Jaime G. Wong

Hobbies on the go: Today I dropped off my work car for service. They told me it would take two hours, and there wasn’t much I could do but sit and wait. When I told a colleague, he said: “Oh, what a drag! It’s always like that. I hate waiting!” Me, I thought: “Yay, two hours to tinker with my blog.”

Chatting with Oliver on Wednesday IRL was, as always, refreshing and reenergizing. Also, he added Hackergotchis to IcaPlanet the very same Wednesday!

Later tonight I'll meet Oliver to celebrate IcaPlanet's 15th anniversary! I wish I had an screenshot of the first version. I refrain from taking a screenshot of the current one as it's practically a JaimePlanet at this moment, haha. Hey, Oliver, we should add hackergotchis!

I'm proud to announce I've successfully migrated my personal site to Eleventy, a static site generator written in JavaScript. There's lots of static site generators in most programming languages (even Bash). I wrote my own once, with PHP and Makefiles, but it was slow and inefficient. This time I wanted to learn a new thing and add it to my toolbelt. I was surprised at how fast Eleventy was. It exceeded my expectations. I like that it has several template engines and you can mix them. My pages…

Why Plain Text Is Still One of the Best Technologies We Have: A text file cannot embed a spreadsheet, preserve elaborate page layouts, run a presentation, or provide many of the conveniences we expect from modern applications. What it does instead is store text in one of the simplest and most widely understood forms in computing, and that simplicity is a large part of why it has lasted. This is an excellent piece on why Plain Text matters today more than ever.

Tycho’s lid latch misaligned. Fixed it, but accidentally broke other part. Bummer. Superglue to the rescue. Also, I checked why the Right cursor key and PgDn key weren’t working. Depressing and massaging them fixed them, whew! I was already getting frustrated on the idea of not being able to buy a replacement keyboard. The F3 and F4 keys still work intermittently, tho.

I love this idea of Robert Birming: Maintaining a gallery is a bit of a hassle on most indie platforms. I’ve tried various ways of doing it, but it always ends up the same way: I forget to update it. Therefore, I decided to create a /photo slash page. Like a /now page, but just for photography. One photo, swapped whenever I have a new pic I feel like sharing. Now that I’ve picked my DSLR again, I’ve created my own /photo page, go check it out!

There’s several YouTube channels of photographers asking beautiful strangers on the streets to take their portraits. Staged or not, I find them entertaining. I recently saw this one where the photographer asks this woman, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this beautiful backdrop here?” which, indeed, it is. Having said that, it’s hilarious that the entirety of his photos were shot like this:

I don’t remember where I got this quote from, but it’s great: “The drawing you make will always be better than the drawing you didn’t make at all.”

My old Canon Rebel T1i camera’s batteries started failing months ago, they didn’t reliably hold a charge. My concern was that the camera would not shutdown correctly and break. Better safe than sorry, I stopped using it. I dearly missed my DSLR a lot, especially on a family travel to Cuzco. While smartphones can take great photos, they can’t compete against a larger sensor and larger interchangeable lenses. I’m delighted that, with the help of my mother-in-law I got ahold of two new batteries!…

Who knows that you blog? Question for the audience: Do you tell people you blog? Interesting question. I, for one, don’t for no special reason whatsoever.

My brother Juan Pablo has a Supernote Manta and it’s pretty cool. I tried my hand doing a drawing. There’s a short lag but, to me, it’s noticeable. Not a deal-breaker, I think I can get used to it. The friction is good, I didn’t pay much attention at the time. We were talking before about an old wooden chess set we have, my brother was remarking on the craftmanship of the Knight across sets.

I had two issues printing with CUPS on Arch Linux: When printing more than one copy, it always prints one. When selecting “Reverse” printing (that is, invert the order of the pages) didn’t work. It’s a bug in libcupsfilters 2.2. Reverting to version 2.1 fixed it for me. I’ve added it to an IgnoreGroup in my pacman.conf until it gets fixed. You should have seen me last Friday printing 20 copies of my Bible Study worksheet. One by one. Double-sided. Definitely not fun.

If my life was a movie, the soundtrack would have several Roxette songs in it. It’s the sound of my daydreams, happiness and sadness; songs of love and heartbreak, pop guitars, strings and synthesizers. It’s the 90s, my brother and I were in school. How Do You Do? was Roxette’s new single and it got a lot of radio airplay. I successfully recorded it with our tape recorder and we played it nonstop. I liked that Per Gessle sang prominently in this one. While visiting an older cousin to play Risk,…

There’s several facets of AI that sickens me. This is one of them. The price we’re paying is too much to bear.

Popularized by Suzy Welch. When faced with some important decision, ask yourself: How am I going to feel about this in 10 minutes? How am I going to feel about this in 10 weeks? How am I going to feel about this in 10 years?

I discovered Fabric, a Python-based automation framework. It’s a wrapper of Invoke and Paramiko (the Python SSH client). It’s thing is to run commands and automate tasks in remote servers. What’s the difference with Ansible? Ansible’s approach is to run remote commands in an idempotent way: running the same command should leave the system in a specific state, even if you run it repeatedly. Fabric is procedural. Both have their uses, they aren’t meant to replace each other. Now that I have…

One obscure, but very useful Bash trick is CTRL+X CTRL+E, which will open $EDITOR to edit the current line. This means I can switch to a Vim session with whatever I was typing on intact. This is handy for those times where I need a search-and-replace operation or fix things in a long command or build a long complex command from scratch. I’m aware of Bash’s vi-mode, but I prefer using the default Emacs keybindings because I also work in other’s remote servers. Also, it’s a Vi emulation. I’ve…

I’ve upgraded to Renoise‘s latest version: 3.5.4, a phenomenal version, there’s lots and lots of new features! The thing I immediately liked the most is all meters show RMS! Yay! The possibility of doing Live Coding using pattrns is a killer feature. One more item to the long list of things to try and learn! Speaking of which, today I learned a new music production trick! I have a bass that sounded good until I tried listening to it on my iPhone and it was nowhere to be heard, because physics.…

I turned this Journal Comic drawing into my Kindle’s lock screen wallpaper!

A few months ago I bit the bullet and installed Arch Linux on Prime, my Early 2011 13″ Macbook Pro. At this point in time, making Linux work on a Macbook Pro is no longer a challenge, especially of this vintage. It was amusing to see Intel’s text-mode character set on a Mac. Prime is old and is showing its age. The battery has swollen, pushing the trackpad up making physically impossible to click. Despite its condition, the battery still lasts around one hour. The speakers can barely be heard.…

It’s been a long time since I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. My cousin Oscar and I were at school, we recently met Edgar and he presented us Santos, a senior at our school. Santos brought with him Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun, in English. By then I had read Arthur C. Clark’s 2001 and Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity from my oldest brother’s collection, but Santos had read a lot more. He asked if we heard about Foundation and pitched the story about this super advanced mathematics and science…

While linking yesterday to Jordan Mechner’s website page about his Making of Prince of Persia book, I learned he also drew a graphic novel called Replay about his family’s past and his own life, including his game developments. I took some of Jordan’s style of journalling after reading Making of Prince of Persia: no long context descriptions, concise, in medias res. I have read Replay’s Kindle sample and I’m already inspired by his narrative style. I didn’t knew the man could draw so well! His…

After finishing Mickey7 I haven’t found another book that catches my interest. I might move into non-fiction. Meanwhile, I’m re-reading Jordan Mechner’s The Making of Prince of Persia.

I finished reading Mickey7. It was very entertaining and funny. At a certain part, I thought I guessed what was going to happen but I was wrong! There’s no filler nor fluff, I liked it.

Bubbles is “Hacker news for independent blogs.” I love it! A place where interesting blogs can be discovered without any trickster algorithm behind the curtains.

From Dune, in 1965: Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

My oldest brother had this Game & Watch, Helmet. The batteries were worn down, I played very little and broke it when my curiosity to see how it looked inside took the better of me. You can play a free 3D-emulation on itch.io. (Not my photo, I copied it from lulu-berlu.com)

Oh, I didn’t know the Mickey17 movie was a book adaptation, I’m reading it now! Fun fact: the book’s title is Mickey7.

Lorenzo Etherington has created 1,000 entries of his “How To Think When You Draw” series. That’s nothing short of impressive! It spans many diverse topics, he’s going for breadth rather than depth. For that reason, I wouldn’t recommend it to beginners. I’ve been trying to collect them but some aren’t numbered. Lorenzo haphazardly posts them in his blog, mixing new entries with old ones.