The musings of an aspiring carver of space

Life in the UK test, and tmux

Well, the subject test is booked; reference material ordered. That wasn't cheap, but no part of this gruelling five-year process has been. My anxiety is way up, thinking about going to the testing centre in person. Wish I could've paid for something proctored over the Internet. Goodness knows they've come up with loads of ways to gouge me to date; can't believe they've missed this opportunity. Business figured this out long ago, folks — get with the times, dang it!

I almost thought about asking for a mental health exception; I'm confident I could get it. But I'm absolutely terrified of running afoul of this process; of being kicked out, losing my family, my job. Oh, for the day this Sword of Damocles is sheathed for good; 'til then, mind the eggshells.


I did find time to have a proper play with tmux. It's easy to see why it's so popular. I found a good introduction on YouTube, which linked to the author's associated cheat-sheet. The only omission: resizing panes; the documentation confused me on this point, but I found an excellent explanation in short order. Now I've got watch — which I only found out about through Mike, btw! — running who -uw | sed -E 's/\s+/ /g' - | cut -d" " -f1-4 - in a small pane off to the side, letting me know who's about while I play about. :–)

I'm also learning about weechat at the same time. I think I might move away from Hexchat; I don't find it intuitive or user-friendly, so, if I'm going to struggle with this return to IRC regardless, I'd like to have a snazzy, simple command-line waiting at the end of those efforts.

Oh, and I've got my backups to a decent state, finally. Timeshift snapshots sit on my new thumb drive (for that purpose alone), ready to boot, and all my documents and keepsakes are on an external hard drive, and on Keybase.

My Android phone sits outside of all that, though. Backups go to Google Photos as soon as I hit Wi-Fi, but I typically don't move everything over to my desktop until I start running out of space on my phone. So, yeah, not great on two counts. A work in progress, as I've said before.

End of Day 47


jlj@Fosstodon #100DaysToOffload

I'm writing this as part of the 100 Days To Offload project; join us at: https://100daystooffload.com/