Quarantine life
New Zealand is currently down to Level 2 of our COVID-19 alert system
While this means everyone is free to roam about, as long as they use proper social distancing measures, it may take a little bit for people to want to do so?
Personally, having spent about 6 weeks mostly inside, I don't actually know what I would like to do?
I suppose a lot of businesses are back up and running but a lot are only operating at partial capacity as well?
Well, I think so? I haven't actually been into the Auckland CBD in quite some time now so I don't truly know what our current situation is like myself.
Perhaps I'll go and have a look
Emacs
Oh no, I'm slowly integrating my life into my text editor. Will I ever see the light of day again?
I started using Doom Emacs recently, having found Spacemacs to be quite slow (short of using a daemon) in the past.
More than anything, Henrik‘s welcoming attitude is what really got me to stay invested. I've been enjoying hanging out in the Doom Emacs discord server as well.
org-mode
This has captured my interest in previous years, in regards to Emacs.
org-mode is a pretty powerful tool and I've been slowly integrating my (somewhat half-baked) GTD workflow to make use of org-mode, org-agenda and so on
No better time to experiment given that 95% of my “Someday” list has been rendered unprogressable by COVID
org-roam
Ok but this is actually what got me to invest the time in integrating my soul into Emacs
It's an Emacs mode that aims to replicate functionality of Conor White-Sullivan‘s Roam Research
As far as the functionality of org-roam, this post from creator Jethro Kuan is a solid starting point.
I didn't really “get it” though. I've often considered (and tried) to maintain an external brain of sorts, but I wasn't really sure how it would benefit myself. The idea of publishing it all was quite cool but I'd also like to get benefit out of it, rather than just writing notes for the sake of it.
Hopefully you can get a similar “aha” moment by investing 15 minutes into watching this video by Nat Eliason
While this video uses Roam Research, the same concept applies to org-roam as well.
It's also just a good excuse to make notes in general, even if I never get to this level of thonking
My blog
Wow, I've actually written two posts this month and even better, less than 7 days apart
I actually wrote both of them in Emacs funnily enough.
There's something quite nice about having nothing but text as your interface so I'm starting to understand why people like it so much
I quite enjoyed this presentation on Emacs For Writers as far as how non-programming professions may stumble upon the software as well, for the text editing experience
As far as my blog itself goes, I still feel like the theme is a bit unwieldy. The “dark mode” is still too dark for my liking and I feel like font could be bigger.
I'd like to do some A/B testing on using org-mode as well, so that there's less friction between opening up Hugo, running the dev server vs just editing and exporting an org file.
That said, I need to learn the proper syntax and see what I can do compared to Markdown
Side projects
Hah
I've got too much stuff on the backburner
Well, whether I should or even need to is another question
I think I need to close a lot of loops