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Title: Things Going On
Date: July 02, 2022
Written On: vim on Dell Latitude E6430 (Fedora 36)

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 Well, I'm back on the Dell laptop after my MacBook failed. It's currently in
pieces on my desk, waiting to be repaired, but I've had no desire or energy to
do so lately. So, I got a new SSD, threw it into my Dell laptop, and installed
Fedora onto it once again. It took 18(!) installs before it became stable, and
I'm still paranoid about the thing breaking with an update[0].

 Admittedly, I've gotten back into the swing of using the terminal for nearly
everything again. I mean, my toolkit consists of

* vim [1]
* pass (Password management)
* lynx (WWW, gopher)
* slrn (NNTP)
* mutt (Email)
* newsboat (RSS)
* weechat + bitlbee (IRC, XMPP, Discord)
* gomux (Matrix)
* imgcat (image "viewer")
* cmus + vlc-nc + modplay123 (media, Icecast streaming)
* wordgrinder (Word processing)
* sn (Spreadsheets) [2]
* other small things...

 Honestly, it comes at a great time, since the RSI in my right wrist has been
getting quite bad at times, mostly from mouse use. At least laptops have
trackpads, and I can always get a trackball for my desktop.

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 My stress levels have been getting to me a lot lately, mostly because of all
the things happening on Twitter (in my social circles) leaking out into the
rest of the net. It's hard not to run into someone on Discord or IRC talking
about the latest "Twitter discourse" that seems to start every damned day as
of late, and that was the whole reason I left the hellbird site in the first
place. Too bad newsgroups keep having spam issues, or I'd push for more people
to move back there.[3]

 Admittedly, it's nice when I can just stay off chat, lean back, and work on
something without distractions. The not-real-time nature of email and NNTP for
communication are immensely useful for someone like me now, and when I do go
on chat, I keep myself on "Invisible" for Discord and XMPP, and only barely
pay much attention to IRC. It's something that truly helps my mind clear up
after a while.

 My hobby of retro and historic tech and software has also helped a little in
the stress department. Digging up the source for `sc` and going through it has
been quite fun, and finding NCSA Mosaic source code has made for a really nice
distraction as well. Of course, I'm also trying to learn Perl and C still, so
it helps to go through examples of the past where possible.

 Now I wonder if I can remake textpander [4] with xdialog... Hmm...

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[0]: In fact, while writing this, I checked for updates with `dnf`, and it had
    pipewire and rust listed in there. My first thought was, "Oh gods, not
        again."

[1]: I mean, I still like Emacs and Nano, but VIM has become a bit faster for
    me lately, so I'm using it more.

[2]: Yes, the classic spreadsheet application for Unix. I compiled it myself,
    much like many things on this laptop.

[3]: There's a special place in hell for people who write those spambots.

[4]: https://github.com/leehblue/texpander

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