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Calendar.org

My Journey with Org Roam Journals It’s a while now that I’m trying to use Org Roam’s journal to track my plans. For each day, I’ll have a separate dated file, which I can open with a quick key combination, and if I need some info from other days, I’ll use my project management tooling like consult-ag to find what I need. This is of course not only for planning. I was using this setup, to also take notes, related to each piece of work, so I could also reflect on them relatively.

From Hackers to PowerPoint Warriors: The Decline of Engineering Culture

Intro Innovation. A word that dominates discussions in the software industry. But today, I want to focus on something different: the human factor. Greed, a Feature of The System A software consultancy charges its client around a million euros to develop the MVP of a project—a web and mobile application consisting of just three components—over a period of six months. The catch? The scope of work is so simple that I estimate it could be completed in just three weeks.

C man pages in NixOS

Well, this one is simple. I was reading Beej’s guide to C programming, and learned it’s possible to read C compiler’s documentation using man pages like: man 3 printf But to my surprise I got: ❯ man 3 printf No manual entry for printf in section 3 And it turned out to enable it, I needed to, add the following packages to my system: glibcInfo # look out for the capital `I` man-pages

Blogging using Emacs Org Roam and Hugo

Situation There are not many software preferences in my list that I can not easily replace with alternatives due to how intuitive they feel. Org and Hugo are definitely among the top items of that list. Well, their integration, even though it has existed for a long time, is not the best out of the box. Also with the advancements of cross-article linking, I really wanted to have it in my new blog, which I’m going to use for daily blogging, and also publishing my long form notes and thoughts.

Fixing high resolution font aliasing for Wayland on NixOS

Problem With the progress on Wayland architecture and the usability of its software ecosystem, I’m adapting it more and more. This is quite easy to achieve these days, specially with NixOS friendliness of Hyprland. However, I had a weird issue with my Framework 13th’s high resolution monitor. The font’s on Chrome based applications were looking pixelated, and specially in high res, it wasn’t just the look of it which wasn’t appealing, but I was losing the readability.

Download Sharepoint and Teams videos

Problem I recently needed to download a Teams meeting’s recording from Sharepoint within my organization, and it wasn’t possible due to my access level. I knew from a while back, that there was an all in one solution called Sharedown which uses Puppeteer to trigger a browser in order to download the media from a Microsoft Team account. However, the related package on Nixpkgs for some reason couldn’t be installed on my system, and I didn’t have time to dig into it.

Calendar.org

Planted March 11, 2025
Categories: Quick Tips
Tags: emacs , org-mode , org-roam

My Journey with Org Roam Journals

It’s a while now that I’m trying to use Org Roam’s journal to track my plans. For each day, I’ll have a separate dated file, which I can open with a quick key combination, and if I need some info from other days, I’ll use my project management tooling like consult-ag to find what I need.

This is of course not only for planning. I was using this setup, to also take notes, related to each piece of work, so I could also reflect on them relatively. But it was starting to feel cluttered, and more complex than I need it to be.

Discovering Calendar.txt

Then I came across calendar.txt. The idea is super simple and brilliant. Every day is a row in a text file, and using some code to indicate different type of activities. It’s mainly optimized to be usable via terminal and so to say, grep-able.

It’s fun, but I’m not very good at remembering acronyms and names, and prefer a more descriptive way. So, I thought how hard it could be to recreate this in Org.

Calendar.org Implementation

So, basically, I need:

* [2025-03-10 Mon]

And then I need to repeat this pattern for some times, let’s say a year, so:

M-x org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift (C-c C-x c)

It’ll ask for a number of clones (I used 365), and a cycle, which I used (+1d), and as easy as that, the template is ready. Yeah, I was blown away when I learned about it. This is how it would look like:

* [2025-03-10 Mon]
** Morning routine
  - [X] Meditation
  - [X] Exercise
  - [ ] Review day's priorities

** Work
  - [X] Team standup meeting
  - [ ] Complete project proposal
  CLOCK: [2025-03-10 Mon 09:30]--[2025-03-10 Mon 11:45] =>  2:15

** Evening
  - [ ] Read chapter of current book

So, how would the usability look like. This is of course not following single line approach, and I can go haywire with it. Screenshot, table, and everything else that I can embed in my org file, I can have here. But I can’t grep it without some solid grep kong-fu.

But do I really need it? There are many tools, to optimize the UX, and the plus side is, when I filter what I’m looking for, I can in-place update it as well. One interesting functionality which I haven’t used much before, is narrowing. I go to the sub-tree I’m working on, clock-in (yeah, fancy time tracking), and then C-x n s to hide everything else, so I only see what I want.

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