programming (and other) musings

I've moved the repositories of the geiser packages I maintain to codeberg, so make sure you update your remotes if you access them directly through git.

After many years of switching between email systems, service providers, backup and sychronisation strategies, mail folders layouts, protocols and inadvertent replications, i ended up with a sizeable amount of local email folders containing, i was quite su…

I've been playing with macOS lately, and needed a quick way of grabbing the number of unread articles in NetNewsWire.

Here's a quick'n'dirty command to generate an org-mode rendering of an eww page, taking into account not only links (as the built-in org-eww-copy-for-org-mode does), but also headings, italic and bold faces.

It took me twenty or thirty pages to really enter in this book, but once I got in its mood I had a truly great time.

Vargas Llosa's political views are so obnoxious that I've been putting off reading him for decades out of contempt.

I've read good things about the forthcoming movie, and liked what I saw in the promotional video, but I cannot believe it's going to be near as good as this novel.

Interesting bits elsewhere: Programming language semantics: It’s easy as 1,2,3 No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accident in Software Engineering Older entries Tags: sundry

Physically, this book is obnoxious: huge, wasted margins frame a reproduction of the original text that painstakingly tries to look as shabby as it was, including faded letters and all its typos, and its size and weight border on the unmanageable.

This is a beautiful book.

I've just released a new version of consult-recoll, which implements a couple of features that i am really liking, namely, grouping of search results by mime type: and inline snippets: Happy searches!

A very interesting view of how a biographer started her career in the seventies, with two heavy-weights, Beckett and de Beauvoir.

Lately, i've gravitated towards recoll as a unified search engine for all my local data, including org and text notes, documents in PDF or similar formats, HTML files, and local email.

A nicely written (as always with Ishiguro) history of Stevens turned into an artificially intelligent being, in a near future reminiscent of Never let me go.

I was just watching Prot's explanation of his new package denote, a very elegant note-taking system with a stress on simplicity and, as the author puts it, low-tech requirements.

A problem of using Emacs as my operating system is that any otherwise minor friction with its interface quickly becomes an irritant, and i thus find myself needed a truly smooth emacs-human interaction; or, to be more precise emacs-jao interaction: my must

If you can read Spanish, i wouldn't miss the opportunity to read this beautfiul essay in the original: Irene Vallejo's prose is clear, elegant and very beautiful.

I just got a second-hand copy of this classic.

I like to use a local smtp daemon for sending email from my laptop, because that way i can send emails even while disconnected and, even when the network is up, because i don't have to wait for the network protocol to be completed with a remote smarthost.

Over the years, i've written perhaps hundreds of little emacs commands.

A gem introduced in emacs 23 that i've overlooked all these years: M-x apropos-library Tags: emacs

In the last couple of months, i've been moving from Gnus (after more than twenty years using it!)

It had been a while since i last had this much fun with a programming languages book, and learnt so much in the process.

Reading mailing lists via Gnus by pointing it to the usenet service news.gmane.io is a well-known trick among emacsers.

From a recent checkout of the Emacs source code: ;;; desktop.el --- save partial status of Emacs when killed -*- lexical-binding: t -*- ;; Copyright (C) 1993-1995, 1997, 2000-2021 Free Software Foundation, ;; Inc. ;; Author: Morten Welinder <terra@diku.…

i've been using Bastian Bechtold's org-static-blog for this blog for more than a year now.

I use Dmitry Gutov's diff-hl to highlight (with fringe marks) modified hunks in my files under git revision control.

i've found these last days a handful of really useful little emacs packages: smartscan, a simple way of navigating programming modes (use-package smartscan :ensure t :commands smartscan-mode :init (add-hook 'prog-mode-hook #'smartscan-mode) :dimin…

A couple of days ago, i was writing about embark and my first experiment defining a new embarking to play remote video streams.

I've just discovered Codeberg, a code hosting site that, finally, has let me create a user with plain emacs-w3m, shows me content reasonably well there, with a refreshingly uncluttered layout, handles graciously org files (why, it's even generating a table