive debt> that we’ll have to pay back very soon. There will come a time when we no longer understand how large parts of our digital infrastructure are put together. I might not personally be able to change the course of the entire industry, but I can at least make sure I completely understand the software I put out into the world. Anything else would be professional malpractice. — Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

2026-08-04: Thanks to Armin Briegel, it is easy to replace Google translation cli tool with a proper Swift utility that relies on builtin Apple Translate and local language assets.
Bonus: Put this in your Vim Markdown plugin and you can replace a visual selection with its translation to the appropriate language (here, English):

xnoremap <buffer> <silent> grN :!translate --to en<cr>

2026-08-05: That’s what it looks like when you’re transfering a whole Maildir to a new HD. RIP my old Time Capsule(2nd gen, 2 To) which will no longer be supported after upgrading to macOS 27.

2026-08-07: An ever-changing collection of command line tools that I find useful on a daily basisor just fun to play with from time to time.
2026-08-07: Getting started with Scheme by solving an Advent of Code 2018 challenge. #scheme
2026-08-07: Making ASCII art in Vim: Learn you someeffective Vim motions. #vim
2026-08-07: htop explained. We need more review like that. #unix
2026-08-08:

2026-08-08: Thing is: BibDesk insists in transforming your clean BibTeXfile into a mess. I already use bibclean to format my database:

if executable("bibclean")
  setlocal formatprg=bibclean\ -align-equals\ -brace-protect\ -delete-empty-values\ -fix-accents\ -quiet
endif

Now, I need to resort to bibtool to remove extra stuff added by BibDesk on the fly:

nnoremap <silent> <buffer> g= :!bibtool -q -s -r ~/Documents/notes/clean-bibdesk.rsc % -o %<cr>

In my case, clean-bibdesk.rsc actually reads:

delete.field { bdsk-file-1 }
rename.field { bdsk-url-1=url }
key.generation = off
preserve.key.case = on
preserve.keys = on
print.line.length = 9999999

I guess it will evolve over time with the new surprises Bibdesk has in store for me.
2026-08-08: Two very useful applicationss with stunning Apple design! Expect some quick review soon.

Credit where credit is due: Apple had listened to their users and the next version - macOS Sequoia — shipped with lots of fixes. Border radius was heavily reduced, transparent glass-like panels replaced by less transparent ones, buttons made more serious and less toyish. Most system icons made more serious, too, with focus on more detail. Overall, it seemed like the 2nd version was a giant leap from infancy to teenage years. — Benjamin Button ReviewsmacOS
2026-08-11: > Well, I knew it, you knew it, everybody knows it. Windows is not a high quality product. I really wanted to like it, and I geniunely loved some aspects of it. But there are so, so many bugs and bad design decisions, it’s a death by twenty thousand cuts. — Windows 11 after two decades of macOS: okay, but also awful

> 2026-08-11: I guess I now have the opportunity to study statistics > again.

2026-08-11: I wrote a minimal vimrc file to be used on external servers, as a replacement for my Neovim full config. I recommend minimal settings discussed by Romain > Lafourcade if you’re lacking inspiration or want to try some zero-plugin config, BTW. It appears that shift insert in a rectangular selection is very slow with default settings in Vim 9. The culprit seems to bettimeoutlen which defaults to 1000 (i.e., the default value of timeoutlen). When set ttimeoutlen=100 like in Neovim, everything works smoothly. #vim
> 2026-08-11: Looks like they are on par and well below 50 ms (Vim = zero plugin, Neovim = 5plugins):

» time /usr/bin/vim +q
/usr/bin/vim +q  0,02s user 0,01s system 79% cpu 0,036 total

~
» time nvim +qa
nvim +qa  0,03s user 0,02s system 79% cpu 0,062 total

2026-08-11: Stata 19 now includes just over 20,000 pages of documentation. Last time Ichecked (Stata 15), it was 14,791 pages.

~
» for i in /Applications/StataNow/docs/*.pdf; do pdfinfo "$i" | grep "^Pages:"; done | awk '{s+=$2} END {print s}'
20309

2026-08-11: Building Full-Text Search for BibDeskPDFs.
2026-08-11: monolith: CLI tool and library for savingcomplete web pages as a single HTML file.
2026-08-12: BibTeX Done Right: Lot of useful advices here.
2026-08-12: Cargo Info in Neovim, or How Simple Features Go a Long Way. #vim
2026-08-18:
I did it again…
2026-08-18:
Live again, more live like this.
2026-08-18: /me is listening to “Last Song” by Marta & Tricky
2026-08-18: VisiGrid: A spreadsheet built like a code editor, with a fair comparison of Numbers vs.Excel.
2026-08-19:

I think writing with an LLM is completely stupid. Writing is thinking. If something isn’t worth thinking about enough to write manually, it probably isn’t worth writing at all. — Writing with AI isStupid

2026-08-19:

Once upon a time, long ago, there was a company of Lisp programmers. It was so long ago, in fact, that Lisp had no macros. Anything that couldn’t be defined with a function or done with a special operator had to be written in full every time, which was rather a drag. Unfortunately, the programmers in this company–though brilliant–were also quite lazy. Often in the middle of their programs–when the tedium of writing a bunch of code got to be too much–they would instead write a note describing the code they needed to write at thatplace in the program. Even more unfortunately, because they were lazy, the programmers also hated to go back and actually write the code described by the notes. Soon the company had a big stack of programs that nobody could run because they were full of notes about code that still needed to be written. —The Story of Mac: A Just-So Story

2026-08-20: /me is listening to “Be My Baby” by Patti Smith
2026-08-27:

“Modern” is quite a buzzword, but it is justified when talking about Neovim. The project started as a big refactoring of the Vim codebase, throwing away a lot of code and removing support for legacy systems. It uses a brand new VimL parser which is much faster than Vim’s one, leverages libuv for asynchronous IO and is generally much more modular. — Why Neovim overVim

2026-08-27:

The keyword here is fast. — Fast Filewise GitBlame

2026-08-27: Shout out to the author of this blog for his entertaining posts and for such a beautiful designed website: https://www.tobymackenzie.com.
2026-08-28: Just switched from Texlab to Badness, by the author of the Panache LSP for Markdown & Co., since I barely use $\LaTeX$ these days (and I don’t need the build/synctex toolchain anyway). Great work as with Panache!#tex
2026-08-29: /me is listening to “Block Rockin’ Beats” by The Chemical Brothers
2026-08-29: Are you after some MP diagrams to stay awake all the night? #tex
2026-08-29: Good. Now I know I can lint CONTEXT or plain $\TeX$ file withbadness too.

2026-08-29: macOS applications that has stood the test of time. #apple
2026-08-30: Back in 2006… Mathematica 5.2 and Aquamacs running on OX X Tiger; R and Emacs on Debian while I was writing my PhD dissertation.