Giovanni's Diary > Ephemeris >
2025-04-19
It's been some time since my last publication here and stuff have been piling up, so here is a summary of what I have been playing with lately.
For my Surrounding series, I am converting the org files into latex to generate a pdf. Last week I wanted to improve the presentation of the book to make It look more professional, so I started learning more about typography and paging. While researching for online documentation and learning materials, I discovered what is probably one of the best latex books ever, The TexBook by Donald E. Knuth. This book is amazing, it explains how tex works to an audience of any experteese by having secions labeled by difficulty and experience needed to understand it. It is safe to say that even if you have been writing tex for some years, you would still have plenty to learn from this book. Moreover, the text is filled with funny jokes and interesting trivias. Did you know that the name "tex" originates from greek "τέχ" which means both art and technology?
Since we are talking about greek, last week I became interested in Stoicism as a philosofy for my own life when times get hard, so I have been reading Marcus Aurelious' Meditations and taking notes. Another good source is Seneca's letters. Briefly, the doctrine of stoicism is based on the idea that a happy man is a man that lives with virtue. A vrituous man is someone that does not follow pelasure and recreational activities, "To be violently drawn and moved by the lusts and desires of the soul, is proper to wild beasts an monsters". A virtuous man is someone that listens to everybody, that doesn't talk too much but not too little, is thankful to others, rigid when he needs to be.
There is this idea in many greek philosophies about a "correct" way to live, stoicism extends this by accepting what we are not in control of and working hard on what we can. I have been struggling with this recently since there are many things I have no control over which are giving me great anxiety, and this period in particular is very intense. Almost three years ago I read Aristotele's Ethics and he also talks about virtue in great details by identifying every type of virtue a man should have. I remember trying to take the best of his doctrine with me but I lost motivation and now I want to explore this again.
One last greek thing, I really enjoyed the video about The $2 Million Lost Book of Archimedes. It talks about the history of a book which contained some groundbreaking math research from Archimedes and barely survived time.
Math is fascinating. Because of some of my university courses this semester, I needed to sharpen my multivariable calculus skills so I have been following MIT's 18.02 Multivarible Calculus from 2007. I have to say that I really enjoy math when I don't need to give an exam soon.
Last week there has been a showcase of old computers in the library of my university: original hardware running Microsoft's DOS and other operating systems from that time. Computers looked so different, maybe I am just idealizing a period that has been so important in the history of computer science that I did not experience, but I really like the esthetics. I realized that I didn't know anything about DOS or old hardware since I have always used Unix-like operating systems. Sadly there was no Unix in the showcase so I felt unacculturated about the industry I should be an expert of. Fortunately, most of the computers were working and some had a physical manual, so I started reading a manual and played with the DOS.
I wanted to create a simple executable "shell" script, which in dos id called a BAT file. From the manual I learned to edit with EDLIN which resembles Thompson's ed text editor (that would later turn into vi and vim). The program would just use DIR to list the contents of a folder, I would then execute it with BATCH but I failed to save it because the floppy disk I was using was in read only mode. I gave up trying because I was already at the computer for some time.
I reinstalled linux from scratch on my desktop pc, this time with the automated installer because I already compiled It once and It took a long time. Everything went smootly and the computer was able to boot and connect to the internet in just one evening, incredible. Hopefully the automated BLFS will work as flawlessly.
Meanwhile, the joint between the screen of my laptop and the rest of my laptop broke and I cannot open the screen much otherwise It may break completely. Honestly, this HP laptop really lasted and endured a lot, so I am not really surprised that his time would come to an end. Still, I am a bit frustrated with modern laptops, this is why I only buy really cheap ones. I have my laptop on my back 24/7 and I prefer something that is not a big deal if It breaks rather than one of those expensive laptops with pretty screens that would cost me a fortune. I grow up with a desktop PC so I consider the desktop as the powerful computer and the laptop as a client / browser.