I just spent a couple of weeks on-and-off writing some Lisp. I'm probably going to take a break from this for a bit to focus elsewhere; these are some of my thoughts as a relative beginner while they're still fresh in my mind. There are going to be some inaccuracies here, reader beware etc.

For reasons, I wanted to try creating a Cocoa window from Lisp. The ridiculously easy way to do this is to just use LispWorks; I installed the LispWorks Personal Edition to try this out. But then of course we want to talk to LispWorks using Emacs sly-mode, and it's not exactly documented anywhere how to do this for the Personal Edition. So here's how to do it.

I run Doom Emacs with ultra-scroll to allow me to smoothly scroll using my trackpad. There's just one problem: occasionally the entire display will freeze for a fraction of a second while I'm scrolling, rather breaking the spell of having a responsive system.

Here is a brief guide to adding a wgpu-rendered underlay to an Electron window on macOS. Doing this isn't particularly difficult once you know how, but I couldn't find this information anywhere else. So here's the guide that I wish had existed before I went down this path!

How to regain access to an Anpviz IP camera after you've set a long password and discovered that you can no longer login.

I use VSCode as my main code editor and emacs for everything else. When in VSCode, I use control-tab to switch between recent buffers. In Emacs, this key binding doesn't work (by default, it toggles visibility of the tab bar), causing me endless minor frustrations. This post documents how I brought the VSCode control-tab behavior to Emacs.

2024-03-29 update: As of 23.09.1-RELEASE, the underlying issue appears to be fixed.

After a power-failure, my pfSense router (running 23.05.1-RELEASE) often fails to route packets over its single Starlink WAN connection. This is tedious because (i) power failures are relatively common around here, and (ii) the pfSense router is somewhat inaccessible. Wouldn't it be nice if everything "just worked" when the power came back on?

Although I've written many informal specifications of software as part of my employments, I haven't ever written any formal specifications (and for good reason: in most domains, the return-on-investment likely isn't there). I like to pretend to myself that given enough time, I probably could write a formal specification, but what's it like to actually do this?