Irreal

After I wrote the post on Aqeel Akber’s Perfect Email Setup, I browsed around his site a bit and found this other interesting post from 2016 on going paperless. I’ve written a bit on that subject in the last few years ever since I started making a conscious effort to avoid using pens, pencils, and paper as much as I could. I’ve been successful in my attempt to the point that except for a few common exceptions—the occasional check, signing of credit card receipts, making a mathematical calculation, and the like—I virtually never pick up a pen or pencil anymore.

Although we both start with Org mode, Akber’s solution is interesting to me because it differs from mine in some respects. He likes to store his data according to type in separate directories and files. That’s the natural thing to do especially for those of us brought up on the command line. The thing is, it’s hard, in many cases, to decide where a piece of data should be stored and can correspondingly make it harder to find later. And there’s really no reason to do it. Search on modern computers is fast and will find the data no matter where it’s stored. Ironically, Akber himself demonstrates this in a short video demonstrating how he searches for data. He just uses an Org mode search that doesn’t depend at all on which Org file the data is stored in.

He also likes to have a separate file for each day in his notebooks/logs. Using Org mode’s datetree capture makes this—and all the machinery he added to support it—completely unnecessary. I simply use the appropriate capture template and Org will add the entry in the proper place—creating a new headline for the day, if necessary—without my doing anything special.

Still, it’s fair to say that our methods are more alike than different. We both use Org as the basis of our note and record keeping and value the fact that the data is plain text. We differ in that he likes to encode his data taxonomy in the file system while I prefer to dump everything in just a few files and let search worry about finding them. If you’re looking for a way to go paperless yourself, be sure to take a look at Akber’s post. It’s a nice example of one way of approaching the problem.

About a year and a half ago Rob Hicks wrote an interesting post on bringing literate programming and reproducible research methods to Econometrics. Hicks works mostly in Python and Matlab but also sometimes needs Strata and R. When he began looking for some software to make research and writing easier, he had pretty simple requirements: being able to handle LaTeX (including graphics and math), supporting both Python and Matlab, and being able to publish his results in PDF or HTML.

Of course, once he began investigating, his list grew. Most of the new items were concerned with supporting additional programming languages and with being able to easily produce (at least an almost) submission-ready manuscript. You can check his post for his final list of requirements.

Hicks considered four possible solutions:

1. Strata with Markdoc
2. R with Markdown
3. Jupyter Notebook
4. Org Mode

He includes three tables that summarize his results.

No one reading this will be surprised that he chose Org mode as his solution. It’s unmatched at producing great documents and packages such as John Kitchin’s Org-Ref make manuscript preparation much easier. It also supports nearly every language and—although Hicks doesn’t mention it—it’s easy to add others.

Most of us, of course, aren’t doing research in Econometrics but Hick’s results are applicable to a large number of fields and it’s well worth taking a look to see if his results are applicable to yours.

Ambrevar (Pierre Neidhardt) has an interesting post on why and how he uses Org mode to blog. His two main criteria are that

1. He can write his blog posts in Org mode.
2. He was complete control over how his blog is laid out.

It turns out that he can accomplish that using org publish. That required that he write a bit of Elisp for things like his RSS feed but he mostly used org-publish out of the box. Take a look at his post to see how he set things up and what the result looks like.

What I found most interesting about the post was his discussion of the tension between keeping a post up to date and the value of preserving the original post. At Irreal, I do that by making whatever fix is required and adding a note at the bottom of the post. Ambrevar has a different, arguably better, solution: He keeps his posts in a publicly available Git repository. That way, readers can see both the original post and any corrections/updates that he makes. This, it seems to me, offers the maximum in transparency.

If you’re a blogger or interested in becoming one, take a look at Ambrevar’s post. Whether or not you use his method, he has a nice list of goals and things you should think about when you set up your blog.

Rakhim Davletkaliyev has posted the fifth episode of his excellent Emacs podcast, Emacscast. This time he talks mostly about blogging with Hugo but, as usual, he starts with a description of the changes he’s made to his configuration since the last podcast.

Those changes mostly involve moving from Helm to Ivy on the grounds that Helm does more than he needs and that the lighter weight Ivy better fits his needs. As I’ve said many times, I consider Ivy one of my most important packages: it’s right up there with Org mode and Magit. The other interesting item from the configuration news is his Castelmacs package, which is a minimalist Emacs configuration especially for the Mac. It’s aimed at people who have a lot of Mac muscle memory and would like to use that with Emacs.

In the last episode, Davletkaliyev said that he experimented with using Hugo and Emacs to blog and that the experiment was so successful that he switched both his personal blog and the EmacsCast blog over to the framework. In this episode, he gives the back story on his blogging and discusses how he does things with Hugo. If you’re looking for a nice blogging engine and don’t want a heavy weight solution like WordPress, you should listen to what Davletkaliyev has to say about Hugo. It appears to be an excellent solution that lets you write your posts with Org mode. It’s also the solution that Mike Zamansky just moved his C’est La Z blog (home of the popular Using Emacs videos) to so you can see three examples of the results.

The podcast is 38 minutes so you’ll have to schedule some time.