Weekly Head Voices #116: Nothing much to see here, please move on.

This WHV is all about the weeks from Monday January 30 to Sunday February 12, 2017. I’ve mostly been in heads-down mode on two projects, so this post will be shorter than is usually the case.

I had my very first beer after the 30-day long Experiment Alcohol Zero (EAZ) on Friday, February 3. It was a good one:

EAZ has taught me that it would not be the worst idea to limit alcohol consumption slightly more.

As with many other enjoyable things, there is a price to be paid for this enjoyment. If paying that price interferes with the other enjoyable habits in your collection, it makes sense to evaluate and adjust the balance.

That reminds me of one of my favourite electronic music productions of all time: Balance 014 by Joris Voorn. He blew everyone’s minds when he decided to paint these fantastic soundscapes by mixing together more than 100 tracks, often 5 or 6 at a time.

Right at this point, just after that not-quite non sequitur, I wrote a far too long section on the relative performance of Android and iPhone, with a big “nerd content ahead” warning on it. Fortunately for you, I came to my senses before publishing and copied it out into its own little blog post: Android vs iPhone performance: A quick note.

Last weekend I dusted off my trusty old mu4e, an unbelievably attractive email client, again. This means I’m reading your mail and sending you beautifully UNformatted plain text emails right from my Emacs. As an additional bonus, I put all of the boring details about my configuration into a completely separate blog post, which you don’t have to read, titled: mu4e 0.9.18: E-Mailing with Emacs now even better.

What I will mention here and not in the other post, is that the current situation is subtly different from my previous adventure with mu4e: Where I previously synchronised all 60 thousand emails to process locally with mu4e, I am now following a more mellowed approach where I’m only synchronising the current year (and perhaps the previous year, still considering) of email. I use the fastmail web-app for searching through longer term storage.

I’m happy to report that so far it’s working out even better than the previous time. I really enjoy converting HTML emails (that’s what everyone sends, thanks GMail!) to well-behaved plain text when I reply.

Finally, after the Nth time that someone shared a clearly bogus science news post on Facebook, instantly bringing my blood to the boil, I decided to write a handy guide titled: Critical Thinking 101: Three super easy steps to spot poppycock on the internet.

This guide is 100% free, and really easy to send to your friends when you think this is necessary. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for improvement.

Ok kids, that’s it from me for now. I wish you a great week ahead. In the words of Yo-Play: Come on Mitch, don’t give up. Please try again.