tinker.ph

Re-inventing muscle memory with zoxide

Going down the rabbit hole of updating my terminal, I came across zoxide. In a nutshell, it’s a modern replacement for cd. It seems both a gift from heaven and hell.

From their README.md:

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z foo              # cd into highest ranked directory matching foo
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z foo bar          # cd into highest ranked directory matching foo and bar
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z foo /            # cd into a subdirectory starting with foo
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z ~/foo            # z also works like a regular cd command
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z foo/             # cd into relative path
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z ..               # cd one level up
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z -                # cd into previous directory
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zi foo             # cd with interactive selection (using fzf)
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z foo<SPACE><TAB>  # show interactive completions (zoxide v0.8.0+, bash 4.4+/fish/zsh only)

On the one hand, it makes digging through long directory trees faster. On the other hand, I came across a YouTube video saying they aliased cd for z. Seems like a recipe for disaster when you run bash scripts with expand_aliases, where previously working scripts would suddenly execute commands on the wrong directory.

As for me, I’m getting used to re-wiring my muscle memory around the z command and how I navigate directory trees. So far, despite the extra convenience it offers, I’m still a bit slower than using just plain cd.

Two cool things people made

Here are two cool things I found on the internet today. These kinds of things only exist because of people who let their mind wander and then subsequently following up to validate their ideas.

First is Slices: early versions of the shared XR experiences we have today. The idea is finding a shared common space in our environments by slicing through the room and matching them with another, and then subsequently recreating the shared space in XR.

Wait a second. @GregMadison, who works at Unity which builds tools and platforms for creative people (60% of all video games are built with its platforms), cut his living room up into volumetric pixels.

Billions of them. Each representing a millimeter of space.

And then gave… pic.twitter.com/ntItvOr00x

— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) May 19, 2024

The other is Non-euclidean Doom: what happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159, which is…self-explanatory.

$250 7+6 DoF humanoid arm

I came across @lethic1 who seems to be building the same things as me, albeit at a much faster pace. Check out his progress on the arms below.

Nothing much to see this time, just stress testing, tons of problems, will redo the whole arm this weekend! Perhaps open source in a few weeks pic.twitter.com/pqvXNUIr8m

— Lethic (@lethic1) May 15, 2024

30 days of WhatPulse

The 30 days are over, and here are the final stats for my F-key measurement exercise. Turns out, I made an error with my 15-day measurement by not being on premium and not selecting the All Time option.

Despite the mistake, all the F-keys netted under 0.1%, with only the escape key being 0.6%! My most pressed keys are Space with ~35k presses. Needless to say, I think I’m ready for a 65% keyboard.

In other news, I just settled in to my new terminal today:

Animated equations on the web: Part 2

I got around to working on animated equations on the web again, just out of sheer procrastination and refusal to do the things I should actually be doing.

Here’s my idea:

• Convert LaTeX to HTML using katex ✅
• For each equation, generate a diff of the dom between the current and the next ✅
• Generate the transition dom between the current and the next, using revealjs to animate.

So far, I’ve gotten to the diff part, and the only thing left is to assemble the transition, but my brain is fried from work, so I’m taking a break for now.

Side note, I am really loving my Astro setup. Each entry is essentially its own playground with my own vanilla JS just running, so I wrote code above literally inside this entry as I was writing it.