Ghostty

I decided to give Ghostty another shot after my first try back when it came out. Initially I was kind of turned off by the fact that it’s based on GTK when running it on Linux so it doesn’t really look native on KDE.

But in the meantime they at least changed the titlebar to look nice on QT (KDE), and since I’m not really using the tab functionality directly in Ghostty since i use Zellij for that, it actually does everything I need it to do. I don’t really see any killer feature yet that would differentiate it from WezTerm for my personal usecase - but then again I’m not really using any advanced features in WezTerm either.

It’s possible that there’s some small issue with the column length for fastfetch, haven’t really checked that yet.

GitHub Copilot CLI

Another tool that I just started playing around with is GitHub Copilot CLI. I’ve already been using GitHub Copilot in VS Code and Visual Studio for like a year now, both with a personal subscription and at work, but this allows you to run it directly in the terminal.

It asks for permission to run any commands and you can set which working directories it has access to. It’s been pretty cool to just have it do some annoying or tedious tasks without needing to interact with it a lot. And since in most projects i track everything with Git anyways I’m not too worried about messing something up without being able to revert any changes.

Just earlier today I had it create a PWA for TeuxDeux on KDE even though Firefox doesn’t officially support it yet on Linux. It has been pretty cool to see it actually try and look up things like the icon for it online and it tried out a couple KDE specific commands to have the app show up in the application menu. Pretty impressive - I probably wouldn’t have bothered to make it work myself.

Overall I want to play around with it more but it seems like this opens up the usecases for Copilot quite a bit more for me.

Last week I bought two new VSTs during the summer sale of Native Instruments. Got some pretty good deals on them and I’m excited to play around with them and overall I’m trying to stick to my goal of practising music production more regularly.

Symphony Series Collection

A collection of a bunch of classical instruments - brass ensemble, brass solo, percussion, string ensemble, woodwinds ensemble and woodwinds solo.

Overall I’m pretty happy with how it sounds, the solo ones don’t blow me away but for the price I got it I can’t complain. This means I finally am also able to play around with writing some classical stuff since Ableton doesn’t offer a lot there out of the box.

The Grandeur Piano

A piano VST - I’m actually suprised how nice it sounds and it’s definitely an upgrade over the built in pianos in Ableton. Also has a bunch of nice presets and the common things like pedal noise and different rooms for reverb. You can even open or close the lid of the piano which affects the sound. And I’m going to be using this one also just for general piano practice, not exclusively for music production.

I just set up a second site that I’m planning to use for random programming projects. It runs on Blazor and can be found at code.matkv.dev

As I’ve already written before, I’ve been struggling to find a programming project to work on regularly. So I thought instead of starting random projects and abandoning them after a while, I could try and build a setup that will allow me to try out smaller projects and display them nicely somewhere public.

I’ve decided to build a site with Blazor - I’ve wanted to play around with that anyways and it allows me to use C# (I’ve been trying to use C# for private projects as well, not only for work). And hopefully I’ll be able to set it up in a way that will make it comfortable to showcase some other small projects on there.

I need to clean up a lot of the boilerplate code that was added with the default Blazor setup and just overall learn more about Blazor and then, as a start, I’ll move all the projects from https://matkv.dev/projects over there so I can kind of separate this blog from programming topics - I’ve been meaning to do that anyways.

All in all, I’m curious how it will work out and what I’ll be able to build!

I’ve been interested in personal knowledge base systems recently. After reading about several different ones, I’ve decided to give Obsidian a shot & try moving all my existing notes there & set up an Obsidian vault from scratch.

Obsidian is a personal knowledge base that is based on markdown files. This is one of the main reasons why I wanted to give it a shot. While the software itself isn’t open source, it at least doesn’t use a proprietary format that would keep me locked into their system if they ever decide to give up development on the app.

The whole idea of Obsidian is to create links between notes in order to connect them by topic - this can then also be shown in a pretty fancy graph.

From playing around with it a bit yesterday & today, I’m pretty impressed so far. It has a couple nice plugins + support for community plugins - for example I already have one installed for Git integration which lets me comfortably back up this whole vault to a private GitHub repository.

I’m still deciding how to set it up in general & I want to make sure to only add notes & content that are actually still relevant to me now. I could probably also use Obsidian as my main way to write the content for this website - Hugo also uses Markdown files for the main content. So I could basically mirror everything on here & just publish the content that I’d actually want to be publicly accessible.

I’m curious if I’ll actually stick to it and continue using it. I really like the idea of having all my notes in one place.

I changed the domain for this website! It can now be reached at matkv.dev. Previously it was my full name + “.com” but I decided to change it because I feel more comfortable sharing this domain on various sites without having to actually reveal my full name.

However, my old domain still works & now just redirects to this new one - I think I’ll keep paying for it just so that nobody else can steal it from me :D And it’s also nice to have a fairly professional looking email address that I can use this way.

The setup itself was a breeze, I was able to basically just copy the settings from my old domain and set them for the new one. So far everything works as expected.

A fun fact that I learned, when using a domain with the .dev top level domain, you apparently have to use https & a SSL certificate. But this was pretty easy to set up with my domain provider. All in all, I’m happy with the result!