The Education of James Endres Howell
2026 May 23 Light or dark? GNOME side I like both, depending on how much light is in the room. I much prefer to set my desktop light or dark manually than to automate with timers. On GNOME light or dark is color-scheme and you can set read and set it from the command line. You can read it from the command line (default light theme is called default ) $ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface…
2026 Apr 15 I wrote org-static-blog-emfed , a little Emacs package that extends org-static-blog with the ability to embed a Mastodon thread in a blog post to serve as comments . The root of the Mastodon thread also serves as an announcement of the blog post to your followers. It’s based on Adrian Sampson’s Emfed, and of course Bastian Bechtold’s org-static-blog . I had shared it…
2026 Apr 04 It was really fun to learn about advising Lisp functions to extend functionality in Emacs. My first use case was to run a custom function every time a certain function in Bastian Bechtold ’s org-static-blog is called. Of course, I could customize that function directly in my own fork, but Lisp advice allows you to modify functions without clobbering them directly. This approach…
2026 Mar 10 I loyally enjoy running Debian Stable . I am with less enthusiasm accustomed to GNOME , after years of habit and customizations on which I have come to rely. But Debian has some disadvantages: for me, it was that (apparently) GRUB was not always configured correctly after installation to a random laptop. Meanwhile Linux Mint (inlcuding LMDE) installs are always solid. And I am too…
2026 Feb 25 I was in high school during the 1980s. In a little rural town in Ohio where casual racism was perfectly commonplace. Black History Month had been around for 15 years, and people already loved to complain about “Isn’t EVERY month Black History Month?” Politicians were fighting over the idea of a national holiday to honor Martin Luther King. There were two positions:…
2026 Jan 08 I love mu4e for dealing with email under Emacs. It’s a great package itself, but of course the killer feature is that it’s Emacs, and with a little Emacs Lisp you can make it do email how you want to do email. I mean I know you don’t want to do email, but still. My email workflow I use Fastmail, which I can recommend overall. I have only a few top-level folders: Inbox…
2026 Jan 03 Every year my institution measures faculty productivity by requiring us to submit a report of our annual activities. This year I noticed that two sections had silently disappeared. Climate and Diversity Activities. Creating a welcoming climate, thereby maximizing success for all of our members is an important goal for the college. List your contributions to this goal here. Increasing…
2025 Dec 29 Many of us in higher education use Emacs to produce course materials, and these must conform to the accessibility requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act . We often export Org mode documents to LaTeX to produce very nice PDF output . But until very recently, LaTeX could not produce tagged PDFs that conform to the PDF/UA accessibility standard . Until how recently? Only…
2025 Feb 07 I never write poetry. But this one just spilled out. February 2025 In the checkout line we have spoken our broken Spanish in public with the blushing lady from Mexico. Sharing photos of our kids, our eyes glimmering. Immigration agents could not interfere. In the vaulted auditoriums we have taught the sciences, and we have taught the humanities, and we will teach them again and again,…
2024 Sep 08 On Mastodon, someone in my timeline [update 2025: on an instance that is now gone, alas] asked how to debunk the anti-privacy argument that goes “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” My response was too long for one toot. Was Diogenes correct? When he taught by example that if we are honest, we should carry out openly and in the public square all of our bodily…
2024 Sep 06 One of my proudest moments as a father went like this. I asked my fifteen-year-old son: Say you have a telephone pole in Pennsylvania. And another telephone pole in Argentina. What is the angle between the two telephone poles? He thought for a second. “How far away are they from each other?” “Say 6,000 miles.” He thought for another second. “Ninety…