Donovan R.

💭 The Long Way Back to the Vakana

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Back in May, I told you the idea: that my ancestors’ beads and a Lisp program are the same shape. I made it sound like it arrived in a single evening. The idea did. Getting to the point where an evening like that was even possible took most of my life, and it went the long way around — through woven straw, a programmable calculator, a private alphabet, and a pen I’ll tell you about in a minute.

This is that story. It’s more personal than the last one, and a good deal less tidy.

When I was a child, the vakana — our Malagasy beads — frightened me a little. Some of it was religion. But even as a boy, without the words for it, I understood that these were not ornaments. They were loaded. They carried things: information, the way a label does — but also intentions, and qualities, and something heavier than either. The way a painting carries more than its paint.

The old beads take their names from plants, mostly — no accident, in a people as watchful of plants as mine — and the names are not tags. Each one is a compressed charge. So the beads made me uneasy, as if a curse might find me through my fingers if I touched one.

What is faintly ridiculous — and what took me years to see — is that the imported beads never did this to me. The mass-produced ones felt like nothing at all. Empty, weightless, silent. There was a presence in the handmade thing the factory thing simply did not have. Hold that thought; I had it almost exactly backwards.

And underneath the fear, the fascination never left. People who wore the old beads — monks counting theirs, singers draped in vakana — held my eye completely, even when it tipped into theatre. They carried an aura, mysterious and a little intimidating, because they had something the rest of us did not: a whole psychological arsenal, hung around the neck.

I think differently now about the man who burns his beads and calls them the devil’s tools. A tool does not think for itself. What it does is decided by the one who holds it. If you stab someone, you are the devil, not the knife — and the same knife peels fruit. The Bible has been carried into war and into mercy both. A man is defined by his actions, not by what hangs at his neck. The object is innocent. I wish someone had told me that when I was small and afraid of a string of beads.

But I understood none of this for a long time. To come back and see what the vakana was, I first had to leave it completely.

Two loves were planted in me early, before I could name either: a love of pattern, and a love of structure. They turned out to be the same love.

The first thing I remember as both art and data was my grandmother’s hands moving through woven straw — rary, the plaiting that is everywhere in Malagasy life. A pattern held in the fingers, built up unit by unit into a whole. I did not know I was watching a data structure being assembled by hand. I just thought it was beautiful.

Then a book — Vorona Malagasy — somehow set me chasing Japanese, and I fell for katakana, those clean little signs. They are a kana — a syllabary, marks that stand for sounds, the way hiragana and the roman letters I am writing in now do. They spell; they do not mean. I got so taken with signs that, as a little boy, I invented my own — a private set of characters I wrote with my left hand that only I could read. But what truly caught me was kanji: a sign that is not a spelling at all, but carries its meaning on its own, whole, however you say it aloud. I see now I was already circling the one thing this whole story is about — and that a bead, though it took me decades to see it, is a kanji, not a kana: not a spelling of a sound, but a sign that carries its own meaning. I thought I was only playing.

Then my cousin built a game on a programmable calculator, and that was that: I had to know how the machine was made to obey. I became a computer scientist. I kept learning kanji, because the signs never let me go. I wrote software for a living. I kept my journal on my phone, in OneNote. I had built a whole life inside the digital, the modern, the imported — about as far from a string of beads as a person can get.

And then I got stuck. Nothing you could point to — just a plateau, a sense of being lodged in my own life. I changed jobs, and the new work pushed me to find a better way to take notes. That led me to the Zettelkasten, and the Zettelkasten led me down a long, happy rabbit hole of note-taking systems.

The hinge of the whole story is a pen.

I was doing an observation exercise — just attending, closely, to an ordinary object in my hand. Afterward I could recall the pen in absurd detail: its weight, its seams, the wear on the clip, the exact way the light sat on it. All of it. Except one thing — the serial number.

That blank told me two things, and they rearranged me.

One: I do not have a memory problem. Almost no one does. What we call a bad memory is, nearly always, a focus problem wearing a disguise.

Two — and this became the seed of everything since: the serial number would not stick because it meant nothing to me. It did not harmonize with the rest of the pen. A string of marks with no charge, no relation, no reason to hold — exactly like the empty factory bead that had never frightened me. Meaning is what makes a thing stay. The unmeant thing slides off.

I already held the whole pen — the weight, the seams, the way the light sat on it — so I went back for the one thing that had refused me: the serial number. I tried to brute-force it, plain repetition, and it would not stick. Of course it wouldn’t — numbers slip because their spoken names are long and mean nothing. So I got stubborn: I tried using just the first Malagasy syllable of each digit and stitching those into little words. It worked astonishingly well. I had to tweak the 4 and the 6 because they resemble each other, but it worked.

I was amazed I had reached my age without seeing something so simple — and, of course, others had been there long before me. That is how I found the Major System, centuries old and far more mature: it assigns each digit a consonant sound and builds words from those, where my trick only borrowed the first syllables of our number-words. Not the same idea — but unmistakably the same family, and proof I had stumbled onto something real. That sent me down a second rabbit hole, the memory arts, until I reached the Memory Palace and started walking my number-words through remembered rooms. I found Anthony Metivier and read everything of his I could; the way he thinks about it finally explained why the pen had stuck so well that day.

And somewhere in the trial and error I learned the one thing I — of all people — did not want to be true. For memory, the physical always beats the digital. I love the digital; I have spent my life in it. I tried virtual rooms, every strange combination I could invent; I even built myself a little tool to design imaginary places, a level-editor for the mind. None of it held. A digital place I have to work to remember. A real place I walk through once is mine forever. My own memory kept voting, against my wishes, for the physical.

That — finally understanding how memory actually works — quietly turned me around to face my own ancestors, and answered a question I had been carrying without noticing. The Ntaolo — our old ones — left behind a whole ethics of living: thousands of proverbs that still do their work, and fihavanana, the bond of kinship and harmony we still measure ourselves against. How did they build and carry all of that with almost no writing, and none of our machines? It had embarrassed me, faintly, the way colonized people are taught to be faintly embarrassed about their own. Now it was obvious. To encode, and to store — that is what the Major System and the Memory Palace are, and it is exactly what we do in computer science. They simply did it in the mind, with the tools every human being is issued at birth. And it is not only ours; the same thing surfaces, in different dress, across indigenous cultures the world over.

Once I could see that, the vakana clicked into place, and I could not unsee it. I have written about what I saw — the bead as a data structure, the shape of Lisp, code is data, data is code, the serpent that eats its tail. I won’t repeat it here. What matters for this story is smaller and more personal: the question that had quietly shamed me turned out to have been answered all along — by the very thing I had been taught to fear.

The vakana were everywhere in public life once, and nowhere more than in the hands of the ombiasy — our healer-sages, the keepers of what a community needed to remember. Ask the obvious question: how did they hold it all, without a computer and without much in the way of scripture? Picture an ombiasy who works out a new plant-medicine today. How does he keep it? How does he hand it to the one who comes after him? The bead. We have computers and keyboards; our parents had pen and paper; they had vakana and rary.

And here the childhood fear came back to me, turned the right way round at last. The factory bead had never frightened me because it was empty — no one had ever encoded anything into it. The presence I had felt in the handmade vakana was never in the glass or the seed. It was the encoding — the intention, the meaning a person had pressed into it. An unchosen, unmeant bead is inert, the way the serial number was inert. What I felt as a boy was not superstition, exactly. It was a crude, correct respect for a loaded thing. I had been right about the weight. I had only been wrong about where it lived.

So I came back. Not to a string of beads in my pocket — not yet — but to the recognition, which is its own kind of homecoming.

Vakana.mg, the thing I am building, is simply what my own century has put in my hands. The way they had vakana and rary, I have a database and a screen. I have been honest elsewhere about what isn’t mine in any of this, and about how small a portion of the real thing an app can hold — the physical always wins; my own memory taught me that against my will. I mean to keep being honest about it.

But what I had was never brilliance. It was the accident of one biography — the woven straw, the calculator, the kanji, the pen, the palace — setting me, without my ever arranging it, in the one place from which the straw and the sign and the remembered room and the bead could be seen as a single idea wearing four sets of clothes, the oldest of them ours. That is the whole of what I did. I stood where the doors between those rooms happened to be open, and I was stubborn enough not to look away.

The system existed before the app and will outlast it. The serpent had its tail in its mouth long before I noticed. My grandmother’s hands were assembling a data structure out of straw while I watched — and it took me a degree in computer science and a long detour through the art of memory to come home and see what she was doing.

The long way back was the only way I knew.

We have a proverb for the shape of it: Miriorio foana ny angidina, fa any an-kady ihany ny iafarana — the dragonfly wanders and wanders, but in the end it always comes back to the ditch it came from. I wandered a long way. It was always going to end here, at the bead.

💭 Vakana Thinking

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:46:38 GMT

As I am using the Vakana.mg app heavily in recent days, my mind can’t stop thinking about vakana and beads in general — there’s

💭 My Ancestors Were Writing Lisp

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been hard on Lisp lately.

Last time I wrote here, I called it a curse — a language so powerful that everyone who touches it ends up building their own private dialect, until no one can quite understand anyone else. A small Tower of Babel, assembled out of parentheses. I still think that’s true.

But I left something out of that post, because it didn’t fit the argument I was making. The same Lisp idea that scatters programmers did the opposite thing to me, once. It didn’t scatter anything. It pulled something very old back together.

It gave me back my ancestors.

Let me explain, because it sounds like more than it is.

I’m not a Lisp programmer by trade. I just love the elegance of the thing — I’ve lived inside Emacs for years, written my own Elisp, poked at Clojure enough to feel what makes the family different. And the difference, the one everyone eventually trips over, is this: in Lisp, code and data are the same kind of thing. A list of symbols is information, or it’s a program, depending only on how you choose to read it. Data is code, and code is data.

Most people find that strange. Some find it beautiful. I was sitting with the strangeness of it one evening when something turned over in my head.

The vakana, I realized, were the same shape.

Vakana is our Malagasy word for beads — and there is no other word for them in my language, which tells you something about how old they are. I grew up knowing two things about them. That they were beautiful. And that they were a little frightening — in Madagascar, beads are tangled up with sorcery, and you learn young to keep a respectful distance.

What nobody told me — what I had to go the long way around to see — is that they were also a tool for thinking.

A bead has a form, a surface, a feeling it carries, a mark. Thread a few together and you have a sentence. Wear them in an order and you have a record. Pass them to someone and you have a message. The bead isn’t only worn — it’s read. And it doesn’t only get read; it does: it anchors a memory, marks an intention, names a person, declares a state. A unit that is at once what you say and what you mean. The exact shape a Lisp programmer knows in his fingers.

It was a small thing to notice, structurally. It was a very large thing for what it implied.

(Added after a reader asked for a concrete example.)

For most of my education I’d absorbed, without anyone ever saying it out loud, that the practices of my ancestors were aesthetic. Or spiritual. Or symbolic — and sometimes those words were just a polite way of saying not quite serious. The real thinking tools belonged to modernity: the journal, the calendar, the database.

But the vakana are exactly that. My ancestors used them the way I use a journal — to hold what happened, what to remember, what to commit to. The way I use a calendar — to pin meaning to a time and a place. The way an engineer uses a schema — to compose meaning out of a few fixed parts. They wore the whole system on the body, where it could be touched and counted without looking.

What I had been taught to see as ornament was the operating system.

There’s a second half to this, and it’s the half that turned the realization from clever into important.

Malagasy is a language made of pictures, and you hear it most clearly in the way we keep time. We don’t say one-thirty in the morning — we say mitrena ombilahy, the bellowing of the bull. Two in the morning is maneno sahona, when the frogs call. Six in the evening is maty masoandro, the death of the sun. (I wrote about this once: in Malagasy, time is told by what the world is doing, not by a number.) Even the turning of the year was read this way once. The month-names we use today are borrowed Arab zodiac, but the older Malagasy ones were small descriptions of the world — Papangolahy lava elatra, the long winged male Papango, for the season the zodiac calls Aries.

And it isn’t only time. The names themselves are descriptions. A tree can be called Mpanjakaben’ny tany, the great king of the earth; the pomegranate is Apongaben-danitra, heaven’s great drum. A person’s name can be a whole sentence — Andriantsimitoviaminandriandehibe: the noble without equal among the great nobles. To name a thing, in Malagasy, is already to draw it. To think in the language is to think in pictures.

I knew, before I made the connection, how much that matters — because I’d wandered into the Art of Memory. The Memory Palace: the old trick that lets a person hold a whole shuffled deck, or a thousand names, by placing vivid images in remembered rooms. It works because memory is built for image and place far more than for word and order. The Greeks thought they’d discovered it. They were late too.

The classical memory artists knew one more thing — that the kind of image matters. An image that frightens or shocks or moves you sticks; a neutral one slides off. And here is the part that stopped me: the vakana names are already charged that way. Tsileondoza — roughly, disaster cannot undo it — is a bead worn against ruin. The whole intention compressed into one frightening word, carried on the body.

So the fear that follows the beads in Malagasy life — the sorcery, the thing I was taught to keep away from — was never a superstition wrapped around a harmless object. It was the technology working. An emotionally inert bead is a worse memory tool than a charged one. My ancestors built their system out of images that stick, and one of the surest ways to make an image stick is to make it a little dangerous.

It was a cognitive technology. It was also magic. I’ve stopped thinking those two sentences argue with each other.

Not yet another technique. Something bigger. Something stronger. One of the most sophisticated tools for thought any culture has ever produced — and most of us who inherited it have forgotten that this is what it ever was.

Let me not overstate it, though. The art is not dead. The ombiasy — our sages and healers, the keepers of the old knowledge — still hold the vakana, and hold it far more deeply than I do; there are things in it I probably can’t yet fathom. What’s been lost is not the tradition itself but the everyday relation most of us had to it — the way it was once common knowledge and is now a specialist’s, kept by a few while the rest of us learned only to be a little afraid of it.

I’d like that to be known again, by the rest of us. That, honestly, is most of why I’m doing any of this.

Here is what is mine, and what is not.

I didn’t invent the vakana — they’re older than my whole line. I didn’t discover that they form a language, either. That reading came from inside the tradition itself, and it had been set down in serious, scientific study years before I had any interest in note-taking or productivity — before I had even started to learn computer science. It was never mine to claim. And the bead itself was never the genius — the genius was the grammar that could take any object, even a foreign one, and make it carry meaning.

So what’s mine is small, and I want to keep it small. Only this: I happened to be standing in an unlikely spot — Malagasy, in love with Lisp, curious about memory — from which you could see that the bead and the list and the remembered room are the same idea wearing different clothes. That’s the whole of it. I noticed a rhyme. And I’m holding it lightly, the way you should hold any reading that hasn’t yet been proven wrong.

The app came after all of this. Not before.

A few posts ago I told you I was building something, and that I’d write about the journey. This is me, finally writing about it — except I owe you an honest correction. The tool isn’t the one I set out to make.

What I wanted was modest. Last year we planted trees, and I started watching the seasons turn — the jacaranda in flower, the odd little weeds that appear in winter and vanish before you’ve learned their names. I wanted to keep a journal of the plants in my garden: how they grew, what they were called in Malagasy, how my people once used them. Nothing on my phone fit the shape of it, so I started building something that would.

And the moment I did, the vakana insight walked in and asked to be tried. I reached for the bead-grammar almost as an experiment — could it hold a plant, a season, a cycle of growth? It could. And not only that: it held nearly everything else I had ever wanted to write down. I came back holding my ancestors’ beads. The journey took a turn I didn’t choose, and I followed it.

It’s called Vakana.mg, and I want to say plainly what it is and isn’t. It is not the vakana. The system is older than any of us and will outlast the app by a long way. What I’ve built is a working surface for it — a way to practise the grammar every day, on the phone most of us actually live inside, without a string of beads in the pocket. It’s an imperfect translation, because anything digital trying to carry something physical is imperfect. My own memory taught me that years ago, against my preferences: for remembering, the physical always wins.

But even imperfect work bears its fruits. The app lets the practice be kept, and re-read, and handed to someone else. And it lets the vakana be met, for the first time, by people who’d otherwise never hear the word.

If I do this honestly, the app won’t be the destination. It’ll be a door. Some who walk through it will be happy with the digital version. Some will want a real bead in the hand. Some will go and study what the ancestors actually did and bring back more than I ever could. All of that is good, and none of it belongs to me.

Lisp and the vakana turn out to be the same shape — a tiny grammar that composes without end — separated only by centuries and by what they’re made of. And neither of them hands you meaning. Lisp gives you a handful of parentheses and lets you build whatever you want; the bead gives you a handful of forms and lets you mean whatever you need. You can no more read the meaning off a stranger’s beads than off a stranger’s code — and I built the app that way on purpose.

I’ve written here before that you have to seek your own understanding — that no one can do that part for you, however much you’d like them to. The vakana is the same conviction, made into a tool.

Because no one can hand you your meaning, either: not a guru, not even a true elder — and not me. Not because the keepers are frauds; they hold real depth, more than I ever will. But a meaning you were handed, and did not make yourself, won’t hold — and an image you choose is the only kind that does. What an elder can give you, what I can give you, is the grammar: small, and old, and ours, and far stronger than I was taught. The meaning, you write yourself.

I’m building it for the few people who, reading this, will feel a small click of recognition.

It isn’t out yet — vakana.mg just says coming soon, which is honest. If you’d like to know when it’s ready, you can leave your email there.

If that’s you — stick around. I’ll be writing about the journey.

💭The curse of LISP, Again

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:34:21 GMT

Long ago, while hiking far from the big cities, we passed through a small village.

Something happened that caught me completely off guard.

People we had never met before invited us into their home to eat with them. Just like that. No suspicion, no hesitation, no awkwardness. It felt so natural to them that they didn’t even think twice about it.

And I was… in awe.

Which is honestly a bit embarrassing. Being surprised by your own culture says more about how much city life reshapes your expectations than anything else.

But in those villages, it’s not strange. It’s simply how things used to work.

When places are difficult to access and transportation isn’t fast or reliable, people develop a very different mindset. Survival, comfort, and safety depend on cooperation. If someone is traveling and runs out of food, what happens if nobody helps them?

You help because someday you might be the one who needs help.

For a long time, humans had to live this way. As groups. As communities.

In big cities today, things work differently. You can behave like a complete jackass and still get away with it. If things go wrong, you just hop on the next bus and disappear somewhere else.

The environment shapes the mindset.

And lately, I’ve been feeling a strange sense of déjà vu when looking at the AI ecosystem.

The Curse of LISP, Again

There is an old joke among programmers: God created the universe using LISP.

LISP is one of the most powerful programming languages ever created. Once it clicks, it gives you an incredible level of freedom. You can reshape the language itself. You can build almost anything.

But that power carries a strange side effect.

Everyone ends up building their own thing.

Their own frameworks. Their own dialects. Their own tools.

The ecosystem fragments.

Sometimes I like to imagine a different version of the Tower of Babel story.

Maybe God gave people LISP.

Everyone became powerful enough to build their own system, their own language, their own tools… until none of them could understand each other anymore. Without a shared framework, the tower stopped growing.

And now, looking at AI assistants, I can’t help but see the same pattern emerging.

The Claw Explosion

Since the birth of OpenClaw, new AI assistants have been spawning everywhere.

NanoClaw.
PicoClaw.
ZeroClaw.
NullClaw.

And it doesn’t seem to slow down.

Even big companies are joining the party. Alibaba recently released their own version called CoPaw.

It’s both fascinating and a little unsettling.

If you’re from Madagascar, this phenomenon sounds oddly familiar.

We have a term for things that suddenly appear and multiply uncontrollably — “Foza orana.” It literally means crayfish. When crayfish appeared en masse in Madagascar, they didn’t just spread fast — they started destroying rice fields, disrupting the ecological balance.

That’s the image I can’t shake when I see hundreds of AI assistants being born at once.

It’s not that they’re evil — just that their number, speed, and independence could quietly reshape the landscape they’re meant to improve.

When Individuals Get Godlike Tools

AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to building tools.

A single individual can now create things that previously required entire teams.

That power is incredible.

But it also brings back the same pattern we saw with LISP… and later with the Node.js ecosystem. Thousands upon thousands of tiny packages, dependencies stacked on dependencies, each solving a slightly different problem.

Now imagine that phenomenon multiplied by hundreds.

Or thousands.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. And I’m definitely not saying we’re doomed.

We’re still at the beginning, and it’s impossible to predict how things will stabilize.

But one question keeps coming back to me:

What happens when you give individuals the power to build worlds?

They start acting like gods.

And when many gods start appearing in the same universe…

Conflict usually follows.

Maybe it’s just human nature — repeating itself in code.

Plain Text to Vision Models: Evolving My Expense Workflow

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:47:53 GMT

A few years ago, I went looking for a good app for budgeting and tracking expenses. I wanted something simple enough that I would actually use it.

Then I discovered the Plain Text Accounting approach and eventually hledger, and it immediately clicked for me. If you are a terminal lover or you like your data in plain text, hledger is a great fit. Your records live in ordinary text files: no proprietary format, no locked‑in database, and best of all, everything is Git‑friendly.

Using hledger quickly becomes natural once you grasp the basics of double‑entry accounting. You run hledger add, type in accounts and amounts with tab completion, and hledger appends the transaction to your journal file:

1
2
3

2026-03-02 Supermarket
    expenses:food          2500 Ar  ; sandwich
    assets:cash

I type each item as a comment next to the price, so if I ever need to find something, a quick text search pulls it right up. In practice, this feels smoother than any graphical budgeting app I have tried, and it costs nothing except a bit of time. This simple workflow has worked reliably for years.

During my workflow review session in December 2025, I wanted to try a new approach that could save me time on the manual work. Hledger is great, but not without its own limitations:

Flexibility: I had to be at my desk to actually use hledger. It probably works fine with Termux, but I was never tempted to set it up.
Chores: I would buy something during the day, stuff the receipt in my bag, and by evening I had zero interest in sitting down to type entries. The receipts piled up. Saturday mornings became catch‑up sessions — me and a stack of crumpled paper, working through the backlog.

The second issue was partially solved: use a VLM to digitize and structure the data from receipts directly, just the way I was digitizing my notes with Google Gemini. I wanted to build a personal app with my own database, which would also be flexible enough to swap models in case I had a problem with whatever I was using.

The idea was not novel. In fact, I had played with OCR before (ocr.space generously gives some free OCR API access, by the way). But it was always finicky: the photo had to be straight, the lighting had to be good, the text had to be clear, and even then it often stumbled. Using a VLM is different. It does more than read characters; it understands context. It knows what a receipt looks like, which number is the total, which one is the tax. With proper prompting, you can get cleaned‑up data with proper formatting.

So I wrote a small Python script at first: send the image to the model and get back structured data.

It worked, so I turned it into a proper backend with an API, then built a Vue frontend to use my phone camera. It was pretty cool: point the camera, send, and the extracted data is directly saved in the app’s database. The rest of the features came up organically. I added:

categories, tags, and search features
a dashboard
budgeting features with spending progress and alerts
a calendar with an expense heatmap, scheduling, and recurring expenses
a natural language extraction feature
…

By the end of January 2026, after some polishing and a security checkup, I had a full‑featured, production‑ready, AI‑powered expense management web app deployed on my VPS.

Now, when I have a receipt, I take a photo from the app… and it is done. I can do that whenever and wherever I am. No need to wait until I am in front of my computer anymore, and no need to manually put the items in hledger. The app handles everything automatically for me.

The receipt on my desk does not wait for Saturday anymore.

I built a hledger export feature, just in case. If for some reason I no longer have access to a VLM, I can still export my data and fall back to hledger. But so far, I have not needed it.

My 2026 Note-Taking Workflow

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:31:26 GMT

I think about note-taking more than I probably should. I’m thinking about it right now, actually. 😅

It started as a way to understand myself better — to track how my mind worked, what I cared about, where I was going. Somewhere along the way, it became a time machine. I can look back six months, a year, and see myself thinking. Sometimes I cringe at what I wrote. Sometimes I surprise myself with wisdom I’ve since forgotten.

I didn’t expect any of this. I didn’t sit down and design a workflow. It just… happened.

In January, I bought a pack of blank little square papers. Non-sticky, white, nothing fancy. I thought I’d use them for doodling. Like during meetings while half-listening 😁 .

But then a grocery list ended up on one. And some todo items on another. And before long, I was sketching diagrams, mapping out project architectures, jotting down random thoughts across these small white pages.

They kind of took over.

Now I keep three or four squares spread across my desk, each holding a different topic. When something comes to mind, I jump to the right one, write it down, move on. One square for project ideas. Another for a blog draft. A third for whatever’s rattling around.

The square format forces me to be concise — there’s only so much space. And having multiple squares open means I can switch contexts without losing the thread.

It’s simple. It shouldn’t work this well. But it does.

At the end of each day, I go through my squares one by one. It feels like viewing old photographs — each one a small window into what I was thinking earlier.

I regroup similar topics. If something needs more, I flip the square over and keep writing on the back. Tasks get marked done. And when a square is fully processed — completed, digitized, no longer needed — I scrunch it up and drop it in a transparent jar.

The jar idea came from Laurie Herault’s article about sticky notes and feedback loops. There’s something satisfying about watching thoughts become artifacts. The jar fills up. I see how much I’ve processed. It’s a small thing, but it matters.

Google Gemini digitizes my handwritten notes. It’s free, it’s capable, and the process is simple:

Photo. Send. Get text.

Analog becomes digital. Messy becomes searchable. Most of the time, that digitized text ends up in Logseq — where it connects to everything else.

I’m also testing other models on OpenRouter — experimenting for something I’m building. But Gemini handles the job for now.

Here’s what I’ve learned: handwriting is thinking. The pen slows me down, and in that slowness, understanding emerges. AI just ensures I don’t lose what I write. The notes live twice — once on paper where hand meets thought, once digital where search and connection happen.

My current stack is nothing special:

Square papers — for raw capture. One topic per square, spread across my desk.

Logseq — for networked thinking, daily journaling, tracking people. My old banner plugin resurfaces quotes randomly, which keeps old insights alive.

Emacs (Org Mode) — just org-clock-in and org-clock-out. My pomodoro timer, time-blocker, work tracker.

Google Gemini — for digitizing handwriting.

So naturally, I’m building something to bring it all together.

Yes, I know.

Yet another PKM app.

The squares work. The ritual gives closure. The tools hold what matters. But I can’t help wanting something that brings it all together — notes, schedule, time. A tool that resurfaces not just old notes but connections between them.

Proactive insights. Notes that talk back. Patterns I’m too close to see.

The technology exists. I know how to build it.

I just need the time.

If this sounds interesting, stick around. I’ll be writing about the journey.

💭 What Happens When the Apprentice Magician Plays with God’s Wands?

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:47:49 GMT

Building on my previous posts about meta-understanding and on my relationship with AI tools, today I’m sharing a bit of a conflicting interest.

In recent months, every noise you hear seems to carry AI with it. It is everywhere, and it won’t stop or go away anytime soon. We can’t really deny what’s in front of us. The capabilities of AI tools in the last few months are completely insane. I’m not talking only about content creation tools, but also deeply technical ones.

As much as I’m concerned with privacy and all that, it’s impossible to ignore that AI is here and changing everything right now—for better or for worse. I often remind myself of the movie Don’t Look Up when I’m too stubborn to see what’s going on.

The Grail for Developers

One particular tool that piqued my interest is Google’s code wiki (an AI-powered codebase explorer), where you can dive into repositories and learn whatever you want using an AI assistant. As a software developer, this feels like a grail. You cherry-pick what you want, and it’s delivered exactly as you need it.

I cannot imagine the amount of knowledge you can pour from that. Agentic AI systems (autonomous agents) can do even more, but hey, this is already here and free to use. What I want to say is that possibilities are opening everywhere for almost anyone with the right interest. Intent is no longer constrained by time or resources the way it used to be. With tools that can narrate a codebase or explain a complex paradigm in seconds, the floor of the ocean feels closer than ever. We are no longer limited by the speed of our reading, but by the clarity of our desire.

This power excites me as a developer, yet it’s exactly why my dilemma starts to grow.

Lisp, AI, and Meta-Understanding

Lisp and AI share a kind of DNA: they are both declarative. They allow us to bypass the “how” and focus on the “intent.” But Lisp is a declarative sun—it illuminates the logic. AI is a declarative shadow—it gives you the result, but swallows the entire process.

While AI helps me grasp the latest details of almost anything, the AI itself remains a black box—a closed room where the lights are off. We know little about how it truly works, and we can’t accurately predict what it will do. We are using an opaque mind to create a transparent world: an apprentice magician playing with God’s tools.

If I use a tool I do not understand to explain a tool I want to master, where does the meta-understanding actually live?

Closing Thought

“The one who invented the boat also invented the shipwreck,” as the saying goes, but the unease persists for me. There is a new light, a very strong one. It is the future, but I can’t shake the uncomfortable feeling I have about this “new light.”

I’m interested to know what people think about this. Do you share similar feelings? What’s your take on all this?

💭 The Seed Beneath The Tree

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 13:49:55 GMT

“I cannot understand every leaf of a tree. There is just too much. But if I understand the essence of the tree, I will intuitively know what will come out and when.”

By understanding the root, the understanding of the branches arises naturally. And understanding the rest follows.

What is the root but the planted seed? The one source of truth where everything else came from.

Studying all the patterns within all leaves of a tree is a tremendous task. But one might understand more about the tree just from its seed.

Everything is connected

Often, what appears to be unrelated is but the prolongation of the same thing.

Everything seems separated—not because they objectively are, but because we are unable to see the interconnection yet.

Every aha moment is the finding of that one dot connecting two seemingly isolated points.

I keep noticing this. A real-life situation that can be resolved using a paradigm from programming. A problem in one area that mirrors a pattern from somewhere else entirely. It happens so often that I have started to expect it.

Most innovation in the world is not novelty. It is borrowed concepts from other domains. A combination of what appeared to be unrelated.

I was watching a video recently—Michael Levin on Lex Fridman’s channel—talking about how different domains seem to point to the same direction about the manifestation of “emergence.” It struck me. Isn’t that what mystic figures were talking about thousands of years ago? Scriptures from different religions already pointing to the same thing?

Different waters, same fountain.

Finding the fountain is what understanding means to me.

What is timeless must be true

What is true in one place must be true in another. What is timeless must be true. And what is fundamentally true must remain true across different domains.

This is why I am drawn to philosophy, psychology, spirituality. This interest in the meta—in understanding itself.

And somehow it led me to Clojure, LISP, Emacs, Smalltalk. To the philosophy behind FOSS. Not just because of how they work, but because of what they represent—meta-programming, self-modification, the freedom to understand all the way down.

What is even greater is that these tools attract like-minded people.

When I read articles from the LISP or Emacs community, I see it. They are not just tinkering with tools. They are building deep understanding—a meta-understanding beyond their craft.

Consciously or not, we are pursuing the same Dao, if I might say it differently. Seeking essential patterns of life.

I wonder how many fountains there are. Or if it has always been just one.

My Emacs Journey (5) - Gnus

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 19:53:22 GMT

I had a little time to actually set up a mail server during the weekend. Something I wanted to do for long already but I keep postponing because I knew it will be a little challenging.

But now that it’s done, I can finally update my info page to add a mail contact@donovan-ratefison.mg. If you’ve got thoughts on anything here, I’d genuinely love to hear them—I’m always keen to hear what people think.

And since I had my own server, it was also a good time to dive down the rabbit hole of Emacs and include mail workflow.

I’ve explored a bit Gnus before when I was searching for RSS tools, but ended up using Elfeed because I felt a bit overwhelmed by its capabilities. It was too much for my little brain.

During his presentation on EmacsConf2025, Amin Bandali gave me the inspiration to give it a honest try. And I did!

And … it wasn’t that hard to get it working.

Everything about Gnus is … a bit weird but I won’t complain. I know I will get used to it over time. Plus, like Emacs itself, its weirdness makes its charm.

I can read, reply and send mails, follow RSS feeds and that’s enough for now. I intend to go full Gnus with my mail and RSS feeds from now on and we’ll see later how it goes.

The Manual Work: Authenticity In The Age Of AI

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 06:41:39 GMT

It’s been a while since my last post about AI and writing. Back then, I was worried about how AI would dissolve the real person behind the words. I wasn’t entirely wrong to worry about that. But I think it’s fair to explore different perspectives and update my understanding more often.

Things have changed fast. The AI tools are evolving at a pace that’s honestly a bit frightening. It’s Decembre 2025, and I believe it’s a good time to make retrospection, challenge my assumptions, and adjust my knowledge. After all, humans have always survived by adapting depending on the circumstances. And I’m but a human in this era of AI.
I’ve reconsidered my perspective and gave AI a honest try with new perspectives, new lense and here are my updated thoughts regarding writing.

There are things that don’t feel quite right to outsource:

Emotional depth doesn’t come from a language model—it comes from feeling, from struggling, from living through moments that shape us.
Relational understanding requires showing up for people, being vulnerable, learning through connection what no training data can teach.
Intellectual development demands grappling with hard problems ourselves. If we skip the struggle, we skip the understanding.
Intention—our sense of direction, what we actually want—that’s ours to cultivate.

These four things are where our humanity lives, at least as far as I can tell.

I keep thinking about walking as a metaphor. We walk not just to get somewhere, but because walking builds us.
It strengthens our body, clears our mind, teaches us about the world at a human scale. It is necessary for our wellbeing.

AI is like a car.
Once you’ve walked long enough to build real strength, taking a vehicle for long distances makes sense.
You still walk to the corner store. You still use your legs. You understand what they can do because you’ve used them. But for vast distances, taking a vehicle just make sense.

Some people have walked long enough to develop strong foundations. Years of intentional effort, struggle, showing up. They are way ahead of anybody who’ve just started the walk. They’ve built strength for years, and still continue to do so that any new challenger can’t ever hope to catch up.
AI won’t build that strength for us. That part is completely up to the individual. But it gives us an opportunity, a chance to close the gap in distance.

AI can be the amplifier:

After you’ve felt something deeply, AI can help you convey it.
After you’ve built relational wisdom through genuine connection, AI can help you articulate it.
After you’ve struggled with an idea and wrestled with it, AI can help you refine your thinking.
After you’ve decided where you want to go and why, AI can help you execute it.

But the struggle has to happen first.

AI often will mislead us into the convenience of skipping steps. It’s easy to be tempted. The tool is seductive precisely because it works, because it’s fast, because it removes friction. And it’s up to each of us to resist the temptations, to adjust our relationship with it, to notice when we’re letting convenience become the decision-maker.
AI has the power to carry us further, and at the same time, the power to dissolve us to nothingness and strip away our will. We have to retain the ability to decide where to go.
The way we are should remain. Our authenticity should not be dissolved.

We are the idea bringer and the decision maker. The AI should assist us in conveying the idea, not replace us in our decision-making. That boundary matters.
We need to engage AI after we are clear on what we want.

So maybe it’s worth giving AI a chance for the long distances, for the mechanical work, for amplification. But the work that shapes who we are—the emotional work, the relationships that require our presence, the ideas we need to struggle with to understand them—these feel worth protecting.

Fun fact: This article was originally written using AI assistant. It took me so much back and forth, so much editing to get it to reflect what I’m trying to convey and the way I want to convey the idea. It makes me wonder whether I could have saved a great deal of time by doing it myself.

💭 Where The Dice Fall

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:35:56 GMT

We are like dice thrown onto the ground. Each lands in a different place, showing a different face.
Humans are the same. We are cast

💭 On The Malagasy Sense Of Time

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 14:59:11 GMT

We often think that precision defines progress.
Numbers, clocks, and calendars give us control — or at least the illusion of it.
But lately, I’ve started to see how our ancestors’ way of measuring time might have been far wiser than I first imagined.

In Malagasy culture, time dances with imagery rather than digits.
Each phrase paints a moment that you can see and feel.
For example:

mangiran-dratsy (4 AM): to depict the first light of dawn,
maizim-bava vilany (around 6:30 PM): when cooking, the pot’s mouth darkens as dusk falls,
maneno sahona (2 AM): the frogs’ call…

(More about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1943D4py94)
It’s not just about when things happen but how they happen. Time becomes memory, not mathematics.

Compare these two sentences:

Vao mangiran-dratsy dia niala tao an-tranony izy (He left his home at the first sparkle of light when darkness begin to fade).
He left his home at 4 AM.

The second one is clear, exact, and practical. Yet the first one lingers.
It carries the air, the light, and the texture of early morning. It belongs to memory because it belongs to life.

Numbers are our own invention — useful, but detached from the natural rhythm around us.
They serve us in planning the future or describing the present. But for remembering, they fade quickly.
It’s almost as if the past doesn’t want numbers; it wants stories.

When I think of it this way, I realize how naturally our ancestors lived.
They didn’t ignore writing or counting because they lacked intelligence — they simply didn’t need them in the same way.
Their systems were complete: time was felt, cattle and chickens had names (such as Ilemasira, a named chicken), numbers were linked to trees (Isa ny Amontana, roa ny Aviavy).
Everything resembled life itself. It flowed within the limits of what could be remembered and shared.

It’s easy to mistake simplicity for ignorance. But now I see: their world worked beautifully. It was coherent, alive, and effortless.
Their time was not something to be managed but something to be lived.

Why carry books when the knowledge can live in your mind?

My Emacs journey (4) - Weird Yet Amazing Modes

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 10:34:04 GMT

I try to keep my Emacs setup as minimal as possible so I don’t repeat the mistakes I made when I first started.
That means avoiding unnecessary packages and complex workflows that are easy to forget.
Still, from time to time, I enjoy experimenting with new features just for the adventure, even if I don’t necessarily want to integrate them into my workflow.
The discovery of lesser-known, weird-yet-amazing features in Emacs is always refreshing.
Most people have heard about M-x tetris, M-x zone or M-x butterfly. But there are other fascinating modes that don’t get as much attention.
Here are some of my favorites:

svg-clock

A month ago, I considered buying an analog clock.
I’ve realized that working with shapes like circle, half-circle or quarter-circle feels less mentally taxing to me than reading precise numbers on a digital clock.
Out of curiosity, I searched for an analog clock in Emacs and sure enough, I found one: a minimal and beautifully designed SVG clock.
It’s perfect for my use case: a vertically splitted window with my task tracker on the left and the SVG-clock on the right.
Here is how it looks:

Sometimes I do think Emacs is like a modern “Magic Lamp”: just scratch the surface and it fulfills your wishes!

artist-mode

I stumbled upon artist-mode a few weeks ago while reading Emacs blogs and I was stunned by what it could do.
It never occured to me that Emacs can be used as a canvas for ASCII Art. And yet it does, surprisingly well.
I can draw diagrams, use any character to paint. I can even use a spray-can tool for graffiti!
Had I discovered it earlier,I would’ve used it for many of my diagrams that are actually in Excalidraw.
SVGs are nice, but plain text is far more Git-friendly.

follow-mode

I first learned about follow-mode years ago from a Reddit post, and it quickly became an incredibly handy tool when working with codes.
Normal split windows are useful, but sometimes it’s more convenient to have a book-like view when reading long files.
Follow-mode does exactly that: when you scroll in one split, the other updates accordingly.
It’s especially convenient for working with large code sections or documents that can’t fit on a single screen.

💭 About Growth and Responsibility

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 19:04:15 GMT

There is this word, “Fanabeazana” in my mother tongue that people often translate as “education.”
It is often misused and confused with other words like schooling or teaching. But if we translate its original definition it carries a very deep and heavy meaning. It means: Raising the child to give him/her good character so that he/she will grow up to be a better person.

The concept of education is also misinterpreted nowadays. Many people confuse education with schooling. They think education is just about attending lessons, gaining skills, or passing exams. Sometimes it’s reduced to simply following training programs. Teaching is often seen as “I talk, you listen.” But education is not just that.

Real education is about sharing life experience and insight. It is supposed to help a person grow in a way that makes taking responsibility feel natural. This should be the job of parents first and foremost, but often this important task is overlooked.

Today, we see many adults with little mental or personal growth. Social media shows how common it is to be “uneducated” in a deeper sense. Sadly, being uneducated now seems almost normal. Many people choose money over growth and maturity. Sometimes, people are even paid to behave immaturely which is very sad.

People still go to church, which shows they believe in something greater than what can be seen or touched. Yet, despite that belief, the world is filled with too many grown-ups who lacks true maturity.

It is frightening to think of a future where children grow up without learning responsibility. But today, that seems to be happening. Society is producing people who are often naive and immature. Many believe the comforts and systems around them just appeared out of nowhere, without effort.

People often forget that responsibility is not just a burden or obligation but is deeply connected to a person’s overall wellbeing. When individuals embrace responsibility, it brings a sense of purpose, self-respect, and empowerment —a cure to depression, a problem that, unfortunately, is becoming more and more common nowadays.
Rather than being merely a duty, responsibility is a vital part of living a meaningful and fulfilling life.

Multiple ways of selecting text

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 18:19:02 GMT

Today, let’s talk a bit about text selection.

One of the greatest decisions I’ve ever made in my digital life a few years ago was to invest more time in Vim.
Editing, especially when working with code, just becomes so much smoother—almost addictive. The VIM-COMBO really does feel like some divine superpower bestowed upon the worthy!
And now, with Emacs and its arsenal of tools, my digital life has never been better.

Once you get a real taste of what it’s like to use powerful text editors, going back is just torture.
To give you an idea, every time I see someone struggling with the aim-and-shoot method to select text, I just want to hang myself.
It’s even worse when the person is a developer editing code. I just can’t stand it—my anxiety goes through the roof.

For anyone who’s curious, here is my own ranking of text selection methods along with some descriptions:

Level 1: Aim and shoot (for mortals)

This is where everyone starts: you point your mouse, click down, and drag to highlight your text.
If you want to get fancier, you can hold Shift and click at the end of your target area.
The drawback is, of course, you have to be better at aiming and not have shaky hands.
If you miss your aim, you have to restart the entire process.

Level 2: Ctrl Shift Arrow (superman)

This technique is used by seasoned computer users.
Park the cursor, hold down Shift and use the arrow keys to expand or reduce the selection.
Use Ctrl to select word by word instead of character by character to speed things up.
This method is good for working on short paragraphs, but it’s still painful when dealing with selections larger than your screen.
Combining this with the previous method (Shift+click) offers a better experience.

Level 3: Vim-way (God Level)

Hit v in Normal Mode to enter the Visual Mode, which starts the selection from where the cursor is.
From Visual Mode, a sea of possibilities for selection opens up before your eyes.

Movement: Pair Visual Mode with arrow keys or with powerful motion commands ($, 0, ^, …)
Examples: v$ for selecting ‘til the end of the line, or v^ for the beginning.
You can also combine this with search (/, * command) for even greater efficiency.
Context: describe to Vim what you want.
Example: vi(, you are telling Vim to “select (v) inside (i) the brackets (()“. Or vi" to select inside double quote, and so on.
The precision is just unreal! Imagine selecting everything inside curly braces across thousands of lines of code using just vi{—with 100% accuracy.

If you are interested, resources for learning Vim are available everywhere on the internet. You can pick any format you want—whether it’s articles, videos, ebooks, or even mobile applications!

Level 4: Emacs-way (Evil)

You can do everything you would normally do in Vim: set a mark and then expand your selection using search, movement,or context.
There are also some methods unique to Emacs that are sometimes even faster and more convenient than those in Vim.
For example, M-h quickly select up to the top level, like the paragraph you are in; and M-@ to select the next word.
Both can be repeatedly executed to expand your selection further.
And there is so much more Emacs can offer.

Why did I rank the Emacs-way above Vim?
That’s because the Evil-mode brings everything Vim can do—right inside of Emacs.
You have the combined arsenal of Vim and the endless toolbox of Emacs at your fingertips!

If you are interested, why don’t you grab Emacs now! 😁
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

💭 The elite players in the game of reality

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 14:50:40 GMT

Life is like a game—a serious one, but a game nonetheless.
If you ever played any game, you know there are exceptional players out there who’ve somehow figured things out. They move differently and play like magicians.
These are the elite players, the GOATs.
In real life, we have an equivalent: the gurus.
They come in many forms, from the spiritual to the material, and everything in the between: life coaches, self-help authorities, mentors and thought leaders…
They are often venerated like saints. Their words carry immense weight, shaping thoughts and choices. They have deep influence in people’s lives.

One might assume that gurus always have good intentions. But that’s a baseless expectation.
Just like in games, they’re under no obligation to share the knowledge or wisdom they’ve gained -if they possess any at all.
They are free agents, just like you and me. Some might even troll the game itself, playing unpredictably, less seriously, purely for their own amusement, leaving others confused in the process.
They owe no one guidance through the maze of life. And even if they do help, the walk is still ours to make. They cannot do the work for us.

Alongside the gurus, there are also the fake ones: scammers and shapeshifters. Tricksters who study the game just well enough to exploit it.
They’ve discovered a wicked way to grow richer, coming down from a higher level in the game just to farm the unaware and unlucky ones.
They may not know everything… but know enough to manipulate. Enough to extract wealth and worship from the naive and desperates. And tragically, that includes the majority.
They would use any means to gain influence: charisma, power, emotional hooks, even blackmail in some cases.
They are often gifted speakers and masters at hiding the truth in plain sight.
They use the same strategy as rodent traps: 99% food with less than 1% toxin.
The food is what people crave: promise, hope, clarity, motivation,…
The poison is the subtle manipulation, psychological trap designed to keep the victim dependent and easy to control.

Life is both amusing and challenging!
On one hand, we have gurus who might deceive, intentionally or not. On the other, we face deliberate predators who play a malicious game for personal profit.
They seem to have their own agenda, entirely disconnected from ours.
In the end, we are on our own, left to navigate this world with instinct, experience and the hard-earned fragments of knowledge we collect along the way.
Baits are everywhere, and if we don’t develop our own immune system—the power of discernment—then we walk straight into the traps.
Naivety and ignorance invite predators. They make us the most vulnerable.
As a rule of thumb: good and free food is too good to be true. If you didn’t pay a dime to earn it,… it’s probably a trap.

Seek knowledge. Seek wisdom.
More than anything, seek Understanding!

My Emacs journey (3) - Agenda for everyone

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 08:07:44 GMT

What if you want an agenda to keep track of TODOs and scheduled tasks, but you only have Emacs at your disposal?
You might find yourself in a situation where you don’t have access to the internet, Outlook, a smartphone or a physical planner.
Or, like me, you might simply prefer to keep your agenda in a straightforward plain text file.
It’s not a common problem, but I found it intriguing enough to write this little Emacs survival guide for anyone interested.

If you know nothing about Emacs, don’t worry. This guide is completely beginner-friendly.
I wrote the initial notes while I was still learning how to use the agenda in Emacs myself, so you’ll be just fine, even if it’s your first time running Emacs.

Before anything else, how to Execute command in Emacs

To run a command in Emacs, press M-x or Alt+x.
This open the prompt in the mini-buffer (at the bottom of Emacs) where you can type and execute commands.

Open the agenda view

To access the agenda menu, run M-x org-agenda RET (Alt+x, org-agenda, <Enter>).
Next, press a to open to the agenda view.
You’ll see an empty agenda first, and that’s no surprise since we haven’t added any tasks yet.

Schedule a task with org-capture

Creating a capture

To create a new task, invoke org-capture with M-x org-capture RET.
A menu will appear for you to select a capture template.
Press t to create new task.
A buffer will open where you can enter your TODO item

Scheduling a date

To add a scheduled date to your task:

Run M-x org-schedule RET to bring up the calendar.
A calendar view will appear below. You can pick a date using Shift + <Arrow Keys>, or simply input the date and time you want.
Example: 1 nov 9am, saturday 8pm, +2sun 6pm (meaning 2 Sundays from now at 6pm).
Once you’ve chosen the date, press <enter>.

Tip :

The shortcut C-c C-s also run org-schedule.

Your TODO item will now have a SCHEDULED: line with the date you chose.

You can repeat this process anytime to reschedule your task.

Saving the task

There are two main ways to save your task:

Use save-buffer with C-x C-s or M-x save-buffer RET to save and keep the buffer open for further editing.
Use save-buffer-kill-terminal with C-c C-c or M-x save-buffer-kill-terminal RET to save and close the capture buffer.

By default, tasks are saved into a file named .notes in your home directory.
To check this, run M-x describe-variable RET org-default-notes-file RET.

Viewing the scheduled task in the agenda

If you return to the agenda view (M-x org-agenda RET a) now, it will still be empty.
That’s because Org-agenda needs to know which files to scan for tasks.
To fix this:

Open your task file with M-x find-file RET or C-x C-f, then entering ~/.notes.
Add it to the agenda files by running M-x org-agenda-file-to-front RET or C-c [.

Now, when you reopen the agenda view (C-c a a), your scheduled task should appear!

How to use the agenda

To refresh the view, press g.
To see more days, add a prefix argument like C-u 14 before running M-x org-agenda RET a. This shows 14 days in the agenda.
To jump to the task in its file, navigate to it in the agenda and then press <Enter>.

Re-schedule a date

You can reschedule tasks right from the agenda using Shift + <Arrow Keys> or M-x org-schedule RET to pick a new date.
Refresh the view with g to see your changes.

Change state (TODO, DONE)

When you complete a task, change its state by using M-x org-agenda-todo RET or C-c C-t.
This cycle the task between TODO and DONE.

And that’s it folks!

What else can be said?

I’ve covered just a bit of Org-agenda in here, but the Org-mode ecosystem is truly a beast when it comes to personal organization and note taking.
There is so much you can do with it. It’s a real rabbit hole!
Org-mode can be your agenda, notebook, time tracker, habit tracker, and more. You can even use it as a full-fledged spreadsheet, much like Excel.

With so many features, it’s really easy to get overwhelmed.
Personally, I like to explore how other people use Org-mode and then pick only the ideas that fit my own workflow. I leave the rest for later discoveries.
It’s a sane way to learn step by step without getting lost in the endless possibilities of Org-mode and Emacs.

What I’ve shown above is a very simple workflow. It is very easy to adopt, and it’s more than enough for effective day-to-day usage.
I hope this proves useful to someone out there. And if not, it might come in handy for me later.

💭 Tropical Winter - The Shameless Weather

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 14:30:31 GMT

Since we had a bit of free time on Saturday, we decided to visit my mum and sister in the countryside.
We also planned to check on the trees we’ve been planting a few miles away during the summer.
For context, we planted around 200 trees along with some fruit trees, back in February. We’ve also been growing sweet potatoes.
It had been a long time since I last visit the fields, and I was so excited to go back.
Who knows, maybe we could bring some sweet potatoes home with us?

The region where I spent my childhood is known for its unpredictable, rainy weather.
The plantation is located off-road, and when it rains, getting there can be a bit tricky and even dangerous.
So before leaving, I asked my mother if the weather was good enough for us to reach the plantation. She assured me it should be fine.
Sadly, just few miles before we arrived at my family’s village, it started to rain heavily.
My mother said it had been perfectly clear just an hour earlier. The weather had suddenly changed, which meant no field visit for us.

There is a saying in Madagascar: “Tsy mena-mivadika tahaka ny andro ririnina” which litterally means, “Changing shamelessly, just like winter days”.
I used to hear it all the time without paying too much attention to what it truly meant. Now I totally get it!

No sweet potatoes for us this time, and we have to postpone our visit to the plantation.
Still, it was nice catching up with my family despite the setback.
They prepared rice with fried fish and romazava for lunch, followed by hot milk for dessert.
A truly warm and welcoming meal!

My 2025 Note-taking workflow

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 19:40:48 GMT

Taking digital notes is something I do a lot. Not because I particularly enjoy writing all the time or because I’m especially good at it, but because I want to understand myself better and gain a little more control over my life.
Taking notes is like building a time machine that tracks how my mind works.
I do it also because it’s fun to rediscover my old self through my notes.
Sometimes I made silly decisions, other times I appeared wiser than I do today.
Sometimes I find my belief swinging from one extreme to the opposite like a pendulum.

It’s June 2025, and I want to share with you what kind of notes I take and an overview of my current workflow for note-taking.

As for today, I’m using both Logseq and Emacs to take notes.

Logseq

Logseq still holds most of my old notes, and I rely heavily on it for capturing media-related content (videos, Excalidraw diagrams, and more).

What notes do I take in Logseq?

Quotes

I capture quotes from other people that resonates with me, as well as my own insights.
I use the Logesq banner plugin to randomly display these qutes in the banner.
I love this mechanism of resurfacing quotes.

Contacts and People info

When I interact with someone, I note the interaction in the journal page, using their name as a tag (which also creates a page in Logseq).
Later, I can fill in more details about the person, such as email addresses or phone numbers on their page.
From their page, I can quickly check every interaction in the backlink section.

Youtube links

I use the youtube timestamps when learning something new or bookmarking some interesting part of a video.
This allows me to quickly jump to the relevant part later.

Excalidraw

I use the build-in excalidraw to brainstorm or create presentations.
I maintain a vertical calendar in Excalidraw where I jot down some notes about what I might want to do each month.
I use the green color to separate what’s done from the rest.
I find this gives me a convenient overview of the year.

Presentation

Logseq is excellent at structuring ideas with bullet points.
The Bullet Threading plugin combined with the built-in zoom in / out feature of Logseq makes it a very good tool for presentation.

Emacs

I rely extensively on Org mode for note-taking on Emacs.

What notes do I take in Emacs?

Long-form notes

Insights, Technical documentation, Blog Posts, Journals, etc, when I’m in the mood for a long-form writing, I switch to Denote and start typing.
I don’t use many of Denote’s features. I just run M-x denote , fill in the title and tag, and start writing.
It’s simple and gets the job done!

Project

I have a folder named project where I put org file for each project I’m working on.
I don’t use a specific structure yet. Just bullet points for todos and scheduled items with notes for each project task.
The org files are linked to Org agenda for convenience.

Time tracker

Similarly, I have org files for tasks. For example work.org for work-related tasks.
I track the time I’m working on tasks using org-timer-set-timer combined with org-clock-in and org-clock-out.
And I use Org capture template for convenience.

Event Scheduling and Agenda

As above, I have an agenda.org file that is linked to my Org agenda for all my scheduled event.
Using of course org-schedule for scheduling a task.

Synchronization

Wether I’m using Logseq or Emacs, all my notes are linked to a private Git repository. This setup ensures that my data is always synchronized and backed up.
It’s simple and reliable.

In summary

This is my current workflow. Nothing set in stone, just how I do things right now.
Like everything else, it changes and evolves over time as I learn and grow.
Who know what it’ll look like in the next month or next year?
For now, this is what works for me.

💭 Shut out all reason and blindly follow the crowd

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 11:44:56 GMT

It still feels so strange to me to see people intentionally closing their eyes and blindly follow the crowd, regardless of the direction they’re heading.
When you witness large groups repeatedly falling victim to scams like MLMs (Multi-Level Marketing), miracle-maker sects, and similar schemes, it’s truly astonishing.
I’m sure that at some point in their journey they had doubts about the path they were taking, yet instead of bailing out, they doubled down or even risked everything they had. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) must’ve kicked in so strongly that it overrode any logical thinking.