hotchill's gopherhole

Growing Ginger Is Dead Simple.txt

01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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growing ginger (is dead simple)
October 01st, 2026
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It is october, at last!

I know it is known to be pumpkin season. And I love a good pumpking soup.
But do you know what goes well with pumpkin? Ginger!
(And cumin/jeera, and soy sauce, and korean sweet chili paste, and...)

It is dead easy to grow ginger, you just have to hunt for it.

Step 1: find a place that sells ginger. Fresh rhizomes, that is.

Step 2: does it sells good and fresh ginger?
	- No. Go to step 1.
	- Yes, proceed to 3.
Step 3: find a rhizome with burgeoning parts (rosy/greenish)

Step 4: put it in a shallow and big pot filled with soil.
	Water a little, just keep the soil wet.
	Ginger roots and rhizomes grow horizontally so you don't need a deep pot.

Step 5: Wait.

If you live in subtropical regions, you may grow it indoor in the cold season.
It grows like lemongrass and the leaves can be used to season lots
of things. Like butternut pumpkin soup!

Also, there is a botany daemon running on tilde.institute. You can virtually touch grass
in the tildeverse too!

Great Expectations.txt

27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Great Expectations
September 27th, 2026
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  I notice I have been prey to great expectations again.
Plans go in my mind, some idea comes forth, and I think:
Great! I will do this incredible thing!

  Of course I somehow conclude that the thing itself will be great,
that I will push it further than anybody and that the world will
be reasonably changed for the better once my idea gets from my
mind to the material world.

It goes like this:
1. A fair bit of daydreaming: I have to consider the idea so it fills me
   with delight, without being too precise.
2. Procrastinating a lot.
3. Try to get something done. In general, it looks like everything
   at the inception stage: unfinished at best, shitty at worst.
4. Get a new idea, return to step 1.

Meanwhile, a lot of unfinished ideas come to this half-life.

  I read a strip from cartoonist Aude Picault today:
It goes a little bit like this:

---
[A young woman, phoning 
- Mom, I can't believe it, work is getting most of my time
  and energy. I can't bear it.
- [...]
- What? You mean it is so for everybody else?
  HOW COMES NOBODY HAS DONE ANYTHING TO SOLVE THIS YET!?  [1]
---
  The necessity to secure an income plays a part in this.
Work is tiring. Generally must be done asap, without being
really urgent. We get the general idea that some numbers
somewhere need to go up.

  Sometimes there is something as urgent as, in my opinion, 
pointless. Administrative work, office, going back and forth
without a clear purpose. David Graeber made a paper about what
he called `bullshit jobs', and then he had to write a thick
book about all the guys who mailed him telling him that
this resonated deep within them.

  I am lucky that I don't consider my job pointless at all.
But the energy and the time it takes are still very much real.
And as daydreaming and free flow of ideas is not really a part
of it. Ideas must come and go and get to fruition on my so-called
free time. Thus, more free time = better ideas?
It is worth considering. Greeks had this idea that leisure
(schole) was an essential part of development of developing
mental, physical, and political activity.
They did obtain this free-time by enslaving others, though.
Today we have lots of robots and computers that can do menial
work and John M. Keynes used to predict that the human economy
should only need a few hours of work per week, mostly to satisfy
our human need to feel useful. So why so much work has to be done
only to feel useless?

  And again, what were those great expectations in the first place?
That sometimes we should just relax and let go. We can't rush them!

# REFERENCES
[1] Aude Picault: Moi je (2004).

Ed 1 No Going Back.txt

20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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ed(1), no going back
April 20th, 2025
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# ed - no going back

Phloggers of the world have intrinsically an afinity for old unix
history and minimalism, else they would be on other parts of the
internet.

It should come as no surprise that most have an acquaintance with
the standard editor ed(1). It is often treated as an elaborate joke
nowadays to be referring to ed as an actually usable editor.

The war vi and emacs has been raging for most of several decades,
but we can say that nobody takes it seriously. Vi has been superseded
by Vim, which is in turn being replaced by Neovim.  Emacs has now
a marketshare reduced to a bunch of old CS majors, and arcane Unix
gurus (or wannabe gurus).  Neovim is all the rage among hip DevOps,
But let's be clear, VSCod(e|ium) is dominant in the tech sector.
Even some emacs and vim aficionados relish their editor of choice
and their precious dotfiles curated with love and tears to an
electron app.

Where are we heading?  Does a choice of editor even matter?  And
what is the place of ed(1) in all of this?  Stop beating around the
bush!

Lets adress the obvious point, ed(1) is a line oriented editor.
Right, that is obvious.

How is that different from other kind of editors?  Modern editors
are screenful oriented, they display screenfuls of text you can
browse.  They have a cursor you can move around to point at text.
You can move that cursor either by point and click with a mouse or
moving around via keyboard input.

Modern workflows generally imply a combination of point-and click
and keyboard input.  Smartphone's touchscreens give yet another
paradigm, but we won't talk about this for now.

ed(1) is different in that regard in the fact that it impels you
to go forward (to Xanadu we go!).  Once you validated a line input,
it is written in the buffer, and another line is open to be prompted.

Of course, ed(1) is not cat(1), you can go back to a previous line
and edit it. But you have to explicitely refer to it, be it by a
line number or a regular expression to access it for editing.
Whereas in screenful oriented editors, you have the possibility to
move the cursor up and down, back and forth, or directly point at
it.  The flow of text is presented as pages in which you navigate
by scrolling.

Most of the hurdle of an editor is to present an efficient way to
move the cursor where it needs to be quickly and with the minimum
amount of overhead to the user.  This moving around the cursor is
almost a non-problem to ed(1); but this comes at the cost of other
problems (which you are free to consider as features).  Why is that?
Well, the cursor edits one line at a time, so you reduce the dimension
of the cursor from two to one.  Even so, ed(1) has some trouble
with going backwards.  Typing your text is fine, editing before
submitting to the editor is not as free as most editor: no arrow
back, no C-a or Esc-0.  The keyboard shortcuts are the standard
one, C-w deletes word backwards, C-u deletes line backwards. This
is pretty much it. There are ways to have a more featureful line
editing in ed, by wrapping the editor in some tool like readline.
Syntax highlighting with hl or pygment and so on.  Purists may
scream.

In a nutshell, a(dd) and i(nsert) do one job and do it well: add
and insert, not finicky edit a line until it's good to be written
into the buffer.  A line editor like this one is the bane and
salvation of perfectionists.  Or maybe it just sets a new set of
problems for perfectionists...  Maybe instead of frantically moving
their cursor around because their eye has catched a wrong formulation,
or some missing punctuation, they will still do that, but the ed(1)
way?

I can only speak from experience here, but line oriented editing
has helped me with that.  Once the friction of moving the cursor
back increases, that energy is directed towards thinking and writing.
And once there is proofreading to make, it is pretty straightforward
to go to the offending words/sentences and edit them with minimal
input.  It is true, you have to think, but it is pretty much like
a human interaction in editing: "Oh well, you know Ed, where you
say so, I'd like it written in this way".  This is what it feels
like to issue a command like '/re/ s/foo/bar'.  And it feels damn
nice.

Further reading: ed man page on BSD systems (GNU has only an info
manual which is not so nice for a small program); edbrowse documentation
at http://edbrowse.org/usersguide.html; ed Mastery by Michael W.
Lukas

See also: Sam(1), regex(7)

Only Alive Keys.txt

30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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Only alive keys
November 30th, 2024
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In defense of no dead keys keyboard maps.

Those of us that have to use a latin alphabet
with non-ascii characters know the hustle
when learning UNIX. Some characters like
tilde (~) or caron (^), and backquotes and so
on are mapped as dead keys to be able to type
easily some characters essential to our day
to day prose. But *nix typescripting reserves
a lot of these characters to regex, shortcuts,
markdown code blocks,... you always end up typing
these twice to watch them appears.

Also, the classic way to type non-ascii characters
vary from OS to another, in mac there usually an
alt-? shortcut that suits your keyboard map,
in windows you enter unicode sequences
(seriously Windows, you are forcing half of the
world to google up characters to copy-paste them,
the 21st century was 24 years ago, stop it).

On Unix, there's the compose key.
The compose key is like this:
- you press the compose key (next key is treated as a dead key)
- you type a two-characters sequence like 's' and 'v'
- a 'composite' character is inputed 'š' [1]

This is easy, extensible, doesn't requires a
huge memory effort and is pretty intuitive.

But when you have deadkeys baked in your keyboard map
you have to press your deadkeys twice to get them
as composite characters.

I made the choice to set my keyboard variant
as "_nodeadkeys".
echo 'setxkbmap "ch" -v "fr_nodeadkeys"' >> $HOME/.xinitrc
It is pretty nice, even though I have to unlearn some
things, and rely solely on the compose key to type
some characters.

Happy typing in non-ascii,
happy tty-ing,
happy unixing,
[1] If this does appear mangled, set your browser or pager to utf-8

	~hotchill

Wordpress Is Hard.txt

18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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WordPress is hard
November 18th, 2024
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In most tools I can think of, easiness of use comes at the cost of
difficulty of repairability, tweaking and general "hacking".

Recently, I had to (yes, "had to") write a blog post in WordPress;
and man, what an unpleasant experience.

First, the spell checker would not let me write as I meant, underlining
pretty much every word I wrote.  Okay, it couldn't detect that I
were writing into several languages.  Accorded, the spell checker
was my browser thing.  But still, what a pain.  I went to school and
had grammar classes, I know (mostly) how to proofread and else I own
my mistakes and typos.

Second, trying to tweak the html to make changes manually that were
not an option into the widgets of the WordPress editor ended up
into invalidating and breaking the whole thing.  WordPress doesn't
like you peering into the inside to make changes that were not meant
to be done by the WordPress devs.

In short, preventing you to do mistakes generally does not let you
do what you mean to do, and just write what you mean to write.

This was my luddite rant. I hope you enjoyed it.  But pretty happy
to be writing this in gopher with a proper editor that doesn't get
in my way, this too is technology.  But technology that is open,
simple and get just what it needs to do, let you write some text
and sharing it over the internet.  Okay, there is no fancy headers,
footers, SEO guidelines and all that jazz, but this is my happy
place.  Writer's block is already hard, no need to push a lot of
crap and friction over it, it won't make it go away.

Happy gophering, it makes the internet a better place.

~hotchill

First Gopher Post.txt

11 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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First gopher post
November 11th, 2024
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So this my first gopher post.  I have been reading and browsing
gopher holes for a year, give or take, so I figured I would do my
own one.

Happy gophering!

~Hotchill