2018 NBA finals musing

The NBA finals finished last night with the Golden State Warriors finishing the sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers. On the whole, the Warriors completely deserve the series win: they had the better team, the better coaching and the better play. The Cavs are a limited team lifted to excellence by Lebron James and it showed. If Lebron wasn’t amazing, they were easily dominated. If he was amazing, it was close.

Simple Linux keyboard switching: Carillon

As part of my work on my custom Linux distribution, I needed an application that: had a graphical user interface, listed a set of keyboard layouts, applied them when changed, used low-level X components only. A very simple set of requirements. And yet, I couldn’t find anything. Most of them are tied to a specific desktop environment, like GNOME or KDE. Or they use their own complex components, like iBus. I knew about xkb but everything I’d used was either CLI-only or were static graphical views.

My own Linux distro: DistroD

Linux is the best alternative if you’re not running one of Windows or Mac OS, the two big juggernauts of the desktop OS world. There are a huge number of distributions that cover a range of use cases. But none really hit the sweet spot for me, so I built my own.

Clojure Is Lovely

In my current job, I’ve been using Clojure as one of the main languages. Every time I go back to it, it makes my heart soar. Ok, I might be overexaggerating a little. But it is great.

The state of basketball in Ireland

I love basketball. I’ve played many sports, but none make me feel as good when I’m shooting hoops. So today I got to do a shootaround for the first time in nearly five years. Why so long, if I like it so much?

On backups and old digital data

On starting up this blog again, I wanted to import the posts from the old Google App Engine version. I had made a backup of them beforehand. Or had I? I looked in some of my backup locations:

Irish politics makes me mad

The referendum on the 8th amendment of the Irish constitution is due on the 25th of May. This amendment, for all intents and purposes, banned abortion in Ireland. It’s a heated topic here as much as it is anywhere else in the world. For my part, I’ll be voting to repeal the amendment but I’m not going to get into that now. My beef is really with what’s going to happen if the referendum does end up changing the constitution.