Work

If someone had told me three and a half years ago, that I would: Use Emacs as my primary editor nearly everywhere. Not just as an editor. In fact, I would stop thinking of it as an editor and come to see it for what it really is. A whole computer with an editor bolted on. Use Emacs not just for writing, but also have it serve as the cornerstone for two other extremely important activities in my life, organising my life (with Org Mode) and tending to my commonplace book (with Org Roam) Come so far as to scrape a web page, set it up as a connected node in my Zettelkasten, strip close to fifty superfluous lines, edit the rest to my liking, change the title to title case, and then file it way within minutes, and learn do all this by osmosis and research over the years, just by using it daily and being curious1 Have a kind community support all my crazy attempts to bend Emacs to my will I would have told you, you were off your rocker. But I do, do these things (which, I’m ridiculously pleased with) and have this wonderful community (which, I am earnestly grateful for). Here’s to three and a half decades! ...

Kubernetes v1.29 was released a couple of days ago. And just like every other release before it, it has a distinct name and theme (Mandala) as well as its own unique logo. In whose creation, I’m proud to say, I had a part to play! ...

Every evening, after my shutdown ritual, I move my current day’s branch to the bottom of my Org Mode file, so I begin the next day at the same fixed place, at line 36.1 The day is done; moving it to the bottom of the pile ...

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. ...

I love it whenever the Roger Ebert of the Emacs world aka Jon Snader aka irreal, gets his hands on one of my posts and uses it for his insightful annotations. His conclusion is something I totally relate to, because that is exactly what has kept me using Emacs ever since I began using it. It bends to my will. Or as Jon puts it … It’s yet another way that Emacs adapts itself to its users rather than insisting those users adapt themselves to Emacs. ...

One of best parts of using Linux Mint is its Web Apps Manager. I can use most of my websites as dedicated applications now. Case in point, I use a dedicated web app to run Elk, the web client for Mastodon. Social stuff like this, or banking stuff or my webmail for that matter, stays away from the rest of my browsing and lets me keep these activities cognitively separate. ...