
Meeting Mauro for #Coffice in town is always a breath of fresh air, a semblance of "normal" even in hopeless times. And work gets done.
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Meeting Mauro for #Coffice in town is always a breath of fresh air, a semblance of "normal" even in hopeless times. And work gets done.
Woke up this morning with a feeling of "nothing bad in the world". Obviously only until I remembered the war.
In the last few days I had followed an account of someone in Mykolaev (aka Nikolaev). At night when I went to bed, the account was quiet for 5h, so now I rushed to check if there is some sign of life. Which there was. Amongst other posts, there was a link to an article in Novaya Gazeta about the situation in Nikolaev. It will take me a while to work myself through that.
Mind blown here: For years I've been using par(1) to reformat paragraphs in vim. Which does an aesthetically pleasant job, but the documentation and configuration is mildly speaking nuts. And today for no obvious reason I came across the vim-builtin "gq" command. Which does it all and with some extra magic.
In a handful of tests, there were some cases where "par" gave a more pleasant reflow. Most of the time there is no different result. But then "gq" has some easy to understand options that are actually readably documented and... it does crazy useful stuff like being able to recognise lists (numbered, bullets) and reformat them successfully.
Want to reformat mail messages from clients that do not hard wrap lines? Why ofcows no problem! "gq" handles all the weird stuff, like not wrapping long URLs, and mixing various quote levels. It won't even mix in the attribution line with the quoted mail text.
How come I didn't discover this long ago? Yesterday I had noticed that par put in an extra space after punctuation in rare and weird circumstances. There probably is some way to configure it not to do that. But go have a look at that man page... it's out of this world! No way. Which led me to search and discover the vim-builtin "gq" command.
I use set nojoinspaces
and set formatoptions+=n
. Then I also
have a map _r gqip
to save some typing. For documentation, start
with :help gq
and :help fo-table
.
Again war. Again sufferings, necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled for; again fraud; again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.
...
What can this be? Is it a dream or a reality? Something is taking place which should not, cannot be; one longs to believe that it is a dream and to awake from it.
But no, it is not a dream, it is a dreadful reality!
—Leo Tolstoi / Bethink Yourselves
Recommended viewing: F@ck this job, a documentary about Дождь (Dozhd) the last independent TV channel in russia. Saw it yesterday in german online at the german ARD tv mediathek.
It gives some insight into some of the backstory to our current war tragedy, to the part of russian society that fights against Putin, and to the repression they face.
Update 2022-03-03: Only one day after I've seen the documentery, the journalists of the дождь tv channel decided to temporarily pause their work. This is due to the new media laws that come into force tomorrow in russia. These laws threaten to punish journalists with up to 15 years in jail for spreading "fake information" about the war that is supposedly not a war.
I watched the last broadcast of the channel live on youtube. The last words said on air were: Нет войне! ... No to war!
In times of hopelessness like these, I find reading the FAQ pages of the OpenBSD project oddly soothing. A world where almost all the important questions (and their answers) fit on a handful of pages.
What is this thing with taking walks and clearing your head? If that is even the right term for it. Sometimes it's not "clearing your head", but rather "filling your head". All kind of ideas and spirits, plans and instructions, and motivations, not to forget the motivations, everything entering my head.
I mostly walk the same few routes near the village. I look at the same mountains and trees, fields and sheep. Sometimes a farmer or shepherd passes me in their trucks and we greet each other, they already know me a bit. Sure, with the changing of seasons and the variations in the weather, things look different again and again (sometimes there is snow on Naxos). But in general, this is the same stuff all over. Indeed, I'm sometimes too bored to actually go for a walk, sometimes it's too-much-the-same all over.
But most of the time walking works. Except... then I come back and sit down at the computer, and most of the high spirits and ideas are quickly evaporating. Oh, there is a news tab open, before I close it, I read a few words. Half an hour later, I realize that all my walked-up energy has gone down a drain of consuming useless information.
Could someone invent not a standing desk, but a walking desk? So I could work right while out walking? I imagine there are some difficult UI and UX problems to be solved, but this can't be a task too hard for today's experts and entrepreneurs. Piping all these great ideas and motivations right into work would be totally worth it.
Noticed today that there was some appreciation for one of the posts from my old blog. So I went and resurrected the text of that post at the right URL. In the process I found out how to put stuff into random places in Nikola, so I could actually selectively bring some of the old blog content back. Here is Matryoshka Code.