An Mbsync Tip

Posted on 2021-03-23 by jcs

Charl P. Botha over at Vxlabs has a lot of very helpful things to say about configuring mu4e and mbsync. I’ve certainly learned a lot from him when I was attempting to get mu4e up and running.

Now, he’s got another tip for mbsync users that can be useful under certain circumstances. It has to do with making sure that mbsync maintains the correct arrival date of emails. The problem manifests only for emails that stay in the inbox for an extended time before being sent to their final destination in the mail folder.

This doesn’t effect my workflow because

  1. I maintain a zero inbox policy as recommended by Ben Maughan so my emails never have a chance to age. They’re all dispatched to their final resting place within a day.
  2. Unlike Botha, I rarely if ever search for emails by their date.

Still, the tip involves adding a single item to .mbsync so I added it anyway because it’s worthwhile keeping the metadata attached to emails you’ve saved as accurate as possible.

Take a look at Botha’s post for the details. As he says, there’s no apparent reason not to enable the option. I enabled it a few days ago and haven’t had any problems.

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UK Police and Sci-Hub: Not Helping

Posted on 2021-03-22 by jcs

The BBC is reporting that the UK police—actually The City of London’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit—is warning students not to use Sci-Hub. You might assume, as I did, that their warning said something along the lines of, “Using the site is illegal and you could be prosecuted” but that’s not what the warning said. Rather, it said, in effect, that using it put you in jeopardy of being hacked.

They urged universities to block the site because Sci-Hub would try to steal user credentials in order to steal more papers. There are a couple of things wrong with that. First, universities already have subscriptions to most of the important journals and that extends to online access for students and staff. There’s really no reason—other than convenience, perhaps—for university students to be using Sci-Hub, especially not from university computers. Second, I know of no evidence that Sci-Hub is stealing credentials in order to get more papers. Their “business” model is that those with access voluntarily upload papers to them. Of course, it may be that they are stealing credentials but you’d think there’d be some reports of it.

Then the police say that those who have had their Twitter accounts suspended are particularly likely to have their credentials stolen by Sci-Hub. This is probably another example of the press getting a story wrong because it makes no sense. What does one thing have to do with the other?

Assuming the BBC has the story right—not at all a sure thing—this whole episode is an embarrassment to the UK police force. Of course, this is the same organization that warned people not to make fun of a fugitive’s hair. One could be forgiven for not taking anything they say seriously.

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Control the Apple Music App from Emacs

Posted on 2021-03-21 by jcs

About 6 months ago, Álvaro Ramírez posted some code to play music on the Mac through Emacs. I didn’t see the point of installing a new music app when the default Music.app works just fine so I didn’t read his post carefully. That was my mistake because what the post is really about is controlling Music.app from Emacs.

That’s something I would be interested in. It’s not that hard to use the default app but I like the idea of moving yet another task into Emacs. Actually, Ramírez’s code includes fuzzy search provided by the Ivy library. The Music app has (incremental) search, of course, but Ivy’s search is more powerful and can use regular expressions. That can be a boon if you have a large music collection.

All the heavy lifting is done by pytunes and ffprobe. The Emacs part is just some glue code and functions to control the playback. If you’re using Emacs on the Mac and would like to control your music from the comfort of Emacs, take a look at Ramírez’s post

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Emacs 27.2 Is Almost Here

Posted on 2021-03-20 by jcs

There’s a lot of news about the upcoming Emacs 27.2. First, Eli Zaretskii wrote that RC1 for Emacs 27.2 has been released. Then he said that barring any problems, this release candidate would become Emacs 27.2 in about a week. The next day, Eli reported that RC2 had been released. It shouldn’t be long before 27.2 is officially released.

As always, thanks to Eli and all the others for their hard work.

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Red Meat Friday: Prettifying Emacs

Posted on 2021-03-19 by jcs

When I was younger, we had a term for programs that produced some sort of impressive display but were otherwise useless: eyewash. Such programs were produced for the benefit of the suits and visiting firemen. There’s a faction of Emacs users who have their own form of eyewash. They are obsessed with making Emacs pretty and are sure doing so will solve all the problems with finding new Emacs users. Another faction believes, as I do, that pretty is as pretty does.

Vivek Haldar belongs to the latter group.

There’s nothing evil or corrupt about liking bling, of course, it’s just that some of us would prefer that Emacs developers’ energy be focused on making Emacs more useful.

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Industrial R&D Labs

Posted on 2021-03-18 by jcs

When you read “Industrial R&D Labs” in the title, what did you think of? Even in our field, there are plenty. There’s Xerox’s PARC, AT&T’s Bell Labs, and IBM’s Thomas J Watson Research Center to name just three of the most famous. But if you’re like me, only one comes to mind: Bell Labs. One of the great disappointments in my life was that I never had the chance to work there.

Now they’re sort of like Pink Floyd: there are past members still active but the Labs itself is only a shadow of its former self. We all know what happened—sort of—but, of course, the truth is more complicated than the conventional wisdom.

Over at Work in Progress, Ben Southwood has an interesting article that considers The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab. It’s long and a bit complicated but suggests that forces other than divestiture probably guaranteed the end of Bell Labs and others as the forces they once were.

I consider Bell Labs one of the jewels of the American nation and mourn its loss. I don’t think the smaller independent organizations that replaced it have the same ability to scale and opportunities for synergy that Bell Labs and the others had but Southwood makes the case that things are in some ways better now. And in any event, he says, the big industrial lab may be making a comeback as evidenced by, say, Google.

The article is worth a read if you’re interested in this sort of thing. It will help you understand why the big labs died and why, perhaps, they’re coming back.

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Book Publishing with LaTeX and Pandoc

Posted on 2021-03-17 by jcs

Dan Grec was a software engineer who gave it all up for adventures of a different kind. Now he drives his Jeep all around the world living the life he’d always dreamed of. He’s also published a couple of books on his adventures. Since he’s familiar and comfortable with computers, he decided that he’d publish them himself and sell them on Amazon.

While Amazon will give you some tools to help you get your book into their supported formats, you’re mostly on your own. That means you have to produce camera ready PDF for the physical copies and .mobi files for the ebooks. If you’ve never written a book, you have no idea how many tedious details and chores the publisher handles: copy editing, editorial advice, production, design and production of the front and back covers, and much more. When you self publish, all those responsibilities fall on you.

Grec has a long post on how wrote and produced his books. Because he cares about production values and wanted his books to look professionally produced, he decided against using Word and produced LaTeX source instead. He used Pandoc to convert that to PDF and .epub files. He used an Amazon tool to convert the .epub files to the .mobi files required by Amazon.

The post provides the details of his work flow including how he generated both formats from the same source. That’s not quite as trivial as it seems because some aspects of the LaTeX markup are different depending on the target format. Grec used an Eclipse plugin for the actual editing but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done with Org mode from the comfort of Emacs.

If you’ve ever considered writing a book and selling it through Amazon, Grec’s post is a worthwhile read.

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Does Targeted Advertising Work?

Posted on 2021-03-16 by jcs

We know from Betteridge’s Law that the answer must be no. Elaine Moore writing for The Finanical Times comes to the same conclusion and says that there’s plenty of evidence that the whole thing is a scam and that targeted advertising probably doesn’t work. Her article, If Big Tech has our data, why are targeted ads so terrible?, says that based on her Facebook profile, the data adtech collects is worthless. She’s not interested in anything her profile says she is except for family and, as she says, who isn’t interested in their family.

The article also has stories about companies that suspended their targeted advertising and saw no discernible change in sales or customer engagement. At least one Facebook employee agrees according to an internal memo revealed in court. None of this is new, of course. Irreal has be reporting similar stories for a long time.

And yet the adtech juggernaut keeps rumbling along. It is, you must admit, a compelling story: we’ll find out all about people so we can show your ads only to the people who are interested. More bang for your buck. But there doesn’t appear to be any cogent evidence backing up the claim. Certainly Moore’s profile doesn’t speak to adtech’s efficacy. It could hardly be more wrong.

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Why Use RSS

Posted on 2021-03-15 by jcs

Marc Kydd has a post from last month that I’ve had in the queue to write about. His post is on why he still uses RSS. I’m always a bit surprised by posts like that because why wouldn’t you use RSS? I didn’t understand it back in 2017 and I still don’t.

After Google shutdown their RSS service—which I accessed through Reeder—and before I discovered elfeed, I used the feedly Web-based app and was very happy with it. Of course, once I discovered elfeed, I was even more committed. It brings the content from all the sites I’m interested in right to my Emacs instance. All of this is kept in a database that I can search in various ways even years after the content originally appeared.

Kydd says RSS has been replaced to some extent by social media. Many people are getting their news and content from Facebook and Twitter. That’s too bad because you don’t get the same content. Facebook and Twitter have algorithms that determine what content to show you. Most Irreal readers, I’m sure, are capable of deciding for themselves what they’re interested in and don’t need someone/something else deciding what they should read.

I see somewhere around 90 items a day in my feed. I look at each headline and the attached summary if there is one but don’t follow most items to their source. It takes only a few minutes to do this and I know I’m seeing all the content I asked to see. I also look at the Twitter status page for any tweets with the #EMACS hashtag but almost everything interesting I see shows up in my RSS feed anyway. Again, I don’t see why anyone who reads a lot of content on line wouldn’t use RSS.

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Piracy Doesn’t Exist

Posted on 2021-03-14 by jcs

Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson gave a short, provocative talk at the Independent Games Summit in which he made the argument that there’s no such thing as piracy or a lost sale. Countless barrels of ink, not to mention pixels, have been spent pushing the opposite viewpoint so it’s worth considering Persson’s argument.

The idea that each pirated copy of some work represents a lost sale is silly and has never made sense. Most people who pirate something do so because they aren’t willing to pay the price asked for it and if they can’t find a pirated copy they simply do without. Persson says that such people are an opportunity. They can help the product gain traction and may well become customers tomorrow.

Persson explicitly rejects the notion that piracy is theft. If you steal a car, he says, the original is lost to its owner but if you pirate a game, say, there are simply more of them in the world and costs the publisher nothing because the pirated copy doesn’t really represent a lost sale.

I don’t expect that Persson’s argument will prevail or even that most people will agree with it but it’s an interesting point of view from someone who you would expect to hold the opposite opinion.

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