Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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— Kunal
After flying very regularly I wanted to improve my typing setup beyond my regular desk: I'd originally bought the Glove80 (and that has been my favorite keyboard ever), but with the case it's fairly painful to travel with.
I finally caved and bought myself the new Go60 -- and spent a large part of today configuring it correctly (I'm mostly there; I still need to customize the keypad layer to handle symbols correctly). So far, I'm liking the keyboard and it feels comfortable, though there's a slightly higher learning curve than the glove80 because of the fewer keys. My current speed seems to be hovering around 80wpm based on typ.ing -- something I hope improves soon as I build more muscle memory with the layout and key spacing.
execsAn underrated utility is to be able to quickly see all the program execs happening: I've written some bpftrace scripts, and more recently also tried to use mac os's eslogger: it logs the path, pid and args (among other values).
This is really invaluable in tracking what's going on when you run a command, and can be surprisingly enlightening when you see just how many subprocesses are launched by any given process -- you can see how your regular scripts and commands interact with the system, debug authentication commands running under the hood, and generally deal with bad error propagation.
I finally finished reading a book on Montaigne after reading repeated reviews by Ryan Holiday, by Stefan Zweig. I later realized that the more popular series on Montaigne is a different book: How to Live, which I apparently purchased a decade ago and forgot I owned; I'm going to pick that one up next.
It's always a delight when I go back to a book I'd picked up in the past: it gives me hope I'll actually work my way through the most interesting books in my personal library.
Initially I was pretty unsure about why Montaigne is so well known; but learning of him as the person to first establish essays -- and his influence on so many writers makes sense. A few of the quotes that stood out from this particular edition:
The true essence of feedom is that it can never restrict the freedom of another.
Custom clouds the true face of things.
Thirst for glory is the most futile of all, the most valueless and bogus currency known to man.
He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.
Focus on yourself, save in yourself what can be saved. Build as others destroy, strive to remain sane in the deluge of madness. Close yourself off. Construct your own world.
The last one is one I'm not too sure of just yet: saving yourself is the baseline, but hopefully we can do more.
I'm nearing the age when Montaigne locked himself away from the world; I can't say that locking myself in a tower with a wifi connection isn't particularly unappealing. Realizing that Montaigne's quotes and books resonate -- albeit through translation through another author -- 500 years after they were written leaves me with a sense of awe.
As a short snack while my flight was taking off, Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky was fairly satisfying: both science fiction, fantasy, and a gentle twisting of tropes. I'm looking forward to the sequel.
Finally, I've been struggling with figuring out how to pace myself in my work: I picked up Cal Newport's Slow Productivity -- another book I'd bought a really long time ago -- to rethink how I tackle work. So far it's fairly familiar; I think my current position on pacing is to pace myself based on my current personal, physical and mental limits -- and to expand them as I go instead of relying on external forcing functions or stimuli.