I think I might have forgotten to tell you that one of the many perks of working at the Stone Three offices is that there’s a micro-brewery within walking distance. Triggerfish Brewing, as brewery in question is called, was the location of a midweek mini-get-together that ended up looking like this:

On the topic of not-too-shabby settings for meetings, I finally got around to visiting Truth Coffee in Cape Town, described by some as The best coffee shop in the world. I was too busy having a good meeting, enjoying the superb coffee, and generally gawking at the fantastic interior and the pretty people (guests and staff) to take any photos, so you’re going to have to take me on my word and check some of the photos floating around on the web.

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In week 23 of 2014 I nerded out by writing two Emacs-related blog posts over at the vxlabs, and hacking org2blog to support WordPress image thumbnails:

• Modify Emacs Deft for recursive directory search -- this shows you how you can modify Emacs Deft mode, a Notational Velocity clone, to handle nested directories.
• Configuring Emacs mu4e with nullmailer, offlineimap and multiple identities -- this post documents my complete Emacs-based mail client setup.
• org2blog image-thumbnail fork on github -- this is my first significant Emacs package hack! Using this, you can configure org2blog to make use of the image thumbnails automatically created by WordPress on image upload. By default, it will insert the 300px thumbnail into your post and link to the full size image, instead of just inserting the full size version.

Conserving keystrokes

Besides the general Emacs frenzy I’m going through at the moment, there is some method to my madness, especially the org2blog part. Through Emacs and org2blog, it has become significantly easier for me to publish a blog post. I’m in Emacs the whole day in any case (email and text notes database), so turning any piece of existing text into a blog post now takes no more than a minute or two.

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Welcome to this post, the 72nd edition of The Weekly Head Voices, and a momentous one at that. For the first time, I’m writing the WHV using my favourite operating system with editing function, Emacs. To those of you who don’t know Emacs, this might mean that I’ve finally gone around the bend.

I can report that it is a very happy place.

(there will be more Emacs shenanigans in the near future.)

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Ubuntu, my personal favourite Linux distribution, has recently released version 14.04 LTS. LTS stands for Long Term Support: LTS releases are supported for 5 years, meaning that with 14.04 you are covered until 2019.

Trusty Tahr, as 14.04 is known, is beautiful, functional and still free.

This seemed like an opportune moment to get something off my chest. I’m trying to understand why South Africa, my current home, is not running more Linux. In this post, I’m going to summarise the reasons why I think that, especially in SA, we should move away from proprietary solutions such as those offered by Microsoft and Apple, to solutions that are technically at least as good, are completely open and free, and, perhaps most importantly, better empower us to stimulate our local technology ecosystem and the national economy.

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One of my colleagues at Stone Three, Ernestine, is teaching me isiXhosa. I’m a very slow learner, partly because isiXhosa doesn’t fit in any of my existing Germanic or Romantic (I only have a smattering of this, but it’s there) language frameworks. However, it’s loads of fun, so I decided this had to go on my blog.

There will be absolutely no structure to these lessons. I’m planning to put posts up more or less when I think it’s going to be fun to do so. At some point I might even post a sound recording or two, and then you can laugh at my attempt to reproduce the different types of click sounds in isiXhosa.

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On Wednesday May 7, together with just over 18 million other South Africans, I voted. Afterwards, my thumb looked like this:

… and the rest of me felt like a million bucks!

Some complained about the outcome. I think we’re moving, albeit slowly, in the direction of a healthy democracy. Here are this year’s results, and here are 2009’s results. The opposition has been growing (slowly) at a national level. Interestingly, in Gauteng, smallest province with all of the money and power, the opposition is making similar progress.

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(I just deliberately deleted the draft I was working on. It was not the best pattern.)

I want you to read this quote by Richard Dawkins, taken from the God Delusion:

Think of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all you really were there at the time, weren’t you?

How else could you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren’t there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place …. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.

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This time, the head voices are echoing the span of time ending strictly on Sunday, April 27 at 23:59.

I have to break my rule and reach through past the start of that week however. On Wednesday April 16 I had quite a heavy sugar crash. After about 12 cups of coffee, each with a spoon of sugar (as per usual), some chocolates from the Stone Three sweetie jar during lunch ,and two giant coconut crunches at about TU Delft sugar fix time (yes children, I do my best to commemorate the sugar fix, even at 11000 km distance from you), my energy levels dropped through the floor and no amount of coffee could get them close to normal again.

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Noeska’s new weekly status update blog posts inspired me to get mine back on the road again. To be more precise, the observation that I really enjoyed being updated in this fashion with a far-away friend’s exploits hints at the possibility that, somewhere out there, there might be someone who finds it similarly enjoyable to read mine! (Long ago I learnt the trick from Swimgeek, who is still going strong with his weekly updates.)

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(I was supposed to publish this around the start of February, but then life happened, and I didn’t get to quite finish it.)

For the first time in the three weeks after having arrived back on South African soil, we find ourselves in something that we’re going to call home for the coming months. Until now we have been living out of our suitcases, spending time with various grandpas and grandmas somewhere in the Boerewors Gordyn (the Northern ‘burbs of Cape Town, to those of you not in the know), The Oven (I just made that up. It’s Paarl, the town where I grew up thinking that 40 Celsius was a normal temperature to be wearing a blazer and a tie. 40 Celsius is now my preferred outside temperature.) and in Betty’s Bay (that’s its real name. It’s really cute that way. Look at me walking the thin line of apostrophe (ab)use.) We’ve been doing our fair share of early-to-bed-early-to-rise makes John cranky and not very wise, because Genetic Offspring Unit #1 had to be taken to school in our current town of residence, from our at that point temporary residence.