~hedy's blogroll - BlogFlock

Little moments of joy - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-21T00:00:00.000Z

As I write, the lowering sun is gently shining on the monstera plant in the living room, casting a shadow on the wall. I am enjoying the changes in light outside as the longest day draws to a close. The birds sing quietly outside.

Yesterday, the clouds started to move away for the first time in days, leaving a sky so clear at sunset I couldn’t see a cloud out the window. The clarity carried on to this day: for all the day there have been few clouds in the sky. I look out the window and see a few clouds. I briefly imagine what a city in the clouds would be like, but I can’t formulate a complete picture in my imagination. The clouds themselves say so much that I am preoccupied by studying what I see.

I write down little moments of joy as I go around the world: “the joy of watching the sun set under a clear sky,” “the joy of someone seeing you so clearly after only saying a few words,” “the joy of singing a song to yourself while waiting for the bus”. These moments come at random. That is what makes them so special.

Earlier today, after leaving a shop, a car parked nearby which had their windows down and was loudly playing Taylor Swift’s Delicate. I started to sing along. Was that their favourite song? I’ll never know, but it is fun to imagine. The moment was fleeting, but one I knew I had to write down – if a moment is fleeting, words can help it exist a little bit longer.

The light beaming onto my monstera is fading. The shadow cast by the two tallest leaves that are closely interspersed looks like a palm tree: a vision of the tropical in the Scottish summer. The contours of some of the shadows of leaves are still well defined, but others fade into a haze. Soon, the sun will set. I think about how special it is to watch this moment: to see the last slivers of sunlight peek through a low cloud on the horizon on the longest day of the year.

The colour from the lingering lavender cast onto the sparse clouds, possible only because the sun is where it now is in the sky, makes me smile; oh! how wonderful the changes in colours through Day and Night are.

Small wishes - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-21T00:00:00.000Z

I like to wish people a happy day, and so many of my conversations start with “Happy Sunday”, or similar. Today I was able to add an additional well-wish: “Happy Solstice!” As I write, it is 9pm and the sun is still radiating over the hills. Trees cast long shadows over the quiet fields. The pattern of branches at the top of a tree reminded me of a village Kirk I saw earlier today.

I started my morning with a long walk followed by a (decaf) coffee. I love when I can start the day with a walk: when I have time to watch the world go by, listen to some music, and notice the world around me. Within thirty minutes my environment can change from the plain walls of my bedroom to Nature in which, no matter how much I look around, there will always be a new detail to appreciate.

After my coffee, a thought came to mind: I hope that one day I can see the countryside from a double-decker bus. It’s a small wish. It may never happen but I hold onto the thought any way. The wish pops into my mind sometimes when I am travelling. Maybe I need to travel at a different time of day to have a higher likelihood of catching the double decker bus that sometimes runs. But then again I like the feeling of holding a tiny hope – something that makes me feel “what if?”

While at the bus station I skimmed through new blog posts. I opened one in which the author had shared a photo of a pancake with a face made of butter on top. It was a tiny moment, but one shared across continents through the medium that we call the web. I smiled, my heart already warm from the light of the day and the coffee and the tiny wish of seeing the countryside from a double-decker bus.

I looked up to the sky and saw blue wherever I looked. I thought about the contrast between the greens of Earth and the blues of the sky and let a few moments pass while I admired the contours of the trees in the middle distance.

On my journey, I saw the countryside with new clarity: the day is clearer than many I remember from recently. The trees and fields and valleys and peaks were all so vibrant, their colours illuminated by the warm sun: a warmth that will linger today longer than any other: therein, the joy of Solstice.

Travelling further through the fields and hills, I thought about how even a tree far away can have an impact on me. A tree may be a mile or two away by distance, but yet it can still feel close. Our hearts can interpret what we see no matter how far away what we are looking at may be.

Selfie: relaxing at home - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-06-21T00:00:00.000Z

Take a rest while at home.

Emacs: modus-themes version 5.3.0 - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-06-21T00:00:00.000Z

I just published the latest stable release of the Modus themes. The change log entry is reproduced further below. For any questions, you are welcome to contact me. I will now work to apply these same changes to emacs.git, so please wait a little longer for the updates to trickle down to you.

Package name (GNU ELPA): modus-themes (also built into Emacs 28+)
Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes
Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-changelog
Colour palette: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-colors
Sample pictures: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes-pictures
Git repositories:
- GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes
- GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes
Backronym: My Old Display Unexpectedly Sharpened … themes.

5.3.0 on 2026-06-21

The Modus themes are in a stable state. To my mind, they provide the best “default theme” experience across the 40+ original themes I have carefully designed.

Modus is also a platform for making themes for Emacs. There are plenty of derivatives already. I am linking to them through the project’s README.md and am always happy to mention more packages—just let me know.

This version does not include many user-facing changes. Most of my work focused on making internal refinements.

Load the themes through the `early-init.el`

The Modus themes can now be loaded through the early-init.el file. The idea is to avoid the flash of light that occurs under certain conditions during startup.

This feature is the result of several changes to helper functions, especially those contributing to the modus-themes-generate-palette function that Modus derivatives may be relying on.

Thanks to Steven Allen for an intermediate refinement in pull request 194 and to Mike Olson for another relevant tweak in pull request 199:

Steven’s contribution no longer exists in the code base due to other changes I made, but was still useful at the time.

Both changes are small, meaning that their authors do not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

Also thanks to Jacod “Jake” Gordon for reminding me to apply one of the new functions to the org-habit faces. This was done in issue 197: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/197.

The underline for widget fields has the correct colour

Relevant faces use the palette entry for border (invoke the command modus-themes-preview-colors or modus-themes-preview-colors-current to view the entries in a theme’s palette).

A popular package that makes use of widget.el widgets is notmuch.

Thanks to ukiran03 for the contribution, which was done in pull request 193: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/193. The change is small, meaning that ukiran03 does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

A palette can now have a `bg-popup` entry

This gives users and derivative themes the option to pick a suitable value for popup interfaces, such as those of the company and corfu packages.

Thanks to aikrahguzar for making this suggestion in issue 70 of my ef-themes repository (the ef-themes are built on top of the modus-themes since Modus version 5.0.0, Ef version 2.0.0): https://github.com/protesilaos/ef-themes/issues/70.

Support for faces or packages

lin by Protesilaos.
pulsar by Protesilaos.
institution-calendar by Protesilaos.
markdown-ts-mode by Rahul Martim Juliato and Stéphane Marks.
trust-manager by Eshel Yaron.
typst-ts-mode by Ziqi Yang. Thanks to Pranshu Sharma for suggesting its inclusion in issue 208: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/208.
new elfeed faces since the maintenance of the project was assumed by Daniel Mendler, Karthik Chikmagalur, and Ihor Radchenko. To this end, thanks to Steven Allen for pull request 217 that added the elfeed-show-* faces: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/217

Internal refinements to the `modus-themes-with-colors` macro

It now correctly handles the order of default palette colours and user-defined palette overrides. Thanks to JD Smith for the contribution in pull request 191: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/191.

The change is small, meaning that JD does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

The `multiple-cursors` are fine even when a bar is used

When the cursor-type is configured to be a bar, the fake cursors produced by the multiple-cursors package will still look right. Thanks to Elias Gabriel Perez for the change to the mc/cursor-bar-face in pull request 213: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/213.

The `blink-matching-paren-offscreen` is the same as `show-paren-match`

This is for thematic consistency. Thanks to Troy Brown for suggesting this change in issue 209: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/209.

Get `vc-annotate` look right

The built-in vc-annotate command relies on a user option to read color values. We cannot handle this nicely at the theme level. Users need to write their own configuration like this:

(defun my-modus-vc-annotate (&rest _)
  (modus-themes-with-colors
    (setq vc-annotate-background-mode nil)
    (setq vc-annotate-very-old-color fg-dim)
    (setq vc-annotate-color-map
          `(( 20. . ,red)
            ( 40. . ,red-cooler)
            ( 60. . ,red-warmer)
            ( 80. . ,yellow-warmer)
            (100. . ,yellow)
            (120. . ,yellow-cooler)
            (140. . ,green-warmer)
            (160. . ,green)
            (180. . ,green-cooler)
            (200. . ,cyan-cooler)
            (220. . ,cyan-warmer)
            (240. . ,cyan)
            (260. . ,blue-warmer)
            (280. . ,blue)
            (300. . ,blue-cooler)
            (320. . ,blue-intense)
            (340. . ,magenta-cooler)
            (360. . ,fg-dim)))))

(with-eval-after-load 'vc-annotate
  (my-modus-vc-annotate)
  (add-hook 'enable-theme-functions #'my-modus-vc-annotate))

[ The above code is relevant as of this writing. Though remember that I do not keep older publications up-to-date. The only source of truth is the manual of the Modus themes. ]

Two old user options are no longer needed

The user options modus-themes-completions and modus-themes-prompts are obsolete. They used to be relevant before the introduction of palette overrides.

Rewrote large parts of the manual

I did it for clarity, but also to remove notes that were specific to older versions of Emacs.

Many new ERT tests for the project

I have written many tests. They do not cover every single function, though the plan is to do that eventually. These tests are important to ensure that Modus is a solid platform for making derivative themes.

Much of this was done live: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-04-10-emacs-spontaneous-live-modus-themes/.

Thanks to Benjamin Kästner for a couple of tweaks to a relevant macro in the tests’ file. This was done in pull request 212, with further changes by me: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/212.

Links to projects related to Modus

In the README.md I now mention projects that are related to the Modus themes, such as derivative Emacs themes, but also ports for other editors.

There is also a link to my modus-themes-exporter package, which I developed during a live stream:

Git commits

git shortlog 5.2.0..5.3.0 --summary --numbered
Protesilaos
Benjamin Kästner
Steven Allen
Elias Gabriel Perez
JD Smith
Mike Olson
ukiran03

Saturday, June 20, 2026 - Baty.net

2026-06-20T14:28:49.000Z

I'm not addicted to the internet. I'm not remotely addicted to my phone. What I'm addicted to is sitting at a computer. Some days I sit here all day, just clicking on things and farting around with software that I won't use in a week. It's a tough one to kick. For me, it seems impossible.

When posting these journal entries, I can't decide if I should include them in the "newsletter" email send. They seem trivial, but what do I write that isn't. I'm going to include this one, so anyone who's subscribed is encouraged to weigh in.

Day - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-20T00:00:00.000Z

The warm glow at the door, intensified by the morning sun beaming and then reflecting on the blank walls of the hallway, is the first colour I notice when I wake. I then look around and see the blue around the blinds – colour from the evening before, but seen from a new perspective: the hybrid of restfulness and tiredness that occupies the first few moments of the day.

My eyes are heavy, lingering between the last moments of sleep and the beginning of the new day. When I close my eyes I dream of the day ahead. Idle thoughts come to mind: when will I get up? More serious thoughts arise, too: how can I comprehend the contradictions of modernity? Such thoughts pass. I haven’t had a cup of tea yet.

I hear the birds sing. When the bird song recedes, I notice breath – life – is the loudest sound I can hear.

I wake up to a bluer sky than I have seen in a week. I later hear that the weather for the next week is to be sunny. That reminds me: the solstice is coming soon: the longest day. We are always so close to Nature. Memories of music and tales of travel come to mind. Mornings feel like the space for reminiscing and dreaming and waking.

As I get ready to go on my morning walk – a walk to which I have been looking forward for days, with the sky now clear – I find in my pocket the five pence coin I found outside of a museum. I remember the phrase “Find a penny pick it up, and all day you’ll have good luck. If you pass it to a friend, then your luck will never end.”

Leaving the house, I sing the songs I played yesterday evening with the world waking up around me: the melody of day.

Passing of the torch - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2026-06-19T12:00:00.000Z

If you are subscribed to People and Blogs, you might have noticed that today’s newsletter arrived from a different address. That’s because the always lovely Zach has officially become the new custodian of this series. The peopleandblogs.com domain name has been transferred, the mailing list has been migrated (from Buttondown to Buttondown), and the RSS feed has been redirected.

As I wrote in a previous post, I’m gonna publish three more interviews here on the site before officially saying goodbye to the series on July 10th. But contrary to what I wrote months ago, I decided that I’m not gonna keep the interviews archived here on the blog, and instead I’ll redirect them all to their new location.

Keeping them here would be obviously good for me, it’s extra traffic that comes to the site, but I don’t care about traffic, and I much prefer to send people towards Zach’s site and help the series grow that way. I’m very happy that the series will continue on, and I’m excited to see where Zach will take it. As I said to him, this is his series now, he can and should do whatever he wants with it, and I look forward to seeing it evolve over the next months and years.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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Edoardo Baldi - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2026-06-19T11:00:00.000Z

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Edoardo Baldi, whose blog can be found at edoardob.blog.

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Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hello! I’m Edoardo, in my thirties, born near Milan (Italy) and raised in the Alps of the same region, to escape the boredom of too flat a horizon. I studied physics, first in Milan, then abroad in Switzerland, where I spent a little over four years on a PhD that convinced me academic research wasn’t for me – or so I thought, since I didn’t stray too far. In the following years I became a “research software engineer”, meaning a software developer who works closely with research. It took me a while to realize that, despite the many benefits, that work had become a routine I was taking too much for granted. Or better: I had lost sight of why I was staying there; why I kept choosing that configuration for my life. Now I’m trying to figure out if teaching the two subjects I’m most passionate about – math and physics – is what I want to do in the next chapter of my career.

I can never get enough of hiking in the mountains, especially over multiple days – as long as my body agrees. And sharing an experience with other people who love the same thing is my ideal vacation. Books, writing – I don’t know how many experiments with novels and short stories I’ve done over the years – and puzzles of all kinds (including programming challenges, even though I’m a particularly slow coder) are some of the activities that can easily fill my free time.

What’s the story behind your blog?

Having always loved tinkering with computers, I think I started writing random things online quite early. If I remember correctly, it was on LiveJournal or MySpace, prehistoric stuff now. I discovered WordPress during high school, following a guy from my same school who wrote ironic essays on philosophy topics. I tried to emulate that model, but I didn’t get very far as it wasn’t my thing. Years later, with some friends fond of cinema, again on WordPress, I started a collective blog where we wrote our opinions on the movies we watched, often together. The name of the blog – Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators – was a tribute to a classic 50s American comedy. (I’ll let you work that one out.)

During my PhD, I collaborated on and managed the university cinema club’s blog. At the time, however, I also started publishing my very personal ideas on books and movies on another blog, whose name or domain I honestly don’t even remember now. I think I tried to recover something from that blog via the Wayback Machine, with no success.

Fast-forward several years, I realized why none of those blogs had survived: I was writing on commission – I loved the perk of press screenings, but writing something afterwards was non-negotiable. Or I was performing for some imagined audience by covering whatever was trending, not what I actually cared about. I could say that my personal blog was born when I decided that my online space would be only a public personal journal: the only rule was to write about what interested me the most, in the way that felt most natural. This is still the reason behind my current blog. How long is it going to survive? I don’t know. It did well, so far, with ups and downs.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Beyond my hiking recaps, almost everything I write starts from curiosity – a science-based question (“if I ate an apple a day for a year, how many kg of peel could I accumulate?”), something I want to understand well enough to explain, a brain teaser that sometimes keeps me awake. Since it’s often something I don’t know, a research phase almost always follows – and I admit that, sometimes, it derails my intention to write. I keep a dedicated note for each idea, where I track its evolution. When I feel like I’ve reached a conclusion of sorts, I then sketch out a structure and use it as a guide for the first draft. Curiously, all my notes are in English, but the first draft of anything I write is always in Italian. Then I translate into English, and very often rewrite some parts that don’t flow very well in the other language. And yes, I often use Claude for a final proofread: I’ve given it strict instructions on what it can and can’t touch, and how. The content is always mine, and I’m careful to keep it that way: I don’t want to end up with a voice I no longer recognize as my own.

As for the tools, my personal notes live in an Obsidian vault – because they must be plain text files – and I write all my drafts almost exclusively in iA Writer. It’s been my first choice for many writing projects, at least in their early stages. One feature I particularly love is its support for authorship, without violating the plain text pact.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

When I sit down to write the first draft, I have only one need: to be alone in a fairly quiet environment. Honestly, I’ve never tried writing in a public place, like a café – and the few times I did write on a train, it was surely due to a deadline I couldn’t avoid.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s more the act of moving through space that stimulates what I might call creative thinking – which I take to mean authentic rather than original, as in “totally new”. And I’m also convinced that the environment influences my creativity, but I couldn’t say how or why. Often I’ve only realized much later that I had visited an environment from which I returned with ideas I considered creative – whether these didn’t go very far is another, unresolved story.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I think I’ve tried dozens of frameworks to create a blog, starting with the large family of static-site generators. After several attempts, intrigued by some input from Manu, I gave Kirby a chance and discovered that it met all my needs. One above all: my blog’s content must be in plain text, as I don’t want to deal with any kind of problem taking it with me, wherever it might be in the future. So, for the moment: Kirby CMS, hosted on a fairly basic server managed by Hetzner. The domain is registered on Porkbun, and the DNS is managed by Cloudflare. I’ve also written a dozen custom plugins to tweak many aspects of my website because, for me, tinkering with the mechanics of a personal blog is part of the joy of having one. I just can’t resist – and I keep telling myself “tinker less, write more”.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I would probably study web design and web technologies properly from the start – I mostly stumbled into this stuff through my day job. I say this to avoid having to settle for some preconfigured service that isn’t right for me.

I would love to have a domain like firstname.blog, but the problem isn’t availability so much as the popularity of my name. And, honestly, I’m not ready to pay $200 a year for a personal website.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

The maintenance costs for my blog are quite low: 4€ and something a month for the server, plus the annual cost of the domain – about 20€. Kirby CMS requires a one-time license (100€, renewed every four years), and this is the only expense I periodically re-evaluate: the moment it no longer aligns with my needs, I will have no problem planning a migration elsewhere. In fact, I’ve already done it several times as a stress test, but for now I don’t feel the need to.

My website generates no revenue, nor have I ever tried to make it do so. Personally, I have nothing against monetising a personal website, provided it’s done honestly. If I were to do it, I probably wouldn’t rely on platforms like Substack – only because I like building things myself. Even today I financially support some blogs because I believe in the work of the people behind them – or to give a friend a small nudge to keep going.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

A good part of the blogs I follow, or like to return to from time to time, I discovered thanks to “People & Blogs” – or through “Ye Olde Blogroll”. I think it’s unlikely that anyone reading this page doesn’t know either of them; but if that’s the case, I invite you to take a look, exploring even the older, less obvious stuff.

I want to mention a friend’s project, halfway between a personal blog and a photography portfolio, that I had the pleasure of contributing to. I’m very fond of it: partly for my friendship with the author, and partly because it circles a theme that has quietly followed me for years: the sense of belonging to a place, or to multiple places; the idea, the concept, the experience of what we call home. The project is “Stay Stay Stay” by Elettra Pistoni: if you’re not into reading about this topic, her pictures are well worth a look. I also think she would more than gladly welcome the opportunity for this interview, but I’ll leave the decision to those in charge.

I’ve lost count of how many newsletters or feeds I’ve subscribed to over the years, and it doesn’t really matter. I’ve reached the point where the list of online content I follow consistently has no more than ten items. Among these, two blogs and a newsletter (in Italian) that I return to quite regularly, even to reread older things:

“Useful Fictions” by Cate Hall
Julia Evans’s blog, a trove for tech enthusiasts
The newsletter “It’s Friday I’m (not) in love”, partly inspired by “Modern Love”, the New York Times’ well-known column.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I’ll take this as a cue to share a bit of what’s going through my head – two thoughts and a side project that will maybe see the light someday.

Whenever I feel like telling someone “I don’t have time”, I stop and remind myself that it’s almost never true. In fact, never. It’s just my fear of making a commitment, or a lack of courage to admit what I really care about. I try never to hide behind this excuse with the people I really care about, because they don’t deserve it. I’ve also written a short post about it.
This could be one of my guiding tenets, because I haven’t been able to refute it yet: “Actions, not words, reveal our real values”. It’s not mine, and I often struggle to accept it myself. But I’m convinced that if we actually lived by it, we would have far more genuine and satisfying relationships with other people – in whatever sense you want to take that.
Being a hiker obsessed with traveling light, I started working on an app (web only to begin with) that lets me keep track of my gear and which items I decide to bring on each trip. Dozens of these tools already exist, but this is my vision of what I’d want such an app to do. I called it “Baseweight”, and I hope to have an alpha version out in the near future. If someone is curious, the app’s future home will be at baseweight.my. And if you’d like to share your thoughts on it, don’t hesitate to reach out! Opinions and suggestions are especially welcome at this early stage.

Finally, a heartfelt thanks to Manu for offering me the opportunity to share a bit of myself with this community!

Keep exploring

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Rainbow - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-19T00:00:00.000Z

“Cheers.” I like to say a toast to the day: to myself and others: peace, hope, happiness, health. After I raised my glass of orange juice, I looked up and saw a rainbow. I don’t think I have ever seen a rainbow from this view before: a rainbow that stands out among the grey clouds, originating from a valley in which many stories have been told.

As I watch the rainbow and notice the clouds movie, a tiny grey cloud floats past, insignificant relative to the rainbow: rain created the conditions for the rainbow, but the colour cannot be dulled by a lone grey cloud. I keep looking at the colours, which seem to intensify in some places. I notice the blue sky above. Will more of the sky be blue soon? The colour and light brought a smile to my face.

I see the faintest hint of a second rainbow, a tiny haze of colour, but enough for me to see. In the background, the birds sing the melody of the morning. Cars occasionally pass: people are starting their days. The world is waking up. I am, too. The warm breeze from the window eases me into the summer day.

After several minutes, the rainbow started to fade, slowly. I wanted to hold onto the colour as much as I could, so I kept watching until I could see no more colour. Soon, the rainbow was gone. But when I stood up and went to look out the window moments later, the rainbow was back again, not quite as intense as the first rainbow but all the colours of the spectrum – the reds and yellows and violets – are still discernible.

Intense and contrasting with the dark green of the trees that surround me, the rainbow brought a little bit of joy into the morning. I wonder how many other people smiled this morning too – or are smiling now – as they too notice the rainbow.

Re: how to practice for public speaking? - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-06-19T00:00:00.000Z

This is an excerpt from a private exchange. I am sharing it with the permission of my correspondent, without disclosing their identity.

I was wondering how do you have the courage to become who you are today, you know, making speech and talk to different people. I have to do a presentation next week, and I find that even the most trivial presentation would stress me out and ruin my whole week. Is there any tip?

Change takes time. Big transformations are the result of many small tweaks whose cumulative effect eventually becomes noticeable as the new normal. There is this expression in English that “practice makes perfect”, which basically means that you become competent at something the more you do it. Though you also have to be mindful of what exactly you are doing. The technique or the method matters, otherwise you are embedding initial errors as second nature, which then makes them harder to correct.

Specifically on the topic of making a presentation, there are two core skills involved. One is the ability to express an idea clearly. The other is to connect with people at the interpersonal level through language.

You can think of “clear expression” as a direct path to somewhere. There are no obstacles, no branching sideways, no surprises and distractions: it just goes from A to B. You improve this skill by writing—and you have to write consistently. What you write about does not matter. The point is to pick a topic that you care about and formulate at least one relevant thought that makes sense. For example, you can write about the job you do, the place you live, a book you read…

Write as if you are addressing a stranger. So you cannot say “I like this book because it is good”, as that contains a lot of unknown information which may be clear in your head but does not appear in context. Instead, you have to note how, e.g. “I like this book because it taught me about X”. Then describe X to someone who is unfamiliar with the given domain of knowledge.

You do not need to publish your writings or show them to anyone. But it is essential for you to imagine that they are open to the public. This helps you have the correct frame of mind to make the thought understandable.

I described clarity as going from point A to point B without any impediments. A common mistake is to overexplain things. Perhaps you do it to prove that you really know what you are talking about. Or you underestimate the skills of the other person. The reason is not relevant though. When you overexplain, you effectively introduce distractions by making the instructions too verbose and thus too difficult to process. The essence may still be “from A you reach B”, but this “essence” cannot be buried under piles of unimportant details.

At this early stage you will not be competent at focusing on the essentials. Just know that there will be lots of “useless additives” in the beginning. As you write, those will gradually disappear. An example is what you have just read. You will notice that up until this point I have been thorough, but not frivolous with my words: I have not mentioned anything unrelated to the point I am elaborating on, nor have I explained every single concept I introduced.

The interpersonal skill is what separates interesting presentations from boring ones. Lots of scientists, for example, are excellent at getting all the details right but terrible at producing an interesting presentation. This is because they do not consider a basic fact about people: we remember big ideas and tend to forget tiny details. I can tell you about a story I heard when I was a kid, but I already forgot the quarterly report I got from the ministry of financial affairs.

Consider that our tendency to grasp the big ideas and forget the details is also a function of time. We might have the capacity to remember some details if they are given to us over, say, 30 seconds, but we will not be able to keep every detail in our head over the course of a 20-minute technical presentation. That is overwhelming.

Understand, then, that you are talking to people and are making a somewhat general point. This is true even in a technical setting. For example, a scientist should communicate their main findings and let their paper go over the technicalities of the data. You want to give them the big picture. It is sufficiently informative, but not too detailed.

People effectively need “breathing space”. You cannot bombard them with words non-stop. Pace yourself to be slow. Introduce brief pauses in between periods of higher intensity. If something is monotonous, then it is harder for people to discern patterns: they feel they are entering a closed space, with nothing to see, which makes them lose interest. So read/talk with the intent of varying the tones. Then you get them to listen to you because you keep their brain active.

Control your breath so that you can speak properly and think clearly. You do this if you are not rushing to finish your points. Have short sentences. Use commas for emphasis. Again, take it slow. Read this last sentence with a break where the comma is, like “again STOP take it slow”. Now read it again without that stop to check how awkward it is.

The ability to pause communicates confidence because you truly are in control of the situation: you are not panicking, you are not showing that you would rather be somewhere else, you are not trying to run away, you are not afraid of the clock.

You get better at this skill by practising speech. Consider recording yourself. Write your presentation in a way that is slow, has pauses, and lets you vary the tones. Then read it out loud and check the recording. Focus on the clarity of the words. If your breathing is correct, then you have air to speak loudly.

With enough practice you will learn to communicate effectively even on topics you are not prepared for, though that is the longer-term result. Similarly, once you get better at pacing yourself, you will be able to work on non-verbal communication: to look around the room, to establish eye contact, to have an aura of perfect balance. Though these come later. Right now your goal is to learn the contents of your presentation: they are not too detailed and they are not monotonous. Then read it properly, as I have outlined here.

Finally, remember that what you are feeling is normal. Everybody is like this because public speaking—and public speaking that is coherent and laser-focused—is not something we get by default. We become better at it through continuous practice. Try things to the best of your ability. You may not be good right now, but you will improve over time. Even if you are not good at all at doing presentations, you can still write a script for next week that contains elements of what I have covered, such as clear points and viable pacing.

In Greek we say “there is no ‘I cannot’ but only ‘I do not want to’”. Our emphasis is on the honesty of the effort: try it sincerely and only then decide if you can or cannot do it. But do not quit early, as that is your fear or complacency speaking. Of course, there are things we cannot change through practice (e.g. I cannot train to become 3 metres tall), but most things are malleable. Have this attitude and take it one step at a time. The rest will follow naturally.

Decoupling from the web - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2026-06-18T18:15:00.000Z

I spent a lot of time recently reflecting on the things that make me happy and unhappy. And one thing that has emerged from all this meandering inside the inner workings of my brain is that the web is making me unhappy.

The web, as a whole, is a big place and as Bo said «Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found» which is both a blessing and a curse. Because even though my content diet is quite strict—compared to most people at least—I’m still fucked by the fact that I am a curious person and there’s an infinite amount of interesting things to be found out there on the web.

The problem is that there’s also an infinite amount of depressing and/or enraging shit out there on the web, and even though I’m not on any social media platform of any kind, I’m still exposed to that crap. And I’m tired of that. Which is why I’m wondering if it’s possible to completely decouple from the web.

I need to be “on the web” for work, since I code sites for a living, and so quitting the web entirely is not really an option at the moment. But consuming content? That is not something I have to do. And nobody is forcing me to do so.

Spending more time paying attention to the way my body feels made me realize how much I neglected taking care of my mind recently. And that’s clearly not good since those two things go hand in hand, «mens sana in corpore sano» and all that. And so I might actually try “quit” the web as a source of content and see what happens. I suspect I might end up reading more books, which is good since the goal was to read at least 36 of them this year, and I’m currently 115 pages into number 25.

Am I going to miss out on a lot of stuff? It’s possible. But aren’t we all constantly missing out on a lot of stuff anyway? Wish me luck.

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The Capture (2019) - Baty.net

2026-06-18T00:42:03.000Z

I don't know why I don't hear anyone talking about this show. It's damn good TV.

Views - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-18T00:00:00.000Z

The faint reflection of the hall catches my eye; how nature and humanity blend — how there are so many ways to see the world; how painting lets us explore what we see and what we want the world to be, just like words. A figure — a few brush stokes and colours — stands out in the grove of light amid the shadowed grounds. To see the geometry of the inclining hill, the depth of the layers of trees at the end of which is the house and the sky.

When I walked into the National Gallery of Scotland today, there were three paintings near the entrance that caught my eye: two paintings of Durham Castle, and one of Somer Hill at Tonbridge.

When I first saw the painting of Somer Hill, by JMW Turner, I was transfixed. The painting looked both new and familiar at the same time. After studying the painting for a while, I realised I had seen it before: the artwork had been moved from another wall. Yet in this new place – in this new light – with all the time that had passed since I had last seen it, the painting was anew.

I started taking notes of the painting, an impression of which remains in my mind: of the small bird soaring in the bottom of the picture, of the boat in river in the bottom left, of the faint reflection of the hall in the water, painted with such detail, of the golden glow of the sky and the warm colours used in the painting.

After gazing at the painting for some time, I moved on to the two paintings of Durham Castle, a castle I had seen a few times as a child.

Both of the paintings, the first by Turner and the second by Sir George Reid, transformed my understanding of the castle. I held in my mind a childhood impression, and gazed before me to see two more impressions: one abstract, in full colour, the river of my childhood seen in a light beyond my wildest imaginations; the other, truer-to-life, warm, autumnal.

Turner’s impression of the Castle, a building now ruined, left me thinking about how only a few colours and details could create a whole new image of the castle. The yellow of the sunshine reflects on the river. The blue castle stands strong in the middle of the painting. I thought to myself it would be hard for me to interpret the painting without the explanatory text next to the artwork – there was no way for me to know it was Durham Castle without the text. In this painting, too, the castle reflects on the river.

Sir George Reid’s painting brought Durham Castle back to life in my mind in a new way – Turner’s interpretation was one of colour and abstraction, Reid’s was one that brought me back to my time passing through Norham as a child. The autumn leaves in the painting were wonderful; the painting radiated warmth. Two birds fly close to the river. The castle appears small compared to Nature.

I went into the gallery expecting to go to the medieval art and left having seen a place I knew from childhood in two new lights, and an image of a country house far away depicted with such attention to depth that I felt like I was only beginning to appreciate the details of the painting in my visit today. Indeed, one of the wonderful things about art is that the more you look, the more you see – the same is true, too, of life.

Sir George Reid’s painting Somer Hill, by JMW Turner Turner’s impression of the Castle

The fountain - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-18T00:00:00.000Z

I opened my eyes and saw pink flowers; the countryside was dotted with flowers of all colours. Bees bounced between the thistles. I was delighted by all that I saw when I opened my eyes on the train journey; sleep is seductive, but so, too, is colour.

I spent the afternoon on my feet, wandering. I think wandering felt right because I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go. I wanted to walk to figure out where I should be. This has been a theme lately: I put one foot in front of another and look around, admiring the world around.

On my first stop I saw a tiled floor with a Greek motif reflected in the chrome espresso machine in a small cafe. I revealed in the sound of the espresso machine; the way the steam wand halts with a whimper. I appreciated the colour of all the ceramic cups on top of the machine. I noted that “Greek motif” is now part of my vocabulary. With studying, I see more patterns in the world.

I kept walking, drinking one of the best decaf flat whites I have had. I look up and see a car pass whose license plate ended with “JOY”. I look around and see and appreciate the architecture of all that is around: the way that two houses next to each other have doors that look exactly the same, the corinthian capitals of the pillars in the front of some buildings, the different kinds of columns whose name I can’t remember but that I know are of specific orders.

We are all time travellers. Did this thought come from looking at Georgian architecture over a hundred years old? With every second we travel through time: we go to the future. And with every moment we look back, we go to the past . We live within time, our time, and all of time. The coffee reminded me of a place I visited last year. There is something delightful about how the mind can go from appreciating taste to admiring the temporal in the space of a minute.

I kept walking, exploring, ending up in a Parish courtyard. A person sat on the stone steps at a red door, taking notes. I wonder if they were writing a story. Studying? I wonder. Shortly thereafter, walking loosely in the direction of an art gallery, I thought to myself “the world is my art gallery”. Wherever we go there is architecture, people, stories – life – just like in an art gallery.

I stopped at a fountain, a tall turquoise fountain with a gilded top. A bird perched on the top. I appreciate how we can all see the world from our own perspectives. Perhaps only birds will see the city from the perspective of sitting atop the fountain. What can I see from where I am?

The gardens are blue and red and yellow and a lighter blue and pink and white. The grass is green; the trees around the fountain are green, too. Did we remove a tree to make space for the fountain, or did we plant the trees to make this space? Around me dozens of people sit on benches. An older man looks upward with his hand on his chin and an inquisitive look on his face, as if deciding where to go next. I, too, am deciding where to go. His gaze was toward the spire of the church I had passed several minutes earlier.

As the water rushes down the mountain, I realise I am not sure how fountains work – there is so much to learn; there are details everywhere. The prospect of rain that the sky carried fell into the background as I watched people pass by one by one, many stopping to take pictures and to look at the fountain. I wondered if I might see a rainbow here on a sunnier day.

Two kids shout “playground!”, looking excitedly toward said playground. A lady seated at a nearby bench looks toward the fountain and smiles. I do too. How many people have stood here before, smiling at the fountain?

I’m not sure how much time I spent watching the world go by. I kept watching because I was so excited by all of the stories: the people who decided to spend time here. Eventually, I stood up and started walking toward the art gallery. The fountain kept flowing as I walked away. In the background and all around, new memories are made second by second, minute by minute.

Why am I here at the fountain? I wondered. The first answer that came to mind was “To be part of the story.”

Interpretation of “The sea is deep” by Nana Mouskouri - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-06-18T00:00:00.000Z

For this entry in the series I have picked a song of composer Manos Chatzidakis, as it is performed by the acclaimed Nana Mouskouri: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lp6f_T1z_o. This is a wonderful performance. Even the breeze adds to the magic of the show.

Below are the lyrics, my translation of them, and further comments.

Το πέλαγο είναι βαθύ

Ερμηνεία:  Νάνα Μούσχουρη
Στίχοι:    Μάνος Χατζιδάκις
Μουσική:   Μάνος Χατζιδάκις


Το πέλαγο είναι βαθύ
κι η αγάπη είναι μεγάλη

Έχω έναν πόνο στην ψυχή
και ποιος θα μου τον βγάλει

Το πέλαγο είναι πικρό
χάδι μαζί και δάκρυ

Και με κυλάει αφρίζοντας
στου ορίζοντα την άκρη

Το πέλαγο είναι παιδί
τρέχει και δεν το φτάνω

Παιδί και στην αγάπη του
που σαν παιδί το χάνω

The sea is deep

Singer:  Nana Mouskouri
Lyrics:  Manos Chatzidakis
Music:   Manos Chatzidakis


The sea is deep
and love is big

I have a pain in the soul
and who will remove it

The sea is bitter
caress together and teardrop

And it rolls me foaming
to the horizon's edge

The sea is a child
it runs and I cannot reach it

Child also in its love
that as a child I lose it

The theme of The sea is deep is discerned through millennia of Greek culture: it is about the world as admixture. The sea is the poetic representation of the world at-large, here approximated through the human experience. Life contains all the parts germane to the human condition: those we like as well those we dislike.

Our preferences about the world are irrelevant, for we cannot enact them. We may not opt out of the magnitudes we do not enjoy or approve of. There is not stylistic or moral argument to be made that shall bring about permanent changes to the functioning of the world.

All we can do is accept what is, be it sweet or bitter, attractive or repulsive. Then we may work on internalising the observation that each is exposed to vicissitudes beyond their control. Phenomena come and go, much like waves. There is no holding onto them. Whatever we have is not ours to keep forever: it is alienable.

The sea exhibits the quality of the world as admixture quite clearly. It is a source of food, a place for recreational activities and romantic escapades, the space for commerce and for connecting to distant cultures… There are just so many beautiful moments we can think of. Yet the sea is never tamed. It has no friends and plays no favourites. In it lies the imminent threat of death and destruction, the peerless potential to make entire realities and to undo them.

Our powerlessness in the face of the world does not prevent us from working with what is available to us. We carry on living, with the qualities we are endowed with, under the evolving circumstances that govern our day-to-day affairs. The feebleness of ours underpins the sense of wonder we have. It manifests as awe: the feeling that consists of admiration and fear in tandem.

This poetic sea is likened to a child to emphasise its vitality and exuberance. Its energy is always more than our own, such that we cannot keep up with it. It is a child also in the sense that it does not obey our longer-term plans, seeking instead change of some sort.

The sea is deep speaks of love. We connect deeply with people, other animals, places, items, and activities, even though we are well aware that death will undo everything. Death in the literal sense, but also the figurative end of an era. A single kiss, for example, is enjoyable in its own right, not because there is any guarantee that there will even be a tomorrow in which another kiss shall happen.

Love is a part of what we seek even with a dagger firmly planted in our heart with nobody to remove it. In a sense, what we do is futile as the sea will wash it all away. In another sense, it is all important since we understand the grandeur of love through the ups and downs.

To what end? The sea knows, yet has no reason to tell us. We keep going regardless. Uncertainty does not deter us.

Ghost theme fatigue - Baty.net

2026-06-17T20:41:27.000Z

I've spent many hours fine-tuning my custom Ghost theme to get things just so. Then, I woke up this morning and decided I didn't like most of what I'd done, so I reverted to the default "Source" theme. Source is mostly inoffensive, and a good fall-back position when I'm sick of thinking about themes. It happens a lot.

I dislike nearly every available Ghost theme, so I thought I'd build my own. It turns out I kind of don't want to. The local setup is full of things I don't really understand, and I ran into path and build issues when starting work on Linux then resuming it on macOS. That put me off the whole idea, but I persisted for a while.

Another issue with custom themes is keeping up with Ghost development. For example, they recently improved how social media icons are handled and I wanted that. I had to build it in myself. Source got it immediately, for free.

At least with Ghost, changing themes is relatively easy, so I'm not out much if I want to switch back or to something new. I've tweaked a few things in Source with custom CSS, like hiding the giant SUBSCRIBE!!! form in the footer. Gross. I'll probably remove the remaining "Monetize your audience!" bits at some point as well. Now, if only I can find a way to show more than one tag on a post 🙄🤦‍♂️. Or, as you can see from this post, a way to show the featured image on the home page, but not on the actual post. What happens now looks stupid and I'm not doing the Unsplash or genAI thing.

So, yeah, I'm taking a break from thinking about the theme for a minute.

Fitness Challenge: Update One - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2026-06-17T05:25:00.000Z

A week or so ago, I posted about my currently ongoing fitness challenge where the goal was to go down from the almost 90kg I was weighing to below the oldest measurement I had on record, which was an 85.3kg.

Side note: that’s the oldest but not the lowest, because I do have an 81kg on record, but that’s honestly not a healthy weight for me.

I know that day-to-day weight can fluctuate considerably, I know that body composition changes a lot when you’re dieting, and I know that weight will also change a lot depending on how much I’ll train because muscles are denser and generally speaking “heavier” than fat. As much as I enjoy being an idiot and doing random shit, I am not entirely clueless about all this stuff.

All that said, I hopped on the scale this morning, as I do every morning since I started this challenge, and I guess not eating pasta and pizza is working.

Yes, the line is flat because I had to weigh myself twice to make sure that number was actually correct

Now, this is just one measurement; I can be back up tomorrow, and it means nothing in the grand scheme of things. I’m still figuring out a workout routine that works for my brain, and it’s an enjoyable process. But the summer is yet to start, there are 100 or so days in front of me to get in better shape, and I need to keep training. I'll be honest though: this is such a fun experiment and I'm having a blast.

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Beyond the want for happy endings - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-06-17T00:00:00.000Z

This is an entry from my journal. I comment on how I accept the world as-is.

Over the past few weeks Atlas’ cancer has resurfaced. This time I will probably not be able to do anything about it, though I will still check with the medical experts. The cancer has already grown more than what it was a few months ago when the doctor performed an operation on it. I still take care of Atlas and provide all I can. He is happy, though noticeably weaker than what he was even in recent times.

This is the real world. We long for happy endings. Our stories have them, as do our dominant religions. There has to be something more, something in another place that is better than what we have here. Such is our hope and desire. There is no proof of an altogether different world; a world of pure bliss. We want it to exist perhaps to distract ourselves from the actuality of our condition. Here things are neither purely blissful nor completely miserable. There is attraction and repulsion, that which is beautiful and that which is disgusting. One flows into the other. It is and becomes not, depending on the interplay of factors that constitute the given case.

My life with Atlas goes back a decade when I got him as a tiny puppy. On day one, during our first walk, he stood up against a large, poorly socialised Rottweiler. I remained calm and smiled at his audacity. The other man was struggling to contain his dog and was visibly stressed.

Atlas grew up to be a mighty dog, blessed with supreme intelligence, and independent in his behaviour. He never works for me: he only does what he wants, cooperating with me when it makes sense to him. So he learnt all the essentials of living with people and skipped the lessons for all the tangentially useful tricks. I am a little bit like him and he is like me. The closest I have ever experienced to an ideal friendship between human and dog.

Cancer or not, death is part of the incessant process. The story of the universe is one of dust configured into systems of systems, transfiguring into galaxies and particles alike, all exhibiting the constants of patterns, structure, cause and effect else feedback loops else language. Reasonableness woven into fabric. Such is the living universe of which we are a part. A cycle everlasting, experienced as an organism of organisms.

We suffer for as long as we expect the world to deliver us from one of its facets. Mind without body, good without evil, happiness without suffering, sociability without the messiness of human relations, and so on. There is no pure benevolence as the irreducible quality, no father in heaven as the supreme good, for such a being necessarily is in a mode of being, inclined a certain way, which may then be made manifest as its context-dependent irreconcilable other on a spectrum of preference, inclination, way, or mode. An omnipotent god qua omnipotent cannot be constrained and thus cannot be limited to any one quality, goodness included. Whatever ultimately is, simply is. The mode of being is a point on an infinite line: a presence that is transfigurable.

I will continue to live with Atlas and my three other dogs, Raizou, Meelon, and Oreeon, the way I have done hitherto. We are happy here in the mountains. The dogs run around the slopes unleashed. They are close to their wolf nature, owning to the exposure they get to these open vistas. I, too, have long now rewilded myself because I accepted the world as-is and consequently escaped from the grip of fancy, of the want for happy endings. I am undisturbed by indeterminacy and open-endedness. I do not expect anything and fear nothing. This evening, when the sun sets, we will go for our nightly hike with the same vigour and intensity we always do. And when we cannot do that anymore, we shall do whatever our condition renders unavoidable.

Selfie: sunbathing around my plants - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

2026-06-16T00:00:00.000Z

Plants all around me with the sun shining on my face.

Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 6 - James' Coffee Blog

2026-06-16T00:00:00.000Z

The sixth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:

In Episode 6, I chat with Cory, the author of coryd.dev. We talk about, among other things, the role of community in the indie web, a day in the life with his website, and music listening and community as it relates to personal websites.

I hope you enjoy the episode!

Wonders of Web Weaving has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.

Cory coryd.dev The sixth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weaving has an RSS feed

~hedy's blogroll - BlogFlock

Little moments of joy - James' Coffee Blog

Small wishes - James' Coffee Blog

Selfie: relaxing at home - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

Emacs: modus-themes version 5.3.0 - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

5.3.0 on 2026-06-21

Load the themes through the early-init.el

The underline for widget fields has the correct colour

A palette can now have a bg-popup entry

Support for faces or packages

Internal refinements to the modus-themes-with-colors macro

The multiple-cursors are fine even when a bar is used

The blink-matching-paren-offscreen is the same as show-paren-match

Get vc-annotate look right

Two old user options are no longer needed

Rewrote large parts of the manual

Many new ERT tests for the project

Links to projects related to Modus

Git commits

Saturday, June 20, 2026 - Baty.net

Day - James' Coffee Blog

Passing of the torch - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

Edoardo Baldi - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

What’s the story behind your blog?

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Keep exploring

Rainbow - James' Coffee Blog

Re: how to practice for public speaking? - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

Decoupling from the web - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

The Capture (2019) - Baty.net

Views - James' Coffee Blog

The fountain - James' Coffee Blog

Interpretation of “The sea is deep” by Nana Mouskouri - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

Ghost theme fatigue - Baty.net

Fitness Challenge: Update One - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

Beyond the want for happy endings - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

Selfie: sunbathing around my plants - Protesilaos Stavrou: Master feed with all updates

Wonders of Web Weaving, Episode 6 - James' Coffee Blog

Load the themes through the `early-init.el`

A palette can now have a `bg-popup` entry

Internal refinements to the `modus-themes-with-colors` macro

The `multiple-cursors` are fine even when a bar is used

The `blink-matching-paren-offscreen` is the same as `show-paren-match`

Get `vc-annotate` look right