Bookmarks (76)

2025-02-20-01 Productive procrastination -- productivity parenting.png Text from sketch Productive procrastination We are going to procrastinate. That's the way our brains like to work. No sense grumping about it, that'll just make it worse. We might as well get better at it This is a skill that takes practice, so try to learn when the stakes are low. Have a good idea of what...

I set up a BigBlueButton web conferencing server so that people can use it for Emacs meetups. To keep costs down, I want to resize it to 1 GB RAM 1 vCPU most of the time, and then resize it to 8 GB RAM 4 vCPU when there's a meetup. When it's at a proper size (4 CPUs), the Nginx web server should proxy...

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Feb 19 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Feb 20 0000 Asia/Singapore Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Feb 22 0030 America/Vancouver - 0230 America/Chicago - 0330 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/GMT - 0930 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630...

A+ asked me to take her on another informal field trip to the Art Gallery of Ontario to check out that special exhibit on modern art that we didn't have the energy for last time. I decided that was worth taking her out during a school afternoon. I figured there'd be plenty of time to catch up with schoolwork over the long weekend, and...

Help wanted: Looking for testers: Nix (Flakes) integration for Eshell (Github) Re: Status of xwidgets support Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #2 2025 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/36aa7507-8a4f-4ab4-bd1f-fa12b5d1accb Tue Feb 11 1900 CET OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed Feb 12 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Feb 13 0000...

A+'s class is working through a variety of assignments while reading through The Wild Robot. They've done chapter 1-11 so far. One of the assignments is to visualize things from the book, like sketching 6 things Roz has seen in nature so far. I figured I'd practise drawing too. 2025-02-06-01 Beaver, goose, squirrel, sparrow, flower, sheepdog, sheep -- drawing.png References: blue flower by NiklasErnst...

I want to get better at helping A+ learn more about art, and I want to learn more about art myself. She'll learn whatever she's ready to learn, but maybe I can help her get past the initial frustrations by breaking it down into smaller skills. As for me, there's plenty I can learn about seeing, getting stuff to look like what I'm seeing,...

I joined @screwtape's Lispy Gopher Show at the last minute because he wanted to chat a little about community, his experiences starting a new blog, and my recent post Through blogging, we discover our thoughts and other people. Ramin Honary was also there, so the conversation also included Scheme, CL, Haskell, and other cool things. I shared the notes I was taking (yay screen...

Help wanted: F-Droid are in need of a new maintainer for their Emacs package. Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/305908631/ Wed Feb 5 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto – Thu Feb 6 0000 Etc/GMT - 0100 Europe/Berlin - 0530 Asia/Kolkata - 0800 Asia/Singapore M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Feb 7 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto...

Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog How to Take Smart Notes Mathematica peer-to-peer education Emacs Calendar Emacs News EmacsConf Emacs.tv Writing helps you refine your thoughts Writing helps you find your tribe Text and links from sketch Through blogging, we discover our thoughts and other people. Henrik Karlsson's "Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog" nudged me...

A+ eight years old and she won't always want to play with me, so while I can, we play together. Lately, she's been interested in Minecraft parkour maps. I remember when parkour was too frustrating for us to do. In the beginning, I felt my stomach flip every time I fell. I kept having to tell myself that I wasn't the one actually falling....

While putting together some notes on how to use subed.el with auto-generated YouTube captions, I decided to get subed-word-data working with the Youtube VTT format. The sample file I downloaded from one of my YouTube videos had a cue whose text started with a blank line, so I ended up redoing the way subed-vtt.el parsed cues. Twice, actually. The first time, I changed it...

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs Berlin (hybrid, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Jan 29 0930 America/Vancouver - 1130 America/Chicago - 1230 America/Toronto - 1730 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2300 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jan 30 0130 Asia/Singapore M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Feb 7 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Sat Feb...

Now that we've survived EmacsConf, I've been looking into running a BigBlueButton server so that various Emacs meetups can use it if they like instead of relying on Jitsi or other free video-conferencing services. (I spent some time looking into Galene, but I'm not quite sure that's ready for our uses yet, like this issue that LibrePlanet ran into with recording.) BigBlueButton requires a...

I want to be able to use voice control to do things on my phone while I'm busy washing dishes, putting things away, knitting, or just keeping my hands warm. It'll also be handy to have a way to get things out of my head when the kiddo is koala-ing me. I've been using my Google Pixel 8's voice interface to set timers, send...

preprocess image edit and link text Inkscape prompt for rectangles inline SVG write about sketch Build up, drill down handwritten.blog sketch viewer Text and links from sketch Hyperlinking SVGs - 2025-01-17-01 I like drawing my notes. I can jump around, draw connections, doodle for fun. A sketch can only fit so much, though. (even if I write really small) Idea: Links: They can be...

wearable computing life-logging an M1 display Emacspeak untangle my thoughts emacs.tv Quick audio/video notes adapting to age-related changes lapel mic WhisperX Org Mode SuperNote Smart glasses upgrade lapel mic add gamepad Smart glasses Text and links from sketch Revisiting wearable computing 2025-01-18-01 I experimented with wearable computing in 2002 because I wanted to explore life-logging and access to more info on the go. I...

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs Berlin (hybrid, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Jan 29 0930 America/Vancouver - 1130 America/Chicago - 1230 America/Toronto - 1730 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2300 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jan 30 0130 Asia/Singapore Beginner: Programming in Emacs | Utah.edu Emacs configuration: I wrote a simple "profile" switcher/manager for emacs. - symlink script as an alternative to --init-directory Configuring emacs is...

SuperNote Verbal to Visual Clarity Canvas Weekly Andy Draws Drewscape Sketchplanations Build bigger thoughts Visual Frameworks my blog sketches.sachachua.com Make animations Code to work with sketches Text and links from sketch Organizing my sketches What I have now: SuperNote A5X: Monthly notebooks Long-term note with links Daily moments Crafts PDFs (esp. w/ large margins) Highlighted heading ☆ for needs more No antialiasing: … Preferences...

A+ was inspired by the SapWing villages from Wings of Fire to make a couple of orb houses up in the trees. Figure 1: A+'s latest creation: tree orbs I think she used copycat blocks and vertical slabs from the modpack in order to get it to look so round. "I'm excellent at creating things that are not supposed to exist in Minecraft, in...

For the longest time, planet.emacslife.com was generated with the Planet Venus aggregator, which required Python 2.7. My recent blog post about Yay Emacs 8: which-key-replacement-alist had some emojis that the parser couldn't handle, though (unichr() arg not in range(0x10000) (narrow Python build)). I decided to rewrite the aggregator using NodeJS. Here are some differences between the current implementation and the previous ones: The website...

2025-01-14-01 Looking ahead – parenting planning skills Text from sketch A+ is 8 years old. We're letting her be part of managing more things for her future self, like keeping track of when we're running low on her laundry or her favourite yogurt or toilet paper under the sink. She doesn't always get it right, but then again, even grown-ups have a hard time....

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #1 2025 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/cb726f44-8b7f-44f7-91a5-fc9d3f9ad7a9 Tue Jan 14 1900 CET Talk by Andrew Tropin - Arei/Ares: A modern, extensible IDE for Guile Scheme https://www.meetup.com/guix-social/events/304634420/ Thu Jan 16 1000 America/Vancouver - 1200 America/Chicago - 1300 America/Toronto - 1800 Etc/GMT - 1900 Europe/Berlin - 2330 Asia/Kolkata – Fri Jan 17 0200 Asia/Singapore (@futurile@mastodon.social) M-x Research: TBA...

[2025-01-12 Sun]: u/dr-timeous posted a treemap_org.py · GitHub that makes a coloured treemap that displays the body on hover. (Reddit) Also, I think librsvg doesn't support wrapped text, so that might mean manually wrapping if I want to figure out the kind of text density that webtreemap has. One of the challenges with digital notes is that it's hard to get a sense of...

I usually write my scripts with phrases that could be turned into the subtitles. I figured I might as well combine that information with the WhisperX transcripts which I use to cut out my false starts and oopses. To do that, I use the string-distance function, which calculates how similar strings are, based on the Levenshtein [distance] algorithm. If I take each line of...

Mermaid makes pretty diagrams from text. It's Javascript-based, so the command-line tool (mmdc) uses Puppeteer to get the results of evaluating the diagram in the browser. I was running into some errors trying to get it to work from Org Mode over ob-mermaid on Ubuntu 24, since apparently AppArmor restricts Puppeteer. (Error: Failed to launch the browser process! · Issue #730 · mermaid-js/mermaid-cli). I...

2024-12-31-09 December 2024 -- monthly review.png EmacsConf 2024 was a ton of fun, and we managed to get the Q&A videos up quickly. I indexed lots of Emacs videos for emacs.tv, and I wrote some Emacs Lisp so I can manage the queue from Emacs. W- retired, hooray! He's been keeping himself active with lots of biking and various projects like fixing the toaster....

New in this video: subed-record-sum-time, #+PAD_LEFT and #+PAD_RIGHT Video not supported. Thumbnail:Download the video I like the constraints of a one-minute video, so I added a subed-record-sum-time command. That way, when I edit the video using Emacs, I can check how long the result will be. First, I split the subtitles, align it with the audio to fix the timestamps, and double check the...

[2025-01-06 Mon]: Fix typo in exitter's name Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed Jan 8 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jan 9 0000 Asia/Singapore Atelier Emacs Montpellier (in person) https://lebib.org/date/atelier-emacs Fri Jan 10 1800 Europe/Paris EmacsSF (in person): coffee.el in SF https://www.meetup.com/emacs-sf/events/305422188/ Sat Jan 11 1100 America/Los_Angeles...

[2025-01-07 Tue]: I like the way Karthik's blog posts have play-by-plays for the videos (ex: Fringe Matters: Finding the Right Difference), so I've added an experimental play by play at the bottom of this post. Video not supported. Thumbnail:Download the video I wish I could memorize all these keyboard shortcuts in Emacs, but I just don't use some commands often enough to build the...

A+ often enjoys watching Minecraft videos on Youtube where streamers take on challenges like surviving harder, more realistic worlds. We briefly gave RL Craft a spin the other day, but I died to a dragon and that wasn't realistic enough for A+, so we checked out Underdog today. We couldn't get Underdog to work under GDLauncher on her computer even when I changed the...

Since A+ and I play lots of Minecraft together, I figured it's a good opportunity to slowly get her into the idea of documenting learning. Besides, I can always practise it myself. Screenshots are handy for that. In Minecraft Java, F1 hides the usual heads-up display, and F2 takes the screenshot. Usually, when I start taking screenshots. A+ starts taking screenshots too. I want...

A+ likes exploring different Minecraft Java modpacks in creative mode. We're currently playing FXNT Create 2. I like challenging myself to figure things out in survival mode, so I'm getting a lot of practice in building early-game survival farms with Create. My setup has changed a little bit over the last few modpacks/worlds. I usually start by mining enough iron and zinc to make...

I want to document more of my Minecraft adventures with A+. Video is a natural way to do this. It builds on her familiarity with the tutorials and streams she enjoys watching. I set up OBS on her laptop and plugged in my Blue Yeti microphone. We did our first interview yesterday. I edited and subtitled it (because why not!), uploaded it as an...

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Jan 3 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Sat Jan 4 d0000 Asia/Singapore OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed Jan 8 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jan 9 0000 Asia/Singapore...

2024-11-30-06 November 2024 daily #moments This month, I experimented with doing my daily drawings on a calendar grid. Since that meant I had a nice neat one-page summary of the month right there, I figured I might as well resume writing these monthly reviews. Most of my discretionary time was taken up by preparations for EmacsConf, which was a lot of fun. The main...

I've been experimenting with these default header args for Org Babel source blocks. (setq org-babel-default-header-args '((:session . "none") (:results . "drawer replace") (:comments . "link") ;; add a link to the original source (:exports . "both") (:cache . "no") (:eval . "never-export") ;; explicitly evaluate blocks instead of evaluating them during export (:hlines . "no") (:tangle . "no"))) ;; I have to explicitly set...

[2024-12-28 Sat]: Added talk and Q&A count, added note about BBB max simultaneous users, added note about BBB, added thanks The videos have been uploaded, thank-you notes have been sent, and the kiddo has decided to play a little Minecraft on her own, so now I get to write some quick notes on EmacsConf 2024. Stats Timeline Data Communication Schedule Recorded videos Recorded introductions...

I came across Ruby Video on Hacker News and thought it was a good idea, particularly the topic view. I mentioned it in a toot and that seemed to strike a chord in the #emacs community there, so I exported some of the metadata for EmacsConf videos into an Org Mode file. @xenodium whipped up a quick web prototype at emacs.tv. I added a...

Help wanted: Org Mode requests: [FR] Allow SPC to scroll todo/tag selection menu - for users with huge accessible fonts (was: Transient: accessibility problems for users who need to use large fonts) Emacs updates: Emacs 30.0.93 pretest is available (Reddit, Irreal) Emacs 31 News Stream VOD (01:26:53) Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs Berlin (virtual, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Dec 25 0930 America/Vancouver -...

When subtitle times are too far off from the video or audio, people start worrying if their video has frozen or jumped ahead. It's good to keep subtitles roughly in time with the audio. For EmacsConf, we can get timing information from two places. WhisperX produces a JSON file with word data in the process of doing the speech recognition, and the aeneas forced...

Help wanted: Org Mode requests: [RFC] The best way to choose an "action" at point: context-menu-mode, transient, which-key or embark? (was: Fwd: Org-cite: Replace basic follow-processor with transient menu?) also on emacs-devel Org Mode requests: [TASK] Documenting ob-fortran, ob-forth, ob-sed, ob-ocaml, ob-ruby, and ob-sass (was: [TASK] Move babel backend docs from WORG to Org manual) Merging MPS a.k.a. scratch/igc, yet again - documentation help...

This post covers the week ending Dec 4 and the week ending Dec 11, since it was a bit of a rush leading up to EmacsConf. EmacsConf 2024 went well, hooray! Here are some of my journal entries over the past two weeks: I worked on the BigBlueButton server some more. I used Spookfox to automate Firefox from Emacs Lisp so that I could...

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed Dec 11 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Dec 12 0000 Asia/Singapore Atelier Emacs Montpellier (in person) https://lebib.org/date/atelier-emacs Fri Dec 13 1800 Europe/Paris M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Dec 18 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT -...

Emacs 30: New stuff in Emacs 30 (July 2024, @frodjo@mastodon.social) Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs Paris: S: Emacs workshop in Paris (online) https://emacs-doctor.com/ Thu Dec 5 0830 America/Vancouver - 1030 America/Chicago - 1130 America/Toronto - 1630 Etc/GMT - 1730 Europe/Berlin - 2200 Asia/Kolkata – Fri Dec 6 0030 Asia/Singapore Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #15 2024 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/57815aa7-f253-4768-8059-9fbede8de0f9 Thu Dec 5 1900...

Upcoming events: Emacs Berlin (hybrid, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Nov 27 0930 America/Vancouver - 1130 America/Chicago - 1230 America/Toronto - 1730 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2300 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Nov 28 0130 Asia/Singapore Emacs Paris: S: Emacs workshop in Paris (online) https://emacs-doctor.com/ Thu Dec 5 0830 America/Vancouver - 1030 America/Chicago - 1130 America/Toronto - 1630 Etc/GMT - 1730 Europe/Berlin - 2200 Asia/Kolkata –...

[2024-11-21 Thu]: Fixed the second filler words regexp, and make it work at the start of lines too. Thanks to @arialdo@mastodon.online for the feedback! Like many people, I tend to use "So", "And", "You know", and "Uh" to bridge between sentences when thinking. WhisperX does a reasonable job of detecting sentences and splitting them up anyway, but it leaves those filler words in at...

Reflection on writing style - 2024-11-18T00:44:18.080Z I notice that I have a lot more fun writing tiny workflow tweaks (mostly #Emacs ) and sharing them on my blog versus, say, insightful reflections developed over a longer period of time. I think it's the payoff of being able to enjoy those tweaks. Sometimes abstract thoughts help me come to realizations that I can then try...

I get word timestamps for free when I transcribe with WhisperX, so I can skip the Aeneas alignment step. That means I can update my previous code for handling audio braindumps . Breaking the transcript up into sections Also, I recently updated subed-word-data to colour words based on their transcription score, which draws my attention to things that might be uncertain. Here's what it...

Figure 1: Blog statistics I was curious about the shape of my blog over the years, excluding Emacs News and my link-heavy weekly/monthly reviews. It started off with lots of little posts like the way other weblogs were also quick links and notes. As weblogs morphed into blogs with more text, I also settled down into fewer, longer posts with lots of code (analyzed...