About this blog

This blog reflects my personal opinion, experience, experiments and advice on a certain number of topics. It is a way of sharing thoughts and information that others may find useful.

I am fascinated by technology, many may call me a geek. My background is in research, computational chemistry in particular, and you can get more information about my professional activity on my research website. This blog is mostly reflecting my experiments as an individual fascinated by all things digital. I live in the terminal, nowadays very much in Emacs, and most of the time some type of keyboard is close to my fingers. Computer graphics and (scientific) visualization are among my favorite topics, as well as gaming.

There are a gazillion facets of the digital I want to experiment with. I love to optimize my processes, workflows and my digital life in general. I am also fascinated by many recent trends, AI, generative appraches, chatbots, crypto and the blockchain, etc. - you name them! These are the core types of thoughts and findings I would like to share. They typically relate to Emacs, MacOS, GUIX Linux in particular, but themes may spill over to very diverse areas of application. One of those is retro-gaming based on the batocera platform.

No big story here. Simply, when I was looking for my own domain name, more than 25 years ago, at the beginning of my PhD thesis, I had just discovered the symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) architecture on Linux. I was so blown away by this concept that I thought it would be great to name my web and email domain after it. Hence I have been truthful to this choice - made long ago - and it is now quite logical that my main personal blog also goes to the www.smplinux.de domain.

When I put this blog together, I took much inspiration and resources across the internet. Here is a list (I hope not to forget anything too important -- tell me if you notice I used some of your tools or resources and didn't credit you!).

I use lazyblorg to make this blog happen. I made slight adaptations, for instance to make use of #+LINK tag url.. definitions to call my url links just by the tag name rather than putting the actual URLs everywhere inside the core of the text.

Heavy inspiration from SystemCrafter's website and the many resources it provides. I liked the color and font setup so much, I copied it almost literally over to this blog's stylesheets etc.. I hope David Wilson will forgive me the heavy inspiration I took from his style. I also looked at bits from Barely Buggy's blog and stylesheet, using dark mode for lazyblorg. The fonts -as mentioned- are the same as used by David Wilson on SystemCrafters, namely JetBrains Mono (SIL OFL-1.1 license) and Iosevka Aile (SIL OFL-1.1 license). The color theme, I believe, is a mix between the dark Modus theme modus-vivendi and the doom-palenight theme from Doom themes.

The usual way I work requires a large number of tools that I cannot all thank here. Among the essential ones figures GNU Emacs and a broad range of packages for it such as org-mode.

All information on this blog is shared as is, without any warranties and only based on my limited experience on my computer and setup. Before applying anything to your specific case and re-using snippets of code, be aware that it is your responsibility to make sure nothing bad may happen (data loss, unintended information sharing, ..).