Dictating a Blog

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is the first of many blogposts that is actually dictated instead of written. I’m trying this out as a way of making it easier for me to actually write posts (instead of procrastinating) by getting the thoughts from my brain vocally. Typically, when I think of something that might be a good blog post, I usually tell someone about it. Sometimes I tell my wife, sometimes I tell a friend, and usually the thought is fresh, and it comes out the way that I want it to during that explanation. Often when I want to go back and write it down, I no longer have the thought in the same way that it was when I first expressed it verbally. My solution to this problem is simply to record what I say and write it down the first time. Afterwords, I can go back and edit to add context, examples, other useful information in a wat that that’s efficient for me. In this first blog post, I’d like to talk about the software that I’m using to do this and go over what type of things I’d like to talk about in the future on this blog.

Firstly, let’s talk about the software. I’m using a program called VoxType that allows for dictation on Linux using a whisper model. This seems to be pretty good for me so far and I’m able to record each phrase one by one to build the full post. If I’m honest, I’m not super sold on the solution yet, because transcribing is a bit slow on my laptop (it’s an older framework 13). So an alternative may be to make a recording of the entire blog post that I want to do and have it all transcribed in one go, then go back and edit it after.

Next I want to talk about the type of things that I am going to write about on this blog to give you a teaser of what’s to come. I often find myself writing tiny programs, trying new programs that I find on the internet, or just seeing new ways to do things on my computer. This blog is going to focus on these tiny little tweaks that I do to make my workflow more efficient. If you’re interested, I highly suggest you follow my RSS feed.

Having fun with qr-codes

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I had recently learned of a useful program for creating qr-codes called qrencode.

qrencode takes some plain-text data and converts it into qr-code format. What’s cool about this is that any data can be encoded, so I decided to try a few things.

The first thing that I tried was encoding the url for a website. I thought it’d be cool to be able to quickly convert the url for any site I was browsing at the time to a qr-code. Since I use qutebrowser, Doing this is possible using its extensible user-scripts api.

#!/bin/sh

echo "$QUTE_URL" | qrencode -o - | feh

This script takes the current url that I’m on and passes it to qrencode via standard input, which then outputs it to standard out and displays it using feh (an image viewer).

I have this script bound to the keys ,q (q for qr-code) in my browser configuration, and it’s very convenient for those times when I’m about to walk away from the computer, but I’d like to continue reading the article or viewing the listing that I’m on.

With that convenience now added to my workflow, I thought to myself how could I take this further. I saw an article with the example of having a virtual contact card (*.vcard or *.vcs) Being able to have someone import my contact info in a quick scan? Sign me up! So I looked up the vCard spec, and began writing up a simple contact card. The vCard spec allows for adding all sorts of useful things, like you’re website, company, multiple email addresses and phone numbers.

I typically want to share only certain information with certain people depending on the context. So I decided to make three separate vCards for myself. One for personal contacts, another for professional contacts, and a third for work related contacts.

Now the next time someone wants to exchange personal information, It’s a quick scan away for me to give them exactly the information that I need.

I’m looking for more ways to utilize qr-codes in my daily life since the spec allows for some very interesting applications. One has to be mindful that there is a character limit to the data that can be converted. (well unless it’s just really, really large)

Tray Dennis

Dictating a Blog

Having fun with qr-codes