The minions at Irreal, it appears, refuse to let the light-mode/dark-mode debate die. Here’s the latest offering:
Your choice between light mode and dark mode on your phone clearly dictates whether you’re Jedi or Sith
— Shivon Zilis (@shivon) April 7, 2020
I’ll talk to the minions but it probably won’t do any good.
UPDATE : Read → Red
Jacob Bergdahl over at Towards Data Science has an article discussing what makes a good password. His advice is not entirely wrong but has some problems. His main point is that greenelephantswithtophat is a better password than jK8v!ge4D. That’s probably correct but only because jK8v!ge4D is fairly short while greenelephantswithtophat is reasonably long. He’s not wrong that longer is better than shorter but it’s a little more complicated.
One of the main problems with jK8v!ge4D, according to Bergdahl, is that you can brute force it reasonably quickly. That’s true but ignores how passwords are cracked. If a site has robust password processing, the password isn’t just hashed—let alone left in plain text—it’s salted and then run through a hash function many times so that the time to arrive at the hash is non-trivial. And, of course, no one is trying to crack just your password. They typically have a list of hashes stolen with an exploit and are running the brute force attempts against the entire list. All of that means that jK8v!ge4D isn’t as vulnerable as Bergdahl makes out.
Still, it’s not a strong password. Bergdahl’s other main point is that even as it stands, it’s difficult to memorize while greenelephantswithtophat is both more secure and much easier to remember. To make jK8v!ge4D a strong password it would have to be much longer making it effectively impossible to remember.
On the other hand, passwords like greenelephantswithtophat aren’t as secure as you might think because humans will always pick words in a predictable way. Back in 2013 I wrote about how hackers recovered the seemingly impossible password Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn1, a line from Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu. In order for correct horse battery staple to work, the words have to be chosen at random so they form no pattern. Even then, they’re a lot easier to remember but not if you have one or two hundred.
Bergdahl dismisses password managers as something for power users but
With a password manager you can have a long random password like nD34$@ckwS.-33SBx!+4.gsac4 that you don’t have to remember and a single password of the correct horse battery staple sort to protect your password database.
You may not like it. Bergdahl may not like it. But the only secure way of managing your passwords is with a password manager.
Once again, I lost track of Sahas Subramanian’s Emacs through macros videos and while I wasn’t looking he’s posted 3 more. Number 7 is about grep and doesn’t use macros in any significant way. Number 8 is an exercise that you can try to test your keyboard-macro-fu. You can check those out yourselves. The last one, number 9, considers the common task of renaming files. There are, of course, lots of ways of doing this using things like mutliple cursors, iedit, or even the Dired R command.
Subramanian shows how to do it with a simple macro. He’s in a dired buffer and wants to change the names of the files containing his videos. They’re all of the form
Learning Emacs with Macros - nn.webn
where nn is the number of the video. He wants to change them to better reflect the name used on YouTube so he wants them in the form
Emacs Through Macros - nn.wbm
He steps through the first recording a keyboard macro and then applies the macro to the remaining entries. It’s a pretty simple operation and if you have macro experience, you’ll have no problem figuring out what he did. If you’re new to macros, take a look at the video to see how he did it.
The video is only 2 minutes 55 seconds so you should have no problem finding time for it.
Yiming Chen has an interesting post on his org-refile workflow. Before you read his post, though, you should (re)read Aaron Bieber’s Organizing Notes With Refile that I wrote about back in 2018. Bieber’s post gives you the background you need to follow Chen’s.
If you’re a little hazy on the Org-refile concept, the TL;DR is that you can move an Org tree node someplace else. Some like Matus Goljer use it to deal with items from Org-capture. Others use it to move items to a more appropriate place or as a sort of archiving operation. If you use Ivy or Helm, when you call org-refile you’re presented with a list of possible targets to which to move the node.
That list is completely configurable. A common choice is to include all the headers from all the Org files that make up your agenda, but that’s not the only possibility. You can add other Org files, including the current one, or as Chen demonstrates, you can add all headers in all Org files on your system. Most people probably won’t want to do that but it’s possible.
One of the reasons that Chen includes everything in his target list is that he likes to use it as a way of jumping to a specific Org node. You can do that by specifying the universal argument to org-refile. Take a look at his post for all the details. Org-refile can make many workflows easier so it’s worth taking a look at these posts to see if it can reduce some friction in yours.
Protesilaos Stavrou is all in on Eshell. On the very rare occasions that he needs a “standard shell,” he fires it up in Emacs using vterm but mostly he uses Eshell because he considers it a superior solution. He’s posted an excellent video that shows how he uses Eshell in his workflow.
One of the things he likes the most about Eshell is that you can write and execute Elisp as well as traditional shell commands. That means you can have bits of Elisp to provide shortcuts that make your work easier. Stavrou demonstrates several of those in action and while he doesn’t show the code in the video, he does provide a pointer to them so it’s easy to use or adapt them in your own workflow.
If you’re an Eshell user or considering becoming one, be sure to take a look at Stavrou’s video. It shows you some of its built-in features as well as the helper functions that Stavrou built. The video is just over 23 minutes so you’ll have to schedule some time.
Websockets are a handy device that allow for snappier browser/server interactions. Like all useful things, the usual bad actors have found a way to abuse them. It turns out that a Web site you are visiting can port scan your machine’s private address space (localhost, 128/8) to infer what software you using. Charlie Belmer, who posted the above link, speculates that sites are probably doing this as a way of fingerprinting and tracking although he notes that it may also may be being used as a means of threat detection.
Apparently, a number of major sites are guilty of this behavior. Belmer’s post shows a bit of code that caught Ebay doing it. That sort of behavior is annoying and arguably illegal but it’s easy to shrug it off as small potatoes. That would be a mistake.
Steve Stagg wondered what would happen if after finding an open port, an attacker tried to connect to it. It turns out that it is possible to capture useful data although it’s not really a very efficient exploit. Read Stagg’s post for the details. Stagg didn’t find any evidence that anyone is actually using the exploit but we can be sure that someone, somewhere will find a way to make it pay.
I’m sure browser manufacturers will move to close these holes but in the meantime it would be nice to see an investigation into this sketchy behavior. Maybe it will give some of these companies pause. But probably not.
On Thursday, Mike Zamansky published a video on some tweaks he made to Elfeed. As soon as I wrote and published a post about it, I found two more posts on hacking Elfeed to make it better fit the tweaker’s workflow. The first, by Álvaro Ramírez, was directly inspired by Zamansky’s post and shows a way of opening an Elfeed entry in a browser without losing focus. That’s convenient if you like to skim through the entries and open the ones you find interesting in a browser tab for later reading.
As Zamansky demonstrates in his video, Elfeed does allow you to open multiple entries but you lose focus to the browser. Ramírez’s method keeps you in Elfeed until you’re ready to change to the browser and read all the interesting articles.
The second post, by Karthins, considers several hacks to adjust Elfeed to his liking. These include:
If you use Elfeed—and if you’re an Emacs user, you should be—be sure to take a look at these two posts. You may or may not like the changes they implement but even if you don’t, they show nice examples of how easy it is to adjust Elfeed to your needs.
Mike Zamansky has a new video up in his Using Emacs Series and an update on his last video (Zamansky 71: Openwith). Let’s deal with the update first.
As you’ll recall, the problem Zamansky was trying to solve was being able to open a file in Dired with an external application. He found a solution but then discovered that it interfered with his mail client, mu4e. It turns out that Dired already has a built-in solution although you can be forgiven for not knowing about it. It’s not on the Dired reference card for Emacs 26 and even knowing what it was and the name of the function implementing it, it was still hard to find.
The answer is to press W on a Dired entry to open the file in your default browser. Despite the name of the function, browse-url-of-dired-file, it will open any file that the browser can display. That’s exactly the behavior that Zamansky was looking for: problem solved.
The current video documents a change Zamansky made to the behavior of Elfeed and the process he went through to accomplish it. When I’m reading my Elfeed entries, I usually start at the top and go down the list by pressing n after I finish an entry. If the original post/article looks interesting or offers more information, I may press b to bring it up in my browser. That’s the default behavior of Elfeed.
Zamansky’s workflow is different. He likes to stay in the index and rather than reading the RSS entry, he presses b to open the entry in his browser. When you do that, Elfeed marks the entry as read but many times Zamansky just glances at the entry in the browser with the intention of reading it later. That means he has to mark it as unread so it doesn’t disappear from the index. He wanted to find a way of displaying the entry in the browser but not mark it read.
Most of the video shows the process he went through to discover how to do that. His point is that Emacs makes such discovery fairly easy. He did have a problem with an anaphoric it but solved that too with a little experimentation. The takeaway is that you don’t need to be an Emacs internals expert or even an Elisp expert to make Emacs suit your work flow.
Take a look at the video for all the details. It’s about 12 and a quarter minutes so plan accordingly. Also be sure to read his post if you want the details on the update.
Irreal has been railing against adtech and the malware that advertisers download onto our computers to facilitate their tracking for a long time. Despite pretty compelling evidence that it doesn’t work, its use continues unabated. There is, however, a modicum of good news. Sort of.
The New York Times has announced that beginning next year they will no longer use 3rd-party data to target their advertisements. That means that they will no longer buy customer data from third parties to use in targeting their advertisements. That’s not great; they’re still collecting our information but at least it’s information we’ve revealed to them directly rather than data vacuumed up by tracking cookies and other sketchy methods.
Part of their decision is apparently because of the growing backlash against spying on our Internet activities and a desire to be seen as on the right side of the privacy debate. That and the fact that most of the major browsers make collecting meaningful data and associating it with a given person much harder than it has been.
Some other publishers are following suit but the strategy of using your own data doesn’t scale very well. The NYT has 6 million subscribers and millions of registered users who have signed up for occasional access and newsletters. Small publishers don’t have the wherewithal to rely on their own data.
As I say, this isn’t unmitigated good news but it may be a leading indicator of a trend to move away from surveillance capitalism. Best of all, it’s bad news for Facebook, Google, and others who make their money spying on us and tracking us across the Internet. Their demise can’t come too soon to suit Irreal.
A great deal of my Emacs tube time is spent displaying the Org agenda. My use of the agenda is probably not standard: I use it mainly as a portal into my log type entries. There are some TODO entries but it’s mostly just the headlines from log/journal entries. Most people, I think, use the agenda as an agenda: as a list of appointments and things they need to do. If you’re one of those people, there are several things you can do to make the agenda more useful.
Vedang Manerikar is one of those people who uses his agenda to plan and run his day and he has spent some time making it as useful as possible. His video, Using Org-Agenda to run your life!, shows what his agenda looks like—spoiler: it’s not at all like the vanilla agenda—and some of the built-in shortcuts that he uses to interact with it.
The entire video is useful but what I found particularly useful (perhaps because of my abnormal use of the agenda) is the information he gives on entering dates and filtering agenda entries. I learned a few things that will definitely make my daily workflow easier. Even if you don’t use the agenda at all, the information on entering dates is worthwhile.
As for filtering agenda entries, it’s a much richer capability than I thought. You can filter on many different parameters, can combine multiple filters, and can refine filters by adding additional items. Take a look at the video to see how rich the capability is.
The video is 36 minutes 40 seconds long so you’ll need to schedule some time. It’s from a remote conference so there’s occasional distortion but it’s still worth watching.