Monday, October 14, 2024 · Permalink

I am tired of AI:

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you probably have seen the same massive surge I’ve seen in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to pretty much every problem out there, in software testing, in software development, and in life in general.

Now, I am all for finding and developing new solutions to existing problems, but boy, am I tired of AI, of how it is used and of how it is marketed.

My sentiments too. I’ve never used ChatGPT or similar tools to this date.

Final issue of Future Music magazine

Friday, September 27, 2024 · Permalink

After 30 years, Future Music magazine has published its final issue, number 414, September 2024.

I discovered Future Music on a small local place here in Ica that sold second-hand and old magazines, books and other publications. I bought the only issue that was available (issue 56), still on its bag and with the free CD, but it was a few years old. I read that magazine many times over! There was a pseudo-interview with Kraftwerk, and also a Roni Size interview from which I learnt early on the value of hard work (he and his mates working at 3 AM) and to make the most of what you have (he had a sample with a hiss, and he used it anyway).

Later, more magazines appeared and I bought as many as I could afford. The free CDs had tracks, demos and samples. One of those samples is the centerpiece of my «404 Dancing Ducks» track. My music production was limited to trackers at the time, and thanks to Future Magazine I was properly educated on MIDI.

I wanted to get my hands on the gear they reviewed: the Yamaha A3000 sampler, the «affordable» XG-powered Yamaha CS1x, the virtual analog Yamaha AN1x beast, the physical-modelling Korg Prophecy, among others.

The massively productive Mike Paradinas was 24 when interviewed, to the chagrin of the interviewer. I was younger than him and thinking «hey, so I still can make it!» I’m now 46 and owning the chagrin.

And then there were the album reviews. Oh, right, thanks to Future Music I learnt about The Blue Nile! Wow, I forgot.

I’m not exaggerating if I say that Future Music shaped my life in many ways. I still have the issues, I still have all the CDs. I’ll give them a good read again!

Thank you to all the staff, specially the ones who wrote on the issues I owned, with a big shout out to Andy Jones. You did a great job.

I have a twtxt now, BTW

Monday, July 8, 2024 · Permalink

Today I learnt about twtxt, a very simple, decentralized microblogging… thing. I don’t dare call it platform. But looks like I arrived late to the party, all twtxts I find no longer exist, clients are now archived, read-only GitHub repositories, etc. Bummer.

Not sure when the novelty will wear off, but here we go: https://jgwong.org/twtxt.txt

Wiki linking and concealing

Tuesday, December 5, 2023 · Permalink

Something I don’t like of Obsidian‘s Wiki links syntax is that the link is first, and the label second. So:

[[Link|Display Text]]

This breaks the reading flow, because if I write:

Whatever happened [[Daily Notes/Daily Notes 2023-11-01|the other day]]

You inevitably read «Whatever happened [[Daily Notes…» and then see the | character and then I realize, «oh, the text meant to be read was «the other day,» that makes sense now.»

This is no problem while working in Obsidian, because Obsidian will display the link as an HTML link, you read «Whatever happened the other day» and you won’t see the link. That’s great, but I spend most of my time in Vim/Neovim. I would have rather preferred if Obsidian used the other Wiki link format, which is «label first, link second.» Like this:

Whatever happened [[the other day|Daily Notes/Daily Notes 2023-11-01]]

It’s more natural to me. You read «Whatever happened [[the other day» and when you see the |character, you know it’s linking somewhere else. Reading flow doesn’t break.

Then I remembered Vim’s conceal feature. By setting up the proper syntax highlighting rules, Vim can hide the link and show only the label, just like Obsidian!

I thought there might be no need to do this from scratch, maybe there’s a syntax file that, at the very least, parses the link and label. I can go from there. I looked at Wiki.vim’s own syntax highlighting but they don’t parse the text and link part. Same with a Mediawiki syntax file for Vim. Pandoc’s syntax file for Vim doesn’t either.

Change of plans, I had to do it from scratch. I would had to learn two things: how to create new syntax highlighting rules and how Vim’s regular expressions work.

And so I did. I learnt on every little pocket of time I had, meaning, when I was sick with tummy ache at 2 AM, when singing to the kids to sleep, whenever Thais was busy baking, etc. I devoured tutorials and the Vim manual. By the way, Neovim has a better, navigable, manual.

This is how it looks like:

A screenshot of Vim, showing how my concealed Wiki links look.

It works awesome and I feel awesome! I feel like I own Vim at a new level. I’m now thinking on how to leverage this new skill and also the fact that I’m no longer at the whim of a colorscheme being almost perfect if only the Comments color were a bit darker. Now I can tweak it to my liking. And even make some new rules or copy over stuff between syntax files.

And Vim is so powerful! Everything is so very well thought out. It has the experience of years, decades of work. So the syntax highlighting can handle many things and already has solutions for things you might stumble because, in these past decades, many people stumbled with it already and it was solved. Elegantly.

Wiki linking indecision

Sunday, November 26, 2023 · Permalink

Something I’m undecided about my personal Wiki is linking from directories. I had to reorganize entries into directories because they started to grow in quantity making navigation cumbersome.

My «problem» now is that linking from, say a Daily Note, looks like this [[../foobar]]. It breaks the natural reading flow. As in:

Yesterday I met [[../../People/Oliver Etchebarne]] and it was nice.

Now, Obsidian does something interesting. If I create a [[foobar]] link, and Obsidian doesn’t find it in the current directory, it tries to find it on every parent directory. This means you can have «clean,» good-looking links that work transparently.

So I was looking on how to make Wiki.vim do the same and there’s indeed a way to do that, I’d need to write a «resolver.»

And here’s where my indecision begins. Is Obsidian going to shape how I write notes? Because otherwise, why not just move my writing entirely to Obsidian? I know the answer to that is, «no, I want to keep using Vim.»

I only use Obsidian on my smartphone, because it’s the better Markdown editor I know of. But I refrain from using Obsidian plugins that require Obsidian to work. If I can’t parse them, read them or replicate their functionality in some capacity, then no.

For example, I use the Templater plugin because it creates files from templates, something I already did with Vim, but I don’t use the DataView plugin, because I’d only see some code declarations and query specifications, making my Wiki dependant on that specific plugin.

So, no, Obsidian will not shape how I do things. Having said that, I’m still undecided on the paths. For now, I’m keeping them relative. I don’t like them but I have writing and stuff to do.

Mike Portnoy is back!

Thursday, October 26, 2023 · Permalink

Mike Portnoy is back as Dream Theater’s drummer! I can’t believe it!

Just read the news and, really, I still can’t believe it! I feel bad for Mike Mangini, tho, he’s a terrific drummer but he was in the very uncomfortable position of filling Portnoy’s shoes and pleasing the fans. I remember being very skeptical anyone could replace Portnoy and Mangini proved me wrong with his powerhouse audition, but I then found his live performances lacking and eventually lost interest on the band.

I never imagined Portnoy would be back after 13 years! Looking forward for their new album!

Drawing for fun

Wednesday, October 11, 2023 · Permalink

I’m reading Bakuman again.

It’s a manga about two kids and how they reach their dream of becoming professional manga artists (mangakas). It’s very inspiring and often very meta. The story and art are phenomenal; it’s one of my all-time favorites.

In the current arc, both kids are running on empty. Mashiro, the artist, accepts a temporal job as their rival’s assistant, with the goal of breaking the rut and find a solid idea for their next manga. He finds it by being reminded how much fun he had when he was a child, drawing nonstop and imagining story concepts and characters.

I paused reading and reminisced on my own childhood and how I also drew a lot and enjoyed it. I drew armies, cartoon and video game characters, spaceships, robots and martial artists. I once drew a complete comic, full color, with a cover, something close to 30 pages.

In other ocassions I played by drawing. No panels, just characters and fighter jets flying all over the page, raw action in real time, with no care of layout, fast, loose and incomplete — just enough lines to suggest the missile lock in the HUD or have the character talk (no written dialogue, I made all the voices!). It was a complete mess and chaos, but immensely fun.

I’m trying to tap into that childhood playfulness and boldness I’ve since lost. While pondering on this, I remembered my frustration wanting so badly to draw The Real Ghostbusters’ Slimer and failing no matter how many times I tried.

It took a bunch of decades, but I finally can.