Pretty excited about this one. I started reading it online through the university library just to get a taste, and within five pages decided I had to buy it and put aside everything else I’m reading until I’m through it.
Naar aanleiding van een blogpost van Jan Wildeboer over Nextcloud besloot ik om een voorgeïnstalleerde server aan te schaffen voor een maand. Met Nextcloud kan ik audio, foto’s, bestanden nog meer in eigen beheer houden. Na mijn Linux laptop is dit een project dat ik al een tijdje op mijn lijst had staan. En nu wilde ik er eens aan proeven.
Gebruik ik de verkeerde apps? Mogelijk. Moet ik zelf een hoop configureren achter de schermen? Zou kunnen. Maar ik had gehoopt op een meer gebruiksvriendelijke onboarding in een systeem als Nextcloud. Want ze worden vaak als alternatief gegeven voor diensten als iCloud en het Google ecosysteem. Ik zie dat niet snel gebeuren voor de grote groep gebruikers die een zelfde soort ervaring verwachten zoals Apple of Google kan geven. En dat is jammer.
Of ik na deze maand nog Nextcloud houd? Ik weet het nog niet, ik wil het echt wel een kans geven, maar het was geen flitsende start.
Linkrot is always a problem for the web, but please let’s not purposefully destroy our own content when it’s easy to keep it going. John Gruber on 538 shutting everything down:
Why not keep the FiveThirtyEight site up and running — at least for a while, if not in perpetuity? It costs practically nothing to run a website serving a static/archived website. I don’t get it. It betrays a profound level of disrespect for the work that the site hosted.
Just a few more days before I leave Kassel after two and a half years. Feeling grateful for everything this city has given me and excited for what’s ahead!
There's one challenge most bloggers encounter: discovering their unique voice.
The only way to discover it, really, is to just keep blogging. Hopefully, we'll find it eventually.
However, maintaining that voice can be just as difficult.
It's easy to be blinded and lose yourself in the glow of upvote buttons and statistics. Some posts gain more traction, and we're tempted to continue down the same path.
We might convince ourselves, "This is my true voice." But is that genuine? Or is it merely the false advertising of a traffic-hungry ego?
It's easy to deceive yourself, but our readers are not as easily fooled. They'll expose our deception faster than it takes to learn how to format text in Markdown.
Once you've found your voice, cherish it. Nurture it like the precious treasure it is.
Seth Godin blogs about making the most of a second chance with customers:
If a customer service call goes wrong, or if a new employee is stumbling, this is the moment to escalate and get the second impression just right. It shows that we can recover, that we’re listening, and that the relationship is worth something to us.
As soon as I finished reading its prequel, I started reading Becky Chambers’ A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (and then, for various work/life reasons, only got around to publishing my micro-review just now).
The book carries on directly from where A Psalm for the Wild-Built left off, to such a degree that at first I wondered whether the pair might have been better published as a single volume. But in hindsight, I appreciate the separation: there’s a thematic shift between the two that benefits from a little (literal) bookending.
Both Wild-Built and Crown-Shy look at the idea of individual purpose and identity, primarily through the vehicle of relatable protagonist Sibling Dex as they very-openly seek their place in the world, and to a lesser extent through the curiosity and inquisitiveness of the robot Mosscap.
But the biggest difference in my mind between the ways in which the two do so is the source of the locus of evaluation: the vast majority of Wild-Built is experienced only by Dex and Mosscap, alone together in the wilderness at the frontier between their disparate worlds. It maintains an internal locus of evaluation, with Dex asking questions of themselves about why they feel unfulfilled and Mosscap acting as a questioning foil and supportive friend. Crown-Shy, by contrast, pivots to a perceived external locus of evaluation: Dex and Mosscap return from the wilderness to civilisation, and both need to adapt to the experience of celebrity, questioning, and – in Mosscap’s case – a world completely-unfamiliar to it.
By looking more-carefully at Dex’s society, the book helps to remind us about the diverse nature of humankind. For example: we’re shown that even in a utopia, individual people will disagree on issues and have different philosophical outlooks… but the underlying message is that we can still be respectful and kind to one another, despite our disagreement. In the fourth chapter, the duo visit a coastland settlement whose residents choose to live a life, for the most part, without the convenience of electricity. By way of deference to their traditions, Dex (with their electric bike) and Mosscap (being an electronic entity) wait outside the village until invited in by one of the residents, and the trio enjoy a considerate discussion about the different value systems of people around the continent while casting fishing lines off a jetty. There’s no blame; no coercion; and while it’s implied that other residents of the village are staying well clear of the visitors, nothing more than this exclusion and being-separate is apparent. There’s sort-of a mutual assumption that people will agree-to-disagree and get along within the scope of their shared vision.
Which leads to the nub of the matter: while it appears that we’re seeing how Dex is viewed by others – by those they disagree with, by those who hold them with some kind of celebrity status, by their family with whom they – like many folks do – share a loving but not uncomplicated relationship – we’re actually still experiencing this internally. The questions on Dex’s mind remain “who am I?”, “what is my purpose?”, and “what do I want?”… questions only they can answer… but now they’re considering them from the context of their relationship with everybody else in their world, instead of their relationship with themself.
Everything I just wrote reads as very-pretentious, for which I apologise. The book’s much better-written than my review! Let me share a favourite passage, from a part of the book where Dex is introducing Mosscap to ‘pebs’, a sort-of currency used by their people, by way of explanation as to why people whom Mosscap had helped had given it pieces of paper with numbers written on (Mosscap not yet owning a computer capable of tracking their balance). I particularly love Mosscap’s excitement at the possibility that it might own things, an experience it previous had no need for:
…
Mosscap smoothed the crease in the paper, as though it were touching something rare and precious. “I know I’m going to get a computer, but can I keep this as well?”
“Yeah,” Dex said with a smile. “Of course you can.”
“A map, a note, and a pocket computer,” Mosscap said reverently. “That’s three belongings.” It laughed. “I’ll need my own wagon, at this rate.”
“Okay, please don’t get that much stuff,” Dex said. “But we can get you a satchel or something, if you want, so you don’t have things rattling around inside you.”
Mosscap stopped laughing, and looked at Dex with the utmost seriousness. “Could I really?” it said quietly. “Could I have a satchel?”
…
That’s just a heartwarming and childlike response to being told that you’re allowed to own property of your very own. And that’s the kind of comforting joy that, like its prequel, the entire book exudes.
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is not quite so wondrous as A Psalm for the Wild-Built. How could it be, when we’re no longer quite so-surprised by the enthralling world in which it’s set. But it’s still absolutely magnificent, and I can wholeheartedly recommend the pair.
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A week ago, I toyed with the idea of using Gnus for reading Email in Emacs.
As expected, I hated it at first. But then…
Gnus is a newsreader that can be coerced into pretending it’s an email client. There’s no getting around this masquerade and it feels awkward. On the other hand, it’s a powerful news reader pretending to be an email client.
I don’t manage a ton of email, so experiments with how I deal with it aren’t high risk. Still, my recent email fiasco made me nervous. It also what got me looking into using Gnus.
Most of the time, I read email on my desktop Mac. I’ve been using Notmuch for this. The problem is that the Notmuch database is then tied to that computer. I was eventually able to configure muchsync so that I could read everything on my laptop (MBP) as well. It was working, but felt fragile and the process would often fail for various reasons.
The other place I manage email is of course on my phone. Notmuch isn’t an option there, so I use Apple Mail. As I wrote in I think I have to go back to Mu4e, Notmuch wasn’t fitting my workflow as well as I’d have liked. As I was looking at returning to Mu4e, I figured I’d play with Gnus.
Gnus solves the sync problem because it feeds directly off the IMAP server (Fastmail, in my case). Using Gnus, not only do I not worry about syncing between Macs, I don’t even need to sync to my desktop Mac, at all1.
Long story short, I’ve stuck with Gnus for the past week and I’m kind of digging it. Once one gets past the weird terminology (Groups, Articles, Dormant, Ticked, etc.) it’s actually very powerful.
I cobbled together my configuration from a half-dozen Stack Exchange answers and blog posts2, with some tweaks from me. It ain’t pretty, but it’s working. I’m not even sure what some of it is doing, but here’s most of it:
(use-packagegnus:bind (("C-c o g".gnus)
(:mapgnus-group-mode-map;; I like seeing all mailboxes, not just those with unread messages ("o".my/gnus-group-list-subscribed-groups))
(:mapgnus-summary-mode-map;; Move message to "Archive" folder ("C-c a".my/gnus-summary-archive)))
:custom;; Archive outgoing email in Sent Items folder, mark it as read;; UPDATE: Do I need this? Fastmail saves Sent items automatically;; (gnus-message-archive-method '(nnimap "personal"));; (gnus-message-archive-group "Sent Items") (gnus-message-archive-group (format-time-string"sent.%Y")) ;; keep local copy (gnus-gcc-mark-as-readt)
(gnus-search-use-parsed-queriest) ;; standardize searches (gnus-auto-select-nextnil)
(gnus-paging-select-nextnil)
(gnus-summary-stop-at-end-of-messaget)
(gnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixedt)
(gnus-auto-select-firstnil)
(gnus-summary-display-arrownil)
(gnus-thread-sort-functions'(gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-date (notgnus-thread-sort-by-number)))
(gnus-show-threadst)
(gnus-sum-thread-tree-false-rootnil) ;; use subject (gnus-sum-thread-tree-rootnil)
(gnus-sum-thread-tree-indent" ")
(gnus-sum-thread-tree-vertical"│")
(gnus-sum-thread-tree-leaf-with-other"├─► ") ;; fancy (gnus-sum-thread-tree-single-leaf"╰─► ")
;; |2025-03-06 (Thu)| Sender Name | Subject | (gnus-summary-line-format (concat"%0{%U%R%z%}""%3{│%}%1{%&user-date;%}%3{│%}";; date"%ub:";; indicate (+) if known (bbdb)"%4{%-20,20f%}";; name" ""%3{│%}"" ""%1{%B%}""%s\n"))
(gnus-user-date-format-alist'((t."%Y-%m-%d (%a)")
gnus-thread-sort-functions'(gnus-thread-sort-by-date)))
:config (setqgnus-select-method'(nnnil""))
(setqgnus-secondary-select-methods'((nnimap"personal" (nnimap-address"imap.fastmail.com")
(nnimap-server-port993)
(nnimap-streamssl)
(nnmail-expiry-target"nnimap+personal:Trash")))))
;; Send email via Fastmail's SMTP:(use-packagesmtpmail:custom (send-mail-function'smtpmail-send-it)
(smtpmail-default-smtp-server"smtp.fastmail.com")
(smtpmail-stream-type'ssl)
(smtpmail-smtp-service465))
I’ve configured BBDB (Insidious Big Brother Database) for contact management.
(use-packagebbdb:ensuret:config;; initialization for both Gnus and Notmuch (bbdb-initialize'gnus'message'notmuch)
(bbdb-mua-auto-update-init'gnus'message'notmuch)
;; When invoking bbdb interactively (setqbbdb-mua-update-interactive-p'(query.create))
;; Check every address in a message and not only the first (setqbbdb-message-all-addressest)
;; use ; on a message to invoke bbdb (add-hook'gnus-summary-mode-hook (lambda ()
(define-keygnus-summary-mode-map (kbd";") 'bbdb-mua-edit-field)))
(add-hook'gnus-startup-hook'bbdb-insinuate-gnus)
(add-hook'gnus-startup-hook'bbdb-insinuate-notmuch)
(setqbbdb-complete-name-allow-cyclingt))
Using BBDB is neat because when I’m viewing a message, a small window pops up at the bottom with that person’s info. One nice feature is that, in the list of messages (Summary view), a “+” symbol is displayed before the name of people who are already in BBDB. (This is via %ub in the format string). Plus, Notmuch and Gnus can share the contact database. BBDB was initially developed by Jamie Zawinski.
In 1991, I wrote this program, “The Insidious Big Brother Database”, which was an address-book and note-taking system that was tightly integrated with the Emacs mail and news readers. It was pretty popular until 1997 or so when even the last hold-outs stopped reading their mail in Emacs.
Well, not everyone stopped :).
I’m still very clumsy using Gnus, but it’s been a blast to learn and play with. Part of the attraction is that it’s built into Emacs and needs nothing else to work. It’s nice not having to deal with sync or external dependencies. I admit that I also like that it’s really really old and feels almost rebellious to use.
That said, I am still syncing and keeping the Notmuch database up to date, because I like having a local copy of all my email. Also, who knows how long I’ll be using Gnus? ↩︎
As soon as I finished reading its prequel, I started reading Becky Chambers’ A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (and then, for various work/life reasons, only got around to publishing my micro-review just now). 
