The DS-640 is a compact USB scanner from Brother. It was surprisingly hard to get it working on NixOS, so I wrote up my solution so others don’t have this problem. The bad news is you need Brother’s proprietary drivers to make this work. You need this configuration: # Enable SANE scanners. hardware.sane.enable =...

The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen by nostalgebraist. A revelation (ἀποκάλυψις = “unveiling”) told through the eyes of a developmentally-disabled teenager. You will never guess where it goes. This came across my desk because I really enjoyed The Northern Caves, which is both a great horror story and an evocation of...

When DALL-E came out, it took me a couple of weeks to pick my jaw up from the floor. I would go to sleep excited to wake up to a full quota, with a backlog of prompts to try. It was magical, miraculous. Like discovering a new universe. I compiled the best art in this post. The other day a friend ran some of my old...

Probably not a popular thing to say today. The zeitgeisty thing to say is that we should all log off and live terrible cottagecore solarpunk lives raising chickens and being mindful. I wish people were more online and more public. I have rarely wished the opposite. Consider this post addressed to you, the reader....

You can use Nix as a package manager for Emacs, like so: { home-manager.users.eudoxia = { programs.emacs = { enable = true; extraPackages = epkgs: with epkgs; [ magit rust-mode treemacs # and so on ]; }; }; } Today I learned you can also use it to create ad-hoc packages for things not in MELPA or nixpkgs. The other...

This post describes my experience using Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729. The tl;dr is that it’s a delightful laptop, and Linux runs flawlessly, and all the hardware things I’ve needed run OOTB. The only difficulty I had was in disabling Secure Boot, but I figured out how to do it, which I explain below. Contents...

To install Agda and its standard library, add this to your config: environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [ (agda.withPackages (p: [ p.standard-library ])) ]; Or, using home-manager: home-manager.users.$username.home.packages = with pkgs; [ (agda.withPackages (p: [ p.standard-library ])) ]; The p here stands for...

hashcards is a local-first spaced repetition app, along the lines of Anki or Mochi. Like Anki, it uses FSRS, the most advanced scheduling algorithm yet, to schedule reviews. The thing that makes hashcards unique: it doesn’t use a database. Rather, your flashcard collection is just a directory of Markdown files, like...

tl;dr: you have to modify the application bundle. Celestia is a space simulator: you can fly around space and look at moons and exoplants, fast forward time. It is sometimes used by sci-fi artists for worldbuilding because you can easily add new stars/planets/megastructures/spacecraft. Some people have built whole...

The pleasure is in foreseeing it, not in bringing it to term. — Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions This post is about managing ADHD. It is divided into two sections: “Strategies” describes the high-level control system, “Tactics” is a list of micro-level improvements (really it should be called “stratagems”,...

I have a lot of communication apps. By volume: Twitter DMs, Signal, Whatsapp, iMessage, Discord, email. Because I have so many disjoint places where communication happens, I have a daily task on Todoist to go through each of these, and ensure that every conversation is handled, where “handled” means: if I can reply...

On Hacker News and Lobsters I often see blog posts with titles like: Why I built my startup on Common Lisp and DragonflyBSD Rewriting PyTorch in APL (year six update) I will never, ever, ever learn Docker The general form being: why Obscure Thing is better than Popular Thing. And always the justification is...