Today I dreamt about helping Corvus Corax with recording flute in Himalayas for their music video in support for the Ukraine.

Here’s the closest I found to what it was in a dream (except for Himalayas, of course).

Here’s some artwork for that day (initially designed for our basketball team)

Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Since the death of Google Reader (may the googler who doomed it burn in non-existing hell) I’ve been looking for new RSS reader. What I need is:

• Web-app (or some kind of synchronization between machines);

• good keyboard navigation;

• responsiveness;

• design which lets me read stuff and gets out of the way.

That’s all I can think out at the moment. Strangely enough, that seems to be quite a lot: I looked at The Old Reader and Feedly and several others, but wasn’t satisfied (though used The Old Reader for more than half a year). And now BazQux has implemented keyboard shortcuts for selecting feeds, and I gave it a spin again. And I actually liked it. It costs $9 per year, but you can evaluate it for free, it’s written in Haskell by a Russian programmer and has quite a bunch of features.

GNU coreutils are so elusive:

 [b0x123a@i6n66 ~]$ rm bin/
rm: cannot remove `bin/': Is a directory
 [b0x123a@i6n66 ~]$ rm bin/ -r
rm: cannot remove `bin': Not a directory

For those who seek Git enlightenment

If you use git diff-index to get a diff to staging area, there’s a saner way: git diff —cached.

git: baffling users unexpectedly since 2005.

make: *** No rule to make target `sense'.  Stop.

(Just to save a useful and complex construct for future reference)

List all the overlay maintainers who hasn’t migrated their packages to virtual/pkgconfig:

ag --files-with-matches dev-util/pkgconfig | xargs dirname | uniq \
       | xargs -I {} grep '<name>' '{}/metadata.xml' \
       | sed 's:\s\+<name>\(.\+\)</name>:\1:' | sort -u

Yes, I use ag instead of grep, being too lazy to add all the necessary options. And wait. And ag is so much better however you look at it.

Digging through my ebook reader’s memory, I’ve stumbled upon book hitherto quite unknown to me, „Shantaram“ by Gregory David Roberts. So I’ve read it (that’s what books are for, ain’t them?). Well… It’s one of the most impressing books that I have read recently (along with „Doctor Zhivago“). I will not retell it, read the Wikipedia or something if you want to know the plot (but what for? Don’t spoil the reading!). But the book is great. Life, people, good people, good things in common people, war, (of course!) love… Modern literature without dirt, sex, drugs and violence on every other page. Book that gives you something to think about without showing off intelligence. If you heed my advice, read it.

Anyone who walks away from Shantaram untouched is either heartless or dead or both.

• Jonathan Carroll