Alastair M. D. Touw 🌹 @amdt@mastodon.social

I hate computers (and programming is terrible). 💩

Watching Red Letter Media’s Mike Stoklasa becoming increasingly tired of all the rebooted film sequels is really enjoyable somehow. I guess I’m tired of them as well. 📺 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSItaxluYb4

YouTube has started recommending me ‘ambient’, ‘meditative’ mixes of the Blade Runner soundtrack. They sound like listening to the soundtrack from your neighbour’s apartment across a busy street in the middle of a rain storm.

Just heard a cicada on Omotesandō. Is the rainy season over already? 🌧☔️ Is it summer now? ☀️

One of my favourite #Emacs features is, ‘scroll-other-window’, and, ‘scroll-other-window-down’, bound to, ‘C-M-v’, and, ‘C-M-S-v’, respectively, by default. It’s so useful I can’t believe other editors don’t have it!

One of my favourite features of Emacs is the lengths it goes to integrate into, and provide an interface onto, Unix (particularly #GNU).

And SLIME with Common Lisp is an excellent IDE — although Genera was the better Lisp environment overall.

In those senses it does feel like the last refuge of the Lispers.

The same user continues:

‘Many Lisp fans are nostalgic and still hoping for a “Hello everybody out there, I’m doing a (free) Lisp operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like Genera)” moment during their lifetime. Until that happens, that text editor and its extensions are the closest we’ll ever come to a Lisp machine like environment.’

🔗 https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/2zvhmu/emacs_vs_linux_why_not_use_a_terminal_and/cpob8ln/

I was searching the #Emacs subreddit for ‘IRC’ and found this justification for using Emacs for more than just editing text:

‘Emacs is the last remnant of Lisp-based operating systems that predate Unix … Lispers had to migrate to Unix.’

‘With Emacs, people are basically trying to painstakingly recreate the look and feel of Lisp Machines of yore and forget that they need Unix to run them.’

#Lisp

🔗 https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/2zvhmu/emacs_vs_linux_why_not_use_a_terminal_and/cpn4qfs/

The weather in Tokyo this morning is great! ☀️😊

Editing WordPress PHP with a proportionally-spaced face? No thank you!

I hate computers (and programming is terrible). 💩

I actually wanted a Japanese maker, either Pilot or Sailor. I went with a Pilot Custom 74 with a medium nib, as I’ve done before. It’s a good, reasonably priced, everyday pen. #fountainpen #fountainpens

Buying a fountain pen:
‘We have many overseas makers… oh, excuse me, we have German and English makers among others…’

I was running on four hours sleep when I wrote this. 😴

I’m not sure what I was imagining at the time but the Linux virtual console, framebuffer, tmux and a collection of command-line interface tools isn’t it. Emacs is sort-of it, if Emacs was less of an editor and more of a Lisp machine.

I don’t want to suggest that graphical user interfaces themselves are particularly wrong or something, but I’m wondering whether my computing environment wouldn’t be simpler to use and require less resources if it was a high-resolution fixed-width character display.

I really like the upright italic face available on #Smalltalk-76 and the #Xerox #Alto seen here mostly in the class browser. It looks like it’s called Cream, but I can’t find much about it on the Web.

Screenshot by user ‘SUMIM.ST’ on Wikimedia Commons used without endorsement via CC-BY-SA-4.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smalltalk-76.png).

#retrocomputing

The X1 Carbon’s page up and page down keys being in the corners of the cursor key cluster is still fucking me up… I miss the X220’s 7-row keyboard.