New Car

Today we purchased a new car! Thank you (Here I assume you are congratulating me 😄) It is a great feeling. Some quick thoughts (in random order) The process took about 2 hours, even though we were waiting just 10 minutes for our turn. Tomorrow onward there will be a lot of rush due to Diwali Kids got bored towards the end, when the executive was giving me the demo/explaning the features.

M-x butterfly

It started with a post on Emacs Stories Telegram group. Someone posted a pretty picture with Emacs-logo-on-a-butterfly and a comment M-x butterfly But the actual command M-x butterfly is boring (to me at least) I wanted the nice image. Some nice soul on the group directed me to this page First I changed the icon of my doom emacs to this image. I followed these instructions. No immediate success. Because, I have Emacs installed from brew, so one in /Applications folder is a symlink to the actual file in /opt/.

Domain Expired : Moved to Netlify DNS

Last night when I wanted to check this site, but I started getting security error related to certificate. But it did not say domain expired. I know Netlify automatically renews the cerificates, so I was confused. But I was too sleepy to troubleshoot. This morning, for some reason I checked my other email account which I almost never use except for domain registrar 😄 The Domain has expired email was smiling at me.

→ Bruno: Local-first Postman Alternative ∞

I think I came across this tool via Hacker News 🤔. But may be not. Anyway, it does not matter.

Why it appealed to me ?

At work, we have a shared Postman workspace, which often breaks.

Because anyone and everyone can modify it (which is some times needed) But then people click the Save button, because it is easy to 😄

and now, it is broken for others.

OK, there is a concept of fork in Postman, but then everyone has their own fork.

It is same as git fork. One has to keep the fork up to date.

Here comes bruno.

First thing I liked about it is that we can import from Postman. So that one does not need to create entire collection from scratch.

Once imported, it becomes a script/text, which can be version controlled

Next thing is secrets.

I have not yet figured out where and how they are stored. But secrets is one of the reasons, I was attracted to bruno

With local first, developers are free to use their own passwords on their machines.

I was able to get APIs working from Postman to bruno without much friction.

I did have to create environments from scratch. Not sure why they were not exported by Postman Maybe because they contain secrets ? 🤔

But once I added all the variables to Local environment, I can just copy-and-modify to create other environments.

At work we have a LOT of environments (At least 10. Yeah, I know)

I’ll be exploring bruno’s capacities in coming days. Like Bruno CLI, tests etc.

Uninstalled Instagram

Few hours ago, I uninstalled Instagram from my phone.1 Ironically, earlier today I watched a reel on Instagram saying “Instagram is like Chakravyuh, and we are like Abhimanyu. We can go inside, but not come out”.2 I think that made to take this action. I noticed that I had not written much in the entire month of August 2023, and hardly 2 entries in September. While some of it attributes to work pressure, my instagram addiction may be equally responsible.

Emacs Bedrock : First impressions

As mentioned earlier I tried new starter kit called Emacs Bedrock. Getting started was easy with --init-directory option in Emacs 29 I also enabled a few mixins in init.el as recommended. Especially evil mode. The *Quick Help* that shows up at the start is very useful. Especially for someone like myself who is not familiar with native emacs keybindings. Enabling evil mode means I can at least edit the text.

Use different init directory in emacs 29+

Recently when reading about emacs Bedrock I learnt that emacs 29+ has command line option that lets the user pass custom init directory via emacs --init-directory=MYDIR option. 1 This makes it easy to try out different starter kits without touching your stable/working config Currently, I use Minemacs on my personal machine. In past I would rename my .emacs.d to try new config. (Then switch it back) This makes things easier.

Spellcheck in Vi/m

I’ve been using vi for 20+ years and somehow I didn’t know that it has spell check built in 🤷‍♂ Enable it by simply :set spell Now misspelled words are shown in red background 1 (depending on the terminal’s capability this might vary - I assume) Off course, this is nowhere near full fledged LSP like ltex which I use with emacs and helix. ltext does more than spell check.

Markdown vs Orgmode

My thoughts in the context of this thread. I did try org for some time (initially when I switched to Emacs) as mentioned here But eventually I realized that markdown is more pervasive. I am aware that Org is supported outside of Emacs as well. But compared to markdown, that is nothing. But that is not necessarily the point. e.g. When I do code review, most of the git service providers support markdown.

Respect and Authority

Why do we “listen” to somebody ? Here I do not mean hearing when I say listen I mean obey or follow. I think it comes from either respect or authority. Authority maybe given by someone else e.g. Teacher in school, boss at work, parents at home. Lot of times, most people do what these people tell you to do, because of the authority inferred on them. Because you are “supposed to” do what they say.