TIL that there is actually no abortion law in Canada, i.e. there's no law which explicitly allows or disallows an abortion. It's treated simply as a medical procedure, like a hip replacement (no law for that either) and is legal in the same sense.

Bookmark of https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/10/reframing-and-simplifying-the-idea-of-how-to-keep-a-zettelkasten/

Fifteen years ago today, I published my first blog post and I wanted to mark the occasion with - you guessed it! - a blog post. I didn't really have a strong sense of what I wanted to say but, anniversaries being a chance to reminisce, I found myself revisiting what I've written over the years.

It's definitely a mixed bag. The tone and content vary quite a bit. For this reason, when people ask me what this blog is "about", I don't usually have a ready answer, and this sometimes catches them off guard because common wisdom states that blogs typically have themes. People will manage a cooking blog, for example, or a programming blog, or a reading blog. Among other things, it's a way to collect followers - people seem to place greater trust in a blog when it focuses on one subject.

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Gorgeous day in Montreal

Tried my hand at buttermilk pie.

Bookmark of https://coredumped.dev/2021/05/26/taking-org-roam-everywhere-with-logseq/

Bookmark of https://www.canadahelps.org/en/donate-to-the-afghanistan-emergency-relief-efforts/

Tried my best. Lunar eclipse.

Ha! https://williamkennedy.ninja/javascript/2022/05/03/in-defence-of-the-single-page-application/

I don't believe I'm a person with seasonal depression or anything but I have to admit that my mood is better with the warm weather.

This is truly fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O28uSZxyEw

TIL that the term "through-composed" refers to a piece of music with no repeated parts (no refrains, etc.)

It always amazes me to think that Prohibition in the U.S. was implemented via a Constitutional amendment, as was its repeal.

In my head I think of a Constitution as a country's legal axioms - the foundation of its law system. From this perspective it makes sense that the prohibition of alcohol, having no Constitutional basis, had to be passed by adding another axiom. And when people realized that this was just a bad idea, it makes sense that getting rid of it required adding yet another axiom. It's funny, when you think about it, like a big legal "oops!" that you can't erase.

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Quite the shit show in the US today

These cuties showed up randomly in my yard

Webmentions are the way people have conversations on the Indieweb, but integrating them - or, indeed, any kind of dynamic content - into a static site can be a little tricky. Luckily, many people have run into this issue before and so there wasn't much for me to do but steal.

To be clear, I'm talking about receiving and displaying webmentions here, not sending them. How I ended up sending them will be a separate topic, as it is tied into how I manage POSSE and backfeeding on my site.

The previous, pelican-based incarnation of my blog used a homegrown system involving a webmention listener that handed off data to a redis server and ultimately resulted in a new webmention being committed to my site's repo, causing the whole thing to be rebuilt. It certainly worked, but it required a fair bit of maintenance. It also failed to take into account certain edge cases that I hadn't previously considered (like a commentator's avatar image going missing).

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Out and about. Griffintown has changed a lot.

Bookmark of https://learntrepreneurs.com/books-reading-better-learning-more/zettelkastens-3-note-taking-levels-help-you-harvest-your-thoughts/

I'm a pretty big fan of TypeScript, probably best described as a statically typed language that transpiles to standard JavaScript. I've written about it before.

People who have worked with me in the past may be surprised at my admiration, given the rancour I occasionally direct at something like the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-to-JavaScript transpiler, which to the casual eye seems to be in a similar vein.

The similarities, however, are superficial; TypeScript and GWT are quite different beasts. Something like GWT is used in web development in order to avoid writing JavaScript. TypeScript, on the other hand, is best viewed as JavaScript extended with an optional static typing system. The optional part is key; in theory, any JavaScript program is also a valid TypeScript program. In other words, TypeScript doesn't try to hide the fact that it's merely an enhanced version of JavaScript.

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Reply to https://boffosocko.com/2022/02/05/zettelkasten-overreach/

I've only started looking into this, but my impression is that a Zettelkastan is both a thing (a big slip box of interconnected notes, either on paper or in digital form) and a methodology (literature notes, fleeting notes, etc).

Something like Roam Research provides the slip box part, and you can therefore use it as a Zettelkastan, but the app also lets you use it as a personal wiki, possibly alongside the Zettelkastan functionality, if one wants to draw a distinction between the two.

I've decided I want to try building up a Zettelkasten (I've settled on org-roam), but I think a personal wiki would be useful too, and I'm unclear if I should be keeping the two things apart.

As a participant in the IndieWeb, I publish my share of likes, replies, reposts, and bookmarks. These posts all have one thing in common - they refer to another, external URL and only make sense in the context of that URL.

This being the case, it's nice to give my readers (and myself) some sense of what I'm referring to when I post that content. The process of scraping metadata from URLs for display purposes is called "URL unfurling" and implementing it efficiently on an Eleventy based website is not entirely trivial, especially when you're trying to save your Netlify build minutes, so it's worth sharing what I've learned.

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I'm not religious, but I occasionally think that for some people, their purpose in life is to be a cautionary tale, and that makes me sad.

Reply to https://social.johanbove.info/2022/03/29/people-drinking-the-vodka-they-already-had

Is this a comment about Russia or a comment about drinking in general?

Bookmark of https://medium.com/@rebeccawilliams9941/the-zettelkasten-method-examples-to-help-you-get-started-8f8a44fa9ae6

Bookmark of https://github.com/james-stoup/emacs-org-mode-tutorial