Painless External References from Org Roam

Web Surf with Purpose A very simple setup to get going and I have now a pretty robust way to ramble on and reference sites and pages and papers external to content within Emacs. There are a few pieces connected around to make it work but I'm surprised it was as easy as it was. Roam There is something particually interesting about this way of orgnaizing random files across directories and the like. I talked about this in a post earlier a bit, but it makes more sense with these next features I've added in. ...

21 March 2026 · liam

Trying out Org Roam

Org-Roam Experience This is a feature I've seen a lot of screenshots of mainly due to the fact it has the cool graphical interpretation of whatever it is you're writing and how it's connected to everything else you've written. I'm not much of a note taker. Never have been and probably never will be. But I think this is maybe where the joke comes from where people say "you start off by bending Emacs to your workflow, but soon it becomes how to make a workflow that fits into Emacs", or something to that effect at least. ...

19 March 2026 · liam

The Debate of the Century: SET vs Push Pull

Intro This is not my work, it’s the introduction to a larger, but not too much larger, paper on the differences in design between Single Ended Triode amps and PushPull amps. I always thought it was funny and I have lost the document once or twice so I wanted to put the initial part here so it’d be easy to find again. Plus I saved the actual file here on the server for you to download if you’d like. ...

10 March 2026 · liam

The Live Blogged Experience of Trying Emacs

How'd We Get Here Emacs oh emacs it has such a reputation. Also it's an interesting one because really I don't think its explained too well. It's so often directly compared to Vim as the other long running option for an extensible text editor but then you open it and it's sorta hard to grasp what is actually goin' on? I've watched enough videos now of people talking about it and I think now I actually sort of get the mindset and idea behind it enough to give it a whirl. ...

10 March 2026 · liam

MangoWC Initial Impressions

MangoWCurious So since I got back on the window manager game I’ve been on Hyprland as it was super easy to install, works pretty much right out of the box, and the pain points of how to get some system things like Wifi and brightness control working are something which I’ve become familiar with. Wayland having a compositor as part of the way it works is sweet because things like blur and animations (gol don’t like these but they’re a good example) work as defined in the Hyprland configuration files as opposed to a separate program running to render those things in X Server. ...

1 March 2026 · liam

Reflection on Vim/GNU/Linux/thinkDesktop After 20 Years

20 Years?! This is bad, it’s actually over 20 years now I think and I’m not even that old actually, 29 at the time of writing this. That’s a long time to have tinkered with Linux. I’ve essentially grown up with it now. These tools and I have come to maturity (or lack there of) together through the years and I think it’s interesting now looking at the state of the actual tools themselves as well as, lets say the ‘community’, around this grouping of utilities we have come to know and love as Linux, or actually GNU/Linux, today. ...

27 February 2026 · liam

Mechanical Keyboards in 2026

Typing Oh yes, I love it, you love it, we all do it, I have been a strong believer in that the things we use every day should be the ones you spend time learning about or looking into quality examples of. The modern world has us typing every day to some degree or another and so it only makes sense that you and I would have different and strong opinions about the tools we use to do said aforementioned typing. Out of all the computer related rabbit holes one can get sucked into, the tool you use to interact with your computer in the first place, the keyboard, seems like the most obvious one for the normal “I don’t care about computers I just use one” crowd to get at least semi interested in. ...

25 February 2026 · liam

Learn About Hi-fi in Showrooms

The Rain is a Vibe Seattle is a strangely in tune with Hifi sort of town actually. It’s not immediatly obvious but once you start looking around with a bit more specificity than “speakers” or “stereo” you slowly find more and more people interested in bispoke and niche Hifi gear. I don’t think there are many other places in the US with such a high density of places where you can go listen to one off speakers/amps and the like! ...

24 February 2026 · liam

Attempting the Switch to Flakes

This why flakes start to shine! Initially I had this section at the end, but in this case putting the conclusion at the beginning here might help motivate someone to try this for themselves. The crux of the situation is that the flake.nix file defines the package versions and ‘channels’ so to speak. It’s like a level higher than the configuration.nix. You import your configuration.nix as a module into the flake. Now you can rebuild –flake and that means 1. you don’t have to switch channels first to get the same options as I have defined and 2. all the versions of stuff are exactly exactly the same, meaning once you switch into what you’ve built it will match the last time the repo was written without any doubt. ...

22 February 2026 · liam

Vim as a Writing Tool

Word Processing? A classic predicament. Using MS Word or Google Docs is painfully slow, requires internet, and all your sensitive information along with your family’s is sent off to American mega corporations. Alas, but what else can one do? I’ve written about this before generally as far as making documents with Vim, here I’m hoping to keep track of the practical tips, tricks, and settings/plugins which add to the experience of using ViM as primarily a writing tool. Generally, at least for me, how typing things out usually goes is: ...

19 February 2026 · liam