Pop!_OS redux 🔗
I set up a Linux PC over the weekend, and I’m going to give Pop!_OS a try on it. I want to be able to use this machine for work sometimes, and there are a few desktop-y things that work better under Pop! than they do Fedora, maybe owing to Pop! remaining on xorg. Screen sharing in Zoom, for instance, works like you’d expect on xorg and does not under Wayland. Apps with taskbar icons also work without the need for an extension.
You can tell Pop! is a little behind Fedora 39, but I’m not sure it’s that big a deal. I found a PPA for Emacs 29.1, but don’t worry about much else: The stuff that moves with any speed is coming from a Flatpak. My ~/bin, ~/.fonts, and ~/.config/doom are all handled via SyncThing.
What else?
- I noticed that my Elgato CamLink 4k + FujiFilm X-T2 work with a little less lag. I think there still is some, but it’s pretty smooth.
- shairplay-sync has some permissions issues as a service, but works fine when I start it in daemon mode, so I’ve moved my bookshelf speakers over to this machine: It acts like an AirPlay 2 endpoint for all my other stuff, and I can use Cider to get at my Apple Music stuff when I’m working on this machine.
- There’s less font weirdness than under Fedora, meaning most apps show most fonts at a normal size out of the box and don’t require passing environmental variables along or messing with config files.
- My Jabra Engage 75 works fine with this thing, so no more messing around with AirPods: I just plugged it into an open port and I’m back to reliable audio.
- The rbenv and ruby-build that ship with Jammy don’t have any of Ruby 3.x available. I just installed that on my own and added ruby-build as a plugin. Problem solved.
Otherwise … I got through a day with it and it worked great: No weird glitches, crashes, or whatever. Multiple Zoom calls. Oh, and I’m down to my last possum sticker, but the wireless scanning stuff works great, too: I managed to get a hi-res scan of my last sticker so I can make more.
Bad company 🔗
I like company-mode in Emacs when I’m coding, I hate it when I’m writing prose. It slows everything down to suggest words I do not need suggested. This incantation fixed it:
(setq company-global-modes '(not text-mode markdown-mode org-mode))
Don’t spin me 🔗
I enjoyed the most recent episode of Bad Faith, “Vibecession?”, partly for the analysis and partly because one of the guests got to the thing that has been bothering me the most about the discourse around the economy:
“… as to why people are so heated in the first place I think you have a few things going on. One you do have people who are just kind of concerned about Biden’s electoral prospects they’re worried about Trump and they’re worried about […] a negative narrative.
“You’ve always got people out there who although they […] appear to be kind of making objective arguments about this or that topic they’re really mostly worried about trying to kind of steer the discourse in one way or another to to be more favorable to Democrats or less favorable to Democrats or whatever so there’s that aspect […] of the election worrying …”
I posted about it a few days ago:
… and then:
… and then I favorably boosted this:
… because if there’s one word I have worn some grooves into over the past four years, it is “precarity.”
I don’t know. We can either speak truthfully or we cannot, and I am not responding well to progressives or leftists or whatever who do not want to speak truthfully because they believe that are actually unpaid press secretaries for the Biden administration.
I’m not telling anyone what to do with their spare time, I’m just saying that if you’re talking to me, leave me out of the four-dimensional chess game. I show up every election and vote exactly as you’d expect. It is okay if, in December of the year before an election, I say “I wish we had a better alternative than Biden.” And it is super okay if I say, “you know what, I wish we had a better alternative than this entire way of being we’ve landed on.”
A Disturbance in The Force 🔗
A Disturbance in the Force is a documentary about the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.
Al and I went to see it at the Hollywood Theater several years ago. I managed to win a cool Boba Fett poster (the cartoon version, from the special). It truly is wretched, but the documentary does a nice job of explaining that actually everything in 1978 was at least a little wretched, including the entire variety show genre.
And it does a nice job of explaining why the silly thing even mattered to anyone.
I had just turned nine when Star Wars came out. My family went to the theater to see a 6 p.m. showing on opening weekend in 1977, and ended up waiting around for a special 10 p.m. showing the theater added. It stayed in that theater for the better part of a year, and it became a way to just get me out of the house: Mom would give me ticket money, I’d walk across the field and hop a ditch to get into the loading dock area of the mall, then walk around to the theater. When we visited relatives that year, “what would Mike like to do” was always “go see Star Wars.”
I was completely saturated in anything Star Wars I could get my hands on. Magazines, copies of People featuring any of the cast, the novelization, the comic books, aaaaanything. So the Holiday Special was a huge deal because it was gonna be more actual Star Wars and not just stuff about Star Wars.
And, as someone points out in the documentary, Star Wars was a very wild property at that point. Like, there were hints of deep lore and all, but the only “canon” you had to work with was the movie itself and wild theorizing. Some heretics thought Darth Vader was actually a robot. There were rumors that there would be a whole movie about Wookies. It was just this crazy thing that had landed in our pop culture lives and nothing was ever going to be the same again. So we were ripe for whatever George Lucas wanted to churn off the assembly line, including, apparently, a superannuated Wookie grandfather perving out to VR porn with Dianne Carroll.
Anyhow, the documentary is a fun 90-minute diversion. Not super heavy, but cool to hear from people who actually worked on it, and fun to see a lot of period clips, like the bonkers Donnie and Marie episode with Kris Kristofferson Han Solo and Paul Lynde Imperial officer.
Hugo Previews in Emacs 🔗
I made this function to spin up the Hugo preview server while still working in Emacs:
(defun my-start-hugo-server ()
"Run Hugo server with live reloading."
(interactive)
(let* ((root (projectile-project-root))
(default-directory root))
(compile "hugo server -D --navigateToChanged" t)))
(defun my-stop-hugo-server ()
"Stop Hugo server."
(interactive)
(kill-compilation))
(map! :leader
(:prefix ("H" . "Hugo")
:desc "Start Hugo Server" "S" #'my-start-hugo-server
:desc "Stop Hugo Server" "s" #'my-stop-hugo-server))