serhii.net

Scratchpad with the DTB in bspwm

If it starts appearing on the wrong monitor, I can drag it to the right one, and its location will be remembered.

Repeat command with sudo in bash/zsh

sudo !!. This is awesome.

Pareto charts

TIL about Pareto charts, and they look very interesting.

To take the example below, in order to lower the amount of late arrivals by 78%, it is sufficient to solve the first three issues.

Checklists

are the next thing that will save my life, we’ll see if they stick.

Week review

• Week review template is nice!
• Also nice

Random / Psychology

Карта чуств is absolutely brilliant.

Stack

• I should create additional vim maps for a better way to access other registers. I should create at least one more p/y/yy/d/dd commandd set for them and keep them separatee from the main ones.
  • Or just let vim have it’s own copy/paste registers and make pasting the OS ones a special case

Quotes

In college, I ran a painting business. Every painter I hired had to buy their own brushes. This was one of the first things I learned. Throwing a standard brush at new painters didn’t work. The “company” brushes were quickly neglected and degenerated into a state of disrepair. But painters who bought their own brushes took care of them. Painters who bought their own brushes learned to appreciate the difference between the professional $20 brush they owned and cheap disposable dollar store brushes. Having their own brush engendered a sense of enduring responsibility and craftsmanship. (from Codinghorror “The Programmer’s Bill of Rights)

rsync progress based on all files with pv

Allegedly there’s an official way, though I could not get it working: rsync -a --info=progress2 src dest What works is the second answer: rsync -aix /source remote:/dest | pv -les $(df -i /source | perl -ane 'print $F[2] if $F[5] =~ m:^/:') >/dev/null, and the general way rsync -ai /source remote:/dest | pv -les [number of files] >/dev/null.

To find number of files in general, find /source|wc -l.

Quotes

There are two sorts of comments - “What” comments and “Why” comments.

“What” comments tell you what the code is doing. In a lot of cases, depending on the language, the need for these can be reduced by writing clear code. This is much easier in, say, Python than Assembly. Even in Python though, sometimes you can be doing something a bit subtle where a 2 line comment can clear things up. These comments aren’t irreplaceable because with a bit of reading and work, you have all the information to work out what is happening.

“Why” comments are much more important - telling the reader WHY the code is doing whatever it is that it’s doing. The ’trim()’ comment referenced in the article is a great example of a Why comment - all the reading around the code wouldn’t give you an explanation (although sometimes git blame will).

Many ‘what’ comments are superfluous, almost no ‘why’ comments are - they are the collective memory of design decisions that otherwise lives in people’s heads. (HN)

Linux sandboxing

For programs I don’t trust, Firejail seems okay. firejail <appname>.

Android ADB Push

Still works as I remembered it. adb push <sourcefile/s> <location>, where location in my case is storage/sdcard0 for the memory and storage/FD... for the sdcard. adb shell is very nice also.

Technical writing errors

3 shell scripts to improve your writing, or “My Ph.D. advisor rewrote himself in bash.” is an excellent description of typical errors in technical writing. One of the pages I see that make me want to archive everything linked here and on the Link Wiki just in case it disappears. Also,

In that sense, peer reviewers are the guardians of the scientific community’s most limited resource: our collective attention span.

Sins

weasels=“many|various|very|fairly|several|extremely
|exceedingly|quite|remarkably|few|surprisingly
|mostly|largely|huge|tiny|((are|is) a number)
|excellent|interestingly|significantly
|substantially|clearly|vast|relatively|completely”

• passive voice
• Duplicates

Stack

• Should I add important quotes I want to read often in Anki instead of creating my own solution for basically the same thing?
• Python built-ins worth learning

Language / German

• 10-er – it’s like ‘sechziger’, ’neunziger’ etc. - just never seen it. It works to say ‘десятки’ too (as opposed to ‘1-er’)
• Vorkommastelle, nachkommastelle

Quotes

Let the past die, kill it if you have to.

LSD and installing fonts in st and urxvt

LSD is a very nice replacement for ls. To set it up, I needed to download the individual fonts from Nerd fonts, cp-ing them to /usr/share/fonts, then running fc-cache -f -v.

To set up the new DejaVu font in urxvt, this is the line in .Xdefaults:

URxvt.font: xft:DejaVuSansMono Nerd Font Mono:pixelsize=12
URxvt.boldFont: xft:DejaVuSansMono Nerd Font Mono:pixelsize=12:weight=bold
URxvt.letterSpace: -1

And in st, config.h is:\ static char *font = "DejaVuSansMono Nerd Font Mono:pixelsize=12:antialias=true:autohint=true";

AUR has a BIG nerd-fonts-complete package with all the fonts.

bspwm, polybar and multiple monitors

Following the advice in this article:

bspc monitor HDMI-0 -d 1 2 3
bspc monitor eDP -d 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 a b c

polybar example &
polybar big &

[bar/big]
monitor = HDMI-0

[module/bspwm]
used = %name%
label-occupied = %name% 
label-urgent = %name%!
label-empty = 

Also to make the tray appear only on the right monitor, I commented out ; tray-position = right on the HDMI monitor, now it appears again on eDP.

They work a bit different than i3 – the workspaces I list in each of the monitors in bspwmrc are accessed sequentially via the keyboard. That is, in the config above, f1..f4 get accessed with Mod+1..4, and Mod+5..x access the I..X ones. I think they get cycled from the left monitor to the right one, but definitely not in the order the monitors are set up in bspwmrc and not alphabetically.

bspwm config changes

Stolen mostly from dotfiles in this repo:

bspc config pointer_follows_monitor true # brings pointer to focused monitor (see workspaces)

[module/bspwm]
label-empty =

Amongst other things – I’m not sure how to move my windows from the HDMI workspaces if I disconnect the second monitor from the computer, partly it means I’m (I think, for now) limited to a number of workspaces in each of the monitors. I’m not sure I miss the flexibility of this process in i3 - it might be a good opportunity to play with a much more structured number of workspaces. Maybe I don’t need the flexibility as much as I think.

bspwm/firefox go fullscreen (F11) but stay inside the bspwm window

full-screen-api.ignore-widgets in about:config (from here) is the best thing since sliced bread. I can F11 firefox, but it doesn’t occupy my entire monitor, just removes tabs/url/…, and I can still use Tree tabs. It’s very close to what I used to do with pentadactyl. This is freaking awesome.

pikaur full system upgrade

Works the same way as with pacman. Interesting that I never thought about this. sudo pikaur -Syu

redshift change day/night temperature

Updated startup.sh to use redshift with a warmer nighttime temperature: redshift -l 51.34:12.38 -t 6500:3000

Also I’m not sure I like the use -l both for location provider and lat/long info. I think I understand the logic, but still..

Stack

• Add spoilers to Jekyll.
• Check again laptop-mode
• In general document all my settings well in one place.

Random

• Python API checklist
  • TODO: Read through and google everything mentioned in there until I grok it.
• Color/brightness bookmarklets

Quotes

If you never heal from what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you

Spoilers in HTML and now Markdown (kramdown)!

markdown="1"

print("hello world!")

I should look into markdown options which would allow me to do more flexible CSS – and I could create a vim mapping to make them quick.

Bash dtb create.sh script

Updated the script to create a markdown dtb file to the following:

FILE=_posts/$(date +%Y-%m-%d)-day$(date +%j).markdown
DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d\ %H:%M:%S\ +0100)

if test -f "$FILE"; then
        vim $FILE
        exit 1
fi

echo "Creating file $FILE"
touch $FILE
echo "Adding stuff"

/bin/cat <<EOM >> $FILE
---
layout: post
title:  "Day $(date +%j)"
date:   $DATE
categories: []
---

EOM

vim $FILE

Now it’s closer to create_or_open.sh and doesn’t overwrite anything if run again by error, doesn’t add any unused parts, and opens the file if it exists already.

Bash check if file exists

if test -f "$FILE"; then
        vim $FILE
        exit 1
fi

Bash exit script

exit 1 or whatever status code.

Bash suppress output of command (bash redirection)

SO:

command > /dev/null 2>&1 redirects both stdout and stderr to /dev/null;

command &> /dev/null & works for me too, though it may not work in all shells. command > /dev/null still shows errors.

Progress notes

Added to anki everything until this page on the pro git ebook

After another small pause, here comes another längliches post!

Urxvt -name and settings

I had been trying to get urxvt to play with i3 scratchpads, but when I set the -name setting I got a vanilla URxvt look.

You evidently configured the font for a specific application instance rather than for an application class. (SO). To make your settings always apply, set URxvt.font rather than urxvt.font, etc.

Solved my problem.

Though at the end, I spent some time looking for a way to grep “name” instead of “class” for URxvt in bspwm and gave up, now typing this on a st terminal and loving every second of it!

st

Is the terminal I might start to use everywhere.

In config.h I changed the font to be static char *font = "DejaVu Sans Mono:pixelsize=12:antialias=true:autohint=true";

Bspwm

Decided to give it a try, loving it!

Scratchbox

To implement the scratchbox, used the method described in the Arch wiki.

In bspwmrc,

t -c scratchterm &
bspc rule -a scratchterm sticky=on state=floating hidden=on

In sxhkdrc,

super + minus
    ~/s/scratch

In ~/s/scratch,

#!/usr/bin/env bash
id=$(xdotool search --class scratchterm | head -n 1)
echo $id

if [ "$id" != "" ]
     then
       bspc node "$id" --flag hidden -f
       fi

I added |head -n 1 so it can better deal with possible multiple terminals of this class, in case I have to restart bspwm for whatever reason.

Random

• The hype cycle of working memory training
  • near transfer is much more likely and proven than far transfer
  • in general doesn’t look to optimistic
  • High IQ/WM people benefit the most
  • High spacing seems the best for transfer
    • might be related to all those other “pauses are good you learning” effects
• Spectrometer using a CD
• ‘I’ve become very isolated’: the aftermath of near-doomed QF72

  • Like a bad partner, the computer’s systems went crazy then stopped communicating with me.

  • I’ve become very isolated. When you’ve been to the Moon, you can only talk to astronauts.

• The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics
  • Excellent.

  • The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more.

  • The program was helping as many people as it could, the only change was explicitly labeling a number of people it wasn’t helping as a “control group”. The response?
    “They should immediately stop this experiment, ” said the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer. “The city shouldn’t be making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable.”

Arch compiling AURs from source

Didn’t have to do this a long time:

1. makepkg -Acs
2. sudo pacman -U x.pkg.tar.xz

Stack

• Formalize my Sprint reviews.
• Three works a week of PI – how do I actually keep track of this? I need an infrastructure.

Markdown

Block-level attributes in Jekyll/kramdown/markdown

This describes amongth other things block-level stuff for Markdown. This is potentially a solution for different footnotes and various other small design tweak I’d like to have on this blog. I can just add a CSS class and then in CSS see what I want to do with it.

Git diff a file between revisions

git diff HEAD^^ HEAD file.md – where HEAD^^ is “two revisions back”. Also the option --compact-summary gives number of insertions and deletions.

Anki steps

It’s an interesting thing to research someday. This discussion and similar ones can be a reference, along with looking at the graphs and targeting 80% retention.

In general I really should invest an hour or so to learn everything about Anki, so far it’s been the single most effective tool I have for my memory but am using it on a default and primitive level.

For now I changed Steps to “1 10 60” and “10 60”, new interval to 30%.

To print for The Road

• https://mnielsen.github.io/notes/quotes/quotes.html
• https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/CognitiveDimensions/CDtutorial.pdf
• https://github.com/progit/progit2/releases/download/2.1.146/progit.pdf
  • till page 123 or so
• https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-Visual-Information/

Stack

• Remember that Eisenhower Matrix is a thing and that it used to help me quite a lot before.
• I should formalize all the checklists I created for myself and use them.
• Look into Energy Management vs Time management
  • https://hbr.org/2007/10/manage-your-energy-not-your-time
  • https://www.coachingpositiveperformance.com/energy-management-vs-time-management/
  • etc.

Markdown

• A | character doen’t play nice with bullet point lists (*) - why?
  • Seems to be related to tables

Timewarrior “multitasking”

You can’t do simultaneous stuff, but you can have simultaneous test. From SO:

    timew start MONITORING PROJECT1 # monitoring all day, starting with project 1
    timew start MONITORING PROJECT1 PROJECT2 # adding project 2 to the pool
    timew stop PROJECT1 # done with project 1, still monitoring and working at project 2
    timew start MONITORING PROJECT2 PROJECT3 # adding project 3
    ... # something similar with PROJECT4 and PROJECT5
    timew stop # done for today

To read

The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher

DNB

Quotes

“Think in the morning, act in the noon, read in the evening, and sleep at night.” Blake

Links

• Rediscovered docbastard

English

“Buy the farm” in North American slang for dying.

When a military pilot with a stricken airplane attempted to crash land in a farmer’s field, he would destroy a portion of the farmer’s crops for which the US government paid reimbursement to the farmer. If it were a bad crash-landing destroying most of the crops then the crash would cause the buying of the whole farm

Firefox resistfingerpringing setting

The flags privacy.resistfingerprinting.* in about:config. Let’s test this and see what happens.

Presentations format

Clear is better than clever uses a nice way to publish a presentation: slide on top and any test notes on the bottom. Never seen that before and it’s nice.

Articles

Kernighan’s layer

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? Main points:

• Implement below your ability, and you get to debug in the “flow” area.
• Implement at your ability, and the debugging will be frustrating, but you gain skill.

Quotes

stop starting and start finishing (HN)