Andrew Quinn's TILs

Today I released a dump of six months of flashcards I autogenerated from my tiny Finnish news archive to make the lives of my fellow language learners easier.

Consider the problem of “how do I run more than 1 terminal at a time”.

This week I achieved a modest personal dream of mine I’ve had since I was a high schooler: I purchased a proper standing desk, with a low-profile treadmill underneath.

Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances.

A while back I stirred up some controversy on Hacker News by talking about why I liked it when tutorials take you from clean VM to working, installed software.

The best websites are home-cooked meals.

There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions.

I was 100% mouseless back before it was cool.

tmux (short for “terminal mux” (short for “multiplexer”)) is i3 for your terminal.

Most of us work in companies with something approximating a shared online internal wiki, be it Confluence or MediaWiki or even a searchable, static website custom built for the task.

I’m kidding, I’m switching to OpenBSD because I like security or code quality or something.

One of the cooler things about working in a firm founded and run by a lot of dyed-in-the-wool Linux hackers like my current place is that there is a lot of Bash lying around, accumulated over a good 25 years or so.

I am, emphatically, not the language learning type.

I Robert Anton Wilson was, is, and always will be a fascinating and hiliarious writer to me.

Imagine you had the Most Complicated Program On Earth (MCPOE), with 1,000,000 dependencies.

The law of diminishing returns needs no introduction.

In order to learn a word, we need to come across it several times.

Here’s a secret.

I’ve been on vacation this week, and part of what I’ve been up to is fixing up the Selkouutiset Archive.

1 wall "Hello, world!"

Hyvää uuttaa vuottaa!

Hei kaikki.

Shell Bling Ubuntu and finstem now have what I’m calling “speed paints” of how someone, starting from scratch on a standard Ubuntu VM, might install the programs.

fzf is an incredibly useful bit of software, if someone shows you how to use it.

At work I’m currently experimenting with using Vagrant to automate getting an entire local network of our tiny embedded Linux systems running all on my local box.

There are only four single-digit primes: 2, 3, 5, and 7.

haskell-kata’s Quickstart now has this neat little ditty at the start: 1 2 git config --local alias.build '!

Apparently so..

For some reason, my daily archive of Finland’s “clear news” broadcast didn’t work today.

Recommendations appreciated.

At least on Linux.

Example from yesterday’s news.

I love pomodoros 🍅.

I’ve discovered one big downside of [putting systemd times into ~/.config/systemd/user/][1]: They stop running when you log out.

Some more updates to the main repo of this TIL site today, in particular I have added a new fzf-tags.fish script. til uses this script to Scrapes all the YAML tags: frontmatter from all current Markdown posts, Puts me into a multi-select fzf menu containi…

A communication heuristic, optimized for asynchronous communication of detailed concepts between human beings.

This blog now has a swanky new RSS feed button right on the front page, courtesy of the well-designed PaperMod theme powering things on the backend.

For a long time after moving my website from Netlify to Azure, none of my fancy emoji or weird umlaut characters would display properly.

TL;DR systemd timers are a serious upgrade from cron.

1 2 # ⚠️: Reboots your VM. su -c "$(whereis adduser | awk '{print $2}') $(whoami) sudo && $(whereis reboot | awk '{print $2}')" In all its glory!

This weekend I’ve been procrastinating playing the long game by getting some nice workflows set up for my TIL content repository and its associated website (cf Context, below).

Tonight I was hacking away at some more little automations to make this TIL nice and presentable over at https://til.andrew-quinn.me/.

I’ve been a big fan of both spaced repetition in general and the Anki spaced repetition system in particular for a long time now.

The Fish shell has… interesting syntax for multi-line string literals.