Reference

Figuring out my webapps problem yesterday made me ask myself if I could somehow repurpose that little xdotool script to solve another niche itch that I had. Spoiler alert: It did. I run Emacs as a daemon, and use EmacsClient to connect to the Emacs process. Makes it really ease to launch, work on, sling around and close lots of Emacs windows.1 Which brings me to the hiccough. I launch EmacsClient and a window (frame) does indeed launch, but it just … stays there in the background....

Updated: 2023-11-17. Read more below Nearly everything I write is in Emacs.1 It’s been slightly more than two years, since I made the move to using it as my everyday text editor. I have a spartan Emacs config, with only a few customisations, that I found by watching David Wilson aka System Crafters’ Emacs From Scratch #1 video and the rest by searching on the web and asking around on the fediverse....

Various bits and bobs, I gradually accumulated over the past couple of years, to make my self hosted Miniflux look just the way I want it. Width and Size Changed the width to 850 pixels wide, because even on my vertical monitor, there was quite a bit of wasted horizontal space. Changed the body to use a slightly smaller size. body { max-width: 850px; !important; font-size: 90%; } Italic Blockquotes Changed blockquotes to be italic, so that they’re better set off against normal body text....

This is a picture of my notes, when I import them in from the Kindle. And every time I have to corral them into some sort of structure or write a blog post, I needed to laboriously get rid of all the Kindle metadata with multiple searches (and replaces.) I mean these lines ========== Draft No. 4 (John McPhee) - Your Highlight on page 27 | location 406-407 | Added on Sunday, 15 August 2021 12:43:15 But having learnt Regex about a year ago, I have been using it on and off and have come to appreciate the power it offers....

Sometimes, I want to share snippets of what I am reading with my friends. Kindles make it easy, with screenshots. The only issue being I want to share the full length of two pages, like I’d do if I was reading a book. And I need it often enough, that I felt I needed to go figure out some way to do it. It was an easy-ish hack on the mac with printing with Preview....

I have been deleting too many books by mistake, now a days. Past Jason might have been pretty sure about what he wanted, but I sure as heck am not. So I had to do a bit of spelunking to figure out how to get the delete book option to confirm first. All I needed to do was Preferences -> Behaviour -> Reset all disabled confirmation dialogs Et voilà, Calibre now asks me if I am sure about deleting my books :)

If you haven’t subscribed to Seth Godin’s podcast already, well then what on earth are you doing? I’d written about it here on the home blog and you can go subscribe here. This episode (Season 2, Episode 1) on blogging is very important to me. I think it’s a distillation of all of Seth’s thoughts about writing and blogging in a crisp, crackling 20 minute episode. I wanted this for permanant reference, so I thought, I’d transcribe it for myself, and then I thought, well, if it helps me, it’ll surely help others....

Problem: I wanted to launch Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code from the command line at will. What I did: Launch VS Code Hit cmd-shift-p (⌘-⇧-P) Begin to type Shell … and choose and execute “Shell Command: Install ‘code’ command in PATH” Launch Terminal and check to see if VS Code launches by typing the code command. Edit the .bash_profile file in the home folder and change the $EDITOR variable like so … # Setting Visual Studio Code as $EDITOR...

*** Everything below is broken. Kept just for posterity *** Install this script into the footer in the Code Injection section <script type="text/javascript" async src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.4/latest.js?config=TeX-MML-AM_CHTML"> </script> (that should autoupdate MathJax versions or if it all breaks and goes to hell, get the latest install instructions here) If I’ve done this right, this little piece of LaTeX should give me the quadratic equation $$ x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a} $$ $$x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a} $$ Et voila!

Ok, now that I’ve installed CentOS, I decided to install X Windows. And like Rip Van Winkle, I learnt that a lot has changed in 20 years :) A windowing environment was easy to install … sudo yum groupinstall "Gnome Desktop" and the trusty old startx & gave me a Windowing Environment (which I have yet to explore) However, switching permanantly to graphics mode (or vice versa) wasn’t so easy....