Music with a message, Rust tools, Watauga Lake

Culture

• There is so much in Jamila Woods’ first album, HEAVN (2017).
• Miriam Makeba was an incredible artist and activist. Her expansive body of work is hard to summarize, but this “essentials” album provides a good introduction.
• Nina Simone’s version of Bob Dylan’s “I shall be released”:

I see the light come shining

From the west unto the east

Any day now any day now

I shall be released

Tech

• I love GNU tools, but there are a few Rust based alternatives that are just better:
  • rg > grep
  • bat > cat
  • fd > find
  • exa > ls
• I just added these two books to my Bookshop.org wishlist:
  • Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the Afronet to Black Lives Matter
  • A People’s History of Computing in the United States

Random

• In Tennessee there is reservoir known as Watauga Lake.
• What was once the the town of Butler is located at its bottom.
• The residents were transferred to a new location, and the valley in which it stood was flooded in 1948.
• In 1983, the reservoir was drained for a short while, allowing former residents to wander about in their old drowned abodes.
• There is a museum where a person who lived in the original town tells the story.
• I went canoeing there last weekend.