Today marks Batik Day, celebrating the recognition of the traditional Indonesian dyed fabric as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. And I can tell you, as someone who went through a phase of gift-giving that focused on artisanal—and I hoped ethical—products from the Global South, it does look fairly nice.

A craftsperson dying batik

And more material to the blog—I apologize for that one, but couldn’t resist—on to the projects…

Notoboto

GitHub - jcolag/NotobotoAnother attempt at a lightweight note-taking application - jcolag/Notoboto

I didn’t get to do as much, here, as I had hoped.

That said, because I often find myself opening the program shortly before my laptop cuts over to dark mode for the evening, the program now has an option to start it in dark (or light) mode explicitly, even if that contradicts the current system theme.

At some point, I should dig around to figure out if Tcl programmers have a more standard way of handling arguments, but this seems like it’ll do, for now.

Entropy Arbitrage

GitHub - jcolag/entropy-arbitrage-codeThe Jekyll blog for https://john.colagioia.net/blog - jcolag/entropy-arbitrage-code

I finally cleaned up some minor issues with the blog’s code, none of them show-stoppers, but some mildly irritating to me.

You’ll find some added emoji names. I discovered that neither the egg emoji 🥚 nor the rock emoji 🪨 have unique names. And due to the way that I built the emoji plugin, every time I build the blog, you might get the hatching chick or the fried egg for one 🍳, and finger-horns, a rock climber, or a moai statue for the other 🪨.

Speaking of emoji, it appears that I have spent all of 2023 to date not realizing that Unicode has a 🦣 mastodon emoji, instead using the 🐘 elephant to mark the social media roundup posts.

If you’ve ever heard me complain about—or have, yourself, complained about—Alex providing you with writing advice like referring to people as “it” or suggesting that nationalities qualify as profanity, then you might appreciate that I finally learned how to configure the tool. Mind you, they don’t document it well, so I needed to read through some of the code to figure it out, but if you look at the .alexrc file, you can see how to turn off the he/she, her/him, and his/hers warnings, and only reserve profanity flags for words that don’t come up frequently in polite conversation.

And I cleaned up a couple of the maintenance scripts.

Library Updates

I didn’t want the update backlog to fill up again, so I bumped the library versions for Bicker, Fýlakas Onomáton, Renew DB, and Slackup.

Next

I’d like to wrap up Notoboto, so that I can see about adding new features, but I could also get distracted again.

Credits: The header image is (part of) Women Making Batik, Ketelan crop by Stephen Kennedy, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.