Today I have updated my $EDITOR variable to point to Helix instead of Neovim, and also configured Yazi to use it as the first option for text. I have used [Neo]vim since forever, so what made me switch? In this post, I discuss some of the ups and downs of both editors and what ultimately made me decide for Helix.

Nowadays, makefiles are ubiquitous in software. Most C and C++ projects have used them historically, and still use them as a build system. Nowadays, lots of projects written in other languages which have their own build tools also use them, not to make files, but to store and run commands in an organized manner. If this is you, you are doing it wrong. However, there is a tool designed to do just that: just.

Do you want to add a canvas with a shader running in real time to your Hugo site? In this post I show how to create a Hugo shortcode to display a shader.

A couple of years ago I wrote about the procedurally generated planets in Gaia Sky. In this post, I provided a more or less detailed technical overview of the process used to procedurally generate planetary surfaces and cloud layers.

Since then, we have used the system to spice up the planets in the planetary systems for which the Gaia satellite could determine reasonable orbits (see the data here, and some Gaia Sky datasets for some of those systems here, including HD81040, Gl876, and more).

However, with the upcoming Gaia DR4, the number of candidate exoplanets is expected to increase significantly, rendering the “one dataset per system” approach unmaintainable. In this post I describe some of the improvements made with regards to exoplanets in Gaia Sky, in both the handling of large numbers of extrasolar systems seamlessly, and in the brand new, improved procedural generation of planetary surfaces and clouds.

Edit (2024-07-03): The thesis has now been published and is available here (Open Access).

After almost 2 years since the submission of my Ph.D. thesis, I finally could defend it successfully last Friday (May 3, 2024). It has been a long journey, exactly 9 years since the initial acceptance on May 3, 2015. The road has been bumpy, especially since I had to juggle my job with the work I was doing on the side for the thesis, but in the end I think it was well worth it. I learned a ton, especially in the field of scientific visualization, which was completely new to me. I will share the author’s copy of my thesis shortly.

The POSIX diff, cmp and patch commands are very versatile. Sometimes, you need to edit a part of a file and send only your changes to somebody else to apply. This is where these handy commands can help. This post describes concisely how to use them to compare files, create patches and apply them.