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Practicalli working

Much cooler week and my ankle is feeling sore, so more focus on work this week.

Aims:

  • update Practicalli Clojure hot loading examples
  • continue eval of shuttle and rust experiments
  • new cleats for the black & red Lake shoes

Getting hot

The United Kingdom is heading for another heatwave.

Continuing to train for a cycling trip at the end of the month. Lots of Yoga and a long ride at the weekend. Finding some interesting routes for training.

GitHub sent an email about charging the Practicalli Org. Investigation revealed a change in that GitHub started to meter usage of user accounts and Organisations since March/April 2025.

I am starting to collect my thoughts about AI (and dig up information about software agents I researched back in 1997). An interesting aspect of AI is the relationship that people are building with AI, both positive and in some cases a little disturbing.

Listening to "Welcome to the Pleasuredome" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, specifically the anti-war song Two Tribes, reminded me of the early 1980's and the deep concern about nuclear war, which seems to be an increasing risk at the present time.

The toppling of US-aligned governments in Iran and Nicaragua and the Soviet-Afghan war drove a significant increase of tension in the cold war, as make prevalent in the UK by the government's protect and survive public information campaign.

I remember watching the file Threads, an apocalyptic nuclear war drama which they actually showed us as school. The family in the film was very similar to my own when they were younger, so it did have a significant impact. After watching the film I realised how ineffectually the protect and survive information was.

The current near term risk to nuclear war being the violence over the continued land grab in the middle east, driven and masked by fear and hatred that has been there longer than everyone currently alive today. All this propped up with certain people using the politics of popularism to their own financial advantage.

The longer term risk of nuclear war of course being countries fighting over ever dwindling resources, e.g. food and clean water & air, due to disastrous changes to the climate of planet Earth driven by unsustainable human activities.

The 1980's had many songs that covered the darker part of humanity, often in a subtle way that people listening to the songs didn't realise (or want to realise). Here are a few examples I remembered:

  • Luka by Suzanne Vega was quite a harrowing picture of child abuse and how
  • Every breath you take by The Police which is often though of as a love song and was in part about stalking and part authoritarian 'Big Brother' control of the people
  • Russians by Sting was a commentary on the dangers of the 'Mutually Assured Destruction' doctrine pushed by the governments of the USA and Soviet Union. The song also inspired in part the nuclear war story of the Terminator movies.
  • Everybody wants to run the world decries peoples desire for control and power, often at the expense of others. The song originally titled 'Everybody wants to go to war' so reflecting aspects of the cold-war. The song also hints at humanities lack of respect for the environment.
  • In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins venting the frustration, anger and despair that so often accompanies divorce. A very poignant song personally as my parents had a very tumultuous divorce at that time that greatly affected me for many years.

Passwords Fixes Maintenance and Tools

I had an interview for a new role last week and it seems a very interesting company. The seem very organised and clear in their communication and I am on to the next step 😺

Putting the finishing touches to the Debian Linux install on the Lenovo Extreme laptop. Reviewed the Debian Linux mirrors work as its been a while. deb.debian.org contains the SRV records in DNS that manages the routing to the most appropriate package archive, so I dont need to do anything to have the best mirror.

I found a solution to GTK4 apps not using the dark theme in i3 (Regoligth), so the world is a happy place again 🙄

Testing out 1Password password manager as a replacement for NordPass which was used for the last couple of years. :crossed_fingers:

Update: 1Password is so much nicer experience getting setup so I will definitely switch. An interesting thing I saw when signing up for an account was that 1Password first did a credit card check by trying to take 1 USD from my account. As the account was empty then my bank refused the withdrawal. So 1Password asked for $0 dollars instead, which my bank app prompted me to accept. I have 7 days trial to change my mind before they take the annual payment (32 Euros).

Started the Practicalli Rust book although this is only the structure of the book and the CI publishing workflow for the moment. It does provide a central place to capture all my experiences with Rust and hopefully it will become useful to others in the near future.

TV & Movies this week:

  • Evil Dead III - Army of Darkness: my favorite movie of the series, I've watched this dozens of times and always enjoy.
  • Paradise - an interesting show with good characters
  • Rich and Morty season 8 on Channel 4: first two episodes have been very enjoyable.

johnny turbo

Started the week with a much stronger ride than I have been able to do this year. I had the energy and motivation to push myself, especially on ascents.

Finally finished backing up the Lenovo Extreme laptop. Tried out Garuda Linux Hyprland version which was nicely organised with lots of neat desktop tools.

Installed Debian Linux as Garuda Linux had issues installing on the Software RAID partitions that the laptop had (two 512 GB drives in RAID 0). I recreated the Software RAID with the Debian installer anyway, so maybe Garuda Linux would install on the recreated array. I am not ready to switch to Wayland yet as there are a few key applications that are not yet supported.

Organising Practicalli boards

The week started with a Bank Holiday Monday and I was still sleepy after the 100km ride on Sunday. As I was too low on energy for Practialli work, I did lots of chores instead. I had more energy later in the week.

I received a puncture on the Sunday ride which was the first in about 5 years. It was relatively quick to change even though it was rear tire. I brought the punctured inner tube back home and repaired it with a patch along with some other cycle maintenance.

A search showed me how to correctly create Markdown comments which are supported by todo comments. The todo comments help me track work that needs to be done within markdown files.

Started watching Star Wars The Bad Bad animated series from scratch as I hadn't seen it for a while and I hadn't seen season 3 at all yet. Season 3 is the final one for this show. I really like this show as it has some interesting characters and stories. The storyline starts where Star Wars The Clone Wars animated series finishes, from the issue of Oder 66 that brings the Jedi order to an end.

My Bose Quiet Comfort earbuds died last week. The left earbud is now flashing red and white which means it cant connect the right eadbud (the main controller). I've tried rebooting it several times but without success.

Bose support will offer me a small discount (189.99 instead of 219.99 on Amazon) on the Bose Quiet Elite earbuds if I send my faulty earbuds back. However this apparently takes about a month to confirm I've sent the faulty earbuds back before Bose would send the new earbuds. Not a nice experience having to wait that long.

I do have some smaller Bose earbuds that work pretty well. I may shop around and probably try the Sony earbuds next time to see if they last longer.

Clojure REPL IntelliJ plugin & LazyVim Config for Neovim

Very tired this week, probably from all the exercise in the last two weeks catching up to me. After taking it easy and catching up with various Star Wars series I started to have a lot more energy by the weekend.

LazyVim is another community configuration for Neovim, its quite nice out of the box and has a 'Clojure extras' with Conjure support.

Looking for an icon to represent a project maintainer, I browsed through the GitHub Octodex that contains a wide variety of Octocat design images.

Backing up the last couple of projects on the Lenovo Extreme and will give ... a quick try before installing Debian Linux.

IntelliJ IDEA editor hasnt been on my radar for a long time until a friend reached out via Clojurians slack about the Clojure REPL and Clojure LSP plugins for Intellij. These open source plugins are a very interesting alternative to the commercial Cursive plugin. I took IntelliJ and these new plugins for a quick test run and liked the results.

Its self-assessment time and hopefully I can get a little tax back from the UK government, expecially as I did a nice pension contribution and didnt work a full tax year.

My local Co-op has been very short of supplies for the last few of weeks, something I havent seen since the UK left the European Union. Reading the result of the Co-op annual general meeting there was a link to 🌐 message from the CEO about a Cyber Incident.

It seems the Co-op systems were hacked and deliveries to Co-op stores were greatly affected, so there were very few products on the shelves. Deliveries have apparently resumed now, although I have enjoyed walking down to Waitrose instead.

I did another order for organic hemp seeds, walnuts, peauts, jumbo oats and dried apricots from 🌐 Forest Whole Foods.

Volunteering at Devoxx

Updated the command line prompt to ⚓ Starship.rs due to an ⚓ issue with Powerline10k.

Starship works very well and is fairly simple to configure using a ~/.config/starship.toml file. There is a 🌐 Catppuccin Powerline Preset (theme) that was customised to move some information onto the right-hand side of the prompt and tweaked some of the default Catppuccin Mocha colors.

Practicalli Customisation of catppuccin-powerline preset

MkDocs is used for all Practicalli websites and something has changed so that ⚓ running a local website fails to build. This does make using MkDocs a little more fiddly to use. If I dont use embedded files in a code block then everything seems okay again.

This week I have been volunteering at ⚓ Devoxx UK in London. Tuesday was setting up activates for the event, such as building video game cabinets. Wednesday and Thursday was room monitor, ensuring the speakers and attendees are taken care of. The room monitor also captures feedback about the event back to the conference organisers (so they can continue optimising the conference for next year).

Preparing Neovim Config release

Preparing the first major release of Practicalli nvim-astro5

Submitted 4 pull requests to Astrocommunity last week, to support the new config and keep it nice and light.

Received a request to add Babashka file support to Practicalli nvim-astro5

For some user acceptance testing work I did a few weeks ago, I received a nice sized Amazon gift card. To give me more ways to keep healthy, I spent some of the money on parts and upgrades to my Brompton folding bike.

Older and wiser

After last weeks experiments with Neovim 0.11 and AstroNvim version 5, it was time to put together the new nvim-astro5 configuration. The AstroNvim 5 based config is even simpler with fewer lines of code than current AstroNvim 4 config.

AstroNvim has replaced many plugins with Snacks and it feels even more responsive to use and more visually appealing. I've also updated the theme to Catppuccin (Cat Pussin') for Neovim and Kitty terminal app for a nice consistency.

There will be some significant changes to add to the Practicalli Neovim book as the content migrates to use Practicalli nvim-astro5 configuration. So as to not disrupt users of Practicalli Astro (based on AstroNvim 4) I will use a separate git branch and publish initially to Practicalli Neovim Staging site.

Once the Practicalli nvim-astro5 configuration is feature compatible and has proven itself stable, I will push all the updates to Practicalli Neovim

Firstly, I had to create a staging website and workflow to publish from a seperate branch (or a pull request) for a book created with Material for MkDocs. A staging site was used for the Practicalli blog generated by Cryogen and pushed to a separate repository (GitHub Org token added for accessing a different repository).

TODO: Relesed Practicalli nvim-astro5

DOING: are there meaningful icon for linking to GitHub issues, pull requests and and projects? Other than the generic GitHub icon

Material for MkDocs Icons & Emoji page has a search across all icons and emojis available. Potential icons include:

  • - Octicons issue open
  • - Octicons issue closed
  • 🎫 - a ticket
  • 🎟 - tickets (like ticket but red)
  • - a project board

Updating to Neovim 0.11 on Arch Linux was unexpectedly challenging and was an opportunity to look into package mirrors. It seems some mirrors are not updating as regularly as they could. Further investigation into the best mirrors to use for my geographical region seems valuable.

Contributions: