Here’s a useful tip for bringing up the agenda for a given date. If you have the point on an Org date, typing 【Ctrl+c Ctrl+o】 will bring up the agenda for that date.
This is really useful if you have a memacs-like environment where you tie your notes and events to your agenda. It’s the same key sequence you use to follow a link so it’s easy to remember if you think of a date as being a link to its day’s agenda.
Is the wicked witch really dead? Although I’m running the risk of suffering ignominy at the hands of Betteridge’s law, The Daily Beast is speculating just that. Namely, that the Patriot Act may soon be gone for good. We can only hope. Specifically, they say that if the Patriot Act is allowed to expire, it will almost certainly not be renewed.
That’s because while the politicos judge they can get away with renewing the act, they’re pretty sure the country won’t stand still for what amounts to a new act that authorizes mass surveillance. This explains the frenzy that the Senate leadership is in. Although they are loath to “water down” the act, they know that if they don’t get the act renewed in some form, it’s probably dead forever.
This cravenness is really disturbing. If you think the act is useful and worthwhile then you should support it and pass another one if the current one expires. If you’re not willing to do that then you have no business supporting the renewal of the current act. But, of course, politicians will be politicians.
Despite all the fuss and scare mongering on the part of the act’s supporters, it probably won’t make much difference if the act does expire. As The Daily Beast explains, the reason for that is that the act’s major provisions are mostly not used or worth the trouble
This is all in keeping with the IG’s report that Section 215 has not played a part in any investigation. The Senate has been called back in session today for one last stab at renewing the act. Let’s hope that those senators who believe in civil liberties will hold the line.
In a short tweet, Karl Voit explains the power of plain text and why you should avoid lock in:
Devastating: how much money/human-life-time/information is lost because #Microsoft #Word was used to archive things. #digitalhumanities
— n0v0id (@n0v0id) April 7, 2015
I’ve written many times about the evils and absurdities of open plan offices. There’s lots of duckspeak about improving communication or culture building but everyone knows that its real—and only—virtue is that it’s cheap.
Given that fact, if you find yourself in such a place, the chances are great that it won’t change to a more sensible arrangement. Fortunately, Matt Blodgett has some simple suggestions to make open plan offices suck less. They’re easy to implement so unless your management have come to believe their own quacking, you shouldn’t get much pushback from managers.
From the art reflecting life department, we have this story of a guy named Null and what he does to databases.
I’ve written several times about ace-jump-mode and how it’s now my main navigation tool. I’m also a huge fan of ace-winodw and use it through the excellent hydra from abo-abo that I use to control all my window operations.
Abo-abo, it turns out has written a replacement for ace-jump, called Avy, that extends the its functionality. Abo-abo writes excellent software and is fastidious about maintaining it but ace-jump was working well for me and my inherent laziness kept me from switching. Then Artur Malabarba wrote about his upgrading to Avy and I was shamed into at least considering upgrading.
Finally, I realized that ace-window was based on avy and was therefore already installed on my machines. All I had to do was switch my key binding for ace-jump to avi-goto-word-1 and I would be using avy instead of ace-jump as well as having access to the rest of avy‘s functionality. You can take a look at avy‘s READ ME to see what some of that functionality is.
I also rebound 【Meta+g g】 and 【Meta+g Meta+g】 to avy-goto-line. It’s a more featureful replacement for the built-in goto-line.
I’ve been using the new setup for a while now and am very happy with it. I finally deleted ace-jump from my packages so you can consider me all in now. If you ever have more than two windows open in Emacs you absolutely must have ace-window. Once you have ace-window, all the rest is available for free. I can’t overstate how useful this package is. I can’t imagine using Emacs without it now.
Here’s a useful tip for those of you who run Emacs in a terminal.
Despite doubling its use of bulk surveillance orders in the five years ending in 2009, the FBI could not point to a single case where the use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act helped solve a major case. That’s not some left-wing activist speaking but is the conclusion of a 77 page report by the Inspector General of the Justice Department.
Yet to hear recent remarks from the political class—I’m looking at you, Senator McConnell—the imminent lapsing of the Patriot Act is the harbinger of Armageddon. The FBI, too, has always described the act as essential for battling the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse.
Remember this the next time the three-letter agencies and their apologists in the government trot out their usual scare tactics. What they’re really saying is, “It’s absolutely essential even though we haven’t actually used it. Still, it’s a fair trade for your civil liberties.”
Here’s a fascinating graph indicating what people of different age groups would miss the most as a way of getting information.
What Would You Miss The Most? Radio? Newspaper ? Smartphone? Tv ? Laptop? #newsgeist Via @_JackRiley (ofcom data) pic.twitter.com/Wt9IP9IYtB
— Henk van Ess (@henkvaness) May 17, 2015
It’s interesting in its own right but it got me thinking about how I would prioritize my needs for the various choices.
Some are easy. I could easily live without television and probably would if it weren’t for the contrary views of my family. I listen to the radio only when I’m in the car so, again, I could do without it, especially since I have other ways of playing music in the car.
I don’t read hard copy newspapers or magazines so I wouldn’t mind if they disappeared as long as their digital versions were still available. Despite the many and manifest problems with the press, it’s hard to imagine doing without it completely but that doesn’t mean we need to print the news on dead trees.
That leaves the difficult choices. Of the original list, I could live with just the computer and smart phone but I’d be hard put to decide between the two of them. On the one hand, my iPhone has a browser so, as far as surfing is concerned, it can do pretty much the same things as my MacBook. On the other hand, I use my computer for more than just surfing. I’m just glad I don’t really have to choose.
How would you prioritize the list? Are there some items you could easily do without? What two items on the list are the most important to you? Could you choose between the top two?
John Kitchin has an interesting post on embedding Org documents in HTML. The idea is that you embed the Org in a data URI so that the user can click on the URI and see the Org code. This is useful if you are using Org mode to write HTML documents and want to make the original Org code available to the user for inspection.
For example, if you click on this source link, you will see the Org document that I used to generate this post. The Org code is base64-encoded and inserted into the link. The code to do all this is pretty simple. You can check Kitchin’s post for the details.
The whole idea may seem a bit odd. After all, you could just provide a link to Org file if you wanted to make it available. You can read about his original motivation in this post about a previous implementation. Whether or not you find it useful, you have to admit that it’s a neat trick. And, of course, you could use it to embed whatever you like in the file.