DannyQuah

How one economist tries to interpret the Realist perspective

by Danny Quah (Jan 2022)

There is a link below to the video recording of "Is US-China Conflict Unavoidable?", an IEA World Economic Order working group discussion with speakers John Mearsheimer and Susan Thornton, and discussants Jisi Wang, and Yongding Yu, from Tue 04 Jan 2022.

The event was moderated by Dani Rodrik, with participation by other members of the IEA Working Group on World Economic Order.

All the discussion was greatly interesting; and I hope those interested get to watch it all. But, for what it's worth, my own challenge was to try and see how the Realist perspective might have economic expression:

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Obsidian iPad syncing via iSH git

by Danny Quah, Jan 2022

This gist describes using Obsidian on iPad while syncing to other Obsidian platforms. The procedure uses git in iSH on iOS, and thus differs from using either Obsidian Sync or Working Copy as described in Obsidian/iOS+app.

(To be clear, Obsidian is one of my favourite Apps, and I'm all for supporting the team financially. Moreover, everything I've heard suggests the paid Obsidian Sync is excellent. However, I don't want my syncing processes to proliferate --- each service using a different client sync flow --- so I keep my systems minimal: just syncthing and git. After writing this I found an Obsidian Forum writeup which uses the same tools I do to achieve the same goal, but you'll want to read that with its accumulated contributions dispersed across the comments. So at least I was thinking

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Setting up syncthing

by Danny Quah. Jan 2022

Software syncthing runs on Linux, Windows, and Android. It "replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized.": syncthing syncs not to any commercial or public Cloud but purely between my machines. This note describes how I set up syncthing to synchronize folders across my Linux, Windows, and Android devices.

A lead syncthing use-case for me is to synchronize Obsidian vaults across all my machines, including smartphones.

1. Install syncthing on at least two machines.
2. Run syncthing on desired machines. On Windows look in Task Manager to make sure syncthing is present and chugging away. On Linux check if syncthing is running by going to a shell and doing ps aux | grep syncthing. (On Windows, run the syncthing app if it's not already executing. On Linux if sycnthing isn't running, you might need to do something like /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser &, or however it is you l

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My Pandoc Markdown-PDF Workflow for Routine, Not Especially Technical, Writing

by Danny Quah, Aug 2020 (revised Jan 2022)

TL;DR: I write technical articles in LaTeX. But shorter, non-technical writings are easier to do in Markdown. How do I produce PDF from Markdown documents? Answer: provide YAML information in the Markdown; run Pandoc (typically through a Makefile or Atom's Markdown Preview Enhanced). To make all this work, some adjustment is needed in Pandoc options and template files.

Pandoc is a filter that takes a written document in a particular format, and produces a version of that same document in yet a different format. I use Pandoc primarily to transform Markdown documents to PDF, but I also draw on Pandoc to convert Word or ODT documents to Markdown. And vice versa.

Available official Pandoc documentation is voluminous. So as a matter of logic the knowledge to generate PDF from Markdown, to the user's desired degree of control, is already extant, out there somewhere. But a user j

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Pulse Secure Client on Ubuntu Linux

by Danny Quah, June 2020 (revised Jan 2022)

Pulse Secure Client is a VPN client that allows secure connection to a Pulse Connect Secure SSL VPN gateway. Many universities use that latter for faculty, staff, and student access to their computer systems. However, because Linux comes in many different flavors, the standard Pulse Secure Client installer does not always run to completion. (For one, [UWO.ca][] suggests "PulseSecure's understanding of Linux package managers and distributions in general seems very limited.") The user is then either forced to use a Windows machine, somehow, or fail VPN access when traveling with their Linux notebook.

This Gist describes the steps I took to install Pulse Secure Client on my Ubuntu-based Linux machines, including a Pixelbook running GalliumOS 3.1 and Dell desktops running Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04. Other writeups elsewhere that I've looked at describe the same problems I encountered, but were either out-dated, overly localised,

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When was the world given official notice about the novel coronavirus's human-to-human transmission and high infection rates?

by

Danny Quah

May 2020

Wasn't it already too late by 12 Mar 2020 when WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic? Did backroom geopoliticking lead WHO's Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to delay warning the world? Did this timing mean that WHO and Tedros were responsible for wrong-footing nations across the world in preparing for the COVID-19 crisis? Did the world lose precious weeks when it should have been readying defenses against the coronavirus outbreak at least since January?

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Managing Gists Locally

by Danny Quah, May 2020 (revised Jan 2022)

Through the Embed instruction or plugin, Gist snippets on GitHub can conveniently provide posts on Medium, WordPress, and elsewhere supplementary information (lines of code, images, Markdown-created tables, and so on). But while Gist snippets on GitHub can be managed directly via browser or through something like [Gisto][], a user might also wish to manipulate them offline. This last is for many of the same reasons that a user seeks to clone a git repo to their local filesystem, modify it locally, and then only subsequently push changes back up to GitHub.

Here's how to do this:

Create the gist on GitHub and then clone it to your local filesystem:

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Date	Event
2019.12.30	(Mon) Wuhan City government started tracing cases [JHU][JHU-Data-Hubei-Timeline]
2019.12.30	(Mon) Dr Li Wenliang warned friends and colleagues to take protective measures against the outbreak possibility of an illness resembling SARS, "Seven cases of Sars were confirmed in the Huanan Fruit and Seafood Market". He would a few days after that be reprimanded by local police and his employer Wuhan Central Hospital, but then later exonerated by the state supervision authority. Dr Li passed away 07 Feb 2020 from COVID-19 ([SCMP-2020.03-Wuhan-police-apologise][])
2019.12.31	(Tue) Taiwan CDC emailed query to WHO, confirmed by [MOHW Taiwan tweet 2020.04.11][Taiwan-CDC-2019.12.31-email-W