---
id: index
aliases: []
tags: []
title: "Alexandria: a knowledge garden"
---

Welcome! You've stumbled upon (or perhaps were pointed to) my public-facing
[Zettelkasten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten), or _knowledge
garden_.

This is where I grow my ideas, and they are meticulously tagged to form the
knowledge webs you see in the top right.

Currently this is a very new vault and the only contents are the trash notes
which I took in the fall quarter of 2024. You can find them in
[the Fall 2024 directory](./Fall-2024), with [[./Fall-2024/as-am-5/week-1.md]],
[[./Fall-2024/as-am-5/week-2.md]] and [[./Fall-2024/mes-45/week-1.md]] being
the weekly notes.

If you're interested in the Nix package manager, I've also started maintaining
a sort of "cheat sheet" or "tips and tricks" collection around variou quirks
and features of the NixOS / nixpkgs ecosystem in
[[nixos-cheat-sheet]]. Maybe you'll find something useful in
there!

Feel free to take a look around and appreciate the scenery.

## FAQ

> How do you edit these notes?

The underlying notes are simply Markdown files. Precisely, they are
[Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/) compatible Markdown files, which are tagged
with metadata for use the Obsidian apps.

However, I do not use the Obsidian desktop app, for two reasons:

1. Out of principle, Obsidian is [free as in free beer, but not free as in free
   speech](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html).
2. (main reason) [Vim](https://neovim.io/) is just too good to give up.

Therefore, I edit my notes using the free and open source
[obsidian.nvim](https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim) plugin for Neovim.

> I want to know cool technical details about the site!

Glad you asked, real person who is interested! This site is powered by [Quartz
4](https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/), and uses `typst` for math typesetting, not the
common `LaTeX`. Behold:

$$
integral _(diff Omega) omega = integral _Omega dif omega
$$