The Universe of Joshua Blais
The Universe of Joshua Blais
Joshua Blais
Welcome to my Hub on the Worldwide Web. It serves as the central and canonical point of truth for all activities, writings, videos, works, and content.
Latest Posts
For the past few years, I have self hosted services that permitted me to leave behind all subscriptions. I have built out a system using off the shelf solutions for this which follows: Why self host?# The thing that one should start any...
Recently, some influencer was banned from TikTok for some sort of prank video. I refuse to look it up, it just crossed my RSS feed and it sparked the idea behind this article. Many such cases. The thing about social platforms is that you...
The Adam Freeland Song “We Want Your Soul” was released in 2003, and while the world was going through a transitory period, we are realizing the entirety of the soul sucking nature of modernity today. This version of the music video...
“A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”— Charles Darwin I would say that the greatest issue in my life is that I don’t know where my time is going. Some days, I look up at the clock, and wonder...
On mac, the Command Space~ shortcut is one that can be unbelieveably powerful - not only do you have the native Spotlight app, you can rebind the key to something even more powerful, namely Alfred or in recent years, Raycast. I...
One thing that has greatly improved my digital quality of life is being able to capture anything from anywhere on my system. Bind a hotkey in your WM or DE for this command: emacsclient -n -e '(progn (select-frame-set-input-focus...
“God, the Universe, whatever name you might call God by.” In our culture, it has become “hip” to call God “the Universe” - you will see it time and again when people claim the Universe is “aligning with them” (specifically when something...
As everyone in this generation, I have struggled with phone addiction and wasting time in apps for much of my teenage/adult life. I have setup my phone to strictly allow for only that which is productive and allow focused work. We can so...
One of the greatest investments in the last half decade I made was the purchase of a Kobo e-reader. The ability to take your library anywhere with you, the e-ink display that doesn’t give you eye strain, the freedom to actually own your...
Since I started using the Zen Browser, I have been more inclined to bookmark the pages that I visit and organize them in a logical way that allows me to revisit them whenever I need to. For some time, I saved my bookmarks in plain text...
Earlier this week, there was a post by Bozhidar Batsov that sparked a lively conversation on Reddit about the same topic. I figured I would throw my hat in the ring and talk about why it may, or may not matter at all. It all depends how...
The thing that has always mattered in this life was the depth to which we were willing to go. With the advent of LLMs and “AI” (don’t get me started), the one thing that will continue to differentiate human beings will be the depth to...
I have pretty well integrated emacs into everything I do on a computer. Using GNOME as my underlying “bootloader” for doom emacs, I have setup various hotkeys to make my experience seamless and easily accessible from anywhere on the...
Some consider this to be an impossible feat, and until lately, I too, thought I was doomed to out of sync calendaring between my mobile calendar with notifications (Google calendar) and my always on screen calendar in org-agenda. Well -...
Hands down the easiest way to manage your configuration files in a unix environment is via GNU Stow. For some time I hesitated to set this up as I didn’t “get it”, but now that it is working, I would never go back to manually handling...