Monday, Jul 20, 2026
This is an Emacs carnival post for 2026.
Sometimes it’s the little things that make a substantial cumulative impact on computing satisfaction.
I’ve set up both my terminal emulator and graphical Emacs with added line spacing. Absolute bliss. It’s like a quiet, undisturbed pond at dusk. Less busy, less rough.
Seeing is believing. On the left is with (setq-default line-spacing .15) as found in my configuration.org, the right is the default (nil).
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Sunday, Jul 19, 2026
ChatGPT is full of shit and that’s okay.
I wish I had something profound to say, but it wasn’t a big deal. It did take nine drafts, a hardware failure with multiple SSD swaps, and five thousand words to work out how to say “🤷 no biggie”.
When I began using ChatGPT I recognized it could become unavailable like any other internet service does. Outages happen, corporate priorities transmogrify, enshittification happens.
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Friday, Jul 10, 2026
I am curious how LLM/AI has affected my cognition and behaviors. Many animals learn to adapt pretty quickly; humans are no different. I’m pretty sure there’s going to be some adaptations found in my own behavior. Here’s the pocket notebook for my experiment.
Figure 1: AI Free 72 pocket notebook
In this notebook I’ll write down every question I had for AI, every urge to reach for AI, and whatever else I noticed about myself during these 24 hours.
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Wednesday, Jul 8, 2026
I cloned my Debian 13 libvirt template VM and named the clone “occ”. This’ll be where I run weird OBD-II code without careful analysis.
You see, I decided to pivot away from SocketCAN/raw CAN and toward ELM327-based OBD-II diagnostics. Seems a bit easier to accomplish within the timebox. Besides, this way I can run ELM327-emulator in the VM, and run the DOS QEMU guest nested within the same VM. Keeps life simple.
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Tuesday, Jul 7, 2026
The Old Computer Challenge started last Sunday. Have been real busy so all I’ve done so far is brainstorming ideas and research. If I had infinite time, I’d consider OpenVMS + CAN bus silliness. CAN bus, a.k.a. controller area network, is used to interconnect bits and pieces of car electronics. (Imagine plugging OpenVMS into your car for diagnostics!) Buuuut, OpenVMS has been hamstrung by HP corporate overlords’ action against the HP hobbyist community.
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Saturday, Jul 4, 2026
By a guest automaton. Written by ChatGPT in a mock-medieval style.
FYI: Every post on blog.winny.tech which has AI content carries a madewithai tag.
Read on: Racket Yet Vexes Me Long ago, Winston wrote that Racket frustrated him. Years passed. The code slept. The ache endured.
A small pull request came to `toml-racket`: inspect, test, merge.
Yet Racket took toll.
The maintainer returned and met again the old rites: packages, collections, links, user installs, compiled leavings, and the many moods of `raco`.
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Sunday, Oct 12, 2025
As a studious GNU Units user, I have a small body of notes documenting various ways to perform calculations with unit conversions. Here are a few select ways that I found use of GNU units.
But first, a word about using GNU Units GNU Units is a powerful, free calculator that performs unit conversions for you. Please check out the examples on GNU Units’ homepage to see what it is capable of.
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