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Books and some interesting pages I read in June 2026 This month I decided to not finish a book after reading the first 100 pages, so I just finished a single book. The warm weather and outdoor activities resulted in less screen time, but still ran into some fine web pages! Fiction Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (2002) 116 pages 4 stars A novella telling the story of the lonely life of Robert Grainer, who was born at the end of the nineteenth century. Good but sad story, short, fine writing.…
Start Guile shell script that listens on a port for REPL client Guile, while running a program, can listen to a port for a REPL client, like a Swank server on SBCL. Here's how to connect from Geiser to a running Guile script. Start the Guile shell-script This is how to start a Guile script: #!/usr/local/bin/guile3 \ -e main --listen -s !# (use-modules (...)) ... Note the the first line starts with #! and third starts with !#. The first line contains the name of the Guile executable and the path…
Enhanced Motif Window Manager on FreeBSD The Enhanced Motif Window Manager (EMWM) is a fork of the Motif Window Manager with fixes and enhancements. This brings the wonderful look of Motif to the X11 desktop. Virtual workspaces EMWM version 2.0 offers virtual workspaces. The FreeBSD packages contain EMWM version 1.3. To get virtual workspaces it is better not to install the FreeBSD package, and to compile EMWM from source from (fastestcode.org]https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html). Compilation of…
Books and some interesting pages I read in May 2026 Non-fiction The End of Everything by Katie Mack (2020) 226 pages 5 stars We know that the universe started with the Big Bang, and that it currently is expanding. But will this go on forever, or is the universe destined to end, and if so, will there be a new Big Bang? The writer, a theoretical cosmologist, gives an easy to read overview of the current scientific understanding on the future of the universe. During this tour we encounter subjects…
Awkiawki with slowcgi with NGINX on FreeBSD How to run awkiawki using slogcgi and NGNINX Awkiawki is a wiki written in awk. slowcgi is a server which implements the FastCGI Protocol to execute CGI scripts. slowcgi is a simple server that translates FastCGI requests to the CGI protocol. It executes the requested CGI script and translates its output back to the FastCGI protocol. slowcgi is on FreeBSD available as package. I run this from /home/www. Configuring slowcgi Add the following lines to…
Books and some pages I read in April 2026 Non-fiction Vintage Didion by Joan Didion (2004) 200 pages 3 stars A collection of previously published essays focussed on US politics. The essays date from different periods. There are also three chapters from her book "Miami" in it. Usually I like to read Didion, but several parts of this collection were boring. Short-stories The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (1956) 9 pages 5 stars A short story with a somewhat predictable end. Good read though.…
Explore the smol web with Bubbles All Aggregators Are Equal but Some Aggregators Are More Equal Than Others Bubbles is a new, brilliant, blog aggregator. Bubbles combines the power of RSS feeds with the power of voting. Of course there is lobste.rs, but that has a focus on technical publications. Non-tech blogs Hacker News and Lobste.rs have community voting figured out, but non-tech content gets drowned by the tech majority. Bubbles aims to (also) promote non-tech content. RSS and voting…
Install minimal Recoll on FreeBSD 15 Recoll is a full text search application. Recoll is based on the very capable Xapian search engine library. The FreeBSD package comes with a ton of dependencies, which is great for use on your desktop, but can be a bit of overkill for non-graphical systems. Minimal install The idea is to install with as minimal dependencies as possible and start working with that. Later we can always add more. Install dependencies Although we install Recoll from so...
Books of March 2026 Below are the two books I finished reading this month. Fiction The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954) 423 pages 5 stars This is a re-read, I have read the book several times, first time in the early seventies, the last time at least a decade ago. I also have seen the movie directed by Peter Jackson several times. During reading the book I discovered that my memory of it is tainted by watching the movie. I wasn't aware of much deviation of it, but the...
My Emacs misconceptions Emacs Carnival Mistakes and Misconceptions Philip Kaludercic has started the Emacs carnival on the subject Mistakes and Misconceptions. Here's my contribution. Vim to Emacs In 2021 I switched to Emacs after using Vim for more than 20 years. I was thinking about learning Lisp and Forth, and somehow I had the notion that programming in these languages is better supported in Emacs. Also, I had discovered that extensions like rec-mode and ledger-mode offer much more ...
