You’ll probably want to skip ahead if you already know what Mastodon is. Mastodon is a Twitter-like microblogging service. Where it differs from Twitter is that it is a decentralized service, i.e. there is no central place where all toots (the equivalent of tweets) from every user in the Mastodon universe, also known as the Fediverse, live. Instead, your toots live with one instance of Mastodon,...

This is an article is a reflection of my own after reading Tobias Bernard’s “Doing Things That Scale” (see his reflective blog post here), and spending quite some time, usually putting it in the back burner, thinking about his opinion.

Note that I do not claim to be in any authority in “replying” to Tobias’ blog post. And I’ll express that I wholeheartedly agree on his points on the grounds of pushing ethical technology...

Those familiar with this site and myself know of my obsession with dark mode: I have a dark background on my terminal, I install dark usercss for sites I frequent, I make dark-mode-first PDFs, and I configured by PDF viewer to recolor documents to be dark by default. For 2019 to be the year of dark mode, I felt like I was truly blessed by whatever omnipotent deity there is.

With 2019 now in the past, I figured it’s probably a good time to revisit how I’ve did my color scheme swapping. I recognize that it wasn’t a good idea to load all of my styles in one file, have two completely separate files with a lot of similarities, and swap the two “big” files while changing themes. There were two reasons why I employed that decision;

• CSS variables was not widely used at the time; and
• CSS preprocessors do not work very well with CSS variables.

For quite some time now, I have been writing a command-line-based personal task manager, mostly as a hobby project where I plough forward with my learnings about computing, programming, and the science behind them. I have decided to start writing about it, and make it a habit writing down my learnings, my findings, my rationale, my reactions, etc. I think it would make for a good record of what I have done, tried, and experienced.

First to give a brief coverage about the origins of Enpitsu. The name enpitsu is the romanization of the Japanese word 鉛筆(えんぴつ), which means pencil. I figured that I wanted a simple name for the tool, which sort of acts like a trusty pencil used to jot down things to do. I wanted the tool to be simple to use, to understand, and to build.

Foreword

Inspired by this post on Reddit on someone else’s workflow, I decided to kick things up a notch and bring even more of the similar ideas on board. There will be many parts of which may take a lot of effort to emulate, but hopefully this in-depth plunge into my setup can give you ideas on how you can make your own experience of using and writing in LaTeX more enjoyable.

This is not your tutorial to how to use LaTeX. I do not proclaim myself a pro at LaTeX at this point, and so I do not think I am eligible to write a even an introductory passage to using LaTeX. You are free to ask me how to do certain things and I’ll gladly answer them to the best of my abilities or point you to the right resources.

Due to how I use my computer and the nature of my setup, here are some knowledge that I expect the reader to know or be familiar with before delving forward.

• familiarity with the command line (cli) and terminal environment is required; and
• basic familiarity with how LaTeX and TeXLive works;
• basic familiarity with regular expressions (pattern matching and groups);
• already have TeX installed on your system.

Granted, this is a pretty late post for something that I have completed a month ago now, but let’s see what I can cover.

I will be honest and come out saying that the last design was basically not my design at all, but rather a stepping stone for myself to get familiar with the new landscape of web designing and web technologies. It was the standard Bootstrap-y layout/theme, one that has become the de facto standard design of the web, one that has recently become a design chided by those that are familiar as the style of the lazy, or the style of business sites.