Well hello there you old-school blog enjoyer, you internet connoisseur you!

(I just learned that the English connoisseur comes from the now obsolete pre-1835 French spelling. The originators of the term have since moved on to the new and improved connaisseur (like the Dutch, which is why I was briefly confused), but in English we are stuck with our quaint little oi.)

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Welcome to the year 2025!

We are all still waiting for our flying cars, but if you don’t like the indistinguishable-from-human talking AIs you got instead, you can have this traditional yearly transition blog post here to keep you busy in the meantime.

Welcome everyone to one of the final WHVs of the year!

This one covers the period of time from Monday 9 December to Friday December 20 of the year 2024.

Kogelberg Anniversary

My life partner and I very recently achieved a quarter century of official togetherness.

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This, the 257th edition of the WHV, covers the period of time from Monday November 25 to Sunday December 8, 2024.

Haskell vineyard has made previous appearances on this blog in WHV #99 in 2015, in WHV #181 in 2019 and perhaps in other posts. I strongly suspect that some of the good friends mentioned there were the same good friends we were so fortunate to spend this Sunday lunch with!

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The title of this post is another nerd-dad joke I probably should not have made, but which I simply could not resist.

Whatever the case may be, I’m happy that it’s out, just like this, the otherwise extremely modest 256th edition of the Weekly Head Voices!

There is a nerd joke I could make about using a single byte to store the WHV post number, which would explain the long stretch of time between this edition and the previous one in March, itself also lamenting the growing interval between posts, but I’m not going to.

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At AfrikaBurn 2018, the South African / Dutch theme camp Burniversity (that’s us!) was again present and active with a range of workshops and other learning experiences.

(Strangely, although I wrote vaguely about our AB 2018 experience on this blog shortly after the event, I did not even mention this electronics project, and now it’s only taken 6 years to get around to the nerdy bits.)

That year, we had perhaps a bit too much energy and decided to design an electronic artwork, inspired by the fun we had in 2017 with a giant bottle of helium, a bag of CR2032 button cell batteries and leds, and another bag full of helium-grade balloons. (In short: On the less windy nights, we would inflate clusters of 4 to 5 balloons with helium, each with a burning led inside, and attach the cluster to a theme camp member. Picture little clouds of illuminated helium balloons floating above their humans as they were roaming over the Binnekring.)

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Hello there WHV enjoyers, and welcome back! …ish.

The last official WHV, by name, was WHV #253, published on September 2, 2023, although the 2023 to 2024 transition post certainly deserves its honorary WHV title.

In the meantime, I have been experimenting with the Daily Head Voices / lifelogs, which was fun, but ultimately not sufficiently meaty to fill the WHV vacuum.

We are clearly going through a pretty significant WHV-hiatus.

Although I’m still not sure what the new stable state is going to be, I have some extremely modest plans, and in addition to those I’ve decided to dust off and revive the draft of WHV #254 which was just lying there on my disc since September of last year, all languishing.

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Monday 2024-02-26

• started the morning (and the work week!) with stupid indecision: Had all my work gear in the car, but chose to drive back home after dropping of GOU#3 for a logistical task which one of my other clan members would gladly have taken care of.
  • Indecision irrelevant against the backdrop: We had such a good time in the car first being on time (GOU#3 loves that), then listening to Skrillex together, then talking, and then performing our morning ritual of verbally attesting our super-infinite love for each other as I drop her off at school.
• During highly technical demo outside of my domains, used perplexity in real-time to lookup various details as the demo was going on, and thus could focus on the really interesting questions for the presenter.
• Between meetings, struggled a bit to focus in the focusy bits, but managed to do quite a bit of work eventually (with focusapp and some deep house) and even got milestones done.

Tuesday 2024-02-27

• Super frustrated during the morning rush, because could not find running shoes at the critical moment when we had to leave for school
  • Reverted to backup shoes (old ones, with too many kilometres on them)
  • Good run in L&Z, but it took so long to disconnect from my shoe moment, in spite of really putting my mind to it. Succeeded a little bit at the end, shocked at the mental cost of something this trivial.
  • BTW, it was almost a textbook “not inside it’s on top!” situation.

Wednesday 2024-02-28

• For once some Waking Up in the morning! (I once had a streak of more than a year. Currently happy if I do just one!)
• Started the day in pensive mood (before and after the meditation) thinking about what I would like from the future
  • Naturally I wanted to write a note, so then I tapped out a topic in the daily list so that I could use org-roam-node-find-similar to surface similar notes from the past. I did find the correct historic note which I would not have otherwise, but then I got sucked into emacs config…
    • why has my org-roam-node-find-* never done live preview like other consult commands? – solved by installing https://github.com/jgru/consult-org-roam/tree/main and then tooting about it: https://emacs.ch/@cpbotha/112008312753264000
      • During the day I was surprised at the amount of traction that toot got. It seems there are more people who missed this. It seems it can sometimes really help to share the minutiae.
    • realised that org-roam-node-find-similar did not sort the similar nodes by similarity, so fixed that: https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-similarity/commit/d940c12e70468adfbc1e41ef997c5f797540ebf7
  • After extricating myself back out of Emacs config yak shaving, I did spend some quality time writing up my thoughts, helping to clarify them.
    • I don’t know the answer yet, but the direction I’m moving in feels good.
• Lunch with inner circle friend and mentor DMW at No Way Jose was great thank you!

Thursday 2024-02-29

• Run at shortly after 7. Legs did not really want to cooperate.
• Got distracted by meetings day at work, so almost no writing in the daily. Now, [2024-03-10 Sun 18:35], I’m really sorry.

Friday 2024-03-01

• Pool repair at my house. They are able to pump out all water, repair floor of pool, then pump all water back all in a few hours.
• I have two ideas for the weekend
  • Build and publish a QRCode contact card generator using marimo and wasm
  • build a telegram bot to manipulate my org-mode database, e.g. adding tasks, searching for existing tasks and notes.
    • I don’t like this second idea, but it keeps on coming back to me.

Saturday 2024-03-02

• 12km run with tired legs, so tired that I decided to stop the fast and get Powerade for the last 5km, which felt like it really helped.
• Super happy that I could get the promised marimo-wasm-qrcode generator online: https://vxlabs.com/2024/03/02/contact-qrcode-generator-with-marimo-and-wasm/

Sunday 2024-03-03

• After sunday morning coffee and scrolling, dug into marimo to see if there’s some way to create the WASM locally. There does not seem to be.
• Scanned through https://core.telegram.org/bots to see (again…) what might be possible.
• Actually, now I’m thinking about the idea of making a telegram bot that sends me random tasks from my org-mode every day. I already have a proof of concept in Python that uses emacsclient to expose org-roam nodes via API (see https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-canvas ) so I would probably follow a similar path, probably with something like org-ql. Does anyone know if something like this exists somewhere?
  • Apple’s Journal app, that suggests a new journalling possibility now and then, made me think that this could help.
• In iTerm2, press the Option-Cmd keys together to make a rectangular selection.
• Sublime lunch at Millhouse Kitchen with inner circle family
• Back home, tried to get MobileOrg going again; looked promising, but then after successful sync ran into this bug with empty outlines in the app when synced via iCloud. 😥
• Configured perplexity via gptel in my Emacs; I am especially interested in using perplexity’s sonar-online internet-capable models.

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Monday 2024-02-19 to Wednesday 2024-02-21

• Prepared for and did business trip to Johannesburg with longest time friend FS.
  • Highlight was tripping with FS, and trip was successful to boot.
  • Only one night away, really missed the famjam.
• Dealing with stomach issues this week, relatively mild but distracting nonetheless.

Thursday 2024-02-22

• Short run this morning in school district. Not feeling 100%, but good enough for run and conditions perfect.
  • Did run into G-J on Reservoir road and had quick chat, serendipity! Lunch will follow.
• Stomach getting better, but not yet in a good place.

Friday 2024-02-23

• Ran into the Kagi sidekick proposal, which made me think about frontend-only search functions for my static websites
  • SemanticFinder: Frontend-only live semantic search with transformers.js
  • victoria.dev: Adding lunr.js to Hugo for frontend-only search
• Spent some cycles today exploring ways to save a tweet so that it can be archived and searched offline
  • If I could just traverse the DOM tree, starting from the <article> or the parent <section>, and also gathering all of the applicable styles, I would be golden
    • Discovered three different paid-for chrome extensions that do exactly this. Small side-hustle idea right there.
  • MarkDownload extension for saving any page as markdown came quite close
  • Dev tools “capture node screenshot” saves to PNG. Would have been great if it could have done the same to PDF.
• Had a lovely lunch with great colleague from 1999/2000 at Mont Marie in Stellenbosch.
  • Randomly reached out when I heard that he was back in this valley, super grateful for this enjoyable reconnection.
  • Remember, call up your friends!

Saturday 2024-02-24

• Spent too many hours building a Tampermonkey script with which I can get tweet threads reasonably clean in order to print them
  • First time using Tampermonkey, good tool to have on the belt!
  • Twitter makes this a lot more tricky than it needs to be.
  • Ideally, people would stop using twitter altogether, but for the ML crowd, I still need to go there
• Perfect dinner at Decameron in Stellenbosch with the family, because we had to take GOU#1 to a party in the region
• Karpathy proclaims his love for Obsidian, very cool! https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1761467904737067456

Sunday 2024-02-25

• Thanks to serendipitous serendipity the previous day, took part in an unexpected and epic hike up India Venster with a lifetime friend (first hike together in the 90s!) and a fantastic new friend. Experienced maximal presence. Glorious.

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