During the last week this blog had been rather silent, for the obvious reasons. I had, and still have, a hard time keeping politics out of this blog. I started this post a few times, and routinely ended up in a lengthy rant.

I lack the political background to make a profound statement about the situation, but all I can say is that I have been shocked and in a constant state of anger and outrage at the racism in the states. Plain horrible!

But now to something completely different before I manage to work myself up again…

My switch to Linux had been successful and have a blast using Ubuntu. I haven’t been using Linux for about 15 years or such and it’s fun using it again. So far, the best IT decision that I have done this year and I enjoy that I can learn new things.

Which brings me to…

Emacs

One of my ideas of switching to Linux (even though that has nothing to do with Linux in general, it’s more of a fresh start) was to also finalize a process that started many years ago and use as much plain-text files as possible and stick to Markdown and, what I have been looking at for a while, that is new to me: ORG-Mode.

Since the latter requires Emacs, I’m even closer to my idea of a minimal setup and can use only one app for all things related to task-management, writing and some of the other things one can use Emacs for (I understand that is everything but preparing coffee).

It’s a plan and a huge rabbit hole. Then again, I’m on summer-vacation.

Therefore, during the last week(s) I spent quite an amount of time with the built-in manual, watched tutorials, got used to (and forgot half of them again) the shortcuts and tried to get a grasp at how the app works and most importantly used it for as much as possible. I set up a bunch of .ORG files, capture-templates and checked out what I can do with the Agenda views and what not.

I barely have scratched the surface, but at least I have come so far that I can use it for the things that I need at the moment. Yet, I’m still tinkering.

I’m long time fan of avoiding the mouse as much as possible and the wealth of keyboard-shortcuts certainly comes to an advantage to me. Okay, when it comes to Emacs, this is still a huge overstatement. I routinely accidentally minimize the app or have to look up how to copy/paste, but I’m learning. Which is fun. Did I mention already that I’m on vacation?

From what I gather so far, ORG-Mode is nothing but amazing for task-management, then again my Bullet Journal had been very successful filling that need during the last year. Oh my…

I have Markdown-Mode and ORG-Journal set up, will have to have a look at Deft and look in awe at what one can do with ORG-ROAM (I blame Jack for that). There is a lot to explore, to tinker and to make the editor my own.

Blog

My Blot.im subscription had been renewed and I’m going into my third year (with breaks) running the blog here and am still happy with the service.

On the blog side there are a few things that I would like to add, but neither are crucial. For example I would like to add a feed-template for tags, and add a /USING and /FEED page. Also, I would like to give the site a minor face-lift, maybe.

My best guess (read: hope) is that by the time I have the next Weeknotes out, at least the pages are in place.

Things Watched

Well, I’m bad with watching things. The only thing that I have watched that comes to mind right now were a bunch of EMACS related tutorials and the Bugle’s live-stream a few weeks ago. Also during the day I watched John Oliver’s latest and brilliant episode in “Last Week Today” which I think was a very important one.

Read

I’m currently on a Cory Doctorow binge and recently (I already wrote about that) and am reading “Walkaway” at the moment, and have a few more books in the pipeline, but that might be another post.

So, let’s see what happens until the next Weeknotes is out.