Weeknotes 2025W21

This week, I tried out espanso, a text expander that works like a dream on my computer. I think I found it or an equivalent on Hacker News. It allows you to create “matches” and “replacements” so that when you type out the match, espanso replaces it with custom text. For example, em and en dashes are hard to type out but I use them quite a lot. With espanso, anywhere I type /em or /en, it replaces it with — and –, respectively. Some other crucial ones I’ve added:

a, e, i, o, u, and resume plus ` adds an acute diacritic above to the letter—á, é, í, ó, ú, résumé. n` becomes ñ. This helps a lot with my Spanish learning.
/date and /wdate add today’s current date in YYYY-MM-DD and YYYYWWW, respectively.
/slorem and /llorem add lorem ipsum. The short version is just a sentence and the long one is a paragraph. Great for when I’m designing websites.

I brought coffee to a friend and talked and reminisced which was nice. I also called quite a few friends that I haven’t reached out to in months. It’s nice catching up with people you care about.

The weather got really nice this week so I did chores outside. I like to take a break from job searching and computer work to listen to podcasts and use my body. Sometimes it’s a distraction but healthy distractions are good in moderation.

I finished reading Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green. I blew through it pretty quickly. What a great book. More novelists should write non-fiction. It went through some interesting history about a disease that killed so many people because we just didn’t understand it. Today, it’s completely curable—it’s just a social disease now. The cure is where the disease is not (rich countries) and it isn’t “cost-effective” enough to get to poorer countries where it ruins so many lives. Definitely give it a read.

I also took a trip to the library and picked up The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim. Black orbs that can fly and go through walls at about walking pace absorb people when they touch them. Pandemonium ensues. Pretty interesting premise so far and it really gets me thinking about emergencies, system fragility, and misinformation.

Lastly, I launched a web app. It was mostly a project to learn Elixir and Phoenix and I had a ton of fun building it. The idea is kind of cool and it got surprisingly positive feedback from friends. I’ll do a proper write-up but it’s a semi-social app where people drop notes into a pond and other people fish out random notes and interact with them. It’s not ready to open to the public quite yet but as a gift for making it this far, you can go give it a try.

Weeknotes 2025W21

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