I just finished reading a recent post by Manuel Uberti, in my RSS reeder.
The problem is not the tool one uses to collect updates, of course. The problem is how pervasive they had become. I felt irresistibly attracted to the news provided by my collection of RSS entries, pulled into my Elfeed buffer over and over again. But was it worth it? How many times I was just marking an entry as read before reading it fully? This can be very subjective, sure, and the beauty of an update speaks more about my taste in RSS feeds than the actual content. Not to mention the simple fact that one could just learn to set their priorities and schedule feed-checking at precise times.
Incidentally, I happened to expunge the long list of unread posts that were sitting in my Reeder.app. I’ve been a slow reader the last two months, mostly because I needed to focus on “immediate work to do”, and of course cooking and groceries for my son who sayed at home during most of the quarantine days and afterwards. That being said, RSS feeds are now my main digital sources of information, in addition to Hacker News. Last week I uninstalled the Twitter app from my iPhone. I’ve been using Twitter exclusively from my phone the last 10 years or so, and it’s been a hard decision. But I’m okay with that, as well as other deletions from my accounts. It’s been months and months that I no longer enjoyed getting into Twitter, other than causal checking of French accounts I started following 1 or 2 years ago. Last week, I noticed that one guy I followed from the beginning was about to leave. The other ones I followed all along during the last 10 years are no longer active either. Let’s stop that. So, no, I will not stop consulting my RSS reader right now, and I’ll be skipping content here and there, depending on my mood.
Other than that, I discovered Andrey Orst’s blog a few days ago. There are many interesting posts on Emacs, text editors and Scheme programming. I must confess that I tried his suggestions for native tab (tab-line mode in Emacs 27+) and it looks pretty nice. I usually don’t care about tabs as long as I have handy keyboard shortcuts for switching between buffers in text editors. Since I use Doom Emacs, this is quite immediate using, e.g., persp-switch-to-buffer. However, it’s nice to have a native solution and not to have to rely on external packages (like centaur-tabs)! Another post that attracts my attention was What I learned from 6 months with VS Code. The author provides a fair overview of VS Code, and I would only disagree with his remark on the Emacs side: “Emacs does not have a proper terminal.” Now that there’s libvterm, there really is no reason to mess up with term (or even Eshell), and you get a fully functional terminal emulator right into Emacs.
I started reading some books on Vim, Typescript and Haskell this month. I realize that the Epub format offers a far better experience in full screen mode on my Macbook, and that synchronization via my iCloud account let me switch over to my iPhone when I’m away from my computer. I’m now in the process of filling my Books.app with electronic books that I bought from O’Reilly long ago to replace the PDF versions. The only minor issue is that I need to find a way to tell ivy-bibtex to index those Epub versions as well.
Finally, I’ve been following some coders on Twitch lately — apparently, after Suz Hinton who started two years ago, the Science & Technology category exploded this year and we now have a bunch of hackers live streaming. I soon became a fan of Matthew Glazar’s pedagogical approach, and I already learned lot of useful tips and tricks on Vim, Git and Python.