Karl Voit on the Reply-To Header

Posted on 2021-07-22 by jcs

I’ve long known about the Reply-To header in emails but I’ve always been unclear on exactly what it did and how it worked. Karl Voit has an excellent short blog post on using the Reply-To header in emails. It turns out that it’s just what you need to solve a certain type of problem.

The use case that Voit describes is typical: you send an email to a group of people soliciting their opinion on some matter and say something like, “Please let Kate know what you think.” The problem is that almost everyone is simply going to hit reply and email you instead of Kate. The Reply-To header is the solution. By adding the header and specifying Kate’s email address, she instead of you will be emailed when the recipient hits reply.

Of course, that’s a simple use case. Voit describes some of the details of the header and the things you can do with it, including replying to multiple people. Take a look at Voit’s post. It’s a 5 minute read that’s very much worthwhile.

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System Crafters: Magit 2

Posted on 2021-07-21 by jcs

David Wilson over at the System Crafters YouTube channel has his second video on Magit up. Irreal looked at the first video a couple of weeks ago. In the current video, Wilson considers some of the intermediate Magit functions.

He starts off with showing how to clone a repository with Magit. That turns out to be pretty easy, especially if you’re cloning a GitHub or GitLab repository. Next, there’s a short introduction to using the log to get a history of commits. From there, Wilson moves on to the meat of the video.

He shows how to stage hunks of a file, how to stash changes so that a branch can be updated, and how to reapply the stashed changes. For me, the handiest information is on how to change previous commits. That’s easy for the last commit but even for an older commit it’s possible to make changes without doing the rebase dance. That’s something I didn’t know so I found it particularly useful.

He moves on to cover pushing and pulling to and from the upstream repository, including how to force push a modified commit that’s already been pushed to the remote repository. Finally he shows how to delete changes—or complete files—from Magit. That’s really handy if you want to discard a set of changes. He also shows how to add a file to one of the .gitignore files.

This is a really good introduction on how to actually use Magit in your workflow. I’m looking forward to the next one. The video is fairly long—56 minutes, 38 seconds—but worth your time if you want to integrate Magit into your daily workflow.

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PSA: Mastering Emacs is On Sale Until Monday

Posted on 2021-07-20 by jcs

If you’re an Emacser, you’ve certainly heard of Mickey Petersen’s book Matering Emacs. If you’ve been thinking about getting a copy, now’s the time because it’s 20% off until Monday.

Petersen has been writing about Emacs for years on his blog and is considered by everyone I know as a subject matter expert. The book is aimed at an intermediate level so if you’re a relative n00b, you shouldn’t be scared off. It’s a good book and something every Emacs aficionado should own.

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Calc Formulae in the Minibuffer

Posted on 2021-07-19 by jcs

Tony Aldon has another quick video up that considers using Org-mode table formulae in the minibuffer. It’s a nice way of trying out a formula or even using them to make calculations and inserting the results into the current buffer.

The video, Calc formulas, all you need to know, uses the “quick-calc” mode of Calc to do its calculations. You can invoke quick-calc either by calling it with Meta+x quick-calc or by starting calc as usual with Ctrl+x * and specifying q instead of c. The advantage of quick-calc for non-Lispers is that you can enter the formula in infix notation if you prefer. In any event, all the action takes place in the minibuffer and returns to the current buffer after a single calculation.

After the calculation, the result is left in the kill ring so you can insert it into the buffer with Ctrl+y but there are a couple of other ways to do it as the video shows. Even if you aren’t a Lipser, you can use quick-calc as a handy calculator so it’s worth taking the time to watch the video. The video itself is only 3 minutes, 45 seconds long so it’s easy to schedule time to watch it.

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Google Drive and Censorship

Posted on 2021-07-18 by jcs

I’ve told you and told you and told you but some people aren’t listening. Okay, let’s be honest, they aren’t even reading to begin with but they should be. If you use Google products for producing, storing, or sharing your documents, expect to have them reviewed and if they fail to conform to Google’s political preferences, to have them removed or blocked.

Here’s the latest example:

Notice that we’re not even talking about “dangerous” or controversial material here1. It’s simply a collection of headlines concerning vaccinations but Google has a preferred narrative and if one of those headlines contravenes that narrative, their slipshod algorithms will flag the entire document as too dangerous to see the light of day.

Maybe it’s just me but I don’t want third parties reading and reviewing my documents and I certainly don’t want them disappearing those documents. There are plenty of ways of producing and sharing your content that doesn’t involve Google. I just don’t understand people who are willing to risk having their data deleted simply because Google has some convenient tools.

There are plenty of free, safe, Word clones to produce your content if you insist on Microsoft’s version of WYSIWYG, and as I’ve said before I pay about $100 a year for the Irreal Web site. I’m sure you can do better if you try. As I’ve also said before, if you insist on using Google for your content, I’m not going to feel sorry for you when the inevitable happens

Footnotes:

1

And even if we were, so what? What ever happened to the notion that opposing ideas should be debated and that the truth will emerge from that debate?

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Remote Work in Australia

Posted on 2021-07-17 by jcs

I have, for many, many years, been fascinated with the idea of remote work. Since Mike Elgan wrote about the New Bedouins in 2007 I yearned to be part of the revolution. Now, of course, due to COVID-19 it’s the new normal.

There’s an interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald that posits the five day office week is dead, at least in Australia. That’s not to say that everyone will be working remotely from now on, merely that workers won’t be spending all their time in the office in the future. In a survey, 42 of 50 of the major companies in Australia said that they were adopting permanent hybrid working plans where employees would spend 2–4 days in the office and the remainder working remotely.

Despite the widespread adoption of remote some companies are eager to get back to the ways things were. In some of these, the workers are customer facing so have them in the office makes sense. In others, though, it’s simply a rearguard action. Here’s what Telco Optus’ HR VP Kate Aitken has to say on the matter“”

“Optus believes co-location fosters collaboration and innovation; you can’t just ‘dial-in’ culture,”

Notice that it’s the usual talking points—already debunked—that those loath to give up control always use.

In the end, it won’t matter. Many workers, perhaps even a majority, simply aren’t gong back to the office.

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Like Musical Instruments for Musicians

Posted on 2021-07-16 by jcs

Ayrat Badykov has a nifty short post on why he thinks Emacs is a great text editor. As for many developers, Badykov was inspired to learn Emacs when he saw how much more efficient the Vim and Emacs users were compared to users of the other editors who had to click, swipe, and use menus to get anything done. His reason for choosing Emacs over Vim was—as it often is—a matter of happenstance: the people he was working with were Emacs users.

His reasons for believing Emacs is great are the usual: efficiency, Magit, Org-mode, terminal emulations, server mode\(…\) . The thing that stuck with me was his final observation:

I remember a quote from another of my colleagues, “I learned emacs so I could use a text editor like I’m playing guitar”. This quote contains some kind of truth. Like musical instruments for musicians, text editors are the same tools for developers.

It’s a good metaphor. Like a musical instrument, Emacs takes lots of practice and effort but the result can be beautiful. I’m tempted to push the analogy with comparisons like Gilmour on the guitar to digital music players but you get the idea.

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Does Piracy Affect Sales?

Posted on 2021-07-15 by jcs

The headline is a spoiler because we know from Betteridge’s law that the answer must be “no.” That the answer is “yes” has been a matter of faith among those who earn their living through the copyright system but research has mostly failed to back that supposition up.

There’s an interesting story on Engadget that makes two points:

  1. Except in a special, obvious case piracy does not appear to negatively affect sales and in some cases may actually help them.
  2. You can’t depend on the government to tell you the truth about such things or to even let you hear the truth.

The article, EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn’t hurt sales, reports on a $430,000 study by the Dutch company Ecorys that was commissioned by The European Commission. The study concludes that except for new, blockbuster movies, there is no evidence that piracy has any negative effect on sales and that in the case of games, may even increase them.

That was not what the commission, which has been championing laws to require ISPs to monitor and filter their users’ downloads, wanted to hear so they suppressed the report except for the part about blockbuster movies. The report was commissioned in 2013 and disappeared until EU parliamentarian Julia Reda filed a freedom of information request in 2017. The commission stonewalled as long they could but finally released the study’s findings.

As a published author, I have some skin in the game but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the rent seeking by the copyright industry is not in the public interest and should be reexamined. After all, if their cause is righteous, why do they need to hide the facts?

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Query: Emacs Vterm on the M1

Posted on 2021-07-14 by jcs

A while ago I asked about Emacs on the Mac M1. Everyone who replied agreed that Emacs ran without problems so I got myself an M1. I really like it and have almost got it configured as my default machine. I couldn’t get Emacs to compile from source so I loaded emacs-plus@27 from Homebrew. That runs fine and now the only thing not working is vterm.

When I try to install it, it compiles the vterm library for the x86 instead of Arm. I’ve asked Duck Duck Go and even Startpage but haven’t found an answer. The only really relevant thing I found was to ensure that /opt/homebrew/bin and /opt/homebrew/sbin were added to the exec-path variable. I did that but I still can’t get it to compile for Arm.

If anyone has wisdom to impart, I’d be grateful.

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See the Underlying Org Entry for an Agenda Item

Posted on 2021-07-13 by jcs

Here’s a quick tip that I just learned about from Tory Anderson:

Rather than having to click through the see where an agenda item came from, you can type E to expand the agenda items to the Org entries that they came from.

My first reaction was that it’s an interesting capability but probably not one you’d use very often. Then I remembered that I regularly need to do just that. It’s easy to try it out: just type E in the agenda to toggle it on. Type E again to turn it off. It’s nice because your window configuration stays the same.

One of the things I love about Emacs is that you’re never done learning about it. There’s always something else to discover. Anderson’s tip is another example of that for me.

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