TIL May 1

• Nota seems a nice command line calculator. It converts what you type into ASCII art formulas.

  In[1]: 10 + 10

 Out[1]: 20.0


           _____
  In[2]: ╲╱ 100

 Out[2]: 10.0


             ┌                  ┐
  In[3]: Max │ 10 , 1 , 21 , -3 │
             └                  ┘

 Out[3]: 21.0


  In[4]: ⟨Emre's Number⟩ ≡  79

 Out[4]: 79.0


           _______________
  In[5]: ╲╱ Emre's Number

 Out[5]: 8.888194417315589


                      2
  In[6]: Emre's Number

 Out[6]: 6241.0


                      Emre's Number
  In[7]: Emre's Number

 Out[7]: 8.1759873707105095e149

It looks a bit heavy for a CLI calculator, due to the fact that it's written in Haskell and downloaded 100+ MB of libraries but when you need ASCII art to show your calculations and use spaces in variables, it may prove useful.

• I began to use Intention to limit my Twitter time. It allows to set a limited time (1-5-10-15 minutes) for yourself occasionally and checks the total time you spent in addictive sites. When this total time is lower than your goal for a period, you get a streak. Looks visually and psycologically nicer than LeechBlock.

• I read the git reset section in the git book. It details how git reset behaves with its --soft, --mixed and --hard parameters. The first resets only the HEAD, the second both index and HEAD and the third resets working tree and copies files back from current HEAD to the working tree.

  One important point: Contrasting git checkout master and git reset master: The first moves HEAD to master branch and the second moves current branch to master.

  git reset can also be used to squash commits into one. Basically you git reset --mixed to an earlier branch like HEAD~3 and recommit. This creates a new commit, taking HEAD~3 as parent and skipping HEAD~2, HEAD~1 with a new HEAD

• Here there are many useful pure bash functions to be used in scripts. I’m a zsh person but writing bash scripts is more portable, of course.