Of Note #1

A couple of years ago, I got the Hobonichi Techo and fountain pen bug. Something about the unabashedly analog planner practice and the staggeringly heterogenous approaches of the believers rubbed off on my usage of org-mode and org-agenda. I started regularly taking notes via org-capture.

While org provides the alluring digital spell of Random Access, one habit that I picked up from the Techo is periodical linear review. By walking leisurely backwards through time, I see what I'd forgotten, when I learned something, when a topic began to interest me, a striking passage in a book, etc.

CLI Curios

Getting the process id of a X11 window

xprop | grep PID

If you run the above command and click on a window you can see the owning PID. The fact that xprop composes with grep … perhaps I'm still too much of a UNIX neophyte, but that's freaking cool.

Website statistics with zgrep

I don't run any JavaScript-based tracking malware on this website. That doesn't stop me from getting a rough idea how much traffic I get thanks to zgrep. I had never heard of zgrep until last month. With the following snippet I can collect basic statistics from the haproxy logs:

zgrep ' 200 ' /var/log/haproxy.log* |
  awk -F'"' '{print $2}' |
  awk '{print $2}' |
  sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

I haven't posted in a while, so currently the most popular path is the RSS feed.

Archiving a website for offline reading

Messing around with NetBSD and doing a significant portion of my computing in Emacs has really driven home how unpleasant modern software documentation really is. It used to be you could either read everything on your machine or find what you needed in a well written technical book. Products like Dash attempt to recover this offline-first approach to documentation, but I discovered that wget serves just as well.

The following snippet can be used to politely archive well crafted online documentation:

wget -mpckE --user-agent="" \
  -e robots=off --wait 1    \
  -I /specific/path www.foo.com/specific/path

Lifted from this awesome post.

Books

The Anarchy

This fascinating review of a now passed exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, made me realize how little I knew about the East India Company. To rectify this situation I picked up William Dalrymple's The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Oh boy, oh boy, is it good.

Human Acts

A compact novel about the Gwangju Massacre by Nobel laureate Han Kang. As written elsewhere, the books focuses on the body and bodies in an unforgettable way.

One of those drizzling autumns days. I'd just turned a corner and there, from beneath the rim of my umbrella, I saw Kim Jin-su waiting for me. He had the hood of his black waterproof jacket up over his head. Perhaps because I was so startled, I remember being gripped by an odd rage, wanting to punch that ghost-pale face. Or not, not punch it, just rub my hands over its contours and erase the expression I saw there.