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Trying Out Emacs

Posted on with tag Emacs

Since I started tinkering with computers and with free software in 2019, I’ve been deeply in the vim camp. The majority of my professors and classmates in uni, however, used emacs or some derivative. So, recently I thought I’d give emacs a shot and see if I could recreate my neovim setup, and I have to say that I think my peers were onto something…

I certainly haven’t explored even a fraction of emacs’ features, and obviously emacs is more than just a text editor, but the text editing is amazing and seems more openly configurable than vim. What rocks is that I don’t have to completely abandon the familiarity of vim binds because emacs can run pretty much everything in “evil” mode (and I get to keep the native emacs binds!)

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A Week of Adventures

Posted on with tag Travel

I spent the past two weeks travelling throughout New England: I spent two days in New Hampshire hiking the White Mountains and Flume Gorge, got to spend a day sailing with a friend, and I hit up New Bedford’s whaling museum. Here’s a few photos I took from the trip:

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Quick New York Escapade

Posted on with tag Travel

I hadn’t seen my godson in a hot minute, so we spent a day chilling. Nothin’ crazy, but this dam is nuts — seriously it looks like the Tower of Babel.

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Pilgrimage to St. Dumitru's

Posted on with tags Christianity and Travel
Last updated on

Update: added a few more photos.

A few friends and I just got back from a short pilgrimage to St. Dumitru’s Romanian Orthodox Monastery in Middletown, NY (about two hours from Albany).

This was my first time in a monastery — I really enjoyed it. The church and monastery grounds were beautiful, and the services were prayerful and somber. Although we missed the myrrh-streaming Holy Theotokos Iveron Icon, the analogion it had rested on was thoroughly soaked with extremely fragrant myrrh and we had the blessing of venerating that.

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Physical Media

Posted on with tags Self Hosting, Philosophy, and Art

Owning physical media is more important than ever; moreover, DRM is evil.

If you purchase your movies/music through Amazon, Spotify, SiriusXM, AppleTV, &c. you really only purchase a license for use that can be revoked at any time. This makes your media access fragile: your access to the things you have purchased is one inter-corporation lawsuit away from being revoked.

Whether or not you should be consuming mass-produced, copyrighted media is another question, but purchasing (i.e., legally obtaining) DRM-free versions of your media has never been easier. In fact, buying/ripping CDs or downloading music from Qobuz can be cheaper than a spotify subscription. These days, you can even play Blu-ray discs from the command line. (Generally speaking, you can find most Blu-ray disks on eBay for less than the digital asking prices for the same movies!)

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Bozeman, Montana

Posted on with tags Lifestyle, Photography, and Travel

My family and I flew up to Bozeman for my sister’s graduation last week. I got to spend some time innawoods at our cabin and I also visited the local OCA parish. There’s also a wonderful monastery in Harrison that’s tightly knit with the surrounding parishes, but unfortunately I didn’t get an opportunity to visit.

Given the time of year, the weather was outstanding — it hit 80 degrees despite snowing nearly two weeks ago! We also got to spend some time in yellowstone. It’s always great, but this time I had my iPhone’s 48MP camera with me. The photos are pretty spectacular.

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