The New Luddites on iPhone Addiction

Posted on 2018-01-19 by jcs

Farhad Manjoo writing for the New York Times has a particularly silly article on “Tech addiction” and how it’s up to Apple to fix it. The Apple part is the usual Tech Press anti-Apple nonsense. Given that Apple has a relatively small share of the smart phone market, it’s hard to see why Apple—and only Apple—should be responsible for fixing it. The Macalope does his usual fine job of mocking and demolishing Manjoo’s article but I’m not interested in the Apple aspect so much as the whole idea of “tech addiction.”

The notion of tech addiction is popular among the new Luddites and we keep seeing articles about its horrors and how it’s leading to the imminent demise of our children’s mental health. As even Manjoo admits, tech addiction isn’t a real addiction like drugs or alcohol can be. So what is it? Is it even a real thing? John Gruber doesn’t think so and neither do I.

The new Luddites like to point to psychology studies that have examined the putative problem but these studies are from a field that has a reproducibility rate of less than 50%. That’s less accurate than flipping a coin. Why should we credit anything they say? It always ends up that they find that kids would rather interact with their friends on their smart phones than listen to adults talk about things they don’t care about. Do we really need psychologists to tell us that?

If you think you have a problem with using your smart phone too much, delete your Facebook and Twitter accounts. They’re only exploiting you anyway. If that doesn’t work, get rid of your smart phone or seek help. It’s not up to Apple or any other company to solve the problem for you.

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New Org Mode Repository

Posted on 2018-01-18 by jcs

As part of Org Mode’s migration to a new server, its ELPA repository has also moved. It used to be part of the GNU ELPA repository but is no longer housed there. Instead, Org now has its own repository. If you like to upgrade Org with the package system, you should add the new repository to your init.el.

To do that, simply add 

(add-to-list 'package-archives '("org" . "https://orgmode.org/elpa/") t)

to your init.el.

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Scale All Emacs Windows for Presentations

Posted on 2018-01-17 by jcs

If you use Emacs in or for your presentations, here’s a nice tip from Robin Green on how to scale all the windows up for better presentation:

You’ll have to load Drew Adams’ zoom-frm.el but if you give a lot of presentations where Emacs and its buffers play a significant role, you may find it worthwhile and helpful.

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Org Mode Cookbook Revisited

Posted on 2018-01-16 by jcs

Way back in 2014, I posted about Eric Neilsen’s excellent Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook. I recently came across a reference to it and was reminded what a great resource it is. It’s easy to browse through and just read one or two entries when you have time. In skimming through it, I learned—or perhaps relearned—how to insert in-line calculations in a document.

As I wrote in the original post, Neilsen is a researcher and his cookbook is oriented at using Org mode to produce documents of various types. Still, that covers a lot of territory and there are many good examples of powerful Org mode use cases in it. The Document has moved or, really, taken up a second residence. It was originally hosted at Fermilab, where Neilsen works, and it’s still there but it’s also available at his own site. The two documents are identical so it doesn’t matter if you use the new link or the original one pointing to FNAL.

If you’re an Org user, especially if you use Org to produce documents, you should take a look at Neilsen’s cookbook and bookmark it for future use.

Update [2018-01-16 Tue 16:18]: Revistited → Revisited

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When Emacs Users Lend Their Computer

Posted on 2018-01-15 by jcs

This is amusing and most developers—Emacs users or not—have probably experienced something similar. I find, though, that it’s the opposite that happens more often. I’ll be using a layperson’s computer and press Caps Lock expecting Ctrl. The expected hilarity ensues.

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Things Seen That Can’t Be Unseen

Posted on 2018-01-14 by jcs

Whatever your opinion on the relative merits of the original Star Trek versus Star Trek TNG, there’s no debating that Jean-Luc Picard was one of the franchise’s iconic characters. The following image is therefore deeply disturbing:

Via Karl Voit.

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Pencils

Posted on 2018-01-13 by jcs

The New York Times Magazine has an interesting article of one of the last extant pencil factories in the United States. The article includes a photo essay on on how pencils are made. Although the manufacturing involves many machines, it’s still amazingly low tech depending on workers to do much of the process by hand.

Pencils are one of those items that, although ubiquitous, we never think about. Every now and then we buy a box or get one from work. Most people use a pencil several times a day and would probably be lost without one (or a substitute such as a pen). It’s worth clicking through if only to look at the pictures. They’re amazing.

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Emacs Survival Card

Posted on 2018-01-12 by jcs

I stumbled across this Emacs survival card, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s very much like the Emacs Reference Card but seems more useful to me. Of course, you may disagree but it’s worth taking a look at it to see if you find it useful.

I don’t print out cheat sheets anymore but I do bookmark them for those occasions when I need a quick reference. I will definitely be bookmarking the survival card. At least on my Mac, survival.pdf is included with Emacs so I can use it offline and I automatically keep it up to date as I compile and install new Emacs versions.

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Experiencing the Old Days

Posted on 2018-01-11 by jcs

Many of you know I like reading about early Unix history and how the original developers worked to implement the utilities that we take for granted today. A nice resource for this is The Unix Heritage Society and their mailing list on which some of the oldtimers share their memories.

One of the things you often see on the mailing list—either in the message body or the signature line—is that some of these folks are running old, even ancient, versions of Unix. Sometimes it’s versions as old as the 1st edition but many of the purists insist that V7 was the greatest Unix release and that it’s all been downhill since.

Much as I like reading about the history, I’ve never had the urge to actually run of the older versions for serious work. Not everyone agrees. Xorhash decided to experience a bit of life in the past by doing his document preparation on a V7 Unix system.

How do you do this? Xorhash started with Robert Nordier’s port of V7 to the X86 and using the then current Vi for editing and Nroff for formatting the documents. His post was, itself, written in Troff markup but he had to use Groff to actually typeset it because the V7 version of Troff was for the long dead CAT typesetter. If you’d like to try something like this, take a look at Xorhash’s post to see the details and how he managed to get the data into and out of V7 system.

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Apple and Targeted Ad Revenue

Posted on 2018-01-10 by jcs

Here’s some good new (via John Gruber) from the fight against ad-tech and the industry’s efforts to track our every move on the Internet. The Guardian is reporting that companies perpetrating these outrages are losing hundreds of millions of dollars due to Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Protection that the company rolled out in 2017. One advertising company, Criteo, reports that its revenue is down 20% despite Apple’s Safari accounting for only 15% of the browser market.

This is an excellent start and I hope that it ends with every company guilty of these invasive techniques being driven out of business. They will have well and truly earned it. Let me state again for those of you who haven’t read my previous writings on this, I have no objection to display ads. They are the price we pay for having access to the content they support. The people who create that content need to earn a living just as we all do and ad-supported content appears to be the best model we’ve found.

What I do object to is being tracked across the Web by these companies and their running what can only be described as malware on my computer without my permission. Often that JavaScript is literal malware but even when it isn’t it’s still software running on my computer doing things I don’t approve of. It’s got to stop and if driving these predators out of business is the result, I’m fine with that.

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