Adventures in Tech

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has come a long way—especially under Windows 11 . WSL2 now offers smooth integration for Linux graphical applications, making it feel less like a compatibility layer and more like a native experience. But if you're an Emacs user, you might have noticed something off. Launching Emacs under WSL can feel like stepping into a time machine. Tiny fonts, washed-out visuals, and a UI that evokes the green-and-amber glow of vintage terminals. Functional? Yes. Pleasant? Absolutely not. But here's the good news: it is easy to make Emacs under WSL2 look just as sharp and modern as it does on Mac OSX . The emacs-pgtk build is designed for better graphical integration under WSL. It uses the Pure GTK interface , which plays nicely with WSL’s GUI support. sudo apt install emacs-pgtk To make Emacs look great, we’ll use Windows’ rich font library. First, edit your font configuration: sudo emacs /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and add the Windows Font directory...

 For sometime I wanted to build a data explorer for Valkey Cache , and this past long weekend afforded me some time to start the project. Instead of building the application from scratch, I decided to give " vibe-coding " a try. After all, there is a lot of excitement around it now, and I wanted to see for myself how effective it could be. I fired off gemini-cli in an empty directory, and gave simple instructions of what I wanted to accomplish: a simple key-value explorer for open source valkey , that runs locally on my machine, can load and save CSV data files, and offers the ability to change keys and values interactively. I asked for the app to be built in python , and to use the tcl-tk libraries for the graphical user interface. I chose tcl-tk for a couple of reasons: it is available on multiple platforms, and is a challenge on OSX after Apple deprecated support for it. The CLI started cranking, and created the directory structure for the application, and asked for pe...