Testing this quiet corner of the web. I collect small notes about everyday tools ๏ฟฝ๏ฟฝ file formats, tiny utilities, offline workflows. First post is just a hello; longer notes will follow once I settle in. Plain text feels good after years of heavy editors.
Any conversation
Looks like you-know-who has finally come for nitter. :-(
nitter.net
I've been on a kick lately of trying to visualize the oscillating clock, and ultimately the effectively arbitrarily complex activity of a computer processor, as modern refinements of the line shaft factory of the 19th century. Of compute as being not much more than profoundly refined "work" delivered by the electrical grid into marvelously complex machines.
Does that, as a metaphor at least, feel as important to you as it has to me of late? We spend so much time in a world abstracted.
I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing
130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later. Reading Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, discovered via onboarding content in mymind mymind.com
I've been enjoying toast to help click through a project. I still mostly use Zed to handwrite code, but it's nice to open a pane and fire up toast from the terminal. paradise-runner.github.io/toast/

