Gemini Links 24/07/2024: Face à Gaïa, Emacs Timers for Weekly Event, Chromebook Survives Water Torture
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Face à Gaïa: book review
I just finished reading Bruno Latour's Face à Gaïa, originally published in English, then translated to French with some minor changes. Some twenty years ago I read another of his books, Pandora's Hope. If there is something I can recognise across these books, it is Latour's theory of actants, or collectives that include both human agents and objects, although they play a lesser role in the more recent book. I wouldn't expect much from a philosopher (or sociologist of science, as Latour used to call himself) who writes about climate change. Coming up with new clever ways of thinking about things is such a slow method when action is urgent. Or is it? I will admit that thinking the wrong way about things can be disastrous, as so often happens when greenwashed solutions are being proposed.
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writededed out
Fingers bleeding (not literally), I sip coffee and step out on the back steps of The Midnight. Letting quasi-humid Web air hang around the flickered alley light, cig smoke in it's glow, lights and sound of the Big Web distantly thunder in the distant horizon where I can *kinda* see, *kinda* hear, but deliberately make no mind of, as the smoke brings joy, darkness brings calm, neon reflections from the sign of "The Midnight" glimmer in the puddles on the streetside. All sparking inner cyberpunk joy and cozy tranquility, knowing I am off to the far end of the Smol Web where I can continue in quiet and peace - unknown and without care. A dark apparition of being forgotten and willfully desiring to do nothing more than to forget.
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Technology and Free Software
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Emacs: Timers for Weekly Event
A great feature of Emacs is the timer library. This includes `run-at-time' for starting a timer at a particular time (relative or absolute) and it can receive an argument for repeating the timer every 𝑥 number of seconds after that. You can list all your active timers with the `list-timers' command, which interface also includes a handy shortcut key for cancelling a timer.
It is not obvious, however, how to use run-at-time to set up a weekly timer event. It is possible to pass a time of day to run-at-time, but that forces the user to check what day of the week it is; also there is a quirk in the design of run-at-time, such that if you specify a time of day, the timer will immediately run if the time of day is already past that point. Now, in Elisp it is not too hard to calculate the number of seconds until some future date. But that is not very helpful since, if your run-at-time is part of your init.el, you would need to first calculate what that next future date would be, which is not trival.
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Chromebook may be the most badass computer of all times
It was one of those days. I had a 20-ounce plastic bottle of Vitamin Water and a similarly sized plastic jar of peanuts. I was working on something. I thought I grabbed the jar of peanuts. Instead it was the Vitamin Water, roughly 3/4 full.
I had accidentally poured approximately 15 ounces of Vitamin Water all over my laptop. It's one of those cursed incidents anyone would dread.
Supposedly Chromebook is built to withstand those events, considering that lots of schoolchildren use them, and school districts and government agencies buy them. Still then, I did not expect my laptop to survive this.
Yet, all keyboard and trackpad functions survived unscathed, and the audio speakers work just as good.
And this is a $249 ASUS model I bought used for $100.
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