It has been awhile since I have written a tutorial. I have spent 2-3 hours
working on this post, but I think I need to spend another 2-3 hours before I
publish it.
I expect to be able to write these posts faster as I practice.
I would like to create a few resources that I can reuse in each article for
things like:
- "Let's Learn Nix" reproducibility: Where I list all of the tutorials'
dependencies: nix version, <nixpkgs> version, OS type and version, etc.
- Haskell type signature convention for Nix
- Ad hoc vs. declarative configuration for Nix
- Troubleshooting Nix: <nixpkgs> search, nix repl, searching the Nix codebase
- caffeine.md: an explanation of my theory that caffeine antagonizes
mindfulness.
- nix-and-hugo.md: a short tutorial explaining how I use Nix, the package
manager and Hugo, the static site generator, to host my blog.
- self-hosting.md: explain how I installed NixOS on my used Acer laptop.
I'm adding Google Ads to my blog to:
- learn more about Google AdSense
- attempt to offset the my advertising costs for learn.wpcarro.dev
I may need to surround the <script></script> tags with markup to positions the
ads optimally. I will publish this first, see what it looks like without any
markup, and then progress.
My Emacs automatically trims trailing whitespace when I save a buffer. As a
result, this diff appears whenever I edit the baseof.html file. Instead of
continuing to ignore the diff, I'm committing it.
Started working on my debut blog post about giving up my cell phone during
march.
I'd like to publish this post by the end of the month, once I conclude the
experiment. At that time, I'd like to change the voice of some the content to be
past test. For now, I'm dumping ideas here while they're fresh in my mind. I
will refine and prune the final post later.
To create new posts, I run...
```shell
hugo new name-of-post.md
```
While writing posts, I run...
```shell
hugo serve -D
```
I need hugo available on PATH environment variable, which lorri provides.
Instead of creating my own static website generator, I'm trying Hugo. Huge is a
newer alternative to Jekyll. So far, I like what I see.
- Ignoring /blog/public since this is where `huge -D` generates the static
assets.
- Using a TailwindCSS theme.
- Creating a dumby post about Emacs to test deployments.
- Deleting all Common Lisp and Nix code that powered my previous, half-baked
blog.
I'm not sure if this commit breaks everything in my monorepo. I think it
will.
Why am I doing this? Perhaps it's a bad idea. I don't fully understand how
readTree works. My ignorance is costing me hours of time spent debugging. In an
effort to better understand readTree, I'm removing the default values for my Nix
expression parameters, which I believe have preventing errors from surfacing.
Renaming my mono-repo briefcase.
I first introduced this commit in master, but it introduced a bug where one of
two things would happen:
1. Emacs wouldn't start and would crash X.
2. Emacs would start but my keyboard wouldn't work.
I learned some valuable debugging skills in the process. Here are some of them:
When my keyboard was broken, I wanted to control my computer using my
laptop. Thankfully this is possible by using `x2x`, which forward X events from
the SSH client to the SSH host.
```shell
> # I'm unsure if this is the *exact* command
> ssh -X desktop x2x -west :0.0
```
Git commit-local bisecting. I didn't need to do a `git bisect` because I knew
which commit introduced the bug; it was HEAD, master. But -- as you can see from
the size of this commit -- there are many changes involved. I wanted to binary
search through the changes, so I did the following workflow using `magit`:
- git reset --soft HEAD^
- git stash 1/2 of the files changed
- re-run `nix-env -f ~/briefcase/emacs -i`
- restart X session
- If the problem persists, the bug exists in the non-stashed files. Repeat the
process until you find the bug.
In my case, the bug was pretty benign. Calling `(exwm/switch "Dotfiles")` at the
bottom of `window-manager.el` was failing because "Dotfiles" is the name of a
non-existent workspace; it should've been `(exwm/switch "Briefcase")`.
There may have been more problems. I changed a few other things along the way,
including exposing the env vars BRIEFCASE to `wpcarros-emacs` inside of
`emacs/default.nix`.
The important part is that this was a valuable learning opportunity, and I'm
glad that I'm walking away from the two days of "lost productivity" feeling
actually productive.
Manually merging:
- README.md: I added the description from universe/README.md into the heading of
dotfiles/README.md.
- .envrc: dotfiles/.envrc was a superset of universe/.envrc
- .gitignore: Adding some of the ignored patterns from universe/.gitignore to
dotfiles/.gitignore
Everything else here should be a simple rename.
