Magit: The Emacs Killer App

Posted on 2020-07-12 by jcs

Over at DistroTube, Derek Taylor has posted a video that makes the case that for many people, Magit is the killer app for Emacs. He thinks that’s especially true if you’re primarily a developer.

I use Magit everyday all day but for me the killer app is Org-mode. Taylor notes that Org-mode is the killer app for many people so we’re not really in disagreement. It depends on your workflow and what you’re doing with Emacs.

Most of the video is a short demonstration of Magit so if you’re wondering what all the excitement is about, this video is a good way to get an idea. The video is 9 minutes, 40 seconds long so it should be easy to fit it in.

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Some Remote Works Tips from Backblaze

Posted on 2020-07-11 by jcs

I use Backblaze to backup my work. If you don’t have a backup service of some sort, you’re just an accident away from disaster. My recent debacle with my laptop illustrates the point nicely. Without backups I would have lost all my data, including Irreal, tax documents, medical records, and a host of other important information. Fortunately, I did have a backup service in place so recovery was fairly easy.

If you’re looking for a backup service, I can recommend Backblaze. The backup is continuous and seamless. You never have to think about it except to pay for the subscription once a year or recover your data if a disaster occurs. They’re very reasonably priced so there’s really no excuse not to be backing up your date either with them or some other service.

Occasionally, Backblaze sends me a newsletter with various articles that they think may be useful or enjoyable. The most recent such letter was entitled Welcome to the Digital Nomad Life. It’s a series of tips for those who were suddenly thrust into the remote work lifestyle. It’s not about technical issues such as what microphone or camera is best but instead lists ways to make working from home more pleasant and strategies for dealing with interruptions. It’s a short article and may help with a new and unexpected working environment so there’s no reason not to check it out.

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The 500 Mile Email

Posted on 2020-07-10 by jcs

I vaguely remember writing about this before but I just saw a reference to it and it’s such a great story that it should be repeated every few years. Trey Harris tells a funny and instructive tale about how even the seemingly impossible can happen in our industry.

Harris was a system administrator at an unnamed university who took care of the campus email system. One day the Statistics Department called up and said that their email was broken. They couldn’t send an email further than 500 miles. Well, actually, a little bit further but effectively 500 miles. Harris’ reaction was the same as yours or mine would have been: Cripes! Another luser with no understanding of tech or email.

Except that when Harris went to the department and checked things out, it turned out to be true. An email to a site less than 500 miles, no problem; greater than 500 miles, the send failed. If you know anything at all but how email works, you know this should be impossible. It couldn’t possibly be true and yet it was.

I won’t ruin the story by telling you the answer; you’ll have to read Harris’ story for that but, believe me, it’s definitely worthwhile. It’s also a good lesson. Sometimes the seemingly impossible can be true and when you figure out why, it’s a great lesson and a great source of barroom tales. You might even get someone to buy you a round.

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Organizing Workflow with Notion (and Org-mode)

Posted on 2020-07-09 by jcs

Ali Abdaal, whom I’ve written about several times before, is a physician in the UK. Starting back when he was still in medical school, he’s been posting YouTube videos on how he studies and organizes his life. If you’re into productivity hacking, he’s definitely worth following.

He’s just posted a video on how he uses Notion to organize his YouTube activities. That doesn’t sound too exciting until you discover that he makes more from his Youtube videos than he does as a doctor. Although he describes his YouTube and other activities as a “side hustle,” a case could be made that medicine is the real side hustle and that he’s primarily a YouTuber. He’s currently aiming at posting 3 videos a week and has a support team to edit the videos and perform other vaguely administrative chores.

He’s a “Junior Doctor,” which in U.S. terms is something like an intern or resident. That means he’s always busy at the hospital and has to be as efficient as possible in his video endeavors. The current video describes the process he uses and how it’s all mediated by Notion.

Watching the video, I was struck, as I was with his previous videos, how everything he does with Notion could be done just as well with Org-mode. One of his big wins with Notion is the use of a template to organize and track a new video. As soon as I saw that I immediately thought of how I use yasnippet to do the same thing in Org-mode. If you’re an Org user and watch his video, you’ll be immediately struck with how seamlessly his process carries over to Org-mode.

Some of the things he says in the video about his structured planning of videos makes me think that I should adopt some of his ideas for writing Irreal posts. I have a process that’s sort of like what he does but his video shows there’s plenty of room for improvement. The nice thing is that I could adopt his entire procedure in Org-mode if I needed to.

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Tracking on Steroids

Posted on 2020-07-08 by jcs

The (Canadian) Financial Post has a truly horrifying story about out-of-control tracking by the chain coffee shop Tim Hortons. James McLeod uses the Tim Hortons ordering app on his Android phone so he could order his “morning medium coffee with two cream plus a toasted everything bagel with herb and garlic cream cheese.” The app, of course, wanted access to his location data, ostensibly to locate the closest store.

Then one day his Android OS was updated and he got a notification that Tim Hortons had obtained his location in the background. He wasn’t using the app at the time and didn’t understand why it would be accessing his location data. Under Canadian law he was entitled to a copy of the data Tim Hortons was collecting so he requested it.

The result was shocking. Tim Hortons—or, rather, their parent company Restaurant Brands International (RBI)—had a very granular record or his movements. They knew when he left home, when he was at work, when and where he took an out-of-country vacation, when he went to a ball game, and when he visited Tim Hortons’ competitors. They also knew when he visited his girlfriend. RBI was unapologetic saying, in effect, that it was up to the users to set their phone access parameters to whatever level they desired. Of course, at the time he installed the app, Android’s choice was binary: allow access to location data or not.

I can’t begin to capture the full outrageousness of RBI’s actions so you really should read the full article. I should also mention that Burger King and Popeyes are also RBI companies with their own apps so if you’re an American you shouldn’t be smug. If you’re using an app from one of these companies you should be aware that your movements may be being tracked in disturbing detail.

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A Passport on Your iPhone

Posted on 2020-07-07 by jcs

I haven’t written about my dream of a walletless life for a while. My end goal, as I’ve written before, is to be able to leave the house with nothing but my iPhone. That would mean using Apple Pay to buy things, a digital house key, a digital driver’s license for identification and driving, and being able to unlock and start my car with my phone.

We’re almost there. Because of COVID-19, basically everyone but Walmart—and there are whispers that even they may be ready to capitulate—now accepts Apple Pay and other contactless payment methods. Apple has announced keyless car entry in iOS 14 and BMW is expected to support the system in their 2021 BMW 5 Series of cars. And, of course, keyless house entry with the iPhone has been available for some time.

That leaves just the digital driver’s license and other ID. It’s a tough nut because it depends on government action. Florida, despite a promising start, is still nowhere near agreeing on a plan and after the last bill failed, I haven’t seen any other movement.

All is not lost, though, because I have an ally. Apple also wants to get rid of the wallet and move everything onto the iPhone and has been quietly working toward that end. According to stories in Apple Insider and iMore, Apple has filed a series of patents to enable the iPhone to securely carry Passports and other government IDs. Apple says that passports on your iPhone is not too far away but won’t be available in the near term. That will be the last piece needed for going walletless and I’m looking forward to it.

Everything I’ve written above applies, mutatis mutandis, to the Android and probably any other smart phone. I haven’t heard anything about passports for the Android but when the government finally offers the ability, Android will certainly have their own solution to support it.

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Some Register Tips

Posted on 2020-07-06 by jcs

Tory Anderson has a handy post that reminds us about the utility of registers in Emacs. It’s easy to forget about them but they’re incredibly useful and flexible. Anderson considers three of the major use-cases:

  1. Saving text in a register.
  2. Saving a window configuration in a register.
  3. Saving the position of the point in a register.

I learned a couple of new things from the post. It’s possible to list the current registers with Meta+x list-registers. You can also get a short list with Ctrl+x r j. That’s normally the way you jump to a register but if you wait a short time, Emacs will pop up a list of registers and their contents even if a register contains something you can’t jump to such as a string. This list is meant to show you the available registers, much like abo-abo’s Counsel functions or the corresponding Helm functions, so you’ll have to quit the operation with Ctrl+g to avoid a possibly undesirable interaction with one of the registers but it’s a quick and easy to see what registers are currently in use.

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Wanted: The World’s Smallest Violin

Posted on 2020-07-05 by jcs

The crybabies making up a Google-backed group of European advertisers are very upset that Apple will shortly require apps to notify users that they intend to track them and ask their permission first. As Yoda might say, “The schadenfreude is strong in this one, Obi-Wan.”

Apple will enforce this with a popup the first time an app requests a device’s IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers). Users will be asked if they wish to allow the tracking. Despite the one-time nature of the popup, the adtech crybabies are whining that it’s an intolerable burden and users might even refuse to grant permission. They insist that Apple should abide by their industry standard for handling such things.

The group appears to believe that it’s somehow incumbent on Apple and its users to make it easy for them to track us. Their complete disregard for the do-not-track bit shows that they don’t care a whit whether we want to be tracked or not. That’s why the new popup is so unfair: Apple is not letting them do what they want, users be damned.

Consider for just a moment what the advertisers’ position boils down to. They don’t want Apple to let their users know when they’re being tracked and when, finally, Apple does it’s somehow unfair.

I get that advertising pays for all that content we consume and that it’s a necessary part of the modern Web. It doesn’t follow, however, that therefore we shouldn’t complain about being tracked. Advertisers do it because they believe—erroneously according to most research—that targeted advertising is more effective but even if it were, that doesn’t mean we should acquiesce to it. Send me advertisements but don’t track me and don’t run scripts on my machine without my permission.

Finally, an orthogonal point about the press and Apple. This is a story about how Apple is doing the right thing and the adtech industry is upset about it. Why then did Reuters insert the photo and its caption at the top of the article? It has nothing to do with the story and arguably makes Apple look bad. Just another example of why the press is not a favored industry at Irreal.

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Org Covers 90% of Blogger’s Life

Posted on 2020-07-04 by jcs

Stormrider has an interesting and inspiring post in which he says that 90% of his life is handled by Org-mode. Stormrider is a technical writer and occasional programmer. As such, he is a perfect example of someone who can benefit from Org-mode. Stormrider started out as a Vim user and, like me, remained one for many years. When he changed jobs, one of his new colleagues suggested Emacs as an efficient way of combining his writing and coding examples. Later, at another job, his colleagues were all Emacs and Org-mode users and that helped him find his home.

Stormrider has a set of principals that he lives by. They are:

  • Keep it simple.
  • Do one thing at a time.
  • Network.
  • Say what you mean.
  • Hack.
  • Be who you are.
  • Use leverage.
  • Use what you have.
  • Have faith.
  • Think ahead.

A large part of Stormrider’s post describes how Org-mode satisfies those principals. That may sound a little “new age” but Stormrider explains how those principals make sense for him given his experiences and how Org-mode does, in fact, satisfy them.

What I like about this post is that it’s not simply an “Org-mode helped me organize my life” post but an “Org-mode turned out to be an application that perfectly matched how I think and how I work” post. If you’re looking for a story of how Org-mode can help someone organize and revitalize their workflow, Stormrider’s post is a good example.

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Red Meat Friday: What Could Have Been

Posted on 2020-07-03 by jcs

Here’s some red meat for all you parentheses haters and Blub users:

It’s probably a little hyperbolic but it feels right to us Lisp partisans. And guess what: Lisp users consider whatever non-Lisp language you’re using a Blub dialect.

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