June 24, 2020

I got up to Chapter 5 for that C Programming Language book today.

C is such a cool language, and the power of it can’t be overstated. It is embedded in so many devices to the point where if you can program in C, you can pretty much use it to program on anything (that isn’t requiring pure assembly language of course :D).

I’m debating what the best things I can do to install on the work based Devuan VM I have so far. I’d like to maybe consider using something like “exwm” which is basically Emacs as a window manager, which is such a neat concept. The idea is that everything would be Emacs based by default. This would be cool because then you can basically run Doom Emacs as well for text editing so that you can use the glorious Vim bindings, but use the pretty decent Emacs standard bindings for other things as well.

Just an fyi, Doom Emacs doesn’t have any evil connotation. It’s named that way because it adds ’evil’ mode style bindings (hence ‘vi’ in ’evil’) which allow you to use ‘Vi’ or ‘Vim’ style key bindings within Emacs. Personally, I think Vim’s bindings are far superior than Emacs. I love being able to write this blog with Emacs alongside the ‘org-twbs’ export plugin with standard Emacs keybindings. However, past using Emacs keybindings in Org Mode to write documents, I think they’re pretty terrible for actual coding situations. More or less, they’re very very very hard to remember and way less intuitive than Vim’s default bindings.

However, for those that totally complain about Emacs keybindings as being ‘painful’ probably don’t realize that you can totally use your left thumb for the ‘meta’ or ‘alt’ key based bindings, and also use the right ring finger for the ‘p’ key. Too many times I see the term, “Emacs pinkie”, being used, and I just have to laugh since most likely the person is attemping to use the ‘p’ key with their pinkie, when the right ring finger is almost near the same position anyway.

Just to set the record straight, I like Emacs bindings for Org Mode and some terminal related applications that happen to have them, but I prefer Vim bindings for any coding situations (hence Doom Macs is probably what I should be using going forward).

’exwm’ can be found here: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

‘Doom Emacs’ can be found here: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

‘Emacs’ can be found here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

‘Vim’ can be found here: https://www.vim.org/

I’ve installed DietPi on the Raspberry Pi, and just plan to use it as a downloading agent. I might get a separate external drive for it to store media so that I can use it to scrape the net for content, and then later access it afterwards purely through SFTP or ssh to retrieve the data from it. That alone is such a cool idea because if you booted your huge desktop computer just to do menial tasks such as downloading wallpapers, then its a bit of a waste of energy.

I’m thinking of the possibilities of what I could do to either deploy Jitsi or Jami as a private instance for family communication purposes. I find both pretty fascinating as they can be used on most platforms AND they are secure communication programs.

‘Jitsi’ can be found here: https://jitsi.org/

‘Jami’ can be found here: https://jami.net/

I also wonder what can be done with mesh networks such as ‘gnunet’. The idea of being able to link computers and devices together without depending upon a centralized internet service company sounds amazing. This idea alone could be used for sharing files, communication, etc, even when a grid is potentially knocked down. Sounds pretty useful given the times.

‘gnunet’ can be found here: https://gnunet.org/en/

I’m planning on also figuring out what to do next week since I have it off from work. Most likely, I might go ahead and start that one-man dungeon synth band, “Sieges”, as I’ve been planning in my head forever. That band will probably include loops, drum samples, and keyboard riffs. I’d like it to be the anti-thesis of what you can typically find in this genre under Bandcamp, as I would like to prove that you can create some cool themed music in that genre without having it to be so dark or dreary. As seen by a few select bands in that genre, I think the best encompassing idea of that genre is to utilize RPG video game style music but with relaxing themes. However, I think a lot of those great ideas are kind of lost between the all too many dreary dark albums of that genre on Bandcamp, so here’s to proving that positive dungeon synth music can be made.

Never stop learning, and have fun with Linux :) God Bless.