Welcome to my little corner of the Web.
Here you’ll find a potpourri of ideas, explorations, ruminations, and explanations of the things that capture my interest. I make no promises as to the veracity of my words, only that they are what I believe at the moment I wrote them.
I don’t remember now, what prompted me to think about this topic. It’s one that I actually jotted down some time ago in response, probably, to a news article or some other reading I had done at the time. But the question that I wanted to explore a little bit (this may be more a micro blog post rather than long-form) is in the title.
Emacs, if you’re unfamiliar, is a text editor that has been around since the 1970s. It was originally designed for editing macros in early computer systems. The most popular version, and the one that dominates the space today is GNU Emacs which was developed by Richard Stallman somewhere around 1976. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of its history but knowing that it has been around for nearly 50 years and remains a very popular editor, particularly among developers and others, like me, who are interested in exploring different technologies and appreciate the extensibility and utility of the program gives you a sense of why you might want to consider it.
For most of my life I’ve lived in more suburban areas. And, since this is what I’ve known and am comfortable with, this is often my “go-to” when looking for a home.
In fact, my tendency has always been to lean rural. I once went looking for a home that I could “sit on my front porch buck naked and nobody would know or care.” I wanted that privacy. I wanted that distance from others. I am not a terribly social person so being out in the sticks where I don’t have to deal with neighbors has always had an appeal to me.
So, one of the challenges I encountered with OpenBSD is that the touchpad does a really bad job of rejecting motion from my palm. While writing in Emacs I’d often find my mouse jumping around and my writing not where I expected it to be.
After some digging around I found a solution:
Create a file in ~/home/bin/ called “toggle-touchpad.sh”
Probably a couple of years ago, while doing some researching on learning, I ran across numerous articles and blog posts that touted the notion of learning in public. In general, these were associated with Personal Knowledge Management software such as Notion, Roam, or Obsidian (and a whole bunch of others!). This topic piqued my interest then and I played with it a bit. More recently, the topic was brought back to my attention so I wanted to explore it a bit more.