I don’t need to explain Christmas to anyone, do I? To gain favor among potential converts, Christians adapted an assortment of holidays adjacent to the winter-in-the-Northern-Hemisphere solstice as a raucous festival. When the Industrial Revolution meant that Christmas festivities would put masses of raucous poor people in the same regions as wealthy people, a campaign—including such luminaries as Charles Dickens and Thomas Nast—reinvented Christmas as the quiet family holiday that we know today.

A girl in a red cloak and hat carrying white ice skates over her shoulder in a snowy outdoor area

I happen to like the holiday, though I don’t have much interest in the religious side. I’ve long said that the shortest days (and so the longest nights) on the calendar make ideal excuses for celebration and togetherness, as exemplified by the Iranian Yaldā Night celebrations held on the winter solstice. As such, I don’t consider it a coincidence that so many cultures had and still have comparable holidays within the span of about a week.

Anyway, to those who celebrate, have a wonderful Christmas; to those who don’t, you should also have a pretty great day, if you have that option. Now, I can’t guarantee that my project updates won’t look like proverbial coal in your stocking, but let’s go, anyway…

Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter

For those of you interested in such things, I’ll have the next issue of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter ready to go on Saturday the sixth.

If you have signed up on Mailchimp, I still don’t quite trust the company, then you’ll get the e-mail on Saturday. If you have subscribed on Buy Me a Coffee—at the link in the previous paragraph, click the Follow button to the upper-right of the page; no money will change hands—you’ll get it on Tuesday morning, the ninth of January, because I never publish blog posts on Tuesdays, making that a nicer match than Saturdays.

What will you find inside? As always, you’ll find links to all the articles that I found interesting in my RSS feed or bookmarked, plus some analysis of blog traffic. For December, I haven’t yet written a specific quasi-article quite yet, but I discussed media consumption and have some early stage looks at two upcoming projects. If you’ve become a member on Buy Me a Coffee, then you can already see previews for some of that.

Notoboto

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

Somehow, I managed to not only get some useful and maybe-interesting things done, this week, but I somehow did them all on a single project that I use.

As the week started, I honestly didn’t have high hopes. I fixed some minor cosmetic issues in the code and looked for another idea. Then, however, I realized that I could probably figure out how to apply syntax-highlight to my Markdown notes, displaying and editing them approximately as they would appear rendered in another format.

To experiment, I started with detecting URLs in a note to underline them, using Tk’s tagging system. Once I had that working consistently, that demanded code to open the web page on clicking the link. And once the program had URL-highlighting settled, it came time to highlight Markdown elements. Now, I see URLs underlined, headings in larger text, bold text bolded, italic text italicized, and lists indented, making it far easier to navigate through the notes to find what I want.

Next

I may keep working on Notoboto, now that I have some momentum back. Or maybe I’ll start a new project for the holidays.

Credits: The header image is untitled by an uncredited PxHere photographer, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.