( A guide for English speakers as of May, 2022)

I’m going to assume that this isn’t terrible if you speak a language which doesn’t look anything like English. I’m going to assume that your domain name registrar’s don’t have their heads up their butts.

Over here in the English speaking world they’re too anglocentric to notice anything that goes on in languages that have non-ascii characters. Since you’re reading this, you probably use a lot of software that was written by American companies. This means that even if you do succeed in buying an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) there’s a very good chance that anything you try and stick it in that isn’t a browser will reject it. Especially if you try and use it for email.

The goal of this post is to give you the information you’ll need to start using Mastodon before Twitter becomes even more of a dumpster fire than it currently is. It assumes that you’re familiar with Twitter and that you’d like to see if you can continue your twitter-like postings over on Mastodon.

I’m going to cover the following topics:

• what the deal is with all the different servers / instances
• instances as communities
• moderation
• choosing an instance
• how you use Mastodon
• what’s different

Before that, I’d like to recommend you watch this 6 minute intro to Mastodon. I’ll fill in the details afterwards.

org-roam supports multiple directories and it should work fine if you start that way, but if you’ve already got an org-roam project that you need to split up, it’s a pain in the butt.

Here’s how I managed to divide my org-roam project into multiple directories after much trial and error and googling.

A note before continuing: If you’re googling around for this you’re going to find a bunch of old commands from when people were upgrading from v1 to v2. Many of these won’t work because their names have been changed.

You’ve been lied to about the Newline Character

The humble newline character: \n.

You’ve seen it in countless code examples. Usually something like

foo\n
bar\n
\n

You look at that and probably think, it represents the end of a line. Or maybe you think it represents the start of a line. If you believe either of those things, I’m sorry to inform you that you’re wrong.

Fortunately, by the end of this post you’ll have a much better mental model of \n.

Once upon a time a group of friends gathered at a restaurant. We passed the time trying to devise the worst phonetic alphabet. One that, when heard, would do the best possible job of not successfully conveying the letters you were trying to communicate. This is what we came up with.

A aye
B bdellium (the b is silent)
C cent
D djin
E eye
F fore
G gnu
H heir
I I
J jicama
K know
L like
M mnemosyne
N no
O oops
P psalm
Q quatar (pronounced kutter)
R really
S sea
T two
U umm
V varies
W why
X xenomorph
Y Yes
Z zero

That sounds pretty obvious. It is pretty obvious. Anyone with any familiarity with older humans knows that they generally have trouble reading small text, or making out fine details. Every drug store has a rack of magnifying glasses. Everyone’s seen an older person doing the thing where they lift up their bifocals and start moving a thing closer and farther with their arm trying to find a spot where it both large enough to be readable but far away enough to be in focus. They’re not the only ones who need bigger text, of course, but they are the ones everyone should be familiar with, and likely has in their lives.

[⚠️ This is a blow-by-blow ranty post about what happened when Ubiquity screwed up a software upgrade ⚠️]

This morning has been… a journey.

Our Wifi coverage has been kinda 💩 at the new house because there’s way more space between us and the Access Point.

So, let’s just run some ethernet across the floor for now! Should be quick! 🤦🏻‍♀️

We run it into my wife’s iMac. No problem. All good. Fast fast. Another cable, through her office, past front door, into my office, And…. “wait… wtf do i plug this into?”

The Coin Game is one of the tools I’ve come up with to help myself recognize when I do accomplish something of value. It also helps motivate me to do more.

Boring tasks are hard, especially for ADHD brains. On top of this, when we do actually manage to accomplish something, we don’t give ourselves credit for it. Sometimes it feels like it shouldn’t count because of how long it takes. Sometimes getting it done involved lots of irrelevant tangents, and we “yeah but” all the value away. At the same time, most of us do actually contribute enough value to our employers that they keep us on staff.

(Or, The Value of Working at Lower Levels of Abstraction.)

I’m loving working in Scheme because it forces me to work from First Principles.

There’s a huge value in the convenience functions that most languages wrap around those first principles, but it’s like buying and using a car vs. building the car you’re using.

The latter is more work but you’re going to really understand how that car works and you’re going to have the perfect car for your needs.

Emacs is arguably the most powerful tool available to the modern programmer. Vim’s pretty close. Both require more effort to learn than say Atom or Sublime Text. But, the additional start-up effort pays off quickly.

Like Scheme, they both suck out-of-the-box. Unaltered they’re both horrible bare-bones skeletons of an editor. Their potential is incredible though. If you’re just going to do something quickly, and never spend the time to customize them, they are a terrible choice.