Aqeel Akber

I am Aqeel Akber, a Ph.D candidate in nuclear physics at the Australian National University.

I like art, science, nature, and humanity.
I have a twitter.
I operate within this system.

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Connectivity

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• 10 Oct 2018 » myOS / emacs configuration - org files and spacemacs layers
  myos emacs

  Emacs is not a great text editor, but a great operating system. However, that's most certainly not because it's easy to configure. Experienced users of emacs (like myself) begin to start viewing emacs as a way of life more than a piece of software. This is unsurprising. Emacs is tantalizing. It's simple because it focuses on working with plain text, it's complex because it's meant to be infinitely customisable. This translates to a lot of hours and effort to get set up the way you like in return for such a wonderful reward. Maybe emacs is more a drug and we're junkies? Not really a question, it's definitely true. This is how I make sure my habit doesn't get out of hand.

• 02 Oct 2018 » Burning Seed 2018 - sharing my personal journal entries and post chrysalis Aqeel
  musings journal personal

  Prologue

  I never intend to publish my journal entries, especially not my personal ones. When I die the custodian of them can do as they please, until then they're mine. The following three are an exception to this, determined after the fact. This musing, these entries, are built upon thousands of hours of personal thoughts and hundreds of hours of journal entries. Fair warning, I'm going to make abstract (and likely confusing) references very quickly. This is more faithful to the entries themselves that are a way for me replay the day, word vomit, and serialize complex thoughts from memory to disk and store just the pointer. It's relieving and a snapshot of my thoughts at that time. They lack external detail and only contain internal thoughts I want to remember, this is not a book. Because they're intended for me, and they are my thoughts, I know how to deserialize them.

• 25 Sep 2018 » Generate a dark theme and add a toggle switch to your website in 10 minutes with pure CSS / JavaScript
  javascript css blog

  Click the following icon and this website will change dramatically right before your eyes. Because I'm lazy I used the excellent browser plugin Dark Reader on the light theme of my website to generate the dark theme. Using its static theme engine, I copied the CSS dark reader generates and ordinarily injects into the page. I'm now hosting that on my server and with a bit of JavaScript attached to the moon icon, readers can now enjoy a beautiful dark theme without having to install a plugin.

• 23 Sep 2018 » Visualise the knowledge contained on your blog with a tag network
  musings physics blog javascript

  Since I started my Ph.D about 2 years ago, I have been thinking a lot about where knowledge is contained. This is because one of my objectives during my Ph.D is to advance human knowledge. My research sub-field in nuclear physics is nuclear structure. The holy grail of nuclear structure research (as far as I see it) is to represent the nuclear chart in such a way such that nuclei with similar quantum structure are grouped. The electronic quantum structure has been classified in this way already, we have the periodic table of elements. However, nuclear structure is objectively more complicated and it's unlikely that a simple 2-dimensional table will be an accurate representation. Thus, a large amount of study of nuclear structure involves identifying systematic trends between nuclei. I can add knowledge to the field of nuclear structure by connecting nuclei by a trend / behaviour. Turns out my thoughts on this topic align very closely with the relatively modern (2005) theory of learning called connectivism.

• 22 Sep 2018 » Delegating work to machines and becoming a superhuman
  myos lifehack musings

  If you took the title to its extremity it's impossible to live in this day of age not having delegated some work to a machine. Take for example the delivery of this document, it's highly unlikely a human is dictating it to you purely from memory. When I was writing about my email setup it started a train of thought that I wanted to formalise into myos. I'm interested in creating small machines that assist in completing a task. I want to reduce the amount of energy I expend on tasks i.e. I want to work less!

• 20 Sep 2018 » myOS / email - Building the perfect email setup
  myos emacs

  Trust me when I say this is the perfect setup, I've tried pretty much all of them. This setup is designed to align with myos as described in my last post that I recommend reading. Here's what you'll get:

• 17 Sep 2018 » myOS / Qubes and the Laptop
  myos lifehack qubes

  Here's the back story: the last year has been non-stop work. My $HOME folder turned has about 100 files just sitting in it, 2 tmp folders filled with lots of stuff, I'm constantly synchronising emails to my disk so that I can use notmuch mail to filter it but something broke – I don't even remember / know what (maybe nothing?), I have accrued many private keys for all the VPS' I've been using, invested in a password manager and am only starting to realise how easy it is to get to 50+ different services – and none of this is backed up.

• 12 Jan 2017 » The Fundamentals of Everything
  physics scicomm

  Yesterday it was my pleasure to brief high school students and teachers attending National Youth Science Forum on particle physics before a video linkup to Rolf Landua at CERN. Here I give a brief overview of the talk given in Canberra and provide the slides.

• 08 Jan 2017 » Auto complete anything with company mode
  emacs

  This post is in response to a comment left on my last emacs post regarding my auto completion setup, which is visible in the screencasts.

• 21 Dec 2016 » Going paperless, replacing my notebooks and journals with 1's and 0's
  lifehack emacs

  The motivation is always clear but the execution almost always falls short. At least, that has been my experience with trying to go paperless in the past. I just couldn’t find anything that could beat the simple, intuitive, and fast user experience of picking up a pen and scribbling in a hard covered notebook.

• 07 Oct 2016 » An introduction to this blog
  musings

  Dear and beautiful readers, I warmly invite you to share in the best selection of my thoughts and experiences here at my new blog, welcome.