2026-10-01:

Remember when System Preferences had a graphical UI for controlling your local> Apache webserver? Remember when /usr/bin was filled with interpreters before> you installed Xcode? — Will Apple get on the> bus?

At that time, it was even possible to manage Ruby or Python projects in XCode.

2026-10-02: /me is listening to “Dry Your Eyes” by Ash Code
2026-10-09:

Apple doesn’t seem too happy about agents. — Apple and a Hacker’s FutureI’m not either.

2026-10-09: I’ve been using Automator for a long time now (like 20 years, really), and I started replacing some of my services and quick actions with Shortcuts. Thanksfully, it is possible to directly import exiting Automator workflows into Shortcuts, so that was not that painful. There’s still a lot work to do, though. #apple

2026-10-09: Today’s little joy: I temporarily saved a draft post to the Desktop while working with BBEdit, then renamed and moved the file to my Hugo directory. When I tried to reopen that file from the Recent file menu, BBEdit correctly picked up the udpated file. I guess that’s what native macOS app are intended to do, after all. What a relief not to have to worry about that sort of detail. #apple
2026-10-09: My favourite small tools, scripts and aliases. #unix
2026-10-09: Proofreading with Writing Tools: Great use of side by side diff windows with BBEdit. Effectively, I was really late to this one (writing tools have been around for a while now). #apple
2026-10-14: I found myself spending most of my time in a Wolfram notebook these days. For whatever reason, the builtin LSP has stopped working with BBEdit (maybe because I moved my user files to iCloud, or for whatever reasons I don’t really care at the present time) and code formatting (via CodeFormatter) is now a mess. I mean, it just hurts my eyes to find comma on a single line, like this: (indentation preserved)

-%<---
        Epilog ->
          {
            {Red, Dashed, Line[{{1, threshold}, {Max[1, Length[kappa]
              ], threshold}}]}
            ,
            {Red, Dashed, Line[{{1, -threshold}, {Max[1, Length[kappa
              ]], -threshold}}]}
            ,
            Table[
              {
                Purple
                ,
                Thick
                ,
                Line[
                  {{pos, Min[kappa, 0]}, {pos, Max[kappa, 0]}} /.
                    {
--->%-

I’ve tried various combination of Airiness and other options (but see this GH issue) but never got something decent although it was working fine with v14. I’ve disabled auto-formatting in Neovim. Copying/pasting a whole notebook to a plain text file provides decent formatting.
2026-10-14: Making git hooks visible: I don’t have that many Git hooks for my own repos but this looks like a good idea. I’m already using a Zsh hook to detect uv virtual environments:

function auto_activate_venv() {
  if [ -f ".venv/bin/activate" ]; then
    source .venv/bin/activate
  fi
}

autoload -U add-zsh-hook
add-zsh-hook chpwd auto_activate_venv

2026-10-15: Testing tip: Enable the zoom peek gesture. #apple
2026-10-15: The Dock on Mac, From OS 10 to macOS 27. #apple
2026-10-20: Vista looks like a good replacement for Feh on macOS. And it’s free on the AppStore. #apple
2026-10-24: /me is listening to “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop
2026-10-27: /me is listening to “Four Horsemen” by The Clash
2026-10-27:

It is worth emphasizing that tinyplot requires only base R. It has zero recursive dependencies and we have been careful to keep its installation size down to a minimum. tinyplot should thus provide an attractive and lightweight option for package developers (or regular R users!) who would like to produce convenient and sophisticated plots, combined with a minimal footprint. — tinyplot

Things I like nowadays.

2026-10-27: Great resources if you’re into Mathematica: Exercises & Solutions from Paul Wellin’s excellent book, Essentials of Programming in Mathematica.
2026-10-27: Looking at CRAN packages, it looks like many things are “tidy” (n=127) and most “tiny” ones (n=24) are not dependency-free. I’ll try living with those packages for some time, just to see how it goes:

~ ^Z
» ls .local/lib/R/library
data.table/ renv/       tinyplot/   tinytest/

2026-10-27: New icon (B&W instead of white on red) and new default color scheme (blue) for Apple Music on macOS 27.2:

2026-10-27: Rediscovering this nice blog post, Classical array algebra, by Taliesin Beynoni (former lead developer at Wolfram Research). See also Rainbow array algebra. Funny enough, I used similar depiction for matrices and vectors in an R tutorial several years ago.