Since I’m spectacularly dim, it never occured to me that I can run markdown from

within

vim. Select your text, run !markdown, and wham! bam! everything is replaced by its technicolor HTML twin.

Yet another linux trick I keep on forgetting…

To display a notification on the desktop from the command-line:

# apt-get install libnotify-bin

$ notify-send “hello world”

obv. “from the command-line” really means “from a script”, unless you’re in some Evil Dead situation of independently-mobile hands

[reason for looking: trying to get xmonad+dmenu to notify me when I mistype a command, rather than just failing silently]

Modern Arab/Arabic fiction — any recommendations? Ideally not something too downbeat or unrelentingly political, and available in translation.

Habermas and Europe — Crooked Timber:

A very considerable part of Habermas’ intellectual project over the last few years has been exactly to come up with a form of patriotism which is distinct from nationalism. Habermas dubs this “constitutional patriotism” – and while it is not intended to overcome existing forms of nationalism, it is intended to temper them, and to make them non-exclusive.

& back to Henry F as himself:

he moment when (if) an actual European polity will be created, will not be the moment when European publics, led by their elites, realize that they are actually Europeans. It will be the moment at which self-interested political parties, rather than arguing and picking petty squabbles about whether ‘we’ should all be Europeans or not, start arguing and picking petty squabbles about what kind of Europeans ‘we’ should be.

Reddit longform seems bizarrely invisible to search engines. Search ‘reddit longform’ anywhere and you won’t reach it; wonder what happened?

WaPo:

Like Washington’s go-go, Baltimore Club exists as a regional sound relatively unknown outside the mid-Atlantic. The music blends the repetitive boom of house or techno with hip-hop’s aggressive posturing and full-frontal frankness (one of the most popular B-More singles is DJ Booman’s “Watch Out for the Big Girl”). What B-More lacks in subtlety it overpowers with shouted hooks, uncleared samples and chest-rattling bass patterns that induce dance-floor euphoria. Baltimore Club allows hip-hop heads to get their rave on.

Still can’t figure out if I like bmore at all, or if it’s just Donna Summer. Suspect the latter

For the record: there are few corners of the internet that I loathe as completely as I loathe twitter. If I love you very much, it’s possible I may still read your tweets. But it’ll be through gritted teeth, with constant frustration at the impossibility of having a decent conversation there, and I’d much, much rather follow you to almost any other online forum.