Oatmeal

Today I received an incredibly powerful voicemail. Listen here.

My child vastly overestimates how much I enjoy guessing what is behind his back (usually some sort of kitchen implement).

My internet is substantially quieter than yours

I recently had the distinct pleasure of wiping my laptop and re-installing Debian linux on it (I done and goofed up good).

This is a personal machine that I only use for hobby projects and idle noodling. Wanting to keep things minimal, and fast (because the computer is also not the most Herculean of machines) here’s what I installed and (loosely) how.

Tools and utilities

• git (apt)
• build-essential (apt)
• emacs (apt)
• zsh (apt)
• oh-my-zsh (install script)
• rlwrap (apt)
• spell (apt)
• pandoc (apt)
• rsync (apt)
• 1password (apt)

Languages and dependencies

• Retro (minimal version built from source, http://forth.works/retro-unix.c)
• sbcl (apt)
• quicklisp (install script)
• Racket (racket-lang.org install script)
• MIT Scheme (built from source)
• Lua (built from source)
• Fennel (downloaded a static binary)
• Scheme 9 (built from source)
• Janet (built from source)
• Janet deps all installed with jpm:
  • circlet
  • hypertext
  • jhydro
  • json
  • nanoid
  • sqlite3
  • trolley
  • uri

A notable omission is a browser — this is because the computer is a Chromebook. I run Debian in Crostini, ChromeOS’s vm. Another notable omission is Nodejs — tbh, I don’t really ever use node when I write js for fun, so, I figured I’d fly free from it. I’ve also been poking around Deno lately, so will try that over node if needs be.

This time around I’ve created a snapshot of this vm, so it’ll be easy to restore in the future. Looking at my minimal setup, too, I’m thinking that it’d be pretty straight forward to write a make file to handle this configuration/updates. The quarkiest bit of the entire process was install racket, which isn’t all that quarky.

2 solid Yiddish curses for this morning:

• Zol er krenken un gedenken.
• Let him suffer and remember.

And then,

• Hindert Harzer Sol er hob, in yeder hoyz a hindert tsimern, in yeder tsimer tsvonsik betn un kadukhes zol im varfin eyn bet in der tsveyter.
• A hundred houses shall he have, in every house a hundred rooms and in every room 20 beds, and a delirious fever should drive him from bed to bed.

She made herself stronger by fighting with the wind

• Frances Hodgson Burnett

Getting spooky

Axiom: given enough time working in or adjacent to technology of any sort you will eventually work on a project meaninglessly codenamed “Apollo.”