November 19, 2020

I debated how to properly deploy the ‘w3mBookmarkSorter’ project, and it turns out that it’ll be a hard uphill battle on how to package it for the Debian release. This is important because the major ‘w3m’ fork, even on GitHub, is for Debian itself. The project itself is based in C, while my plugin uses Python 3 with the BeautifulSoup4 library.

That being noted, I’m most likely going to just create an alt account on GitHub to host stuff as well, but also mirror it on my own Git page as well.

I’ve been assembling ideas in Org-Mode docs for what I want to learn, and this has helped me a TON for focusing on what I want to learn for work based skills, and especially in building my own current Linux skills.

I am really understanding that to better learn anything new, its better to consult the man page or the Arch Wiki, which is hilarious for someone like myself that refuses to run anything Arch based in the first place. However, the Arch Wiki is an amazing resource, so I think its something I’m going to learn towards. Too often I quickly try to search for something on DuckDuckGo when I could have easily just tried to find it myself.

For example, I’m trying to learn LaTeX so I can re-create my own resume in LaTeX because I think modern WYSIWYG editors are trash, and I want a resume that’s not dependent on Microsoft products. I had to install a package called “texlive”, which is apparently a distribution of LaTeX. That being noted, I tried to do the most obvious thing, and tried to just do:

man texlive

This yielded nothing for me.

Then, I looked into more resources on how to take advantage of man pages (manual pages), and figure out what manuals actually exist on your system. I found out that the ‘apropos’ utility is your friend in this scenario.

So, to use the previous example, we can pipe that into ’less’ so that you can have nice readable output, and figure out what man page to actually use:

apropos tex | less

Using this, I was able to see many, many, MANY LaTeX related resources that already existed on my system.

And then… I figured out I could just look at the ‘man’ page for ’latex’…

But hey, I learned something in the process, and in doing so, I answered my own question in terms of what specific ‘man’ page I can refer to.

Found a cool site totally by accident as I was looking for games to improve my Vim skills:

It’s websites like this that make me want to copy their look, style, and feel. The functionality of that site itself is inviting, and just overall easy to manage.

Definitely will be taking notes to improve the “Geocities”-esque overhaul later this year.

Here are some cool ‘Vim’ based games to check out too that I found:

I found out about ‘Vim’ games through this crazy, but informative talk on how to play Vim like an instrument, and YES, this guy actually uses sounds for his Vim macros, which is nuts, cool, and awesome at the same time:

I’ve learned a lot today in terms of Linux shell commands, especially how to utilize the ‘man’ command to reference manuals or ‘man’ pages.

I’ve also made a schedule of video topics to possibly do screencasts for. I think I’ll do YouTube videos like ‘gotbletu’ without showing a webcam, as I would rather the content to be the primary feature being presented. I also plan to backup these same vids to Internet Archive and to PeerTube just in case as well given the state of YouTube these days.

However, I only want to do informative, helpful, and just fun screencast videos on Linux, BSD platforms, music creation, and neat pet projects to inspire others. Maybe even stuff on Ham Radio, mesh networks, etc., would be awesome too.

I also want to deploy my latest band’s album on my own site too to not depend on any platform like Bandcamp. That has been a lot of fun to work on, and I’m up to maybe around 4 decent songs at the moment with a 3 or 4 other ones in very early stages. It’s a lot of acoustic and vocals so far, which is pretty new to me as I used to never like acoustic until recently.

Lots and lots of goals, and only so much time.

Good thing there’s Org-Mode to organize it all ;)

~ Sam