The Universe of Joshua Blais

For some time, I have gone down the Tea rabbit hole, to come out on the other end with a Gaiwan for Gongfu brewing, a Matcha set, I started importing tea from abroad, and have found that tea is now my drink of choice in the afternoons.

One question I have had in my mind that I have been seeking the answer to for some time is this: “How Does one reconcile with the immediate nature of life (we could be gone a moment from now), with the need to work toward a tomorrow that may never come?”

For the past few years, I have self hosted services that permitted me to leave behind all subscriptions.

Recently, some influencer was banned from TikTok for some sort of prank video.

The Adam Freeland Song “We Want Your Soul” was released in 2003, and while the world was going through a transitory period, we are realizing the entirety of the soul sucking nature of modernity today.

“A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” — Charles Darwin I would say that the greatest issue in my life is that I don’t know where my time is going.

On mac, the Command Space~ shortcut is one that can be unbelieveably powerful - not only do you have the native Spotlight app, you can rebind the key to something even more powerful, namely Alfred or in recent years, Raycast.

One thing that has greatly improved my digital quality of life is being able to capture anything from anywhere on my system.

“God, the Universe, whatever name you might call God by.”

As everyone in this generation, I have struggled with phone addiction and wasting time in apps for much of my teenage/adult life.

One of the greatest investments in the last half decade I made was the purchase of a Kobo e-reader.

Since I started using the Zen Browser, I have been more inclined to bookmark the pages that I visit and organize them in a logical way that allows me to revisit them whenever I need to.

Earlier this week, there was a post by Bozhidar Batsov that sparked a lively conversation on Reddit about the same topic.

The thing that has always mattered in this life was the depth to which we were willing to go.

I have pretty well integrated emacs into everything I do on a computer.

Some consider this to be an impossible feat, and until lately, I too, thought I was doomed to out of sync calendaring between my mobile calendar with notifications (Google calendar) and my always on screen calendar in org-agenda.

Hands down the easiest way to manage your configuration files in a unix environment is via GNU Stow.

I used to laugh at the meme that emacs could be used for everything, and thought it crazy that one would “live in emacs” (that is a post from almost two years ago where I didn’t even really believe it myself).

One of my gripes with internet creators is their speed with which they denounce the previous work they completed.

I have, for some time, been wanting to litreately (is that a word?)

Using the standard Unix password manager is helpful to creating a git version controlled password database.

When you visit a site, you should use the webarchive’s tooling to save a snapshot of the page incase for whatever reason, the page goes down in the future.

The thing that really became the killer app for me in emacs (and for many people I have come across) is org mode.

If you have been sitting under a rock, there is a new browser in town that all the cool kids are switching to, the Zen Browser.

There have been various times that I have detoxxed myself from the social media demon that plagues our society.

I have arguably gone about 85% of the way down the custom, ergonomic, split, alternate keyboard layout rabbit hole with my chocofi 36 key, Colemak DH board.

If you are in the tech space, or even just someone that has turned on the television (I hope not!)

As we start the new year, it is always interesting to see what people are using on the devices to get things done.

OBS is a great streaming software, the only issue is that you cannot send hotkeys to it when on wayland as it would be “insecure” - I get the mentality, if you allowed hotkey acess to a window not in focus, it could very well be malicious.

I convinced Claude that God exists, that Catholicism is the one True Church, and that the linchpin of the resurrection is that which all history hinges on.

For the last six months or so, I have been using Hugo as my blogging platform of choice, switching over from a heavy NextJS site to one that is far more lightweight and focused on static files.

2024 was a solid year for me and my family, and I look to build upon the progress and education I acquired in the year as we move into the new year.

While most release their yearly review sometime in the period over Christmas - New Year’s, I figured I would be the weird one and post it the first week of January.

While most are waiting for today (Happy New Year) to come around to hit the gym, to start eating better, to start that business, or change their lives in one of the thousand stereotypical ways people start each new year, know that every day could have been

“Christmas is the day that holds all time together.”

I recently was migrating to a fresh installation of Fedora 41, and in order to do so, moving over gpg and ssh keys, as well as my .password-store database was vital.

“All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

I think I made a mistake, team!

I know that I am going to generate hate for this one, but I have left my Hyprland tiling window manager for the pastures of Gnome.

Switching between the mouse and keyboard is a fool’s game - one that takes 100% productivity and slowly erodes it away, percentage point by percentage point until we are taking valuable brain power and energy to swap between the two.

Not that long ago, I was terrible at taking notes.

I had the privilege to visit the Cathedral de Santa Maria del Fiore on our recent trip to Italy.

In my early twenties, I thought that stoicism was the “ultimate philosophy”.

Keybinds Reference for the Zen Computing System# I use Gocheat as my built in cheatsheet for all key bindings and update it frequently if there is anything I have missed and/or forget here Hyprland# Hotkey Function Alt + T Toggle tiled/floating view Alt +…

For the past two months, we have been sleeping on the floor on a Japanese futon.

After about half a decade of daily driving Linux, I have come to understand why the command line is simply better.

Recently, the founder of Telegram was detained in France and charged with complacency with regard to the various shady activities that go on on the platform.

Although I don’t use social media, there are still many distractions to be had on the internet (oh the understatement!)

Update: I am back to using emacs, you can read why here At the beginning of this year, I aimed to simplify many of my processes so that I could focus on the things that I actually wanted to do with a computer - namely build things efficiently and quickly.

It is no secret that I detest the smartphone culture in which we live, and I look forward to the day that I can ditch mine in the river.