Midnight Pub

Humping right along

~inquiry

Hello Wednesday. Hope you're doing well. I must say, an unexpectedly moist start to you - or so the pitter patter sound against the neighbor's wall facing the window of the bathroom I was in half an hour ago suggested.

(Why does the vim spell-checker not recognize 'pitter' as a word? Hmmm....)

No chemical sleep "assistance" last night, i.e. neither ethanol nor THC. Plenty of muscle/tendon/joint/whatever pain throughout the night. Not the blindingly kind: just the long, drawn out, achey-every-time-you-turn-and-sometimes-when-motionless kind.

But I did sleep somewhere between five and six hours. Lotsa dreams. Weird ones. The last year or two I swear I keep visiting roughly the same resort-ish-blended-with-a-meld-of-places-I've-lived place. I don't know what's going on with that. It's not unpleasant. But it doesn't promote muscle relaxation is one thing I can tell you.

"tput cols" tells me my four vertical tmux panes I've come to favor as a terminal layout are each 52 columns wide. I'd rather that number be bigger at times, and yet four panes simultaneously visible turns out to be enough to cover the things I do most in this terminal:

0) an "inspirational" pane in which I "less" a bunch of files containing content pilfered from web pages that "does it for me"

1) a pane in which the http[s]/gemini/gopher reader I wrote in the spirit of the "offpunk" reader awaits my perusal (FWIW, I decided to call it "web")

2) a pane running slrn for USENET joy

3) a pane mostly to vim in, but sometimes to lynx/elinks/gemget in

Yep. I've got it down to one screen.

(You *did* notice the tmux default pane numbering, right?)

Okay... oh-KAY, so I fibbed a little. I occasionally run line commands that invoke Chrome pointing to URLs containing content that just doesn't work well in lynx/elinks. And I just remembered a line command that invokes the Lagrange in times of testing my kwazie 'lil command line browser. But I don't linger therein no matter how friggin' beautiful it looks (and it does... oh yes it does.. my gosh you're brilliant, Skyjake...).

But for the most part, it's just me and my four tmux panes.

It feels so right. And it's fun!

Heh, you know how you can hit '=' in elinks to see information about the page you're visiting? Well, I got tired of trying to copy/paste the URL in that, because it's often longer than what fits in the dialog, meaning there are unwanted characters to remove (even if merely whitespace (has that been deemed a racist term yet? just wondering...) and newlines when using tmux's "copy mode"). So I wrote me a Lua script to "tmux capture-pane" and massage those characters out of that URL string's brief existence. Super handy! Slick, even!

Anyway, so mighty fine a Wednesday it seems to be at this point. In addition to the aforementioned screen-gasms, I'm hearing birds chirp, distance traffic, a bit of room air-filter hum, and occasionally that slightly high-pitched sound I've heard in my head (when I remember to listen to/for it) as long as I can remember (which isn't as long as it used to be, by the way).

Here's to you, this new and quite possibly slightly improved instantiation of Wednesday!


tffb

Welcome to Wednesday. There are many Wednesdays, but this one is now.

I expect some packages today, and tomorrow, and the next day, inxl the exact phone I have right now only unlocked (bye $150) so I can activate Google Fi which I am smitten about. I mention because then and only then can I get back to my mostly-cli antics and not have to be mobile only (which is a pita, lemme tell ya).

The four window web (4WW(c), ha) sounds like a nice way to do things. Makes me want to finally try tmux, as well, just as a half-day-long conversation in Ctrl-c chat suggested I do the first week I joined up there (and one of the first times I used irc, too!). I'd likely have it:

ssh into Ctrl-c

Irssi (irc in cli)

Lynx

Local window for `wget` and other junk

Been trying to localize files, myself. Right now with videos and music (NewPipe to download both, VLC and Auxio for their players, respectively) but having some local text docs are nice as well. Even if simple .txt files.

But now, I have to be prepared to make breakfast at clubhouse. Be back before mail runs. Coffee and cigs, hopefully in the rain much like the pitter-pattering of InquiryLand, ha!

Stuff on tttlog as usual later, much like lately. Stay good, Inq! If you have a place you'd like to share the http[s]/gopher/Gemini reader, I'm all eyes!

later

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inquiry
> Welcome to Wednesday. There are many Wednesdays, but this
> one is now.

Love it!

> I expect some packages today, and tomorrow, and the next
> day, inxl the exact phone I have right now only unlocked
> (bye $150) so I can activate Google Fi which I am smitten
> about. I mention because then and only then can I get back
> to my mostly-cli antics and not have to be mobile only
> (which is a pita, lemme tell ya).

I'd go pub-sane under such conditions. ;-)

> The four window web (4WW(c), ha) sounds like a nice way to
> do things. Makes me want to finally try tmux, as well, just
> as a half-day-long conversation in Ctrl-c chat suggested I
> do the first week I joined up there (and one of the first
> times I used irc, too!). I'd likely have it:
>
> ssh into Ctrl-c
>
> Irssi (irc in cli)
>
> Lynx
>
> Local window for `wget` and other junk

What comes to mind is "no one ever said making things easy would be easy". There was definitely pain to learning tmux, vim, & co. But the effort has sooooo streamlined the mechanics of all this, facilitating focusing more on the fun(ner) stuff now.

But then there's the side-benefit that proficiency therein becomes its own fun/joy/satisfaction.

So let us all raise our glasses to the practice making perfect of getting there!

> Stuff on tttlog as usual later, much like lately. Stay
> good, Inq! If you have a place you'd like to share the
> http[s]/gopher/Gemini reader, I'm all eyes!

I might. But realize there's been so much "nobody reads any of this anyway" over the years that sharing can feel pointless. And then there's the fact it's not standalone. There's the main Lua script, but then there's also a small Lua library I wrote supporting the script. And then there's the fact they leverage "elinks" for https/gopher, and "gemget" for gemini. And then there's the fact that my code tends to be indecipherable to others, because I'm opposed to commenting *and* empty lines in code for these two personal reasons:

1) Both take up screen real estate that arguably become less meaningful over time, to the point where I have to do the hard work of struggling to figure out how the actual executable stuff works *anyway*. So why bother writing stuff that doesn't execute *and* ultimately becomes as unobvious as the stuff that *does*?

2) I've become acclimated to how empty-line-less code looks to the point of preferring it.

Oh, wait! A late-breaking third reason just came to mind!

3) Nobody ever seems to know what I'm talking about anyway, so comments will likely do more to confuse/obfuscate than enlighten.

On empty lines and comments, yes, I realize one can leverage or write editor extensions to toggle "folding" that kind of stuff out of view. But that doesn't fix how its meaning entropy will slowly creep along until I can't figure out what I originally meant, or subsequent understandings of other things cause the original comment verbiage to mean something else without my realizing that's happening.

Words are just soooooooooooooooooo inadequte some... I mean most... I mean all of the time. :-)

Heh... I'm certain I had two reasons before that one... but honestly can't remember what it was (says the fool continuing to type anyway... <coughs>).

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tffb

In that case, I might dabble with offpunk, as it looks cool. Also see what kind of gems are on suckless.org, as those seem to be lightweight things I could enjoy in the cli. We have `ii` and another one on Ctrl-c, but I didn't use either even though I requested the admin add them to the server. I use Irssi locally for irc, love it.

The gem/gopher/https thing you have going I may take a pass on, as it seems a few steps away from the formalized, perfectly-tabbed, and noob-proof config file Irssi has to offer. Also, Lua? Isn't that a bottled water? ;) (kidding)

Sun is up here and though the new phone (and Fi that gets added to it) doesn't get here until Monday, this is the last day stuck on 2G Island, and I have 10gb of 5G tethering after midnight tonight with CricketWireless. I may get lucky and the Motorola arrive a day or two early, and the Fi SIM is sitting ready to go on my desk. So I should be in the fast/5G fastlane starting early AM and just keep everything humming along after that. Then offpunk, then tmux, then other things.

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inquiry

offpunk is super solid, but if I'm remembering correctly doesn't do http[s]. That's part of what motivated me to write my own. I don't like having to switch apps to read what is fundamentally The Same Kind Of Thing (i.e. bloggishness) just because different peeps can't settle on a delivery protocol.

The second part is that offpunk is written in Python, which is an abomination to me due to it constantly leading me to discovering I'm missing dependencies, trying to install those dependencies leading to further dependencies misery, and so on. Should I need to move onto another machine, I just want to bring my latest tar.gz of my stuff to it, gunzip and "tar -xvf" it, and be done, not suffer past installation indignities all over again.

FWIW, sliced bread cowers next to Lua. I mean, nothing is perfect, but I've only *one* beef with Lua, which is way less than with most (all?) other languages - especially Ingles.... ;-)

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tffb

well what's the singular Lua beef?

On Python, everyone who ever bought a PC says "check out Python!", then I do and I realize I don't want to delve deep at it is an interpretted language, and I haven't learned any languages yet, but I swore I'd start with a non-interpreted one, like C or whatever

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inquiry

The singular Lua beef is I don't like that code blocks can begin with a variety of things like:

while true do
  -- do something
end

for i,v in ipairs(some_table) do
  -- do something
end

local function tmo(argument)
  -- do something
end

That makes it difficult for me to jump back and forth from the beginning of such a block to the end.

I mean, perhaps someone has augmented vim so that one can make such a jump easily the way one can with curly braces, but I did some searching for a such a couple times and came up empty. I'd try writing such myself, but there are a bunch of cases to cover, and suspect it's a gnarly enough problem for me to consider it more trouble than its worth.

And yet every time I need to be able to do that, it's a considerable amount of trouble.

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tffb

computers speak Pig Latin to me, hence why I do not learn programming languages. I like computer science, but melding my brain to GoLang, C, Lua or anything else seems like a lot of hyper specific learning with zero reward long or short term. Sysadmin is as far as I'll go with fussing with computers, can get plenty done there, kill plenty of time.

Props to all who partake

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inquiry
> computers speak Pig Latin to me, hence why I do not learn
> programming languages. I like computer science, but melding
> my brain to GoLang, C, Lua or anything else seems like a
> lot of hyper specific learning with zero reward long or
> short term.

That's roughly how I feel about humans.

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tffb

Humans aren't fluent or articulate enough for Pig Latin. They talk shit and forget what they're supposed to be paying attention to.

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