Posts from June 15, 2026

The simplification of my mode line is sticking, in that I like how it's turned out and I find it more useful to have it this simple. But I did notice something was missing: I'm a pretty constant but pretty casual user of projectile. I know it's a package that offers a wealth of tools, yet mostly I just use it as a project bookmark system. For this, though, it works well.

Given this, having a quick and easy way to check that I'm in the project I think I'm in is a good idea. While I also have neotree open all the time, which gives a fairly obvious clue, my eyes keep flitting down to the mode line.

The change I made the other day, deliberately, left the project off. I think this was a simplification too far. So now it's back.

The core of my mode line configuration now looks like this:

(setq mood-line-format
      (mood-line-defformat
       :left
       ((or
         (mood-line-segment-buffer-status)
         (propertize
          (mood-line--get-glyph :buffer-modified)
          'face 'my/mood-line-good-status))
        " "
        (mood-line-segment-buffer-name)
        (my/mood-line-segment-project)
        " "
        (mood-line-segment-major-mode))
       :right
       ((my/mood-line-segment-vc)
        " "
        (propertize
         (mood-line-segment-cursor-position)
         'face 'my/mood-line-cursor-position))))

A little busier than it started out, but still pretty clean. I do keep wondering about the cursor position. In most buffers I have line numbers showing to the left anyway, and it's rare (but not unknown) that I need to know what column I'm in. I'm very tempted to remove the cursor position altogether, then the right-hand side would just be the vc information, at which point it might make sense to also move the project name over to the right, given that the project and the repository information generally go hand-in-hand.

I'll stick with this for now, but I can see this happening soon.

Having generated an animation of the development of BlogMore, I thought it might be interesting to visualise the evolution of the repository for this blog. So here it is:

I do like how it's really obvious when I changed from Jekyll to Pelican (a little after 3:11), and again from Pelican to BlogMore (a little after 6:06).

A little animation of the first few months of the work on BlogMore:

The video covers the whole period of building BlogMore, from the start until today. This means that it includes work done using GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini CLI, and Antigravity.

Introduction¶

An occasional collection of things I've recently found on the Internet and added to my bookmarks.

Tutti Space Program¶

Described as "A playful 2D space sandbox with flowing materials, heat, and gravity", it's exactly that. One of those things to mess with in the browser when you're either waiting for a boring meeting, or in a boring meeting, or just have time to kill. Or just because.

The Jqwik Anti-AI Affair¶

The Jqwik author's perspective on their Markdown-based "malware".

Finalist¶

Saw this go past in my Mastodon feed, although I lost track of who mentioned it. This app falls under the heading of "apps I really want to like because it seems to solve a problem I want solved but I don't like how it solves it". Mostly I do like how it solves it, but something is off about it; also it's laggy as hell on my iPhone 16 Pro, for some reason.

As such, I didn't stick with it for long, but I might revisit it at some point to see if the performance improves; hence saving it.

Modus Themes¶

In the past few days I've been toying with changing the look of my Emacs. This is where I landed. The documentation is excellent. I don't know why it took me so long to discover it.

LisaOS Emulator¶

An Apple Lisa. In the browser! I've never used a Lisa. I've never seen one in person. It's sort of wild to me that I now live at a moment in time where we can emulate, right in the browser, machines that date from my younger days.

Vintage Macworld Magazine Library¶

Never read it myself; I'm a late arrival to the world of the Mac (I've been a user just over a decade now). Should be fun reading some of the older copies.

Project Gemini¶

This is a new one on me; I just stumbled on it over the weekend. It is a now well-established protocol for a simple web of documents. I'm very tempted to have a play with this. I'm ever so slightly tempted to see if I can do something with BlogMore, such that I could target this approach in some way too.

Gemcities¶

Free hosting for Gemini-protocol sites.

flounder¶

Free hosting for Gemini-protocol sites.

It's the best part of two years now since I dropped Pinboard in favour of Raindrop. It's also seven years now since I first created a Pinboard account and started collecting possibly-useful bookmarks¹. I've found this process useful, and it continues to be a great way to find and remember things. The way it works these days is:

• Spend most of the week scrolling social networks, Reddit, the Orange Site, etc.
• See something I find interesting.
• Add it to the unsorted collection in Raindrop (mostly via the iOS app)
• Normally once a week fire up Braindrop and filter, edit, describe, and tag the links.

This approach gets used for a few different reasons:

• It lets me collect links I want to refer to in the future.
• It lets me collect links I want to review as a reminder to look at a thing.
• It lets me collect links to posts and articles I want to make a point of reading.

As such, I use it as both a long-term bookmark/information store as well as a read-it-later queue. It works well.

When going through this routine over the weekend, I got to thinking: while I do publish a public list of my bookmarks (complete with RSS feed), it might be interesting to make an occasional post where I list out the links I discovered, which I found interesting and worth hanging on to, and explain what caught my interest. It might also be a worthwhile process to look further through the past seven years of bookmarks and write about some of the older links (or at least use that occasional review to weed out the history).

So, that's the plan. I'm not sure quite how long it will last, but I think it would make for a good occasional series. I was going to call it "This week I found...", but then I realised that that puts pressure on me to make it a weekly thing. Perhaps it should be more like "Recently I found..."; that way it can either be multiple posts in a week, or once every few weeks.