Not so long ago, I was using macOS as my daily driver. The main reason why I got a macbook was the underlying BSD Unix and the nice graphics it provides. Also, I have an iPhone. But they were also the same reasons for why I left macOS. — macOS to FreeBSD migration a.k.a why I left macOS
2020-12-02: High accuracy Data Anonymization.
2020-12-02: Interactive Linear Algebra.
2020-12-02: Retrospective (Observed) Power Analysis.
2020-12-02: Statistical Analysis of Genomics Data.
2020-12-03: Conceptual Foundations of Statistical Learning.
2020-12-03: Emacs in the terminal (via Irreal). #emacs
2020-12-03: Putting all the pieces together. What a wonderful piece of work, by Nicolas Rougier, again. #emacs
2020-12-04: The simplest solutions are often those that stand the test of time and a changing environment: How I Manage My Random Daily Notes.
2020-12-04: Time to Say Goodbye to Google Fonts. It’s now more than one year since I decided to host my own font. Google is evil, anyway.
2020-12-05:
Most people today don’t know what the command line is, much less why they would want to bother with it. As computing pioneer Alan Kay said in a 2017 interview, “Because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that ‘Guitar Hero’ is the same as a real guitar.” — Command Line Interface Guidelines
2020-12-05: R now provides a simple native pipe syntax ‘|>’. That was quick! #rstats
2020-12-05: Entropy and Diversity: The Axiomatic Approach.
2020-12-05: My Writing & Coding Workflow.
2020-12-06: EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis): Stata program that automates the generation of exploratory data analysis reports. #stata
2020-12-07: Coherent PDF Command Line Tools Community Release.
2020-12-07: The Tectonic Typesetting System. #tex
2020-12-08: Agnes Obel, Aventine.
2020-12-08: Hexagonal Grids.
2020-12-11: I haven’t updated my Emacs config since July. Same for my dot files, which appear to be stabilized after several months of tricking zsh, vim, emacs & Co. Finally, I wrote no blog post the last two months. I must be busy with something else, I yet have to know with what.
2020-12-20: Back to reading some RSS feeds thanks to newsboat. This is the third text-based app I use daily for processing incoming news: For mail, I settled on Neomutt, and for IRC that’s irssi.
2020-12-22:
The Macintosh was designed under a number of constraints, including: (1) It needed to sell to “naive users,” that is, users without any previous computer experience. (2) It was targeted at a narrow range of applications (mostly office work, though entertainment and multimedia applications have been added later in ways that sometimes break slightly with the standard interface). (3) It controlled relatively weak computational resources (originally a non-networked computer with 128KB RAM, a 400KB storage device, and a dot-matrix printer). (4) It was supported by highly impoverished communication channels between the user and the computer (initially a small black-and-white screen with poor audio output, no audio input, and no other sensors than the keyboard and a one-button mouse). (5) It was a standalone machine that at most was connected to a printer. — The Anti-Mac Interface
2020-12-22: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course.
2020-12-22: Half-Precision Floating-Point, Visualized.
2020-12-22: My perfect Irssi setup.
2020-12-22: Unlimited free email address.
2020-12-23:
So, I stopped using the Gmail web client. Google the data kraken, Google the spearhead of surveilance capitalism. I don’t want to live in front of the camera with algorithms watching my every move, using the data they gather about me to manipulate me into voting for this or for that, or to buy this or that. “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” And remember, “Don’t be evil” was a part of Google’s Code of Conduct from 2000 to 2018. They removed it. — RmailAs I now start Emacs from scratch, with a minimal
init.elfile (just to load a monochrome theme, really), I come to appreciate the default settings, although I will need to tweak the base config a bit.
2020-12-23: Experimenting with git storage. #git
2020-12-24: Trying out calcurse to manage my TODO and appointments.
2020-12-24: Learning Statistical Models Through Simulation in R. #rstats
2020-12-29:
$ git clone https://github.com/jhbadger/xlispstat.git
$ cd xlispstat
$ ./configure --prefix=/home/chl/.local
$ make && make install
Enjoy your 30 years old statistical package!
I install very few things on either my personal or work computer. I don’t have terraform, aws, node, or pip installed, but I use them all the time. I have a Docker image for each, and I run them in containers with minimal privileges. I’m definitely not the only one, but it’s not as popular as it should be. None of these tools actually need full access to my computer to do their work, but that is normally how they’re run. — Run More Stuff in Docker
2020-12-29: Apple Music everywhere! I would love streaming my playlists via cmus.
2020-12-29: Some of git internals (updated). #git