Around a month ago I decided that it would be a good idea to begin to learn and use Vim as my primary text editor. Prior to that I had used Notepad++ on Windows-based machines and either Mousepad or Leafpad on my Linux-based machines.
Vim (pronounced, not surprisingly to rhyme with “him”) is an updated, improved version of a program called Vi (pronounced, somewhat surprisingly as “vee-eye”). Vim stands for Vi-improved.
Vim is a standard offering on linux machines and works in console mode whereas many other text editors such as Leafpad, Gedit, Mousepad etc work only in Linux desktop or windows environments.
Fascinating – that a lady in America in the 1940s, Frances Glessner Lee made dioramas of murder scenes to assist in the training of homicide investigators.
I called it to the local library this afternoon seeking something in particular – not so much a specific book as a type of book. And what may that type of book be? A travel guide. You know, like Rick Steves, Lonely Planet, DK and Michelin (close, but not the restaurant guides).
But why, I don’t hear you ask? Because I need a holiday and I have too much annual leave accumulated (close to 10 weeks now).
I wrote about my history of Linux Distros here. At the time I indicated I was using Ubuntu 16.04 with the Gnome 3 desktop. That was true (and technically is at the moment), but it won’t be for long.
I find frequent issues with my current setup. Nautilus (the file manager) simply refuses to start when I first fire up the machine three times out of four. It will eventually start – perhaps one or two minutes after I need it. I receive regular crash report notifications telling me something hasn’t worked and inviting me to send some information to someone so they can think about fixing it never. I receive crash reports for programs I’m not even running, or need to run. And sometimes (once every five or six boots) my wifi network isn’t found. It hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just that Mr (or Mrs) Ubuntu can’t find it.
[Below is the text of a sermon I preached at our church on Easter morning, 1st April 2018.]
Matthew 27:46
Aramaic – Heart Language
My offering today is half sermon, half reflection. As I pondered and prayed about what to speak about a couple of weeks ago a phrase came to mind. I gave God the opportunity to change His mind but I kept coming back to this particular phrase.
At work we have a website that uses Joomla. The site administrator has left the organisation so the site’s administration is falling to me. I haven’t had much to do with Joomla (or the work website) in the past. I had looked Joomla briefly (along with WordPress, Drupal, Hugo, Grav and Jekyll) last year when considering what sort of engine could best drive the great beast egeiro.net.
As a result, I’ve had to spend time installing/running/checking/modifying/learning Joomla over recent weeks. I’ve loaded it up on several computers locally and accessed it using XAMPP and/or WAMP. These applications run Apache, MySQL and PHP so that web applications can be installed and tested offline.
Last year I posted some brief ponderings about a few different wikis. At the time I was intent on getting to grips with TiddlyWiki. I began doing that and used it within my employment for around 5 or 6 weeks. During that time I migrated my previous notes into TiddlyWiki and began using it to take notes during meetings and to record a range of tasks and activities. Shortly after that, however, I came across what was, for me, was a major hurdle. That hurdle was accessing and updated my wiki whilst I was travelling. Each time I edited and saved the wiki it was another 1+mb of usage on my mobile plan. Even a one-letter change and save would mean the wiki in toto was being resaved to my cloud storage. As a result TiddlyWiki got shelved.