@mandarvaze’s microblog - Posts

Duck Duck Go Browser

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:39:38 +0530

Every now and then, I use private (or temporary) chat mode when asking something to AI.

Not because I am asking something sensitive ¹ but because it is a one-off query, and I do not want to pollute my chat history.

It may sound stupid, but …

Sometimes - most times - the default search engine DDG uses its AI to find the answer rather than just searching.

It is helpful.

Most times, I look at the answer, and done.

Yesterday, I noticed there is an edit box to ask follow up question.

When asked, it takes the user to chat interface from the search engine interface.

That is when I realized that all such chats are private.

No need for the extra step to start a private chat.

One thing led to another, and now I have native macOS app for the Duck Duck Go browser.

I had used it in past (years ago?) but it got dropped to the sideways.

So another try now.

It looks better after a big gap.

I’m too paranoid to ask something sensitive to AI 🤷‍♂️- at least for now 😄 ↩︎

Theme Update: Added Tags Listing

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:28:44 +0530

When adding a new post, I was looking for appropriate tag for the post.

I wasn’t sure whether I have already used relevant tag earlier, so I checked /tags assuming that I’ll see the tags there, but there was no listing.

I thought I broke it when I did a major update recently. But that was not the case.

So I checked the original theme from which I forked mine.

Even their site does not have tags. (Their site uses categories not tags, but even categories listing doesn’t work)

So (with the help of my coding assistant) I got it working. 🎉

Additionally, I also fixed how code listing looked.

Earlier, inline code blocks looked nice, but ones with three-back-ticks looked horrible (Yes, only word I can think of)

Now, it looks better.

Also, strong and h3 used grayish color, which was difficult to read (at least in the dark mode)

Fixed that as well.

Sketch: Bungalow

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:55:54 +0530

Inspired by this sketch

Compared to the original, two humans and a dog are missing from my copy 😄

It has been exactly a month since I posted my last sketch.

I had been meaning to draw something smaller in between, but never got around to doing it.

The original drawing (link above) says this was built in late 19th century. But in reminds me of some old bungalow (not seen in person, just imagined) in Lonavala - a (former?) hill station between Pune and Mumbai.

I would really love to stay in such a quaint bungalow.

Device: Lenovo Idea Tab

Software: HiPaint

Theme Update

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:13:53 +0530

The last update to the theme was in Dec 2024, as per the git log

The website looked like this ¹

Then recently, I came across blowfish theme. XeroLinux used it ² (but currently it uses Astro+Tailwind 🤷‍♂️)

So I tried to locally see how my site would look with this theme.

I liked it a lot.

But …

The documentation site is s…l…o…w ³

So slow, that the entire machine comes to stand still if the browser is on the docs page.

To be fair, the sites using blowfish aren’t slow.

I wasn’t going to use background on my site, so locally it was OK.

But one has to refer to the docs when changing theme, and reading docs was punishment (due to entire machine grinding to halt)

That is when an idea struck me.

Why not make existing site look more less blowfish?

It was not going to be easy

But it was.

Enter AI assisted coding.

I asked opencode to port blowfish look to my site.

Voila!

It did take couple of hours for 2-3 days each to get it the way I wanted, and bugfree, but I think I finally got it.

You can read about it in the post linked above, if you are curious.

Is the link is dead, you can use wayback machine and search for this site ↩︎
See this older version of the site via Wayback machine ↩︎
See this discussion ↩︎

Opencode: Second Impression

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:13:31 +0530

Last time I wrote about my first experience using opencode, I was using (and learning) opencode CLI

This time, I switched to Zed editor.

Zed is so amazing that it can work with “Agents” installed on your machine (or it can install them for you) via ACP - Agent Control Protocol

It recognized that opencode was already installed on the machine, and show it in the drop down.

I decided to take it for spin.

So I used Zed’s AI pane, which has opencode embedded in it ❓🤔

So I was indeed talking to opencode, but only in right pane of Zed. ¹

It means I could have been using opencode CLI and I would have got the same result (without other Zed panes like file editor, git integration etc.)

OK, that is all fine, but how did opencode perform? You ask.

Excellent!

I used the recommended OpenCode Zen/Big Pickel model.

I gave it the task to port blowfish to my existing hugo theme.

I did couple of things right 😄

I opened parent folder containing my blog, my theme repo and folder where I was trying blowfish locally.

So it had access to both blowfish code, as well as my theme’s code.

Possibly due to idiosyncrasies of my theme, it took some iterations to get to 80%

Remaining 20% took another 80% time (Such is the 80-20 principle 😂)

It made some big blunders in the first go (where the task was high level - port blowfish to my theme)

So I asked it to fix the issues one by one.

And it worked!

At one point though, it committed the go.mod containing the replace directive, which is used for locally testing the theme. ²

I had to manually fix the file and commit the change

I also reviewed the git diffs (when it was only make code changes - no git commits) and asked questions where needed.

It caught some issues (and fixed them) while answering my query.

The last/final part that impressed me was that one change worked locally, but was breaking when deployed to Netlify.

We both (me and opencode) struggled a lot.

Finally it suggested that Netlify has older hugo version installed.

I was skeptical at first, but having no other option, I decided to try it.

and it worked!

I may not have guessed it.

But opencode did.

🙏

I admit, I was harsh during my first interaction with opencode, but it has grown on me.

So current impression about opencode ?

It is awesome!

✌️

I later confirmed from opencode CLI that all my interaction from Zed (opencode calls it session) were available there. ↩︎
Need to figure out whether it has list of safe/approved commands. I never use agent to push to git. Never ever. ↩︎

How to enforce `uv` to use specific version?

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:47:28 +0530

Few days ago, in AIML cohort that I teach, one of the student faced a problem where some python package refused to install because it required python 3.10 or higher.

So I asked the student to install the latest python using

uv python install 3.14

But we kept getting the same error.

Turns out, uv uses system python by default. (Which was 3.8)

Here are the steps that ensure uv uses specific version for your project.

uv python pin 3.14

The command uv python pin is used to set a specific Python version for your project by creating a .python-version file. This helps ensure that the project consistently uses the specified Python version across different environments.

Now check which version is being used via this command:

uv run python --version

In our case, it would return 3.8 because the .venv was already created with System python. So we had to rm -rf .venv first.

Then uv python pin 3.14 itself is enough for uv to install pinned python version, if not then uv python install 3.14

Finally, if you want to create .venv with specific python version you can always remove existing .venv followed by uv venv --python 3.14 (But usually it is not required. uv automatically creates .venv if .python-version exists.)

Opencode: First Impressions

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:46:40 +0530

Everyone is praising opencode - It is like Claude Code, or Codex (or Gemini CLI) except it is not tied to a corporation. It works with models from all of them, and other models, not from these corporations.

I had installed opencode long time ago, but never used it.

Today, I decided to give it a go.

As I was exploring, I came across /editor command. ¹ I had expected /editor command to open a file in an editor

But the command does not take argument/filename. So how would it know which file(s) to open? 🤔

So I asked opencode itself. But it hallucinated. Says, “Select the file from the sidebar”

Except there is none.

OK, there is a sidebar, but it does not list any files. It lists stats about the project.

It told me how to toggle the sidebar. (Not its fault. I told it ‘There is no sidebar’)

Finally I decided to solve this the old fashioned way.

RTFM

The documentation says:

Open external editor for composing messages.

Then I shared this “knowledge” with opencode.

Essentially, I taught opencode about its own features/commands

🤦

I wanted to share my conversations with opencode here, with a link. Luckily, there is a /share command.

The /share feature is great (but Amp already has this built-in and works better) But the UI can be better.

During the conversation with any agent, there are several back and forth.

This is not obvious when viewing the same on the shared link (at least to me, at first) that there are several dialogue in this conversation.

Only the first one is shown.

I thought it shared only part of the conversation. (bug/feature 🤷‍♂️)

Turns out there is a hamburger menu like thing on the left, when clicked with precision opens subsequent dialogues. Clicking on the appropriate one is not easy.

I would have preferred that each dialog had separate anchor within the page that can be linked to, separately.

I’m not giving up on opencode yet.

The first impression isn’t great.

By the way, My favorite coding assistant, Amp has stopped supporting VS Code extension, and is asking the users to use AMP CLI instead.

Maybe that is the one I’ll use.

Or that and opencode

🤷‍♂️

Update: I asked opencode to commit this file, and to add suitable commit message. It did surprisingly good job, following the style of my existing messages. I’m impressed!

There is hope after all 😄

In past when used AI to generate commit message, it generated very verbose messages. Sometimes that may be a good thing, but not always.

I started this blog post with title “/editor command in Opencode is misleading” But as I used it (a little) more, I was disappointed. (and changed the title) ↩︎

Taming Zellij Keybindings on macOS: A Journey Through Conflicts and Dead Ends

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you use Zellij as your terminal multiplexer on macOS, you’ve probably hit the same wall I did: the default keybindings are built around Ctrl, but on macOS inside a modern terminal like Ghostty, Ctrl is a warzone. This post documents the full journey of finding a setup that actually works — including all the wrong turns.

The Problem with `Ctrl` on macOS

Zellij’s defaults use Ctrl as the modifier for every mode-entry key: Ctrl+T for tabs, Ctrl+P for panes, Ctrl+O for sessions, and so on. On macOS, this causes immediate conflicts:

Ghostty binds Ctrl+T to open a new tab
Amp CLI and opencode CLI use several Ctrl+ combos internally
Many other terminal tools treat Ctrl as their own domain

The obvious fix is to switch to a different modifier. But finding one that’s actually clean turns out to be harder than it sounds.

Attempt 1: `Cmd` as Leader

The first instinct on macOS is to reach for Cmd. It feels native, it’s easy to reach, and it’s what macOS apps use for everything important — which is exactly the problem. Cmd+Q quits apps, Cmd+T opens tabs in Ghostty, Cmd+W closes windows. There’s essentially no safe Cmd+letter space left for a terminal multiplexer. This idea was dropped immediately.

Attempt 2: `Alt` (Option) as Leader

Alt seemed more promising. It’s less used by macOS system shortcuts, and Ghostty doesn’t claim many Alt+ combos by default. The plan was to use left Option as Alt for Zellij, and keep right Option for typing special characters like © and þ.

Ghostty supports this cleanly with one config line:

# ~/.config/ghostty/config
macos-option-as-alt = left

Note: the setting is macos-option-as-alt, not option-as-alt — the macos- prefix is required and its absence produces an “unknown field” error on config reload.

This worked at the Ghostty level, but a new problem surfaced immediately: Alt+P was triggering random behaviour at the zsh prompt. The culprit wasn’t Ghostty — it was readline. zsh’s readline layer binds Alt+P to backwards history search, so it was intercepting the keypress before Zellij ever saw it. The same issue exists for Alt+N, Alt+F, Alt+B, and several other letters that readline claims as editing shortcuts.

Worse, Zellij itself uses Alt+P as a default binding (cycle pane focus), so the conflict was happening at two levels simultaneously.

Attempt 3: Trying to Work Around `Alt` Conflicts

The next idea was to keep Alt but surgically remove the conflicting readline bindings in zsh:

bindkey -r '\ep'   # remove Alt+P in zsh

This works for specific keys, but the list of Alt+letter bindings claimed by readline is long. After auditing all of Zellij’s default Alt+ bindings against readline’s defaults, it became clear that almost every useful letter was already spoken for by either readline or Zellij’s own built-in shortcuts. A clean Alt-based setup would require unbinding half of zsh’s editing shortcuts — not a great trade.

The F-Key Idea

At this point, function keys came up as an alternative. F-keys aren’t used by most CLI tools, aren’t grabbed by zsh readline, and Ghostty passes them through cleanly. The concern was macOS system-level conflicts.

A quick test confirmed that pressing Fn+F9 inside Ghostty and running cat -v prints ^[[20~ — meaning Ghostty is forwarding the keycode to the terminal application. Zellij can bind to it using the simple string "F9" in config.

The ergonomic concern was real: on a MacBook with a Touch Bar, there are no physical F-keys. Every function key press requires Fn+F9, Fn+F10, etc. — a two-key combination every time. For a key used constantly as a leader, this would be miserable. But the conclusion here was pragmatic: the modes in question (tab, pane, session) aren’t used that frequently. Pressing Fn+F9 a handful of times per session is acceptable.

The `F11` Casualty

The initial F-key plan assigned:

F9 → Tab mode
F10 → Pane mode
F11 → Session mode

This lasted about five minutes before F11 turned out to be macOS’s Show Desktop shortcut (Mission Control). Even inside Ghostty, Fn+F11 was triggering the desktop animation. F11 was swapped out for F12, which produced no macOS-level conflict in practice.

The `clear-defaults=true` Lesson

An earlier config iteration without clear-defaults=true produced bizarre behaviour — typing the letter t in the shell would silently vanish, p would do nothing, and several other letters were being eaten. The root cause: Zellij’s bind "F9" "t" syntax does not mean “F9 then t” as a sequence. It means F9 or t — both keys independently trigger the same action. So every time the letter t was typed in normal mode, Zellij was intercepting it as a mode-entry key.

Adding clear-defaults=true to the keybinds block wipes all built-in bindings, ensuring nothing bleeds through unexpectedly:

keybinds clear-defaults=true {
    ...
}

The Final Configuration

After all of that, the working setup is:

Ghostty config (~/.config/ghostty/config):

macos-option-as-alt = left

Zellij keybindings (~/.config/zellij/config.kdl):

Key	Action
`Fn+F9`	Enter Tab mode
`Fn+F10`	Enter Pane mode
`Fn+F12`	Enter Session mode
`Esc` / `Enter`	Exit any mode back to normal
`Alt+h/l/j/k`	Move focus between panes (always available)
`Alt+n`	New pane (always available)
`Ctrl+g`	Lock Zellij
`Ctrl+q`	Quit Zellij

Inside each mode, navigation uses plain h/j/k/l keys with no modifier — this is Zellij’s modal design working as intended. You enter a mode once, do what you need, and Esc returns you to normal.

The Alt+ shortcuts for focus movement and new panes are kept from Zellij’s stock defaults. Left Option now sends proper Alt keycodes thanks to the Ghostty config, so these work without any special handling.

Lessons Learned

A few things worth knowing before you start this journey yourself:

There is no perfect modifier on macOS. Every key has claimed territory somewhere — Cmd in system/app shortcuts, Ctrl in readline and CLI tools, Alt in readline’s line-editing bindings. The best you can do is find the modifier whose conflicts matter least for your specific workflow.

Test keycodes before configuring. Running cat -v and pressing your candidate key inside the terminal tells you immediately whether it’s being forwarded or swallowed. This saves a lot of config-reload cycles.

clear-defaults=true is almost always what you want when doing significant keybinding overhauls. Zellij’s default config is additive — without clearing it, you’ll have phantom bindings from the built-in defaults layered under your custom ones.

Zellij’s modal design rewards commitment. The temptation is to make everything a single-key shortcut available at all times, like tmux’s prefix model. But Zellij’s modes are genuinely more efficient once you lean into them — three F-key presses to enter a mode, then free navigation with plain letters, beats modifier-chording every single action.

Oh My Posh

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 22:39:10 +0530

I had heard about Oh my Posh several years ago. It was in the context of Oh my Zsh ¹ Oh My Posh was its Powershell cousin.

Since (AFAIK) Powershell is on Windows, and I haven’t used Windows in so many years, I had no use of it.

Then few days ago, I came across XeroLinux ²

The shell prompt looked very nice. I had assumed it must be starship which was my prompt engine till that point. But looking at XeroLinux’s github, I could not find starship.toml but I found Oh my Posh config instead.

Could my eyes be deceiving me? 😄

So I searched, and it turns out it is (now?) shell agnostic Prompt engine.

The site has install instructions for macOS as well as Linux (and Windows of course 😄) It supports a lot of different shells, including zsh. They also have good documentation about how to integrate it with different shells. I used the one for zsh

Currently, I’m using XeroLinux’s config almost as-is. That is what I wanted anyway 😄

I wish I could post screenshots of my terminal, but it does not need to be my terminal. Since I use the same config as XeroLinux, and since Oh-my-Posh is OS and shell agnostic, why not check XeroLinux screenshot directly ? Check the beautiful prompt near the bottom of the terminal window. 👆

Oh-My-Zsh is starter kit for Zsh. Check the site if you are curious ↩︎
It is a beautiful Arch Linux based distro. At least checkout the gorgeous screenshots. ↩︎

Sketch: Tortoise

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:09:03 +0530

I had saved a pencil drawing of a tortoise from the internet. Unfortunately I can not find the link to the original.

I wanted to try a light pencil layer first and then a final layer, but since I did not play around with brushes too much, it did not turn out the way I wanted.

Looking back, I should have used lighter and broader pencil for the first layer, and then HB, followed by darker (2B ?) at the end.

But all 3 of my layers were HB, same thickness.

I did a pencil drawing after a long time, and enjoyed the process.

Device: Lenovo Idea Tab

Software: HiPaint

Now that I look at the drawing, it looks like one of the hind leg is missing. Let us assume it is exactly behind the other hind leg and thus not visible 🙈

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:27:59 +0530

Using Gen AI in day-to-day life

Today, I wrote an angry email to some support team. While I was writing it, I realized that while I’m pouring my heart out, the tone I used will not help. Yet, I could not have made it better without a lot of effort/multiple iterations.

ChatGPT to the rescue.

I simply pasted my response as-is, and asked it to make it professional sounding.

The reworded letter was much better.

Thanks ChatGPT! 🙏

Sketch: Robot

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:43:09 +0530

This image inspired by a cartoon appeared in the local newspaper. I liked how simple drawing the robot was. (I’m always looking for simple-to-draw sketches)

For the first time, I used color (albeit very tiny, still…) The original sketch had light blue hue for the body of the robot, but I decided not to paint the whole sketch. Just the eyes to draw viewer’s attention was enough.

This time also I used multiple layers. Pencil layer at first, then Ink layer.

At this point, I noticed that image is smaller for the entire canvas. So I enlarged the sketch using the lasso+transform tool. I couldn’t have done this on paper. 🤷‍♂️

Then added name+date

Finally color for the eyes. (It was an after thought 😅)

I exported the pencil layer first and then final sketch. I had changed the size between the two steps. I wanted to enlarge the pencil layer as well. But I got an error that locked layer can’t be exported (or something) The layer was not locked 🤷‍♂️. Need to figure it our some day.

Device: Lenovo Idea Tab

Software: HiPaint

Sketch: Brendan and Al

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:21:54 +0530

These are two main characters of O Human Star Comic

When I looked at this comics, I really liked how simple the character faces were. So decided to see if I can draw them. I am likely to draw more characters from this comic in the future.

These two faces were drawn by looking at this page

This is the first time I used layers in HiPaint.

First layer is the a pencil drawing. I was surprised how “real” it felt. The graininess of the HB Pencil (when zoomed) looked close to actual marks made by HB pencil on the paper. (Drawing on the glass surface wasn’t bad either - kudos to the hardware)

Then I created a separate layer for Inking (I feel like an impostor even using this term 🙈) I hid the pencil layer when exporting the final image.

Device: Lenovo Idea Tab

Software: HiPaint

Sketch: Weight Training

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:47:01 +0530

The doodle comes from Dave Gray’s old video (Not sure of the source - sorry) But doodle itself was not the interesting thing.

Today I discovered that the Whiteboard app has excellent pen tool. I used the Size 10, and I was able to create excellent calligraphy (if I may say so myself 🫣)

Normally I add the date and name in some other app, but I could not resist writing the date in calligraphy fashion. So I did.

The name itself was added later in okso.app 🤷‍♂️

Software : Whiteboard

Visual Alphabet : Session by Dave Gray

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:07:06 +0530

This is my attempt to create a sketchnote of the session he delivered during the World Sketchnote Week. ¹

Looking at other people’s sketchnotes of this session, I realize that I need to do much better. I’ve just reproduced parts of sketches from his session.

Drawing Dave’s face was original idea, rest of it seems unconnected ideas. I should have used banners, containers, lettering etc.

Next time.

I used a different software this time. I have used it earlier.

What I liked about this tool is in a true digital tool sense, I am not constrained by the size of the canvas. It is an infinite canvas. So I can draw as big as I want (Or am comfortable) and then resize and/or move them around.

I was also able to straighten an originally titled drawn text 🙈

Software: OK! so

Yesterday’s post was just part of his session, though he did not cover the acronym. ↩︎

Visual Alphabet

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:49:19 +0530

All the (English) words (sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books …) are made up of only 26 alphabets. (Let us leave aside punctuation marks for now 😉)

Similarly, most the (basic) drawing is made up of these 12 basic shapes, hence the visual alphabets.

This English phrase makes it easy to remember

ALL HOT BREADS

A: Angle

L: Line

L: Loop

H: Home

O: Oval

T: Triangle

B: Blob

R: Rectangle

E: Eye

A: Arc

D: Dot

S: Spiral

No, I did not come up with these shapes or the phrase. I’m not sure who initially listed these 12 shapes.

On the other hand, while I remember this phrase, there are few other phrases that make it easy to remember.

Software : Whiteboard

Using Harper Language Server with Helix Editor

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 13:47:49 +0530

First Install Harper using the method appropriate for your OS.

Then add the following to languages.toml

[language-server.harper-ls]
command = "harper-ls"
args = ["--stdio"]

Restart Helix Editor.

Now you should see squiggly lines under incorrectly spelled words. 🎉

In order to see (and possibly choose) the correct spelling, take the cursor on the error and space a (Code actions)

Solved: unknown terminal xterm-ghostty

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 13:27:55 +0530

Add the following to your (platform specific ¹) config file

shell-integration-features = ssh-env, ssh-terminfo

Now reload the configuration.

The configuration can be reloaded at runtime by pressing ctrl+shift+, (Linux) or cmd+shift+, (macOS).

Update: (13 April 2026)

Here is another solution, maybe generic, does not involve updating Ghostty’s config file

infocmp -x xterm-ghostty | ssh YOUR-SERVER -- tic -x -

This would work for other unknown terminal type errors as well. Just replace xterm-ghostty with other terminal type which is giving unknown terminal type error.

on macOS : $HOME/Library/Application\ Support/com.mitchellh.ghostty/config, and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ghostty/config for Linux if XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not defined, it defaults to $HOME/.config/ghostty/config. ↩︎

Deliberate Practice

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 15:45:25 +0530

The idea comes from the book “The Magic of Thinking BIG”

Dr. Schwartz makes a point that just persistence is not enough.

Each time you try (and not succeed) learn from it, and change something (experimentation) only this will lead to (eventual) success.

I tried to show this visually by having different styles the word Try is drawn in the bottom half (but also wrote experimentation - just to be clear 😄)

Initially I was going to just use the word Failure in red. But it seemed negative, so I wrote it in light color and replaced it with “No Success”

Few things I learnt/noticed:

Whiteboard is just that. Infinite canvas cum whiteboard.

There is no “export”, so I had to take a screenshot. (No big deal, but still ..)

Also, the Text tool is available only in the paid plan.

There is no “paste” either. So I added the date and my name in Preview app after I took the screenshot. 😄

Software : Whiteboard ¹

About the Topic of Deliberate Practice itself.

Deliberate Practice was made popular in the context of 10000 hour rule. ²

10000 hours of same things does not make you an expert.

Unless one is paying attention to what/how they are practicing.

The word Deliberate means knowingly.

It says don’t just practice mindlessly (for 10000 hours)

Add variations (and try and fix mistakes done/detected earlier)

Dr. Schwartz knew it well before (1959) K. Anders Ericsson wrote a paper about it in 1991

I gave the link to the app, because the name is too generic and not good for the SEO 🤷‍♂️ ↩︎
Unfortunately, Gladwell focused more on the quantity rather than quality, in his book Outliers ↩︎

Sketch: SEO out, AEO in

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 13:21:11 +0530

Once upon a time, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) was all rage. How does your product show up in the Search Engine.

But now a days, people have stopped using search engine. Instead they prefer to “get the answer” from one of the LLM/GenAI

The Search Engines also now have “AI summaries”, so may be AEO can double as SEO 🤷‍♂️

Software: tldraw.com

Sketchnote in Day to Day Life

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 12:44:29 +0530

This is not shared to showcase my skills 😄 But to remind myself (maybe others 🤷‍♂️) that sketching/drawing doesn’t have to be a big deal.

When I make a mental list of things to buy (aka shopping list) I usually write it down if it is more than 2 items (else I’m bound to forget something)

Usually, I write it down as a text (doesn’t everyone ? 🤔)

But today, I thought in images. At first, I wasn’t sure whether I could draw quick sketch for the each item, but it was easy.

I still wrote text next to it (Not that anyone else was gonna refer to this list) I suppose next time onward I won’t write text.

I felt good about myself 💪

The last one is in Devnagari script, Marathi language. The English name is “Ice Apple” It is unlikely to be known/available outside India/SouthEast Asia. Curious ? See this Wikipedia Entry

Sketch: Dude and Doc

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:34:38 +0530

I had not planned what to draw today. So I decided to use this time for practice.

Here is the reference

Few things I noticed today.

Having a digital canvas has advantages of being able to zoom in. This came in handy when coloring the hair and t-shirt.

While at normal scale (no zoom) I have to fill a tiny portion so as not to worry. But I lose precision. I am unable color without leaving tiny white/uncolored marks.

Zooming in gives me better control. But then there is more area to color.

I used biggest size to color, but due to this, I colored over the original black borders.

No problem.

After coloring the t-shirt, I switched to the smallest size and drew the borders again where I had earlier “painted”

Fun!

Obviously, other benefit (of digital art) is the ability to select and move stuff around.

Another thing I noticed is that even though I had reference image, the recreation turns out different than the original.

Looking at the original, the first one “seems” like a boy, while mine looks “grown up” (Dude)

Could be because mine has more hair 🤔

Software: tldraw.com

Sketch: Pens and Pencils in a Cup

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 14:32:41 +0530

This is another one from the same YouTube video I referenced earlier for the Church

This time, I wanted to try watercolors in true urban sketching style (Although this isn’t an Urban sketch 😄)

Hence, Tayasui Sketches.

I chose Water Color Paper to start.

Rather than drawing directly as suggested in the video, I did 3 steps.

First, I drew a rough sketch using Pencil tool. On a water color paper, it gave me a grainy texture. Cool! (I chose a little thicker size)

Then I created another layer, and traced on the pencil sketch using Ink tool. (Tribute to “Draw directly with Ink” from the video)

Finally, I added water colors.

I wanted to create a separate layer, but (I think) free version of Tayasui Sketches allows only 2 layers (Fair 🤷‍♂️)

You can see images from all these stages here

Software: Tayasui Sketches

Urban Sketch of a Church

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 12:29:46 +0530

I came back to tldraw for this one.

But first, here is the inspiration for this sketch :

The video shows how to draw directly using the ink. tldraw was kinds closest to that feel.

There is only one tool for drawing. Call it pen, brush whatever. There is no fancy fountain pen, technical pen, certainly no pencil. No layers.

While tldraw honours prssue sensitivity to an extent, that is about it. There are 4 stroke sizes. I used small for most of the drawing. Used Medium for filing up the trees/grass with green color.

During the video, he talks about mistake. I also did some mistakes But here drawing “over” is possible, hiding the mistake.

I wish I could have “precise” eraser. Here it is stroke eraser, which is not one wants. Just reduce that accidentally long line (like in the video) But No!

So this was kind of digitally closest to drawing directly using the Ink

Since tldraw has bug enough screen, I pasted the photo on the top right corner, so that I could see it all the time, while I was drawing.

Sketch: Person Practicing Drawing

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 14:04:55 +0530

After my last sketch, I kept searching for simple sketching/infinite canvas program, and came across an app simple called “Whiteboard”

The UX is a bit different, but not too difficult. This might be my second favourite after ExcalidrawZ

The sketch is really simple (it is meant to be) The sketch is based on this video by Eva Lotta 🙏

I probably did this under a minute.

But I learnt how to make the stick person look “down”. It is pretty simple. If I draw the eyes a little lower that normal, then it appears as if the person is looking down. Drawing small line instead of just dot helps (I think) While it appears simple, it took me two tries to get it right. (Wisdom came later 😄)

I enjoyed drawing “upside down”. In the original video, she drew an orange (I think) I decided that I would make my stick person draw (what every child - at least in India draws) a house, rising sun, and a tree.

Drawing this upside down (So that it is right side up for the stick artist) wasn’t difficult (for me) but I enjoyed.

Software: Whiteboard

Before I started posting on Pixey I used to publish on my own site. If you haven’t, you can check my older sketches here

VSCode Multi-Root Magic: Run Flutter APK Builds in Separate Git Repos

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 14:18:10 +0530

TL;DR

Stuck with “No pubspec.yaml found” when building Flutter APKs in a multi-root VSCode workspace? Fix it in 3 steps:

perfect workspace naming,
cwd overrides,
emulator-ready URLs.

The Problem

Top-level folder with 2 separate Git repos:
- flutter_app/ (Flutter)
- fastapi_backend/ (Python)
Flutter .vscode/tasks.json ignored in parent.
Tasks fail: “Must be run from root of Flutter project” or “No pubspec.yaml found”.

The Fix: Multi-Root Workspace + Smart Tasks

1. Create Multi-Root Workspace

File > Add Folder to Workspace… > Add both subfolders.
Save as myproject.code-workspace in parent.

{
  "folders": [
    { "path": "flutter_app" },
    { "path": "fastapi_backend" }
  ],
  "settings": {
    "flutter.sdkPath": "./flutter_app"
  }
}

2. Update `flutter_app/.vscode/tasks.json`

For Flutter task:
- Edit .vscode/tasks.json in flutter_app to use ${workspaceFolder:flutter_app}.
Run task from flutter_app folder context.

{
    "version": "2.0.0",
    "tasks": [
        {
            "label": "Build APK (Dev Local)",
            "type": "shell",
            "command": "flutter",
            "args": [
                "build",
                "apk",
                "--debug",
                "--dart-define=ENV=development",
                "--dart-define=BASE_URL=http://10.0.2.2:8000",
            ],
            "options": {
                "cwd": "${workspaceFolder:flutter_app}"
            },
            "group": "build",
        },
    ]
}

Key: cwd must match exact folder name in .code-workspace (case-sensitive).

Pro Tip: Emulator Localhost

Use 10.0.2.2 to hit your local FastAPI backend from Android emulator.

Final Checklist

Workspace folder name = task cwd
Run task via Command Palette (select Flutter folder)
Reload VSCode after changes (Very important)

No monorepo. No drama. Just build.

Perfect for full-stack Flutter + FastAPI devs.

Omarchy on Macbook Pro

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 21:20:49 +0530

It has been almost two months since I was meaning to try omarchy I could not “move” to it, since I was in the middle of a project.

Since then, I have moved to Macbook Pro for development.

I was testing the waters, lurking on reddit etc.

Recently, Omarchy made huge progress. When I first came across it, it was already 2.x Now it is 3.1.x

One of the “features” of 3.x was better support for (Intel) Macbooks.

Today, I made the jump.

Installed Omarchy on my MBP 13" (early 2015)

To my surprise, it worked! 🎉

I was stuck (for sometime) in connecting to the network.

I was shown the Access Points in lower section, and the top section was empty.

Normal keys like up/down arrows did not (seem to) work.

So with the help of ChatGPT, I successfully connected using combination of following commandsa after initial sudo iwctl

device list
station wlan0 get-networks
station wlan0 connect "NetworkName"

Then Omarchy default UI, showed two access points in the top section, and I could move between them (to disconnect, and connect to the other etc.)

It has been only couple of hours.

At one point, I had to get away, so I tried Suspend from the menu. It seems to work. (Not sure if it suspended to disk - most likely not ¯_(ツ)_/¯ )

But after “wakeup” WiFi was lost.

I was not surprised. I had read about this on reddit.

Reboot.

but since then I saw “hyprlock screen of death” at least twice in under an hour.

FWIW, the instructions did NOT work 😢

I am setting this up for my son. While I know Omarchy would be a big jump from Windows, I would have preferred that he learnt in the process.

But the system needs to be stable.

I wanted to keep experimenting. So I thought, I’ll create a separate account for him.

But

Omarchy is single-user system by default.

While it uses SDDM, it also auto-logs-in the only user it created during the installation.

I found some instructions on reddit, but within couple of months they are out-of-date. (Could not find omarchy-seemless-login service in systemctl)

While I could spend time fighting it, it won’t be “standard” omarchy, and DHH has already refused to support it (but was nice enough to accept documentation, if someone provides some - but there isn’t one - yet)

Bottomline : I’m installing Linux Mint 22.2 for my son on that machine.

I am just glad that at least I got it working (mainly WiFi - everything else I can learn)

Mission : Upgrade macOS

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 16:47:27 +0530

The machine I got has macOS Sonoma. This is from 2023 - almost 2 years old. There was Sequoia - in 2024 and now there is Tahoe - in 2025

I wanted to upgrade to the latest.

But quick check on the internet suggested that I may be better off staying on Sequoia. Tahoe seems unstable ¯_(ツ)_/¯

So I decided to make USB bootable for Sequoia. When installing via the app store, it directly starts the install (I think) So I decided to stick to the terminal (a good thing too IMO)

softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 15.7

This failed with inexplicable error.

ChatGPT was helpful in pointing out following command : softwareupdate --list-full-installers

Turns out there is no 15.7 instead there is 15.7.1

Fixing the command, finally got me downloaded version 😌

Now to make installable disk.

The external disk I have, has PikaOS live ISO.

So I tested that on the new machine.

First it won’t boot due to security.

Removed the security (Apple error message was very helpful in explaining what to do)

Booted into live PikaOS

Turns out Wireless card is NOT recognised 😢 Anyway, I’ll be using macOS for the foreseable future, so it was just curiosity.

But I couldn’t do anything to this USB drive. So I attached it to Linux Mint, and formatted it with FAT32

Still no luck.

Disk Utility kept giving error.

Once again, ChatGPT to the rescue.

diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ VOLUMENAME GPT /dev/disk2 ¹

Finally

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sequoia.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume

🎉

Use diskutil list first to ensure that the USB drive is indeed on /dev/disk2 😄) ↩︎

Purchased Macbook Pro 16" 2019 🎉

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:03:45 +0530

I had been meaning to upgrade my early-2015 MBP for quite some time.

Then I got one from office, so did not need to upgrade.

then something or the other kept coming up.

Few months ago, I visited a shop to get battery replaced for my MBP

The service was good.

The shopkeeper also told me that he has some used MBP for sale.

Usually these come from corporate customers (I think) and are in good condition.

I decided to stick to Intel mac, since there is a possibility of installing Linux on it eventually ¹

I had asked for at least 16GB RAM - current one has 8GB, which works well for most tasks but it is from 2015, and apps in 2025 may more more demanding on memory so 16GB seemed like the least I should buy.

I went to the shop to “see” the machine.

He showed me i9+32GB version (We had discussed i7+16GB) and said “Yours will be just like this” (i.e. as good condition as this)

So I asked if this machine itself was available and what is the price difference.

Yes, it was for sale.

Turns out the price difference was not much.

So I decided to go with better version. 😁

I am really happy being back on macOS. ²

Not that I was unhappy with Linux, but things are just better on macOS 🤷‍♂️

Other minor details :

The machine had Sonoma - which is from 2022 - 3 years old.

I asked the shopkeeper to give me Tahoe aka macOS 26 on a bootable USB stick

But he couldn’t do it. 🤷‍♂️

At the time of purchase he suggested to wait before switching to Tahoe, as it was “too new” (euphemism for buggy 😄)

Once I came home, I checked reddit, and turns out people are not too happy.

So I decided to upgrade to Sequoia instead.

Turns out this particular one has T2 security chip, and at least WiFi doesn’t work OOTB. There is t2linux.org, so … Anyway, I am not installing Linux on this till at least Sept 2028 when apple won’t provide anymore OS updates. Also we’ll see how long brew supports this version. 🤞 Update : Omarchy 3.0 has support for T2 Macs Out of the box 🎉 ↩︎
This post was written on the new machine. ↩︎

Flutter Development on Windows

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 21:53:01 +0530

As I wrote earlier I’m doing Flutter Development on a Windows 10 machine.

The configuration of this machine is as follows :

Intel i7-6600U @ 2.60GHz
16GB RAM
224 GB SSD
AMD Radeon R7 M360 (2GB)

So on paper this looks impressive.

But it feels so sluggish.

But “feels” is very subjective. (My other machine is 10-year-old-MBP) So I decided to gather actual timing.

Starting Visual Studio Code took > 1 minutes 51 seconds (After which I gave up) Gemini Assist was still not done loading. ¹ But even without it, it took > 1 minute
Starting Android Emulator took : 1 minute 40 seconds
- UI showed up after 7 seconds
- Pixel is starting message after 1 minute 14 seconds
- and Then I see System UI is not responding (I choose Wait ¯_(ツ)_/¯ )
Starting Android Emulator (cold boot) took : 3 minutes 28 seconds
- UI showed up after 43 seconds
- Pixel is starting message after 1 minute 59 seconds
- and Then I see System UI is not responding (I choose Wait ¯_(ツ)_/¯ )

In the mean time, VS Code reports

Failed to start Emulator. Could not connect in 60 seconds

Next stop, Launching the app in Emulator (“Run without Debugging”)

Time taken for the app to show up :

Build took 2 minute 11 seconds

App was ready after 2 minutes 52 seconds

So for the most part I’m just waiting 😢

The app has “QR scanning” functionality.

“Showing” the QR image to the Emulator takes a lot of patience (and luck)

Holding a QR image (on mobile) in front of PC’s camera till it is recognized is testing my patience.

I was lucky, I got it working two times in past.

I tried to use OBS Virtual Camera based onChatGPT’s suggestion, but Windows does not recognize the Virtual Camera (even though Virtual Camera has started in OBS correctly)

If you are Flutter developer, help me.

What am I doing wrong ?

Is the entire ordeal so slow ?

Please help!

Turns out The extension needed to restart. This information was hidden in the Extensions panel 😢 ↩︎

Windows for Development

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 15:56:50 +0530

Recently, I started working on a flutter project. I started on my own 10-year old MBP. (running Linux mint 22.1 BTW) It has “just” 8GB RAM. Flutter development is (near) impossible on this machine.

As per the documentation Android Studio requires 8GB and with Emulator 16GB, while 32GB is the “recommended” configuration.

But it is not just the documentation. I tried to push through. Decided to use Physical device rather than Emulator. But even then, it was just too slow.

So my client gave me i7 Dell machine with 16GB memory. It came with Windows 10 (which is gonna be End of Support soon) I setup all the tooling (Android Studio

Emulator) and got everything working.

It works. (not like my machine)

I also needed to run mysql (in docker) and need to run REST API server. In my opinion, these two do not add any slowness - cause I had them running on my 10-year-old-MBP-running-linux as well.

I think Android emulator is what makes this thing slow. (Flutter build/loading to Emulator are the ones that feel slow)

I have not used Windows for development in ~~years~~ decades.¹

So I had to start from scratch.

I had seen some people use Git Bash so I installed that. It gave me better “Terminal” and unix-like command line programs. But it was still Windows.

FWIW, my client allowed me to install linux on his machine, if I want. 🙏 ²

I did the next best thing.

Ubuntu on WSL2

I also discovered “Terminal” app on Windows.

Allows me to open various kinds to command prompts like

Windows Poer Shell
Git Bash
Ubuntu

This was better. I would open mysql shell in one, REST API server in another etc.

But Copy/Pasting in terminal was awkward. (I got used to Ctrl+Insert to Copy/Shift+Insert to Paste in Ubuntu terminal)

I would do some parts in Git Bash and some in Ubuntu but they didn’t share history

Yestersday, I started Ubuntu app (not the terminal, like I did all those days)

and I was blown away.

Ubuntu “session” in Terminal app is clunky/Big font

Ubuntu app (which is just a shell - but that is all I ever wanted) is much better. Smaller font. Right mouse click to paste (I think selecting via mouse automatically copies the text ¯_(ツ)_/¯)

Now, rather than having different tabs, I start a tmux session in Ubuntu.

Switching between mysql, REST API server, and bash is keyboard driven.

I will try this for few days before deciding to install (or not) Linux on it.

Another quirk I faced was Windows machine did not Hibernate.

Both my macOS and current Linux Mint hibernate. i.e. When I close the lid, everything is saved to disk, and no battery is consumed.

I was surprised that Windows didn’t do that.

I enabled it from some settings.

But I am not sure it works 😢

So I decided to add programs (VSCode, Ubuntu, Firefox) as Startup program.

But that too is not straight forward. At least one Bing suggested.

It involves typing shell:startup in a popup, and copying shortcut of each app there ³

I think when I did the last time, Windows was used for Browser and Corporate Email, and then I used to ssh to Linux server. I think. It was really long time ago. So my memory might not be accurate ↩︎
I might do that. But it will add to down time, so I am delaying it. Also, if Android emulator is making t feel slower, installing Linux may not help that part (Overall experience might be better) ↩︎
Apparently there is a slightly simpler way, but Bing did not suggest that ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ↩︎

Appimage

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 11:51:45 +0530

I have been almost exclusively using Ubuntu and its derivatives as long as I remember ¹

Benefit of using such mainstream distro was that for the most part, all the software was available in deb format.

But recently things are changing.

More and more software is being made available via snaps, flatpak or appimages

Much can be said about pros and cons of each of these. But that is not the point of this post. 😄

Why is AppImage getting popular ? Read this

TL;DR :

Self-contained binaries.
Avoids dependecy conflicts
Can get latest version of the software directly from the author. No need to wait for your distro’s packages to get the updates (which may take really long or never)

Few downsides of Appimages:

Need to manually add execute permission (as simple as chmod a+x myapp.appimage, still ..)
No auto-updates
- Although some apps provide build this functionality in the app. How ? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
No Desktop entry. Need to start the app from the terminal

There are a few solutions for this.

I tried both, and settled on AppImageLaucher.

appimaged monitors certain fixed set of folders. ~/Downloads being one of them. Which is a good thing. Most of your software first lands up in that folder. But then for the same reason, I keep deleting stuff from it, so keep it clean. appimaged does not let you configure “folders to watch” ²

AppImageLauncher comes with proper GUI to configure the “destination” for appimages.

When one starts a new appimage, AppimageLauncher moves it to designated folder (configured earlier by you)

It also supports updates (per documentation, but I have not tested it yet) ³

Both of them create a Desktop Entry, so that the app can be launched from the menu. Although AppImageLauncher created an entry with Version number 🆒

Now that I have AppImageLauncher, I am more likely to use appimage based software. Especially when deb file is outdated.

I used Red Hat in late 1990s when Ubuntu didn’t exist. But that is the only exception. ↩︎
I worked around this by moving the file, and creating a symlink inside ~/Downloads 😉 ↩︎
There is also AppImageUpdate which I have not tried yet ↩︎

Experience of Conducting Mass Media Workshop to Young Students

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 20:16:22 +0530

During Ganeshotsav, Jnana Prabodhini Prashala organizes a variety of workshops for students. For these 10 days, there are no regular classes — instead, students immerse themselves in learning new skills.

This year, I had the privilege of conducting a Mass Media workshop for 20 boys from 5th to 7th standard (a mixed group).

I don’t need to emphasize how bright these children are — after all, they are among the 80 selected out of 1200+ who appear for the entrance exam. Still, knowing this in theory is very different from experiencing it firsthand.

One of our workshop topics was Social Media. While I was explaining cyber security, a student pointed out the difference between http and https. What truly amazed me was when a couple of them went on to explain, in very simple terms, how encryption works!

On the final day, a fellow coach (conducting workshops for the third year) shared his observation: “These students are raising the bar every year. What I had prepared for the first few days was already known to them 😄 — and covered in the introduction itself. We had to rethink and stretch our plans for the rest of the sessions.”

It was both humbling and inspiring to witness such curiosity and brilliance at such a young age.

Pikaos : Hyprland

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 23:05:01 +0530

Yesterday, before I installed Hyprland on Mint I was researching Hyprland, and someone/somewhere mentioned pikaOS

PikaOS is a gaming/optimization-focused Linux distribution that emphasizes ease of use and high compatibility. Built on a Debian base but with cherry picked and custom compiled packages ensures that Pika is stable whilst being bang up to date!

I had mentioned in my post about Omarchy that I would have liked if it had Live ISO

I like to “try before ~~buy~~ install”.

PikasOS luckily has that option. So that is what I did.

As expected I booted into Hyprland login screen

What was the password for live user ? 🤔 I tried pikaos 😉 it worked 😄

I could see the waybar (Term I picked up while reading about Hyprland - maybe wrong)

But I had no idea what to do next.

Clicking on icons in waybar opened some settings.

But how do I open any app ?

I searched from my phone to find the basic keybindings. ¹

Turns out they are listed in a config file. Listing here for others who might run into such issues

Super D for launcher
Super Enter for the terminal

I have 2 monitor setup. And always builtin one becomes primary. App launcher look too tiny (since builtin screen is HiDPI Retina screen)

Luckily I found a way to make bigger external monitor as “Active” one.

One more nice thing about pikaOS was randomly changing wallpapers. They are (I assume) from some game - pikasOS being Gaming focused distro.

I liked most of them.

I spent only limited time. But I might replace mint with pikaOS

Since this is based on Debian Sid (unstable) it is indeed bleeding edge, and thus more suitable for Hyprland.

I have not analyzed it from “Let me replace my working system with it” point of view.

But the initial impression is good. 😄

This is where Omarchy shines. Super+H - H for Help - shows the basic keybindings. ↩︎

Hyprland on Mint

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 22:24:08 +0530

Ever since I read (and watched videos) about Omarchy I so wanted to try it. As I mentioned, the ISO directly wants to install it on the machine. There is no live - try before you install - option. So I didn’t.

I wanted the next best thing.

Try Hyprland with disturbing the cart too much.

Why not try setting it with Linux Mint that I’m already using ?

Reddit forums were discouraging.

Everyone said, it (i.e. Hyprland) works best with bleeding edge distro like Arch (Omarchy is based in Arch) and Debian/Ubuntu (and thus Mint) have too old dependencies.

But someone pointed to Ubuntu Hyprland

The 24.04 branch is closest to Mint 22.1 that I have.

Although the installer mentions that this version has reached end-of-support in July 2025, I went ahead and tried it.

Installer initially mentioned that light-dm is running, so I logged out of the GUI DE, and ran the installer script from tty1 (It still said the same 😄)

Installer went on to install a whole lot of stuff, but luckily no errors.

At the end it said, start Hyprland by entering the command Hyprland from the terminal. So I did.

Lo and Behold!

It worked.

Quite nicely.

Off course there are quirks. (which means the config needs tweaking 😄)

After initial glimpse, I logged out.

I realized that I get Hyprland as one of the option (along with Cinnamon) on the Login screen.

🤯

I’m back to Cinnamon, and I shall explore/fix Hyprland in coming days.

Omarchy

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 22:34:59 +0530

I had tried Omakub a while ago. While it is nice, it is Ubuntu under the hood, and Gnome and I did not like the aesthetics of it.

I then used KDE for long time via Tuxedo OS, and then settled on Linux Mint Cinnamon flavour.

Recently I came across Omarchy via the Reowrk podcast

It is next incarnation of DHH’s (dare I say infactuation?) move to linux.

As is the natural progression, one enters Linux world via safe Ubuntu (or derivatives) before venturing into distros like Arch Linux, Gentoo (or NixOS)

So DHH moved from Ubuntu to ArchLinux, and the result is Omarchy.

Main selling point (per the podcast) is Hyprland tiling window manager.

Like DHH, I too had tried tiling window managers in past (i3) but I couldn’t really get it.

I liked the idea, but probably make it stick.

So I wanted to give Omarchy a try.

Luckily the ISO booted fine (unlike AnduinOS) but there is no Live mode to try it out.

It asked me few questions. But when it reached “where to install”, I had to bail out.

In past, my attempts to install Arch derivates like Manjaro, CachyOS and EndevoursOS had failed because WiFi did not work. I so wanted to use Arch/Derivatative, but this was a blocker.

Here it recognized and connected to my Home Wifi (via Terminal - no less) during the initial setup.

Other thing that does not work is Camera.

I tried lsusb and looks like camera may still not work.

So far so good.

But I’m in the middle of development project, and can not afford downtime.

So I’m very likely to try Omarchy once I have some downtime.

AnduinOS

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 21:50:08 +0530

I was told by AnduinOS by one of my friend. I was told that it looks like Windows 11

I was intrigued.

Spoiler Alert : It does not 😄

All it really has is the centered menu button - which was to the left bottom for the longest time. Everywhere. Gnome, KDE and other DE (even until Win10) ¹

It is based on Ubuntu and uses (skinned) Gnome.

It did not boot on my MBP (Currently running Linux Mint)

I just got the grub prompt. The USB was not recognized as EFI boot. 😢

I have tried too many live ISO on this machine, so I *know machine is not a problem. Maybe AnduinOS write the disk (a bit?) differently ? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I did try it on a windows PC (Dell) - and it booted fine.

The website does say it supports only x86_64 architecture - which my machine is.

A little bit searching revealed that my old Apple machine may not be fully ACPI compliant.

Overall, I am not impressed.

It may be very good Gnome based distro.

But it is not for me.

I’m happy with Linux Mint. Thank you.

The menu can be moved to left, per the documentation ↩︎

Dynamic Values when buiding Flutter app

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 22:55:04 +0530

Let me explain the usecase

I’m working on a flutter app that talks to REST API. During the development, the server wil lbe on localhost but in production it would be real server.

Solution ? Use --dart-define

Way to do this is pass the value during the build time like flutter build apk --dart-define=BASE_URL=http://10.0.2.2:8000

10.0.2.2 is a special alias to your host machine from within the Android emulator. ¹ When running the app on an Android emulator, it allows access to your local development server.

During the production build, use something like

flutter build apk --dart-define=API_URL=https://api.myserver.com

There is also more complex option called flavors - but that is for another post 😄 For now --dart-define is enough.

Apparenly this won’t work when testing on physical Android device connected (via USB) to the development machine unless your server is accessible from the phone’s network and the IP is correct. (Maybe use something like ngrok 🤔) ↩︎

Human Would Have Known That

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:41:25 +0530

This Linkedin post, reminds me of the following dialog from the movie “I, Robot”

“That was somebody’s baby. 11% is more than enough. A human being would’ve known that.”

No, I don’t mean to say losing uncommitted work is same as someone’s life.

But more “we” (society) trusts machines, such scenario are going to be more and more likely.

(If you haven’t seen the movie, narrator is in an accident, there is another girl in another car - both cars are drowning. Robot jumps and saves the narrator, cause he has 45% chance of survival, the girl only has 11%

Now go watch that movie 😊)

`ty` type checker with Django

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 10:44:58 +0530

I wanted to try this new (still under preview, but when has that stopped me 😄) type checker named ty ¹ from astral

Installing(?) was as easy as uvx run ty ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I wanted to try it on Django project I’m working on.

Turns out Django code isn’t typed

See this discussion

Too bad. I so wanted to use ty is my regular workflow.

Maybe during my next non-Django project.

It was originally called Red Knot ↩︎

Troubleshooting ssh error

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:25:52 +0530

Today, I needed to setup ssh on a newly installed Ubuntu machine. Setting up ssh itself was straight forward

install openssh-server
start it via systemctl
enable the port in the firewall

But when I tried connecting it from other machine, I got the following error:

Received disconnect from 192.168.1.110 port 22:2: Too many authentication failures ¹

When I tried to get help, GenAI focused on Too many authentication part of the error, and gave me suggestions to change server to allow more attempts.

But I had a hunch that was not the case.

So I asked generic debugging tips, and was suggested to use ssh -vvv

Bingo!

Turns out all the publickeys from my client were being offered, and since I had not set the publickey (yet) it was not gonna work.

Based on this, I asked how can I force ssh to use password instead of publickey

Solution : ssh -v -o PreferredAuthentications=password (OK, you can skip -v)

It worked! 🎉

Next either setup publickey, or make password auth default.

Since the machine is temporary, I’m likely to stick with password based authentication. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

IP address changed for this post. ↩︎

Make Bad Art Everyday

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 20:35:38 +0530

The tile of the post comes from Cheat code #3 of this post.

I had a good streak writing here for a long time. Then in late April, I went on a week long trip. (Not vacation, it was a volunteering trip. I should have posted about it here. I did write about it in marathi, but shared it with closed group.)

Long story short, that broke my streak, and it occurs to that I wrote 1 post in May, none in June, and this is my 2nd post in July. I used to write 3-4 posts per month before that.

What has all of the above got to do with this post - you ask.

Tim Denning says (in the post linked at the beginning of this post)

Better to do a poor job of, say, writing than it is to never do it at all

While I am far from never do it at all, but may be I was becoming that, by breaking the streak.

I still get ideas that I “decide” to write about, but never do.

So just to get out of “deciding but not really writing”, I’m finally writing about this cheat code.

BTW, Tim’s entire article is worth reading.

and after you are done reading, go ahead - Make bad art.

Eventually you’ll get better, if you keep at it consistently.

How to use real android device for flutter development

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 21:50:47 +0530

I recently started learning Flutter. My 10 year old MBP with 8GB RAM is apparently not “enough” based on this documentation

It “recommends” 32GB RAM.

Lowest number listed is 8GB, but it means I can’t use Android Emulator, which seems like most common way to test the app during the development phase.

But I do have a real android device, can I use that instead ?

But most documentation talks/assumes emulator.

This does have information about using physical device, but I think it glosses over the instructions at a very high level.

Also, even after you click the above link, you have to explicitly click on Physical Device tab (Default being Android Emulator)

As document says - for Windows, install the drivers, but I’m on Linux, so no drivers required, but I needed adb

I installed sudo apt-get install android-tools-adb android-tools-fastboot

Followed by adb devices (after enabling Developer Options on the device, which also isn’t trivial) after connecting the device to my laptop.

OK, so my machine recognized the Android device.

Now, I had to restart VSCode, so that Physical Device appears in the target platform.

I was finally able to run the namer app from the tutorial on the android device 🎉

My overall impression is that setting up laptop for Flutter development involves a LOT of components, luckily the documentation is mostly up to date, even if spread over various sites (e.g. Setting up Android Studio is a separate document, because Android is only one of the targets for Flutter)

Failed attempt at Integrating Webmentions

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 27 May 2025 12:35:03 +0530

I wanted to use webmentions as comments (maybe that is incorrect term, but I wanted to show thes webmentions at the end of each post)

So setup everything correctly.

I have been posting links to my posts on mastodon, like this one

First I tested using Telegraph but I got an error The source document does not have a link to the target URL or domain

Little bit of searching informed me that it must be <a href=..> link. But for some reason the link appears as <meta content='..' (although it is clickable) ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Another issue was it turns out Mastodon does not support sending webmentions

The github issue was closed as Completed without any changes 😞

For now, I’m putting this on hold, and will try to use Mastodon for comments 🤞

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 06:31:40 +0530

It feels so good to “Do the right thing even if you don’t feel like doing it”

Hal Elrod (Miracle Morning fame) defines Habit as

Doing what needs to be done whether you feel like it not.

I did my MM SAVERS for 50 days, and then fell off the bandwagon.

Till I picked it up yesterday.

Today was the second day, and I didn’t feel like getting up.

But I did.

Once I was up, rest was easy 😄

Initial resistance needs to be overcome.

Maybe use 5-second rule ? (I didn’t. Today. Just sayin)

Firebase Studio : It is not ready yet

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 13:28:16 +0530

I read Addy Osmani’s announcement on LinkedIn, and wanted to give it a try myself.

Coming from Google, I had high hopes.

As per Google, it is improved version of, and will replace Project IDX.

While I have not used Project IDX in past, Firebase Studio looks like hosted VS Code.

As soon as you “login”, you get two options.

First to create a brand new application, and other to import your existing repo.

The demo shows the first flow - creating new app.

I didn’t want to try that. Instead, I tried this on my existing repo.

Importing repo worked without hitch. ¹

But several people in the discussion forum reported errors importing repo.

While I had no error importing, I couldn’t type anything in the Gemini pane, to give instructions. No cursor where I would type, just one big empty white pane.

Main feature of AI IDE is to be able to interact with AI (Gemini in this case) Since I couldn’t interact with Gemini, trying this was a non-starter.

It looks like Google released it too early 😞

Maybe I’ll again later in a few weeks.

Till then I’ll stick to #WindSurf by Codeium

It was a public repo, so no auth issues. ↩︎

Is GenAI biased toward a specific region ?

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:46:13 +0530

I came across a LinkedIn post here where the author asked ChatGPT to create a fake Aadhar card, and a fake US Green Card.

For later, ChatGPT added “For Fictional Use only” in the image, and wouldn’t remove it when asked to.

So such “security concern” for the Aadhar Card.

Here is my take on it.

AI trained in US (ChatGPT) will have bias for US

AI trained in China (DeepSeek) refuses to answer “sensitive” questions about china (At least the hosted version.)

Nothing surprising

AI is like a child. It will learn what you teach it.

Child growing in English speaking home will learn English naturally. Child growing in Hindi speaking home, will have to learn English in school (if at all)

Neither is “wrong”

It is what it is.

Rust : How to use `match` to replace nested if/else

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 19:45:12 +0530

When solving errors4.rs exercise of rustlings, I initially used nested if/else. It helps with readability.

While the solution was correct, clippy suggested following:

help: consider rewriting the if chain with match: match value.cmp(&0) {...}

I had used match only with various possible values (mostly from Enum) and thus was unfamiliar with value.cmp(&0) approach.

So I asked Gemini for a working example. ¹

Here is the code is shared :

fn check_value(value: i32) {
    match value.cmp(&0) {
        std::cmp::Ordering::Less => {
            println!("{} is less than zero.", value);
        }
        std::cmp::Ordering::Equal => {
            println!("{} is exactly zero.", value);
        }
        std::cmp::Ordering::Greater => {
            println!("{} is greater than zero.", value);
        }
    }
}

fn main() {
    check_value(-5);
    check_value(0);
    check_value(10);
}

Moral of the story :

Always use clippy when developing
Read all the errors carefully. Chances are there is plenty of information.
Rust tooling is awesome! 😄

Turns out, clippy also pointed to exact documentation which also has a working code. But I didn’t pay attention. My bad. ↩︎

Eight must have pre-commit hooks for #python code

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 13:57:33 +0530

Recently there was an article on LinkedIn about how debugger statement was left in the production code (front end javascript) and thus user could not move forward.

People commented about the code review.

But why invest manual efforts when such things can be automated ? See #4 in the list below.

pre-commit hook is an under appreciated (dare I say, unknown) feature of git

As the name suggests, set of commands/scripts can be executed before git commit

If any of these fail (exit code other than 0) the code is not committed.

Some of these are just checks, but some automatically fix/change your code for the better. How cool is that.

Here are the eight precommit hooks you must use:

Automatically remove trailing spaces
Exactly 1 new-line at the end of file
Check YAML (prevent bad config getting into production)
debug statements are only for local testing, but get rid of them before committing to git
reorder imports alphabetically (and group them)
Automatically use latest idiomatic python. (pyupgrade)
automatically fix style errors to make code look consistent
catch type mismatches during development, leading to fewer runtime errors

While some of these may seem like they do not add value (consistent looking code) others have tremendous value (detect debugger statements, type mismatches and automatically using latest idiomatic python)

While these are specific to python, similar ones are available for other languages as well (git is programming language neutral). e.g. there is husky for node/javascript.

Read the original article here

Announcing my rust project: snb

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 17:06:07 +0530

After learning (and I’m still learning) basics of Rust, I decided that I need to work on real world project to get better understanding of the language and face real problems 😄

Introducing snb ¹ - Superfast notes from the terminal 🎉

Why choose this project ?

I’m most comforable with terminal, and Learn Rust page has a link to Command Line Book

So building some kind of command line utlity was easy decision.

But what to built - wasn’t.

Then I remembered nb

Side Track

There is no dearth of note taking apps.

Even after excluding GUI apps, there is org mode built into emacs, and then there is denote and org-roam in Emacs alone.

Then there is VimWiki and neorg

But nb is amazing because of the breadth of the features (Lets not get into feature comparison, OK?)

It can be used standalone, unlike other tools mentioned above which are part of the editor itself.

But what blew my mind was that is a one huge ² bash script.

Let that sink in.

One. Bash. Script.

So it is not someone’s toy project.

In terms of feature set, and possibilities of using various rust libraries (using ratatui in future once I have basic functionality in place) this seemed like a worthy project to port over to rust.

Back to the scheduled blog post

So I found a worthy project.

As the meme goes, re-write everything in rust, so why not. ³

I will write more about what I learnt, and my journey in upcoming posts.

I’ll end this announcement post mentioning that while original nb has a lot of features, so far I’ve implemented only the notes ⁴. Refer to the Roadmap for other features planned.

Please reach out to me with any feedback/comments on mastodon (link below) and/or open an issue on github or codeberg

Code also available on github ↩︎
Approximately 26.5KLOC. That is 26489 lines of bash script. ↩︎
I think rust binary will be faster than a bash script. But it is too early for benchmark, and that is not the goal anyway. ↩︎
I was waiting for notes feature to be done, before I announced the project. And, publishing on crates.io, so that users to cargo install it, rather than having to build it yourself. ↩︎

Linux Mint may be it

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 06:08:06 +0530

I’ve been using Linux Mint for a while now.

I started using linux because my machine stopped getting macOS updates.

But I always wanted something as stable as macOS

Initially I tried Tuxedo OS.

While it looked nice, there were tiny issues that I couldn’t ignore.

Things like “WiFi completly going away” put the break to the flow.

Hibernate did not work.

Ghostty didn’t work

I can go on.

I’ve been using Linux Mint for a less than a month, and it seems quite stable.

I have not seen any of the “paper cuts” I faced with Tuxedo OS. 🤞

and then last week, I came across a good surprise.

Usually I work from home, but last week I needed to go to office.

At home, I have an external monitor, and the latop’s builtin screen is closed by default.

Earlier, whenever I needed to switch from external monitor to built-in one, it was a hassle.

Not so with mint.

I opened the lid, and disconnected the HDMI

I had fully expected to see tiny characters (Cause it is a retina display)

But the scaling was auto adjusted.

Awesome!

Then I had to take the laptop to the meeting, so I tried “Suspend” (I don’t get hibernate option - but I’ve given up hope and it does not bother me any more)

To be honest, I’m not sure whether Suspend worked.

Because the apple logo was lit. again. after few seconds.

I assume suspend did not work.

I didn’t have to travel long, so I didn’t bother.

I did not have to open the laptop during my meeting.

When I came back, I had fully expected the battery to have drained, and having to restart and lose my work.

But looks like suspend had worked.

Or was it hibernate ?

Cause I had to hit the power button to start the laptop

But it came back “from sleep” with everything in tact.

I was pleasantly surprised.

I tried this one more time, and it worked second time as well.

If I can just close the lid and leave, and not have to worry about losing my work (and/or battery) I think I may have found nirvana 😄

I will be using mint for a while, and will update this post if I find any other issues.

Adding alias to CLI built in #rust

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 17:57:20 +0530

Turns out it is very easy if using clap

I wanted to add command alias to a tool I’m building ¹

I didn’t know how to do it.

I wasn’t actively working on it either, just one of the items on the TODO list.

Then I was looking at the source code of some completely unrelated to my project, and I found the answer.

#[clap(name = "mycommand", visible_alias = "alias1", visible_alias = "a1")]

There can be multiple alias.

Usually one is shorter version of another, but it does not have to be that way.

I was trying to point to exact documentation for clap but I could not.

Closest I found is this

will be announced here soon. I’m finishing up minor tasks before publishing to crates.io ↩︎

My PR related to Rust project got merged 🎉

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 13:13:35 +0530

I’m so happy that my PR ¹ to a new and upcoming #rust framework called Cot was merged yesterday.

@m4tx - Thanks for accepting my contribution 🙏

Although it is a PR for the documentation, I’m so glad that I was able to contribute to a Rust project.

Why is the important ?

It is not my personal project
It showcases that even though I’m new to Rust, the concepts like - making even sample code secure - is a transferrable skill 💪
Gives me hope that now I may be able to contribute code as well 🤞
I consider this “foot in the door”
Boosts my confidence.

The PR ↩︎

Linux Mint

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 06:58:46 +0530

I’ve been using Linux on my old MBP since November of last year.

I started with OpenSUSE

After using it for a month or so, I switched to Tuxedo OS 4 It is based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS but ships with latest KDE Plasma 6.

I meant to write about it, but didn’t ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I used it for 3+ months.

It was more mainstream than OpenSUSE (because of its Ubuntu base)

But there were paper cuts. Things that are not show stoppers, but minor incoviniences that add up over time. (I’ll write about it separately, maybe)

Then I came across ParrotOS, which is based off Debian Stable (with focus on security) I tried that Live ISO, and liked it.

It is based on Gnome. Tuxedo had KDE Plasma (which I still think is better but I understand it is subjective.)

I didn’t dislike it. I was about to install ParrotOS on my laptop, but then decided against it

Because the distro itself is not main stream enough. (Most Debian instructions would work, but if they didn’t they may not be much support)

So I looked at Linux Mint. I had tried the Live ISO long time ago, but didn’t like it. But now my opinion had changed.

I tried the Cinnamon version of it. It worked well.

So as of three days ago, I replaced Tuxedo ¹ with Linux Mint 22.1

It (Cinnamon version at least) does not support Wayland (says experimental).

I tried it, and it shows. The right click menu on the try icons showed up in the middle of the screen, not near the icon ¯_(ツ)_/¯

To be honest, I’m not sure whether (and how) Wayland is better for the end user. Whatever it maybe, I’m on X11 with Cinnamon.

Visually, I see no difference.

On the other hand, X11 being older of the two, if well supported by apps like espanso for example.

On Tuxedo+Plasma+Wayland, I had to manually compile espanso, and while it worked (for most) there were issues. Specifically, there was a problem with Alacritty.

Expansions did not work in the terminal at all.

and they did not work elsewhere either if Alacritty was started after espanso. (which was the case all the time)

So I had to manually stop and start espanso after alacritty started.

espanso works well with X11.

and now I’m using Ghostty instead of Alacritty (Cause Ghostty did not work with Tuxedo)

expansions work well inside the terminal apps 🎉

I could not get kinto to work with Linux mint.

It turned out to be blessing in disguise.

I discovered Toshy in the process of troubleshooting the issue.

I’m very happy with Toshy 😄

It has been only a few days since my switch. So it maybe too early, but overall I’m happy with my switch.

To be honest, I miss KDE Plasma’s Quality of Life features. ↩︎

Rust: Improve readability in default arm of match statement

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 20:00:16 +0530

#TIL in #rustlang we can use any variable name (starting with _) in ignore path of match

Instead of

let x = 1;

match x {
  1 => println!("one"),
  2 => println!("two"),
  3 => println!("three"),
  _ => println!("anything"),
}

We can write

let x = 1;

match x {
  1 => println!("one"),
  2 => println!("two"),
  3 => println!("three"),
  _ignore_this => {},`
}

Sure, this is a silly example (Original example from the Rust book)

See this commit for real-world usage.

As you can see, I removed the (now defunct) code comment, by using better variable name over just _

If we don’t want to ignore the value (I know this also seems like a made up example, still ..) then

let x = 1;

match x {
  1 => println!("one"),
  2 => println!("two"),
  3 => println!("three"),
  unexpected => println!("Got unexpected number : {}", unexpected),
}

No need for _ at the beginning 😄

Deepseek : Model vs Web app

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 10:54:22 +0530

There was a post on LinkedIn about how asking DeepSeek to list states of India is not answered. ¹

First of all, why would you ask such a trivial question to it , when you can just search.

We need to consider the difference between search engine and “thinking model” like DeepSeek

It is like asking Einstein help with 10th class Physics exam 😃 - while he may be able to help, his abilities are better suited for more difficult tasks.

Now that it is out of the way, I also tested the same (after seeing the LinkedIn post) What I noticed is :

It starts answering the question, and then it stonewalls us.

Since the responses are streamed, it is easy to see the first part of the response, before it is quickly replaced.

At first, I saw the answer that started with “My knowledge cutoff date is October 2023 …” and then the text was replaced with “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”

I asked why it is out of scope, it said :

I can provide information and discuss topics related to any country in the world, as long as the conversation adheres to ethical guidelines, avoids harmful or inappropriate content, and respects cultural sensitivities. If you have questions about a specific country or topic, feel free to ask, and I’ll do my best to assist!

I said :

Listing the states in India isn’t unethical, harmful or inappropriate

I definitely saw answer starting with

“You are right….” and then it was replaced with

Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.

Here is what I think is happening:

The “model” understands that “Listing states of India” is not harmful/unethical etc. So it starts responding accordingly.

Then the “frontend webapp” built by DeepSeek the company - intercepts and removes what it considers “risky”

The “model” is just software - it is not impacted by human’s perception (Even if it is trained with guard rails in place) But DeepSeek - the Company - needs to worry about public perception.

My idea can be verified (by someone else, I do not have capable enough hardware) by running DeepSeek model locally, where the “web app” won’t intercept the responses.

Unfortunately, I lost the post i the feed, else I would have shared the link. ↩︎

Make constraints useful

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 10:53:04 +0530

Recently, I came re-listened to a podcast episode where they discussed about constraints.

Everyone thinks that constraints are bad.

But having some constraints may be good.

If there are no constraints, it may lead to analysis-parallysis. It is not easy to choose when there are too many choices.

Let us say group of friends (or colleagues) want to go out for dinner.

“Where should we go” may take forever, if there are no constraints.

But if you put conditions like say “No pizza” (or “we are going for a pizza, now where should we go?”) Or “Vegetarian only” now, choices should be limited, and hopefully you’ll decide faster 😄

Same for “What to wear to office ?” (Remember famous Steve Jobs rule about Turtleneck and Jeans ?)

Back to the podcast episode.

They talked about “Story in only 6 words”, “A book without letter E”.

Those are extreme constraints, but could be fun.

Personal example of using constraints to my advantage ¹

My machine suddely loses network ² Only solution (so far) is to reboot.

So when this happened (again) this morning, I decided to see how much time before I must have internet.

I used this time to:

Read ebook that was already downloaded on my machine
Solve some rustlings problems ³
Write this blog post
I also did some pending git commits. The git push can wait till after the reboot.

I’m sure there can be more. Since this happens every now and then (This is not the first time I delayed the reboot, but writing about it just now)

Truth be told, the constraint was forced, not by choice. But there are examples of people choosing devices without internet connection to avoid distractions. ↩︎
I have found some possible solutions, yet to implement them. I wonder if I should delay “fixing” the problem 🤔 😄 ↩︎
Hint asked to read rust documentation, but then I remembered that rustup doc lets me access rust documentation locally without internet 🎉 ↩︎

Rust Script

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 13:19:53 +0530

After my previous post I came across other ways to “quickly test rust code”

Obvious being rust-script

It is easy to install via cargo install rust-script (But I had it already installed. I think Espanso installed it, but not too sure)

This may be better than rustc because one can define the dependencies in the “script” itself, like :

#!/usr/bin/env rust-script
//! Dependencies can be specified in the script file itself as follows:
//!
//! ```cargo
//! [dependencies]
//! rand = "0.8.0"
//! ```

Start the file by specifying rust-script in the shebang line, so that shell knows what program to use for running this code

While the README on GitHub shows code with fn main(), it is not required.

Since we are testing throw away code, I write only the absolutely necessary code.

#!/usr/bin/env rust-script

use std::env;
match env::home_dir() {
    Some(path) => println!("Your home directory may be: {}", path.display()),
    None => println!("Unable to determine your home directory")
}

You also need to give it execute permission via chmod a+x file.rs if you want run it as ./file.rs

Else you can run it as rust-script file.rs, in which case shebang is not required, neither is execute permission.

Rust: When rustc Beats Cargo for quick trial code

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:00:39 +0530

Recently, I needed to ~~test~~ try some functionality (of getting user’s home directory) ¹

Setting up a throw away project via cargo new is certainly possible but seemed overkill.

A little bit of googling, presented me with an option of using just the rust compiler, without having to setup a project.

Just create a rust source file, say test.rs and compile it via the Rust compiler as : rustc ./test.rs

(If there are no errors) It creates a binary called test 🎉 ²

I know what you are thinking.

Rust playground!

Yes, So far in my rust learning journey, that is what I have been using and it works for most cases. But,

It requires Internet (rustc works locally)
Sometimes you need to test something locally, like getting files from root directory. You may not have access to root folder in rust playground

While I was gloating about my epiphany, I remembered I had installed irust ³

It is ipython like interactive REPL for rust.

At first, I was skeptical how well it will work.

But it works well.

At least for this particular case anyway.

and it is also local (No internet required!)

Here is the output of irust session :

In: use std::env;
In: match env::home_dir() {
..: Some(path) => println!("Your home directory, probably: {}", path.displat()),
..: None => println!("Impossible to get your home dir"),
..: }
error[E0599]: no method named `displat` found for struct `PathBuf` in the current scope
 --> src/main.rs:6:66
  |
6 | Some(path) => println!("Your home directory, probably: {}", path.displat()),
  |                                                                  ^^^^^^^
  |
help: there is a method `display` with a similar name
  |
6 | Some(path) => println!("Your home directory, probably: {}", path.display()),
  |                                                                  ~~~~~~~

In: match env::home_dir() {
..: Some(path) => println!("Your home directory, probably: {}", path.display()),
..: None => println!("Impossible to get your home dir"),
..: }
Out: Your home directory, probably: /home/mandar
()

In:

I’m gonna write about my new project in a separate post, soon. This is related to that project. ↩︎
It is possible to generate a binary with other name using -o option. But we are already talking about throw-away code ↩︎
irust is so awesome that it deserves a separate post ↩︎

Polywork Shutting Down

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:53:10 +0530

This morning, I got an email notification that polywork.com shutting down.

Polywork was a good idea.

I never updated it regularly because I was worried about such thing (it going away) But I liked the idea of putting regular “updates” and I started this microblog.

One of the reason I created this microblog is for the same reason. Otherwise, Polywork seems nice for such “What am I doing right now” notes.

What if Polywork goes away one day ? Once bitten twice shy.

Mandar Vaze https://microblog.desipenguin.com/post/appflowy/

In fact, I had considered polywork.desipenguin.com as well.

But then, I changed my mind for the same reason.

Polywork is a specific website which if goes away, may not make sense in the future. microblog on the other hand is a concept (I’m aware of https://micro.blog/)

I’m sad to see Polywork being shutdown.

Their landing page has no mention of it ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

But New Signups are disabled. I saw proper message only on one page.

Other places, Sign up leads to 404. Kinda bad, but then what does it matter if the website is going away in a month.

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 08:06:36 +0530

Happy New Year 2025 to everyone and their family !

May your dreams come true

Rust: How to print Command Output

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 17:28:55 +0530

I was going thru struct Command in std::process ¹

Obviously, I tried the very first code snippet in the rust playground. There is a very convinient ▸ to run the sample code.

The code ran without any errors.

But no output 🤔

Ohh, there is no println!. That is why.

No, that was not it. (I mean it was, but it didn’t help.) Adding println!("{:?}", hello); produced this output

[104, 101, 108, 108, 111, 10]

Earlier, without :? - rust compilter told me

the trait std::fmt::Display is not implemented for Vec<u8>

The output is a vector (array) of u8 ²

I kept on reading the doc, and later came across io::stdout().write_all ³

So in order to see the output of the command, I had to add use at the top and replace let hello = .. with write_all

use std::io::{self, Write};
...
..
io::stdout().write_all(&output.stdout);

Final code looks like this

See doc ↩︎
As you can see here it is indeed hello represented as numbers. h is 104 and so on. Ending with 10 which is line feed. ↩︎
There is one for stderr as well. ↩︎

Finally got Auto Complete working in Helix

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 12:55:23 +0530

I have been using Helix as an editor, not as an IDE. One of the USP of Helix is LSP support out of the box

Recently, I’ve been programming in rust.

Helix is also written in rust.

So I think it is natural that they would support rust LSP rust-analyzer and it does.

But I wasn’t getting auto completions 😞

I had rust-analyzer installed (or so I thought) and helix health check also passed.

$ hx --health rust
Configured language servers:
  ✓ rust-analyzer: /home/mandar/.cargo/bin/rust-analyzer

Yet, I did not get auto-complete. helix log showed some error related to rust-analyzer not being there.

How can it be ?

Let us check if the file really exists.

$ file ~/.cargo/bin/rust-analyzer
/home/mandar/.cargo/bin/rust-analyzer: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, with debug_info, not stripped

OK, path listed by Helix health exists, and it is not a link. It is a proper ELF 64-bit binary.

Maybe permission issue, or something else 🤔

Let me try to run it without argument.

$ ~/.cargo/bin/rust-analyzer
error: Unknown binary 'rust-analyzer' in official toolchain 'stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu'.

What ??

This is same error listed by helix logs.

No wonder auto completons do not work.

After some searching, I found the solution 🎉

rustup component add rust-analyzer

But did I have rust-analyzer already in my ~/.cargo/bin

A kind soul on reddit pointed me to this issue.

As of this writing, the issue is still open. But it helps to know I’m not the only one with this issue 😌

Turns out I’ve already written about similar error but for Emacs here. Doh!

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 18:09:56 +0530

Today I completed “Rust: The Complete Developer’s Guide” course on Udemy 🎉

Here is the certificate

Rust: Unit tests in a separate file

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 19:23:21 +0530

In rust, tests are written in the same file as the code. But I want to have the tests in a separate file.

Conventionally, only the integration tests are written in files under tests folder. ¹

I just wanted to have the unit tests in a separate file. So I created a file src/my_tests.rs and moved all the tests there.

But cargo test kept saying running 0 tests

Turns out, I’m not the only one. ²

if you don’t import it in main then it doesn’t “exist” as far as the compiler’s concerned. ³

I was able to fix it by adding mod my_tests; to the top of main.rs

It is one thing to read the docs, but real learning comes from actually writing the code. (and making mistakes)

Each file in the tests folder is a separate crate. Which means they can only call functions that are part of your library’s public API. Since unit tests are in the same file as the code, they can access (and test) even the private functions. ↩︎
Stack overflow ↩︎
See this comment ↩︎

Updated the README for the Theme Repo

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 18:39:46 +0530

It has been little over 2 years since I forked and updated jnjosh’s internet-weblog theme

While I made several changes to my fork, I never updated the README.

till now that is.

During last few days, I updated the README to match my fork.

These are minor changes, and majority of the README is still from the original (For the things that have not changed)

If you are curious, have a look 😄

Jujutsu: Working With Git

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 12:52:24 +0530

After reading (not done) Steve’s Tutorial and Official doc ¹ (which mentions Steve’s tutorial anyway) I decided that actually using it on real projects is the way to go.

Here is the workflow (after a few ² iterations ³) that works

jj new : Declare your intention to start new work.
jj describe : Intention alone is not enough 😀. What will you be working on ?
Now work. Make changes.
Time to make our “change” available in git. Get the change id from jj log
jj bookmark set main -r <change_id_from_previous_step>
jj bookmark track main@origin (or appropriate branch on origin). You’ll need this step only once.
jj squash -i : Select the files that need to be “added” to the commit
jj git push --allow-new -b main --remote origin ⁴ Done!

Finally, I must say that I’m blown away (and humbled) by the fact that “The Steve Klabnik” who wrote the Jujutsu tutorial and the Rust book, helped me ⁵ (Near real time responses) with my problem.

Steve, I’m really grateful for your help 🙏

I suggest if you are eager (like me) read the FAQ which might answer most of your questions ↩︎
See this thread on bluesky ↩︎
Here is my hack before I learnt the proper way ↩︎
Since I was not tracking remote “bookmark”, this command told me exact command needed to be run. How cool is that! ↩︎
here ↩︎

Jujutsu : git compatible but better DVCS

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 13:00:55 +0530

I learnt about Jujutsu from the “Rust in Production” podcast episode about Git Butler

One of the attractive quality about it is that it works with existing git repos ¹

First superpower : Start using it with existing git repo locally cloned using jj git init --git-repo=. ²

This creates a .jj folder in the existing repo. .jj and .git co-exist peacefully

But I didn’t know that.

So for the first project to try Jujutsu, I jj git cloned my existing repo in a new folder, so that I have “old” git repo as well as jujutsu repo.

I’m still reading the documentation and [Steve’s Tutorial](https:// steveklabnik.github.io/jujutsu-tutorial/) to understand the concepts.

I’ve already started using jj. But git interop is still a bit confusing.

One important/useful feature is that all the changes are available in git as well, as detached HEAD

So I can easily switch (in git) between main and detached HEAD

I still need to learn how to commit just one file to git, since jj does not have a concept of untracked changes ³

unlike fossil which does lot more (built-in Wiki, issue tracker, forum and web interface) but is not compatible with git. ↩︎
I immediately added this repo to jj - CLI for Jujutsu ↩︎
It suggests adding files to untrack to .gitignore followed by jj file untrack <PATHS> ↩︎

Rust: Doubly Linked List

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 16:14:13 +0530

No, this is not a post about how to implement doubly linked list in rust.

Or ir could be a very short post, since doubly linked list in built-in the std::collection as LinkedList

Following functions are available:

new : Creates new/empty linked list
push_back : Adds an element to the list
push_front : Since this is doubly linked list, element can be added at the beginning as well. Nice!
pop_back and pop_front : Remove an element from the list
clear : empty the entire list
append : Append one list to another to make bigger list. One that got appended becomes empty though.
contains : Searches through the list for the element ¹
There are iter, iter_mut and len as well.

[Documentation](https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/ struct.LinkedList.html) is easy to understand

Since this is a Linked List, compute time is O(n) ↩︎

Waydroid

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 13:29:37 +0530

I wanted to use Openvibe - an app that allows having a single timeline across multiple social media networks like mastodon and bluesky. It also supports cross posting (and more)

But currently it only has mobile apps (for both iOS and Android)

While the Desktop app is “in the works” - no specifics are provided.

I do not use mobile apps if at all possible. (Except for podcast and messeging apps to keep in touch with Family - on the go. If I’m at my desk, I use the Desktop version)

So I thought I was out of luck, till I rememembered about Waydroid.

As it mentions on their site, it runs Android in a container.

Installation went well.

Then it downloaded two images. (waydroid init failed during the installation. It needed sudo to work)

Both were lineageOS images.

Everything went smoothly.

But after Lineage OS loaded, I didn’t know what to do.

Using mobile device like interface on a desktop is disorienting 😁

I opened the browser (one of the three icons shown on default opening screen)

Opened Google Play Store.

I assumed it would let me install Openvibe.

But it showed my other two (Physical) devices as targets.

I searched a little more, and realized I need to spend more time (As with everything linux 😊)

(Preferred?) Way to install apps seems to be F-droid.

While I was “looking around” I noticed that this was Android 11. So maybe that is why Openvibe did not offer to install on that device.

Finally, I apt remove ed Waydroid, and removed the downloaded images as well.

I may come back in future.

Couple of things to try (in future)

Download F-droid APK and install from command line as waydroid app install xyz.apk
See if OpenVibe is available on F-droid.
- Even if it is not, there may be other cool apps that I can use 🤞
Figure out how to get (relatively) latest version of Android (At least 14)
Figure out way to install GAPPS (Google Apps)

No One is (really) Evil

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 07:41:43 +0530

NSQ episode about evil led me to thinking about this.

Takeaways from the episode

Evil is attributed only to humans.
- If an animal attacks and kills human(s) we do not label the animal as Evil.
Intentionality matters.
- Accidental killing/death does not mean Evil
People do bad things because their brain is not “well”
- Amigdala is the part of the brain that is responsible for fear and morality.
- Should bad people be locked away longer (cause they may be threat to the society)
Phil zimbardo prison experiment
Bad barrel (Vs Bad Apple)
People become evil due to surrounding ¹
Stanley Milgram Experiment
- People are OK doing bad things if
  - They are in position of power and
  - Are told by their superiors to “punish” others
  - 2 out of 3 volunteers shocked the (the actors playing) students upon giving wrong answers, because they were “instructed” to do so ²

My thoughts

Only movies/TV has pure evil person
- In good movie/TV, they have some explanation about why the person become “evil”
When people do bad things to you, do not hate them
Consider some of the points above.
What made them behave the way they did
(Most of the times) it is not personal [^3]

One can choose to become Oskar Schindler in Nazy Germany. Do the right thing even if the surroundings are wrong. (But takes courage) ↩︎
No one was actually harmed, but people giving electrocal shocks didn’t know. Actors shouted, mentioned heart attack, begged to stop, but “shocks” continued. [^3] That does not make it better, but helps avoid hatred ↩︎

How to run multiple postgres docker instances on local machine

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 22:28:59 +0530

When working on multiple projects, I run separate postgres instance for each of them.

Since these are docker instances, this is not a problem as long as they are not running at the same time

If I’m actively working working on multiple projects parallelly, then there are two problems :

Resources : My laptop becomes slow. There is no solution for this ¹
Assuming you have LOTs of memory, second problem still remains. Both instances try to bind to local port 5432 the default port. Which does not work. So you need to bind other postgres instances to different local ports like 5433, 5434 and so on. This is controlled via -p in the docker command.

The format is :

-p <host_port>:<container_port> (Easier to remember that way)

So you’ll have docker commands like -p 5433:5432 and -p 5434:5432 etc.

and local ports 5432, 5433 and 5434 will all be listening on different postgres servers.

Off course, if you do not have local psql and instead use docker exec (like I do) you have no problem.

On the other hand, if you use local psql you’ll need to specify p 5433 and -p 5434 to connect different postgres instances. (Probably along with -h 127.0.0,1)

Other than adding more RAM, but till Apple allows adding more memory after-market, paying more money upfront is the only choice. Which I had not done last time (About 9 years ago) ↩︎

How to Turn Off Inlay Hints in VS Code

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 16:41:25 +0530

I initially tried to turn off the type hints via rust-analyzer extension setting, but that did not work 😞

Turns out it is very complicated (at least for me) documentation did not help 😞

Here is what worked for me. Thanks to SO ¹

Open Command Palette Cmd+Shift+P
Select Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON) from the drop down
Add the following to existing settings
- Or create new one, if empty. You may need to enclose it within { } though.

	"editor.inlayHints.enabled": "offUnlessPressed"

This will turn off the type hint inlays.

But if/when required, it can be enabled via Ctrl+Alt

SO Answer ↩︎

Kinto : Mac Keyboard layout on Linux

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 22:15:02 +0530

After using Apple laptop for nearly 10 years, I have gotten used to Apple’s shortcuts where most places use Cmd instead of Ctrl

After switching to Linux, initially I fumbled.

Then I had to be alert, which I did most of the times, but when in the zone, I would still do Cmd+c to copy, and when pasted would be disappaointed that it did not work 😄

Then I came across kinto

Installation went through fine, but at the end I got

Namespace Vte not available

error.

The issue is already reported on github, but it is stil open.

But the discussion contains a solution/workaround

sudo apt install gir1.2-vte-2.91

After this, I had to manually start the kinto-gui.py

Funny thing: I had just started retraining muscle memory, so I’m still fumbling 😂

Better History Search

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 12:39:31 +0530

No, I’m not talking about Atuin. ¹

I improved my search experience with just one tool - fzf

As you might know, fzf is a general purpose fuzzy finder. ²

But adding just source <(fzf --zsh) at the end of ~/.zshrc (and/or running it in your existing session) improves your Ctrl+r experience.

See the demo yourself.

I must confess that I’m tempted multiple times. But I think their USP is history sync, which is not my use case right now. For now, I’m happy with my current solution. ↩︎
It can be used for fuzzy finding git objects. Out of the box, you get directory completion (Alt+C) and filename completion (Ctrl+T) - although it clashes with Alacritty for me (worked with Konsole) ↩︎

How to define task dependencies in justfile

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 22:00:10 +0530

It has been more than 20+ years since I used Makefiles seriously. I did use them later, but they were very simple.

Then I found and moved just task runner, which is supposed to be replacement for make

My justfiles were also simple.

and today, I needed to define a task that we dependent on another.

Turns out, it is same as Makefile

task1:
  @echo "Task1"

task2: task1
  @echo "Task2"

In the above example, task2 depends on task1, and thus when we say just task2, task1 will get executed, as it is a dependency for task1

Installing Espanso on openSUSE

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 17:28:54 +0530

After the basic setup was done (I made a list of tools to be installed on line before I installed Linux itself), I wanted Espanso

While Espanso is well supported on X11, for wayland, it needs to be compiled from the source

I ran into this issue but solution was found in the same issue.

While install went through, I ran into issues related to capability grant.

Following worked:

sudo zypper install libcap-progs
sudo setcap "cap_dac_override+p" $(which espanso)
espanso start --unmanaged

I also needed to add the following to config/default.yml

keyboard_layout:
  layout: us

I finally got Espanso working!

Installed openSUSE on Macbook Pro (Intel)

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 16:20:32 +0530

My Macbook Pro (early 2015) isn’t getting any OS updates for some time.

Only version it supports is Monterey (which is already couple major versions behind the latest)

brew has also started complaining as This version is not supported

So I’ve been considering installing linux on it for some time anyway.

I finally pulled the trigger and installed openSUSE Tumbleweed

I had tried the live version, and knew and it generally works.

Their website suggests to use Offline image to install (and use Live version only for testing - even though there is a way to install from within the live session 🤷‍♂)

But ..

Offline image installation failed¹, mostly because it could not connect to the network.

So I did what I was planning anyway.

Booted into live environment, connected to the network, and then installed from there. It worked! 🎉

Finally, I booted into Linux on my Apple Macbook Pro

From live mode installer, I got error like exit status 1 No other info. I went ahead with ignore (Since I didn’t know what went wrong)

During the offline installation, error dialog offers the user to connect to the debugger, but without information about what went wrong, debugger is not helpful.

Error message are not helpful at all. ↩︎

Terminal : How to copy files showing progress

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 06:00:44 +0530

While copying large amounts of files (lots of photos) I used to use Finder in the macOS. Good ol’ drag-n-drop

Usually it is reliable, but lately I’m facing some problems when copying files to external disk.

Finder itself would become unresponsive.

So I decided to use terminal instead.

It worked (kinda) but it took 51 minutes to finish the copy (There were a lot of files)

and as you know traditionally cp does not show progress.

That is when I discovered rsync I had used it ~~a long time ago~~ decades ago, but never for local file copy.

I always used it as it was originally meant to be used ¹ to copy files to and from another machine.

Turns out using it for local file transfers is a good option especially since it has --progress option.

The command I used :

rsync -vhz --progress /path/to/source-dir/* /path/to/destination-dir

v : Verbose
z : Compression
h : Human readable
progress : Duh!

r in rsync stands for remote ↩︎

macOS : Possible workaround for `Disk Not Ejected` error

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 22:21:58 +0530

See this thread titled :

Disk Not Ejected Properly – AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN AND AGAIN…

I have started seeing this problem a LOT

TL;DR: Something breaks when macOS goes to sleep

Solution : Do not allow macOS to sleep when using external disk.

I have had to resort to using an application called Amphetamine (earlier Caffeine) and set the ‘Drive Alive’ mode to prevent sleep. All the problems went away. It has nothing to do with ‘frayed cables’ or ‘drives going bad’.

Based on above, I’ve installed the app, and trying it 🤞 ¹

Other suggestions also suggest turning off screen saver (or other ways to prevent macOS from sleeping)

It helped to some extent. But not fully. As I mentioned I used rsync to copy files, and noticed that I would get this error while the copy (rsync) was in progress. so it maybe more than macOS going to sleep. ↩︎

MacOS : How to Clean up the disk

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 22:48:18 +0530

In my plan to shift to Linux, I considered dual booting.

Turns out I may not have enough disk space.

I have reached at about 12 15GB free space. At first I thought, if live session can fit into 4GB, then 12 15GB should be enough, but looks like that may not be the case. ¹

So I’m shelving the plan to dual boot.

I’ll go with full disk install. That way linux gets entire 128GB SSD 👍

When I started, I had only 5GB space.

So I started finding solutions

This answer from 10 years ago is still valid.

Clear the caches.

I did not realize how much space it takes.

There are caches for the apps that I tried and eventually uninstalled.

The space used by .app was freed (hopefully 😆) but the cache remained.

~/Library/Caches/Homebrew took the most space.

brew autoremove and brew cleanup --prune=30 helped some.

Then there was entire Electron framework inside Ollama.app (Under ~/Library/Caches not actual .app)

Other command that helped : sudo du -hd 1 ²

Rather than running it at / , I ran it manually inside specific folders like ~/Library/Caches and ~/Downloads etc.

In all, I learnt a lot and reclaimed about 10GB of disk space.

Not bad for an hour spent searching plus cleaning up.

This discussion says : Minimum 25GB of disk space. ↩︎
Later I learnt about easier way to do this without using the terminal. Apple menu -> About This Mac -> Storage -> Manage. (This differs from macOS versions, but you’ll be able to figure it out) ↩︎

Vivaldi: How to save all open tabs (and Why ?)

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 17:21:35 +0530

For a long time, I’m considering switching to Linux full time since my existing machine does not get OS updates from apple. ¹

In preparation for this “move”, I check whether all the software is available on Linux.

Vivaldi browser in on that list (available on Linux ✅).

What about my already opened tabs ? Every few days I close the temporary/ unwanted tabs. ² but I do want others on Linux. Hence the search whether it is possible. ³

Turns out this can be done (in theory) via Session Management feature.

Vivaldi can save all open tabs (across workspaces as well) in a session.

Opening it on other device may not be trivial. The suggested solution ⁴ is to back up entire profile folder, and restore it on the new device.

I looked inside the Sessions folder. But the files lack human readability. 😞

So trying it out is the only option. The folder size is currently ~145MB, so I’m reluctant. None the less, I’ll take this backup irrespective. 🤞

unfortunately, I’ve not made the switch yet. I’ve been trying various distros, and while I’m not getting newer versions of macOS, I do get updates to existing version, and most things are working fine currently. ↩︎
Arc browser has this functionality built-in. But it is unlikely to be available on Linux anytime soon (if at all) ↩︎
I’m aware of Sync functionality - which requires account creation - and I do no wish to create one more account. (At least my current thinking on the matter 😄) ↩︎
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/18028/how-to-export-all-the-settings-and-tabs/2?_=1728990641960 ↩︎

What does demunge mean in clojure repl ?

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 13:03:25 +0530

I started learning clojure yesterday.

Initial useful (for me) command in clojure REPL : dir ¹

As per the example given in the documentation, (dir clojure.repl) produced list of commands (?) - one of which is demunge

I had no idea about it, and so I tried dir(demunge) and it returned nil 😆

I could not find it in the documentation, so I asked ChatGPT about it, and it explained the following: ²

Since clojure runs on top of JVM, compiler converts the code into java bytecode.

As part of this processes, the names are “munged” to suit java ecosystem like someNamespace__someFunction__123

demunge is opposite of that.

demunge is used during java interop and not much used a lot in day-to-day clojure.

(demunge "someNamespace__someFunction__123") would generate :

a more readable version of the name

There are several caveats like :

Exact behaviour depends on how the names were munged
This functionality may not be available in all the versions of clojure/REPL

This seemed familiar because python also has similar functionality ↩︎
This is paraphrased, not copied verbatim from ChatGPT output. This should improve my understanding ↩︎

How to use Google Keep for Quick Capture with Obsidian

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 14:05:28 +0530

Problem

While I use ¹ Obsidian to capture everything while I’m at the desktop, it gets tricky when I’m away from the Desktop. Especially during my morning walk, I listen to Audiobook, and want to capture either a quote or some of my own related thoughts. ²

Solution

Today, I came across a YouTube Video ³ which addresses this issue.

Zsolt goes on to explain how see sought suggestions on Twitter ⁴

Important components of his solution are to use Google Keep on mobile (Voice assistant if need be)

Then open Google Keep on the Desktop, and review the notes. Move to Obsidian if required and delete from Google Keep.

But …

The best part happened afterward

Gourav Verma recommended Custom Frames plugin, which enables to embed Google Keep inside Obsidian’s Sidebar. 🎉

Summary

Use Google Keep on mobile
- Use Google Assistant to capture notes via voice (if required)
Use Custom Frames plugin in Obsidian
Show Google Keep in Obsidian Sidebar

References:

realistically, I try to use 😉 ↩︎
I used to use Zoho Notebook for this so far. But the problem is I (almost) never look at them again 🤦‍♂ ↩︎
YouTube Video ↩︎
Twitter Thread ↩︎

When Firefox does not open

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 19:19:32 +0530

Today, after applying latest update of macOS Monterey, I restarted my laptop.

But Firefox won’t start 😢

No error, no nothing, no window either.

At first, I uninstalled existing version, downloaded a fresh one from internet (using Vivaldi). I assumed that maybe my OS update broke something, and reinstalling might help.

It didn’t.

Then, I started Firefox from the terminal hoping to see error, if any ¹.

Didn’t help.

Next, I decided to remove the cache. ²

Assuming that one of the page was taking too long to load. I wanted to really remove “history” of all the windows and all the tabs across all those windows. I didn’t know how. So I started by clearing cache.

Normally I would do this from inside Firefox. But today I didn’t have that option. Hence, tried directly removing it from the terminal ²

Didn’t help.

Final option: Remove the profile folder itself. ³

Worked! 🎉

😌

cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS followed by /firefox ↩︎
cd ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles and then rm -rf <profile_folders> ↩︎ ↩︎
cd ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox && rm -rf * ↩︎

How to pretty-print in Rust

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 15:40:00 +0530

Today, I accidentally found out that instead of using {:?} to debug print, if one just adds an extra # like {:#?} the variable is pretty printed.

This makes sense for struct rather than simple data types like numbers or strings.

The interesting part (for me at least) is how I “discovered” it 😄

When I was printing a struct (for debugging 🙈) VS Code (I think rust analyzer plugin) showed a popup how the struct does not implement Display ¹

I usually ignore the popup. But this time words pretty print caught my eyes.

Moral of the story : It pays to (carefully) read the error messages 😄

The exact error is :

= help: the trait `std::fmt::Display` is not implemented for `......`
= note: in format strings you may be able to use `{:?}` (or {:#?} for pretty-print) instead

This is mentioned in the Rust book, but the specific got buried in the wall of text. Unlike the popup, which made me pay attention

Standard error till one adds at least #[derive(Debug)] before the struct. ↩︎

How to specify the size for the embeded image in Obsidian

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 10:49:23 +0530

TL;DR: When inserting a link (especially of the image) one can add pipe followed by size. This size is used for displaying embedded image inside the note.

For example, I have a markdown and excalidraw mixed note named Dashboard

It references itself (for the excalidraw image on the back of the note) like ![[Dashboard]] ¹

This results into an image that just shows small preview that is not useful, especially if image is wide (and/or tall).

But now I can specify it as ![[Dashboard]]|640x480, which results into decent sized preview.

Refer to this segment in the YouTube video to see it in action.

There is more to this which I’ll cover separately. ↩︎

macOS : Whichspace

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 21:32:58 +0530

I have been using macOS for almost 9 years, and never used the workspaces feature (Not sure when it was introduced)

But after looking at Omakub I started using this feature.

Essentially, I divided the apps as follows. (Or at least that is what I wanted 😄) Each app (window) on its own workspace.

Alacritty
Firefox
Vivaldi
Whatsapp and Telegram (Social apps) together on separate workspace.

But somehow, some of the browser windows (I think new ones, after I moved existing windows to different workspace) moved to different ones.

Suddenly, it started feeling “jumpy”

(I think) I eventually figured out how to ensure that all the firefox windows remain in the same workspace ¹

While looking at all these, I came across Amethyst (Still exploring, maybe upcoming post) and also WhichSpace (finally app mentioned in the title of this post 😆)

This is really tiny utility. It shows the desktop number (like 1, 2, 3, 4) that is all.

But it is useful (at least I think so)

In the dock, right click on Firefox icon -> Options -> Assign to -> This Desktop. The default is None hence the seemingly erratic behaviour. ↩︎

Creating Youtube Banner

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 14:10:26 +0530

Today, I was trying to create a banner for my (upcoming) YouTube channel.

I used Canva to get started. It has a lot of templates to get started.

This can be a rabbit hole 😄 But I finalized the one I liked.

After customizing the template to my liking, I was ready to upload it to youtube.

But ..

Turns out, depending on the device where are watching YouTube, different parts of the banner are visible.

YouTube creator studio ¹ was upfront about which part of the image will be visible based on the device.

The image is fully visible only on TV. On Desktop, only middle (third?) portion is visible.

I had chosen the template based on the background image, which is almost never visible unless on TV.

Without the background, the banner didn’t look as impressive as I had imagined 😆

Back to the drawing board

This time I didn’t focus on the background. Instead, I focused on the middle third of the banner.

I had to modify the image a few times.

Each time, I would

Adjust the elements in Canva
Download the image
Upload to YouTube
Does it look OK (on non-TV devices ?)
If not, back to Canva

I think I finally got it right.

Or simply, the Channel customization page 😄 ↩︎

direnv with python

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 13:19:14 +0530

What is `direnv`

direnv is a tool that allows you to change your environment based on the configuration in that folder.

e.g. You can set different environment variables for different folders.

The reason I revisited direnv is because for python project, we need to switch to different virtual environment each time we change a project.

Wouldn’t it be nice if correct virtual environment was activated when you change to that directory

and unload everything to the way it was, when you switch away

How to use it with python project ?

Option 1 ¹

Create following in ~/.config/direnv/direnvrc

activate_virtualenv() {
  export VIRTUAL_ENV=$1
  PATH_add "$VIRTUAL_ENV/bin"
}

Then, in the .envrc of that folder, add activate_virtualenv path/to/virtualenv

Option 2 ²

Other option is to add just single line layout python3 to your .envrc This automatically creates and activates .direnv/python-$python-version

If you want to control the name and location of your virtual environment then your .envrc should have the following

export VIRTUAL_ENV="my_venv"
layout python3

In both scenario, you’ll need to type direnv allow on the terminal the first time. Otherwise, contents of .envrc will not be executed.

Go through the README to learn more about this amazing tool.

Helix: Vertical Selection and Edit

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 06:09:48 +0530

One of the workflows I used in vi/m over last 2 decades is : vertical selection and edit

So much so that it is part of my muscle memory and I needed to learn the equivalent in helix.

After some searching, I found it. Here are the steps:

Go to the column you want to select. Press v to enter select mode.
Select the column and to go down and up in the column selection use Shift-C or Alt-Shift-C
You can repeat the Shift-c command using the numeric operator if needed, like 10-Shift-C to select the column 10 rows vertically.
Now you can perform any action on the selection e.g.
- Go to insert mode and add * before each column.
- Or d to delete the selected letter from all the rows (in normal) mode.
You can come out of this (multi-select?) mode via , in normal mode (If you are in insert mode, finish editing and come back to normal mode first, via Esc)

Source

Omakub : Lazyvim

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 13:26:08 +0530

As I wrote earlier, I skipped over neovim initially, but then got curious.

I installed Neovim and configured it to use Lazyvim.

I was blown away by how nice it is.

My last serious affair with neovim was two years ago. ¹

Lot has changed since then.

Lazyvim wasn’t even born when I stopped using neovim ²

It is quite polished.³ The hotekys are mnemonic and intuitive (coming from doom emacs, at least)

I have not used it a lot.

Since I’m using Helix (and Emacs), I’m unlikely to use it seriously (But never say “never!” 😄)

But I’m not removing/discarding it yet.

Then I realized I’m spending too much time configuring (and fighting packer and errors from various extensions/plugins) and stopped using neovim ↩︎
I checked. First commit for Lazyvim was on Dec 30, 2022. Few months after I stopped using neovim ↩︎
At the same time, it seems too much as well. (Initial impression.) ↩︎

Omakub : Pinta

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 12:04:32 +0530

While Omakub was mainly intended for developers (and thus has focus on terminal based programs like alacritty, zellij and neovim), it does come with few GUI programs.

I think this is mainly because DHH was trying to switch to Linux as his primary machine, and requires some non-terminal tools.

Choice of Pinta and Xournal app were interesting, so I installed both of them.

I assumed Pinta to be MS Paint replacement.

While it does have tools like brush and pencil, it seems it was more of photo editing tool ¹ (that also allows tiny bit of drawing and paining capabilities.)

e.g. When Pencil tool is selected, there are no options like changing the thickness of strokes. (Paint brush has those options)

Also, when using macOS, the app looks ugly. (I understand that this is not a native macOS app) There are several better drawing apps on mac.

For those reasons, while I gave it a try, I uninstalled it.

I had fun playing with the Effects menu though 😄 ↩︎

Zellij Plugins : zellij-forgot

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 21:40:59 +0530

I didn’t even know Zellij had such extensive plugin system.

I’m going to explore more of those in coming days.

Let me start with Zellij Forgot

While the main (original?) purpose was (I assume) to remember various Zellij Keybindings, it can be extended to remember anything. ¹

While default/out of the box config will load the existing keybindings, it is a bit weird. It shows things like Some(Down, None) which seems more of Rust internal code and may not be directly useful to the user.

Instead, (as the README suggested) I added my own “pairs” (This is also given in the README, I just copy/pasted it)

By default, this adds to the existing list.

Not what I wanted.

Luckily, adding "LOAD_ZELLIJ_BINDINGS" "false" to the config will disable automatic keybinding loading.

The README has example of buy eggs 😄. Personally, I don’t think it is very good example. If you remember to look it up, you’ll also remember to buy eggs anyway. IMO, this is meant for things that one does not use frequently, and needs to “look up” ↩︎

Read Paywalled Articles for free - at least some anyway

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 10:44:39 +0530

If you can afford, please pay!

On the other hand, paying to read articles is expensive for you, here is an option (among many others, I’m sure) for you

Install extension like Click to remove element from the Chrome Web Store. It works with others Chromium based browsers as well, like Edge, Vivaldi, Arc and many more ¹

When you see a popup blocking the article, you can use extension like Click to remove element and remove the popup 😄

You may need to remove some more elements like dark background which covers or obscures the article.

Give it a try.

Bonus:

Use Reader view if/where possible.
Use Print to PDF on the reader-view page
(At least) Vivaldi allowed me to preview the PDF without having to save PDF locally
This idea also works for other popups as well, like Facebook, as per this

There is similar extension for Firefox as well. ↩︎

Omakub

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 13:21:50 +0530

Yesterday, I came across this new script released by Basecamp.

The one-line pitch is:

Turn a fresh Ubuntu installation into a fully-configured, beautiful, and modern web development system by running a single command.

This was started by DHH, but now has a lot of contributors.

Since I’m not on Ubuntu, I can’t directly use it. But I’m tempted to set up Ubuntu on a spare (?) machine just to try this out.

Since this is how DHH wanted his machine to be setup, it installs apps like Zoom and Signal etc among others.

But as the intro post says :

the heart of the pre-configuration lies in the terminal

Since I also spend a lot of time in the terminal on macOS, it was something I could try. Luckily, most of the tools are available for macOS too.

I really liked tokyo-night everywhere.

Here is what I have done so far.

Switched to Alacritty from Wezterm
Configured Alacritty and Zellij ¹ based on omakub config
Installed flameshot. Earlier, I used to use Zappy for annotating screenshots (To be shared with bug report or a fix.)
Installed eza replacement for ls I had tried exa - before eza was forked out of it since exa was unmaintained, and for some reason, forgot to install it when I reinstalled macOS recently.
Made same font as omakub my default for Alacritty

Things I did not install:

mise : I already use asdf, so I don’t see much use switching. mise also has task runner functionality, but I use just in place of make, so I’m good.
~~Neovim ² : Happy with Emacs and Helix. Thank you very much.~~ Update
Lazygit : I tried to use it. But I couldn’t learnt the keybindings and felt like I can’t use it. For now, I’m happy with magit when in Emacs, and just plain ol’ terminal when writing in Helix
lazydocker seems interesting. I might try it when I need to interact with docker a lot
Typora: Since I use Helix for markdown (like these posts), I skipped that section of the demo video. omakub also installs VScode (which I already have) which can very easily be used for markdown, why an editor just for markdown ? It might make sense for DHH - who I assume writes lot more text than me.

Overall, this exploration was much fun.

Since I was already using Zellij, this was nothing more than theme change. ↩︎
It is not like I’ve not spent enough time configuring neovim “just right” 😄 ↩︎

fill-paragraph in Helix

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 22:05:10 +0530

Emacs ¹ has this command fill-paragraph (Usually M-q) which will auto format long uneven lines to make them look even by adding a hard wrap.

But I use helix for writing these blog entries. That is how I discovered reflow command in Helix.

It is simple really

Select the blocks of text you want to format (by typing x and repeating for as many line as you have). Then :reflow. That’s it!

I learnt about gq in vi (Yes vi not vim. This was the time when vim did not exist. Yeah, I’ve been using vi that long) That time we used to use it format “text” where formatting text mattered. Eventually, I forgot about it, till I started using vi/Emacs/helix for writing more text than code. ↩︎

macOS: How to render thin(ner) strokes in Alacritty

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 17:56:25 +0530

After going through omakub ¹ and its source, I wanted to recreate it on macOS as much as possible.

The first thing was to use Alacritty.

I had tried it in the past, but moved to Wezterm.

The reason I stopped was because there was no support for panes or tabs (which is by design) But now that I’m anyway using Zellij for that, I decided to give Alacritty another chance.

But default rendering looks fat (or bold) which I didn’t like.

Turns out I’m not the only one. See this issue.

Problem is with the macOS (things are OK - apparently - on Linux) Need to set AppleFontSmoothing to 0 like :

defaults write org.alacritty AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

Omakub is a (self) described as “An Omakase Developer Setup for Ubuntu 24.04 by DHH” ↩︎

Django: Create new project in an existing folder

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 11:33:00 +0530

Default command for creating a new project is :

django-admin startproject my_new_project

Django will then create a folder called my_new_project (if it does not exist)

But if folder my_new_project exists (even if empty) we get error like :

CommandError: '/path/to/my_new_project' already exists

The way around is to specify a folder name after the project name like

django-admin startproject my_new_project existing_folder

See the documentation for details.

UV: Superfast pip replacement written in Rust

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 23:11:06 +0530

It is (almost) drop-in replacement for pip. We just need to invoke it as uv pip instead of pip

How to install ?

pipx install uv : This makes it available everywhere.
Other alternatives are curl (recommended) and brew (on macOS)

It is superfast

I tried installing Django

$ uv pip install Django
Resolved 3 packages in 138ms
Downloaded 3 packages in 2.53s
Installed 3 packages in 228ms
 + asgiref==3.8.1
 + django==5.0.6
 + sqlparse==0.5.0

This took 3s (As opposed to 33s taken by pip)

Installing ruff took less than a second 🤯

$ uv pip install ruff
Resolved 1 package in 269ms
Downloaded 1 package in 782ms
Installed 1 package in 9ms
 + ruff==0.4.8

Create a virtual environment

uv is not just a pip replacement. It can also create a virtual environment for you.

Use uv env to create a virtual environment.

By default, it is created at .venv.

But if you pass an argument, you can use some other name e.g. uv venv my_venv

It is a standard virtual environment. So source .venv/bin/activate and deactivate works as you would expect.

Rust: How non-primitive types are available in the default scope

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 27 May 2024 08:34:30 +0530

In rust, str is a primitive type, but many non-primitive types are also in scope by default.

e.g. We do not need to add use statement to use Vec - which is NOT a primitive type.

It comes from std::vec

So Vec::new() is really std::vec::Vec::new()

Vec::new() works because Rust inserts this at the beginning of every module:

use std::prelude::v1::*;

This makes Vec (and String, Option and Result) available by default.

I learnt this from learn rust in half an hour

How Zellij saved me

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 23 May 2024 17:53:15 +0530

OK, title is a bit of clickbait. It saved me some inconvinence 😉

Yesterday, Wezterm crashed.

At first, I was worried that all my “work” is lost (few blog posts were in-progress and open in helix)

But I had forgotten that I always start zellij these days.

So all my “work” was indeed there.

All I had to do was zellij ls followed by zellij a my_session1 (and my_session2 and so on)

No one expects the terminal to crash ¹. But if and when it does, you are glad you were using Zellij (or tmux)

This is not to say Wezterm is unstable. I have been using it for a couple of years, and this is the first time it crashed in recent memory. ↩︎

Importance of Making Things

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 22 May 2024 17:18:50 +0530

On the knowledge project podcast, Shane parrish interviewed Kevin Kelly

The link above has good high level overview with timestamps. Definitely check it out.

One thing that is not covered in the timestamps (hence I can’t link to the exact conversation) is about Importance of making things ¹

Kevin says something to the effect of, don’t stop making things (that you care about) just because they are not the greatest or the best. Your “thing” may have influence (or use) for someone in the future in ways you can’t imagine.

The examples he gives are :

No one remembers who or when Piano was invented ², but if piano was not invented, Mozart would not be known as genius.
- He may have made music with something else (if Piano didn’t exist) and may not be well known as he is today.
- Or he may not have made music at all.
Similarly, no one remembers who or when film camera was invented, but everyone knows George Lucas
- No movie camera -> No George Lucas
- He may have become photographer (assuming still photography existed) or a painter
- He may or may not have become such a success in his alternate career.

Point is : make things, your work may support future geniuses

Found the interview on Youtube. This topic is discussed in the chapter definition of success I realize that Kevin says it differently than what I have written above. But the gist is the same (and so are the examples) ↩︎
I’m sure we can search specifics of when piano (or movie camera) was invented. But that is not the point. We don;t need to search for names Mozart and George Lucas. That is the point. Also, I think both piano and movie camera were gradual inventions. Musical instrument similar to piano would have existed and piano we know today would have been an evolution. Same for still camera being stepping stone for movie camera. ↩︎

Homework for Life

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 22 May 2024 07:39:29 +0530

In One percent better podcast ¹, Joe interviews Matthew Dicks

Matthew explains the Homework for Life ² as (paraphrased)

At the end of each day, write down important “stories” (not memories) of the day. Else life passes by, and we don’t remember what you did 12 years from today. (Cause all days look the same in past)

He is a teacher. He asks his students to narrate stories (on a Monday, start of the school) He mentions that 10-year olds can come up with excellent stories. One example he mentions is

There was water on the floor. There was blood.

The last sentence makes the listener wanting to know more.³ That is good story.

Few other points about stories:

Location and action are important
You should mention the location, say classroom and let the reader imagine it for themselves. Everyone will imagine it differently. As long as the specifics of the classrooms are not relevant to the plot, there is no point talking about the details.
Reader is tracking the points. Say you mentioned that the girl had green eyes, and the green eyes are never mentioned till the end, what was the point of mentioning the eye color ? Maybe just say “Beautiful Girl” and let everyone imagine their own beauty.

I’ve started doing this from yesterday.

Instead of “reporting” on the incidents of the day (in a journal) which can be dry and repetitive, tell a story.

At least for last two days, I was able to do that 🤞

I could not find direct link to the podcast with notes and all. So I had to search for “Matthew Dicks” but that also doesn’t work directly because not all episodes are listed. They are loaded when one scrolls down to older episodes. This one was roughly in June 2023. ↩︎
Ali Abdaal also mentioned this in his newsletter ↩︎
If you are curious to know what happened, listen to the episode 😆 ↩︎

Vivaldi Browser

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 21 May 2024 22:49:37 +0530

I switched to ¹ Vivaldi browser after reading this post by Mike Kennedy

To be fair, I had installed and tried Vivaldi a long time ago. But I think things got better this time around.

I seem to have stuck with it for long time.

One benefit of chromium based browsers (like Vivaldi) is that user has access to vast amount of extensions from Chrome Web store. ²

Just today, I explored two other “features” which I’m not sure how I feel about.

Tasks and Notes

It is handy to have these right there, in the browser.

The notes seem quite thought through. It supports folder, and search etc. ³

While there is a WYSIWYG editor, the notes are essentially markdown.

There is also option to export notes.

I tried. They are indeed exported as markdown files. Neat!

I may use Notes more than tasks. But only as temporary place. If I’m already in browser, might as well capture it right there.

But later I’ll move it to logseq and push it to git.

There are other nifty features like web panels, which I still have not explored.

I wish there was a plugin or feature in Vivaldi that automatically closes the inactive tabs after fixed amount of time - like Arc browser and then I’ll make this one my default browser.

My default browser is still Firefox, for my banking, emails etc. ↩︎
So far I’ve installed only 2 extensions. KeepassXC and Bonjour. I also tried some “free vpn” extension that lets user connect to servers from other countries for 15 minutes (for free). I didn’t see the point. So I uninstalled it. ↩︎
Arc also had notes initially, the feature they have since removed ↩︎

`#[cfg]` attrib vs `cfg!` macro in Rust

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 19 May 2024 12:46:46 +0530

When I published my previous post on mastodon, Sebastian pointed out ¹ that using #[cfg] is better than cfg! macro.

Documentation explains that :

cfg!, unlike #[cfg], does not remove any code and only evaluates to true or false. For example, all blocks in an if/else expression need to be valid when cfg! is used for the condition, regardless of what cfg! is evaluating.

Thanks, Sebastian!

See this thread for the original discussion. ↩︎

Rust : Use println! only in Debug Build

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 17 May 2024 22:08:49 +0530

We all know we shouldn’t use print debugging, and yet we all do 😉 ¹

Jokes apart, when I’m still developing the code, I use the debugger where possible. But sometimes, I want to keep certain print statements to verify runtime behaviour, especially when rolling out new feature and when there are too many variations (some of them unknown) in incoming data.

I’m aware, logging is the right way to handle this (with loglevel set to debug or something), but it seems too much when developing toy projects.

I use logging in my project that needs to be “deployed”

Anyway, today I decided to learn if and how this could be done in rust.

Luckily, instead of spending hours, I asked Codeium coding assistant about this. It suggested that I wrap the print statements with debug assertion

if cfg!(debug_assertions) {
  println!("Running debug build);
}

Irrespective of the programming language. So console.log for JS and println! in rust are in the same category ↩︎

`Vec::with_capacity` in Rust

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 17 May 2024 11:46:15 +0530

At first, I assumed since we’ve declared the capacity upfront, it would be maximum capacity of the Vec

Turns out, since Vec is expected to shrink and grow, as needed, there is no maximum capacity for Vec

It just ensures that “sufficient” memory is allocated to the Vec, such that memory reallocation is not required.

On the other hand, if you need more that what you declared with with_capacity, you will get it, but there will need to be reallocation (of memory), so it will be inefficient.

I was surprised when the following code worked (I had expected panic when my_vec had more than declared capacity)

fn main() {
    let mut my_vector: Vec<i32> = Vec::with_capacity(1);
    println!("{:?}", my_vector);
    my_vector.push(1);
    my_vector.push(2);
    my_vector.push(3);
    my_vector.push(4);
    println!("{:?}", my_vector);
}

This code produced the following output

[]
[1, 2, 3, 4]

with_capacity is useful when you know upfront your memory requirement. This avoids reallocation. It provides an efficient operation when the programmer knows what to expect.

Conditional Compilation in Rust

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 16 May 2024 09:28:40 +0530

Today I learnt that certain rust code can be marked such that it is compiled only for specific platform.

This makes sense for low level libraries that provide platform-specific functionality that is not available on other platforms.

This is achieved by tagging the function with #[cfg(target_os = "xyz")]

Here xyz can be one of the following :

“windows”
“macos”
“ios”
“linux”
“android”
“freebsd”
“dragonfly”
“openbsd”
“netbsd”

Similar to target_os, here are other options :

target_feature
target_arch
target_family
target_env
target_abi
target_endian
target_vendor
target_pointer_width
target_has_atomic

~~Some~~ Most of these are obvious. For others which are not, read the :Rust documentation for the details.

You can now follow this blog from Fediverse

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 13 May 2024 22:24:05 +0530

Put @microblog.desipenguin.com@web.brid.gy in the search box.

Thanks to Bridgy.fed this site automatically gets it’s own mastodon account.

Following this account is like subscribing to the RSS feed (I think 😄)

Conventional Commits

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 02 May 2024 18:47:39 +0530

Few days ago, I heard about this on some podcast (maybe changelog ? 🤷‍♂)

I have been using similar notation for my commits - even for this blog¹ - but I did not know it is a specification.

The idea is that very first word of the commit message should indicate what sort of commit is it.

Most common ones are : fix, feat (To indicate bugfix and a feature)

Other useful ones are: docs, style, refactor, test

Then there is chore (catch all ? 😄)

I’ve used some of these at work as well.

As the website mentions, benefit of such style is that some tools can parse the git log to automatically generate the changelog.

Website also mentions, that

it’s not the end of the world if a commit lands that does not meet the Conventional Commits specification. It simply means that commit will be missed by tools that are based on the spec.

Since the commits are just addition or updates to markdown files, most of the tags are not used here. I only use Add and occasional Update. I do believe it is in the spirit of conventional commits 😄 ↩︎

rust can Divide by Zero

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 02 May 2024 18:36:45 +0530

At least for floating point numbers, it does not crash/panic! 🤷‍♂

fn main() {
    let x = 10.0;
    let y = 0.0;
    println!("{:?}", x/y);
}

This above code returns inf

But if we change the number to int, compiler catches this ¹ at shows the following error:

error: this operation will panic at runtime

This is a contrived example. Instead of static values, if these were passed at runtime, it would (should?) panic ↩︎

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 21:36:02 +0530

I got myself a new mobile phone after almost 5 years.

My old one is still going strong.

But there are no OS updates. I’m stuck at Android 10

Some random facts about the new phone - in no specific order

It is 3 times the price of the old one
It is 5G
- I don’t get 5G everywhere, but place where I did get 5G signal, I got 500MB+ download speed (as per speed test) 🤯
It has Wi-Fi calling. Hopefully, my calls won’t get dropped 🤞
- This was one of the main reasons everyone around me was asking me to upgrade 😄

Since the phone is 5 years newer, it is better - by default - in so many categories.

I’m planning to put custom ROM on the older phone and give it to my kids, for occasional game or for web search for their studies etc.

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 15:47:52 +0530

We have a bicycle which was unused for months.

I got it fixed (some oiling, check tyres, brakes etc.) for all of Rs. 90 😄

Today, I rode bicycle for the first time after decades.

Not for long. Maybe 15 minutes.

Since I was not used to it, my legs hurt 😄

But it felt great to ride a cycle after so many years.

Rust: Clone vs Copy

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 18:41:59 +0530

One of the strength of Rust is memory management. This also leads to compiler errors related to move or borrow When we assign an existing variable to new variable, two things can happen.

Either the data is copied - in that case we can use both old and the new variable without worry. ¹

Or data is moved - now we can only use the new variable, as the old variable is “out of scope”. But there is a way to access both the new and old variables. But in that case we have to explicit.

We need to copy the variable.

You may be familiar with concept of shallow copy Vs deep copy. clone in rust is same as deep copy. Here the entire data (String or struct) is copied rather than just the pointer.

Off course, cloning or deep copy means additional memory usage. If the data is huge, then be careful with cloning.

You can read detailed description about the memory management in the rust book ²

Scalar data types like number and characters are copied by default ↩︎
Memory management in Rust ↩︎

How to create IDE like experience in terminal using Zellij

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 10:11:46 +0530

(undocumented?) Zellij Keybindings

Undocumented, because these don’t show up in the default configuration, which shows (I assume) most useful key bindings. I had to look for these, and found them in Github discussions/issues.

Ctrl p d
- Ctrl p is for pane, but d after that (which I assume stands for down) is not documented.
- This creates a new terminal in horizontal split fashion ¹
Ctrl n - to reduce the size of the terminal.
- By default, it is split 50-50
- Usually, you’ll want more screen real estate for the editor (Helix in my case, but works for (n)vi(m) or emacs-in-terminal as wlel)

There is also a possibility of running a floating pane. This may be used for running a server process, which mostly one doesn’t need to look at constantly.

It also save screen real estate.

You can start a floating pane via Ctrl p w

Since this a toggle, new floating pane will be created if one does not exist. If one already exists, it will be toggled between hidden and shown.

Documented/default Ctrl p n creates a pane in vertical split fashion, to the right. ↩︎

error: Unknown binary 'rust-analyzer'

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 08:10:18 +0530

As I am setting up my ~~new~~ machine, I came across this error when emacs tried to use rust-analyzer

error: Unknown binary 'rust-analyzer' in official toolchain 'stable-x86_64-apple-darwin'.

As mentioned in this SO question, which rust-analyzer did not show any error.¹

Luckily, the same SO question also had the solution

I needed to explicitly install it via rustup component add rust-analyzer

Luckily, the comment in the accepted answer also explained why which works. It is a wrapper, which is created/installed by default, but platform specific binary needs to be installed explicitly. See this comment ↩︎

Format raw strings in rust

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 23:15:58 +0530

When refactoring code to make API call to Gemini, I learnt how to format raw strings in rust.

fn main() {
    let var1 = "test1";
    let formatted = format!(r#"var1 is: {}"#, var1);
    println!("{}", formatted);
}

This gives output as : var1 is: test1

If you want { in the output, then it needs to be escaped with additional { like:

fn main() {
    let var1 = "test1";
    let formatted = format!(r#"{{contents: {}}}"#, var1);
    println!("{}", formatted);
}

This gives output as : {contents: test1}

How to use .env files with your rust project

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 07:08:43 +0530

It is very important that secrets are stored in environment variables during the runtime.

During the development, it makes sense to use .env file. In my last project, there were probably 40+ variables in the .env. Although that project was in RoR the idea of .env itself is not new.

But for me, using .env with rust is new.

For my current (self) assignment, I needed to store an API Key. Hence, the use of .env file.

Luckily, there is a crate for that 😉 - called dotenv

To use it in your project :

cargo add dotenv
At earliest place in your code, add dotenv().ok();

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 20:56:20 +0530

Finally, my Macbook Pro is back!

As part of fixing, they put OS X Yosemite on it. 😭

Practically nothing worked. For some reason, Apple ID login also did not work. I checked on another machine, username/password was indeed correct.

There was no option to upgrade to macOS Monterey (last supported version on this hardware) from the App Store either.

App store listed macOS Sonoma, which I knew wasn’t supported, but tried it anyway. As expected, it said “Not supported” (Duh!)

Finally, resorted to Internet Discovery.

It offered to install macOS Monterey, as expected.

All is well.

(It took some time, downloading etc. But otherwise pretty uneventful)

Left Sage

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 23:15:42 +0530

Today was my last day at Sage (I joined Lockstep, which was acquired by Sage) I spent a little over two years working with the wonderful engineering team there. I learnt a lot from everyone on the team, and made some new friends (I knew one person before I joined) during my stay.

Most of the team was junior to me (in terms of number of years of experience.) But as I worked with them, I noticed that every single one of them were exceptional engineers. Without exception.¹

When I joined, I did not know Ruby/Rails.

I’m sad to say that even after 2 years, I can’t say I “befriended” RoR (like I did python) 😄

I also got opportunity to work on C# - but not enough time to feel comfortable.²

Contributions

Generic Webhook Framework, such that adding a new webhook was a matter of adding an entry in the lookup table and writing a Sidekiq Job
Resilient Webhook Framework, using Azure FunctionApp, Service Bus queue, Trigger Functions - Oh my!
I did some feature development as well, but that is specific to the product and may not be of the interest to those outside the organization.

Praise

Co-founder of the original company said “Mandar, you write very good code”
- I interepretted it as “readable” code with code comments explaining “why”
  - There was culture of “no code comments” and PR comments of the nature “Please add code comments” were ignored ¯_(ツ)_/¯
  - So code that could be understood on first read may have been “refreshing”
- Other possibility is that usually people with many years of experience, do not write code at all, so my code may have been unexpected (hence the praise)
QA team members praised me about me taking time to explain the feature to them.
- Unfortunately, QA teams are considered second class citizens (I doubt this is unique here 😞)
- Despite QA teams raising this issue several times, it hasn’t changed much.
People from other sqauds (teams working on same product but different focus, under different manager) thanked me for taking time to help them.

Reflection

Although it is not a revelation (to me) - I am not happy in MNC. There just seems to be a lot of overhead, red tape and lot of wastage of energy. When I joined Lockstep, it was a small organization which was growing. I think people were happy (I hope some still are)

I thrive in smaller teams with autonomy and shared goal.

I understand that no organization plans to be all these “less than optimal” things (I’m really struggling to find positive words 😄) but as the organization grows, there is bound be some inefficiencies. Teams must be broken into smaller units, adding levels of management and additional communications. Some of these could be addressed by willing managers within their “sphere of influence”³ but most things aren’t within their control.

Even few people who were “let go” due to performance reasons were real smart people with good engineering skills. I think if it was not fully remote setup, some of them could have done better. Sometimes juniors need a little hand-holding (not spoon feeding) and they can shine. Alas! That did not happen. ↩︎
After so many years, I feel confident that I can get a “working” code in most of the languages, even the ones I don’t know before starting the work, within couple of weeks. But I would rather learn the new language till I feel comfortable, and not be bogged down by the deadlines to deliver working code. ↩︎
One manager from other squad replaced the daily stand up with written updates. He shows up for the daily stand up, and anyone who is “stuck” can join and discuss/seek help. 👏 ↩︎

Why I switched to Zellij

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 22:33:15 +0530

I had tried switching to tmux for local shell sessions in past, but never truly understood why I might need it.

I extensively used tmux for remote sessions. But why might I need it locally ?

Then slowly I stopped using tmux and switched to wezterm which provided multiple tabs.

Fast-forward several years later.

Recently I came across Zellij. I decided to give it a go.

When I had tried tmux it took some time to get used to the keybinding.

Not so with Zellij¹. The keybindings are always shown just below the window. So learning them wasn’t difficult, plus one can always look it up. It is right there 😊

But that was not enough.

What blew my mind, and made me switch was that

It remembers sessions even after I’ve exited from the session.🤯

At first, it was confusing, but later I noticed how powerful that is.

It also remembered that I was running hx in that session when I exited.

When reattached (we can reattach even to dead session, unlike tmux) it showed Waiting to run 'hx' and options like Press Enter to run 'hx' and Esc to drop to shell

How cool is that. 😎

Configuring Zellij

Zellij switched to KDL recently (Earlier it used YAML like everyone else)

Creating initial file is easy.

mkdir ~/.config/zellij
zellij setup --dump-config > ~/.config/zellij/config.kdl

Since KDL is also a text format, updating it isn’t a problem.

The auto generated file comes with loads of comments and commented config

One can just uncomment appropriate sections and that is it.

TBH, I didn’t need to setup my config till I needed to set theme for Zellij

Define theme colors in the config.kdl file like shown here then specify the theme in the config file as theme "nord"

For now, I’m quite happy with Zellij.

Usually, I’ll have a few sessions defined one per project.

Any of the sessions can be easily detached, or exited (as well as restarted if/when required. So no need to keep them running, unless you really need to switch between projects.)

Zellij means tiles in some Arabic language ↩︎

How I generated 2000 parallel requests using nu-shell

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 23:25:40 +0530

At work, I need to load test new framework I had deployed.

Usually, I work with QA team. They use JMeter (with Azure Load test) for such task.

But today, the QA person was busy with other tasks, and I didn’t want to get blocked.

Since I am learning rust, (nu-shell is built in rust) I remembered that it may be possible to run parallel requests in nu-shell.

and it is!

The important feature is par-each ¹ which executes the command parallely.

http ² is built-in command for HTTP operations

1..2000 | wrap i |par-each { 
  (http post 'https://my.url/path?param=4' 
    --headers [Authorization 'Basic xxxx'] '' --full).status  
}

Read par-each documentation here ↩︎
http documentation ↩︎

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 22:38:56 +0530

My Macbook Pro won’t boot anymore :(

I was watching some Youtube videos in the evening, and then at night, it just became unresponsive.

Over the next few days, I tried various options.

Booted from external USB. Worked!

Tried Internet Recovery.

Turns out the SSD is recognised, but can’t be fixed/formatted/erased.

Looks like a hardware issue.

Clippy

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 10:49:48 +0530

Clippy is a linter for Rust programming language.

If you are annoyed by the compiler (~~shouting at~~ telling you how your code is wrong), wait till you install and use clippy 😄

Jokes apart, why I want to use clippy is it tells us about idiomatic rust and can autofix issues (if we tell it to do so)

Couple of fun facts I discovered :

First search result for clippy is not what I was looking for 😄 till I searched for rust clippy
clippy can not be installed via cargo install (As I tried initially)
- (As with rest of the rust ecosystem) there was a helpful error message with solution 😇

 error: Clippy is no longer available via crates.io

 help: please run `rustup component add clippy-preview` instead

Nu Shell

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 23:23:21 +0530

Earlier I wrote about various utilities written in rust. Nu shell is one of the most important of them (It is an entire shell after all, not just single utility)

Installing

Turns out I had installed nu-shell earlier, but via macports

and I had forgotten about macports (and nu shell)

Mysterious upgrade failure (Or so I thought)

When I installed nu-shell via brew I got the latest version, but nu kept invoking older version.

Little digging revealed, it was being invoked from /opt/local/bin, which is not normal location for brew (on Intel macs)

I tried unlinking and re-linking from brew, but did not help.

Mystery solved

That is when I somehow remembered that I may have installed it via port.

Removing port itself took a long time.

port kept telling me to selfupdate which kept failing due to permissions issue

finally I decided to remove everything including macports itself.

These instructions helped.

I still am unable to remove /opt/local/var/* - I keep getting Permission denied (I’ve given up, for now. May be next reboot will solve the problem)

Starship

So finally I got latest nu shell working. Turns out the prompt is ugly. But who customizes prompts these days when they can use starship (which works across shells - so same look and feel is available across shells)

The instructions were straight forward, but I kept getting error around let-env in the init.nu file.

Turns out I’m not the only one

To be fair, once you have a stable config, that is tweaked to your liking one does not keep updating the tools (At least, I don’t. That is why my emacs/doom is not updated for 6 months at a time. Same was the case with starship)

Anyway, problem identified is problem solved 😉

So now I have good looking prompt. I can start using nu shell.

Oxidise Your Life

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 12:04:00 +0530

This youtube video mentions the following tools:

exa
bat
zellij
mprocs
ripgrep
irust
bacon
cargo-info
ncspot
porsmo
speedtest-rs
rtx-cli

Of these I installed zellij, which is replacement for tmux (or screen)

I also installed mprocs, irust

I already have ripgrep

I had tried exa and bat in past, they are good but novelty item.

Installing bacon failed during the compile step :(

I’ve also installed nu-shell

I’ll write about nu-shell separately, after giving it enough time

100 Days of Rust : Day 9 (Testing)

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 22:01:26 +0530

I continued reading Command Line Applications in Rust

Learnt that testing is easy. Any function that has #[test] above it, will be found (across any files) and used by cargo test

Couple of interesting crates :

exitcode
- It has quite well defined exit codes. They come from FreeBSD
- I wish other languages / frameworks had something similar
proptest
- is a property testing framework
- Based on python’s Hypothesis
- I need to spend time actually trying this
human-panic
- Generates report file on panic
- Shows nice (if a bit long) message to the user, asking them to (optionally) email the report file to the developer 🤯

Things to explore:

Write code across files.
- So far my code is contained within src/main.rs 😄
Then move the tests in a separate files.

100 Days of Rust : Day 8

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 22:29:48 +0530

Today I started reading Command Line Applications in Rust

Even though I have not finished reading “the book”, I am (by now) familiar with enough rust code that reading this book was kinda refreshing.

Few important things I picked up :

{:?} in println! is called debug representation (quite useful for .. debugging 😄)
Custom data types can add support for {:?} for debugging and logging, one needs to add a #[derive(Debug) above their definition. (Not tried it yet)

I’m gonna convert my “Temparature Converter” assignment using the stuff I learnt in this book

100 Days of Rust : Day 7

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 09:15:53 +0530

Technically this may be more like day 8 or 9, cause I did read some stuff from the rust book in last few days, and made note here

Nothing improves your understanding better than doing

– Me 😄

I was trying accessing the individual fields in tuple struct using dot notation via the index

Since the rust book does not have an example of it, I used rust playground (Awesome resource BTW) and just printed stuff.

// struct Color(i32, i32, i32);
struct Point(i32, i32, i32);

fn main() {
    // let black = Color(0, 0, 0);
    let origin = Point(1, 2, 3);

    println!("{}", origin.2);
}

While this worked, I got the following long warning by the compiler

--> src/main.rs:2:14
  |
2 | struct Point(i32, i32, i32);
  |        ----- ^^^  ^^^
  |        |
  |        fields in this struct
  |
  = note: `#[warn(dead_code)]` on by default
help: consider changing the fields to be of unit type to suppress this warning while preserving the field numbering, or remove the fields
  |
2 | struct Point((), (), i32);
  |              ~~  ~~

It took me some time to get this. At first, I thought this was an error. (When I read carefully, I realized it is only a warning)

Turns out it was telling me about unused data 😄

It wasn’t clear to me (at least) 🤷‍♂

Then I printed all three fields, and the error went away 🎉

(and I learnt that indices are zero based - ha ha)

100 Days of Rust : Day 6 (Ownership)

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 16:46:03 +0530

When I started reading about Ownership, I was thinking

I have done C. I understand memory

But Rust book explains :

If you are familiar with systems programming, you might think of memory at a low level like “memory is an array of bytes” or “memory is the pointers I get back from malloc”. .. The low-level model is too concrete to explain how Rust works. Rust does not allow you to interpret memory as an array of bytes, for instance.

Reading further, I’m so glad rust does not allow “manual memory management” (like malloc and free in C)

Learnt about Cloning avoids Moves Useful when we need to reference the “original” data after it the ownership is moved

.clone create a copy (which is used to move the oownership,leaving the original intact)

Logseq : Take 2

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 22:48:42 +0530

I wrote about logseq almost two years ago and then I think when I switched job, I stopped using logseq.

When I updated macOS, I forgot to install it, and forgot about it overall (I started using denote - in Emacs for some time)

Recently when I started using obsidian while trying l learn more about it, I came across logseq again.

I tried it again (after 2 years)

I spent time learning basics (again)

This time I learnt about Properties

I installed some plugins.

Initially I installed too many.

Then removed them all. 😄

Now I have only 4 plugins.

Access Google Bard via API

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 18:07:51 +0530

Yesterday, I was trying to access Bard API via Rust

The task is WIP because :

I’m still learning Rust (Although on Day 5 I was able to access a URL from rust code)
I didn’t know how to access Bard API

It started with a Youtube video that:

Uses python code which uses Bard library
- Not sure if it is official one or third party one
- In either case it won’t be directly useful in rust code
Uses a hack to get session cookie from browser (which will expire sooner or later)

At that time, I didn’t know whether Google has made Bard API accessible via an API

Turns out, they have!

There used to be a waitlist - that URL is now 404

Instead https://makersuite.google.com/ takes you to https://makersuite.google.com/app/prompts/new_freeform

On the left panel, first item is Get the API Key

Select Develop in your own environment (Assuming you are doing this for personal project like myself)

Needless to say, copy the key and keep it safe.¹

They’ve listed the following as a sample. (Add your API key after key=)

curl \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"contents":[{"parts":[{"text":"Write a story about a magic backpack"}]}]}' \
  -X POST https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/gemini-pro:generateContent?key=

Enjoy!

Don’t commit to VCS by accident. Additional commit to remove it does not really make it “go away”. It is available in older versions 😄 ↩︎

100 Days of Rust : Day 5

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 07:40:56 +0530

I want to access Bard API via Rust, but it will take some time.

Here are the things I did today.

First, I tried (successfully) to access an URL via Rust code. ✅

I used the reqwest module.

I just added this dependency in my Cargo.toml and (like in other languages) the dependency hell was let loose 😄

67 other modules were added to the Cargo.lock!

I also learnt to use global variables in Rust.

I used const (Read the documentation here)

Obviously, it is not as straight forward.

See this flowchart

Here is the detailed article.

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 22:38:56 +0530

Due to death in my family, “100 days of Rust” is halted. I’ll continue it soon.

100 Days of Rust : Day 4

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 22:14:35 +0530

Started with (optional) assignment at the end of “Programming Concept” chapter : Convert temperature between Celsius and Fahreinheit. ¹

Since the algorithm itself is not part of the learning the language, I asked Google Bard about the formula.

It was nice working on some code after a while (Aside from work, I mean)

Once again, I realized that compiler is very helpful 😍

I started simple.

Breaking down functionality into smaller functions. (Makes me think of unit testing them. Note to self : Read up about unit testing in rust)

I learnt about handling default case in match. (Once again, I asked Bard)

Why did I need default case ? Cause the compiler told me that I need one 😄

I also learnt :

that unused/ignored return value can be stored in _ (like python and ruby)
numeric data types like integer and floats can not be mixed. If you want result in float, everything must be float. Respect!

Code available on github ↩︎

100 Days of Rust : Day 3

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 21:46:17 +0530

Today I finished Functions and Control Flow etc.

While these are not new “concepts” for me, one always learns something new when learning a new language.

Two things I learnt:

I liked the fact that rust does not evaluate anything other than boolean as truthy like both python and ruby
loop can have labels, and can be used with break and continue to indicate where should the execution continue

100 Days of Rust : Day 2

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 19:39:37 +0530

Today I started with Data Types

While most of it is intuitive, it is useful to go over the documentation.

e.g. For tuple, I had expected that to access specific index, syntax would be mytuple[0]. mytuple.0 was not I had expected.

I also tried to print the tuple.

In the process, I learnt about pretty printing only from the compiler errors.

The compiler errors are so descriptive 😍

Here is the code in case you are interested

fn main() {
    let x: (i32, f64, u8) = (500, 6.4, 1);
    println! ("{:#?}",x)
}

100 Days of Rust : Day 1

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 23:15:59 +0530

Today I finished the Number guessing game

During the early part of the code, my mind started thinking “How will comparing string input from the user, work with a number? 🤔” (💪 of having gone through such issues numerous times over the years)

Of course, it was explained later.

I was a bit disappointed that the code paniced upon entering non-number 😞 especially after the expect clause.

Turns out that is expected behaviour.

The code will still panic, but expect helps the (end) user with slightly better error message

I also made changes in the loop section, that led to an error, which I was able to resolve (more based on the intuition, rather than logic 😅)

Initially I used nvim ( I was mostly copying the code from the book, and/or making minor edits) but soon realized that helix editor is better suited for rust development.

So set it up.

Getting LSP working took tinkering with languages.toml , but got it working!

100 Days of Rust : Day 0

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 23:02:03 +0530

In this new year, I have decided to learn rust

All my recent experience has been in dynamic languages (90% python, 10% ruby)

But I started my software development career in C, and did that for probably 10 years. So I’m not new to compiled languages.¹ But things have changed a lot (for the better) in these years.

Additionally, rust is getting a lot of attention from bigwigs like MS.

On Day 0, I set up the rust tool chain and went through the Hello world program.

Nothing much, but at least got started.

I came across some youtube video explaining rust to JS programmers, and it started with “Program needs to be compiled before it is executed 😄” ↩︎

Obsidian.nvim plugin

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 21:05:55 +0530

After using vim keybindings inside Obsidian, I came across obsidian.nvim plugin that makes working with Obsidian from inside Neovim pleasurable.

This is definitely better than vim keybindings in Obsidian ¹

But I had not not used neovim in a long time. After I upgraded to Monterey, I had not installed neovim again.

So getting it (as in neovim) was a bit of work. But I had my old config saved, so at least I didn’t have to start from the ground floor. (On the other hand, having old/out dated config could be worse than starting from the ground floor 😄)

Then getting the plugin working (with my Neovim from scratch config) was some more work.

But I got it working.

Getting :ObsidianToday working in nvim was a great feeling

Other than evil-mode in Emacs, vim emulation in every single editor leaves a lot to be desired. ↩︎

Obsidian has vim keybindings

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 23:05:59 +0530

Today I discovered that Obsidian supports vim style keybindings out of the box.

But it knows that vim is not for everyone.

So it checks whether you know what you are doing (when you enable the setting, which is OFF by default) by having you enter a command in a pop up 😄

TBH, one can easily find out that command and “cheat”. On the other hand, if you don’t know vim, and still want to turn on the setting (by cheating) - you deserve what you get 😄

In case you don’t know, you can enable it from the Editor section of the settings.

So far most things I use (from muscle memory) have worked so far.

Two other things related to using vim style editing in Obsidian are :

Turn ON the line numbering.
Install and use community plugin named Relative Line numbering

I’ve also installed MAKE.md plugin (more about it later) which adds / commands for easy editing.

When using vim keybindings, it works only in insert mode (as it should) Otherwise / invokes search, as it does in vim

Obsidian

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 23:45:22 +0530

Obsidian is not new to me. I come across it from time to time, but never paid much attention.

That changed when I migrated my PKM site to use Obsidian-zola.

Technically, it use Zola, and has nothing to do with Obsidian (for Publishing)

The “source” is maintained in Obsidian, but it is just collection of markdown files, which can easily be maintained outside.

But then I got Obsidian desktop installed. I used it for making minor edits to markdown files.

But not much.

Recently, I came across Obsidian plugin called Advanced Slides, and down the rabbit hole I went 😄

There are (as of this writing) 1300+ community plugins. Lot of them (statisticially speaking) must be unmaintained.

So when installing a community plugin, I check last updated date. If it is > 1 year, it is probably stale.

Something that is updated within months, is better.

I came across some good ones (I think)

Currently, I’m exploring Plugin called ExcaliBrain.

And before I forget, Happy New Year 2024 to you and your family.

My first post of 2024

New Car

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 00:02:43 +0530

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.

My sister-in-law’s family left (their 5 year old got cranky after waiting around so much)

This is our second car after 15+ years.

Technology has changed a LOT.

Our version (or may be all cars these days) has digital dashboard.

When we were refuelling (first thing after we got out of the dealership premises) the dashboard showed animation of fuel getting filled (liquid level increasing) rather than mechanical indicator going up (in our old car)

This time we went to automated transmission

Last time I had driven one was in US, about 20+ years ago

and it was a norm there.

My car in US had all the features (except digital display and phone pairing) that we have now, including cruise control.

Our model has key less entry and push button start.

So there is no real “key”.

It is just a electronic key fob that was remote open functionality.

Car talks a lot 😄

Seriously.

Due to all the newness (Although I didn’t fumble switching to auto transmission) one is still cautious/extra alert.

and the car wants to talk to you.

I was able to ignore the audio alerts, still…

When we reached home, I though I turned off the car (There is no key), and as I was getting out, car started shouting key not found

What?

Then I pressed the start/stop button once more, little harder.

That was the “power off” (to borrow the term from computing)

Here is what our car looks like, if you are curious

M-x butterfly

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 22:39:22 +0530

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/..

So initially the instructions did not work, until I opened the real file.

and then it worked!

Now I wanted more.

I have had centaur logo on my Doom dashboard for some time now. I changed that to that of this butterfly via the following line in config.el of my Doom emacs

(setq fancy-splash-image (concat doom-user-dir "misc/Mx-butterfly.png"))

The original image is HUGE.

So first attempt did not work, until I resized the image to 230x230 (with resolution of 144)

Butterfly on the Dashboard, butterfly as the icon!

Here is an obligatory XKCD comic

Domain Expired : Moved to Netlify DNS

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 09:32:44 +0530

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.

Once I renewed the domain, using Netlify DNS was relatively straight forward. Once all sites were “transferred”, I deleted all the DNS records from Digital Ocean

Bruno: Local-first Postman Alternative

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 23:50:07 +0530

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

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 21:43:12 +0530

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.

As a lot of us know, we start looking at Reels, “just for 10 minutes” and when we look at the watch, about an hour has passed. I had heard of doom scrolling, but did not know it first hand till Instagram.

At times, I could observe (as if I am an observer, watching myself) that I “decide” to stop, and yet after 10 minutes, I’m still scrolling.

No more. 🤞

When I mentioned this to my family, my 10 year old was worried. “What will happen to the pictures you uploaded ?” I told him that I merely uninstalled the app, not remove my account. So I can access my account whenever I want. ↩︎
According to Mahabharata,Abhimanyu learned to break into chakravyuha from Krishna while still inside his mother’s womb. However, he was unable to hear how to exit the chakravyuha, and this incomplete knowledge later contributed to his demise. ↩︎

Emacs Bedrock : First impressions

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 10:31:12 +0530

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.

But there are so many thing one does other than editing the text.

e.g. Opening a file, switching buffers.

I’m so much used to mnemonic keybindings (Doom, but spacemacs before that) that I never learnt native emacs keybindings.

While I could learn emacs keybindings, I don’t want to :)

Should I ? 🤔

Use different init directory in emacs 29+

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 09:41:43 +0530

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.

Refer to this commit ↩︎

Spellcheck in Vi/m

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 12:48:11 +0530

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.

Yet having built-in spell checker is always nice.

Works with vim as well. ↩︎

Markdown vs Orgmode

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 09:01:58 +0530

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. I was surpised that even Azure git supports Markdown (So does gitlab, probably bitbucket as well, it as been a while since I used bitbucket.)

I am aware github renders org formatted files, but I am not sure if supports org syntax in code review comments.

As the original thread started, obsidian natively supports markdown (org mode supported via third party plugin)

Then there is hugo, blog engine that powers all my blogs. Yes, I’m aware hugo supports org-mode, but markdown is native.

Then there is aptly named Markdown Here - allows you to use markdown syntax in most of the browsers. I use this wit gmail For the most part, my emails do not need any markup, but once in a while, I may want to emphasis certain word/phrase. Markdown to the rescue.

Others tools I use that support Markdown : Telegram, Elk (Mastodon client)

Coming to Emacs ecosystem, I currently use denote for my notes. It supports markdown (I think org is default option - understandably, but it also natively supports markdown) This is very useful. Lot of times, I can just remove identifier from the frontmatter (rename the file if required) and publish it as-is on my blog.

Argument against markdown is that it is not a “standard”, but the way I use it I really just need syntax for italics, bold, headers and bullets. I think that is the lowest common denominator. Works the same everywhere.

I don’t use GFM (Github flavoured markdown) or any other extensions. So I’m safe (I think)

Respect and Authority

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 08:36:20 +0530

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.

This does not last long though.

Sooner or later you leave the school, move out of your house or change jobs.

Respect on the other hand is earned.

You may respect leaders in their field. You may “follow” them on social media platforms, read their books/blogs/articles, listen to their podcasts.

Not because anyone told you to. (Ok, sometimes you read a book because an authority figure told you to, but it does not have same gains)

Because you respect them, you are willing to at least try to follow their advise.

That is why I prefer the term “Respected in their field” over “Leading authority in the field”

I will try to gain respect of my colleagues and my family ¹

Third reason why you obey/follow someone is because of fear . Sometimes you fear someone because of the authority inferred by someone. Sometimes it maybe because you are trying to avoid confrontation.

But sooner or later you’ll try to get out of it.

Authority is transient, respect is long lasting

Reason I wrote this is because during my morning meditation, it dawned on me that I have neither. I need to do better. ↩︎

Rails is not ruby

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 19:44:55 +0530

I had written earlier how learning the language before the framework is more important.

It is important to know which parts is part of the language, and which comes from the framework.

This becomes more important when there are defacto web frameworks (rails in ruby, django in python, phoenix in elixir.. maybe more) For a newcomer who is learning both the language and framework together (or back to back, or worse learning the language via the framework tutorials :shudders: )

Here is an example. to_i converts a string into an Integer

irb(main):002:0> "5".to_i.class
=> Integer
irb(main):004:0> Integer.seconds
(irb):4:in `<main>': undefined method `seconds' for Integer:Class (NoMethodError)

Here is similar example of what I was trying to do

irb(main):002:0> sleep(ENV.fetch('SOME_DURATION', 30).to_i.seconds)
(irb):2:in `<main>': undefined method `seconds' for 30:Integer (NoMethodError)

But it works in rails console 🤷‍♂

$ rails c
Top level ::CompositeIO is deprecated, require 'multipart/post' and use `Multipart::Post::CompositeReadIO` instead!
Top level ::Parts is deprecated, require 'multipart/post' and use `Multipart::Post::Parts` instead!
Chewy console strategy is `urgent`
Loading development environment (Rails 6.1.7.4)
[1] pry(main)> sleep(ENV.fetch('SOME_DURATION', 30).to_i.seconds)
=> 30
[2] pry(main)>

Luckily, I was looking at this for sleep syntax

Otherwise, I would have spent a lot of time, confused.

Trying Macports

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 10:55:47 +0530

I was aware of macports for quite some time (since I moved to macOS about 8 years ago) But most of the tools seem to be suggesting brew install, so I didn’t give macports a second thought.

8 years later, my MBP is old, and soon will not be supported by Apple and brew

While I upgraded to macOS monterey, this is going to be last version supported on this hardware.

Someone on mastodon suggested macports are supported better on older versions of macOS

So today I decided to give it a try.

I still have brew packages (everything so far) and I’ll be using macports side-by-side.

First impressions:

Uses GUI installer, as opposed to how brew installs itself. Considering that port itself is to be used via the CLI, GUI for installer seems odd.
Requires sudo to install the packages, since it requires write permission to /opt/local

Other than these, it is too early to have any other impressions 😄

(The first package I installed in nushell - something else to try out)

Interesting Netlify Build Problem

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 13:01:04 +0530

After build problems with my PKM site, today I ran into another problem with this site.

What puzzled me was Deploy showed Build step failing but no useful error (other than exit code 2 - which does not help much)

But in the process of debugging, I learnt ¹ about the environment variable NETLIFY_BUILD_DEBUG (set to true when needed) It did not help 😞

I also upgraded hugo version (which is another environment variable) in the process.

That did not either.

For some reason, I looked inside Deploying stage- which was shown as Complete in green font with a tick mark next to it. ()Building step OTOH was shown as Failed in red font with cross mark next to it.)

Deploying had following error in it

Invalid filename ’tags/c#/page/1/index.html’. Deployed filenames cannot contain # or ? characters

There you go. (This was not a problem locally though 🤷‍♂)

I changed the tag from c# to c-sharp and all was well 😄

Relevant part of the Support Guide ↩︎

Pass request specific context to Sidekiq

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 10:40:53 +0530

In a multi-tenant rails application, usually we extract the tenant, before we process it further. Sometimes, the process requires us to process the data in background (via Sidekiq) and because the background job also needs to query the DB, it also needs to set tenant.

Turns out, we can pass “some” data from the controller to the sidekiq job via ActiveSupport::CurrentAttributes While, sidekiq may need to set the tenant again (for more DB queries) but one can save at least one query (to find out the account itself)

Apart from the tenant example, controller may have more stuff in the context, which one can pass to Sidekiq.

You can read the original article here

Migrating PKM Site : Updates

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 16:38:37 +0530

As mentioned here and later here I recently moved PKM from Dendron to obsidian-zola

The original code seems abadoned (No updates in little over a year). I understand this since it is likely built for personal use, and it works for them (FWIW, the demo site itself is not updated for exactly same duration)

Turns out people forked it and improved it.

At first I tried this fork, renamed as obsidian-zola-plus (as it made it better than the original) This one seemed active (updated little over 2 months ago. Yet 2 PRs are unmerged 🤷‍♂)

But for some reason, my builds started failing on netlify. Problem did not appear related to this fork, as things worked well locally.

That is when I came across this one

It does not carry either Obsidian or Zola in the name (But repo mentions it)

What I liked is that they got rid of the landing page, which did not serve any purpose. (Just showed some fancy buttons and clever title)

Rename File in Emacs

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 06:07:00 +0530

First impression people have is that Emacs is an editor. So in an editor one should just save as to different name/path. ¹

But save as is different from renaming a file. save as creates a copy of the file with a different name/path. So one has two files with old and new paths.

But rename leaves just one file at thenew path.

Older versions of Emacs (< Emacs 26) did not have this functionality built-in So either one had to use dired or people wrote their own functions.

But now (rather from emacs 26 onward) has this built-in via M-x rename-file (and there is delete-file as well)

Yes, I know one can rename (or delete) the file in VSCode as well :) ↩︎

Read from Dead Letter Queue

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 08:31:31 +0530

As mentioned in the earlier post,

at work I was “strongly encouraged” to use Azure Service Bus, instead of RabbitMQ Unfortunately

SDK has FormatDeadLetterPath functionality but it is not available to HTTP REST API ¹

Append /$DeadLetterQueue to the queue name.²

Refer to this SO comment

Readers would remember that since Ruby is not officially supported by MS, we had to resort to using REST API to access the Azure Service Bus functionality. ↩︎
It has to be exactly as it is with capitalization and all. Took me some time to realize that. MS Docs refer to it in all-lower-case, which does not work. ↩︎

New PKM Site

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 18 Jun 2023 17:01:52 +0530

Finally migrated my PKM from Dendron to Obsidian-Zola

Things I needed to do were :

Remove Dendron specific frontmatter
[In Progress] Restructure flat file names that were like Dev.DB.mysql.md to Development/Databases/mysql.md
Pushed this branch as main
Make main as default and protected branch
Unprotect master
Renamed old master as dendron (just in case)- without unprotecting old master I could not rename it.
Remove Dendron specific settings from netlify. Since this time there is netlify.toml so no additional settings needed.

I would say it was pretty smooth transition 😄

Considering migrating PKM Site

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 11:14:04 +0530

My PKM is currently based on Dendron

Main appeal of Dendron was local-first. At the same time, it indeed was loosely tied to VSCode editor.

Over the years, they had a command line tool to create new notes. Still, its strength always was as a VSCode plugin

Then today, I came across Obsidian-Zola

It splits the task of taking notes and publishing it.

Obsidian for note taking
Zola for publishing

What I liked about it is Search functionality (To be fair, my current PKM build on Dendron also has it)

I had heard of Obsidian, but never committed to it because publishing is a paid option (Also not local-only option any more, I think) I may not even use Obsidian app to note taking (Or maybe I will. too soon to comment)

Dendron

❌ (Mostly) VSCode extension
❌ Uses UUID in the URL when published. This makes it harder
❌ No good theme support
✅ Hierarchical notes taking, and publishing
- A note with filename as dev.db.pg.psql will be displayed like a tree, just based on the file name alone.
- I miss this in Obsidian+Zola

Zola

✅ Obsidian-Zola supports both Light and Dark themes (which Dendron does not)
✅ Zola itself has decent themes support (which I don’t need right now, but could be useful in the future)

For now, I’m migrating my notes from Dendron. What this really means is:

Remove the frontmatter - which is Dendron specific
Delete Empty files. These are required for the hierarchical note taking/publishing.
Rename Notes, so that titles show up as I want, rather than auto-camelcased-from-the-filename 😄
- So far I don’t know how to add frontmatter, so that filenames are separate from the title

I also ran into problem when running this locally on macOS obsidian-export binary shipped in linux specific. I replaced that with this

Emacs Glasses Mode

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 15:22:44 +0530

Now that I’m working on .NET and C#, I enabled csharp-mode in Doom Emacs. While exploring minor modes related to csharp-mode, I came across Glasses minor mode.

Here is the EmacsWiki page.

TL;DR:

The default setting is to separate the Capped bits with an underscore, so EmacsIsStudly shows as Emacs_Is_Studly.

I too, prefer to see the code as-is, but it is good to know that Glasses mode exists. I can see it being useful.

.NET Package Management

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 06:23:53 +0530

I recently started writing C# code at work. While I can read and understand the sample code (and modify partially per my requirement) I still trip up by new-ness (to me) of the ecosystem.

So while I intuitively understand that using is equivalent of require in Ruby (or import in python), I didn’t know which ones are “standard library” and which ones are not.

The sample code worked with standard library, but writing to Azure Service bus requires external library. Just adding using Azure.Messaging.ServiceBus is not enough. One also needs to install the package.

.NET has packaging system called NuGet, but irrespective of the name, there is intuitive dotnet command line program to manage the packages.

I’ve added the TL;DR version of the commands on my PKM

Search for dotnet (I can share the direct link here, but since Dendron URLs contain note-ids which are UUIDs, they are likely to go out-of-sync, hence searching is better.)

Microsoft's Confusing (or Incorrect?) Documentation

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 07:21:09 +0530

At work, I’ve been using REST API to connect to Azure Service Bus because officially Microsoft does not support Ruby SDK (It is retired since 2015)

The documentation related to accessing Azure Service Bus via REST API is very limited, and at time difficult to use.

e.g. This documentation about How to unlock a message in the (Azure Service Bus) queue mentions this URL pattern to be used for the REST API call :

http{s}://{serviceNamespace}.servicebus.windows.net/{queuePath}/messages/{messageId|sequenceNumber}/{lockToken}

I was not sure what is &#124 is. It turns out to be | (Vertical bar) sometimes used to indicate or

So it may mean use either messageId or sequenceNumber. But they could have just explicitly mentioned so.

The example is as follows :

PUT https://your-namespace.servicebus.windows.net/HttpClientSampleQueue/messages/31907572-1647-43c3-8741-631acd554d6f/7da9cfd5-40d5-4bb1-8d64-ec5a52e1c547?timeout=60 HTTP/1.1

So it is unclear that they are using only messageId (sequenceNumber is an Integer that looks like 1,2,3… etc.)

Also, timeout is not documented (except in the example)

Another variation that uses topics and subscription, (and example) mentioned |HTTP/1.1 , but I’m not sure what that is. Also, if they can use | here, why not earlier ?

I had a lot of heartache chasing this.

Finally, using only messageId worked.

But I’m still unsure then why is there sequenceNumber

Changing Emacs Look-N-Feel

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 10:14:14 +0530

I’ve been using nano emacs theme with minemacs I got bored today, and wanted to try something new.

I’m trying circadian.el
- modus-operandi during the day
- doom-tokyo-night during the night

Iosevka font (Have not settled on exact variation)
Also trying org-modern but I use denote - so I’m not sure whether it matters

Language Before Framework

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 16:44:52 +0530

Several years ago, I came across a quote¹ about how learning python via Django. The author said that if you don’t properly know python, you may not understand what is Django specific and what is not.

FWIW, even after working with python, I never used Django in any of my main project. But I did learn python first before the frameworks.

Fast forward to few days ago. I am working on Ruby code to read from Azure Service Bus.

I have been working on rails project for a while now, and (indirectly) learned ruby via rails.

In rails, I am used to checking for nil via .present? and/or .blank? Turns out, both are provided by Rails (ActiveSupport)

Ruby only provides nil? and empty? (For Arrays, Hashes and Sets)²

There is a difference between knowing the path and walking it

-Morpheus ³

For some reason, original post is unavailable. This is the link via Wayback machine. ↩︎
nil?, empty?, blank? in Ruby on Rails ↩︎
Knowing the path ↩︎

Ameba: Rubocop for Crystal Language

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 21:58:21 +0530

Ameba seems like quite mature linter for Crystal language. As I start my first real world code in Crystal language, the real tools are very useful. (Side note: I didn’t write any non-real-world crystal code. I’m not sure it helps. REPL sessions are not code. they don’t count)

It automatically uses built-in formatter in the --fix mode.

There is also awesome emacs integration as well. Check ameba.el

AMQP Versions

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 16 May 2023 21:59:55 +0530

As I had mentioned earlier, at work I was “strongly encouraged” to use Azure Service Bus, instead of RabbitMQ (which was the technology I had suggested.)

RabbitMQ has good Ruby support. I had chosen Sneakers (Which uses bunny under the hood)

Since Azure Service Bus also supports AMQP, I was trying to see if we can use these libraries with Azure Service Bus.

But connection itself wouldn’t work. I kept getting FrameTypeError

After a lot of head-scratching and searching, a colleague pointed me to this discusion

AMQP 1.0 is not a “later version” of AMQP 0-9-1, it is a completely different protocol, despite the name and (in theory) the same working group that developed it. Bunny is an AMQP 0-9-1 client.

🤦‍♂

Azure Service Bus supports AMQP 1.0 while RabbitMQ supports AMQP 0-9-1 🤷‍♂

While RabbitMQ can support 1.0 via plugin, bunny (client) does not.

So we could not use bunny/sneakers (my first choice) to connect with Azure Service Bus

Devnagari

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 14 May 2023 12:11:06 +0530

ह्याच्या आधी मी एक micropost देवनागरीत लिहिली होती, नेहेमीप्रमाणे मी ती हेलिक्स मधे लिहीली पण त्यात थोड्या चुका झाल्या होत्या.

हेलिक्स टर्मीनल एडिटर असल्यामुळे असेल कदाचित 🤔

नंतर मी ती मार्कडाउन फाइल bbedit मधे उघडून दुरुस्त केली.

macOS मधे देवनागरी लिहिण्यासाठी मराठी keyboard च्या ऐवजी Devnagari - QWERTY वापरा. मराठी keyboard शिकण्यापेक्षा transliteration सोपे आहे.

Used Python After Long Time

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 12 May 2023 13:36:14 +0530

Today I wrote (OK, copy/pasted sample code and modified) python after more than a year. (Is it a year or an year - confusing. I think either works)

I had to start from installing python.

Why did I use python ?

At work, we are trying to connect to Azure Service Bus over AMQP. Ruby is not officially supported by MS anymore.

Python is.

But we wanted to try non-azure client. So went with qpid-proton (which also has Ruby version, but I was unable to get it even installed - on macOS - after struggling a lot)

Python sample code worked - but only because of this article.

John de Havilland: God bless you for mentioning allowed_mechs options specifically. 🙏

How to track subtasks in Org

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 11 May 2023 07:24:47 +0530

Continuing from previous post ..

Turns out there is a specific way to handle subtasks in org-mode.

I used something like following - which did not work

* TODO Main task [0/3]
- [x] Subtask 1
- [ ] Subtask 2
- [ ] Subtask 3

As we can see, I expected to see [1/3] but I continue getting [0/3]

Correct way to do this is :

* TODO Main task [1/3]
  ** DONE Subtask 1
  ** TODO Subtask 2
  ** TODO Subtask 3

With the correct syntax, I don’t even need to C-c C-c to update / in the main task. As soon as any subtask chnages from TODO to DONE (or vice versa) the header automatically changes 🎉

Org for TODOs

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 10 May 2023 06:37:18 +0530

Yesterday, I started using org-mode for tracking my TODO items.

I had tried it a long time ago. Org is very powerful, and it can list the TODO items across multiple files.

But that gets (at least in past) overwhelming.

So I started simple.

I started with setting org-agenda-file to ~/org/work.todo

That is the only file I’m tracking my work items.

Then I use org-agenda to list all the open items.

When done, I mark them as DONE using org-todo command.

I also added subtasks and added [/] at the end of the main task. Taking the cursor to / and pressing C-c C-c updates the list to something like [1/5] depending on how many are done.

The subtasks use checkboxes like - [ ] for not done, and - [x] for done subtasks.

~~For some reason, updated tasks aren’t updating the [/] correctly.~~

~~But for now, I’m ignoring that.~~ This is now fixed

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 10 May 2023 06:26:20 +0530

मला व.पु. काळे ह्यांच्या कथा आवडतात कारण त्यात कथा आणि उपदेश हयाचा चांगला balance असतो. नुसता उपदेश थोडा बरा वाटतो, पण नंतर bore होतं हयाच मुळे मला रिचर्ड बाखचं लेखन सुदधा आवडतं

I like Va. Pu. Kale’s stories because it has great balance of the story and philosophy. Just philosophy is OK for a while, but too much of it can get boring. I like Richard Bach’s writing for the same reason

Verified Blog on Mastodon

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 08 May 2023 12:40:48 +0530

My mastodon account is now verified with green tick 😄

I already had a link to my Mastodon account in the footer of this blog for quite some. But did not have rel=me which I added today.

I also did not have a link to this blog from mastodon account - which I added just now.

As a result, now I have green check mark 😄

E/N Style Blog

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 04 May 2023 21:49:05 +0530

TIL that this is an E/N style blog

I didn’t know that it was 😄

E/N stands for Everything and Nothing

The content of this site means everything to the publisher (me) But it may mean nothing to some of the users (at some of the times)

Quoting from the origin site

The website’s author covers a myriad of topics. It’s not narrowly focused. The author writes about everything or at least everything that’s important to the author. The site might contain something useful for anyone who visits.

So at some point, it may mean nothing to you - the reader.

Yet, you are reading this post.

So I thank you 🙇🏽‍♂️

Trying Denote for Note Taking

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 04 May 2023 07:01:29 +0530

I’ve been using org-roam for some time for my note taking. One of the practical problem is I’m used to Markdown so much, that switching to org syntax does not come naturally to me.

The other day, I had to look the syntax for begin_src - which is just 3 ticks in markdown.

So I checked to see if there are note taking packages in emacs that support taking notes in markdown, and thus I came across denote

To my surprise, the frontmatter used by markdown-yaml filetype in denote, is very close to the frontmatter used by hugo SSG. (Denote has an extra identifier which is not there in hugo.)

So here is what I did after above was written as a “note” in Denote I copied the file which has following components

timestamp
title
tags

So original filename looked like 20230504T070129--trying-denote__emacs.md

I copied the file to the content/post/ folder and renamed it to retain just the title.

When previewed with local hugo server, it worked flawlessly 🎉

I removed the identifier attribute (even though it worked with it, doesn’t mean I should keep it)

I plan to add a tag blog in denote - which I’ll remove when I move the file.

I have not explored denote much (at all?) but the first impression is good.

Crystal Language: C Like Performance, Ruby Like Syntax

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 04 May 2023 06:27:00 +0530

I’ve been intrigued by Crystal Programming language for some time.

I’ve been programming in Ruby for almost an year now (Mostly Rails, which I can’t say I like - too much magic)

TBH, speed of interpreted language has not been an issue (I worked in python for quite some time before Ruby) but Crystal also comes with statically inferred types. Since it is a compiled language - bunch of errors maybe caught at compile time, rather than at run-time.

Some possible downsides of new language is that ecosystem is not as mature as languages like python and ruby that has been around for 20 years or so.

But Crystal is now at 1.8, so it is definitely a mature language.

I’m really excited.

I’ve already created an entry in my PKM

Bullshit Jobs

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 02 May 2023 13:37:09 +0530

Bullshit Jobs are meaningless jobs. Jobs which if taken away, won’t matter to anyone (Maybe except to the person who is/was in that position)

While responding to a listener question, DHH mentioned ¹ that it is actually a book, based on a study of such jobs.

He mentioned that BigTech ^TM hires talent so that their competition can not hire the same person, even if the hiring company does not really need the highly talented individual. (Or have enough/great work to fulfill such a person)

Sometimes I feel like that in my current role. 🤔 (The Pay is Good ^TM though 😉) It is not like I’m twiddling thumbs or bored to death. But unlike some of my previous roles, I wonder if it would matter if I were not there. Would they need to replace me by another individual, or would it be better not to have anyone in my current role.

Rework Podcast Listener Questions Part 2 ↩︎

Set Dendron After Os Upgrade

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 01 May 2023 08:09:45 +0530

Today I set my PKM project on the laptop, a little over a month after I upgraded the OS

I just had to clone the repo.

Since this was a new repo cloned, I had to set the user.email and user.name git configurations.

It is good that git reminds me of that, and also informs me to amend the commit with --reset-author param. How nice!

For the curious, I added this entry

Be Better Than You Were Yesterday

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 08:41:34 +0530

Few of the quotes from this¹ interview, Danny Meyers

On why someone is motivated (From sports)

Likes to beat others ² - Muhammad Ali
Hates to lose - John McEnroe
Beat own record - Usain Bolt

Every day is an opportunity to be better than you were yesterday Perfection is stupid, receipe for unhappiness [paraphrased]

Be a 51 percenter.

Of total 100 “marks” - 49% are for the technical skills required for the job and other 51% are for “How did you make everyone else feel while doing it?”

In the context of restaurant industry, “others” mainly mean customers, but it also includes your coworkers as well.

He also talks about “working for free, to learn the craft” At one point, he had to pay to learn (as opposed to getting paid less, or no pay) in an internship (like situation)

Entire interview is great, if you wish to listen, the link in the footnotes.

Interview with Danny Meyer ↩︎
I assume beat as in I beat him in the game of chess, not physical violence. In case of Ali, it could also mean later, due to the sport :) ↩︎

Magit fixed

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 14:45:02 +0530

As I wrote earlier, I was unable to use magit because of the third party issue. Doom fixed it within hours (bigger community)

But minmacs also fixed ¹ it (only one person)

I had to follow a slightly complex set of instructions, but I’m glad it all worked out in the end.

I will continue to use Minemacs on my personal machine. Working in markdown is pleasure in minemacs. I want to get robe working with minemacs, and codium and chatgpt

robe already works with Doom (hence I’ll continue using it for work) codium does NOT work with doom (apparently - per Telegram group)

Minemacs fix ↩︎

Back to Doom : For work

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 10:39:39 +0530

I updated Minemacs few days ago, and it broke magit 😱 ¹

I had suspected that it is not problem with Minemacs

But I can’t have magit broken, so on my work machine I switched (back) to Doom FWIW, the issue is already fixed on Doom ²

This time I noticed doom now installs itself under ~/.config/emacs rather than ~/.emacs.d I also updated my init.el and config.el

Now that I’m back, all my muscle memory started kicking in. Also robe is much better for working in Ruby/Rails - goto definition works a lot of times 😄

I never got it to work with solargraph 😞

I have still kept minemacs on my personal machine (I’m editing this in minemacs) The upstream issue will get fixed eventually, and updating the package will resolve the issue.

CPR for Work

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 18:21:40 +0530

I came across this in the 1thing podcast ¹

C-P-R stands for Communication, Planning and Resources

Nick mentions that how we sort the laundry into separate drawers so that when we need, we can easiy find socks in their drawer, rather than looking for then in a pile of clothes.

Similarly, at work if team members know where to look for something, it would save them time in the long run (even though it feels like it takes time to do that initially)

Another example : It might take an hour to fix a leaky pipe, and takes just minutes to wipe the water from the floor, but these minutes add up, and in long run you would be spending more than an hour, if the pipe is not fixed.

Coming back to “where do I look for ..” he suggests :

Communication

Use email only for External communication.
Everything else goes to either slack or teams (or equivalent tool)
Now when you are looking for something you know where to search, rather than searching emails as well as slack.

Planning

“Tony, Welcome to the team” is an internal communication - belongs to slack
“Can you get me the TPS reports by 5PM on Friday” is a commitment, which should never be over slack. It should go to task tracker like Asana

Resources

Knowledge base
Worth writing down once rather than explaining to multiple people over a period of time. (Fix the leaking pipe, than moping the floor)
Also avoids “Only Peter knows about it, and is on vacation” (Or left the org)

Purposeful Productivity ↩︎

Switched to Arc

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 22:20:29 +0530

I wrote about Arc browser earlier here. At that time, I was still on macOS catalina, version of macOS not supported by many, including brew and Arch browser.

Now that I have successfully upgraded - I was able to get Arc working on my personal machine as well. I did not wish to make this default on my work machine - wasn’t sure if it was supported (based on Chromium, so it should work, still if something does not work, getting support from IT won’t be easy. Better stick to main stream browsers for office work)

But on personal machine, anything goes.

So as soon as I installed Arc, I made it the default.

TBH, I still use firefox for

Gmail
Netbanking

But that is it.

I have been enjoying the feature for which I made the switch, namely auto-expiring tabs 😄

Initially, I was bit surprised - what happened to that thing I was reading last night ? Ohh - it expired.

Off course, If I really need it, I can make sure it stays, or open it again.

But that is the point.

Most of the times, we don’t.

MacOS Upgrade : The Conclusion

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 17:45:30 +0530

previously .. our protagonist made all the preparations, and yet his two attempts to upgrade the OS failed due to what seems like hardware failure. Will he succeed, or give up ? Let us find out in this thrilling conclusion aka Part 2

So in place upgrade did not work. I looked at my SSD. It was partitioned in two. One for OS and other for data. I do not remember if I did that when I tried to install linux on this machine. 🤷‍♂ (Unlikely, I usually boot from external USB disk and try.)

Since I had the exact error, I decided to search and ay least one solution suggested reformatting.

While I dreaded it at first, I had taken the backup (I did one more round, and found some files were not backed up. Good to double check 😄) Reformatting would also serve as a forcing function. I would not have manually deleted whole lot of data that I had accumulated over the years.

In order to install macOS Monterey on a recently formatted drive, I would need a way to boot the installer via external source.

This required me to download the installer as an app. While it is possible to download it via App store, I chose to do it via the command line ¹ (because why not ?)

Once the app is downloaded, I needed to create a bootable media. ²

I had an extra SD card for such purposes - macOS images tend to be large. The SD card is 32GB.

Once I booted via external source ³ - I selected Disk Utility option, and formatted the disk. (Somewhere it mentioned that I needed to delete the container rather than format individual volumes. So I did just that)

After that OS install was uneventful. Answer bunch of questions (language, timezone, create user etc.) and wait while installer does its thing. (prepare drive, copy stuff etc.) (I didn’t actually wait-wait. Focused on work, rather than worrying “will it work, or fail again” 😄

Finally, it was great to see myself greeted into macOS Monterey. (This is the final version supported on this hardware)

Download installer app from terminal softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 12.6.4 ↩︎
Create bootable Disk sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Monterey.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume Ref ↩︎
Option (⌥) or Alt: Start up to Startup Manager, which allows you to choose the drive from which to boot from ↩︎

MacOS Upgrade : The beginning

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 22:38:27 +0530

As I intended and mentioned here - I have started upgrade to macOS Monterey. I had already taken backup. (I don’t expect the entire data to be lost, but still ..) Just before I clicked the upgrade button - I created a list of software I need to re-install after the upgrade. I also went ahead and deleted apps left-right and center from the Applications folder. Nice (and not so nice) stroll down the memory lane. There was so much junk accumulated over the years.

Good opportunity to clean up.

Currently, the progress bar shows few minutes shy of 1 hour.

🤞

Edit 1: First attempt failed :( Something about disk. After reboot, it went straight for OS upgrade - good.

Edit 2: Second attempt also failed with same error Storage system verify or repair failed: -69716 😭

Zed Editor

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 09:30:59 +0530

My colleague told me about this new editor written in rust yesterday. The feaure page mentioned vim-mode, so I was OK to try it.

It seems collaboration is their USP - I don’t see using that feature personally anytime soon.

So what about rest of the features ?

My first impression is that it can be light alternative to VSCode. It has similar UI structure, default keymap as VScode. It supports few languages Out of the box, Ruby being one of them, so I may try it at work as well.

Coming back to vim-mode - the reason for which I even was ready to try it. It was not easy to enable it. I had expected to find it under keymap.

But vim-mode is restricted to modal editing, so one needs to enable it via settings.json (similar to VScode) and set "vim-mode": true there. Other things - not related to modal editing, but I have come to rely upon - like : commands to save (:w), or :1 to jump to the beginning of the file, do not work.¹

Opening new file wasn’t intuitive. It closed the existing file. There is no New tab either.

But after adding the folder to the project and opening anotehr file from the same project, opened it in separate tab. 😌

In conclusion :

Good attempt to provide VScode alternative. Because it is a native app, it will be faster than Electron app
This is not meant to be terminal app anyway. So for modal editing in terminal, I will stick to helix

Cmd+S to save the file, and ^G to goto line/column ↩︎

After Factory Resetting the Phone

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 09:22:19 +0530

(Read part 1 here)

After the initial setup, I installed the apps that I use the most. I had taken backup of my Google Authenticator codes via a QR code, which I sent to myself.

I was able to scan it back from my Desktop Telegram app and all was well.

Restoring Microsoft Authenticator - also used for work - was not so easy. I couldn’t open an IT helpdesk ticket without logging into the Service Portal, which required me to be authenticated via MS Authenticator 😄

Luckily, I was able to work with IT person in my timezone via Teams DM and got it sorted 😌

I installed few other apps that I know I always use. (Some of them require setup/login - which I have not yet done)

But I lost lot of (all?) of customizations. Simple things like ringtones.

I also lost a few contacts - but google sync got most of them back (I think.) Looking back, I should have synced my contacts just before I did a factory reset. (Hindsight 20/20 and all that)

I had a lot of music downloaded - I have a backup, so I copied some of them back.

I had a bunch of recurring alarms that were lost. But I recreated the most used ones from memory (Some I didn’t need, cause they are part of my memory now)

Some customizations were impossible to recreate. e.g. I used to use Google Indic keyboard - which isn’t available any more. It is now part of GBoard (I think) but it is slightly different. I can type indic languages, but it took some time to get used it.

On the plus side, I’m sure lot of “junk” data and apps were cleaned up. I might have installed some app - just to try out, and never used it more than a few times. (And I don’t remember what it was - so I’m unlikely to reinstall it)

The phone is working as expected.

It does feel new (Physically the phone was always in good shape)

---

Armed with this experience - I’m gonna upgrade macOS now.

My current version - Catalina - is unsupported by homebrew - and whole lot of new apps are not available on this version.

I’ve already done with files backup.

It is a 12+ GB download.

So all I need is some courage and bandwidth (Plan to start the download at night - hopefully by morning - download would have been complete 🤞

What is a micropost ?

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 09:25:00 +0530

You know what makes it so easy for many people to just dump their thoughts into a silo like Twitter instead of writing a post on their own site? You don’t have to come up with a title for your post.

Source

This site has two types of posts. The normal ones with title and tags. Other are microposts I wrote about them here

micropost is simply an entry without a title (and tags)

Resetting Phone : Part 1

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 08:43:55 +0530

My Android phone started acting weird few months ago. Some apps started crashing. I started seeing .. app keeps closing 😞

Then Google Play services wouldn’t connect - even when phone was connected to the internet.

I found out that uninstalling the updates (for Google Play) gets it working. But since phone was connected to the internet, it would “auto update” and would break again.

It started getting worse last few days. I had no option but to reset my phone.

I started by taking backup of the data. Mainly photos.

Turns out I had not taken backup since mid-2021 😱

I also took backup of some other data files like documents and Music.

I had two authenticator apps that I needed to connect to various services at work. So I was worried about reseeting the phone.

I considered switching to Authy - which is supposed to be compatible with Google Authenticator. But I could not install Authy 😢 (Google Play Service broken)

But during that research, I learnt that Google Authenticator allows to export all the accounts via QR code that it generates.

I took a photo of that QR code using wife’s phone, and sent it to myself on Telegram (which I can access from Desktop as well) ¹

Then I disabled 2FA from google (goes and turns 2FA back ON)

Finally, I was ready to factory reset my phone.

I was bit anxious - but there was no other option.

Delaying wasn’t gonna help.

So mustered all the courage, prayed the deity and clicked Factory Reset option from the settings. I was asked for confirmation couple of times, and then it was done 😌

The Phone was shut down, and then I saw Erasing animation - gulp

and then after some time, I was greeted with the Setup.

Later I realized that I could have also done screen capture from my own phone (Power+Volume down together - IIRC) and sent it to myself. Oh, well. ↩︎

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 10:29:51 +0530

I tried to brew install crystal

My first attempt seemed like hung, I had to Ctrl-C my way out. Second attempt took 45 minutes.

I have a 7 years old MBP, it is fully functioning machine. In fact this is being written on that machine.

45 minutes+ seems like a lot

VSpaceCode

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 09:25:00 +0530

I have written earlier that I’ve started using VSCode occasionally for work. Finding files and find-in-files is much better and faster.

But I do miss modal editing.

That is where VSpaceCode comes in.

VSpaceCode is Spacemacs like keybindings for Visual Studio Code

I had come across VSpaceCode almost two years ago

I was using VSCodium at that time (hoping it is faster than VSCode - it isn’t - on my old machine) and could not install VSpaceCode.

Fast-forward 2 years later, I have fast M2 machine and I use VScode.

I installed VSpaceCode extension pack.

I’m still getting used to it. I had used Spacemacs long time ago, but mnemonic keybinding for Doom are closer to Spacemacs, and thus VSpaceCode

What I most liked about this extension pack is that there is magit 🎉 How awesome is that.

I used to make changes in VSCode and just for git I used to switch to Emacs. Now (in theory) I don’t have to switch 😄

(I wrote In theory because I might switch to Emacs from time to time anyway, but now at least not for using magit)

NANO Minemacs

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 09:09:49 +0530

In my earlier post I had mentioned that I might try combining NANO emacs features with Minemacs - which is my current Emacs setup.

NANO emacs README has instructions for manual install which is what I ended up doing.

There is a separate repo just for the NANO theme, but somehow it did not work for me.

Instead, cloning the NANO emacs repo, and adding “just enough”™️ configuration to Minemacs worked for me.

Removing tool-bar, and setting the Dark theme directly took a bit of tinkering, but finally I got it working.

I noticed that because NANO emacs is cloned, and not installed using package manager, it takes a little longer for the NANO parts to kick in.

Minemacs complies all the packages hence they are quick to load.

I may need to look into how to do that.

AFAIK, straight allows to install from git repo, so that might work 🤷‍♂

The Arc Browser

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 11:06:44 +0530

Finally, got the access to the Arc browser.

Quick overview of what it is.

It is build on top of Chromium browser engine. But adds difference experience altogether. Benefit of using Chromium is that most of the extensions that work with Google Chrome already work. In fact, one installs the extensions from Google Chrome webstore itself 😄

Most awesome feature that made me want to try it is that it will Auto-close inactive tabs after 12 hours (default - can be increased to 24 hours, 7 or 30 days)

They have and publicize the keyboard shortcuts. All browsers have keyboard shortcuts, but other the usual ones to open and close new window/tab, I hardly use any.

I also tried Notes that can be shared with anyone. I’m unlikely to use the share functionality. But the Easel - which allows drawing (and sharing) - seems interesting.

The concept of Little Arc is interesting. It is a smaller (hence Little) floating browser window.

They also have split view which I’m yet to explore. Seems useful when using bigger monitor.

If you want to try it yourself, here is an invite link

Gitlab WebIDE

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 11:12:44 +0530

This week I’m travelling for work, and hence carrying only my work laptop. So far all my microblog entries were written from my personal laptop

I have option to clone the repo on my work machine, or not publish anything for this entire week (it is not like I publish every day, still ..)

I prefer not to clone my perosnal repo on work machine, and missing publishing also something I don’t want.

Then I remembered someone mentioning CMS for static sites and how it is just an editor in browser, that is when I struck me that this may be a good opportunity to try Gitlab WebIDE

It looks like VSCode in browser although Market place is disabled.

For a simple markdown, I do not need any fancy IDE anyway. Decent syntax highlighting (which works) is enough.

I do miss modal editing (I use helix for these posts) but that is OK.

So here is my first post not written using native editor 😄

Nano Emacs

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 22:12:44 +0530

NANO emacs looks quite amazing, polished. Unfortunately, evil-mode is not turned ON by default.

One thing I’m going to try is to combine NANO theme (and some related packages) with Minemacs.

Minemacs has evil mode and keybindings which are close to Doom and I had no problem switching to it.

NANO emacs README has instructions on how to install just the theme and other parts, so that might do the trick.

🤞

Type accent marks in Wezterm on macOS

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 09:47:48 +0530

The tips from my previous post didn’t quite work while writing the blog post using helix editor.

But as much as I can guess, it is a feature of the terminal and not the editor itself. So no point searching “Accent marks in Helix” 😄

Turns out initially¹ wezterm didn’t support accent mark without special configuration. ('use_ime = true'), but since then it is enabled by default.

Yet, it didn’t work for me.

Turns out the bug² is specific to left Opt/ALT key 😆

Solution to get it working with both left and right ALT key is to add the following to ~/.config/wezterm/wezterm.lua

	send_composed_key_when_left_alt_is_pressed = true,
	send_composed_key_when_right_alt_is_pressed = true,

Tested. Works! 🎉

How to type accent marks in macOS

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 09:31:16 +0530

In my previous post I needed to type letter é but didn’t know how. (So I just copied it from the browser page that search result returned, explaining how to type accent marks on macOS 🧠)

But later, I searched and got it working.

We use what is called as Dead Key method. In Keyboard viewer, pressing the ALT (or Option) key, shows the dead keys.

So to type é, I press ALT+e, this produces the accent, then (after releasing ALT) I press e. This adds é

ALT+e e : é
ALT+o o : ô
ALT+n o : õ

Affirmations

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 08:54:10 +0530

Every day, in every way, I am getting better, better and better.
Negative thoughts, negative suggestions, have no influence over me at any level of mind.

I came across these in a famous book The Silva Mind Control Method¹ The book is quite old. I used to see this (along with “The word power made easy”) at every bookseller while I was growing up. (English not being my native tongue, I ignored these back then)

Few days ago, I came across this book at the library.

I’m still going through the book, but it seems interesting.

About these affirmations: The book itself is quite old, and it attributes the first one to Dr. Emile Coué. I’m reading this book in early 2023, but I have heard variations of the first one in various forms. Sometimes “in every way” is broken into specific areas of life like health, relationships etc.

Affiliate link ↩︎

Memos: A lightweight, self-hosted memo hub

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 08:49:21 +0530

I’m not sure what the main feature of this app.

Memos can be anything

Somewhere it says “Twitter like”, and it does have different visibility settings. Default being “Only visible to you”, but it can be changed.

It also has user management, so it may be useful for say family with 3-5 users, may be smaller start up 🤷‍♂

I think the best part is ability to self-host. Maybe on Rpi, or in house server (If considering for family)

For a small startup, cheap host may be better.

All the data is stored inside ~/.memos folder locally, which is mounted inside docker container.

Docker seems to be the only officially supported/documented/the easiest option to get started. They also have well written document for deploying to render (I might try it if I stay with it for a while - or not 😄)

Since all the data is stored in ~/.memos (in a SQLite DB, if it matters) it is very easy to migrate to different machine.

Currently, my real .memos folder resides inside Dropbox, and a symlink from ~ points to this real folder. So I can access/update the same data from two different machines (I tested it, it works)

Do Something

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 13:10:11 +0530

These days I’m reading a book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”

In it, Author suggests that if you are stagnated, just “Do something” and it will get you out.

I had not posted here in a long time. High priority things at work, late nights, that sort of thing.

While high stress situation ended, the lethargy continued.

Till I posted about Org-roam earlier today.

and now I’m posting my second post of the day 😄

The Advice of “Do Something” does work

Org Roam

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 12:07:33 +0530

Since I started using minemacs few days ago, I discovered some new things like org-roam

As you might know, it is implementation of concepts from Roam research in org-mode (That may not be accurate description, but close enough)

I had tried org-mode long time ago, when I moved from vi/m to Emacs.

But later, as I wanted to share (publish) my notes, I settled on markdown format. (Yes, I’m aware that org-mode allows publishing notes, but for now I prefer native markdown files) Yet, org seems useful for personal notes since it is integrated within Emacs.

I had also written about Stashpad and I use as my Developer notebook ever since.

Since these are just snippets of data/information/instructions that are not necessarily useful for others and/or are specific to the work and thus private, these make perfect candidates for storing in org-roam

org-roam are still text files.

Stashpad notes OTOH are stored in proprietary (binary?) format (I don’t know this as a fact, just guessing)

So I’ve started moving my notes from Stashpad to Org-roam

Minemacs

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 09:17:38 +0530

I came across this new starter configuration, described as “Minimal Emacs config for daily use” via Sacha Chua’s Weekly Emacs Newsletter ¹ If you are Emacs user, you should subscribe. You don’t have to share your email unless you want to. She shares the links on Mastodon² (and other social apps)

Back to Minemacs 😄

It supports emacs versions 28.2 and above (But I got it working with 28.1³)

It is kinda refreshing. Doom Emacs is quite solid, and I’ve tweaked it to my liking over the years, but wanted to try something new.

The developer is very responsive.

I also discovered org-roam by perusing through source code. (Hopefully another post about org-roam soon)

I think you should give it a try.

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 06:07:58 +0530

I used D2 for work today.

So far it was just a curiosity.

But there was an opportunity to use D2 when I had to document an important data flow at work.

With D2 Playground, it is much easier for my colleagues to use same simple format to update the diagram in future when needed.

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 10:25:42 +0530

Now this site has RSS enabled. For both posts and microposts

Next step : Auto post to Mastodon 😄

Bullet train: Rails based framework

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 09:57:18 +0530

I came across this from (now defunct) rails app site. They seem to provide a lot of stuff in their open source version.

Seems like a good framework to get started on the side project or MVP

Other paid features are worth paying when your app starts making money.

I need to spend more time on digging deeper, and actually trying it out.

Now individual posts too show title, date and tags

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 09:49:18 +0530

After I switched the theme for this blog, for the longest time I had not noticed that when reader is viewing specific post, they do not see the metadata like title, date etc.

When I noticed, I tried some time debugging, but couldn’t figure out why this was happening. So like a good developer that I am, I created a github issue so that I can fix it later (and not forget it)

Yesterday, I chose to fix it, and after doing some RCA, I (think) I found the reason why it was not working.

I still didn’t know how to fix it, and it was late.

This morning, I searched based on my understanding, and within few minutes I was able to fix it.

🎉

D2 Playground

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 09:14:36 +0530

I’m not sure whether they launched this recently, or it was always there (As in since I looked at D2 couple weeks ago)

Nevertheless, it is quite nice.

If one is not used to CLI and/or does not wish to (or can not, due to permission on say work machine) install it locally, then playground the best option.

It has all the options the CLI provides (At least the most widely used options)

One can

export the images
Change Engines
Change Themes

What else do you need ? 😄

The playground also has sample code right below it, so one does not need to refer to the documentation (Especially during initial days when one is still figuring things out)

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 07:32:59 +0530

I wish you all a happy new year 2023!

May this year bring all the joy you want.

May you find the satisfaction in your work and happiness in your personal life!

I wish you find your peace of mind!

Year 2022 Review

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 07:01:25 +0530

Blogging
- I started this blog in Dec 2021, and in year 2022 - I wrote 80+ posts and 8 microposts 🎉
- Switched to theme that supports microposts
Editor
- Tried Neovim for few months and went down the rabbit hole
- Till I found Helix - no/low configuration modal editor
- Started using Helix Editor exclusively for writing these posts.
- Still using Emacs for office work
- Recently I’m using VSCode for work 🤷‍♂
Art
- Seems like I drew only one sketch (Analog) this entire year 😱
- Purchased a graphics tablet (No screen)
- Still getting used to drawing digitally
Social Media
- Started using Mastodon
- Also Pixey
- Although I have not imported my Instagram posts yet
Work/Programming
- Switched (back to) Zsh after using Fish for a couple of years.
- Switched jobs
- Now working in Ruby for almost a year

Why do people watch horror movies?

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:46:29 +0530

Today, I listened to this episode of NSQ - No stupid questions - podcast.

Angela mentioned that she has watched 4 out of top 10 horror movies (from some list) Dubner was 0/10

Turns out, Angela watched all those only during her twenties or earlier.

Some study noticed that audience for such movies comprises mostly young adults. (Because they are seeking thrill ?)

Psychologists Paul Rozin calls this “benign masochism”

In the book “Illusions”, Richard Bach asked Donald Shimoda the same question, and was answered as :

Because they think they deserve it for horrifying somebody else Or they like the excitement of horrification

Two ways to look at the same question 🙂

How to get 13 Digit Epoch time in Shell (Ruby Version)

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 10:21:59 +0530

I needed this, because Dendron uses 13-digit epoch time, for created and updated timestamps. While it is not a problem when notes are created from within VSCode (as is expected - since Dendron is a VSCode plugin) - I don’t use VSCode much.

While Dendron has command line tools to create new notes, and notes are markdown only the timestamps are problem.

Hence, the need to create 13-digit epoch time.

date "+%s" can be used to get the epoch time, it only returns 10 digits. Since I don’t care about millisecond precision in my time stamps, I can always add 3 extra 0s at the end, yet it is a hassel.

Hence, the need for solution that does not require manual work 😄

ruby -e "puts (Time.now.to_f * 1000).floor"

At first, it seemed like it didn’t work because I didn’t have puts 😆

looks like, it is also doing the same - add 3 extra 0s at the end, by multiplying by 1000 - except mathematically 😆

Finally, I added this to my espanso configuration file as :

matches:
- trigger: ":utime"
  replace: "{{output}}"
  vars:
    - name: output
      type: shell
      params:
        cmd: "ruby -e 'puts (Time.now.to_f * 1000).floor'"

Emacs D2 Mode

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 13:11:11 +0530

It was only a matter of time before there was Emacs mode for D2 😆

and here it is.

I’m yet to try it though.

Pixey.org

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 06:04:37 +0530

Pixey is instance of Pixelfed server (Just like there are several servers running Mastodon software)

Just as Mastodon is Decentralized version of twitter, Pixelfed is decentralized version of Instagram.

Here is my pixey profile For some reason, when in full view mode, the image appears black. 🤷‍♂ (This is true only for sketched drawn and exported from ok!so app)

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 05:54:57 +0530

Earlier I thought that tldraw can not save as other image file formats. I was wrong.

There is indeed Export as option, and it works !

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 22:23:10 +0530

Earlier this evening, I attended live sermon delivered by BK Shivani didi

Feeling blessed!

Feeling lucky that I got opportunity to listen to her in person, I also saw her in person when she was walking away.

She is modern day saint.

No miracles, but the knowledge she spreads deserves recognition.

paint.diagram.com

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 11:48:43 +0530

I drew this using finger on the trackpad.

I’m impressed.

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 11:42:47 +0530

tldraw seems interesting.

Drawing program inside your browser.

While it does not have Save as functionality, it does have Print option which can be paired with Print to PDF

I can live it that.

Need to try out.

Using VSCode

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 08:44:24 +0530

I installed and used VSCode on office provided MBP yesterday. It is not like I have not used it in past. I tried vscode-vim plugin for modal editing. It allows you to embed neovim in VSCode (So all the configuration of neovim is available here.)

But on my old machine, it was slow.

(I also tried VSCodium, thinking it might be faster. It wasn’t)

I used it exclusively for Dendron (my PKM) cause it is mainly VSCode plugin (While it has command line tools, the main strength is as VScode plugin)

But never for coding.

Till yesterday.

Confession : It quite liked it.

I mainly needed it to go over large RoR project codebase.

I tried solargraph LSP with helix (and Emacs. robe-mode is slightly better) But it is documented NOT to work with Rails.

It doesn’t work with VSCode either.

But Find in files on my newer machine is quite fast (Goto definition still does not work 😞)

I occasionally started with insert mode 😆 - but non-modal also worked.

Confession : I didn’t mind it (Maybe enjoyed it a little bit)

There.

Confessed!

I’m unlikely to switch to VSCode completely.

Both helix and Emacs have modal editing, and after 2 decades of muscle memory I don’t want to go back to non-modal.

Drawing Tablet

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 05:51:47 +0530

I was always fascinated with devices with stylus, where I could draw electronically (Not sure if the word digitally was being used back then.)

My first such device was Palm III.¹ It came with Stylus. That was in the last century.

Needless to say, I stopped using after year or 3. (I had it long time after that, and then I finally gave it for electronic waste/recyling program 😢)

Then after my elder son was born (which has no significance - just that I remember it as such) I purchased Samsung Galaxy Note 8 ²

I still have it. I use it primarily for reading kindle books. My children use it for watching Youtube kids. Just recently it has developed some problem and isn’t charging anymore. 😢

Unfortunately, after initial enthusiasm ³ dwindled, I hardly took the stylus out 😞

I think the issue was writing on glass does not feel natural and while 8" tab was much better than handheld device like Palm III, it was still smaller than A4 paper I mostly used for analog drawing/sketching.

That brings us to my latest purchase

It is too early (only days) to comment.

I’m still figuring out the software that works for me.

But it has a feel of writing on paper (sometimes it makes a noise like pencil on rough paper, I wonder if it is haptic feedback) better than feel of writing on glass.

Bigger size of the screen also addresses some problems (?) I had earlier.

I hope to make much better use this time around 🤞

If you are wondering what is Palm III, see this external link (Link may become 404 🤷‍♂) ↩︎
There was an 8-inch tab, before there was phone by the same name 🤷‍♂ ↩︎
See my initial sketchnotes, drawn on Galaxy Note 8 here oldest 5 were digital. ↩︎

XP Deco mini 7

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 05:51:47 +0530

I purchased myself XP-pen Deco mini 7¹ 🎉

Was debating between this and iPad for so long.

This won, cause :

Much cheaper
Can be connected to Android phone, Windows PC or macOS

Initial impressions :

Feels like writing on a piece of paper (as opposed to, on a glass surface)
The pen is BIG! (Not used to such big pen or stylus)

Still getting used to various sketching software.

I’ll start with something easy (Started with Autodesk Sketchbook - Big mistake - Got lost)

Using Zoho Notebook on mobile to draw was already easy with fingers. With pen, it is much nicer.

Drawing on mobile (smaller screen) using this tablet, seemed easier than drawing on laptop screen (Mostly because I have not found a software that works for me)

I’m so happy!

Affiliate link ↩︎

Zsh Autosuggestions

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 09:35:09 +0530

I used zsh for couple of years, and then switched to fish mainly for its built-in autocompletion.

fish is a modern shell (just like helix) and thus (I think) it does several things differently. For someone using various shells for over 2 decades, resisting muscle memory does not come easy. ¹

I was used to export KEY=value, so in fish I always had to look up How to set an environment variable in fish 😆 - even after 2 years.

Third party programs do not always work with fish - usually I was able to find a way, but if not, I would just invoke either bash or zsh and get work done. (and switch back to fish when done) But I would miss the auto completion when I switched.

So when a colleague told me about zsh auto suggestions, I was thrilled. But I lost the link.

When searched, I came across zsh autocomplete which seems to be under active development. I tried it for few days, but I did not like it much. It seemed too intrusive.

Then I asked the person who had suggested it earlier, and got this

Turns out, I had come across it earlier in my search, but the repo isn’t updated since mid-2021 😞 - so I had ignored it.

Turns out, it works very well. Just like fish

Maybe it is stable enough that it does not need code changes 😄

Installing it via oh-my-zsh is trivial (and documented).

So I’ve switched back to zsh

I did it multiple times with various degrees of success. zsh -> fish, vi(m) to emacs (Though I continued using evil/modal editing) -> helix, and python -> ruby (struggling) ↩︎

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 22:45:35 +0530

Sometimes it is said that notes are write-only i.e. No one reads them later 🤷‍♂

The same happened with me today.

I was looking for way to get only certain file from git stash

I asked ChatGPT with mixed results. (It provided correct answers, but more verbose. On asking, better explanation was provided, still..)

During such time, stackoverflow shines.

Even without going to SO site, the answer is included right on the search results.

I decided that since it was hard to find, it is worth adding it to PKM.

Turns out I already had it stored

🤦‍♂🙈

That is why it is called write-only 😆

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 22:35:05 +0530

I came across fish like auto suggestions plugin for zsh. When I started to update that, I noticed that my oh-my-zsh is two years old (now that we are near the end of 2022, it is more like close to three)

So I uninstalled and reinstalled oh-my-zsh

But the prompt won’t look nice.

That is when I realized that starship is not hooked to zsh

and that starship is also due for an update (6 months)

So upgraded starship and then hooked it up to zsh

Now I can try the autosuggestions plugin. ☺️

Emacs Mode in Shell

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 16:46:52 +0530

I have been using Emacs for several years now. But I switched to (and stayed with) Emacs only because of evil mode.

I had been vi user for decades before that. Even today, I use (Neo)vi(m) occasionally.

Right now, I’m writing this in Helix editor, which is lot closer to modal editing of vi, than of Emacs.

So there.

I am aware that various shell support vi mode, but the default is Emacs.

But I never invested time to either turn on vi-mode or learn Emacs keybindings

Till last week.

One of my colleagues told me about Ctrl-A to move to the beginning of the line and Ctrl-E for the end of the line.

This has been so helpful.

Now I am motivated learn more Emacs keybindings.

I might also try to turn of vi mode for zsh.

Firefox Test Dark Mode

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 21:45:10 +0530

My previous theme indiefeed supported both light and darkmode. The current one does not.

I’m in the process of fixing that.

But I didn’t know how to test it ? i.e. Depending on the time of the day, Firefox would either select light mode or dark.

Turns out, Developer tool lets you switch it (for that page).

When in Inspector tab, look for icons for Sun (light) and moon (dark).

See the diagram below :

How to Support Both Light and Dark Mode for your app

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 19:15:51 +0530

Add something like the following to your css

@media (prefers-color-scheme: light) {
	body {
		background-color: #f0f0f0;
	}
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
	body {
		background-color: #0f0f0f;
	}
}

I’m just learning this. But this above doesn’t look scalable. My previous theme, defined colors as variables, per color-scheme and in the other css, use these variables instead of actual colors.

That way, you need to modify colors only at one place 🎉

See this

D2 Layouts

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 09:38:07 +0530

D2 allows me to generate diagrams from the same source file using different layouts

It comes with two built-in layout engines :

Dagre is the default :

Other one is ELK This needs to be specified explicitly as :

D2_LAYOUT=elk d2 in.d2 out.svg

and here is the output

D2 : A modern diagram scripting language

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 05:50:56 +0530

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.

Since I have not used mermaid extensively, I need to refer to the documentation for mermaid anyway. So learning D2’s syntax isn’t any worse.

But I think D2’s syntax is much easier.

See this D2 syntax for reference :

content: Write contents in markdown
content -> source git repo : git push
Site in docs folder -> netlify deploy : git push
content -> Site in docs folder : Dendron: Site Build

and here is a generated SVG file.

Now compare this with mermaid syntax:

graph LR;
    A{ Write Content in markdown }
    A -->| git push | B[ source git repo ]
    A -->| Dendron: Site Build | C[ Site in `docs` folder ]
    C -->| git push | D[ netlify deploy ]

and generated image :

%%{init: {'themeVariables':{'lineColor': 'lightblue', 'arrowheadColor': 'lightblue'}}}%% graph LR; A{ Write Content in markdown } A -->| git push | B[ source git repo ] A -->| Dendron: Site Build | C[ Site in `docs` folder ] C -->| git push | D[ netlify deploy ]

Beggar

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 11:26:04 +0530

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.

She said, the shopkeeper won’t let me purchase stuff.

This wasn’t uncommon.

So I went with her to grocery store, and asked the shopkeeper to get her rice and daal as she had asked. I didn’t want to get into the transaction, I just wanted to make sure shopkeeper does not shoo her away. Also, Rs. 50 won’t get her the stuff she needed, so I wanted to also pay for groceries.

When shopkeeper was done packing rice and daal, I asked him how much I owed him.

At that time, the lady said : “I also need sugar”

I was taken aback, but didn’t say anything.

Shopkeeper went to pack sugar.

and then she said “cooking oil” as well.

Shopkeeper was now wondering what to do.

At that time, I told him whatever he has packed is enough.

I ended up paying upward of Rs. 300

As soon as I got my change back, I left.

I kept thinking :

Did I do the right thing ? (Yes, I was glad I helped with her with groceries. I think what took me by surprise was that she asked for more and more stuff once at the shop.)
I didn’t know how much it costs for bare minimum groceries. (I didn’t pay for cooking oil.) I am aware that there are shops which sell at lower price. Still..
Is paying Rs. 10/50 to beggars right thing to do ? I know most of them might buy street food, which is easily available for that amount. It is not healthy probably not nutritious either.

I did notice when I left that even though she mentioned that she did not want money, she kept the initial Rs. 50 I gave her 😆

Insert timestamp anywhere using Espanso

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 22:14:22 +0530

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.

If you are unsure where the file is located, refer to the documentation

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 19:44:42 +0530

I just used externalUrl feature of this theme. It is kinda cool.

Such post is indicated with a right arrow like →

The title of the blogpost itself is an external link. So when clicked, it does not open the post, but the external URL.

In order to open the post, either click the infinity symbol next to it, or the date (if on the yearly list page)

Stashpad

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 19:20:39 +0530

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 ? 😆

How to find people to follow on Mastodon

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 08:30:25 +0530

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 😄

One tool that worked flawlessly for me was Fedifinder

Finally, I searched for exact same twitter handles on Mastodon. Chances are people select one handle, and as long as it is available, they’ll prefer that everywhere.

This worked surprisingly well.

Two things to remember though :

Mastodon is still not as popular, so people you follow, on Twitter may not be on Mastodon. Yet.
Mastodon search isn’t that great. Could be because of technical reasons. Or same reason as previous one 😄

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 06:03:28 +0530

Now I’m on Mastodon as @mandarvaze@indieweb.social 🎉

My request to join indieweb.social was approved.

Understanding Mastodon

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 22:00:35 +0530

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.

Since everyone and their grandma are moving to Mastodon, I decided to check it.

(I also checked Koo, but it seemed more like Facebook than Twitter. Not for me)

Mastodon is decentralized. Some people consider it as its strength.

~~Maybe~~. It is. For those who are worried about one company having control over their account. Accounts do get banned on Mastodon as well. Read Wil Wheaton’s post

Another strength that is mentioned is “You can even host your own instance” but normal people do not have expertise to do that, and some that have the expertise may not have time and inclination to have one.

I certainly don’t (have the expertise. And while I could read up the documentation and set something up for fun, I don’t want to worry about server upkeep, Thank you very much)

But it is what it is.

So now the question becomes where do I create an account.

At first, it was not clear. Analogy given is that of Email. Anyone can send email from gmail.com to yahoo.com Similarly, you can have account anywhere, and you can follow people on other servers.

A lot of the servers are for specific topic they care about. Like Reddit communities. But my account is on Reddit.

Here my account is on server specific to Emacs, or Ruby language.

While I might be using both these now, I do not wish to be identified by the use of my editor or programming language.

I do change both. (20+ years vi user, 5+ on Emacs, now trying Helix. After 10 years of Python, Ruby for the last 8 months)

There are some generic (sounding) ones like https://mastodon.social/ and https://mstdn.io/

But neither of them are accepting new users.

(That is another problem of hosting your own servers. Who pays for the infra cost?)

Finally, I found https://indieweb.social/ 🎉

I’ve applied for account.

The request will be reviewed and approved 🤞

Read this footnote in Armin Ronacher’s post about how decentralized banking is better than decentralized crypto.

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 13:17:09 +0530

I wanted to be able to post thoughts without title or any of the front matter for long time.

Now I can 🤞

Mindmaps in Emacs

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 09:35:27 +0530

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.

Enable plantuml in the init.el of your doom emacs config.
M-x doom/reload (This will install the appropriate packages)
M-x plantuml-download-jar (Make sure you have working java installation)
doom/open-scratch-buffer
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.

#+begin_src plantuml :file my-diagram.png
@startmindmap
+ OS
++ Ubuntu
+++ Linux Mint
+++ Kubuntu
+++ Lubuntu
+++ KDE Neon
++ LMDE
++ SolydXK
++ SteamOS
++ Raspbian
-- Windows 95
-- Windows 98
-- Windows NT
--- Windows 8
--- Windows 10
@endmindmap
#+end_src

The above is called Arithmatic Syntax (due to + and -) benefit of this is that + appear on right side of the main node and - appear on the left side.

So if you prefer certain nodes to appear on the left vs right this is syntax you should use.

If you don’t care, then standard markdown syntax also works. Just that all the nodes appear on the right side.

Now, C-c C-e h o to export your org document into html. We are interested in my-diagram.png which will be in the same directory as your exported html file.

If you do not want to export the file, then get rid of the first and last line in the org file above (ones with _src) then plantuml-mode and C-c C-c to preview the mindmap within emacs itself.

This is how it looks

Emacs: How to exclude files when searching in a project

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 12:27:33 +0530

I use SPC / a lot to find stuff inside a project. Since starting on Ruby project, a lot of my search results, specifically the first ones are inside the spec file (which is test case in Ruby)

I may want those instances as well, but more often than not, I prefer the search results in the source code before test cases.

The project is huge, and I have to scroll a lot before I see non-spec code, which becomes tiresome.

While I was looking for solution, I came across two things :

deadgrep (I think it is a play on ripgrep)
.ignore file

.ignore file is similar to .gitignore which is specific to git

While search tools like ag and ripgrep honor .gitignore in my case, test files are part of the git repo (as they should be) and are thus not in .gitignore

This is where .ignore came in handy.

I added *_spec.rb in a .ignore file created in the root of the project.

Voila!

Now search results are much better 😌

Rolf Potts and Richard Bach

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 16:09:08 +0530

This may seem like strange title for the post, compared to my other posts, and it is.

In case you don’t know any of these gentlemen, both of them are writers.

Rolf Potts is known for Vagabonding. Made (more) popular by Tim Ferriss.

Richard Bach may be known for “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” to most people. But I’ve read a lot of his books.

That does not look like they should be the topic of the same entry. So why are they in the same post ?

Recently, I listened to Rolf on Tim Ferris podcast, and I noticed both are similar in more than one way.

Both are writers
Richard was barnstormer in his youth(?), Rolf is known for vagabonding (The activity. The book came later)
Both married late in their life (Richard was married once, before he met Leslie)
Both married actresses
Both call their wives “Soul mates” (Richard and Leslie are no longer together, and Rolf married recently during the pandemic)

If you are interested, you can read about

Richard Bach
Rolf Potts on their Wikipedia pages.

Helix Open File on Side

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 09:14:04 +0530

When I am working on a project, it is highly likely that I would open other files from that project. In order to do that, in Helix I would do SPC F. This opens up file picker for that workspace.

I can then either navigate using arrow keys, or most likely start typing the name of the file and the file will be highlighted. As a side benefit, the file is shown on the right pane as a preview.

If I hit Enter the file will be opened in the same buffer. While I can switch between buffers using SPC b) I may want to work on both files at the same time, say for comparing the code etc.

In such cases, while the file is selected in the file picker, press Ctrl+v to open the file in a vertical split to the side 🎉

I learnt this trick via this youtube video

Rails Runner

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 09:09:28 +0530

Some days ago, I came across a requirement where I needed to run some rails code at the end of deployment. We use the Capistrano tool for the deployment, and it has great support for hooks like after 'deploy:published', 'some_task'

Most of the examples show some system commands, since Capistrano is a deployment tool, and isn’t running rails.

But I didn’t know that, being new to rails ecosystem.

So at first, at just called a background job that needed to talk to third party system and get some data, once the rails server is up.

I was met with uninitialized constant error.

After looking around similar scripts in other projects, I came across rails runner (rails r) also works.

It is like rails c, as in it does not run the server, but loads all the rails environment (which is what I wanted) But unlike rails c, it runs the rails code non-interactively.

Couple of examples :

bin/rails runner "Model.long_running_method"
bin/rails runner lib/code_to_be_run.rb
bin/rails runner -e staging "Model.long_running_method" to run it under specific environment.

You can read more in the rails documentation

Better Git Status With fzf.fish

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 22:01:07 +0530

Towards the beginning of the year, I had written about Fuzzy Search in fish For the better part of the year. I only used Ctrl-R functionality, that too occasionally.

Then today, I came across the same again, and after going through the README, I noticed at least one more useful keybinding.

git status normally would just list the modified files etc. To see what has changed, one needs to git diff <filename>

with fzf.fish one can combine these two functions with git status followed by Ctrl+Alt+S (S for status, easy to remember)

Now one sees, the list on the left hand side, and the diffs on the right.

This seems relatively new functionality.

Refer to the relevant part of the README for details.

Vim Keybindings for Helix

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 16:39:40 +0530

Helix is a great editor. I’m trying it more and more these days (Like this post is edited in helix)

While shift from action->object to object->action in itself is big change (muscle memory), there are indeed other differences as well.

Luckily, it is easy to add keybindings to helix. Turns out someone took this too far, and created a lot of keybindings to make helix more like Vim

Refer to this for the entire config.

While I’m not going to use the entire list as is, some keybindings (that trip me in helix) like 0 to go to the beginning of the line, and $ to go to the end of the line seem worth “borrowing” 😄

Helix New Release (and how to go to the last line in a file)

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 12:34:40 +0530

Noticed that new version 22.08.1 of helix is now available. See this Upgrade via your preferred package manager.

After the upgrade, used hx after a long time.

I also signed up for the matrix channel. Turns out that is where all the action is.

I’m member of (almost-dead-but-not-quite) Telegram group for a while. But matrix channel seems active.

I got immediate reply to my query. Nice!

My query was : How do I go to the last line of the buffer ? In vi/m, I could use :$ which does not work in Helix

TL;DR: ge

Long answer : There is a separate goto-mode in helix, and then there are different sub-commands(?) in that mode. goto_last_line is mapped to e, hence ge (i.e. First switch to goto-mode and then goto_last_line)

Improve Markdown output: Use HTML snippets in Markdown

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 13:15:37 +0530

While I was searching for useful snippets for Markdown (I was specifically looking for snippet to insert current time.)

I came across this article.

To be honest, it feels like cheating. Like writing HTML manually. (With snippets, work could reduce)

ⓘ Info:
I don't see myself using it often.

Did you see what I did there 😉

Back to Emacs

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

If you are reading my posts, you would have realized that I had switched to nvim and went down the rabbit hole with different configurations etc. I think I got it to a stable state, and then I stopped tinkering.

But when I recently started coding again in Ruby, I realized that nvim is good as an editor, but at least I was not able to configure it as IDE. It has all the right tools (lsp, syntax highlighting, packages) yet something didn’t work 😞

That is when I came back to emacs, and realized that in emacs ecosystem, robe was better than solargraph Something about dynamic better than static analysis for Rails.

Then I started noticing more issues with nvim. e.g. Simple syntax highlighting did not work for markdown files.

I still use nvim for quick editing (I’ve been using n(vi)m for 25 years 😄, so I’m not about leave it. Even in Emacs, I use evil mode)

I realized that instead of Telekasten I should be using org - native to emacs, and more versatile. But markdown is universal 😄

Telekasten

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 13 Aug 2022 19:13:57 +0530

I had written about Telekasten earlier, but in the context that I was unable to get it working with NVChad.

But I must confess, I almost forgot about it.

I should use it daily (as intended) to capture things I’m doing, where am I blocked, what unblocked me, make it as part of my daily workflow.

I have seen my colleague keeping a simple daily.txt file open in Sublime, and it works for them (I hope)

It is not about the tool, more about the habit.

Wezterm

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I had installed Wezterm long time ago. I think when I started looking for alternatives to Alacritty. But I settled on kitty (I think I could not get wezterm to work)

Few days ago, I stumbled upon it again, and I wanted to give it a try.

So these days, I’m using wezterm as terminal. I specifically liked the built-in multiplexing feature. I haven’t tried it yet 🤷‍

Bang Methods in Ruby (and Rails)

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 23:11:52 +0530

Today I learned about Bang methods in Ruby.

Methods ending with ! are potentially dangerous, because they update the object they operate on.

➜  irb --sample-book-mode
>> name = "sample_string"
=> "sample_string"
>> name.reverse
=> "gnirts_elpmas"
>> name
=> "sample_string"
>> name.reverse!
=> "gnirts_elpmas"
>> name
=> "gnirts_elpmas"

As we can see above, reverse! modified name itself. Most times (?) we don’t want that. But sometimes we do.

Knowing that ! method will change the object, allows us to choose the correct version.

In Rails, ! methods raise an exception in case of error. Some may prefer this over checking of the return value, when the method will work without error most of the time, and exception is rare. e.g. ActiveRecord::Base#save returns false if saving failed, while ActiveRecord::Base#save! raises an exception.

Interruption is the Enemy of Productivity

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 16:45:54 +0530

Yesterday, I listened to the episode of rework podcast, titled Interruption is the Enemy of Productivity 😄

The link has full transcript of the episode, or listen via your favourite podcast app.

Some quotes (edited little to make sense) from the episodes :

people know that the time they get the real “work done” is when they don’t have the interruptions.

If that time only exists outside of work, that is where they will find it. So it’s early mornings, it’s late nights. It’s weekends. It’s a lot of the overwork

[work is] pushed into the margins because the main bulk of the working hour is just jammed full of these interruptions.

You can’t get work done at work, that the hours you actually, have dedicated to sit in front of your computer are eaten by the interruptions.

Coordination is work too ….. It’s not the nourishing work.

Enable Syntax based Fold in Neovim

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 09:48:13 +0530

When working on large(ish) code files, sometimes it is easier to fold rest of the code from that file and focus on one “block” at a time.

I use the word “block” because based on the context, it means different things. It could be as big as a class (if the file contains multiple classes) or as small as a if-else block.

But this functionality is not always turned on.

One way to test it out is :set foldmethod=syntax

It would for that file, for that session. Once you close the file/neovim instance you lose the setting.

Other/better way is to add vim.opt.foldmethod = "syntax" in your neovim config. (Assuming you are using lua for your configuration- why would you not ? 😉)

Using Telekasten with Nvchad

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 12:00:54 +0530

NvChad is yet another neovim starter kit.

Creator of NvChad is on the VimUser’s Telegram Group. So I was intrigued to try NvChad. (I had tried it a while ago, but decided to visit it later. That “later” is now)

One of the plugin I use is Telekasten. It reminds me of Dendron, another tool I used to use (requires VSCode, which I consider too heavy. But Dendron now works without VScode as well. Also, “daily notes” is just one of the features of Dendron. That is the feature I use with Telekasten)

Unfortunately, I could not use it “out of the box”. NvChad uses Telescope, but it lazy-loads it. Telekasten is dependent on it. So it was weird that telekasten would work after I use Telescope at least once. (Cause by using Telescope, nvim would load telescope.nvim)

After failing to get it working for couple of days, it finally worked. See the discussion in this guthub issue

mandar in ~/.config/nvim/lua/custom on  main 
➜ cat plugins/init.lua
return {
  ["renerocksai/telekasten.nvim"] = {},

  ["nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim"] = {
      module = "telescope",
  },

  ["simrat39/symbols-outline.nvim"] = {}
}

There is another manual workaround. :PackerLoad telescope.nvim before using Telekasten for the first time. But above solution is better. Here is my failed attempt to automate my solution. But somehow it broke telescope itself (while Telekasten worked)

Import json data to hosted elasticsearch

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 08:56:53 +0530

Earlier I imported the data to locally running Elastic (via Docker)

But others in my team could not run Docker on their machines, so we decided to use a hosted Elastic server.

The steps to import the data were the same. Well, almost. Because this was a hosted instance, it would not allow operations without authentication. I got the following error:

dump ended with error (get phase) => UNAUTHORIZED: {"error":{"root_cause":[{"type":"security_exception","reason":"missing authentication credentials for REST request [/]","header":{"WWW-Authenticate":["Basic realm=\"security\" charset=\"UTF-8\"","Bearer realm=\"security\"","ApiKey"]}}],"type":"security_exception","reason":"missing authentication credentials for REST request [/]","header":{"WWW-Authenticate":["Basic realm=\"security\" charset=\"UTF-8\"","Bearer realm=\"security\"","ApiKey"]}},"status":401}

It took me a while to figure it out, but I did.

To import the data, I had to pass the ApiKey as a header to elasticdump as follows:

node_modules/elasticdump/bin/elasticdump --input=formatted-conversations.json --output=https://some-real-hostname.regionosting-provider.elastic-cloud.com/ --headers='{"Authorization": "ApiKey here_is_my_Api_key_that_I_got_from_Kibana"}'

Creating an API Key was easy in Kibana. I searched for API Key in the top search bar 😄. (Management -> Security -> API Keys)

References:

Elasticsearch Authentication using API
Elasticdump README : Search for --headers

Better Tabs Kitty

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 16:27:53 +0530

Some time ago, I started using kitty terminal emulator. I used Alacritty for a long time. But Alacritty is meant to be minimalistic in a sense it does not even have concept of having different tabs.

The suggestion/solution is to use tmux (or like) to manage different shell instances.

And I did that.

And learnt a great deal about tmux in the process.

I don’t regret it one bit.

But sometimes, tmux gets in a way of how terminal based programs look (and behave) when executed inside tmux.

Sometime, there is a way around by tweaking tmux.conf

But I wanted to use real terminal with tabs.

So I tried kitty.

Everything was great, but default tab style was blurry, that I could hardly see two different tabs.

Turns out one can change the tab_bar_style - Default one is fade (No wonder I would not see text properly)

Currently I have it set to the following:

tab_bar_style powerline
tab_powerline_style round

tab_powerline_style has few other options. You can read about them here

Better Icon for Kitty

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 20:04:30 +0530

Official instructions are here but it did not work for me.

I did not understand Drag kitty.icns onto the application icon in the kitty info pane part. I tried dragging the icon, but could not make it work.

I gave up. I can live with the default icon.

But then I came across the following instructions here.

Clear instructions that I can execute from inside kitty 😄

cp /tmp/kitty.icns /Applications/kitty.app/Contents/Resources/kitty.icns
rm /var/folders/*/*/*/com.apple.dock.iconcache
touch /Applications/kitty.app
killall Dock && killall Finder

FWIW, I am using this icon

Import data from Dockerized Postgres to Elasticsearch

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 06:29:31 +0530

After setting up Elasticsearch locally I need to seed it with some dummy data.

I came across this article that explain all the steps in details, including populating the postgres with dummy data to begin with.

But I could not use it as-is because I use dockerized postgres.

I also ran into problem with https and elasticdump

I wrote about the problems and solutions on my other blog. Read it here

Setup Elastic Search Locally via Docker

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 16:01:57 +0530

This is the first time I’m setting up elasticsearch

While one can set it up natively via brew I have learnt longtime ago to use docker for complex, server type applications.

Elastic search’s official document also suggests the docker in their Getting Started.

I’ve made summary of the steps on my PKM. Search elastic on the site, since URLs are likely to change.

Important thing : Create a local user (I called it dev) and make it superuser

This is useful in case you misplace the auto-generated password for built-in superuser user named elastic

Espanso With Helix Editor

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 31 May 2022 06:30:11 +0530

I wrote about espanso in past here and here, and I’ve been using it ever since.

Since helix is (for now) terminal-only editor, my espanso shortcuts work very well with it.

e.g. I can type :smile: and get 😄, and type thru and get through (Automatic correct the usually misspelled words 🎉)

Espanso works well with neovim-in-terminal (and Emacs), but I use Neovide GUI, where they don’t work.

Grammar Check with Helix Editor

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 30 May 2022 15:57:40 +0530

One of the thing that I thought was missing from Helix editor was integration with a decent grammar checker tool. On Emacs and neovim, I use ltex-ls.

To my surprise, it works well (I’m using it already) with Helix.

It is probably not well documented though. I had to look through the github issues, but I did come across the solution.

It is straightforward though.

Download the latest release of ltex-ls from here. I preferred the one which comes with jre. Size increases, but it is self-contained. One can choose smaller download if jre is already installed in your setup.
Extract it somewhere (e.g., ~/ltex-ls) then create a symbolic link to bin/ltex-ls from somewhere on your path (e.g. /usr/local/bin/) like this : sudo ln -s ~/ltex-ls/bin/ltex-ls /usr/local/bin/ltex-ls
Add the following to languages.toml file:

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
language-servers = [ "ltex-ls" ]
file-types = ["md"]
scope = "source.markdown"
roots = []

Restart Helix.
Enjoy 🎉

Helix Editor

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 28 May 2022 21:49:19 +0530

I came across Helix Editor on youtube when watching about neovim related video.

It is vim like editor. That is, a modal editor.

But it is different in one fundamental way, it terms of how commands work.

In (Neo)vim, it is action followed by object. So delete word becomes dw But in Helix it is other way round. Object followed by Action. So it is word delete hence wd

It takes a bit getting used to.

But in other areas, it is far better that (neo)vim. Lot of things work out of the box.

When I opened a ruby file, and gd (Go to Definition) worked in the first attempt. Mind blown!

This has never worked in the first try. Definitely not out of the box.

One other thing I liked was context-sensitive menu popups and help texts.

This makes this approachable.

Most of the keybindings are already intuitive.

One downside, there are no plugins. But it is in the roadmap.

Since LSP works out of the box, I think I may use it as my editor for coding.

I’ll continue using neovim for writing the posts (Although, I wrote this one in helix)

guifont in Spacevim

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 27 May 2022 15:55:05 +0530

In my tour of Neovim starter kits, I landed on SpaceVim

I started my Emacs journey with Spacemacs, and used it for couple of years before settling on Doom Emacs.

Spacemacs inspired SpaceVim.

I had liked the mnenomic keybindings in Spacemacs (and now in SpaceVim)

But Spacevim is different from how other starter kits handle configuration.

Last week, I tried DoomVim (inspired by Doom Emacs) and NVChad (and “Neovim from scratch” by same folks as LunarVim) They all had similar configuration, based on lua

But SpaceVim has its own style.

For starters, it uses init.toml for the configuration.

Also, it uses bundle instead of packer (which I had grown used to)

Nonetheless, using SpaceVim was pleasant experience.

But I was unable to set guifont and thus saw empty square at one place, and font was too big for me.

If I didn’t use Neovide i.e. use nvim in terminal, I could see the icons in place of empty square, but I want to use GUI.

Turns out there is a bug (somewhere)

(At least) Neovide returns 0 for has('gui_running') so guifont value is never set internally.

See this

Then I unconditionally set guifont in my local SpaceVim.vim

For now, it works.

Let us see how long I stick with SpaceVim.

I got LSP working for Ruby, more tweaks like ltex are pending. (and SymbolOutline, and IndentBlankLine and …..)

Floating Terminal in Neovim

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 16 May 2022 16:02:51 +0530

Today I discovered that I can open a nice floating Terminal in the middle of the screen by pressing Ctrl+\

Thanks to toggleterm plugin.

Earlier I used to use :terminal command, which would open a terminal in another tab. I had to switch tabs to use the terminal and going back to editing the files.

With toggleterm I press Ctrl+\, do my terminal tasks, and toggle it again to send it the background. (At least that is what I think happens, since next time I summon it, I can continue where I left off, not a new shell.)

On other benefit was that it behaves like normal shell. Let me explain.

When I used to use :terminal the shell would open in normal mode. To type commands, I had to explicitly enter the insert-mode. While a minor inconvenience, it still feels odd.

Emoji Completion for Neovim

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 16 May 2022 06:26:40 +0530

I’ve started watching this YouTube playlist Neovim from scratch

It is a great learning resource.

I use a program called espanso for hotkey expansion across the OS, that has emoji completion option. But it does not work with Vim. Maybe because of modal editing 🤷

While it took me some time to figure out, setting it up is quite straight forward.

Install the plugin. Add the following ‘~/.config/nvim/lua/user/plugins.lua’ file use "hrsh7th/cmp-emoji" -- Markdown emoji (Search for -- cmp plugins in the file)
Add it as a source for nvim-cmp Add the following ‘~/.config/nvim/lua/user/cmp.lua’ file { name = "emoji" }, (Search for sources = in the file)

Restart nvim to be sure (But not required.)

Now as soon as you type : you get suggestion like this:

Isn’t it 🆒 😄

Neovim From Scratch

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 11 May 2022 06:37:51 +0530

On the Vim Telegram group, I came across this starter kit called Neovim from scratch

But this starter kit is different from others. Others are opinionated (with a good reason). This one seems like purpose built.

Purpose being - to teach the users what goes under the hood. So it comes with a YouTube series.

But ones doesn’t need to follow the YouTube series to use this. One can just clone the git repo and get going.

One this that made this more attractive is that it is created by the same person (or at least one of the people) who created LunarVim.

I’ve been already using LunarVim for some time. But never quite got how it worked. Also some weird choices of keybindings e.g. They have key-binding for moving to next buffer :bNext but not for :bprevious.

So I started with backing up the existing working config - as the README suggested (and as a precaution)

I had to rm -rf the ~/.cache/nvim and ~/.local/share/nvim before I could start my new config. I ran into couple of issues, and I ~~almost~~ went back to working LunarVim config.

But then I found workarounds for the problems in the project’s github issues. (Open source FTW)

While following the YouTube is not mandatory, it is highly recommended.

With the YouTube series, I already modified the various options e.g. I prefer relative line numbering which was turned off by default. I also did not like the colorschemes that it comes with. So I added by favourite Nord theme.

I have only finished up to part 3 of the series, but learned a lot in the process.

FWIW, this post was written in my new setup.

Working Offline

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 05 May 2022 17:21:28 +0530

Today around 10am (or a bit earlier) we lost electricity at our house. Today is Thursday, and power loss isn’t surprising.

As far as I remember, my city always had scheduled power loss on Thursday. This used to happen every week when I was growing up. So much so, that my engineering college had Thursday as a weekly off, due to this. Over the years, things improved, but Thursday remained the day when local electricity company ~~would~~ could schedule the maintenance task.

Every now and then, we still have power loss for 20-30 minutes. It was after a long time we had a day long power loss (5.30PM as of this writing, and power has not returned)

I could not work the whole day. At first, I read the books. I completed two books today (I had started reading both earlier)

Ironically (?) one of the book was science fiction novel in Marathi called “Virus”. It is about how an advanced race from distant planet sends a virus via radio signals, and wants to cripple the modern world. (Earth wins! don’t worry : ) In the novel there are references to how we are dependent so much on computers for everyday life. I was thinking the same, but about internet. Due to battery, we could use our computers (for few hours) without electricity, but almost nothing can be done without the internet.

That is when I started thinking about the things I could do “offline”, and decided to write this post.

While I was able to write this post, I can’t publish it without the internet

Using Projects With LunarVim

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 03 May 2022 21:47:36 +0530

Today I spent some time getting projectile equivalent working with LunarVim

At first I went with builtin/core plugin projects.nvim. Enabling it was quite straight forward. I wasn’t sure how to add new project.

Then I tried telescope-projects. Even here I could not add new project (Per their documentation, it is Ctrl-a in Insert mode, and just c in normal mode) But I just opened the project root I wanted to work on, and it got added to the list of projects.

Now that project was enabled, everything worked in project context, like finding file, finding text.

This is what I wanted.

I came here looking for fzf-projectile equivalent from Emacs, but fzf is already integrated here. So default Find files means Find files in project using fzf

Next stop : Running all git commands from inside nvim (Just like I do in Emacs)

Mystery of Un-upgradable KeepassXC

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 02 May 2022 07:26:56 +0530

For some time now, my KeepassXC browser extension keep informing that I’m using older version of KeepassXC I usually upgrade immediately, so I did. Or so I thought.

I saw the same warning couple of days later. I thought there was new version, but there wasn’t. So installed it again.

This happened one more time, and I realized that even after upgrade, KeepassXC remained at older version (2.66, but as you’ll see it doesn’t matter)

In order to be sure, I first uninstalled existing KeepassXC rather than installing on top of existing version.

That didn’t help.

I searched. Didn’t help.

I looked through their issue list on github. No luck.

Then I thought maybe uninstall isn’t really removing the app. (But how can it be 🤔) But apparently that is what it was. (But not exactly)

So I wanted to find out where was the one that kept running. I had explicitly moved the one from /Applications to trash.

On the terminal I would have used which command. But how does one find out the same for GUI app ? That too on macOS, because .app is usually a folder. The real binary is inside /Content/.. path.

Anyway, turns out there is no technial problem that has not been asked (and resolved) on stackoverflow.

Here is the proof

Long story short, there was another version of KeepassXC.app under Utilities folder.

Once I moved that to trash, all was OK.

Updating LunarVim

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 21:53:28 +0530

Once I got Neovide working with LunarVim, I realized that I had not updated LunarVim for a long time.

I was already in rolling branch, so I did git pull origin rolling

Big mistake.

Things broke.

After RTFM, I noticed that there is :LvimUpdate command in LunarVim.

But by this time, my config was so broken that nothing worked 😞

Luckily, I found the old instructions that helped me initially.

Following those instructions, I was able to get “up and running”

Well, almost.

I still had to run :PakcerSync from normal nvim before I could get Neovide with latest lvim

🎉

Neovide with LunarVim config

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 21:38:28 +0530

So I tried VimR for some time, but it always felt odd. Sure all the LunarVim keybindings worked. But VimR wasn’t just Neovim client. It comes with its own features like the side panes for Files, Buffers, Markdown etc.

Also, it won’t really quit. :q! would destroy the window, but it would remain in the dock.

So for main work, I used Emacs.

Then today in Doom Emacs Telegram group, someone started talking about Vim. After some time, I ended up subscribing to Vim Telegram group, and asked about better neovim GUI.

First suggestion : VimR 😆

When I explained, someone suggested Neovide. I think I had looked at it earlier. But thinking that I need to compile from the source, I decided not to try it.

Turn out they have binary releases for macOS

and they have a new release just 7 days ago (As of this writing)

Getting it working was simple.

I needed to set the font correctly. Out of the box, it looked ugly.

I had to set vim.opt.guifont = "FiraCode Nerd Font:h13" in ~/.config/nvim/config.lua

All is working well.

I think Neovide is better than VimR

First Ruby MR

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 22:10:42 +0530

I just looked at the last post here. It was in late Feb 2022 I just realized that I have not posted anything in entire of March 2022

The reason for this microblog was to make it low-friction so that it does not go the way of my other blogs with month(s) long and sometime year long silence. But then why didn’t I post anything here for a month ?

I started working with a startup that is bigger than ones I was working with last decade or so. and they have processes, and meetings.

I get the importance of both - at bigger scale.

But then I got busy in meetings. Team meetings (some that go on for 2 hours. Every week) and 1:1 meetings, more of collaboration (these I like)

Hardly leaving time for anything else.

Hence no update for entire of March.

Now that I’ve kinda settled, I have just enough time to tell you about my First Ruby MR.

Since I started working here, this is technically my second MR. But the first one was updating the README 😄

This MR is also not real code change. This is more of configuration for rspec and set of changes to remove the secrets that were inadvertently checked into git.

I just felt great so write code after a long time 😄

Got VimR working with LunarVim

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 13:56:01 +0530

I had almost given up trying to use lvim config with GUI. But I persisted (and pestered folks on github issue 🙂) Finally, I got it working.

I wrote about How to get VimR to use Lunarvim configuration so that others can also benefit from it.

VimR

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 19:38:40 +0530

After setting up LunarVim, I wanted to get it to work with a NeoVim GUI

I had tried some in the past, but did not like any.

Then (I think on Discord) I came across some discussion that they got LunarVim (lvim henceforth) to work with Neoclide.

I couldn’t even get it to run 😞

I tried VimR, and it worked. i.e. I got it running. But I didn’t like their default look.

Since I was already happy with LunarVim, I thought why not use VimR GUI with lvim config ?

Apparently it is not so straight forward.

It is/was a known issue, which is apparently fixed

But I’m still unable to get it to work.

Back to Lunar Nvim

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 05:53:50 +0530

After my problems with Doom NVim, I decided to go back to LunarNVim.

I had never really left, but since both Doom and Lunar are NVim based configurations, they may overwrite the configurations (like from ~/.local/share/nvim/)

So I completely removed both Doom and Lunar and reinstalled.

I also installed ltex LSP for makrdown, which I could not do with Doom Nvim.

My other requirement was projectile equivalent. I found that there is :Telescope projects built-in with Lunar.

I’m now spending more time learning minor differences in keybindings e.g. Window related tasks are done via Ctrl+w rather than Space+w that I was used to.

Space+w saves the file (I think w for write rather than window)

While writing this entry, I was surprised to find that I get auto-completion for file paths. Isn’t that nice 😄

Doom Nvim Maintainer Leaving (?)

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 10:41:27 +0530

Just I was getting excited about Doom NVim, today I read (on their Discord server) that Alejandro aka NTBBloodbath on github has lost interest in Doom Nvim

To quote him :

I’ll slowly try to finally make Emacs my primary code editor (always failed in each attempt haha), Neovim’s ecosystem isn’t going in the direction I would like and I think it never will be so I’m very frustrated and sad with it.

Maintenance will still be “active” but a bit more slow from my side …………I’ll accept PRs, work on issues and everything will be as usual but a bit more slow as I told before.

This is sad 😞

I also keep getting a lot of errors from TreeParser (in what I would call minibuffer in Emacs terms) This is distracting.

I tried (maybe not enough) to set projectile equivalent (telescope project plugin) and ltex-ls, but no success.

Left Stck.me

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 23:15:42 +0530

Today was my last day at stck.me (Formerly Scrollstack.com) I spent more than a year working with the wonderful engineering team there. I learnt a lot from everyone on the team, and made some new friends (I already knew a lot of folks from this team before I joined) during my stay.

I will continue to cheer stck.me from the sidelines

Some of my contributions during my time with scrollstack:

Improve the SEO of the hosted blogs by auto generating the Sitemap from the posts
Integrate Honeybadger error monitoring tool for proactively addressing the issues in production setup
POC to generate PDF from Post Source
Multiple file support for Digital Goods like Gumroad
Monthly Active User Metrics. Although we did not end up using it, I learnt about rsyslog and logrotate in the process
Refactor tiptapy to use more Jinja and less python. This helped reduce the python code. Shekhar helped a lot on this process. 🙏

Doom Nvim

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 19:43:04 +0530

Those who know me, probably already know that Doom Emacs has been my daily driver for a last years now.

and that recently neovim has piqued my interest.

I already wrote about Lunar NVim

Today I discovered Doom-Nvim

Port of (sorta) Doom emacs to neovim ecosystem.

What is not to like ? 😄

As I wrote in Lunar NVim post, I am happy with Doom emacs. But this might make me switch back to (n)vim 😄

But seriously, I have used it only for couple of hours ¹

Things I miss

ltex-ls : LSP for text ? Gives me grammar tips (and spell checks)
projectile : Switch between different projects easily, have multiple projects open in different tabs at the same time.
magit : There is neogit, and it is bit behind in terms of maturity I think. e.g. I could not add new file from git status window.

There may be equivalent for both of these in neovim ecosystem, I just have not looked yet.

So while I won’t switch away from Doom emacs tomorrow, there is a high chance that I’ll look for equivalents here, and give an honest try to make this my new IDE

But I find this more aligned with my muscle memory, so I’m definitely switching away from Lunar NVim

(Ironically, I found out about Doom Nvim in a reddit thread reviewing Lunar Nvim 😆

I wrote this entire entry in Doom-nvim. Talk about meta! ↩︎

Added GA Support to Indiefeed Theme

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 19:51:07 +0530

I started this blog using indiefeed theme. But soon realized that the original creator has moved on. They have marked the repo as read-only on github. I had already started tweaking it to my liking, but now changes are more than tweaks. e.g. The original theme did not have good image support. i.e. only images used were in the Author profile image, and it has rounded corners/circular shape, which does not work when image is part of the post itself.

So I fixed that.

I also added Mermaid diagram support.

Since I have been writing consistently on this blog, I was curious to see if consistency pays of, and how.

My other blog uses Google Analytics to track this. So at first I thought : “I’ll just create another property and start tracking”

But it had two problems:

Indiefeed theme did not support Google Analytics
GA has come up with GAv4, so creating property is a bit different.

Second of the two was easy to overcome.

Hugo supports both versions. v4 and v3 (But it occurred to me late) But to be safe, I create Universal Analytics using Show Advanced Options button.

First one took minor code changes to the theme.

Hugo supports GA “out of the box”, but theme creator needs to enable it.

I needed to include the built-in template in the <head> section. If interested, see here

Read The Docs Carefully

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 19:24:41 +0530

Continuing with my Ruby language learning journey, I wanted to use it for more than Hello world.

So I decided to try python’s request equivalent.

Since I didn’t know where to begin, I just searched for requests on RubyGems

Turns out Gem by the exact name exists and with description Because Requests for Python is awesome 🤗 But it isn’t updated in close to 5 years now.

I also wanted to use something native (i.e. not ported from other languages - although nothing wrong with that)

Initially I tried net/http from the standard library.

Several people had already suggested Faraday by then. So that is what I chose.

The code was straight forward, yet it kept failing.

I asked for help on the Telegram group, but people kept suggesting based on their hunch, without reading the code I had shared.¹

I know it is not SO, so I shouldn’t expect too much, still when one feels stuck and other’s suggestions aren’t useful, one feels frustrated 🤷‍

Finally, I decided to dig deep (I thought I had already done that, but I guess not 😄)

Turns out when you create a connection, you only specify the server in the connection object, and specify the path when you make a request. Makes sense looking back. (I had specified the entire URL, including the path)

Second most important one was, and related to the first one, or because of the first one, I specified 'get' as param to conn.get() It is copy/paste from the Usage page of Faraday documentation.

I assumed 'get' string tells the connection to GET the URL. (Looking back, if we are already using conn.get, why would we specify string 'get' again. But .. 🤷‍) Reason I thought that because I had already specified the path in connection.

The problem was I kept getting HTML output, when I asked for json. I thought that was the problem 😆

It wasn’t until I decided to dig down the rabbit hole and reached this page I realized what may be the actual problem.

Here, they are passing 'json' to conn.get. That can’t be right, because they are already specifying f.response :json in Faraday.new

This is when I went to actual http://httpbingo.org and noticed that json is a page that returns JSON response. 💡

Lessons Learned:

Don’t copy/paste blindly
Don’t assume URLs are placeholders (Most times they are, until they are not)
Think! (This happened late, but better late than never 😄)

To be fair, someone shared working code, which was bit different from mine, in a sense it did not use connection, but by then I had already solved the problem myself. ↩︎

Sketch: Dancing Queen

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 29 Jan 2022 17:38:39 +0530

I published my new sketch This appeared on the back of one of the children’s books. I think tinkle

It took me less than 5 minutes, but makes for a good break from work, and lets me keep practicing my art.

The girl appears so happy showing off her new dress (I think) or she is just happy and frolicking. In either case, it is adorable.

If you haven’t, you can check my older sketches here

Ruby Debugger

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 10:49:29 +0530

While there are multiple ways to use Ruby debugger, for my first Ruby script (?) I found starting the script via rdbg to be the easiest.

Like rdbg myscript.rb

Debugger has all the basic command I have used elsewhere.

n for next
pp for pretty print
q for quit

For subsequent times, using require 'debug' followed by binding.break may be better.

This README has all the details.

Bundler

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 21:12:32 +0530

If I were to explain bundler to pythonista (like myself) I would say

Bundler in Ruby land is like poetry in python land, except it does not create sandbox environment

To explain it a little more. It tracks dependencies in a Gemfile (and Gemfile.lock) which then goes in your repo. Other engineers sharing your code would then run bundle install, and they get exact same Gems (including versions) on their machines.

In order to add entries to the Gemfile one does bundle add, which updates the Gemfile and installs it locally

This is somewhat like poetry add updating pyproject.toml and poetry.lock Gemfile is like requirements.txt which one updates manually.

(Just like poetry) one needs to create base/empty Gemfile via bundle init As I found out, one can’t directly bundle add (Although it might be a good enhancement to create Gemfile if one is not found 🤔)

Also, I think the documentation should mention bundle add much earlier.

If I had not used poetry I could not have guessed about it.

Ref: Bundler documentation

Where Are My (Ruby) Gems ?

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 16:38:12 +0530

As I mentioned earlier, I’m trying Lunar nvim starter kit. Latest version of nvim comes with LSP support, and while learning a new language LSP could be really helpful (I think)

I had heard of solargraph. Running :LspInstall in nvim gave me option of sorbet as well. But I decided to stick with solargraph.

nvim was successful in installing solargraph, or so it told me. But it did not work. LspInfo told me that it did not find solargraph Just to be sure I gem install solargraph from the terminal, before I tried to install LSP from nvim again

No dice.

So decided to investigate.

Being new to Ruby, I didn’t know the default location where gems get installed.

In the process, I learnt about gem env where following seemed wrong

 - INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /usr/local/Cellar/tmuxinator/3.0.1/libexec

Eventually I learnt that I could also use gem env home

I had no idea why tmuxinator would even be in the picture.

So I decided to brew uninstall tmuxinator

I also asdf uninstall ruby (I think I went too far 😆 but I wanted to be really sure)

OK, now I had clean slate.

Now asdf install ruby latest followed by gem env and I got:

 - INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /Users/mandar/.asdf/installs/ruby/3.1.0/lib/ruby/gems/3.1.0
 
 ➜ which solargraph
/Users/mandar/.asdf/shims/solargraph

Looks better.

In the process, I also learnt gem which solargraph, which is a bit different (Points to solargraph.rb file, rather than bash script)

Now LspInstall also worked in lvim

But LspStart fails. But with different error. (Investigation and resolution of that in another post)

Lunar Nvim

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 16:13:11 +0530

I came across some starter kits for nvim. Earlier I tried adding individual plugins and learning all the nvim basics, but since I’m pretty happy with Doom Emacs ¹

But Lunar nvim seems stable and provides a lot of functionality out of the box. 👍

prerequisite page asks to ensure that I have cargo. I knew it a package manager(?) for rust, but didn’t know whether I could install it standalone. Turns out I can’t. brew also suggested that I install rust 😄 which I did.

The installation script asked me whether I wanted to install npm, python and rust dependencies (as if it was optional). I didn’t know what all I might miss if I chose not to install those. My aim was to get a decent nvim setup without having to tinker with manual installations. So I accepted those options.

After that, installation went well.

It created a wrapper script ~/.local/bin/lvim which sets up environment variables, and calls nvim

Best thing is that it also uses space as a leader key. So it worked well for my Doom Emacs muscle memory 🎉

It seems to have cool built-in features and sane defaults.

I have since brew uninstall vim

I also wanted and created an alias for view command to lvim -R (which is like nvim -R but with lvim configuration loaded, I think.)

But view command comes with the OS

/usr/bin/view is a link to /usr/bin/vim - which I could not remove, even with sudo. I got Operation not permitted each time 🤷‍

For now, I have settled with an alias lview, which ~~I am~~ my fingers are likely to forget, but I will train them 😄

Who knows ? That might change if Lunar Nvim works really well 😆 ↩︎

Exploring `irb`

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 20:15:07 +0530

Start clean

I created an alias irb=irb --sample-book-mode

This removes the complex prompt like irb(main):001:0> and gives plain and simple >> instead.

Get Help!

When programming in Python, even today I use dir in Python REPL. So I was looking for the equivalent in Ruby land.

Turns out I was comparing apples and oranges (so to speak)

As of early 2022, irb has awesome help built-in. It has good autocompletion. So just typing . may be enough to know list of methods available.

Or just help followed by say String (or Array) is enough.

Remove the clutter

During the initial exploration, irb session quickly gets cluttered.

I instinctively tried clear (as used in shell) - that didn’t work 😄

To clear the irb session, use Ctrl+L

You `require` this

passing -r to irb automatically makes that gem available in irb session.

➜ irb -rpp
>> pp $LOAD_PATH
[".../lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1",
 ".../lib/ruby/site_ruby",
 ".../lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.9.1",
 ".../lib/ruby/vendor_ruby",
 ".../lib/ruby/1.9.1",
 "."]

(☝ example may be old. In my case, $LOAD_PATH️ was automatically pretty-printed 😄)

Time to go

Ctrl+D works for both python REPL and irb

In python you require () to call a function

➜ python
Python 3.8.12 (default, Sep 16 2021, 22:00:28)
[Clang 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.32.29)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> exit
Use exit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit

In Ruby, it is optional. So both exit() or simply exit works! 👍

Now I have Email Address on my own domain

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 21:32:31 +0530

I have owned this domain for a couple of years now (maybe more) But it never occurred to me to have my email address on that domain. I suppose I always assumed that it would involve setting up own servers and/or cost of server etc.

Usually domain registrars provide some free emails, but their interface is just usable. Also, it might become one-more-email I’ll forget to check 😆

But for my recent secret 🕵 project, I needed a professional email. Not personal email.

Turns out zoho has a free forever plan that works well for my scenario.

The plan covers 5 free users, so it worked for me.

Zoho has great documentation. They walked me through setting up all the TXT, MX, SPF and DKIM records.

It was really easy.

So now I have @this-domain email.

I already have and use zoho mail. So I do not need to check one-more email either 😄

Fish function to read webpage in Terminal

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 22:17:02 +0530

I’m really digging reading web posts in the terminal.

After using it for some time, I realized that typing same arguments after the URL (That I usually copied to the clipboard from some other place) is getting cumbersome.

So I created a fish function out of it (If you see yourself doing the same task over and over, it is a good place to automated it)

Here is the simple function

➜ function readweb
      readable $argv | w3m -T text/html
  end

Now save it to a file, to reuse it.

➜ functions readweb > ~/.config/fish/functions/readweb.fish

Just paste the URL after typing readweb, and hit RET 🎉

➜ readweb https://microblog.desipenguin.com

Reference

IRC

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 17:40:11 +0530

I could not believe myself, that I finally created an IRC account.

Lot of people have asked how come I am not on IRC. They told me that we get to interact with smart people on IRC, including creators of great software, libraries, framework. But for some reason, I resisted. It felt complex, compared to modern communities like Telegram, Discord etc.

Today someone suggested it again on the Doom Emacs Telegram channel, and this time I decided to give an honest try.

So here I am.

Choosing a client

While there are a lot of IRC client apps to choose from, I decided to continue with ERC built into Emacs 😄 This means I don’t need to switch to a different app. Plus IRC being text based, it makes sense it belongs to an ~~editor~~ app like Emacs 😉

I had connected to IRC servers in the past, only briefly. So I know there is a nickname on IRC. But like any other social app, you don’t need an account (usually paired with an email and password)

Account is optional.

I wasn’t sure how that works.

So I went ahead and registered

Registration

Since IRC is text based protocol, the registration is via : /msg NickServ REGISTER YourPassword youremail@example.com

The password in plain text. But I assume it is only in my Emacs. Even in browser, technically it is visible till sent over the wire so 🤞

I got email confirmation email, and verification was again a command just like above /msg NickServ VERIFY REGISTER YourNickName YourVerificationCode

Email contained exact command to paste. 👍

I don’t know how to Quit 😄

I don't know how to quit may be a motivational line, Or SO question about vi/vim But in my case, I didn’t know how to exit out of ERC session.

Following are actual attempts 😆

<mandarvaze> quit
No target

<mandarvaze> exit
No target

Finally, I RTFM and figured /quit to disconnect from a server.

Joining (and leaving) a channel

/join #pythonpune /part #pythonpune

I found basic IRC guide here

In case you are curious, IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat

Ruby for Python Programmers

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 19:56:02 +0530

While I noted similarities and difference between Ruby and Python, as I was learning the basics here, here and here there is official document on the Ruby site. See this

Learning Ruby: Syntax (Part 3)

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 16:28:55 +0530

Methods

Ruby functions start with def just like python, but end with end keyword.
splat operator (*) to destructure an array into a List. This is similar to Python splat operator

>>> x = [10, 20, 30]
>>> a, *b = x
>>> print(f'{a=}, {b=}')
a=10, b=[20, 30]

Python ☝️, Ruby 👇

>> first, *rest, last  = ["a", "b", "c", "d"]
=> ["a", "b", "c", "d"]
>> first
=> "a"
>> rest
=> ["b", "c"]
>> last
=> "d"
>>

But in Ruby, splat operator can also create an array.

>> q=*135
=> [135]
>> q
=> [135]

In the second scenario¹, it creates an array. I think this is useful for scenario where the method accepts either a single element or an array.

In python, we have to write an awkward code like


if isinstance(item, int):
  my_list = [item]

When used in method argument, splat operator is similar to python’s *args (args is just a convention)
Method name conventions
- if method ends with ? it returns boolean e.g. 5.even? #=> false
- if method ends with ! it does something destructive
  - e.g. upcase returns the upper case version of the string, but the string itself does not change
  - But upcase! returns the upper case version of the string, while also changing the string itself to upper case.

classes

class definition starts with keyword class just like python. But ends with end keyword.
scopes determined by the prefix of the variable name
- @ : instance scope
- $ : global scope
- @@ : class scope
class methods start with self. Can not be called on an instance (Like @staticmethod in python ??)
Derived class uses < to denote parent class

# Derived class
class Derived < Baseclass
end

include and extend

module ModuleExample
  def foo
    'foo'
  end
end

# Including modules binds their methods to the class instances.
# Extending modules binds their methods to the class itself.
class Person
  include ModuleExample
end

class Book
  extend ModuleExample
end

Person.foo     #=> NoMethodError: undefined method `foo' for Person:Class
Person.new.foo #=> "foo"
Book.foo       #=> "foo"
Book.new.foo   #=> NoMethodError: undefined method `foo'

Variable that start with Capital letter are constants, BUT constants can change 🤯
We get a warning when re-initializing the constant, but that is about it.

irb(main):015:0> Var = "I'm a constant"
=> "I'm a constant"
irb(main):016:0> Var.upcase!
=> "I'M A CONSTANT"
irb(main):017:0> Var
=> "I'M A CONSTANT"
irb(main):018:0> defined? Var
=> "constant"
irb(main):022:0> Var = "I can change"
(irb):22: warning: already initialized constant Var
(irb):19: warning: previous definition of Var was here

To make it immutable, call .freeze method

irb(main):001:0> Var = "I can change"
=> "I can change"
irb(main):002:0> Var.freeze
=> "I can change"
irb(main):003:0>  Var.upcase!
(irb):3:in `upcase!': can't modify frozen String: "I can change" (FrozenError)
...
...
...
irb(main):004:0> Var
=> "I can change"

Last Updated: Jan 22, 2022. Added details of how splat operator can also construct an array

I came across this second use here ↩︎

Icons in Directory Listing

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 20:21:19 +0530

Would you like to see pretty icons in your terminal for directory list ?

Then install lsd from here

Check this pretty screenshot of lsd --tree

In case you are wondering, I’m using nord theme with Alacritty

Learning Ruby: Syntax (Part 2)

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 09:56:32 +0530

Learning continues …

idiomatic(?) ruby loops use each like :

(1..5).each do |counter|
  puts "iteration #{counter}"
end

Although python like loop also work

for counter in 1..5
  puts "iteration #{counter}"
end

array.each_with_index is like python’s enumerate
Ruby seems to have multiple ways to do the same thing, as opposed to Python’s

There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.

e.g. a.map do .. end, a.map { |el| e.something } and a.map(&:method)

➜ cat test.rb
array = [1,2,3,4,5]
sqr = array.map do |item|
    item * item
end
puts sqr

a = ["Foo", "bAr", "baZ"]
puts a.map { |s| s.downcase }
puts a.map(&:upcase)


mandar in /tmp via 💎 v3.1.0
➜ ruby test.rb
1
4
9
16
25
foo
bar
baz
FOO
BAR
BAZ

Python did not have case statement, till 3.10 introduced Structural Pattern Matching
Exception handling has different keywords, but parallels exist in Python world

Python	Ruby
try	begin/end
except	rescue
else	else
ensure	finally

Python requires explicit return, else it returns None by default. Ruby on the other hand implicitly return the value of the last statement. (This was not a surprise to me since Elixir also does the same.)
yield is different in Ruby compared to Python. I haven’t fully groked Ruby’s yield. It seems like a placeholder, but I could be wrong. Need to dig deeper to understand.

Installing Ruby

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 09:31:55 +0530

There are multiple ways to install ruby on your machine.

Official recommendation is to use your OS’s package manager like apt, pacman or brew

If you are using a version manager, rvm (Ruby Version Manager) seems to be popular. But in the past, I started using asdf, so I’ve decided to stick with it. It is also mentioned (first in the list) on the official Installing Ruby page 😄

asdf plugin add ruby https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-ruby.git
asdf list all ruby
asdf install ruby latest

At the time of this writing 3.1.0 is the latest

It took little over 13 minutes. 😱 I think it could be because this was the first time I installed any Ruby version.

I would like to believe that subsequent installation will be faster. 🤞

Before I could use irb (which is what everyone suggest we do, when learning Ruby. It is REPL for ruby) I had to asdf global ruby 3.1.0 ¹

Without it, I kept getting the following error:

$ irb
No version is set for command irb
Consider adding one of the following versions in your config file at /Users/mandar/.tool-versions
ruby 3.1.0

Once done, irb worked. We are off to the races 😄

I could have also used asdf local instead if I wanted different ruby version for different projects ↩︎

Learning Ruby: Syntax (Part 1)

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 21:26:04 +0530

I’ve meaning to learn Ruby for some time now.

Especially, when I dabbled from time to time in Elixir, I felt that knowing Ruby may be an advantage (since Elixir syntax similar to Ruby)

No one learns (I think) Ruby just for the language. They learn it so that they can use Ruby on Rails (RoR as popularly known) RoR, in case you don’t know, is the Web framework. Like Django in Python land. But there are a lot of web frameworks like Flask, Pyramid, FastAPI to name some.

I know of Sinatra - I think it is like Flask, but I could be wrong.

Rails seems to have great documentation.

Ruby on the other hand, sends you to third party sources, at least one of them no longer exist or unreachable.

I started with Learn X in Y minutes. This is a great place to get familiar with syntax.

I understand that knowing the syntax is just the first step. Step that must be taken before knowing more.

Coming from Python, here are some of the differences I noticed.

Python has no concept of Symbols (In Elixir these are Atoms)
Arithmetic functions are just method invoking a method.

1.+(3) #=> 4
10.* 5 #=> 50

Luckily, we don’t have to always use this awkward method. Normal 1+3 also works 😆

Special Values too are objects

nil.class #=> NilClass
true.class #=> TrueClass
false.class #=> FalseClass

%w seems useful. Less typing - more developer productivity !!

%w[foo bar baz] #=> ["foo", "bar", "baz"]

Array are like Python list
Hashes are like Python dictionary, but slight different syntax

# Hashes are Ruby's primary dictionary with key/value pairs.
hash = { 'color' => 'green', 'number' => 5 }

But when using Symbols for keys, python-like syntax can be used

hash = { :defcon => 3, :action => true }
hash.keys #=> [:defcon, :action]

hash = { defcon: 3, action: true }
hash.keys #=> [:defcon, :action]

more tomorrow … 💤

Tmuxinator: Manage complex tmux sessions easily

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 11:50:20 +0530

After using tmux for a while, I realized that whenever I create new session locally, I end up opening same set of panes.

One for work project (Sometimes more than one, but usually one)
One for some kind of blog (I have three Hugo projects at this time)
One misc. I start this in ~, I use this for running brew commands or standalone python session, or bin/doom sync (which I’ve been doing from inside doom emacs these days, so the last usecase has gone down)

Turns out I’m not the only one™️ with such use case.

There is a tool called tmuxinator (what a 🆒 name)

I’ve created a default profile which starts these three panes when starting a new tmux session.

tmuxinator has features to do a lot more.

I’ll explore them slowly and update my tmuxinator config over the time. (Like everyone else 😄)

Firefox Reader mode in your Terminal

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 06:41:01 +0530

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m trying to move to more text based workflows.

On that journey, I came across readable which creates a clean version of a webpage, just like Firefox Reader mode would do. But without Firefox.

Which means, you can read cleaner website from your terminal (if you want)

Read Firefox Reader mode in your Terminal

Fuzzy Search in fish with fzf

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 15:40:29 +0530

I had installed fzf some time ago. But default key ** for invoking fzf did not work with fzf.

Upon searching, I came across couple of options. Of those, I chose the one with active development.

As of this writing, the last commit was 11 days ago. Very active, I would say. 😄

Installation instruction said fisher install PatrickF1/fzf.fish but when tried, I got an error:

fisher: unknown flag or command "install"

🤔

I tried fisher add which seemed like closest option to install.

That didn’t work either. 😞

I got

fisher: cannot add github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish -- is this a valid package?

Turns out someone else also had same error. The suggestion was to upgrade fisher itself.

fisher upgrade also had a minor hiccup. I had to manually remove the old files installed by fisher.

Now that fzf was ready, I’m exploring all the cool things it can do.

For starters, interactive history via Ctrl + R is amazing. It is better than default Ctrl + R in bash (Reverse history search) or even what fish provides out of the box. (Auto complete commands based on history)

text mode browsing in Emacs

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 19:56:56 +0530

I’m leaning more and more towards text based workflow.

Earlier I enabled twittering-mode in Doom Emacs, and tweeted from Emacs. How 🆒 is that.

But that is when I realized that twitter has lots of URLs. If I visit a URL from my Twitter feed, it opens up in external browser by default.

I have two problems with that.

My flow gets disturbed.
The browser already has gazillion links open. Once I go there, I get distracted.

Opening links within emacs addresses both these (I think. Too early to comment)

Since eww is already included in Emacs 24.4 onwards, no separate installation required.

I added the following to my config.el

(setq browse-url-browser-function 'eww-browse-url)

🎉

Installed `most` pager on macOS

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 17:28:16 +0530

Today while I was browsing thru The Tao of tmux - I came across a better pager called most

I think it is a play on default pagers called less and more

Unfortunately, the official website almost makes it impossible to find stuff about it.

Documentation is non existent.

I found elsewhere that most linux distro make it available via their package manager.

I did not find any mention of macOS though.

Installing from source requires something called S-lang interpreter. In any case, I avoid installing tools by compiling them locally.

I prefer and trust the package managers.

Just on a whim, I tried brew info most, turns out it is available. Installing via brew install most was a no-op.

I set it as universal pager in fish via set --universal PAGER most

For now, I have tested it only with man. The man pages look nice with syntax highlighting.

Hugo Modules

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 17:14:02 +0530

Today I spent some more time modifying the IndieFeed theme

As I mentioned earlier, I started using hugo modules instead of git submodule from the beginning. One of the downside of it was I could not preview my changes without pushing the changes to github first.

Sometimes that might be OK, most times it is not.

How do theme developers work in such scenario. Turns out there is a hack just for that.

So much so that documentation mention for Local development at multiple places 😄

The directive is replace. Read the documentation here

I did this in go.mod of this project. But hugo server kept complaining that go.mod was missing from my local folder where I work on the theme. (It is not under themes folder of this project)

Turns out I need to do the following in my theme directory.

hugo mod init github.com/mandarvaze/indiefeed which created go.mod there. Now hugo server had no complaints ✌️

I also removed theme entry from my config.yaml

-theme: ["github.com/mandarvaze/indiefeed"]
+
+module:
+  imports:
+  - path: github.com/mandarvaze/indiefeed
+

These steps documented here and here respectively.

Dooble Browser

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 13:12:34 +0530

I came across Dooble browser via one of the Hacker news post.

The browser use Qt library and thus biased towards Linux. Or so I thought. There is a pre-built dmg file for macOS.

It worked well in short test-run I did.

I wish there was a way to set it as a default browser, so I could have tested it more thoroughly.

FWIW, it did not register itself as a browser with macOS – which seems OS specific requirement.

Without setting it as a default browser, I need to open the links explicitly/manually in this new browser, which I am unlikely to remember during the normal workday.

One of the thing that did not work in this browser is automatic detection of dark mode for this site.

In Firefox, this site always opens in dark mode because I have set Firefox to always use Dark mode. In Auto mode it switches to Dark mode in the evenings and nights. That did not happen here.

But it is not a dealbreaker.

Yet another thing that we have come to expect is pre-installed search engines. Dooble comes with some, even the ones I had never heard of. But they are not enabled by default. I manually added Google and DDG.

But I can’t search directly from address bar. It felt silly. In 2022 who goes to the search engine site to search 😄

The way the integration works is user can highlight a text, and search for it using right click menu. Other browsers also have this functionality, so it is not novel.

You find more from their github page including downloading a release to try it for yourself.

🌱 Automate Dendron Publishing

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 18:38:10 +0530

I have been using Dendron for some time now as a PKM tool. I started when it was using 11ty to generate site out of the notes.

It would create the site in docs folder, using Dendron: Site Build in VSCode I had mapped the docs folder to a git repo.

I would push ready-made site to git, and netlify deploy was a no-op

Then recently they switched to next.js and publishing changed a lot. (Personally I liked the old look and feel, but that is besides the point)

Now the .next/out would contain the Site.

It would have been OK, changing from docs to .next/out is no big deal, but with next-based publishing, out folder gets removed on each build. 😱

I had tough time figuring out how to publish (I did some hacks, but not really proud of those 😅)

Then I came across a blog post on Dendron’s discord channel.

Essentially they figured a way around this.

As a bonus, I don’t have to maintain two git repos like before (Remember, I had a git repo just for the generated output)

The steps from the script are pretty straightforward. Yet having such simple script and asking netlify to use it as a build command (and use docs folder to publish) does make the workflow more efficient.

If you have not, please check my Digital Garden

Espanso 2.x (Alpha)

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 17:09:52 +0530

While reading the documentation on Espanso’s main site, I noticed a Search bar feature.

To be sure, after some time, one is unlikely to remember all the shortcuts one has added, along with ones that came with packages.

So search bar is a welcome feature. But shortcut mentioned on the site Alt+Space did not work. I was not surprised, because this key combination triggers Raycast on my machine.

So I went looking for way to change the hotkey, and reached an issue which mentioned that search bar is a feature of 2.x Alpha 💡

I quickly removed the old version and installed the new one, which happens to be normal macOS app (Earlier I had written that I did not realize it is a Terminal app, but that was for Legacy version)

Starting the app for the first time, pops up a nice wizard that walks you thru all the steps.

The wizard even migrated my old configuration as well.

espanso package list now showed the packages from legacy version, as (legacy). I uninstalled and reinstalled the newer versions of both the packages – just to be safe.

The documentation for this alpha version is still in-progress. But I found both the documentation and the app stable. 👍

As I added a :+1: above, a popup showed up to resolve a possible conflict. (There are two versions/shades of the thumbs up emoji) How 😎 is that ?

Espanso (Legacy)

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 21:29:17 +0530

Just as I was getting to know espanso, I came across a brand-new version of espanso that is way better that this (0.7.6) version, now called Legacy version. Read about the new version here

I have left the following as is, for posterity

Long time ago, when I used Windows (provided by my employer), I used to use AutoHotkey. Since then, I have not used Windows and never used text expander again.

Then today, I came across espanso – open source text expander and more – in logseq discard channel.

Following does not apply with 2.0.0-alpha version

~~At first, it was unclear to me that this is a terminal app. Mainly because I installed via Cask, which I’ve done only for UI apps.~~

~~Looking at espanso –help I was unclear what to do next, so I tried to start the daemon, which failed. There were no logs via espanso log either.~~ ~~I had seen register command, but did not run because I thought it was register-the-product-by-providing-your-info 😆~~

~~Since nothing else worked, I decided to try it anyway. Turns out it registers the daemon with OS.~~ ~~I got the permission dialog from the OS. I also got “This program is trying to control Desktop programmatically” prompt – which I allowed.~~

~~After which espanso start worked 😄~~

~~To be fair, this is already documented, I just never read the documentation.~~

With a tool like this, one does not know where to start. Luckily, espanso comes with packages that one can install to get started with some required tasks.

The packages I installed so far are misspell-en and all-emojis

I also created my first abbreviation 🎉 (I added <- this emoji using :tada: 😄 – which comes with all-emojis package)

Color Scheme Media Query

Mandar Vaze — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 19:34:19 +0530

It surprised me at first to notice that this site looks different based on the time of the day. Upon debugging (aka using Browser Developer tools) I realized that the CSS has media query for prefer-color-theme Learn more here to learn more.

I made some minor changes to the theme, but I could only test one variant based on the time of the day.

That when I remembered that I had set system auto theme for firefox, which enabled dark mode during the evening/night.

So for testing, I enabled the Light theme, and was able to test my changes to the light version of the theme.

Dynalist to Logseq

Mandar Vaze — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 17:12:17 +0530

Almost a decade ago, I came across Workflowy.

It is a simple outliner program. Think of a simple white paper of unlimited length, and digital.

That is all it was. No other frills.

One of its shortcomings was no mobile client. One could hack to get it working on mobile, but there was no app. Then I came across Dynalist.

I used it for a long time. I have it installed on my mobile even today.

As with every app, the data is in the cloud.

I have been always wary of small services that may one day disappear. Bitten once, twice shy. (Anyone remember Posterous ?)

Logseq reminds me of Dynalist. But first and formost, it is local-first tool. All my notes are always on my machine.

I could back it up the way I see fit. Most obvious would be git. One of the YouTube video mentions github integration, that auto syncs the contents with github. I’ll need to check that later.

This is a long way to say, I’ve started migrating my notes from Dynalist to Logseq.

Logseq

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 22:03:10 +0530

I came across logseq long ago, of all the places on Dendron’s discord channel. It has other-projects channel just for this purpose.

Logseq was still early back then (compared to Dendron at least).

I tried, but did not like it. Plus Dendron was much better.

Today, I came across Logseq again, when I was perusing my colleague’s twitter feed and noticed that he is using it. So I checked it again. They now have a Desktop app, plugins and decent community.

So I installed the Desktop app.

What I did not like back then was the dark green color theme. It has not changed. But there are theme support (created by the community) So I might try one that I find better.

They also have light theme, which is white. Better than dark green. For now, that is what I am using.

I plan to use it for their journal feature. If I like that, I might continue it that way.

I do not plan to use it for knowledge management. At least not now anyway.

Interestingly, I came across a YouTube video where the person said:

I’m going to use Logseq for Technical notes, and keep other personal stuff in obsidian

Another (potential) benefit of Logseq is that is supports Org-mode, and there is a plugin for logseq from within Emacs. (It is too early for me understand that what means 😄)

If you have not yet visited my PKM powered by Dendron, please do.

Deployed Microblog

Mandar Vaze — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 11:43:17 +0530

Finally, deployed this site.

It took a while because, at first I was modifying the theme to my liking.

As most theme README state, I started with git submodule, but it gets confusing. That is when I came across hugo modules in this post.

But it did not work for me for multiple reasons.

First, I did not understand the difference between specifying theme from repo Vs local, and hugo mod init

The docs keep referring to my repo, which means the repo for this site, but I confused it with theme repo.

It some trial and errors. But finally it was really easy. These instructions were all I needed.

Deploying to netlify was no-op. I have about 5 sites on netlify. 😄

At first the CSS et al did not work. That is because the baseURL was example.com 😆 Changing that, setting custom domain on netlify (and https certificate) was all it took to get the site up it all its glory.

I do want to tweak the theme more.

I also want to post more.

Appflowy

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 19:50:20 +0530

Came across appflowy on twitter. It is an open source alternative to Notion.

I have never used Notion, but everyone and their grandma rave about it.

Why have I not used Notion so far ? Because I did not want to sign up for yet-another SaaS that I know I won’t use.

I use Dendron (these days) for my PKM. I use it because it is “local first” - meaning I always have access to my data.

One of the reason I created this microblog is for the same reason. Otherwise, Polywork seems nice for such “What am I doing right now” notes.

What if Polywork goes away one day ? Once bitten twice shy.

Back to Appflowy. Their website does not have enough information whether their Desktop app is UI for remote Saas. But I would be happy if it is local-first (or local-only) Notion-clone 🤞

Update : Tried it by brew install appflowy. It is just their second release, and it shows. Basic editing works (I assumed. Did not try) There is a Share button, which I expected will allow sharing in different formats. It does. For now there are two options :

Copy link : Says Work in Progress
Markdown : No error, but does not work.

I have uninstalled it. I might come back again later when it has matured.

Edit : Appflowy should look at Logseq. Since I have never used Notion, I might call Logseq a Open source alternative to Notion, that is local-first

Back to DDG

Mandar Vaze — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 16:27:09 +0530

Few days ago, I came across you.com search engine. I tried it for solid 15 days. There was no set plan for “trial”

It presents the result in card like fashion, which I was OK with. But I think rendering take a bit longer. So much so that I noticed the delay.

Switching back to trusty DDG 😇

Hacking IndieFeed Theme

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 19:52:09 +0530

I started with indiefeed theme. While it is possible to make visual changes by creating css/style.css (as explained in the README) I’m thinking of making other changes as well.

So I started by forking the theme. So far my changes are only in css/style.css

I’m not a frontend developer. But I know enough HTML/CSS to be dangerous 😆

Nvim

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 17:13:17 +0530

I have been using nvim for a while. Initially with VS Code, and then as replacement for vi/vim from the terminal.

Since I use Doom emacs as may primary editor, I use nvim only for occasional quick edits here and there.

So I had not paid attention, but nvim the ecosystem is getting better.

TIL that there are two ways to configure nvim. Via VimScript and Lua

Need to look into each and decide which one to use.

I also did not know there were multiple package managers for nvim. Decided on VimPlug without too much research 🤞

Integrated terminal in Emacs

Mandar Vaze — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 14:02:12 +0530

I spend most of my time in Emacs and Terminal. I make code changes in emacs and switch to terminal to run the tests. It would be nice to do that without switching between the two.

In the past, I had tried shell-mode and inferior shell (python) for this, but it didn’t work, till I found vterm

How to use Emacs as an IDE with Integrated Terminal (Instructions for Doom Emacs, but should work for other configurations as well)

Install LetsEncrypt certificate

Mandar Vaze — Sat, 24 Jul 2021 17:00:18 +0530

Today I installed LetsEncrypt certificate on one of the production server.

I can not believe it is so simple to secure a website running on an Ubuntu server

sudo apt-get install certbot python-certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx -d mydomain.com -d www.mydomain.com

It even configures nginx (or apache) server for you.

To manually renew run the following:

certbot renew --quiet

But you don’t have to, cause certbot is so awesome that it automatically adds an entry into crontab so that certbot runs twice daily. There is an entry under /etc/cron.d/certbot

Run the following to check the status of renewal service :

sudo systemctl status certbot.timer

Finally,

If the automated renewal process ever fails, Let’s Encrypt will send a message to the email you specified, warning you when your certificate is about to expire.

Configure `rsyslog`

Mandar Vaze — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 17:07:13 +0530

Today, I configured rsyslog on Ubuntu server to collect logs from remote application server.

syslog using UDP seems straight forward, but I wanted to set up using TCP (TCP being more reliable and all)

At first, it did not work because I needed to tell SysLogHandler that we are using TCP using SOCK_STREAM as optional param. (Default is UDP) So in a standalone test script, remote logging worked.

Turns out because of how TCP works, the logs are not flushed to the remote server till the application server closes the socket connection.

Considering application server works 24x7, it will not close socket, and thus it appears as if logs are not reaching the remote server.

So settled back on UDP (full circle?)

But learned things in the process. (There may be a way to use TCP and flush the log immediately, but for now moving on)

@mandarvaze’s microblog - Posts

Duck Duck Go Browser

Theme Update: Added Tags Listing

Sketch: Bungalow

Theme Update

Opencode: Second Impression

How to enforce `uv` to use specific version?

Opencode: First Impressions

Taming Zellij Keybindings on macOS: A Journey Through Conflicts and Dead Ends

The Problem with Ctrl on macOS

Attempt 1: Cmd as Leader

Attempt 2: Alt (Option) as Leader

Attempt 3: Trying to Work Around Alt Conflicts

The F-Key Idea

The F11 Casualty

The clear-defaults=true Lesson

The Final Configuration

Lessons Learned

Oh My Posh

Sketch: Tortoise

Sketch: Robot

Sketch: Brendan and Al

Sketch: Weight Training

Visual Alphabet : Session by Dave Gray

Visual Alphabet

Using Harper Language Server with Helix Editor

Solved: unknown terminal xterm-ghostty

Deliberate Practice

Sketch: SEO out, AEO in

Sketchnote in Day to Day Life

Sketch: Dude and Doc

Sketch: Pens and Pencils in a Cup

Urban Sketch of a Church

Sketch: Person Practicing Drawing

VSCode Multi-Root Magic: Run Flutter APK Builds in Separate Git Repos

TL;DR

The Problem

The Fix: Multi-Root Workspace + Smart Tasks

1. Create Multi-Root Workspace

2. Update flutter_app/.vscode/tasks.json

Pro Tip: Emulator Localhost

Final Checklist

Omarchy on Macbook Pro

Mission : Upgrade macOS

Purchased Macbook Pro 16" 2019 🎉

Flutter Development on Windows

Windows for Development

Appimage

Experience of Conducting Mass Media Workshop to Young Students

Pikaos : Hyprland

Hyprland on Mint

Omarchy

AnduinOS

Dynamic Values when buiding Flutter app

Human Would Have Known That

`ty` type checker with Django

Troubleshooting ssh error

Make Bad Art Everyday

How to use real android device for flutter development

Failed attempt at Integrating Webmentions

Firebase Studio : It is not ready yet

Is GenAI biased toward a specific region ?

Rust : How to use `match` to replace nested if/else

Eight must have pre-commit hooks for #python code

Announcing my rust project: snb

Linux Mint may be it

Adding alias to CLI built in #rust

My PR related to Rust project got merged 🎉

Linux Mint

Rust: Improve readability in default arm of match statement

Deepseek : Model vs Web app

Make constraints useful

Rust Script

Rust: When rustc Beats Cargo for quick trial code

Polywork Shutting Down

Rust: How to print Command Output

Finally got Auto Complete working in Helix

Rust: Unit tests in a separate file

Updated the README for the Theme Repo

Jujutsu: Working With Git

The Problem with `Ctrl` on macOS

Attempt 1: `Cmd` as Leader

Attempt 2: `Alt` (Option) as Leader

Attempt 3: Trying to Work Around `Alt` Conflicts

The `F11` Casualty

The `clear-defaults=true` Lesson

2. Update `flutter_app/.vscode/tasks.json`

What is `direnv`

Option 1 ¹

Option 2 ²