Notices by Abhinav 🌏 (abnv@fantastic.earth)

I often read on internet how so and so went out for a #drive to calm down after a stressful event. I, on the other hand, am at my most stressed when I go for a drive. How's driving supposed to be calming‽

I wrote a new #weeknote: https://abhinavsarkar.net/notes/2025-weeknotes-11-30/
This week I deal with cold weather, software upgrades, books and a birthday party.
#blogging #weeknotes

Next #Indieweb Club #Bangalore session is scheduled on this Saturday https://blr.indiewebclub.org/#upcoming-event. Get your tickets now!

This will be a writing focused session. This week we’re talking about digital gardens! Our agenda for the discussions is:

- A rapid fire history of digital gardens, evergreen notes, zettelkasten, and personal knowledge management systems
- How to read a digital garden, and how to write one
- Tradeoffs and constraints (what the format is good for, what it’s bad for)
- The ethos of writing that evolves

As usual, we will end the meetup with a prompt and a writing session. Bring a device you can use to write and post to your blog.

Woah. I'm on Hacker News front page first time in my life! No comments yet though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44767097. #blogging

Finally got around to adding a #LinkBlog page with tags on my website: https://abhinavsarkar.net/linkblog. It comes with a central #feed, and tag-wise feeds as well.

#indieweb #linkblogging

I used #Emacs for a short while a decade ago. I want to get back into using it, but now I'm really intimidated by amount of configuration it needs. Is there an Emacs setup that works similar to other modern #editors with minimal configuration, and looks good? #AskFedi

@samebchase I disagree with you there. I just tried it out. Installed emacs and ran it from a project directory. It showed me some things about itself. Where are my files? Most editors would show you a tree of files by default on start.

I happened to know that I can invoke commands in Emacs with Alt-X, so I presssed that. Searched for "Open file" command ... found nothing. After some typing around, I found the find-file command and used that to open a file. And it opened with almost no editing support. No syntax highlighting, no auto completion. At this point most editors would recommend installing appropriate plugins, and start them with sane defaults to provide good editing support automatically. Emacs does nothing.

Then I went and searched online, and found these configs hundreds of lines long, written in a language I have no idea about. That's when I closed the Emacs window.

Emacs needs better defaults, and more user friendly bundling.

@samebchase I disagree again. I don't want to fight the defaults, I don't want to yak shave my editor, and I definitely don't want to debug my editor config. I just want to edit some files, with basic facilities available in most editors these days.

I don't want to make Emacs my operating system. Just a good basic modern editor would do.

It took me 20 minutes to set up Zed and I have never since changed its config, I don't even think about it. It comes built-in with many useful plugins and they'll never break because they are maintained by the editor developers. Granted that I cannot read emails in Zed or listen to music, but is it too much to ask for a beginner-friendly out-of-the-box experience?

Emacs has so much potential to be the best editor ever, maybe it already is, but the steep starting curve will keep driving newbies away.

To make Americans understand how bad #AirPollution is in India, most of big cities in #India have air quality as bad as #LosAngeles has right now, day-after-day throughout most of the year. I read posts suggesting people to run HEPA air purifiers in and around LA, and here I'm, running three of them 24x7 in my house in #Bangalore, yet suffering from icthy throat and infections many times a year.

There is a visible smog cover in #Bangalore today. The AQI is 153. I woke up with an irritated throat. Seems like I'll have to spend the winter months indoor 😔.

FREE CIGARETTES FOR EVERYONE! #airpollution

After being on #Twitter for 17 years (inactive since 2018), I finally deleted my account today. I found so many interesting people on it and learned so much about the world. It's sad to see it go down like this. #personal

@blinry I have two voices in my head, both of them have my own voice. One of them talks sometimes, mostly to offer insights, counter arguments, advice, or solutions. Other one just keep singing all the time non-stop. Thankfully the songs change every few days.

Here's how you can add #Mastodon comments to the posts on your website: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2023/mastodon-comments
#blog #indieweb #programming

Here's the entire saga of the https://fantastic.earth #Mastodon instance's struggle with disk space, summarized in one image:
#mastoadmin