Dan J’s Website

“The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.”

— W.E.B. Du Bois

(via @patrickrhone)

Setting up Visual Studio Code for F#

• Cool: you can open a Terminal in VSCode with ^ + `
• Do I need to install an extension to use F#? Syntax colouring is built in, looks like
• Let’s try creating an FSX script file
  • Ok, I can do that, it has syntax highlighting …

I always try to do sudo cd /some/restricted/dir and it doesn’t work and I always forget why.

From How to enter a directory with the 'cd' command if it has 700 permission and is not owned by me? - Ask Ubuntu:

sudo cd won't work because the cd …

It gets complicated.

I wanted to read some Hellboy comics, after watching the first movie last year¹.

So, the other day, I got myself some comics and tore through the first half of the main Hellboy set of stories. I usually like reading my comics in print, in trade …

I want to switch away from CloudApp to a host/domain under my control, and DropShare looks like a great alternative, because it lets you pick a back-end.

They have instructions for setting up SCP/SSH using your own server via nginx on DigitalOcean. I’ve already got danj.ca …

Well, half a day, really.

[Yesterday, I wrote][1] about how I took a week off of wearing my Apple Watch, to see what it would be like to pry myself away from the technology that rules my life. While I was writing that, I had the idea to toss …

After closing my rings every day for over 200 days, I stuck my Apple Watch in a drawer for a week, to see if I'd be happier without it running my life.

I've been wearing it again for a few days now, and... I think I'm keeping it.

It's occurred …

In [a similar post][1] a couple months ago, I talked about taking an app I've had for a long time (OmniFocus, in that case) and "doubling down" on it—making it a more regular part of my daily life.

It occurred to me today that Instapaper is another such …

I've been wanting to take up gardening for a long time—in particular, growing some of the veggies I use in my everyday cooking. This is both a health thing, a sustainability thing... and just a nerd thing. There's a lot about the idea of growing crops that appeals to …

Patrick Rhone shared a link to his /reading page, where he posts short notes on all the books he reads. I saw this page, and immediately thought two things:

1. I love that! I should have a /reading page on my site
2. …It’s too bad the hyperlinks he provides to …

I love both of these, but I was particularly drawn by the one about anxiety, that being one of my things.

Anaïs Nin on Love, Hand-Lettered by Debbie Millman – Brain Pickings

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might. When a drowning …

OmniFocus is one of these accessories for my 'aspirational' life. You know, I want to be this disciplined, highly-organized and productive person, and this tool should help me do that.

But really, I've owned a license to this app on both the Mac and iOS for years, and never really …

I've had a tab for this 2014 Ars Technica article open for ages, let me collect the series here:

1. How to run your own e-mail server with your own domain, part 1
2. Taking e-mail back, part 2: Arming your server with Postfix and Dovecot
3. Taking e-mail back, part 3: Fortifying …

You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.

-- Tim Ferriss, Tribe of Mentors

There's no good reason I should build my own site generator, instead of just using Jekyll (as I am at the time of writing this post.)

No good reason, other than I want to, other than I miss software development and, more specifically, have never really done a big software …

Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - Alexey Guzey

Dang, I was quite compelled by Walker's various podcast appearances. You just can't trust anyone these days. 😏

Well. The fact is, science is hard, uncertainty is the only thing that's certain... and you have to be …

Memory matters.

We need to know what we were, where we came from, to know who we are, where we're going.

This is true of the individual as well as the society, the species.

It's a powerful thing to crack open your journal from five years ago and be reminded …

Medium is bad for the web. It’s just one more silo that people pour their creative work into, because it promises convenience and reach. And then it looks like your work is on the internet, but it isn’t, really.

And Medium is arguably more sinister than e.g …

It's possible I'll regret using this title to make a pun about the degree symbol (°), instead of saving it for a pun about the weather, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I noticed, when copying [a bunch of temperatures][1] from a website into a CSV file into a Markdown table, that …

Align SVG Icons to Text and Say Goodbye to Font Icons

I used this article to properly position the little Micro.blog logo next to the Status Feed link in this site's navigation bar. Useful!