Oatmeal

Lichen looking.

8 years!

For the octopus, with thousands of suckers studding symmetric arms, each of which can bend at any point, building a central mental representation of how to move seems like a computational nightmare. But experiments show that the octopus doesn’t do that. “The brain doesn’t have to know how to move this floppy arm,” Cheng said. Rather, the arm knows how to move the arm.

…national Sandwich Day today

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.