I came across D2 on Mastodon I think. (Like most things. But I can’t find the original toot 🤷‍♂)

I used mermaid.js earlier. In fact, I also added mermaid support for this theme.

Benefit of Mermaid is that since it is generated by mermaid.js, I don’t need to save and include the image in my blog (and worry about mismatched filename and/or path, resulting into broken image.)

On the other hand, not many hugo themes support mermaid, but link to an image is supported by hugo and every other SSG.

Yesterday, after I came out of a shop, some elderly woman was begging. Near that shop, it is not uncommon.

She did not look like a beggar. Yet she was.

At first, I gave her Rs. 50 - which maybe more than what people usually give beggars (I think).

I was surprised that she said I don’t want money, I want rice and daal (lentils) instead. I was positively surprised. Not many beggars ask for things. I told her to buy grocery herself. There is a grocery store next door.

I wrote about Espanso long time ago. I have been using Espanso since then.

Recently, I had a need to add timestamp in a note. Espanso already comes with a trigger to insert date via :date. As the name suggest, it just inserts the date.

So I added the following to the match/base.yml file.

  - trigger: ":timestamp"
    replace: "{{timestamp}}"
    vars:
      - name: timestamp
        type: date
        params:
          format: "%b %d, %Y %I:%M%p"

As might be obvious, now I get timestamp just by typing :timestamp anywhere.

I came across stashpad during this Stackoverflow podcast.

What caught my attention was when Cara mentioned

Everyone has untitled.txt open that they use every day

That is me!! 😆

It is really easy. Cmd + N to create a new empty file, and start typing. I use BBEdit for this. I’ve seen my colleagues use Sublime text I have also used Sublime text for exactly that and only that purpose for a long time, since it saves these unnamed files across reboots/application restarts. One less headache. I don’t have to think of what to name the file, where to save it, format (this is easy, I’ll just save it as .txt or .md)

Later I came across BBEdit, which does exactly same, so I switched. My workflow did not change.

Stashpad promises to make the same workflow better.

I have just installed it, and haven’t used it yet.

Ironically, I started typing my thoughts about Stashpad as a Stashpad note, with intention that I’ll copy this into a blog post “later”. But decided that why not directly write it as a blog ? 😆

After creating an account on Mastodon, next question was how to find people to follow ? 🤔

While mastodon has existed for a while, only recently it started getting attention. So lot of people you follow are not on Mastodon. Yet.

I followed a couple of approaches.

First, I searched for topics I am interested in. I started with Emacs and Ruby. Found a few accounts to follow.

Then I literally searched find tweeple of mastodon. It turns out a lot of sites like Wired, PCMag, HowToGeek are writing about it. Most of these articles are from less than a month old 😄

After Elon Musk’s takeover, there has been a lot of discussion about leaving twitter.

TBH, I am not that active on twitter, and I am not sure if charging for blue tick affects me 😄

Yet, I have been burnt in past by having my data lost, because it was on someone else’s platform.

I do not consider my tweets that valuable, yet it seems I should have a back up, just in case.

I have been using Emacs for about 4+ years now, and I still find new things.

One of the thing I discovered this week is ability to create mindmaps without leaving the comfort of Emacs 😄 This is made possible via PlantUML.

Doom emacs makes it very easy to set it up.

1. Enable plantuml in the init.el of your doom emacs config.
2. M-x doom/reload (This will install the appropriate packages)
3. M-x plantuml-download-jar (Make sure you have working java installation)
4. doom/open-scratch-buffer
5. org-mode (Not sure if this is needed, but better be explicit)

Now create following in your scratch buffer that is already in plantuml mode.