Analog Vs. Digital Again

Posted on 2024-12-14 by jcs

Every time I think I’m done with the subject of analog versus digital notes, JTR makes another interesting post on the subject. His latest offering says he’s capitulated to the inevitable and is writing his notes digitally. Still, he says, he has a yearning for the physical. He wonders if perhaps he should print it out.

In the comments Jack Baty says he prints out his journal every month. That’s not too interesting but Baty goes much further. He prints out his journal every month and once a year he binds them into a perfect binding booklet.

The result is basically a book. He exports his journal to LaTeX and adds lots of pictures. The result is very nice: a yearly physical journal that he or anyone else can read and enjoy. Baty’s comments includes some pictures if you’re interested.

It’s a nice solution if you feel that you need a physical copy of your notes but I remain unconvinced. I know lots of people, including Sacha Chua, like to have a physical copy of their work but I just don’t see the advantage. The digital copy is right there to read and enjoy and you can also search it and add links to and from it if the need arises.

I love writing my notes in Org and having them available for future reference. If I want to share them, it’s easy to export them to HTML, PDF, or even—ugh—docx. I see no reason for filling up my home with reams of paper that, truth to tell, I will hardly ever read. But they’re great for collecting dust.

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Law Enforcement Discovers Irony

Posted on 2024-12-13 by jcs

For years, anyone with a reasonable knowledge of the situation and no ax to grind has been preaching the gospel that today’s on-line society needs strong, end-to-end encryption for the safe conduct of our electronic activities. At the same time, law enforcement has been invoking the specter of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse and screaming, “Think of the children” at us.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how the Chinese hacking group Salt Typhoon had proved there’s no such thing as a secure backdoor. Now, in what can only be described as a delicious bit of irony, U.S. Law Enforcement officials have agreed. In the wake of the Salt Typhoon exploit, they are urging everyone, not just government officials and companies, to encrypt their messages and, if they can, their phone calls.

It would be easy to gloat but my feeling is one of relief rather that one-upmanship. The calls for a “safe” backdoor was never going to end in anything but tears. Everybody, probably even those calling for it, knew that. Now, the Chinese hacking group has given us a tremendous gift: the surety that attempts to bypass encryption will end only in disaster. In our current environment, it’s to the advantage of nation states—with their virtually unlimited resources—to intercept and spy on our communications. One way—probably the only way—to prevent that is strong end-to-end encryption. It appears that even law enforcement has stopped pretending otherwise.

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Showing Diff On Some Buffers

Posted on 2024-12-12 by jcs

Protesilaos Stavrou has a post with a really nice tip. Almost all Emacsers know about save-some-buffers if only from fat fingering its default binding of Ctrl+x s instead of save buffer bound to Ctrl+x Ctrl+s.

As Prot says, that’s handy but often you’re not sure of whether you should save a particular buffer or not. Fortunately, there’ a command to run a diff against the current buffer and its underlying file. Unfortunately, there’s no default way of calling it in the middle of a save-some-buffers command.

Of course, Prot being Prot, he decided to fix that. It turns out to be pretty simple. You just need to add another entry to the save-some-buffers-action-alist. Take a look at Prot’s post for the details. Even if you use this capability only occasionally, it’s worth adding the minimal code to your init.el to have it available when you need it.

Update [2024-12-12 Thu 13:22]: Added link to post.

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Guile Emacs: What’s Old Is New Again

Posted on 2024-12-11 by jcs

I remember that a long time ago I was excited about the Guile Emacs project. It’s aim was to replace Elisp with Guile Scheme while maintaining comparability by making Scheme grok Elisp. To be honest, I can no longer recall why the idea excited me. It seems like empty engineering to me now.

Regardless, after a decade the project has been restarted. Robin Templeton gave a talk at Emacs Conf 2024 on the current status of the project and what they hope to accomplish. A lot of what Templeton has to say boils down to:

  • Scheme being more efficient
  • Scheme being a much more flexible and extendable Lisp

I think my original enthusiasm was probably the result of the promise of increased performance but now that we have native compilation, that doesn’t seem so persuasive.

A lot of Templeton’s argument involves the possibility of reducing the amount of C code. Unlike many others, I don’t see C code as bad in itself, but Templeton makes the point that those parts of Emacs written in C are not extensible in the same sense that those parts written in Elisp are.
To me, reducing the amount of non-extensible code is a worthy goal but I’m inclined to think that native compilation can do that just as well,

The takeaway is that my previous enthusiasm notwithstanding, I don’t really see the need for a Scheme Emacs. Still, it will be interesting to see how the projects plays out. Guile is a great platform and if Emacs were being written today, it would make sense to use it but that ship has sailed.

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Passwords And Their Problems

Posted on 2024-12-10 by jcs

In response to my recent post on How Passwords Are Stolen, Smitty remarked that the bar for brute forcing your credentials is lowering. I agreed and remarked that passwords are well past their sell-by date.

Unfortunately, although some reasonable alternatives exists, the industry has been slow to adopt them. That raises the question of what we should do in the mean time. The sort answer is: don’t be stupid. The longer answer is to use safe password practices. This requires action on the parts of both users and site operators.

The sad thing is that none of this is hard or mysterious. The answers have been known for a long time and yet we still see users specifying passwords of dubious quality and reusing them, while sites continue limiting the size of passwords, specifying complexity requirements, and failing to treat password safety appropriately.

Jon over at zudell.io has a very nice post on the problems with passwords and what the answers to those problems are. Take a look at the post to see the full answer but if I had to boil it down it would be:

  • Users: Pick long, random passwords. This is best done with a password manger
  • Sites: Lose all your password requirements and practice industry standard password hashing.

Some users will always be stupid, of course but there’s no excuse for the sites. There are libraries in virtually every language to deal with the safe hashing of passwords so there’s no reason for not getting that right.

Whether you’re a user, a site operator, or both, you should take a look at Jon’s post and take his suggestions to heart.

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Customizing The Emacs Startup Screen

Posted on 2024-12-09 by jcs

The Emacs Cat has another interesting post. This time it’s about customizing the Emacs startup screen. He wants to see something useful when Emacs starts up. In particular, he’d like to see

  • A calendar
  • His agenda
  • His diary
  • A random aphorism

It’s actually pretty easy to do that. You may or may not want his exact configuration but it’s very easy to adapt his code to suit yourself.

I already have some code to instantiate two side-by-side empty screens on startup but I almost always immediately start an agenda in the right screen. It seemed to me that maybe I should adopt and adapt the Cat’s code to start the agenda automatically. On the other hand, I almost never restart Emacs so I’m not sure a lot of effort configuring that for startup is worth the trouble.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do but if you would like to have a specific configuration for your startup screens, take a look at the Emacs Cat’s post. The magic is done with some Elisp but it’s pretty simple so if you are at all familiar with basic Elisp, you shouldn’t have any trouble adapting it for your particular use case.

This is yet another case of Emacs making it easy to have things your way. If you want to see something specific when Emacs starts up, it’s pretty easy to make that happen.

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Narrowing To A Subtree From Org Agenda

Posted on 2024-12-08 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, seidenkaufman asks how he can narrow to a subheading when he types Tab in the Org Agenda. If you don’t do that sort of thing it may not seem all that useful but, believe me, when you want to edit a headline in the agenda, narrowing would be a big win. That’s because by default you always end up at the timestamp in the entry.

Seidenkaufman’s idea was to simply add a hook for org-agenda-goto to call narrow. But that didn’t work and he was wondering why. As usual, the Emacs community came to the rescue with their own solutions to the problem. They ranged from a fairly elaborate bunch of Elisp to a simple macro.

In the end, though, the answer was really simple. There is no org-agenda-goto hook. Instead, you have to use the org-agenda-after-show-hook. Then you can simply use it to call org-narrow-to-subtree to get the desired result.

I really like this post because it shows a couple of things. First, there’s a lot a knowledge embedded in the Emacs user community and those users are generous about sharing it. Second, even those that had working solutions found that there was a simpler solution available. In other words, everybody benefits from the discussion of Seidenkaufman’s question

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How Passwords Are Stolen

Posted on 2024-12-07 by jcs

As most you know by now, I live a digital life as much as possible. I pay my bills, do my banking, order my food and other shopping, communicate with friends and family, and get my news electronically. For someone who grew up with Dick Tracey’s wrist radio, it’s like living in the future.

Still, there are downsides. No, not the silliness pushed by latter day Luddites but the very real possibility of being hacked and losing control of your digital life. The SANS OUCH! Newsletter tells the story of—the probably apocryphal—Lisa, a graphics designer, who, like me, lives a digital life. But then she gets hacked and her digital life appropriated by criminals who proceed to lay waste to her life.

That’s horrifying, of course, but most of the article offers advice on how to avoid that happening to you. They start with the five common ways that exploits can happen:

  1. Social Engineering Attacks
  2. Malware
  3. Brute Force Attacks
  4. Data Breaches
  5. Purchased Credentials

and offers three simple steps that will help you avoid falling victim to such attacks. Those steps are the usual: long, complicated passwords; a password manager; and using two-factor authentication when available.

We nerds always think we’re too smart to fall for these common ploys but if you’ve had a beer, are tired, or simply not paying attention, it’s absurdly easy to become a victim. Read the article and consider subscribing to some or all of the excellent SANS newsletters. There’s a link at the bottom of the article.

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Emacs Use == Skills

Posted on 2024-12-06 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Thick_Rest7609 says that he associates Emacs use with skill. In particular, he says that he’s inclined to presume presentations using Emacs are representative of a skilled user, whereas a presentation using VS Code is not.

As of this reading, the comments—with one one possible exception—are uniformly negative. Almost no one agrees with him. But I do. This is an opinion that I’ve held for a long time. I don’t claim that it’s universally true that Emacs users dine with the gods while VS Code users are condemned to the netherworld but I do think that your choice of editor says something about you. At least potentially.

We shouldn’t think of this as an inviolable rule but as a hint. Of Course VS Code users can be extraordinarily skilled just as Emacs users can be extraordinarily dim witted. But I think Thick_Rest7609 has a point: In the absence of other information, the use of Emacs does indicate a serious person who has invested in his skill and put in the time and effort to master a very useful, if difficult, tool.

It’s precisely because Emacs does take some effort to master that we can presume it’s users are above average. If you want the easy path, as exemplified by VS Code and its ilk, you may still be a great developer but there’s no reason to presume, a priori, that you are. If you use Emacs, there’s still no guarantee that you are but it’s a much more reasonable assumption.

What do you think? I’m interested in hearing from VS Code users as well as Emacs users.

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Reading Email With Emacs

Posted on 2024-12-05 by jcs

As most of you know, we here at the Irreal bunker try to use Emacs for as much as we can. That includes, of course, email. I use the excellent mu4e for that and communicate with my email provider with mbsync. But my situation is easy. All my email funnels through my Apple account and I have no problem communicating with their mail server.

Others aren’t so lucky. They use Gmail or need to interface with Outlook because of work. It’s possible to get Mbsync or something similar working in those cases but it’s not, apparently, easy. Part of that is the increasing security measures that Google and Microsoft keep adding to their email systems and, probably, some of it is about user lock in.

Over at the Emacs subreddit, ttlaxia asks if there are any email providers that still work with Emacs. If you’re having the same problem, you should take a look at the answers. Some of them answer ttlaxia’s question directly and suggest email providers that simply support imap and make it easy to download your email.

Others answer the implied question: how do I get an Emacs email reader to work with Gmail or (possibly) Outlook? There are, it turns out, several good answers to that question so if you find yourself in the unfortunate circumstance of having to use Gmail or Outlook and would like to read your email with Emacs, take a look at the post. There’s a lot of good information especially for Gmail users

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