Oh man, fond memories.
I remember being very interested in programming in middle/high school, but all the environments in our school computer lab had windows (this was in India), and I think at that time (maybe 2001-2003) I didn't even know there were other operating systems.
Our school was participating in something called International Cyber Olympiad, and of course I gave the eligibility exam.
They sent all students who passed a Knoppix Live CD to prepare for the actual competition. We did not have a PC at home until a couple of years later, but I used that CD in any PC I could find anywhere - the school computer lab, the school library computers, and my dad's office computers. It was my first experience with a Linux system (and I found it awesome). Also my first experience with gcc instead of borland c++.

TIL about describe-personal-keybindings from https://mbork.pl/2026-05-09_describe-personal-keybindings and https://irreal.org/blog/?p=13799

Definitely useful to keep track of things in a central place.

A small #Emacs #OrgMode quality-of-life tweak. I often need to replace an org heading's title while preserving the original text in the body. The problem is that pressing enter on a heading inserts a line above the properties drawer, which breaks things.

Here's a function that moves the heading title into the body (below the properties drawer and metadata), and binds it to S-RET:

(defun my-org-demote-title-to-body ()
  "Move the current heading's title into the body, below the metadata.
  Point returns to the heading for editing."
  (interactive)
  (org-back-to-heading t)
  (let* ((element (org-element-at-point))
         (title (org-element-property :raw-value element)))
    (org-edit-headline "")
    (save-excursion
      (org-end-of-meta-data t)
      (insert title "\n"))
    (org-beginning-of-line)))

(defun my-org-shift-return ()
  "On a heading, demote title to body. In a table, copy down."
  (interactive)
  (cond
   ((org-at-heading-p) (my-org-demote-title-to-body))
   ((org-at-table-p) (org-table-copy-down 1))
   (t (org-return))))
  (define-key org-mode-map (kbd "S-<return>") #'my-org-shift-return)

Faced a failing disk in my raidz2 ZFS pool today.

Recovery was pretty simple:

1. Asked the service provider to replace the disk
2. Find new disk ID etc using:

   lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL,SERIAL,LABEL,FSTYPE
   ls -ltrh /dev/disk/by-id/ata-*

3. Resilver using:

   sudo zpool replace lake <old_disk_id> <new_disk_id>

4. Watch status using:

   watch zpool status -v

Re-silvering is still ongoing, but hopefully completes without issues. Will run a manual zpool scrub at the end to make sure everything is okay.

A small elisp snippet that I found useful. I often switch between terminals and #Emacs, and they have slightly different behaviors for C-w. This makes it behave the same in Emacs as it does in bash/zsh/fish etc - deletes the last word. It retains the kill-region behavior if a region is actually selected.

(defun kill-region-or-backward-word ()
  "If the region is active and non-empty, call `kill-region'.
Otherwise, call `backward-kill-word'."
  (interactive)
  (call-interactively
   (if (use-region-p) 'kill-region 'backward-kill-word)))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-w") 'kill-region-or-backward-word)

Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13844453/how-do-i-make-c-w-behave-the-same-as-bash