Lukas Mayer's personal blog
One common finding in psychology that I have noticed in my own behavior as well is that when you make resource-consumption visible, it becomes much easier to change your behavior towards being less wasteful. Ever since I added a CPU and RAM usage indicator to my OS system bar, I have become very concerned about how much RAM different things use or whether my laptop fans are spinning more than what…
Google is now completely phasing out Manifest V2 extensions , effectively making extensions less powerful. For people using Chrome, the main impact of this change is less ability to block ads, while for people who use a Chrome-derived browser that has built-in ad-block the consequences of this change are slightly more subtle. Of course, Mozilla has vowed to stick with the Manifest V2 standard…
Important Disclaimer This method is not as reliable as I initially thought - you will get Captcha’d eventually. Instagram is one of those platforms that’s really hard to avoid if you want to stay in touch with a group or a small business. At the same time, Instagram is quite aggressive in it’s use of dark patterns. For example, you can only sometimes view public profiles without logging in, and…
Why is Emacs, a text editor created some 45 years ago, still under active development and has a vibrant, cult-like user-base? Well, clearly one of the major attractions is that Emacs is so unique in how modifiable it is - generations of hackers have created new features, and some are later picked up an improved upon by others until they mature into extremely useful software. At the same time,…
The Emacs Web Wowser (eww) is one of the more well-known browsers available for Emacs. Full disclaimer, it only renders HTML, no CSS and JS. Still, it can be pretty useful, especially for conveniently looking up documentation or advice online without having to leave Emacs. I, for one, also quite often find myself reading articles from my RSS feed reader in it, if the full text isn’t included in…
One of the biggest draws to Emacs is the very famous Org-mode, which on the surface is a way to markup plain text similar to Markdown. However, Org-mode actually goes way beyond just note-taking - for example, I manage my calendar, habit-tracking, and do my code-writing in Org files. It’s quite the rabbit hole, and one I am still actively exploring. Emacs users have a tendency to move more and…
In this post, I want to take a critical look at LLMs. While my research focus is more around how people’s decision-making is influenced by the presence of AI-style tools, I do have an interest in how LLM-use affects learning. After all, the two are at least vaguely related. Before we continue, I’d like to remind everyone that this blog is mostly my opinion/conjecture, and should not be confused…
These last few months, like most people who get into Emacs, I have been moving more and more of my computing life into Emacs. While some things are relatively effortful (looking at you, E-mail), other things like managing your calendar in a way that synchronizes with your phone are remarkably simple. I say remarkable, because I was expecting this to be a bit burdensome. It is not, it is arguably…
I have an institutional Gmail address that I wanted to be able to use inside Emacs. If you’d be interested in this too, do note that setting up email in Emacs is definitely one of the more laborious things one can do. Setting up a Gmail is even more annoying in Mu4e, because Google now only accepts special tokens (oauth2 tokens), not passwords. I had various stabs at cracking this over the course…
Yes, I have been playing around with Emacs again. It’s become my favorite “simple” text editor since figuring out how to use emacsclient . One thing that’s a pain with Emacs is setting up Vterm, the popular terminal emulator for Emacs. While on normal systems you may run into troubles with C compilers causing weird dependency errors, on NixOS the main hurdle is the extremely lacking (and often…
I’ve been playing around with NixOS. It’s nice! It’s the first time I’ve not encountered a single case of dependency hell when setting up my coding tools. I like it better than the other ‘atomic’ distros I’ve tried because you’re not forced to use containers everywhere. That’s not to say that it’s easy though. In fact, the learning curve is pretty steep, and the documentation is pretty poor.…
As you probably know if you clicked on this post, you can’t just connect a Proton Mail account to Vivaldi mail the normal way because Proton implements various things to make their email more secure than the average web-mail. At the same time, when you go to add a new Mail account in Vivaldi, Proton is one of the logos that appears in the listing. I’ve seen multiple forum posts saying that the…
A few weeks ago, I decided to intentionally break off my 2300+ day streak on Duolingo. Why would I do that, did I decide to quit learning French? Not at all! I’ve talked in previous posts about my experience as a long-time Duolingo user. Duolingo is an impressive app all things considered, both in terms of scale and variety of activities. But, as noted previously, in some aspects the app has been…
Despite having used Vivaldi for something like 3 years now, every now and then I discover something useful that I had previously discounted. Just yesterday was such a day, when I was looking up what Vivaldi was planning with their dark mode settings on the forums. Basically, right now you can have Vivaldi render all webpages in dark mode by default, but like all such dark mode features, sometimes…
I was clicking some of the links in the Quarto documentation, including the one to the Bootswatch project. Quarto’s built-in themes all come from this project, so I was surprised to see that Quarto does not come with all of the Bootswatch themes. The Brite theme in particular caught my eye with its flat, yet 3-D looking button styles. The description simply reads “Neobrutalist form”, but I figured…
I don’t use the phone much, as I prefer to use my laptop for most things 1 . Of course, I do need it for some things like navigation, checking email, searching things on the go. This is all fine and dandy for a minimal setup, as you could just have your five apps, use bookmarks in the browser instead of apps where feasible and call it a day, right? Well, yes, you could, but it’s a bit bare-bones…
So far, I have never felt all that attached to where I live. I think that’s a big part in why I left Germany when I was 19, having since then lived in Scotland, different places in England, and now the USA. However, I do feel like I should settle down once my studies are over, so it’s been a bit of a personal hobby of mine to think about what my location priorities would be. There are a lot of…
As you may be able to tell from the fact that I am writing three posts about theming different aspects of a Quarto website on the same day, I have been re-designing my site. At some point yesterday I thought I was finally done making all page content adapt to the current website theme, until my glaring white CV nearly blinded me on my otherwise perfectly dark website. So I set out to find a…
In Quarto websites you can specify more than one theme, like so: format : html : theme : dark : darkly light : morph If you define your light and dark theme in this way, the rendered website will have a switch icon in the navbar. The icon this theme toggle uses by default is too abstract for my taste. The default theme switcher icon I definitely prefer the more commonly used sun and moon icons, so…
Quarto sites can very easily have comment sections thanks to some pretty creative uses of GitHub Issues. If you wanted to add a comment section to a page on your Quarto website usually you’d use something like this in your YAML front-matter: comments : utterances : repo : username/reponame theme : github-dark The problem with this is that you are locked into one theme. So if someone is browsing…