I'm using Vim, btw...
I recently switched from Zed to Neovim as my editor of choice. It made coding fun again! Here’s how I did it and what I learned.
Preparation
I did vimtutor in vim to get started.
It teaches movements and basic editing commands.
The format is genius in its simplicity: It’s just
a text file opened with Vim, with instructions and examples,
where you can try what you just learned.
After completing vimtutor, I wanted to try it on a real workload. I had recently switched from VSCode to Zed with VSCode keybindings. Luckily, Zed has a good Vim mode.
Language Learning - Phrases
I’ve had the pleasure to pick up French (for work) and more recently Spanish (for love). For me, both of these two adventures have been a great success. The other day, friends asked me for tips to learn some Spanish before a journey to Central America. Let me share with you what I told them:
The single unit of information is a phrase.
Let’s unpack this.
About words
In the beginning, I thought that the single unit of information in languages is a word. At school, we had to learn lists of word-to-word correspondences (“vocabulary lists”). You can buy dictionaries, that also translate word-by-word.
Ciao Google Drive
How do you store your cloud files? I did it on Google Drive. And to be honest, Drive works well. I already had a Google account, it’s easy to use, it comes with 15 Gb of free storage.
But, as always, if you’re not paying, you’re the product. Google can access my personal files and they’re doing it. For example for their AI features.
If you’re like me, you don’t want some random AI to access your data. Even more so since I didn’t ask for it. It’s time to abandon ship and find a better harbor for my files.
Day 24 - Water
Do you want to know what’s crazier than writing 24 articles about making coffee? You’re right, writing 25 of them. Welcome back. Today we’re looking at the influence of the water used to brew coffee on its taste. Coffee is mostly water, so it makes sense to consider it as a variable.
Primer: I hate this idea
Buying water for daily consumption in plastic bottles while perfectly fine water is delivered to your house via a huge system of pipes is an environmental crime in my opinion. (I know, I’m privileged in Europe) It doesn’t help either that many companies selling water have a track record of crimes against humanity that is just staggering.
Why I Don't Use PGP / GPG
I’ve evaluated PGP/GPG for my personal use and I’ve decided to avoid it completely. I’m sharing my reasoning in this blog post.
Best practice
I dove into this subject believing that PGP was best practice. It is prominent in the Codeberg / GitHub interfaces. Every email client supports it. Security focused organisations put their PGP keys close to their email addresses on their websites.
It’s easy to believe that PGP is still a good thing. But, as always with cryptography, things are complicated.
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